oxygen mask. “I take it this isn’t the first time you’ve seen frozen bodies at least twelve thousand years old?”
He looked down at her, barely able to contain his excitement. It wasn’t every day he found evidence for his theories, or proof that he wasn’t crazy. “Those bodies explain how the pyramid got here.”
“Got here?” She managed to sit up, the color returning to her high cheekbones. “What are you talking about? Did it move?”
Conrad dug into his pack and produced a frozen orange. “I chipped this out of the wall,” he said. “This proves Antarctica was once a temperate climate.”
Serena looked at the orange. “Until it suddenly froze over one day, I suppose?”
Conrad nodded. “Hapgood’s theory of earth-crust displacement.”
“Charles Hapgood?” Serena asked.
“That’s right. Dead for years. So you’ve heard of him?”
“The university professor, yes, but not this displacement theory.”
Conrad always relished an opportunity to tell Mother Earth something she didn’t know. Holding up the orange, he said, “Pretend this is Planet Earth.”
“OK.” She seemed willing to humor him.
He snapped open a pocket knife and carved an outline of the seven continents on the thawing peel. “Hapgood’s theory says the ice age was not a meteorological phenomenon. Rather, it was the result of a geological catastrophe about twelve thousand years ago.” Conrad rotated the orange upward so that the United States was in the Arctic Circle and Antarctica was closer to the equator. “This was the world back then.”
Serena lifted an eyebrow. “And what happened?”
“The entire outer shell of Earth’s surface shifted, like the skin of this orange.” Conrad rotated the orange downward until it resembled Earth as they knew it. “Antarctica is engulfed by the polar zone while North America is released from the Arctic Circle and becomes temperate. Ice melts in North America while it forms in Antarctica.”
Serena frowned. “What caused this cataclysmic shift?”
“Nobody really knows,” said Conrad. “But Hapgood thought it was an imbalance of ice in the polar caps. As ice built up, they became so heavy they shifted, dragging the outer crust of the continents in one piece to new positions.”
Serena eyed him. “And you’d be willing to stake what’s left of your reputation on this earth-crust displacement theory?”
Conrad shrugged. “Albert Einstein liked the idea. He believed significant shifts in Earth’s crust have probably taken place repeatedly and within a short time. That could explain weird things, like mammoths frozen in the Arctic Circle with tropical vegetation in their stomachs. Or people and pyramids buried a mile beneath the ice in Antarctica.”
Serena put a soft hand on Conrad’s shoulder. “If that helps you make sense of the world, then good for you.”
Conrad stiffened. He thought she’d be as excited as he was by the evidence. That they were two of a kind. Instead she was attacking the conclusion he had drawn. More than that, she was attacking him personally. He resented this cavalier dismissal-by a woman of religious faith, no less-of a plausible scientific hypothesis from one of the greatest minds in human history. “Does the Vatican have a better theory?”
Serena nodded. “The Flood.”
“Same difference,” Conrad said. “Both fall under the God-Is-a-Genocidal-Maniac Theory.” But as soon as the words were out, he was sorry he had said them to her.
“Hey, mister, you watch your mouth,” said a female voice from behind.
Conrad turned to see Lopez looking cross at him. Another Catholic, he realized. Lopez looked at Serena and asked, “You want me to kick his ass for you?”
Serena smiled. “Thanks, but he gets it kicked enough already.”
“Well, the offer stands,” Lopez said before returning to her work. The Aryan twins, Kreigel and Marcus, looked disappointed. Conrad figured they must be Lutheran, agnostics, or simply of good German stock who in another time and place might have distinguished themselves as poster boys for Hitler’s SS.
Serena reached for her parka and slipped her arms through the sleeves. “What are you suggesting, Conrad?” She was trying to zip her parka, but the EKG wires were in the way. “That God is to blame for humanity’s every famine, war or lustful leer?”
He realized she was looking straight at him now, her warm, brown eyes both accusing him and forgiving him at the same time. It irritated the hell out of him. So maybe he had been watching her breasts a little longer than he should have, he thought. He was only human. So was she, if she’d only admit it.
“I saw the way you looked at the little girl in the ice,” Conrad said softly. “It was like you were looking at yourself. Hardly the wicked sort the Genesis flood was intended to punish.”
“The rain falls on the just and the unjust,” she said absently. “Or in this case the ice.”
Conrad could tell her thoughts were someplace else. She couldn’t see her EKG numbers jumping again.
Conrad pointed to the monitors. “Look, maybe we should take you back up and bring down an able-bodied replacement.” He reached over to help her with the EKG wires. “I don’t want you to get hurt.”
She angrily knocked him away with her shoulder and ripped off the EKG leads. “Speak for yourself, Doctor Yeats.”
Conrad rubbed his head and stared at her in disbelief. “Could you send signals that are possibly more mixed?”
She zipped up her parka and jumped to her feet. “Who’s mixed up here, Doctor Yeats?”
Conrad stood still, aware of Lopez staring at him with interest. So were Kreigel and Marcus. The soldiers looked like they were just itching for the good nun to give the evil archaeologist a hard knee to the groin.
Then the hatch door opened and another blast of cold shot into the module with Yeats.
“You’re right, Yeats,” Conrad said coolly. “She’s fine.”
“Good. Now gear up. We’re going into P4,” Yeats said. “The drill team just found your shaft.”
13
The shaft was about seven feet wide and seven feet high, Serena guessed, and sloped into total darkness. A coin toss had won her the bragging rights of being the first inside, this after the drill team had sent a twenty-two- pound, six-wheeled modified Mars Sojourner down the shaft with a blowtorch and camera. The remote robot confirmed what Conrad had suspected: the shaft led directly to a chamber in the heart of P4.
As Serena stood on the landing the Americans had erected along the north face of P4 and looked into the mouth of the shaft, she could feel her heart racing. She was still disturbed by the little girl frozen in the ice, she realized, not to mention the sudden, cataclysmic end to an entire society. If only the child hadn’t looked so terrified.
She had always taken comfort in the theory that Genesis was a myth and the flood a theological metaphor. Yes, fossil evidence suggested a natural cataclysm. And no, she harbored little doubt that there was some sort of global deluge. But as divine retribution for humanity’s wickedness? That was simply Moses’s opinion. Unfortunately, she found the alternative worldview, that impersonal cycles of nature wiped out entire species in random fashion, even more distressing, if only because it sapped any meaning from her righteous indignation.
Perhaps it had something to do with her own childhood, she could hear the Holy Father telling her. She had seen herself as a child, an innocent victim, encased in ice, frozen in time like parts of her own personality. Or maybe it was simply the failure of her faith to provide any genuine comfort regarding the inexplicable evil and suffering in this world. It was as if Satan had his own guardian angel-God. But then that would make God the Devil, a thought too terrible for Serena to dwell on.
Her trance was broken by Conrad’s voice behind her.
