Cyborg 03 - High Crystal

by Martin Caidin

  They all would, Steve thought. When they’d come to this temple there had been eight of them. Now they were half that number. In cold-blooded terms of survival chances, losing Mueller, and especially Viejo, was particularly serious. The Peruvian officer was more than a fighter; he was native to this vicious high jungle country.

  Well, at least we know the rules now, Steve thought. Anything goes. Which could work both ways. He wondered if he wasn’t pumping himself full of bravado. They were penned like rats in this tower. Certainly Fossengen had figured out the four main entrances to the temple, and waiting outside each would be one or more men with automatic weapons zeroed in on the doorways.

  Think, he told himself. He considered and instantly dismissed the possibility of making some sort of deal with Fossengen. Fossengen couldn’t afford to leave a single one of them alive. Well, the lines were drawn. Find a way out of here, or join the ancient dust of this place.

  It had to be soon. Fossengen’s men would start scaling the walls. There were enough breaks in the surface, along with vines and other growth that had had thousands of years to get purchase in stone, for a good man to work his way to the top and then set up lines for others to follow. After that it would be only a matter of time before explosive charges did the rest.

  Steve looked at the crystal. He’d made up his mind what to do about the incredible device, as well as the schematics and panels engraved in stone and metal. The slow view he took of the dome charged his thinking. The old priests, the men who once ran this temple and conducted the affairs of the local tribes, they’d had more problems than bands of natives. They doubtless had their power plays among the hierarchy—Steve guessed the Caya weren’t so far ahead of the rest of the human race to have avoided old-fashioned, human in-fighting.

  He sat up straight. That meant those who once were in charge of this temple must have provided a way out in emergencies. A back door open—which would have been easy enough to manage for those in charge of building the place, and who kept the secret by killing off the work crew after the job was completed.

  Steve called the others, laid out for them exactly what his thoughts had been and the conclusion he’d reached. They turned on every light they had and began scouring the dome.

  It took Carla two hours to find it. In all the dome there was one bas-relief that didn’t fit. It served no apparent purpose, which was its secret. The carvings they’d found had been functional, not ornamental. Carla sat on the floor by the west side of the dome, a face-mask carving under bright lights, and studied its every detail. She leaned forward slowly, running her fingers along the stone. She hesitated, applied pressure. Nothing. Carla studied the bas-relief even more carefully. Again she applied pressure, and again nothing. She sat back and Rudy Wells joined her.

  “It could be you’re right about that relief being the key,” Rudy speculated, “but maybe you’re going about it the wrong way. I don’t know, but if you were one of the old temple leaders, why use the same system for getting in and out of this place, through the regular corridors, that you’d use for your emergency exit. They would—”

  Carla didn’t let him finish. “Of course!” She turned again to the carving, placed her hands so that she was applying pressure to each side of the figures. Again, nothing. She looked at them in despair.

  “It’s been thousands of years,” Steve said. “Let me try. Is this where the pressure goes?” She nodded, and he brought his bionics hand to the bas-relief, pressed in, twisted. The ornamental carving turned with the pressure of those powerful fingers. Groaning sounds came from within a nearby wall. “You were right all the time,” Steve told her. “But it’s been so long since this has moved—dust, humidity, maybe even some insects jammed it.”

  “It’s not jammed any more. That’s for sure,” Phil Wayne said. “Look!” In the northwest corner of the room they stared at black space where there had been a heavy stone. Two feet wide by four feet high. Just right to accommodate a man.

  Wayne leaned through the space with a flashlight. When he straightened his body and turned around, the smile on his face was gone.

  “What’s wrong?” Carla asked.

  “It’s a shaft.”

  “That’s all we need,” Rudy told him. “The best thing we could have—”

  “It’s a shaft with four walls straight down. A couple of hundred feet, I think. And nothing to hold on to.”

  Steve went to the shaft, probed it with his flashlight. The light shone from the walls of the shaft, but he could see nothing straight down. Impossible, really, to tell just how far it went before it hit bottom. Rudy brought him a thin plastic-lined cable from their equipment pack. Moments later the cable was lowering one of their strong lights down the shaft. It hit bottom on what looked to be stone. Staring downward, the light seemed almost to smoke or twist in their vision. Wayne started hauling up the flashlight, measuring off the depth of the shaft with the cable.

  “Well, we know a few good things,” Rudy said. “The shaft is clear all the way down. No obstructions. It seems to be dry down there, which is important. And we didn’t see any snakes.”

  “Which doesn’t mean they are not there,” Carla quickly warned.

  Rudy nodded, turned to watch Wayne. “How far down?” he asked.

  Wayne whistled, and not with pleasure. “About two hundred and thirty feet. That is tough.”

  “Not as bad as it could be,” Steve said.

  “You kidding? Two hundred and thirty feet not bad? That’s like trying to climb down a rope from the top floor of a building that’s twenty-three stories high!”

  Steve didn’t answer as he leaned into the deep shaft to look not down but up. Sure enough, about four feet above the space through which he leaned were three loops of metal, like eyebolts, through which a safety line or rope could be passed. He took a tripod from Wayne’s camera equipment, tapped one of the metal loops. As quickly as the end of the tripod brushed against the metal loop, it fell apart in rusted fragments and dust.

  Steve came out of the shaft brushing dust and particles from his face, and told the others what had happened. “Still,” he said, “we’ve got a thousand feet of cable and—”

  “What strength?” Wayne asked.

  “Three thousand pound test.”

  They looped the cable twice around the great stand in the center of the dome. Without eyebolts or similar equipment they had little control over hanging the cable dead-center in the shaft, and trying to work down the cable promised to be almost impossible.

  “How are we going to manage this thing?” Wayne said in exasperation. “Steve, that plastic around the cable is slick. I’m pretty strong but I’d never be able to lower myself all that distance without slipping. When your hands start to sweat . . . anyway, it’d be suicide. And what happens if we cut off the plastic? The cable is thin. Right through your skin, or it would at least start to burn you if you went too fast. I don’t know . . .”

  Steve and Rudy glanced at one another, said nothing about a bionics hand with its extraordinary gripping strength.

  “I’ll go down first,” Steve said. “Check it out. See if there’s a way out through the bottom.” A dull boom echoed through the structure. Dust spilled gently from the ceiling. “And I don’t think we have very much more time to discuss it. Rudy, what Phil just said about that cable was right. Tape me up good.” He extended his right hand. Quickly Rudy padded the palm with heavy gauze, then wrapped the hand in adhesive tape, leaving the fingers enough flexibility to be bent. Steve donned the gunbelt with the revolver, loaded gear into his pockets and went to the shaft entrance. He tested his grip on the cable. He turned to the others. “Phil, take the pack webbing from the bodies”—he nodded to the canvas-covered forms on the floor. “Wire two of them together and make a body sling like a parachute harness. That’s how the rest of you are getting out of here.”

  He slipped into the shaft. Rudy leaned into the shaft above him, playing a flashlight beam toward the bottom. Steve ran the cable bet
ween his boots, using friction to control his descent. Actually his movement down the cable that so worried Wayne was relatively easy. His legs weren’t even strained by the effort, and by gripping the cable in his bionics left hand he had no problem about perspiration or skin burns. The tape on his right hand was a just-in-case precaution, and at the same time was a show of normal precaution for the others who, otherwise, would have wondered and asked questions.

  He went down slowly, looking at the four walls of the shaft. The dryness surprised him. No evidence of major leakage or water flow. Of course insects had gotten in, and he dropped slowly through ancient spiderwebs. But even the spiders must have found the insect population too low to bother with, and nothing was seen moving during the long and careful descent. Then he was down, the flashlight showing small crushed stones for underfooting. He kept his left hand on the cable, applied pressure slowly. Firm, but not completely dry. That, too, he expected. He was in some form of cave. He moved the flashlight slowly, stopped, frozen in position. Reflections. Eyes. He moved the light. Rats. Huge. The rodents watched unafraid. No reason for them to be scared of anything, thought Steve. They’ve got no enemies down here except maybe snakes. There was at least a fifty-fifty chance the rats wouldn’t bother him.

  Heavy undergrowth. Mostly vines. He removed a thick candle from a pocket, placed it on the ground, and lit it. The flame speared up momentarily, sending lights dancing on the low cave walls. Then it settled down. Steve waited. The flame moved. Bent over to the right. Kept flickering in that direction. So the way out had to be to the left. He moved the candle closer to the growth, brought the flashlight to bear. A tangled matting. He went back to the shaft, told Wayne to send down the machete.

  About an hour later he had hacked his way through, and daylight showed through an opening not quite two feet off the ground. Outside the temple there was more growth that hid the opening. He blew out the candle and snapped off the flashlight, working his way carefully to the opening. A ledge extended several feet from the temple wall, then fell away in a steep drop. Steve grabbed some of the brush he’d cut loose, held a thick swatch over himself, and inched his way to the end of the ledge.

  The steep slope ended about three or four hundred feet down. A heavy copse of trees showed how solid it was. He looked left and right. Sheer drops from the temple wall. Unlikely that anyone would think of looking for somebody along this flank. No hint of an exit showed. Still, during daylight there was always the chance of being spotted. Animals or birds could set up a racket at any disturbance. The time to go was at night. This same night, in a few hours. They’d need all the lead they could get.

  He retraced his steps back into the low cave. He left the candle and the machete behind. Wayne called down from the chamber. “We’ll pull you up. Hang on.”

  “No, just make sure the cable is secured to that pedestal.” Wayne’s face disappeared to be replaced by Rudy Wells’s. He heard an exchange of words, then Rudy signaled him to start up. He held position with his right arm, the cable twined between his boots. He reached up with his left arm and hauled, then repeated the same move. He made it up the 230 feet. He glanced at Rudy and slipped back into the chamber, just in time to feel another heavy blast elsewhere in the temple.

  “We’re down to no margin,” he said, told what he’d discovered at the bottom of the shaft and outlined his plan. “We strip ourselves of everything except what we need to exist for a few days, and I mean everything. We go as light as we can. We take food, some water, medical supplies and weapons, and that’s it. Only exception is the film. I’ve got one set and Phil has the other.”

  “What about my camera gear?” Wayne asked.

  “Forget it. We get home, I promise Uncle Sam will buy you anything you want.”

  Wayne looked unhappily at his equipment.

  “How about that harness?” Steve asked.

  Rudy held it up. “It’s here and it works. We tried it out.”

  “Okay. Get your packs ready the way I told you. We’ve got three or four hours of daylight left and I want to be moving the moment it gets dark. Rudy, you’ll go down first. Carla next. Then Phil and I have a few things to attend to in here. We’ll follow right behind.”

  He saw Carla looking at her father’s body. “I’m sorry, Carla. There’s nothing we can do.”

  She nodded, holding back tears.

  An hour before darkness Steve lowered Rudy down the shaft. He brought up the cable with the harness, fastened it around Carla, and she was sent down. Then their packs, all prepared to be put on the moment they were ready. Steve turned to Wayne. “No one’s going to like us for what happens next,” he said. Wayne waited. “We’re going to leave a booby trap.”

  “In here? Steve, the crystal . . .”

  “You know its potential, don’t you?”

  “Well, I guess so . . . after all, I work in this field, remember?”

  “How’d you like it to end up in the wrong hands?”

  “It’s not that simple, Steve. I mean, you think of something like that crystal, and what good it can do . . . I don’t know. I really—don’t—know.”

  Steve looked at the crystal. “Maybe I can make the choice easier for you. No political speeches. Just a question. What do you think would happen in the world today if a hostile, aggressive nation were the only one to have the hydrogen bomb?”

  “I get your drift.”

  “We don’t know,” Steve said, “but I wouldn’t like to test it.”

  “No, I guess not. All right, Steve, what do we do?”

  “In my pack. Primer cord. I’ve also got six packets of plastic explosive left. We rig this room. Tape a detonator wire to the entrance down below. A trip wire up here as a back-up. A pressure pad we can rig for the floor as a third safety. Three shots at it. If anyone gets into this room any way except back up this shaft”—he pointed to their escape route—“the whole place goes. Not just the crystal. There’s enough stuff here to take out this entire chamber. If Fossengen and his people don’t get in here, no harm done. If they do—”

  Wayne sighed. “Let’s get started.”

  They finished about thirty minutes later. “We’ve got to let Fossengen think we’re holed up here for the night,” Steve said. “When I come through the shaft behind you, I’ll close the passage. There’s a control inside the shaft for the stone that’ll put it back into place. Just before we do that, I’ll remove one of the window stones. I’ll leave a light on the floor. They’ll see it. They might spend the night taking shots at us every now and then, to keep us away from the window. Anyway, it’ll help keep them busy.”

  He sent Wayne down the shaft. They’d cut three hundred feet from the cable for the job of getting down the shaft. They would need the remainder for dropping down the side of the cliff.

  Steve placed a battery lamp on the floor, turned on the switch. He removed one of the window stones, went quickly to the shaft. He was inside the shaft, grasping the cable and preparing to return the heavy stone to its place when he heard the distant report of an automatic rifle. Bullets ripped into the window, several of them making their way into the chamber. Just before the stone slid back into place he saw a crack start in the crystal, spreading swiftly. One of the bullets had ricocheted from the wall to strike the gleaming object. Several chunks of crystal fell to the stone floor. Steve stooped to pick up one of them. He studied it briefly before slipping it into a pocket. He looked back at the great crystal dominating the chamber. The sudden flaw from the almost-spent bullet saddened him.

  Well, he thought with some satisfaction, at least I can leave here knowing we weren’t the ones who did that. He slid down the shaft.

  CHAPTER 21

  Steve anchored the cable securely within the cave. Wayne slid into the harness and Steve eased him down from the ledge. It was slow going because they had to work in darkness. They didn’t dare chance any kind of light. When he reached the trees below, Wayne shook the cable for a signal. Steve stopped, then resumed a slow descent. Mom
ents later the cable went slack. They waited as Wayne groped in the dark. If the copse was too small or too narrow and he fell, he was still secured in the harness. Several minutes went by, and then Steve felt three sharp jerks on the cable.

  “Everything’s okay below,” he said. Another jerk on the cable and he hauled Wayne in swiftly. They put the harness on Carla and sent her after Wayne. The third time they sent their packs down. Rudy Wells followed. When he received the next signal, Steve grasped the cable in his left hand and slid over the ledge. He went down swiftly, slowed as he felt leaves brush his body. Then he was with them in the trees. He tied the bottom end of the cable to a tree so the wind wouldn’t catch it and send it writhing into the open.

  “Now what?” Rudy whispered.

  “It took us five days to get here,” Steve said. “Five days with eight people, heavily loaded. We were slowed by Dr. Jennings and Dr. Yavari. On the way back, well, if we go southeast we should pick up our old trail about five miles from here. We should be able to get through the grass country a lot faster this time. We won’t be cutting our way through. We’ve got to get back to the Chalhuanca Plateau and get one of the planes.”

  “They might have left someone there,” Wayne said.

  “That’s the chance we take. We have to. It would take us another week to make it from the Chalhuanca to Azul, and Fossengen could have his hired hands on the alert for us anywhere along the way. Our only hope is to make the plateau and fly out of there.”

  “But surely,” Carla said, “those people with Fossengen won’t give us the chance.”

  “They have no way of knowing we’re not in the temple,” Steve said. “We’ve got to stick it out where we are during the night. We can’t see a thing in these trees in the dark. Chances are Fossengen will also wait until daylight to make any move, and by then we’ll be well on our way. Meanwhile, if they discover we’re gone they’ll come after us of course. But at least that’s an if right now. We’d better sleep while we can. We may have to stay on the move day and night.”