ocean,' Cameron replied. 'Sewage. Garbage. Remains.'
'Won't want to be around when that iceberg melts out,' Geller said.
They crawled through the opening, switched on flashlights, opened a hatch, and descended. Cones of illumination danced down old wooden stairs to a snow-dusted plywood floor. The wood was too frozen to exhibit any signs of decay. When they got to the bottom the four of them almost filled the low room, its ceiling bending ominously from the weight of snow above. Cameron let his beam play across the walls. There was a table with an abandoned military radio, its clunkiness suggesting decades of antiquity. A gray metal office chair. Another table with old meteorological charts. There was no decay and no dust, just a patina of frost. The air was utterly still and heavy with an ancient, undisturbed cold, somehow more cloying and penetrating than the brisker air outside. While the temperature was a constant fifty-five below zero, it felt colder.
'Well, I don't like this,' Geller announced. 'Would Mickey really come down here?'
'Moss once lived here, remember?' Cameron said. 'He helped build it.'
'Built a meat-locker morgue.'
'It was different with the heat on.'
Lewis played his flashlight along the floor, trying to ignore his claustrophobia. 'Boot prints.' His light slid along to a dark doorway. 'Lots of them, going both directions.'
'Doesn't mean anything,' Cameron said. 'There's no wind, and no fresh snowfall except what seeps through. Come down here and your prints last as long as on the moon. Until someone else walks over them, like us.'
They went through the door to another room. There were crates and old cardboard boxes, empty. A few polar visitors had scrawled or scratched names on the walls. Nothing had decayed in the cold.
The men shuffled ahead, the gloom swallowing where they'd been and obscuring what lay ahead. Doorways appeared like the lids of pits, yawning a deeper darkness. Examination with the flashlights showed them to be merely old rooms, empty of any life. Walls canted crazily from the strain of the snow above.
'If these lights go out, we're in shit city,' Geller said. 'This place is like a maze.'
'Exactly,' Cameron said. 'So don't wander off.'
'Except maybe it would go faster if we split up.'
'No splitting up,' said Pulaski. 'Mickey got into trouble because he was alone.'
'I thought you was Rambo,' Geller said. 'One-man army.'
'Rambo is horseshit. In the Army the idea is to get there first with the most, and most means you don't split up. Warriors who want to do their own thing are called dead heroes.'
'Tyson says you have to look after yourself.'
'Tyson's a butthead. You look after yourself by looking after each other.'
They came into the galley. It was as if the old base had been suddenly evacuated, not shut down. There were dirty glasses, open beer cans and bottles, and a spill of old forks on the floor. Tables and chairs were askew. In the kitchen an abandoned refrigerator hung open to reveal a cascade of forgotten, frozen hot dogs. A bulletin board had meeting notices and cartoons from a quarter century before. Their lights flickered over an old bar, revealing the charms of a laminated Miss November. Geller studied her with a historian's interest. 'They plasticized her,' he said. 'Look, she was before pubic hair.'
'Did they pack or flee?' Lewis asked as he looked around. 'Some of this is crap from people who sneak down here to party,' Cameron explained. 'Nobody stays too long because it's too damn cold. It's just something to say you've done it, like sleeping in a haunted house. But yeah, the Navy pretty much just walked away.'
'Why didn't they move their stuff?' Geller asked.
'Move it where? It was old and there's no place to store it. Cost a fortune to fly it out. So this has become a repository, like Scott's Hut at McMurdo. A thousand years from now some archaeologist is going to come down here and find those hot dogs.'
'Not exactly King Tut,' Pulaski said.
'But it's history. Just like the dome is history. That's what we're doing down here, making history.'
'The way Mickey Moss is history,' Pulaski said.
'Let's hope there's still a chance.' Cameron lifted his head and shouted, 'Mickey!' The call echoed away into the darkness, seeming to shake the old base as it did so. Somewhere a wall creaked in reply.
'Jesus, don't do that,' Geller said. 'You'll bring the whole place down on us.'
'We gotta try.'
They went into the next room, an old barracks. The bunks and mattresses were free of mold because of the cold. Not even bacteria could live here. The beds held frozen impressions as if bodies had vacated only hours before. Lewis felt like the place was inhabited by ghosts. He was freezing up from their slow pace.
'Are we near the end?'
'Halfway.'
The ceiling on the garage and powerhouse had mostly collapsed, the trusses and plywood snapped and crumpled across an old generator. Cameron played his flashlight across the wreckage, looking for a clue. There was none.
They went on through a connecting corridor to the other half of the base, a gap of snow having been left between the two to help contain any fire. The short passageway was lit by a faint gray crepuscular light that penetrated the snow from the surface.
A beam creaked as they edged past.
There was an old recreation room with abandoned ping-pong table and bookcases. In a storage center were steel and paper drums, lined like sentries, their frozen dregs unknowable. The science room had been mostly gutted of equipment except for a lab bench. Calendars were dated 1974. Discarded trash was heaped in corners.
The last room was a small astronomical observatory. The clump of their boots on plywood was uncomfortably loud.
'They launched weather balloons here and took sightings of the stars,' Cameron said. 'End of the line.'
'That's it, then,' Pulaski said. 'No Mickey.'
'Where do those stairs go?' Geller asked, pointing to a set leading upward.
'Out, I hope. This is the other entrance to the base. We might have to dig a little if it's drifted.' Cameron glanced around the barren room, clearly frustrated. 'I can't think where else to look.'
Lewis let his flashlight play about. Its beam was already dimming. 'What's that?'
There was a small plywood door behind the stairs, its edge opened a crack. The snow at its foot was heavily scuffed.
'I think it's an old tunnel that goes out to pits used for earthquake and geomagnetic research. Probably collapsed.'
'Except the door's been recently opened,' Lewis said. He walked over and pointed. There were fresh splinters of yellow wood around the faded gray.
'Bingo,' Geller said.
The door had frozen back in place and Cameron used his ice ax to once more pry it free. A tunnel just five feet high and three broad led into darkness. The wood ceiling bulged downward as if pregnant. The walls looked ready to implode. But patches of snow on its plywood floor showed a welter of tracks and scuff marks.
'Gawd,' Pulaski said doubtfully. 'Mickey would go in there?' 'Somebody did,' Cameron said. 'Not too long ago, either, I'm guessing. I think we'd better rope up. Who wants to lead?'
No one spoke up.
'Okay, I will.' He peered down the tunnel uncertainly.
'I'll go last,' Lewis said. 'With the other light.' The cold was stiffening his muscles and he didn't want to stoop-walk into that dark corridor. Last in, first out. The snow was pressing down like earth on a coffin. 'I'll take the ice ax; I've used one before. If you fall, I'll brake you.'
They moved in a half crouch, their boots echoing in the stillness. At one point the squeeze of the ice was so great that they dropped to a crawl, then stood again. Still a confusion of tracks went on. The two flashlights continued to dim. Lewis realized he was sweating and that made him shiver. His heart was hammering. It was impossible to see what was ahead.
'Shit!'
It was Cameron. There was a crack of breaking wood and his light disappeared. The rope jerked taut, yanking the men to the floor and dragging them forward in a terrifying slither. Lewis frantically dug with the ax and it
