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The man stood on the doorstep for a moment, his face obscured by a cloud of gray vapor. Then he tossed some-thing into the snow and walked to the vehicle.
The Cigarette-Smoking Man. Mulder watched as he yanked on the door of the snow tractor and clambered inside. The vehicle reversed, driving over its tracks in the snow, then slowly crawled off toward the far horizon.
Mulder drew the binoculars back from his eyes. He was breathing even harder now, more excitement than exertion, and had to force himself to sit for several minutes, to calm him-self for what was ahead.
Finally he pocketed the field glasses, stumbled to his feet, and started down the far side of the slope toward the ice station.
He moved cautiously and with effort, care-fully weighing each step before setting foot on the ice crust before him. When he reached the bottom of the slope he glanced furtively behind him, still unable to shake the fear of being fol-lowed; then turned and went on.
Mulder's gaze remained fixed on the domes. Ahead of him, the ice station very gradually grew larger as he approached, until the domes loomed up against the cloud-streaked sky. He had only a few hundred yards left to go, when with a cry he stumbled. Beneath one boot the ice crust gave way. There was an instant when the world seemed to trembled before him, the domes like huge bubbles floating atop a milky sea. Then the ice collapsed under him.
He fell, landing on his back. The surface beneath him was cold and hard and smooth. He lay there for a moment, grunting as he caught his breath and trying to determine if he'd broken anything. Pain shot through one arm, and the gun wound at his temple throbbed, but after a minute had passed he rolled over, wincing, and began figuring out where the hell he was.
He had fallen on some hard, narrow, metal-lic structure, like a catwalk or steel floor. Its dull black hue was in stark contrast to the dead-white of the ice that encased it. There were vents in the floor through which air blew.
Warm air only by the relative standards of the Antarctic; but when Mulder lifted his head to gaze upward he saw what had happened. The air had caused a bubble, an air pocket, to form beneath the ice: above him the ceiling had been carved into patterns corresponding to the vents below. Where he had fallen through, the ice had softened and melted enough that it at last gave way at his tread. He rose to his knees, the air from one of the vents blowing onto his face. The vent was open, with no protective grate or covering, and big enough for a man to crawl into. Mulder pulled off the hood of his parka and his gloves, and looked deep into the vent, then back up at the hole he'd fallen through. No way back up there, and nothing around him but solid ice. He gazed back at the vent.
It was his only choice. He took a deep breath, then pulled himself forward into the darkness.
Inside the vent was cold and pitch-black, its sides corrugated to give him easy purchase. He moved cautiously, feeling ahead of him as the ribbed corridor snaked downward, until a pinprick of light appeared. Several more min-utes of creeping and he had reached the end, another vent opening into god knows what. He squeezed through headfirst, grabbing at a small ledge that projected beneath him and with dif-ficulty maneuvered his legs until he could swing himself down and then onto the ground.
Mulder blinked and shoved his gloved hand into his pocket, fumbling until he with-drew a flashlight. It clicked on; he swept it up and down in front of him, revealing a terrifying landscape.
He stood in the middle of an endless corri-dor carved into the ice. To the left and right, as far as he could see, were tall glassy shapes, regu-larly spaced on both sides of the passageway, like ice coffins stood upright against the cavern walls. He trained the light on the corridor, marking where it curved off into the distance; turned and did the same in the other direction. Then he spun around and pointed it directly in front of him. Mulder reached to brush frost from the surface ice. He gasped at what he saw.
There was a man frozen in the ice. Naked, his eyes open and staring into some long-forgotten distance. His hair was long and dark and matted, his flattened features oddly inhu-man: broad nose with flared nostrils, pro-nounced brow ridge, lips drawn back to show yellowing peglike teeth. Drawing closer he could see that the man's flesh had the same weird translucence as that of the fireman in the morgue.
Mulder grimaced, then drew back in revulsion as he saw something inside the man: an embryonic creature with huge, oblique black eyes, frozen like its host.
Mulder turned and quickly paced down the dim ice corridor. Where it ended, dim light seeped through several low, arched openings. Mulder dropped to his knees to peer through, and saw before him a brief passage that widened into a sort of balcony. He bellied down on his stomach and pulled himself through the arch, grunting as he scraped against ice and metal. When he reached the other end, he poked his head out onto the bal-cony and gazed up in wonder.
All around him was space, sweeping to a domed ceiling almost inconceivably high above him. He looked down and fought a wave of vertigo; wherever the bottom was, it was at least as far away as the top. Very carefully he pulled himself out, until he crouched on the lip of the balcony—actually a ventilation port opening onto the empty center of the dome. All around him, circling the dome, were count-less other ports; hundreds of them, thousands. Shakily he got to his feet, steadying himself against the wall behind him, and gazed down to the floor of the dome. There, a large central theater glowed with an eerie intensity different from the pale light that emanated elsewhere in the vast space: an icy, almost livid, glow. Leading down to this central theater were sev-eral enormous tubular spokes. One of them angled up past Mulder, perhaps an arm's length away.
It took several minutes for all this to sink in. The scale was too immense, much huger than anything Mulder had ever seen, could even imagine seeing. But strangest and most terrifying of all was what he saw within that central space: row upon row of roughly man-sized pods, dark-colored, hanging in formation from long railings that extended into the dark-ness. He squinted, trying to figure out what they were, and where the seemingly endless rows led; while hundreds of feet above Mulder, another figure gazed in disbelief at what was before him. Within the heated cab of his Sno-Cat, the Cigarette-Smoking Man leaned for-ward to clear a spot on the foggy windshield. Behind him the outlines of the ice station could barely be seen; before him a vague shape grew more distinct, until at last he could see it clearly—
The snow tractor Mulder had abandoned on the ice.
For a long moment, the Cigarette-Smoking Man gazed at the tractor. Then, without a word, he turned his own vehicle, and as quickly as he could, he drove back to the base.
Beneath the ice, Mulder continued to peer into the dimness, tracing the rows of frozen objects in an attempt to determine their origin. As he did so, he noticed that in the furthest recesses of the dome, the rows appeared to be moving. The objects suspended from the rail-ings slid along slowly and rhythmically, one by one clicking into place as though part of some gargantuan machine. He blinked, trying to get a better view, and then saw what he had not noticed before.
On the floor hundreds of feet below him, and within the shadow of those moving rows, lay a discarded cryolitter. Its plastic top had been removed and lay discarded alongside it. Amidst the dull gray bulwarks and stark, com-manding architecture of the dome, it looked surprisingly small and frail, the sole artifact made to human scale. And because of that, it unsettled Mulder more than almost anything else he had seen.