“You’re in the groove,” Steve called as the Gooney Bird presented an almost dead-on view to him. Then he saw it drifting off to one side. “Phil, crab her in. Don’t make any gross corrections. Crank in some left rudder and she’ll be true blue long before you get here.”
Wayne came in just a hair below the speed Steve had called for, but he was really dragging grass and this compensated. “Chop power,” Steve shouted into the radio as the transport loomed before him, rushing toward the ground. “Keep that yoke back and work those brakes!” In the cockpit, a white-faced Wayne followed the calls, the throttles snapping back, the yoke hauled as far back as it would go to get the tailwheel down, combining ground drag with the angled wings as she rolled three-point. “Watch the brakes,” Steve cautioned. “The moment you feel that tail coming up, ease off and then put ’em on again.”
The transport stopped less than fifty feet beyond the outer flags. A lovely job.
They spent the next few hours taking it slow. They taxied the airplane as far back to the eastern part of the improvised strip as they could park it safely. Rudy ordered everyone to eat—hot soups, which refused to get really hot because water boiled at such a low temperature at their altitude, and high-protein rations. And he insisted on candy bars for all hands after that. He ordered a regimen from then on of eating and drinking.
Finally, with Steve taking guard watch, they slept like the dead.
Steve woke the others just before three o’clock that afternoon. Wayne and Mueller set up the photocell detectors several hundred yards from their camp area, which consisted of the airplane and strong tents pitched beneath its wings. Steve found some disbelieving glances about this order, but was too tired to argue. “Just do it,” he said, irritably, and out of his sight Rudy motioned to the others to stop arguing and get on the with the job. For a while Steve assisted Rudy and Jennings in setting up the camp, hammering tent stakes deep into the ground. The afternoon was gone by the time they finished, and Mueller and Jennings forced themselves to eat before they crawled into their tent and in effect passed out. There was much to do, but any excessive effort at this altitude, Rudy warned, and they’d be incapacitated by nosebleeds and headaches, to say nothing of wheezing lungs.
They passed the night quietly, taking two-hour guard watches. In the morning, immediately after breakfast, Dr. Jennings brought everyone running to his side with a sudden shout. He stood by a surveying instrument, waving his arms.
“We’re onto something! I—I—” He was turning a pale blue before their eyes, his body suddenly wavering from side to side.
Cursing, Rudy ran to him, unbuckling an oxygen mask, slapping it to Jennings’s nose and mouth, helping him to the ground. “Five minutes, doctor,” Rudy warned. “Don’t talk, don’t move. Whatever it is, it’ll wait five minutes.”
Jennings tried weakly to gesture, and Rudy lost his temper. “Lie still, dammit, or I’ll put you out with a needle.” Jennings groaned, but closed his eyes and lay silent. His color returned as his breathing improved. The moment Rudy released him, with a warning to take it slowly, Jennings stood up and pointed to the west.
“There,” he said, the excitement now controlled. “Puma Lake. See it?”
“I see it, doc,” Wayne said. “It’s as big as a mountain. How could we miss it?”
Jennings ignored the needle. “Do you notice the line of our impromptu airstrip? We’re centered here on the plateau, and our strip runs exactly east and west. I want to stress that. All the peoples of South America that built complex structures in a relationship always functioned on the cardinal points of the compass. It was always due north or west or south or east. I’ve never seen nor heard of any deviation from that.”
Rudy Wells nodded. “That’s the way I found it in Bolivia, too. The roads there, I mean. Dead along a magnetic compass heading.”
“Of course,” Jennings went on, his excitement drawing a warning from Wells, “and that road, the road or highway, or whatever it was that Major Ryland found, must be on this plateau. We’re not along its centerline, but much of this tableland has eroded away. Much has been lost through earth tremors that must have broken away the flanks. To the south looks doubtful. But directly to the north of us . . . see, both Temple Mountain and El Misti are on an exact magnetic heading of due north. I don’t believe the volcano will fit into any of this, because it could be comparatively recent—it shows signs of young birth, and there’s every likelihood it came into existence long after the roadway was built.”
He stopped talking to breathe in deeply, as Rudy again offered the oxygen mask. Jennings went on. “We might, if erosion and other damage hasn’t wiped out all traces, find some indication of a road that also leads to the north. We just may be standing near the crossroads of what was an ancient and totally unknown empire. The home of the Caya!”
• • •
They found the road minutes before the sun slipped beneath the mountain peaks far west of the Chalhuanca Plateau. Jennings was right. It lay along what was the northern rim of the tableland. They had time only to verify its existence, and for Rudy to order Jennings, white-faced from excitement and overexertion, back to their camp.
“But I can’t leave it now,” Jennings said. “I’ve been looking for . . . for this”—he was assailed by a fit of coughing—“all my life.”
“Doctor,” Steve said quietly, taking him by the arm, “this road has been here at least ten thousand years. It will be here in the morning. What you don’t know is what lives up here or visits this plateau at night. We’ve found game trails all over the place. That means a feeding ground for big cats. Maybe jaguars. The night is their time. It isn’t yours. Now please come back to the camp.”
Jennings stared at him, suddenly feeling exhausted beyond the point of quick recovery. “Of course, you’re right.”
Steve nodded. “Tomorrow, Doctor Jennings.”
They returned to camp, where Rudy placed an oxygen mask to Jennings’s face. The scientist was asleep before his head reached the pack he used for a pillow.
It rained all night. The kind of rain that is described in mystery tales. A wind howling at more than forty miles an hour, the rain slashing at them almost horizontally. And still Steve insisted on the guard watch, with the exception of Jennings.
In the morning they discovered they’d had company during the night. And no one had seen a thing.
CHAPTER 11
“What happened?” Steve demanded of Phil Wayne. They stood by the photocell tripod that made up the eastern corner of their electronic alarm system on the Chalhuanca Plateau. A dozen feet from the tripod they’d discovered the broken grass that aroused Steve’s suspicions. He followed the faint signs and stopped when the footprints became visible beyond question . . . visible despite the heavy rains, because whoever had come up there during the night had penetrated the rainsoft soil. The water drained off, leaving—just long enough to be detected—the fading footprints.
“Steve, I don’t know what to say.” Phil Wayne was devastated by the failure of his device. “I even set up the system with both the optical and audio alarm so we wouldn’t miss . . .” He shook his head. “It could have been the rain, it was coming down heavy enough during the night, what with that wind and everything . . . it could have blocked the optical sensors. Maybe even lightning. There’s a chance it could have overloaded the system. I just don’t know, Steve. I’ll have to check it out close.”
“Time enough for that later,” Steve said, taking Wayne off the hook. “Luck was still with us.” They walked to the rim of the plateau, looked down along the steep slope. “See how the fall is set up?” Steve pointed. “Soft rock, with plenty of outcroppings. And there’s heavy bush and vines all through. It looks tough, but a good mountain man could work his way up here.”
“In that rain?”
“Depends how good you are. A man coming up this slope, using a light that we’d never be able to see from where we were—” He shrugged. “Point is, someone was up here d
uring the night. I said our luck held out. First, our visitor apparently saw the tripod. He had to figure we’d been alerted. Especially after what happened down at Ayabaca. That kind of lesson sinks in.”
Wayne nodded. They walked back slowly to the airplane, where Aaron Mueller was taking his shift on squaring away the campsite. They stopped long enough with Mueller to have warm coffee and tell him what they’d discovered. Mueller sighed, leaning back across the big tire of the C-47. He draped his arms across his knees. “I’m beginning to get the idea someone would like us to go away.”
“You learn slow, but you learn,” Wayne told him.
“So I’m a slow learner.”
Steve extended his hand as if for the first time. “Welcome aboard, Mr. Protocol.”
No one could ever have faked the smile they got from Mueller. He also got quickly to his feet and took Steve’s hand in a firm and genuine exchange.
“By the way,” Wayne said, breaking it up, “where’s Jennings and Wells?”
“Over there.” Mueller pointed to a grove of trees a few hundred yards off.
“How long have they been gone?” Steve asked.
“Hour or so. I’ll call them on the walkie-talkie.”
“No, let’s surprise them.”
“But we’d be leaving the plane unguarded. Shouldn’t one of us stick around?”
“Not in daylight,” Steve said. “Whoever’s after us works best in the dark.” He led them off toward the heavy growth.
They came on Jennings and Rudy Wells on their knees, examining an extraordinary smooth surface beneath them. A powerful battery-run fluorescent light was a pool of glare between them. Jennings was studying the road surface with a thick magnifying glass, while Rudy worked industriously to chip away a section of the material. Strewn about them were the tools of Jennings’s trade—and their rifles. For a couple of minutes Steve, Mueller and Wayne watched them. There was no sign that their presence was even suspected—Jennings and Wells were in their own world.
“This is a stick-up,” Steve said, his voice flat. Jennings froze where he was, his face still poised over his magnifying glass. For a moment Rudy went rigid, then went for his rifle. As his fingers closed on the weapon Steve placed a foot on the barrel. Rudy looked up, his expression going from chagrin to anger.
“That was a pretty stupid thing to do,” he said to Steve. “I could have—”
“You could have had your head blown off and never known it. What’s wrong with you? An elephant could have come up without either one of you knowing it.”
Jennings’s eyes were bright with excitement. “You attend to security, Steve. Right now my mind has no room for anything except this!” His hand swept wide to take in the surface around them.
Steve turned to Wayne. “Phil, will you sort of keep point?” Wayne nodded, and Steve and Mueller bent closer to the two men on the ground. Steve’s impatience with Jennings and Wells left him as he studied the roadway beneath the bright flood of light. Now, more than before, he understood.
At first glance it looked, startlingly, like a terrazzo floor. It had the same consistency, at least to the eye, and when Steve ran his hand lightly across the material where it had been rubbed clear by Rudy, he found it as smooth as any floor he had ever touched. The texture baffled him and the color didn’t settle any easier. It reflected light in a strange manner so that he couldn’t really grasp the coloration. From one angle, without moving his head, the roadway—he stopped himself from labeling it stone—gave off a dull, greenish sheen. It reminded him somehow of jade, although he knew that was hardly possible. He moved his head to change the angle of reflected light and the green shifted its hue into a flickering bronze. And then a strange golden red.
“Doctor, what the hell is it?”
Jennings, apparently as baffled as Steve, rose from his knees. “I don’t know,” he said finally, “and the very idea that this material defies me is . . . well, wonderful. I mean, Steve, I have examined basic materials, stone and clay and glass and ceramics and God knows what else pretty much all over this planet. I’ve been on top of mountains and inside caves. Pyramids, graves, mausoleums, archeological digs of every kind, and I’ve never seen anything like this.”
He took a deep breath, and Rudy glanced at him with concern. “Slow down,” he warned. “You’re getting into hyperventilation. Do you want to pass out again?”
Steve gave Rudy a hard look with his use of the word “again.” Rudy shrugged and motioned for Steve to drop it.
“I know one thing,” Jennings went on, more slowly now, “if this material once was stone, it isn’t stone now. The entire culture is supposed to be based on stone. Everywhere in Central and South America stone is revered, stone dominates, but this isn’t stone. It’s not glass, or quartz, or marble, or anything like it. The way it twists and bends light . . .” He shook his head. “Not only that, but wherever the road wasn’t split by natural forces, such as lightning or earth tremor, in all the thousands of years this roadway has been here, there’s been no interference from growth. Do you know what that means? You’ve seen airports unattended for only a few years. Grass and weeds and bushes sprout up everywhere. That’s only the smallest fraction of the time this road has been here, and from the areas we’ve examined so far, that’s never happened here. The seal of this material has proven impervious to heat, cold, atmospheric gases of all kinds, animal droppings with their chemical reaction . . . I don’t know of anything comparable in modern technology and—”
“Enough,” Rudy broke in. “Harold, I warned you . . .” He lifted an oxygen flask and mask and handed it to the scientist. “Ten minutes under partial pressure. Start now.”
Jennings protested feebly, then sat down carefully, bringing the oxygen system to his face. He took several deep, controlled breaths. At their altitude, if one started breathing quickly, then faster and faster in order to suck more oxygen into the system, one could beat hypoxia—which was oxygen starvation—but one was also nailed by its accomplice, hyperventilation. As a flight surgeon, Rudy had lived with this all his professional life, and he knew how to gauge himself. Rapid talking in thin air meant rapid breathing, and what you did then was to start emptying your respiratory system of carbon dioxide. The body needed about 11 percent of the normal lung capacity. Reduce that carbon dioxide level below the figure of 11 percent and the body started demanding a return to normal. The best automatic defense system the body had was to force the whole system into unconsciousness. Everything calmed down and the carbon dioxide level went up again. Sucking oxygen when you were hyperventilating simply flushed out even more carbon dioxide and brought on even faster the swimming sensation into blackout. Knowing such things, having attended men who had succumbed to these dangers, he well knew how to pace his words and his breathing in reaction to where he was.
Rudy had completed his task of breaking free a clear section of roadway, and this had been accomplished only through diligent use of a cold chisel and hammer, aided by his own skilled and powerful hands. He stood before them, all on their feet except Jennings, who hid his chest pains behind the oxygen mask on his face. Rudy gestured with the stone, and as he did so it caught at an angle the light from the fluorescent lamp and seemed to swirl with green and flecks of gold and a deep wine color.
“I think I’ve seen this material before,” he said finally. “Or something very close to it. Even the basic coloration, the predominance of green”—he tapped the smooth surface in his hand—“is the same. That’s more than coincidence. Not only that, both materials, the one we have from this road, and the other I—”
Jennings found it impossible to remain silent. “What . . . what is it called?”
Hesitancy on Rudy’s part, then: “Trinitite.” His eyes went to Steve, who looked at him in disbelief.
“Trinitite,” Rudy repeated.
“I don’t believe it.” They turned to look at Steve. “It’s impossible.”
“It’s not impossible. I’m not saying the source of t
he heat would necessarily be the same.”
Steve went quiet, deciding to hear Rudy out.
“Trinitite? I don’t think I’ve ever heard of it,” Aaron Mueller said.
“Is it a crystal?” asked Wayne. “I handle a lot of crystals in my business, you know, for electronics and broadcast systems. I don’t think I’ve heard of trinitite.”
“It’s not crystal. And, Harold”—Rudy turned to Jennings—“please stop staring at me. It’s not a natural item. But I believe trinitite and this material”—again he referred to the slab in his hand—“were formed the same way. I also think there’s no longer any question about the legend we’ve been chasing down about a strange kind of crystal in the ancient high country of Peru. A crystal that the best of modern-day science can’t even understand, let alone build.”
Mueller turned in exasperation to Steve. “Will someone tell us what he’s talking about? This trinitite stuff . . . where does it come from?”
“New Mexico,” Steve said. “That was the first place. I’ve seen it there. I’ve also seen it at Jackass Flats. And Frenchman’s Flats. It’s also been found at Bikini, and Eniwetok, and about a thousand feet or deeper in Colorado, and a few thousand feet down in Alaska,” Steve went on. “But the first place was in New Mexico. At a place called Trinity.”
“Would that be in 1945?” Mueller asked carefully.
“July 16th. At five-thirty in the morning, to be exact.”
“The first atomic bomb,” Mueller said.
“Atomic bomb?” The words echoed from Jennings, who got slowly to his feet. He turned suddenly to Rudy. “Surely you’re not serious!” he exclaimed. “You can’t suggest that the ancients had the secret . . . the use of—”
“No, of course not,” Rudy said quickly. “Do you know how trinitite got its name? The first atomic-bomb test was given the code name of Trinity. It was a bomb exploded from a tower set in the New Mexican desert. Some time after the explosion the scientists and technicians who carried out the test visited ground zero—the radiation levels were safe by then for a short visit. They discovered that for a distance of four hundred yards in every direction from zero the sand had been transformed by the awful heat of the atomic fireball into a glasslike substance. Its predominant color was green. When you turned it to catch the light from different angles, it shifted colors.” Again he gestured to the material in his hand. “Just like this does.”
Cyborg 03 - High Crystal Page 9
