“Good day, Casper—or whatever time it is wherever you are,” Denham began. “I trust you had a pleasant trip back?”
“Good enough. What’s the news?”
“I’ve heard back from our friends.” He meant Hyadeans who were raising Terran currency by marketing Terran skills back home rather than undercutting Terran industry. “We seem agreed in principle. The official agenda will be on armaments movements.” Toddrel had suggested that as the ostensible reason for getting together. Preventing Hyadean and foreign-manufactured Terran weapons from reaching subversive groups was a concern both in the U.S. and Europe. In the latter case, overland movement from Asia was becoming a major problem, and closing of the Canadian and Mexican borders was being considered on the other side of the Atlantic. Another potentially controversial measure that had been proposed was the stopping and searching of ships bound for U.S. or European waters.
But that would be a smokescreen. Denham went on, “One thing that we have to give due consideration to beforehand, I think, would be the question of, how would we say? . . . extending the principle exemplified by Echelon to more general operations.”
Toddrel smiled. Even over a secure line, the Englishman couldn’t bring himself to state a delicate matter directly. Echelon was code for the action taken to eliminate Farden and Meakes. What Denham meant was engineering ways of not only concealing but publicly blaming the other side for actions that could not be admitted to. “We’d both like to see the scale of activity in Bolivia cut back,” Toddrel supplied. “And there’s a guerrilla war going on down there. What I’m hearing is that some destabilization in that part of the world would work to our advantage.”
“Er, yes. . . . I think we are on the same wavelength,” Denham agreed.
“I’ll get proposals from our experts in that department,” Toddrel said. “I assume that’s what this meeting is for.” He bit his lip as he spoke. He still wasn’t happy about the security situation concerning Echelon. The ISS’s confirmation that Reyvek had been among those killed in the Chattanooga raid had come as some relief; on the other hand, the loss of their undercover operative in the motel meant that nobody knew how much information the two who had escaped might have taken with them. He didn’t want to divulge any of that now.
“Yes. . . . Exactly,” Denham said.
“Where will this meeting be? Do we know yet?” Toddrel inquired.
“Not for sure. I thought we might go to them this time, and make it somewhere in South America. That sounds like an interesting trip, and to be honest I’ve never been there. What would you say?”
Peals of laughter accompanied by splashing noises came from along the passageway beyond the door. “Well, New York does have its attractions, but there are times when I could use a change too,” Toddrel said. “Sure. Put me down as seconding it.”
Vrel reappeared intermittently for two days, during which Cade and Marie remained out of sight in the hotel. Gradually, they opened up, talking more about their lives in the years since they had gone separate ways—he having nothing to conceal; she, more circumspect for obvious reasons. They had drifted apart into different worlds. Now, suddenly and unexpectedly, they were thrown together in the same world. Cade began to remember Marie again as he had known her—living life with an intensity that made each day a unique experience. The difference now was that he was sharing it in a way that he would never have thought possible. Marie, for her part, had to accept that her world hadn’t protected them, and their security now stemmed from Cade’s world which she had once contemned.
Cade couldn’t decide if the erosion of barriers between them was simply a pragmatic reaction to the situation or signified something deeper and more personal. Even in his own case, he wasn’t sure. One night, after they had sat up late in the suite talking over a bottle of Grand Marnier and then gone separate ways, he returned and stood outside Marie’s door undecidedly. The drink and the closeness had left him mellow, and he found it easy to create scenarios in his mind of reliving lost intimacies. But in the end he turned away and went back to the other room. Something didn’t feel right. He marveled at this apparently newfound sensitivity that he was able to muster. Udovich would surely have approved.
The next morning, Vrel appeared and announced that they were going to Bolivia. Marie wasn’t used to the Hyadeans’ blunt, unceremonious way of going about things once they had set their mind.
“Just like that. Out of the blue. We’re going to Bolivia,” she repeated lamely.
“Roland, do you remember Corto Tevlak? Wyvex talked about him at that last party of yours,” Vrel said.
“The art promoter who was developing Chrysean outlets, right?”
“Yes. He’s been worried for some time about the way things are going here in the U.S. and on Earth generally, too. Erya talked to him on her way back. He knows others down there who feel the same way, including some Chrysean media people. The public back on Chryse is being misinformed, but questions are starting to be asked. Earth and its cultures are big news right now. This could be a good moment for getting attention in the right places.” Vrel paused to let them absorb that much, then shrugged. “You’re not safe here in the U.S. in any case. I’m told that from South America it would be easier to get you somewhere where you can stay out of the way for a while.”
Just like that.
“Well, it’s a nice thought, Vrel,” Cade agreed. “But just how do you imagine you’ll get us to Bolivia—when every security agent and surveillance computer in the country will be looking for us?”
“In the same way that we’re hosting you now,” Vrel replied. “As guests of the Hyadean government. We fly you there ourselves, VIP class.” He shook his head. “Sometimes I think that Terrans just look for problems, not solutions.”
Cade stared at him strangely. “You do realize what you’re doing, Vrel?” he said. “A pure favor, probably at considerable risk, with no immediate payoff. Doesn’t it feel just a little bit odd?”
“The idea of being motivated by helping others. Yes, I agree— it’s very odd.” Vrel paused to consider the question fully. “My honest answer is that I find it . . . strangely uplifting.” He grinned apologetically. “I can’t explain it either.”
The following day, accompanied by two other Hyadeans whom Vrel introduced as Ni Forgar and Barto Thryase, they drove out from the city and were admitted to the fenced compound that the Hyadeans maintained inside the military facility that Vrel had been visiting. A flyer carried them to a Hyadean air base in Maryland, where regular alien traffic connected to other points in the U.S., the Hyadean South American enclave, places in Europe, and elsewhere. They departed several hours later in a suborbital supersonic transport bound for the Hyadean mining center at Uyali, in the southern Altiplano region of Bolivia.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Bolivia is a land of color, contrast, and change, which has been nicknamed “the rooftop of the world.” The western third of the country is covered by the Andes, extending southward from Peru in two roughly parallel chains a couple of hundred miles apart. The western chain, known as the Cordillera Occidental, marks Bolivia’s border with Chile and is the continuation of a high mountain range that begins in northern Peru. Few passes open westward, the lowest being at thirteen thousand feet, and the stretches between are studded with volcanoes, many of them active, with peaks rising above nineteen thousand feet. The eastern chain, or Cordillera Real, consists of a series of great crustal blocks tilted eastward, rising sharply on the western side and descending through a region of rugged, densely forested terrain and mile-deep canyons to the eastern lowlands that make up the remaining two-thirds of Bolivia.
Between the two mountain chains lies a basin of plateau and highlands known as the Altiplano, or high tableland, extending over five hundred miles north-to-south and varying in elevation from twelve to fourteen thousand feet. The northern part of the Altiplano, bordering Lake Titicaca and containing the seat of government, La Paz, is the industrial hub and home to th
e bulk of the population. Nowhere else does such an industrial area, with cities, railroads, and highways, exist at such an altitude. The southern Altiplano is more arid and barren, consisting of vast salt wastes and rolling plains of steppe vegetation broken by fingerlike remnants of eroded escarpments standing between deep river valleys and basins.
The Spaniards began mining in the sixteenth century, finding large deposits of silver that made Potosí the largest and richest city in the New World at the time. Although later centuries saw developments in the extraction of tin, bismuth, tungsten, antimony, lead, zinc, iron, and copper from accumulations of volcanic ash and ancient sediments, much of the region’s mineral potential remained untapped because of political instability and want of capital investment. Then the Hyadeans moved in, and applying such techniques as nuclear-driven particle beam mining, and plasma ionization with magnetic separation, which no Terran operation could rival, began exploiting on a massive scale fabulous deposits along the inner slopes of the Cordillera Occidental in the southernmost reaches of the country. They sold the processed minerals to Terran manufacturing industries in exchange for land-purchase currency on terms highly profitable for the Terran enterprises concerned and also for the national land-management agencies. Development of transportation northward opened up the Amazon route for exporting processed minerals, especially to Europe, and a newer, current project involved blasting a tunnel through the Cordillera Occidental to a new shipping and handling facility being constructed at Iquique in Chile.
The Hyadean residential settlements were farther north in the more picturesque parts of eastern Peru and the highlands in the tip of Brazil, west of Amazon basin. Their main spaceport for connection to the interstellar ships parked in orbit was at Xuchimbo, in western Brazil, near the point where the borders of the three countries meet. The Hyadean presence had brought a prosperity boom to local businesses, and workers and unions were more than happy with the wages. This provided a broad popular base of political support for the Hyadean-backed government operations being conducted against the insurgency forces active throughout the area.
Cade’s reality—the accumulation of perceptions and experiences that he lived in—had always reflected the world of the affluent and the comfortable. Having taken twenty-first-century global communications for granted as part of growing up, he had paid a token concession at the intellectual level to the existence of other places ruled by other conditions; but despite the background detail woven into movie presentations and the vividness of travel documentaries, the places he acknowledged at that detached level of awareness had never before, somehow, taken on the deeper, emotional quality that brings on a sense of being real.
“Vast,” “rugged,” “empty” were the words that formed in his mind as he took in the cabin displays while the SST slowed for its vertical descent into the landing zone. It was now late in the day. To the west, broken ramparts of reds, browns, yellows and grays, rising in ranks of fading ridges to a line of snowy peaks barely visible in the distance, were darkening against the background sun. Arid hills and rocky basins extended away north and south, opening out and leveling eastward into barren salt flats. Amid it all stood the installations at Uyali.
Uyali was Hyadean-built to serve as the center of their extraction operations, sprung out of the Altiplano desert south of previously worked Terran mining areas. On the western side was what Ni Forgar, who seemed to be some kind of engineer returning to base, said was the reduction and processing complex. With its metal domes, cylinders, and spherical constructions standing among large, white boxlike structures, it looked more like a refinery than what Cade would have expected, though with less clutter and piping. It seemed ugly and sprawling, but visiting Terran engineers had apparently been amazed at its compactness for the volume of material that it handled. This arrived by way of two gigantic moving-belt conveyors converging in a V across the landscape, carved through hills and spanning canyons until they were lost from sight; farther on, Forgar told them, the root conveyors divided repeatedly to form a branching tree probing its way through to extraction points scattered among the mountains. He described the processing complex with typical Hyadean bluntness, never slow to make a point of what he thought they did better.
“That’s where the rock is crushed, vaporized, and separated into its various elements,” he told them. “It doesn’t have to be high-grade ore. Any shovelful of desert contains traces of just about everything you can name. But low grades aren’t economic with your methods. You know how to produce nuclear heat but you don’t use it. It reduces all materials to a plasma state of charged particles which can be separated magnetically. All clean and efficient. Tuned radiation fields direct the recombination to whatever compounds, alloys, and other forms you want. Surplus energy is tapped for generating electricity and process heat as byproducts. The refined output is sent up to the rail links and Amazon system.” Forgar indicated a wide roadway disappearing to the north, on which processions of robot trucks could be seen moving both ways. “The Pacific coast will become the most important outlet when the tunnel is completed.” Forgar looked at Cade and Marie as if expecting questions, but neither of them had any for the moment. He turned toward Vrel.
“Terrans stumbled upon the beginnings of low-energy transmutation years ago, but they didn’t read it right. We run reactions at levels far below anything their scientists believed were possible.”
“Was that what they called cold fusion?” Vrel queried. This really wasn’t his field.
“Bad name. ‘Nuclear catalysis’ would have been better. They misinterpreted what was going on, then abandoned it because they couldn’t explain it.”
Vrel looked at Cade. “Is that beginning to sound like someone we know?” he invited.
“Mike Blair?” Cade guessed.
“Because it didn’t fit with the theory,” they both quoted together.
Forgar looked mystified. “Theories! They’d rather stay with products of their imagination? I don’t think I’ll ever understand it.”
A couple of miles east from the reduction complex was the “town” of Uyali itself—more the advanced-alien equivalent of a mining camp. Stark and utilitarian even for something conceived by Hyadeans, conceding nothing to adornment or elegance, it provided living space, services, and administration for the area. From above it resembled an irregular, colored-tile mosaic. As the SST descended, the tiles took on the form of rectangular boxes and cubes aligned and stacked like creations of children’s blocks, making bridges here, adding a level there, the whole giving the impression of being added in haphazard leaps according to need rather than resulting from any unifying design. Beyond, separated by an expanse of fenced open ground, was a sprawl of familiarly styled Terran office units and prefabricated buildings thrown together into streets, blending on the far side into a shantytown of cabins and trailers.
The SST landed and taxied from the touchdown point to a handling area where a mix of Hyadean aircraft was standing amid service buildings, maintenance gantries, and cargo conveyors. A driverless bus took the passengers to a jumble of more Hyadean domino and shoebox constructions that Cade took to be the terminal facility. Along the far side of the landing area, were huge, hangarlike enclosures giving glimpses of sleek shapes surrounded by service platforms and access stairways within, standing in front of clusters of storage tanks, various unidentifiable structures, and tall towers bristling with antenna arrays. To one side, away from the main scene of activity, stood a line of what were unmistakably Terran-built military jets. Armored cars and other camouflage-painted vehicles were parked in a fenced compound nearby. Cade could only speculate as to what they were doing here. They passed a construction area where Terran work crews, some in shirts and jeans, others wearing orange coveralls, using unfamiliar machines, were excavating a new site for something. Evidently, local labor was being employed even inside the air base.
From closer range, the terminal revealed itself as a composition of what appeared to be prefabricated mo
dules and tubelike connecting units stacked and combined in various ways to form office units, living quarters, or work space as desired. The resulting outlandish creations had ends of boxes projecting out into space; blocks straddling gaps and leaving holes through to daylight on the other side; connecting tubes emerging from walls to make right-angled turns in midair, as if changing their minds as to where they wanted to go. It seemed odd that with their obsession for efficiency, Hyadeans should be so incapable of realizing anything that on Earth would be regarded as “pleasing.”
The interior was predictably functional. The mission in Lakewood had used a regular building adapted to Hyadean use. This was the first time Cade had been in an environment that was Hyadean in origin. The part of the building they had entered consisted of several large and irregular interconnecting spaces rather than the linear arrangements of rooms and corridors that typified Terran buildings. The predominant color was unfinished metallic gray, with a rigid white mesh in most places serving as ceilings below tangles of cables, pipes, and ducting that were plainly visible. Dividing up the area was an assortment of structures functioning as partitioning, shelving and storage, seating, control consoles aligned and combined in various ways, making it difficult to distinguish furnishings from parts of the architecture. They seemed to be both. One of the Hyadeans working nearby said something to the unit near him and got up to move to another station. The unit reconfigured itself to present a counter and convenience shelf that hadn’t been there before, lost a corner, and moved after him to attach itself to a different part of the surroundings. A voice spoke from somewhere in the wall; the Hyadean grunted a reply and carried on. Cade noticed that Marie was staring in surprise. Not being familiar with the ubiquitous Hyadean low-level AIs, she had thought for a moment that the Hyadeans were talking to themselves.
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