Stephen Baxter: Project Hades

“Good for you.”

“You’re buttering me up.”

“Well, so I am. Look, Clare, you made one significant choice when you stood by me. Now I have to ask you to make another choice.”

“What choice?”

“You’ve seen how things are fixed here. Tremayne’s atomic landscape-gardening scheme is loony enough. But unfortunately it’s in the hands of Commodore Godwin, who, on first impression, I am finding difficult to trust.”

“I know what you mean.”

“And on top of that we have the peculiar danger Winston has highlighted. Something stirring in the Earth.”

“You’re asking me to help you break out of here, aren’t you?”

“I badly need to find out what’s going on here—and quickly.”

“You’re under arrest, you know.”

“Goes without saying. How long do you think it would take you to get through that door?

She grinned, drew something from her pocket, reached to the lock, and there was a click. “Not long.”

“Lead the way, Constable Clare!”

The university campus was deserted, a place of blocky buildings and long shadows. Thelma checked her watch: one a.m.

Winston said, “I think this is the library.” He wrapped his scarf around his fist and smashed a ground floor window.

“Winston!”

“Do you mind climbing in through the window?”

“I’ve done worse.”

He knocked out more glass, and they helped each other through. Winston said, “We need to find the geology section.”

Thelma looked around for signs. “Natural sciences—this way.” Their footsteps echoed on the polished wooden floor. “Now tell me where you learned to open windows like that.”

“Ay, well, my mum hasn’t always been proud of me.”

“I imagine you got picked on at school, not having a father around.”

“Ay. But I wasn’t the only one. My problem was I got bored.”

“Bored?”

“Always asked too many questions. Got put down in the bottom stream. Then I got expelled altogether. I got in with some bad lads. Ended up in borstal for a bit.”

“Oh, Winston.”

“I was too bright to let myself get put back in there. But I learned a canny few tricks inside. Now I work down the mines. I just switch me head off when I’m down there.”

“I don’t think the system has served you very well.”

“I’m not complaining. You make your own luck. Over here—geology.”

“All right. You get started here. I’ll see what I can dig up on the sightings around Lucifer’s Tomb. Professionally, I used to be a historian. I’ll be more use doing that. We’ve got half an hour before the next ninety minutes is up. We won’t make it back to the base, but we should at least call in before then.” She walked off, searching. “Mythology, mythology…”

Jones and Clare crept along steel-walled corridors, peering through windows and open doors. The bunker was filled with the sound of laughter, cartoonish music, and the click of pool balls.

Clare said, “I don’t believe it, Doctor Jones. They’ve actually got a cinema down here. It’s like a bit of America.”

“Who’d have thought it, eh? Well, I think we’re getting an impression of the layout of this bunker. Living quarters, stores, and facilities to the west. The central block is command, control, communications. Then there’s the tunnel to the east that seems to link to the old mine shafts under Lucifer’s Tomb.”

“Where they placed the bomb.”

“Quite. I imagine there’s a whole series of tunnels out to various sites… What I’m really interested in finding is their records. Tape reels and punched cards. Which I would imagine would be underneath the command centre, in their main computer room… This way, I should think.”

“I just can’t get over how big this place is. I mean, I’m a copper and I knew nothing about all this. Even the wire fence isn’t on the maps.”

“I’m afraid in this post-war world, Britain is neither as sovereign nor as free as its citizens would like to believe. Ah, now what’s down here?” He had found a hatch in the floor. He used a coin, a threepenny bit, to twist back a couple of bolts and lifted it to reveal metal stairs down to a brightly lit chamber. He led the way down.

Clare, following, said, “Crikey, it’s cold down here. Like a meat locker.”

“The computer centre. All atmospherically controlled. Look at all these great blocks, like Stonehenge monoliths.”

“What are we looking for?”

“Seismic records. And they’ll be in these tape cabinets. Come on, you start that end and I’ll start this.”

Thelma, her arms laden with books, found Winston working in a puddle of light at a table.

He looked up. “Wow, what a pile.”

She dropped the books on his table. “I wish I’d taken up your mother’s offer of a cup of tea. How are you getting on?”

“It’s brilliant, Thelma. I’ve never been let loose in a place like this. Full of books and learning. I’m like a pig in muck.”

She sat down. “You know, I had very few students with your promise.”

“You were a teacher?”

“I researched history at university. Oxford. Teaching was part of the job.”

“Do you live down there, Oxford?”

“Used to. I gave it all up to work with Doctor Jones. It was a rather unusual challenge. I don’t mind about the research. But the students—yes, I miss the students. Working with you is bringing it all back. Now come on, we’d better crack on. How do you work these little desk lights?”

In the computer centre, Jones pulled out wire-framed reading glasses and peered into a screen. “I knew it. I just knew it. Look at this, Clare.”

“Doctor Jones, I think you should see this—”

“No, no, whatever it is can wait. Look at that magnificent periodicity!”

Clare walked over. “All right, you win. What am I supposed to be looking at?”

“This! Can’t you see? It’s all quite clear. Look at the frequency spikes! There, do you see, and there?”

“Just tell me what it means.”

“The scientists here have been monitoring the Earth hereabouts—recording seismic echoes.”

“Just as Winston does.”

“Quite. And just as he has found anomalies, so have they. Here they are in their own records. But they haven’t recognised them for what they are.”

“What anomalies?”

“For a start, Winston’s right about that ninety-minute pulsing. See, here and here and here—the same pattern recurring, ninety minutes apart. Something really is orbiting through the basement rocks.”

“Orbiting?”

“But there is a deeper periodicity. See this peak here, here, and here?”

Clare counted the peaks. “If each of these is ninety minutes—that’s about a day.”

“Well done, Constable Clare. But it isn’t quite a day, and that’s significant. What do you know about the structure of the Earth?”

“It’s round.”

“Hmm. I suppose that’s a start. Look, Clare, Earth is a ball of rock—molten most of the way down—magma. The solid crust is only a shell, like the skin of an apple.”

“An apple?”

“Yes—with a worm at its centre! The Earth’s core is a ball of iron the size of the Moon. Like a planet within a planet. And it turns with its own ‘day.’ ”

“And the seismometers pick up these signals in line with the core day?”

“Precisely. Every core day, something comes swimming up from the heart of the Earth—and it noses around here. Almost curiously. Giving off seismic signals as it does so.”

“You make it sound alive. What can swim through rock?”

“Hmm? Oh, something made from denser rock, of course. The point is that these visitors from the abyss began coming here as soon as this base was dug out.”