by Jack L Knapp
Chapter Eight
I gassed up at Walatowa Visitor’s Center and got a large coffee to keep me alert while driving those long, lonely miles back to El Paso.
Predictably enough, I shortly needed access to a bathroom. There aren’t any between Walatowa, which has a poorly-maintained privy, and Bernalillo. There’s a small village along the way between the two but public facilities aren’t available.
Shortly my needs went from fairly-urgent to acute. I pulled over to the roadside and put the emergency blinkers on.
State highway 550 occasionally has periods of heavy traffic, but for much of the time traffic is light. There may not be another car anywhere in sight. Such was the case now.
I might have simply hidden alongside the car while relieving myself as many do. But not now; now I had a new toy to play with.
I didn’t want to forget how to levitate whenever I desired. No indeed; constant practice would be required to implant the necessary steps into my subconscious so that the Talent would be available at need without conscious effort. It was time for a bit more practice, this time unsupervised by T.
There were still no cars in view as I lifted a few inches and drifted across the rough, sandy desert. There’s a lot of spiky, thorny shrub here, but I simply lifted higher and floated above them.
Shortly I found myself behind a scrubby juniper. I contributed a quart or so of fluid to the tree’s future well-being while continuing to float above the ground. I considered briefly whether I might not want to manipulate my position and write my name in the sand. But no, I’m a grownup and we don’t do that stuff. Mostly.
I drifted across a barbed-wire fence, then lifted up a canyon wall. The slope was not too steep and I had no problems other than maintaining balance and control.
The journey was fun and the view from the top of the canyon wall was magnificent. Great vistas of brown canyons and russet cliffs spread away for miles. The thin, dry desert air of the New Mexico uplands allows a watcher to see for greater distances than people who live in humid environments can never know.
Finally, I drifted down the canyon wall and back to my car. I had to settle to the ground after I passed the fence; a state police car had spotted my flashers and stopped to see if someone needed help. I assured him that I was only stopped temporarily and soon we went our separate ways. I watched in the mirror as he crossed the median behind me and resumed patrolling, now westbound toward the village of Cuba.
The next stop happened just before I reached the town of Bernalillo, but not because of my bladder this time. I felt something, a strange shimmying movement of the car’s suspension. I pulled off the highway and put the flashers on again before getting out to check the tires.
I saw nothing unusual and I was wondering if something had broken underneath the car when I felt a comm from T.
We broke the comm and I got back on the road, keeping my speed down to forty miles per hour for a while, but eventually allowing the speed to creep up to fifty by the time I approached Bernalillo. I felt no more shaking and I picked up a short news item on the radio, but the announcer apparently knew even less than I did. Not that lack of knowledge kept him from speculating.
Turning south on Interstate 25, I was soon keeping up with traffic. If the drivers had felt anything they were now ignoring it. I passed on through Albuquerque and the traffic on the overpasses appeared to be moving at its normal rapid pace.
I found myself following behind a tractor-trailer and decided that this was the perfect place for me. If there was a problem ahead he would see it before I could, and if the heavy eighteen-wheeler could cross the bridges I could too.
The truck, me in trail, kept heading south. Elephant Butte Lake was visible off to my left when T’s next comm came in.
I nodded, a reflex action.
I told him I understood and we commed off.
I gassed up in Socorro and made it home to El Paso without further incident. Ana Maria wasn’t there but the answering machine was blinking. She’d tried my cell before calling home and leaving a message, but I had turned the phone off while I was communicating with T via our telepathic communication system. I had simply forgotten to turn it back on, what with the excitement of the earthquake and the possibility that a supervolcano was waking up.
Ana Maria had decided to stay longer with her cousin and told me to call her when I got back, along with putting a flea in my ear about making sure my cell phone was charged up and turned on. I called her cell and we chatted briefly, but there was nothing important to say.
I had hoped, even expected, that she would be home when I returned, but maybe she wasn’t ready to accept that idea just yet. Maybe it was just a place to stay when her family was giving her problems. I had hoped for more, but the age difference and cultural differences might be more than she was prepared to accept. Maybe my absences when I left to help T work through his problems had something to do with it too.
I checked the closet, but a lot of her clothes were there, so maybe the time with her cousin was only a temporary visit after all.
#
T commed me later at the house.
#
In the event, the job took us a little more than two days. Some of it was driving; there aren’t a lot of good roads up where they wanted us to put the instrument package, and even when there were roads the plotted map locations were more than a hundred yards away. For most of the devices, we just loaded up, levitated, and carried the gear as we drifted over the ground.
Fortunately for us, people were now avoiding the caldera in most cases. A movie crew was still working, trying to finish shooting before they ran out of money, but not even the rangers stayed overnight in the caldera now. We didn’t need to watch for people who might see us levitating and lifting the equipment over bushes as we did so.
T could already clear the tops of the trees and ‘fly’ in a direct path to the next map location. I was soon doing it too. Practice helped. I could have gone higher by the end of the second day, and T had done it once just for fun after one of our extended trips to plant a tiltmeter unit. But we avoided the extra levitating because we were now hurrying as much as possible. I wanted to get the job done and get out of the caldera. The longer we worked there, the more oppressive the giant volcano seemed.
#
Both of us were tired by the time we turned the truck onto highway 4 and left the caldera behind. Still, it was a good feeling; what we’d done might save some lives if the geologic unrest continued.
Doctor Wang was glad to see us when we got back to the university.
“I don’t know how you got all of those meters installed that quick, but I’m glad to see them working! We’re not getting a lot of data yet but we’re ready if something happens. How did you two manage all that in less than three days? You didn’t mention a crew before. How many people did you have working for you?”
“Not as many as you might think, Doc. But it doesn’t take many guys to pilot drones…shit, I wasn’t supposed to mention those.”
“You’re flying drones up there? How many were you using? And those things have to be able to lift quite a lot too. You’ve got to be using helicopter drones to be able to put things just where we wanted, and you’ve got to have a visual link to the drones too. Are you using a GPS locater? I’ve never heard of anything that sophisticated. Did you build the drones yourselves?”
“Doc, we just can’t talk about it. It’s proprietary information, and if word got out other people would soon begin building stuff like we’ve got and then we wouldn’t be the only ones doing these jobs. Keep your mouth shut about this, OK?”
He agreed that he would and we soon left. A check was sent to our account electronically and just that easy, we had a business. Consulting and special enterprises, yep, that’s us.
We got to the parking lot before we broke down. T started chuckling and soon we were both howling with laughter. Some of it was because of the way we’d concealed what we were doing, and probably some of it was simply relief from the tension we’d worked under. Whatever, it felt good.
I was soon heading south on the interstate, while T headed north. He wanted to pick up a few more things from the cabin, now that the quakes had stopped.
Ana Maria wasn’t back yet, but I was too tired to worry about it. I crashed and didn’t wake up for a solid twelve hours.
Chapter Nine
T’s cell phone rang late in the afternoon.
“Hello?”
“T, this is Randy. Randy Goodfellow?”
“Afternoon, Prof. How are things going?”
“Oh, fine. You fellows really impressed Doctor Wang. We’re getting data from Valles now but not much seems to be happening. There was a small movement of magma deep under the caldera, but for the moment it appears to have stabilized. We think the magma pool is shallow anyway, so it doesn’t contain enough energy to trigger a major eruption. Not without more magma being added to the pool from underneath. There’s a kind of vertical pipe that leads down into the mantle, but no magma has flowed up the pipe in centuries.”
T detected a wistful tone; if you’re a scientist, you live for catastrophic events, even if everyone else hopes they never happen during their lifetime!
“We were glad to help out, Prof. Call us anytime.”
“Are you still in New Mexico?”
“I came back. My girlfriend finally left for El Paso, but I wanted to be here. I can do more if I don’t have to worry about her.”
“Anyway, T, I thought you’d want to know about our results, even though they’re very preliminary. We’re looking at other things too because the Rio Grande Rift has s
uddenly become a hot topic for geologists! We’re picking up mini-quakes, nothing you’re going to feel but interesting to us just the same, and they’re happening up north as well as off to the east in New Mexico. There were several in the Richter class of three or maybe a little more than that near Fort Collins, in Colorado. The New Mexico ones aren’t that strong, and anyway they’re located a little west of La Luz. There’s a known magma field about eleven miles deep just north of there, and we think it might be associated with the Jemez Lineament as well as the Rio Grande Rift. How much do you know about the geology of the Rift and the Lineament?”
“I know the Rift runs from north to south. The Jemez Mountains are off to the west of the Rift, but that’s about it.”
“Both of those, the Rift and the Lineament, are essentially zones of weakness. We get that information by plotting where earthquakes occur. The Lineament crosses the Rift near Santa Fe and the Valles Caldera is part of both systems. The zones of weakness are fairly wide, not something like you see along the San Andreas Fault in California. That one’s quite narrow by comparison.
“We infer magma bodies by reflection of sound waves and recording earthquake waves through the rocks, and we get pretty accurate information regarding location even if it’s more guess than absolute knowledge regarding how much depth the magma body has. It’s not really a pool of liquid, it’s more like a region of soft rock that’s hotter than the surrounding matrix. There’s a balance of pressure from overburden to counter the heat and pressure from the magma. If the pressure is decreased by an event such as an earthquake or faulting, the magma can become liquid and erupt. It’s like what happens when you take the radiator cap off after the engine’s hot.
“Right now, we’re looking at slightly increased levels of activity in California, northern Mexico, and northern Utah. If the Rift is becoming active, we might see even more activity in California, because those are large blocks of crust that are shifting. It might not happen, of course. The pressure might have been building up since the last major earthquake out west and the activity we’re seeing along the Rift is the effect, not the cause. That’s why we’re looking north and south of the Lineament, to see if maybe the Mexico City quake created instability and we’re just now seeing the result of that, a kind of readjustment.”
