Blair, the little bald-pated biologist of the expedition, twitched nervously at the wrappings, exposed
clear, dark ice beneath and then pulling the tarpaulin back into place restlessly. His little bird-like
motions of suppressed eagerness danced his shadow across the fringe of stiff, graying hair around
his naked skull a comical halo about the shadow's head.
Commander Garry brushed aside the lax legs of a suit of underwear, and stepped toward the table.
Slowly his eyes traced around the rings of men sardined into the Administration Building. His tall,
stiff body straightened finally, and he nodded. "Thirty-seven, all here." His voice was low, yet
carried the clear authority of the commander by nature, as well as by title.
"You know the outline of the story back of that find of the Secondary Pole Expedition. I have been
conferring with Second-in-Command McReady, and Norris, as well as Blair and Dr. Copper. There
is a difference of opinion, and because it involves the entire group, it is only just that the entire
Expedition personnel act on it.
"I am going to ask McReady to give you the details of the story, because each of you has been too
busy with his own work to follow closely the endeavors of the others. McReady?"
Moving from the smoke-blued background, McReady was a figure from some forgotten myth, a
looming, bronze statue that held life, and walked. Six-feet-four inches he stood as he halted beside
the table, and, with a characteristic glance upward to assure himself of room under the low ceiling
beams, straightened. His rough, clashingly orange windproof jacket he still had on, yet with his
huge frame it did not seem misplaced. Even here, four feet beneath the drift-wind that droned across
the Antartic waste above the ceiling, the cold of the frozen continent leaked in, and gave meaning to
the harshness of the man. And he was bronze- his great red-bronze beard, the heavy hair that
matched it. The gnarled, corded hands gripping, relaxing, gripping and relaxing on the table planks
were bronze. Even the deep-sunken eyes beneath heavy brows were bronzed.
Age-resisting endurance of the metal spoke in the cragged heavy outlines of his face, and the
mellow tones of the heavy voice. "Norris and Blair agree on one thing; that animal we found was not
- terrestrial - in origin. Norris fears there may be danger in that; Blair says there is none.
"But I'll go back to how, and why, we found it. To all that was known before we came here, it
appeared that this point was exactly over the South Magnetic Pole of the Earth. The compass does
point straight down here, as you all know. The more delicate instruments of the physicists,
instruments especially designed for this expedition and its study of the magnetic pole, detected a
secondary effect, a secondary, less powerful magnetic influence about 80 miles southwest of here.
"The Secondary Magnetic Expedition went out to investigate it. There is no need for details. We
found it, but it was not the huge meteorite or magnetic mountain Norris had expected to find. Iron
ore is magnetic, of course; iron more so - and certain special steels even more magnetic. From the
surface indications, the secondary pole we found was small, so small that the magnetic effect it had
was preposterous. No magnetic material conceivable could have that effect. Soundings throught the
ice indicated it was within one hundred feet of the glacier surface.
"I think you should know the structure of the place. There is a broad plateau, a level sweep that
runs more than 150 miles due south from the Secondary station, Van Wall says. He didn't have
time or fuel to fly farther, but it was running smoothly due south then. Right there, where that
buried thing was, there is an ice-drowned mountian ridge, a granite wall of unshakeable strength
that has damned back the ice creeping from the south.
"And four hundred miles due south is the South Polar Plateau. You have asked me at various times
why it gets warmer here when the wind rises, and most of you know. As a meteorologist I'd have
staked my word that no wind could blow at -70 degrees - that no more than a 5 mile wind could blow
at -50, without causing warming due to friction with the ground, snow and ice, and the air itself.
"We camped there on the lip of that ice-drowned mountain range for twelve days. We dug our camp
into the blue ice that formed the surface, and escaped most of it. But for twelve consecutive days the
wind blew at 45 miles an hour. It went as high as 48, and fell to 41 at times. The temperature was
-63 degrees. It rose to -60 and fell to -68. It was meteorologically impossible, and it went on
uninterruptedly for twelve days and twelve nights.
"Somewhere to the south, the frozen air of the South Polar Plateau slides down from that
18,000-foot bowl, down a mountain pass, over a glacier, and starts north. There must be a funneling
mountain chain that directs it, and sweeps it away for four hundred miles to hit that bald plateau
where we found the secondary pole, and 350 miles farther north reaches the Antartic Ocean.
"It's been frozen there ever since Antartica froze twenty million years ago. There has never been a
thaw there.
"Twenty million years ago Antartica was beginning to freeze. We've investigated, thought and built
speculations. What we believe happened was about like this.
"Something came down out of space, a ship. We saw it there in the blue ice, a thing like a
submarine without a conning tower or directive vanes, 280 feet long and 45 feet in diameter at its
thickest.
"Eh, Van Wall? Space? Yes, but I'll explain that better later." McReady's steady voice went on.
"It came down fromspace, driven and lifted by forces men haven't discovered yet, and somehow -
perhaps something went wrong then - it tangled with Earth's magnetic field. It came south here, out
of control probably, circling the magnetic pole. That's a savage country there, but when Antartica
was still freezing it, it must have been a thousand times more savage. There must have been
blizzard snow, as well as drift, new snow falling as the continent glaciated. The swirl there must
have been particularly bad, the wind hurling a solid blanket of white over the lip of that now-buried
mountain.
"The ship struck solid granite head-on, and cracked up. Not every one of the passengers in it was
killed, but the ship must have been ruined, her driving mechanism locked. It tangled with the
Earth's field, Norris believes. No thing made by intelligent beings can tangle with the dead
immensity of a planet's natural forces and survive.
.
