Cyborg 03 - High Crystal

by Martin Caidin

  Goldman saw Austin bending down. “Get us out of here quick,” he told the pilot.

  A rock smashed into the plexiglass bubble and ricocheted away. Goldman saw Steve Austin taking aim. The bionics arm was a near blur of movement as Goldman ducked away from the open door. The second rock thrown with near-bullet force banged off the belly of the helicopter. The pilot needed no further convincing. The turbine howled as he went to full power for altitude and distance.

  Goldman pointed. “That clearing over there will do. Let me off there and then get this thing away. It’s eight-thirty. I want you back here at noon, understand?”

  The pilot shook his head as he circled into the wind for the landing. Goldman unstrapped his belt and started from the machine as it rocked gently to the surface. “Just add any damage to the bill. Noon, remember?” He half-turned as he crouched beneath the whirling blades over his head, then moved quickly away, not even looking back as the sudden roar of power and whistling rotors told him the pilot was on his way.

  He walked along the edge of the stream to the small camp. Austin and Wells stared at him. Goldman smiled. “Nothing like a warm welcome.”

  Austin turned to the doctor.

  “What’s the penalty if I kill this character?”

  “They make you fill out forms. In quadruplicate.”

  “He’s not worth it.”

  Steve accepted the cup offered by Wells, who hesitated a moment before handing one to Goldman. He filled a third cup for himself and sat cross-legged on the ground. “All right, Oscar, let’s have the bad news.”

  Goldman took a pull at the poffee, placed the cup on the log beside him. “We have a trip for you.”

  “I’m on a trip,” Steve said.

  “This one has higher priority.”

  “Not interested.”

  “You will be, in fact, you’ll both be interested.” He turned to the doctor. “You’re going with him.”

  “How do I fit in? And where are we supposed to go?”

  “Peru. The high Andes. An area close to the Cordillera Vilcabamba.”

  “I know of it,” the doctor said. “What are you after, Oscar?”

  Goldman finished his coffee. “We’re not sure. The Cordillera Vilcabamba, the maps say, is a high and level plain in the Peruvian Andes. About ten or twelve thousand feet high. But the maps are wrong. We found out only recently just how wrong. The Vilcabamba is a treacherous mountain range. Naked rock. Up to fourteen thousand feet or more. That’s just the general idea. The Vilcabamba is in southeastern Peru. You can better identify our area of concern by El Misti. That’s a volcano, still smoking, exactly 23,482 feet high. The volcano—I’m using straight-line distance—is some forty miles from the native town of Azul. About thirty miles downriver—that’s the Sicuani and it covers a lot of jungle—there’s a larger town. Ayabaca. It has a grass airstrip, apparently a good one about four thousand feet long.”

  Steve said, “How far from Lima?”

  “Three hundred and twenty miles straight east, give or take twenty. The area we’re interested in lies due south, off the bottom flank of the Vilcabamba.”

  “You said the maps were all wrong for that area.”

  Goldman nodded. “They are. That’s why we’ve made you our own charts. The best we could get from the ERTS satellite and Skylab. Also, anything that might have turned up from the Gemini and Apollo flights that crossed over the area.”

  “No aerial photographs?”

  “Very few. In fact, we were working with the Peruvian government on a special effort to get some mapping photography. We were running a C-130 up and down the range to get full spectrum—visible light, radar topography, infrared.”

  “And?”

  “Mostly bad luck. The winds that come down the slopes of El Misti are wild. There’s also a peculiar sort of inversion layer that creates a great deal of fog or mist, not to mention the cloud cover.”

  Steve poured a second cup of coffee, did the same for Wells. Goldman declined. “I gather,” Steve said, “that the net of all this effort isn’t much.”

  Goldman agreed. “But what we don’t have, you can fill in when you’re there.”

  “Which brings us to the why of your unwelcome visit,” Wells said.

  Goldman thought. “The why is rather hazy. There’s something there, way high up, that shouldn’t be there. We’d like to know about it. During the last mission flown in the area of Cordillera Vilcabamba we lost the C-130E aircraft assigned to the mapping program.” He saw Steve’s attention sharpen. “It was at night. We’re reasonably sure about what happened. The aircraft was caught in what are apparently swift-forming and unusually powerful thunderstorms. Since there’s no meteorological service anywhere in that area, night flying is a hit-or-miss operation. This particular machine got caught in one of the more severe buildups, maybe in an entire squall line. At least that seemed to be the situation as we could best determine it from the one survivor. The airplane was hit with something that seemed to be lightning. It—”

  “Hold on, you can hardly mistake a lightning strike, Oscar.”

  “Yes you can, Steve. It could have been lightning. Or a severe electrical short in the aircraft system that ignited kerosene fumes released by the drastic bending motions of the wing during the storm. Or an engine explosion. Or a heat ray or—”

  “A what?”

  Goldman turned to Wells. “I said a heat ray, doctor. Or maybe a plasma bolt. Or a laser beam. Any one of them could be mistaken for lightning. There seems little doubt, though, that the airplane was destroyed by lightning. Major Ben Ryland, Dutch Ryland, was the only survivor. His report strongly supports this. And the nature of his body burns, the way he was blown clear of the exploding aircraft—”

  “What happened to Ryland?” Steve asked.

  “Hit in a wind he estimated at thirty to forty knots. He went into the top of a tree. The impact broke his left arm. He fell through and just before he hit the ground the canopy snagged in the trees. He dropped the last bit without too much difficulty. It was raining hard. He had his survival kit. He set a splint, took rations and morphine, used his mylar blanket for warmth and cover. Next morning he decided to check out something he had seen by flasher during the night. Ryland wisely didn’t trust his own memory of the night. He’d been in shock, had jumped, had broken his arm. Where he came down was almost unbroken tree cover, so aerial or satellite photography would show only treetops and the heavy growth. Also the area due south of the flank of Cordillera Vilcabamba where Ryland landed, at least by any records we or the Peruvians have, has never been explored. It’s so wild and unknown that even the mountains—and they’re rough—are shown on maps as a generally flat plateau. There has never been the slightest evidence that the area was ever occupied, not recently and not even in ancient times. We checked this out with Peruvian archeologists and—”

  “Get to it, Oscar,” Steve said.

  “Major Ryland found a highway running through the jungle.”

  “Highway?” Wells echoed.

  “Highway. Not some rutted path. Not something for animals. Not something pounded into the ground. I mean a highway made of stone blocks. How deep or heavy, Ryland couldn’t tell. Their pattern was jumbled, no geometric design. No careful setting of one block after another. It was Ryland’s opinion that the area had had rock of different sizes pounded into an approximate shape and then some kind of cutting tool was used to make the roadway absolutely level. Absolutely level. Ryland made a point of that. He said the surface, accounting for weathering, mossy growth and the like, was almost as smooth as polished marble.”

  “Did Ryland have any idea how long this . . . highway extended?”

  “No. And with his broken arm he wasn’t in the mood for sightseeing, even if what he saw was impossible. He also had to walk his way out. He guessed, and he was right, that the odds on being found by air search were next to zero. So he walked along the highway to a point where he saw the best chance for working down from the mountain
s. He headed downslope and into the jungle. It took him twelve days to make it to the outpost town of Aztol. He was nearly dead when the natives brought him downriver to the airstrip at Ayabaca. He estimated he’d walked the highway three or four miles. Now, before he started, as far as he could see to the north, the highway just went on and on. He walked, let’s say, for those four miles to the south. Before he turned off and started down toward the valley he said the road stretched out of sight.”

  “Did he say anything else?” Steve asked.

  “Yes. That he could find no signs of wear from a wheeled or other type of vehicle on the highway.”

  “I’m not wholly surprised,” Rudy Wells said as the other two looked at him. “I’ve heard of such road systems in South America, mostly in Peru but some in Bolivia. As I suspect you know, Oscar, I’ve been interested in this for some time. We’ve heard of such roadways made up of huge blocks cut with amazing geometric precision. They apparently were brought together up to great heights by means still unknown. In Bolivia, near Santa Cruz, long stretches of what appear to be stone have been reported to be concrete . . . a strange sort of roadway in some places twenty feet wide, in others thirty, with joined diamond shapes running the length of the road that had been broken up in some places by earthquake or flood or some kind of volcanic activity. That roadway is made of concrete, yet concrete didn’t come into general use for thousands of years after it’s estimated the roadway was built.”

  Steve looked at his friend. “This is getting to sound like that business about ancient astronauts, chariots of the gods and—”

  “Erich von Daniken,” Wells offered. “Much of what he writes about, when you read between his conclusions, is hard fact—things that have so far not been explained, like that highway in Bolivia. He’s accumulated a great deal of material. Say with the skeptics that at best only a small percentage amounts to hard fact. Forget his suppositions and rather special interpretations of the Bible and other historical works. Forget all that. What do you do about the percentage of fact? What can you do with everything else that is a complete mystery?”

  “Like what?” Steve asked. “It’s one thing to talk about ancient mysteries, but how do you draw sensible conclusions about them?”

  Oscar Goldman was pleased. He had, as Wells thought, known about the dootor’s interest and active studies in this field. As long as the doctor held his friend Steve Austin’s interest, he’d be doing the job of convincing that he, Goldman, had come here to do.

  “Well, for starters,” Wells began, “there’s the ancient city of Nazca. It’s in the Palpa Valley in Peru, close to the sea and adjacent to the flanks of the Andes . . . I never thought of this before but there’s another ancient city roughly in the area . . . I’m talking about Cuzco that lies on the southeastern edge of the Cordillera Vilcabamba that’s—”

  “In the same area,” Steve broke in, “where that C-130 went down. Any connection to it?”

  “Hard to say. They were in a storm and—”

  “Never mind, Rudy, go on.”

  “Well, the Palpa Valley has a strip of level ground a bit more than a mile wide and nearly forty miles long. There’s some strange stuff on the ground. It seems to be stone but it resembles rusted iron. No one is really sure what it is. But that’s not the real point. I once flew over this plain, Nazca, and I tell you it’s a shaky experience. The whole plain has enormous lines that follow a geometric pattern. There’s no reason for the pattern. There are large areas that are trapezoids. Some of the lines run in parallel, others intersect. But they are geometric and they are real and . . . well, they’re there.”

  “Any ideas?” Steve said.

  “The archeologists tend to suggest a system of roads built by the Incas.”

  “You agree?”

  “It seems to me to raise more questions than it answers. If they are roads, why do they run parallel for long distances? And the roads end abruptly. Why? There hasn’t been any natural disruption of the surface features—lava flows or quakes. The end of the roads, to use that name for the moment, is too sudden.”

  “How about disease, invasion, change of power among their priests?”

  Wells agreed readily. “Another possibility is that they form some important element in a religion we still can’t figure out. There are theories that the lines represent a link to astronomy. Someone else talks about a calendar. Von Daniken says that when he flew over the plain at Nazca he could make out the geometric pattern of an airfield for visitors from space.”

  “What?”

  “I’m telling you what Von Daniken said.”

  “You seem an instant disbeliever,” Oscar Goldman said.

  “It doesn’t take much,” Steve answered. “First, anyone who’s capable of flight through interplanetary space doesn’t need a runway thirty or forty miles long. If you needed that to stop you’d be using a winged vehicle that would be coming down so fast it’d be tearing itself to pieces with heat. We can take heat in the upper atmosphere on re-entry because the air is so thin. But down here? The shock waves would be incredible. The speed of touchdown would make the slightest bounce a blow that would tear apart any machine. Does this man offer any other explanation?”

  “He does,” Wells said. “He suggests that an airborne machine somehow managed to communicate instructive intimations to the local residents. They responded without knowing why—to some deep inner hunch, you might call it. And when they were finished, this was to be their sign-post to the gods that they were worthy of being visited by god-like creatures.”

  “But you can’t,” Steve said, “label your own conclusions as fact just because nobody knows the answer to a mystery and therefore can’t say for sure you’re wrong. This reminds me of people who ask me if I believe in UFOs. I say, no, I don’t. They get sore and want to know if I don’t believe in life on other planets. No connection between question-answer and conclusion. Same thing goes for whether or not I believe in astronauts visiting earth ages ago. Maybe they did. I just say there’s never been evidence that stands up to a real test.”

  “And the major’s highway in Peru, and the one in Bolivia that shouldn’t be there?” Goldman said.

  “So there are highways. And they’re mysterious. And we can’t understand how they got there. But because they’re there, and we can’t figure out how come, doesn’t prove that beings came into this solar system and built the things. There’s an old saying that countless scientific experiments prove conclusively that the beating of tom-toms always causes the sun to reappear after an eclipse.”

  “We have another one in our trade,” Rudy said. “It’s about a doctor who decided he needed a hobby to get his mind off all the ills of his patients. So he took up training a flea to respond to his verbal command. He did pretty well. The flea, among other things, would jump when he got the command to jump. After a while the doctor got tired of the sport and decided to turn his hobby into a scientific experiment. He pulled the two front legs off the flea and said, ‘jump.’ And the flea jumped. Then he pulled off the two center legs and said ‘jump.’ Again the flea jumped. Then he pulled off the last pair of legs and commanded the flea to jump. It didn’t jump. He shouted and threatened the flea, but it still wouldn’t jump. The doctor then wrote a scientific thesis to prove that when you remove all six legs from a flea, it loses its sense of hearing.”

  Goldman indulged in a smile. “I’ll steal that for McKay.”

  “Let me take it a bit further,” Steve said. “Rudy, aren’t there some unusual astronomical records that come from the Incas, or Aztecs and Mayans?”

  “No question, Steve. One of the best known is the so-called Great Idol of Tiahuanaco, a block of stone that weighs about twenty tons and is marked with precision-made symbols. There’s argument about how to interpret these symbols, but one holds that the symbols actually represent an extraordinary collection of astronomical data. All of it’s based on recognition of the earth being a sphere, and the block seems to go back far past the point when a
round earth first came into scientific favor. Some authorities claim the stone block is around twenty-seven thousand years old.”

  “And the opposition?”

  “They don’t agree about astronomical knowledge being involved. They say no one has yet diciphered or translated the markings. And as for the age of the stone, you can get five experts in one room and each will give you a different answer.

  “Let’s say there are more of these astronomical records. Let’s say they’re accurate. I’ve read the Mayans had some kind of observatories and did some remarkable work in astronomy, and that their calendar was very accurate. We know about great European astronomers from history. We call some of them geniuses, but I’ve never heard anyone say the same about the Mayans and other Central and South American groups who may also have had geniuses in their religious leaders that spent lifetimes in this kind of research.”

  “You know,” Steve added, “we should all have learned from the moon. Never trust conclusive evidence either pro or con until we wrap up the details. How many thousands of years have people studied the moon? How many millions of pictures were taken by observatories around the world? There was an amazing similarity to the pattern. The moon was filled with jagged peaks and crags, sharp rocks and God knows what else. An astronaut would risk tearing or puncturing his suit from rocks if he even brushed against them. Except the moon had been shaved, ground and powdered. The mountains were round and gentle. No one’s ever seen a sharp or a jagged peak anywhere on the moon. Every astronomer and scientist in the world misinterpreted the photographs. They saw jagged shadows so they figured the mountains must be jagged.

  “And what about Mars. They said it was everything from a long-dead civilization to a flourishing one that had built a planet-girdling network of canals. We could see flashes of light on Mars at different times and people spoke seriously about hydrogen-bomb explosions. The waves of darkening were vegetation, and so on.

  “Well, I was pretty involved in assessing what we learned about Mars because we’ve had it as a program target a long time. Mariner Four took pictures that covered about 1 percent of the planet. We saw craters and right away the old theories went out the window. Mars was cratered like the moon; Mars was like the moon. So we fired up Mariners Six and Seven, and they took pictures of 20 percent of the surface. They saw not only the craters but also featureless terrain and chaotic terrain of jumbled faults and the icecaps. The pictures made it clear Mars had been dead a long time. No signs of life. No signs of any growth. No signs of water or oxygen or anything else. A dead world.