Free Raising Atlantis by Thomas Greanias Page A

living daylights.
    Classical music was piped in through hidden speakers.
    Only the thin polystyrene walls separated them from the furious storm raging outside. Eight inches and what sounded like the faint strains of Symphony No. 25 in G Minor.
    “Mozart,” Yeats said. “Some bullshit experiments proved that classical music has a positive effect on the cardiovascular system. A decade from now it will be blues or rap or whatever turns on the geeks.”
    They passed through another air lock into a new module and Conrad felt a weird sensation of vertigo. The upper half of the module looked exactly like the bottom half. And the ceiling area was packed with instrument panels, circuit breakers, temperature dials, and dosimeter gauges. The panel clocks, like Yeats’s wristwatch, were set on central time—Houston.
    Then Conrad noted the NASA markings all around and suddenly realized that Ice Base Orion was never intended for use on Earth. It must have been designed to be an orbiting space station or a colony on one of the polar caps of Mars, where the ice would be tapped for water and life support.
    “What the hell is this place you’ve built down here?”
    Conrad asked.
    “Welcome to the most inaccessible human settlement on the planet, son.”
    They turned a corner, and Conrad followed Yeats down another long corridor. Conrad could hear a low hum beneath the music as they walked. And every now and then, a shudder seemed to pass through the entire base like a train had just rumbled by.
    “We’ve got a command center, biodome, mobile servicing center, an astrophysics lab, an observatory, and modules for materials processing, remote sensing, and medical research,”
    Yeats said.
    “You forgot the drill rig,” Conrad said. “That would explain the shaking.”
    Yeats pretended he hadn’t heard him and pointed in the opposite direction. “The brig is that way.”
    This whole base is a brig, thought Conrad as he looked down a tunnel toward a sealed-off air lock. “Where is anybody going to go that you need to lock him up?”
    “The harsh conditions here are known to send men over the edge,” Yeats said.
    Conrad looked at his father. “Is that what happened to you?”
    Yeats stopped and turned around abruptly in front of a door marked PERSONNELONLY. As if anybody else was around to violate security procedures.
    “Follow me through this door, son,” said Yeats, his hand resting on the release bar, “and you just might go over the edge yourself.”
    Standing on a platform inside the cavernous laboratory was a pyramid about ten feet tall. A solid piece of rock with an almost reddish glow, it was marked by four grooves or rings around its sides. The rings began halfway up the slopes and grew closer together toward the top.
    Conrad let out a low whistle.
    “Pentagon satellites picked up a dark anomaly beneath the ice shortly after the last big quake some weeks ago,” Yeats said. “We put a survey team on the ground, but they couldn’t pick up anything solid. The anomaly appeared to be invisible to radio-echo surveys. That’s when we started drilling. We hit the stone a mile beneath the ice cap. Clearly it’s not a natural rock formation.”
    No it wasn’t, Conrad thought with growing excitement as he studied the stone. The U.S. State Department’s official position was that no human had set foot on Antarctica before the nineteenth century. Yet this rock was at least as old as the ice that covered it—twelve thousand years. That strongly suggested the remains of a civilization twice as old as Sumer, the oldest known on Earth.
    Conrad ran his hand across the smooth face of the stone and inserted a finger into one of the strange grooves. This find could be it, he thought, nearly trembling now, the first evidence of the Mother Culture he had been seeking his entire life.
    “So where’s the rest of it?” he asked.
    Yeats seemed to be holding back. “Rest of what?”
    “The pyramid,” Conrad said. “This is a benben