"What evidence do you mean?" Kieran asked curiously.
"Huge sediments laid down rapidly—thousands of meters thick in some places. Not slow over millions of years," Rudi answered.
"Uniformitarian chronology is dead," another voice commented. It sounded like Dennis Curry.
"If oceanic deposits were due to slow, uniform accumulations, they would get steadily thicker with increasing distance from the ridges as the sea floors spread." Rudi again. "In fact that's what some textbooks originally claimed before the facts were in, because they were so sure it would be true. But when they got around to actually doing the drillings, they found the opposite. The thickest deposits were at the ridges and along the edges of continental shelves. Practically nothing on the sea floors far from the ridges, where it should have been."
"But just the places where planetwide flood surges would be slowed by obstructions and shed their sedimentary loads," Kieran completed aloud. It made sense to him—but then, he wasn't an academic indoctrinated with assumptions that were incompatible with the notion.
"Exactly," Hamil replied. "You have many interests for a busy doctor. Where did you graduate med school, out of curiosity?"
"We have to talk about that, Hamil," Trevany interjected hastily.
Before them, a pinnacle of rock leaning away from the main massif rose thirty or forty feet above their heads, its sides weathered into horizontal grooves and ribs that revealed the strata it had formed from. The trail ended at a leveled terrace skirting the fissure separating the pinnacle from the face, where an assortment of canisters, boxes, and other pieces of equipment lay scattered around. What they had seen of the pinnacle turned out to be only the top part, Kieran saw as they spread out along the edge. The fissure plummeted downward as a narrowing wedge of space that was quickly lost in shadow relieved only by the yellow glows of artificial lighting lower down that told nothing of their depth. Kieran estimated that the lights had to be somewhere near the level of the valley floor below the mesa, although inaccessible from there directly.
A concrete platform set into the lip of the drop carried a motorized hoist mechanism and winding drum with a projecting girder structure and guide wheels, over which a cable descended alongside two vertical rails attached to the rock. A track of lighter colored dust among the rocks extended from the hoist platform to the far side of the terrace, probably indicating where rubble brought up from below had been carried to the edge and dumped.
Hamil was talking inside his helmet, presumably on another channel. Then his voice came through, cautioning: "Stand clear of the machinery, everyone." Moments later, the hoist began running. Hamil extended an arm to indicate the fissure below. "Zorken started one of their slant bores from the bottom as a shortcut for getting samples from deep under the plateau. The excavations that they opened up down there attracted our interest too. When we got to poking around on our own, we started to uncover things like pieces of what looked like paving, and stones that couldn't have been shaped naturally. That was when Walter decided to come out from Earth and join us."
"I'd been following what was going on. Juanita and I are old colleagues," Trevany commented. "I'd already been talking with Katrina's college about getting them to sponsor some field work. Rudi contacted me to say he wanted to come along too. He had the background for this kind of work."
"And Gottfried," Rudi said.
"Oh, yes. Of course there's him."
"Who's Gottfried?" Kieran asked.
"He's a small, tracked, remote-controlled robot that I had made for field work out in the Middle East," Rudi replied. "Ideal for exploring things like narrow shafts and awkward places. There is an autonomous mode of operation too—good for mapping areas of terrain or exploring larger spaces. You might see him. He's down where we're going."
The elevator appeared from below in the form of a railed metal platform six feet or so square with the hoist cable attached to the side running on the guide rails. Two men were riding it, clad in double-skinned heavy-duty suits streaked with orange and brown dust. As the elevator stopped level with the concrete edge, one of them opened the inner section of guardrail like a gate, and together they manhandled off a rubber-tired tip wagon filled with sand and rubble. One had a wizened face with a straggly gray mustache; the other was black.
Hamil clapped the older one on the shoulder and turned to the others. "Hah, people! Here are two of the gang that we depend on for getting the real work done in this operation. This is Zeke. The one with the heavy tan is Lou. Gentlemen, here are our new arrivals, Dr. Walter Trevany, Rudi Magelsberg, Katrina Ersohn. And this is Kieran Thane whom I told you about, who's come in as Pierre's replacement. We're all a family here."
"I guess we'll all get to know each other later," Zeke muttered as he moved through, steering the front end of the wagon.
Lou nodded a round of acknowledgments at the company as he followed. "Nothing personal, Doc," he said as he passed Kieran. "But I hope our relationship stays strictly nonprofessional."
"I need to check something with Zeke," Dennis said, stepping aside and looking toward Hamil. "I'll follow you on down."
While Zeke and Lou trundled the wagon across the terrace toward the dump point, followed by Dennis, the others crowded onto the elevator. Hamil closed the gate and pressed a button, and they began descending.
The rock flowed by, the rumbling and squeaking of the pinch rollers on the rails sounding faint and distant through the thin Martian air. The far wall edged closer as the fissure narrowed; then shadow fell abruptly, framing a receding patch of pale pink sky above. As darkness closed in around, Kieran reflected yet again on what it was about his life that always seemed to draw him into situations of the strange and unexpected. He had come to Mars in all innocence to visit an old friend and follow a unique scientific experiment. Now here he was, plunging down a hole in the Martian desert, once again involved in something totally unconnected with the purpose he had started out with, wondering what twists would lead him where this time. Somebody had remarked to him once that his life was like a lightning conductor.
Light reasserted itself as the elevator passed the first of the lamps on the sides of what had by now became little more than a broad slot through the rock. More lamps appeared and the light grew stronger, revealing the face wall breaking into fault lines and fractures where the pinnacle had torn away. The elevator stopped in what appeared to be a cavern extending under the face beneath a jumble of standing flakes choked with debris and jammed boulders that had fallen from above. The cleave planes and bore holes from blasting showed that it was artificial—or at least, had been artificially enlarged. Another tip wagon stood by a pile of rubble, presumably hauled from farther within. More tools and equipment, stacks of adjustable steel roof props and scaffolding parts, and a humming motor-generator with cables snaking off toward the rear of the cavern filled the rest of the space around the elevator. Hamil raised a gate opposite the one via which they had entered and beckoned the others out. They followed silently, the chatter of the trail above gone now, conscious of moving from one world and its time into another, far removed.
The left side of the cavern ended in a square-cut alcove, clearly artificial, where a section of steel pipe several feet long and a foot or more in diameter, capped by a red plastic plug, protruded up at an angle from the floor. "That's the original Zorken bore shaft," Hamil told the others, waving as he led the way past it and into a low, rising gallery of open floor interrupted by roof props, extending farther back, under the plateau. "But what got our attention when we began exploring the surroundings was this. We were lucky in finding just a trace that the Zorken people had uncovered but not recognized. We've opened up a lot more of it since then."
He stopped before a cleared section of floor and indicated it with a gesture of both hands. The others drew up on either side. The area was formed from roughly rectangular, convex-faced slabs, lying regularly with the edges aligned in both directions. To the rear, they disappeared under a layer of roc
k that looked as if it had covered them and been cut back. At the front, where the group was standing, the slabs ended at an erratic edge where the underlying rock had fallen away into the fissure behind. A trench had been cut to one side, presumably to investigate the foundation and underpinnings.
"Hm. Not unlike several pillow lavas that I've seen," Rudi's voice commented dubiously.
"These are metamorphic, not igneous," Hamil answered.
"And when you probe down under, you can see there are no plumes. They were cut and laid," Jean Graas added.
"Hm," Rudi said again. But even he couldn't argue.
They moved on, still ascending at a mild angle, into the narrowing rear part of the gallery, where Hamil stopped again to let them examine a series of large stones of various shapes and angles that had been set on one side. There were long and short rectangular blocks, several broken curved pieces suggestive of sections of arch, some round pieces, and a few with markings from which encrusting rock had been painstakingly removed, looking tantalizingly as if they could be symbols of some kind. But whether they were or not, it was plain even to Kieran's unschooled eye that these objects had been fashioned. Trevany recognized a couple of instances of indentation marks similar to ones found in South America and Egypt for accepting I-shaped metal pieces to clamp adjacent blocks together. Hamil confirmed that was what he thought they were too. Another broken fragment of rounded rock was surely part of a humanlike chin and nose.
An opening at the back of the gallery, looking at first like a tunnel mouth, turned out to be the entrance to a chamber from which several shafts and crawlways radiated away, some rising, others descending. Hamil led the way, single file now, along a shaft which required only moderate stooping, through another opening. The far side opened up suddenly, in a way that came as a surprise after the warren that had preceded it, into a space that was high but narrow, braced by props mounted horizontally. The rock on one side had been cut into a rising series of ramps and ledges bearing scaffolding, cable boxes, and lights. But it was the other side that captured everyone's attention as the party crowded in to straighten up and stand in awe along the rubble-strewn strip of floor between. They were gazing up at the wall that Kieran had seen on the screen in the Juggernaut.
"We broke through, and here it was, uncovered by a fall that appears to have taken place at some time," Hamil told them. "We haven't had to do much digging at all."
That explained how it could have been news two days ago, yet unburied to an extent that should have required weeks of digging. The space was more confined than the view on the screen had suggested, comprising for the most part a vertical rock fault that revealed part of the wall all the way to its top, where it ended in a line of corbeling at about twenty-five feet. It was smooth and unweathered, grayer and lighter than the surrounding rock. To the left, the wall disappeared behind a line of obscuring rock slanting down to an opening that looked like a pilot tunnel following the base. Just outside the opening was a small, turretlike vehicle, not much bigger than a shoe box, running on what looked like rubber tracks. It was equipped with a lamp, a miniature camera on a pivoting arm, and a variety of sensors, manipulators, and appendages.
"Is that friend Gottfried?" Kieran asked, gesturing.
"Yes," Rudi confirmed. "He'll be in action again later today."
The right-hand side of the wall was buried behind fallen rock extending to the roof, but cleared enough in the lower parts to reveal the ends of several massive stone steps and part of a vertical corner that could have been one side of a gateway. As Trevany and Juanita had said of the mysterious constructions found back on Earth, the way these huge stones fitted was strangely complex yet precise. Kieran tried to imagine what sequence of measuring, cutting, testing, trimming, repositioning and remeasuring would be necessary to achieve such results. He couldn't. Yet, according to the orthodox wisdom that still prevailed upon Earth, it was supposed to have been achieved by cultures that hadn't advanced beyond levers and pulleys, by means of earth ramps and rollers. Trevany scoffed that such explanations were the confident inventions of Egyptologists sitting in university offices; "Construction engineers," he said, "just shook their heads."
So what did it mean? If a close affinity with constructions back on Earth were confirmed, had some lost alien race visited both worlds in the distant past, either from elsewhere in the Solar System or from some other system entirely, and left their enigmatic signatures at enormous expense of effort for purposes yet to be divined? Could they, as some believed, have been the progenitors or creators of the human race? Alternatively, might they have been some advanced but forgotten race of Earth itself, perished in a calamity of interplanetary proportions that had erased virtually all traces of their existence? Or even from Mars, wiped out along with its continents and its oceans? The research that would grow from these beginnings would continue possibly for lifetimes. How much of the planet might eventually be involved in what might eventually be turned up was for anyone to guess. But already, Kieran could see that in terms of additions and revisions to human knowledge, the return over the years was going to be incalculable.
"How about that, Rudi?" Katrina asked with a hint of piquancy. "Does it remind you of any pillow lavas that you've seen?'' She winked at Kieran through her visor.
"Hm . . ." Rudi answered. He shuffled awkwardly in his suit. "It appears we have a lot of work ahead of us. Priceless work, I might add. If my guess is right, this will overturn the conventional school completely."
"Then let's bear that in mind when we set to it," Hamil said to them all. "And think about science. Leave all the petty rivalries and jealousies back where they belong, eh? That was what people came out here to get away from."
7
The flymobile stood in the shed that Solomon Leppo and his buddy, Casey Phibb, rented as a garage and workshop in the tangle of commercial and industrial premises lying along Gorky Avenue toward the terminal domes at Wuhan. It had previously belonged to the son of a wealthy agricultural grower who operated one of the roofed-crater farms. The son hadn't been able to decide whether he wanted a racing machine or a party wagon for his friends. As a consequence, after commissioning a series of unusual and expensive modifications, he had ended up with a curious combination of both that featured a six-seat basic layout with fan-ram hybrid supercompressors, stressed double bubble mainframe, stall-sensing geometry modifiers, and twist-wing aerodynamics. Then he had crashed it, expensively and spectacularly, and as a result of his being either scared off from further sporting ambitions by the experience, or prevailed upon to settle for a lifestyle more agreeable to friends, relatives, and insurance companies, the wreck found its way to the rear yard of Alazahad Machine.
There, it posed Mahom with something of a problem: too heavy and commodious to interest serious racing enthusiasts, yet unconventional enough to dissuade the practical buyers—was its incongruous mix of specifications worth the investment of refurbishing in the hope of an unlikely sale? Mahom had just about written it off for parts, when Solomon Leppo announced that it would be ideal for a project he had been conceiving and offered to take it off Mahom's hands in return for a weekend's overtime. Shrugging, mystified, but never surprised by anything that the human animal might do or desire, Mahom had agreed, happy to cross the liability off his books.
"Not a flymo, Casey. A protection machine! Your flying bodyguard. Five years from now, nobody who really is somebody will be going anywhere in anything else, anymore than they'd leave home without their muscle escort." Leppo spoke while he put tools back in the rack above the bench, brushed chaff and drillings from the past three hours' work into a pan, and emptied it into the trash bin underneath. "Ya gotta think new things—innovation. That's the way to break into where the big money is. Create a demand—a new market. It's no use busting your ass for the crumbs left over from what everyone else has already cleaned out."
Casey worked as an engine and flight systems technician in the transportation depot at Stony Flats. He surveyed
the modified flymobile from an oily steel stool, where he sat munching a microwaved roast-beef sandwich held in a paper napkin by a casually wiped oily hand. They had christened it the Guardian Angel. Painted blue and white with silver sidelines, it was to be their demonstration model. Adding space-grade lightweight armor cladding around the cabin and at critical points had been fairly straightforward, as was duplicating the flight and security electronics in a hidden compartment—deactivating the locator call-back was always the first precaution when stealing or hijacking vehicles. The center-mounted, forward-firing automatic cannon would be trickier, involving another deal with Mahom and some advice, but fortunately he was the kind who tended to let the world be and didn't ask questions. The current project was a pair of rear-mounted tubes for passive infrared and electronic, or laser/radar designated infantry-class homing missiles. Leppo also had plans for target-acquisition and incoming-tracking radar, along with a sophisticated countermeasures package, but they would need parts he was still trying to locate among Mahom's various sources. In the meantime, they had something that was at least flying again.
"This is all good experience we're clocking up, Sol," Casey agreed. "It'll double the ticket I can go hawking around. But do you really think we're going to get big packers with wads lining up for them? I mean, it's not just a question of the iron and the specs. You have to know names, and they have to know you. It's as much a social thing too, know what I mean? You have to have the contacts."
"There's ways," Leppo insisted. "Maybe we don't even have to look further than Mahom. He knows political people, military people, lots with money, some you don't wanna talk about, others you never imagined. They talk to each other. See how it works? All you have to do is get a toe in the door here and there, do a good job and show 'em something that'll make their eyes open, and before you know it they'll be coming to you." He pressed a button to dispense a coffee from the battered autochef on its shelf by the laser needle-drill. "Especially when some of them are rivals like the pirate narc and med dealers, or maybe the security agencies' big-name clients. When one decides to upgrade on equipment"—he gestured in the direction of the Angel—"then pretty soon all the rest will have to too, right?"
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