“Rudy, mark off where we are,” Steve told the doctor. “Make it a clear mark, too. This place is probably filled with all kinds of corridors and passages, and we can get lost faster than it takes to think about it. Start numbering every cross-corridor we come to. Mark it where we can all see it. This could be a labyrinth. We’ve got to be able to find our way around when we start coming out again.”
Steve turned to Yavari. “Doctor, you’ve been in temples like this before.”
“Not like this.” Yavari smiled. “There is nothing—”
“I know,” Steve broke in quickly, “but a structure like this, it’s like the pyramids, isn’t it? The people who built it must have thought of looters—people who might come here to rob graves or strip it of its treasures, whatever they might be. So wouldn’t they set up a system of deadfalls, traps?”
“You’re right,” Rudy Wells said. “It’s the first complication we should watch for. If a true believer were to come in here—he wouldn’t be in a rush. He’d take his time to examine, study learn . . . he’d move slowly. If we don’t do likewise we’ll be vulnerable to . . .” He let it hang.
“Understood. We need to be careful,” Mueller said. “But where do we go?”
“If what Dr. Jennings and Rudy told us before is on the track,” Steve said carefully, “we’ve got to work our way higher. We’ve got to climb. This entire structure is intended to make height important. It’s a guess,” he admitted, “but unless anyone has something better to offer . . .”
“I believe you are right,” Carla said. “There is a strong association here, in what my father has already seen, that suggests heat and light. It is almost certainly sun-oriented. Which means”—she looked up as if she could see through the massive stone above them—“that way.”
“Everybody pick up their gear,” Steve ordered. “Rudy, you mark the way. Aaron, stay close to Dr. Yavari. Make sure he’s got plenty of light. And if anybody sees anything that seems a problem, call out, and everybody else freeze where they are until we figure what’s going on. Colonel Viejo?” The Peruvian officer looked at him. “Anything else?” Steve asked.
Viejo smiled briefly. “The words are yours,” he said, “but the thoughts are exactly mine.”
“Okay, then let’s get with it,” Steve said quietly as they started out along a corridor that took them further and further into dusty time.
“The floor is descending slowly.” They stopped to watch Viejo, kneeling. He placed a bullet on the stone floor and watched it. The bullet rolled in the direction they were headed. Viejo took it up and rose to his feet. “You will find all the other corridors like this, I believe,” he said. “It seems they knew what they were doing, the men who engineered this place.”
Mueller showed the question on his face. “Any special reason?”
“I’d say it had to do with the problem of heavy rain in this country,” Viejo said. “Condensation, too. The slopes guaranteed a water run. Likely there are exit points throughout the temple. And entrance points, perhaps . . .”
They resumed their slow progress. Steve studied a compass, shoved it back into a pocket. “Useless in here,” he said. “It could be the stone, or something magnetic.”
“We’re walking northeast,” Rudy said. “And I’ll wager it’s forty-five degrees. Remember? They built their roads on the cardinal points of the compass. We came into this place on the southwest corner. If it’s one of the main passageways, it should lead to the center of the temple.”
No one contested him. Carla had fashioned a face mask from a kerchief for her father, and the others soon followed her example. Dust lay heavy all about them, piled on the floor and clinging to the walls. Even with the slight breeze of their passage, the dust kicked up from the stone floor, sending irritating clouds swirling around them.
“The corridor’s getting wider,” Wayne announced. They stopped again, looked behind them, then forward again. Wayne was right.
“Look!” Dr. Jennings pointed with excitement. “Can you see it? There’s some sort of light, a glow down there.” He was right. The corridor ended, or seemed to end, in a dim bowl of light.
“It must be air,” Yavari said. “You understand? They had no machinery as we know it to condition a building. So they designed openings at different places. This moves air.”
The others nodded and continued their walk in silence. Their flashlights stabbed through the dust preceding them. Again they stopped. On the left wall of the corridor, the outline of a door. No handle or recession in the stone; more of the symbols they had seen at the entrance-way. “We could open it,” Viejo said.
“Later. Let’s first find out more about how this place is set up,” Steve said. “Rudy, mark it, will you?” Wells wrote carefully on the stone wall by the thin outline of a doorway, using a marker pen from his kit.
Several more minutes of cautious movement passed, and they slowed down their steps. The light ahead was brighter now, and they saw clearly how right Dr. Yavari had been in his judgment. At the end of the corridor there was some kind of enormous chamber, but their vision was diffused by shafts of light stabbing through dust, making it seem as though they were looking into a fog.
Dr. Jennings moved ahead of the others to take up the lead. His face showed the excitement building in him. “This corridor leading to some main chamber . . . what we’re looking for . . . it’s got to be just ahead of us. A dome . . . they usually built a dome in the center of their temples. It can’t be that much different from the Inca or the Maya.” He probed with his flashlight, began to walk faster, well ahead of the others now.
Steve had a premonition. Deadfalls . . . traps for the unwary who rushed in without thought of what had been designed as protection against those who might come to desecrate or loot or—
“Jennings!” Steve’s shout echoed down the corridor. For a moment, no more than that, Jennings faltered, turned his head. Steve hurried toward him. “Stay where you are!” Confused, Jennings slowed his walk but kept moving. Steve was almost at his side when the floor vanished beneath Jennings’ feet. The scientist threw out his arms, his voice a thin cry against the deeper rumble of a huge stone block that moved swiftly into a recess in the side of the corridor, leaving in its space a yawning pit. Steve grabbed, his fingers closing on Jennings beneath the man’s left ann. He fell to the floor of the corridor, pressing his feet against the stone for leverage. There was nothing to grasp, and he hoped at least the strength of his bionic legs would be great enough to hold him in place. Jennings gasped with pain and shock as Steve held grimly onto him. Mueller and Viejo were beside him at once, grasping Steve’s legs, pulling him backward until Wayne got a good grip on Jennings’s other arm and hauled him to safety.
They slumped to the floor, Jennings’s face white, his chest heaving as he gasped for air. Viejo leaned over the sharp edge where the corridor had been so nakedly exposed. They looked with him. His flashlight played on the bottom of a pit which had jagged spikes stabbing upward. Skeletons were still impaled on the stone spears; bones littered the bottom.
Jennings stared at Steve. “My God, you saved my life.”
“Looks that way, doesn’t it? And I won’t say it was no trouble. Please, Dr. Jennings, take it easy . . .”
They heard Dr. Yavari talking in Spanish to Carla. He was pointing to a stone handle jutting from the wall. It wasn’t hard to figure. What Jennings had not seen in his excitement to rush ahead was another bas-relief of symbols and figures. The Caya were not wanton killers. Their rules were clear. One must be able to understand their message, to judge their ciphers, and it was necessary to proceed with the caution and the care that entry into this enormous temple deserved. Yavari translated for them. To proceed with safety beyond this point, what one had to do was to depress an area on the bas-relief. The stone handle would fall into view. If it were pulled down into another recess that opened for it, the stone block would remain safely where it was. Otherwise, the unsuspecting intruder would step on a stone in the c
orridor that released a drop-weight. Counterbalancing did the rest and the stone was hauled swiftly to the side to suddenly expose the lethal pit. Viejo went to the handle, pulled it down carefully. It completed an arc of one hundred and eighty degrees and a slot appeared in the stone wall to accept the handle. The great stone in the corridor rumbled slowly back into place, settled with a dull booming sound.
Steve looked down the corridor toward the bowl of shifting light. No choice. They had to go that way. They had walked no more than another three or four minutes when they noticed the corridor widening perceptibly. Where it flared to its greatest diameter the dust-swirled light was at its brightest. They moved foward cautiously, the dust under their boots masking the sounds of their shuffling walk. They were like eager yet cautious natives standing in some incomprehensible chamber of an unknown science. They pushed forward until they all were completely within the chamber.
At first it baffled them. Across the wide, circular center floor, a completely open space, they saw the opposite of their corridor. Rudy Wells had been right. Four main corridors traversed the ground level of the temple. All of them arrowed into this hollowed-out center. That they could understand. What they saw, more than these four corridor entrance-ways, left them foundering.
Twelve doorways. Each one sealed. Each doorway crowned with an elaborate bas-relief of metal. The first worked metal they had seen, and this was no crude hammering of symbolic jewelry. It had all the appearance of extremely fine etching and engraving in metal. As they brought their lights to bear on the representation over one door, they saw that the metal itself had been worked as if manipulated by . . .
“Good Lord,” Jennings said, “it’s sculpted . . .”
“Or molded,” said Rudy Wells.
“No,” Jennings corrected him. “Look, there, it’s an individual touch. I’ll wager none of these bas-reliefs over the doorways are the same. They’re all different. Each is a work of art in itself.”
Dr. Yavari moved closer, peering, shaking his head in disbelief. “But . . . is it gold? It does not look like it. It is—”
“An alloy?” Carla prompted.
He looked at her. “They did not have alloys. No metallurgy. This science was not developed.” Again he shook his head.
Phil Wayne tapped the metal surface lightly with a fingernail. “I’ve worked a lot with gold,” he said, “and this is not gold.”
“Then what the hell is it?” They all turned to look at Aaron Mueller, who’d put the question to them.
Wells gave the only answer. “We obviously don’t know.”
“Should we take a sample back with us?” Mueller was abashed by the stares from Yavari and Jennings.
“No,” Yavari said. “Touch nothing! We must study, learn. Not damage or desecrate.”
Silence followed his words. “I wouldn’t recommend removing or taking anything here as a sample,” Steve said, in the awkward pause. “We might not survive it.” He looked around at the others. “Whoever built this place understood human nature. Maybe it hasn’t changed in all the . . . well, in all the years this temple has stood here. Dr. Yavari is probably right. We’re better off recording than taking. Phil? Get cracking with those crameras of yours. Aaron and Rudy, give him a hand, will you? Get the lights on those representations for some sharp relief.” He turned to Carla. “Can you work with them? Identify whatever you can? And take some notes to go with the pictures. It will help later.”
She nodded. “But why are you in such a rush, Steve? These representations”—she gestured—“have been here for thousands of years. They have waited for us all this time. A few hours, or months, or years . . . There is no rush.”
“No? Carla, I’m afraid this place is hypnotizing you. You and everybody else.” He motioned behind him. “You seem to be forgetting our friends out there. They’ll be coming in here as soon as they figure out the combination, and I don’t intend for us to be in the middle of this shooting gallery to stop them.”
“You would leave all this to those pirates, Steve? I don’t believe you!”
He glanced at Viejo and shook his head, then back to Carla. “Believe me, then. Those people are professionals. They won’t mind their manners to get at whatever interests them in this temple.”
He turned from her and went to Jennings and Yavari. Carla looked to Viejo for help. “Unfortunately,” Viejo said, “he is right . . . unless your words have magic in them, Carla, the kind of magic that can stop explosives and bullets—”
Rudy Wells was talking. “No matter how impossible it seems, there it is. Each doorway apparently represents a period of time roughly corresponding to thirty days. The time isn’t so much linked to what we consider our calendar of months, but is close. It seems to have a tie to a worked-out astronomical charting of the heavens. Each doorway, or the representation, the bas-relief, over it would then have a counterpart in one of the signs of the zodiac. I don’t mean the astrological equal; at least we can’t be sure yet. I’m emphasizing the astronomical, but that could be wrong, too. From here on it’s speculation, but at least informed speculation.”
In earlier, Air Force days Rudy Wells had earned the wings of a master navigator. As men flew higher and farther and breached the shores of vacuum, he continued his studies in astrogation, the paths along which the astronauts would move. He was also an amateur astronomer of such expertise many considered him a professional in ability. He had combined this background with his love for the ancient peoples of South America and brought this extraordinary knowledge to bear on the mysteries of vanished races which had baffled and confused modern man. At this moment, Rudy Wells was very much in his element. He held a flashlight in one hand, using it as a pointer to sweep the circular chamber. “Three hundred and sixty degrees, give or take a few,” he ventured, “although I bet it’s dead on. Those symbols? They probably represent a constellation, but I can’t figure why they’re so much out of line with what we—”
“I’ve dealt with these same figures,” Steve told them. “Celestial navigation. The circle represents the plane of the ecliptic, the path of the sun through a known grouping of stars or groups of stars. The constellations. I think there are two reasons, Rudy, why they seem so strange to you. First, you’re forgetting you’re in Peru, below the equator. Many of the stars we see here aren’t the ones you see in the northern sky. That takes in some constellations, too. That second item I mentioned . . . I recognize some constellations . . . the grouping of stars, not the pictorial representations. As a pilot and an astronaut, well, you know celestial navigation is part of everything we do, or did. If I hadn’t lived with the stars so long, I’d hesitate to say this . . . The star charts, or the parts of them they show here, aren’t accurate by today’s standards. But they surely were accurate when they were prepared.”
There was quiet in the chamber. Viejo broke it. “How long ago do you think?”
Steve looked at him. “Ten to twenty thousand years . . .”
He could have argued the point. Steve wouldn’t have budged. One of the serious games the astronauts used to play involved the use of planetarium projectors. In effect they were time machines. They could show the heavens as they would be a thousand or a million years in the future. They could do the same with the past—when Polaris was a long way from being the North Star, for example. Steve found the game fascinating. He would take the time to roll back the ages with the planetarium projector to a thousand and five thousand or more years in the past projected glowingly on the curving walls of the planetarium.
It had come back to him as he studied the representations over the twelve sealed doorways. By his reckoning, the stars and groups of stars they showed in metal were from a time some seventeen thousand years in the past. It was a time long before the first glimmers of civilization, before optics became an experiment, let alone a science, before the mathematics with which to chart the visible heavens had been imagined, and many thousands of years before man invented writing. And yet these many years ago the Ca
ya, if these were the people who built this temple, had mapped the heavens. They had shaped massive stone blocks. And built highways aligned to the cardinal points of the compass. They had used some unknown kind of energy beam to cut and mold their stone monuments. And sculpted metal in alloy form before men even thought of metal. Yet how had they carried or moved these massive stone blocks to this height and built this incredible place?—especially at a time when this enormous temple had looked out across the Sicuani Valley when “men” as the western world knew men were still grubbing in the dirt and painting the walls of their caves—
No more time to think, to speculate. They heard the first muffled explosion far along the corridor that had brought them into this chamber. The sound breached the centuries, brought them jarring into the reality of the moment. No question, at least, about what waited on the other side of that thick stone wall, or that they would be killed if they were caught here.
Where could they go . . . the other three corridors led only to similar exits. Two of them must open to a sheer precipice. The remaining one might be guarded. No time to look for other ways out. Besides, they had only touched the dusty surface of what they had come here to find. To run wasn’t the answer; not yet, Steve thought. They had to go up. Higher within the temple. Yavari studied a carved inscription by one doorway. He nodded to himself, spoke in Spanish to Carla, who pressed her hand exactly where he told her to apply pressure.
A great stone block moved slowly aside. Jennings flashed his light into the passageway. Steps leading upward, curving out of sight to the left. Quickly the others followed behind Jennings, Viejo taking up the end of the line. When they were all inside, he reached for the stone handle that now extended from the wall within the stairway, pulled it down. The stone rolled back into place.
They climbed the stairs, starting to feel the punishment of dragging their equipment against the steep ascent, sucking in the thin air. One hundred and twenty-eight steps. Exhausted, dizzy, they came to a short corridor. A flashlight beam showed curving walls. Another higher, smaller chamber. Jennings led the way, physically worn but impelled by the adrenalin of his excitement.
Cyborg 03 - High Crystal Page 14
