Opening up!
March 28
Call me old-fashioned in one way, at least: discoveries lack something when you watch them through a video screen. Then again, I didn’t actually want to be outside in the frozen, slowly deepening twilight, either. Such is the eternal conundrum of Antarctic archeology: field work is dangerous here. I still wanted to be the one opening up the Shackelton Object, though.
Although it turned out that we couldn’t have shifted that door without explosives and blowtorches. This close up, the probe could dimly detect a locking mechanism on the other side of the door; I would call it a deadbolt, except that deadbolts typically do not weigh five hundred pounds. Even the probe had trouble at first loosening and moving it (via gravity pulses, or whatever other witchcraft it uses). Being under the snow and ice for several centuries had frozen it, in more ways than one.
It had been centuries, too. Close up, the structure of the Object was clear: a vault door of crudely machined iron plates, riveted to a lattice of girders and mounted on titanic hinges. Those hinges did not shriek when the door opened; the silence was nigh perfect, the only noise being the faint clank as the Object’s iron edge met the mountain wall. The lack of sound disquieted me obscurely. Who built this thing?