CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Earth!
It was a sight that Zaam had thought he would never see. The legendary ancestral home of the tiny residue of humanity that he had shepherded back after the long exile of their kind. Its form was familiar from images preserved and handed down through generations, but now it was really out there ahead of the ship, shining blue and white against the background of stars—as if it had been waiting.
The attempt to live away from Earth had failed. Contact was lost. Most of the plants, the animals, and the children died. For a hundred or more generations—nobody knew for sure—the colony clung on the verge of extinction, unable to muster the will or the strength to rebuild the facilities necessary for refurbishing the still-orbiting mother ship to make a bid to return. Finally, Zaam's father was born, and he had organized the manufacturing and re-equipping. Tears of joy and final release from the years of strain tickled down the old man's cheeks. The promise that he had inherited was fulfilled. He had brought them home.
As the ship drew closer, the swirls and streaks of color resolved into recognizable parts of continents outlined between the clouds. The long, two-part American hemisphere, although changed a little in places was easily identified, extending almost from pole to pole. West of it stretched the vast ocean occupying almost half the planetary globe. A flyby followed by long turn into an eccentric closing orbit to shed velocity brought the farther hemisphere into view, with its vast northern landmass and stubby southern-pointing extension on the western side. After the caustic wilderness in which the generations had struggled and died, the bands of warmth and color adorning the disk from its green equatorial band to the brilliant ice caps spoke of life and vibrancy that none of the ship's occupants had ever in their lifetimes been capable of imagining.
Despite objections from the others, Zaam insisted on going down to the surface with the advance party. He would let nothing deny him this moment. The lander detached from the mother ship and went into an almost polar descent orbit, coming in over the southern ice cap on a north-bound trajectory skimming the tip of the southern American continent to the right. The computer projection showed their course coming into alignment with the long, narrow gulf far to the north on the western coast, still hidden from direct view by the planet's curvature. "Disengage descent program," Xoll, the commander on the bridge deck ordered.
"Auto unlocked. Approach vector confirmed," the Flight Officer responded.
It was up to Wirton now, tense and concentrating on his displays at the manual piloting station. He was the best, and had trained assiduously on the simulator for this task. It had to be right first time. After shedding its share of the excess charge accumulated through the voyage, the lander would not have the reserves to regain orbit for another attempt. The others around the bridge watched and waited in a silence broken only by the hum of power coursing through the structure and the swishing of air flowing from the ventilator grilles. A display above the pilot's station showed the directions that had been preserved since the time of the ancestors.
The western American coast unrolled slowly ahead and below, the screen images enhanced from long-range infra-red scans. The coastline to starboard receded to become a thin, twisting neck joining the two continents. Ahead, the target gulf crawled into sight over the horizon. A superposed sliding graticule showed Wirton's fine course adjustments bringing their approach over the center point, bearing set on 5.778 radians. Telescopic and infra-red revealed a high mountain peak dead ahead at the limit of visibility, standing white above surrounding plains. It had to be the homing target!
The mouth of the gulf rose up and opened out ahead. . . .
. . . stretching away like a blue carpet. The image inside Kyal's all-round vision helmet was coming from the aerial drone that he was remote-piloting from Explorer 6, making a test approach up the center of the Gulf of California. Altitude twenty miles, descending, bearing set at twenty-nine degrees west of north. The coastline closed slowly inward below from the right until it was immediately below, like a finger pointing the way. Beyond the head of the gulf, the cloud-speckled, red-brown landscape disappeared into haze. He intensified the image enhancement to reveal Shasta standing out dead ahead like a white beacon, radar-echo range currently reading eleven hundred fifty miles.
The Marker distances had made sense instantly when interpreted as fractions of the distance from the mouth of the gulf to Shasta. The purpose of the test run was to identify the Marker peaks from the numbers given, by watching and scanning both sides of the descent path as the drone made its run in.
The Flight Engineer's voice came again. "Charge dump echo signature. Thirty miles, directly ahead."
"Available window?" Xoll queried.
"Fifteen seconds."
"Descent profile?"
"Five percent high, within envelope."
"Engage auto retro for seven seconds, then initiate discharge sequence."
Outside the ship, tendrils of artificial lighting snaked groundward.
"Dumping charge. Sequence function positive."
"Course report?"
"On vector," Wirton confirmed.
Zaam, listening from the side, released a slow, quiet sigh of relief. It seemed strange that the radio bands should be so silent.
Kyal was over the Camp 27 pyramid.
"We have you on radar," a voice said in his helmet, coming from somewhere below the drone. "Your altitude is thirteen miles. Descent reads at point zero-three six." "Check," Kyal responded.
Casselo came through. He was following on an external monitor in the same room as Kyal, along with Sherven, Yorim, and a few others. "The shoreline should pretty much stay with you for the next one hundred ninety miles, bulging slightly to the left."
"Got it," Kyal confirmed.
He made final landfall crossing the coast at nine miles altitude, five hundred thirty-two miles after passing over the base line at the mouth of the Gulf. A quick calculation showed the drone to be 0.384 of the distance to Shasta. Right on!
Over the Yuma pyramid. It seemed odd that the two discharge attractors were not mentioned in the pilot's notes. Maybe they hadn't been built at the time the simulator program was being developed. Another possibility was that the purpose of the run that the notes described had been to test only for the designated Markers.
"You should be getting close to the first Marker now," Casselo prompted.
The drone had just passed the halfway point to Shasta. The terrain below was rounded, featureless desert. Others in the lab were following views from the side-looking imagers tracking the east and west skylines. Just as the distance reading turned over at 0.577, one of the operators reported: "Significant peak to the left now." Kyal turned his head a fraction, which caused the image inside the helmet to shift around. It showed a distinct, isolated mountain standing up above otherwise unremarkable surroundings.
"I have it on the map," another voice came in. "Tagged as San Gorgonio. Seventy miles east of where Los Angeles was. That has to be it."
An instant later the radar surveillance technician announced, "Enhanced echo from the east, directly opposite. Looks like some kind of artificial reflector out there, mirroring the peak."
Everything was going smoothly. The next encouraging sign would be if a similar sequence repeated for the second Marker, which from the pilot's notes should occur at a distance of 0.712.
It did. At exactly that point, the drone was abreast of a peak called Whitney that turned out to be the highest in the Sierra range. And once again, its position was mirrored by a radar reflector located equidistant to the east. It meant that Ground Zero—the presumed location of Providence—should be seventy miles ahead.
"We're on schedule all the way," Kyal said into his helmet mike. "What's the verdict?"
"Is there any sign of this lake?" Casselo asked.
"Not that we can see," someone following on the external monitor screens answered. Kyal scanned the landscape ahead in his helmet image. It was a montage of
crumbling ridges and rocky canyons interspersed with flats that could have been dried up lake beds.
"I'd say this is about as well as we're going to do from up here," he reported.
Sherven's voice came over the circuit. "Go for it. See if you can find anything."
It was dry, desolate country. The ruins of some kind of structures almost obliterated by sand passed by to one side. Boulders and creek beds took shape, rushing out and flying by more quickly as the drone came down to surface-skimming height. Kyal eased up on speed. Quiet reigned in the room around him as eyes searched the views coming in from the drone's cameras.
"Point seven," the radar tech's voice said. "We're getting another Marker echo. You should be in visual range by now."
Kyal didn't need to be told. He could already see it—a deep canyon ahead, skirting the base of a mountain to the right that formed the end of a ridge. The interior of the canyon would only be visible from overhead. He circled the drone to the right and around, coming in again on a low, slow run from west to east, following the canyon line.
Ahead, the canyon turned northward below the mountain. It was gouged between steep walls on both sides. Between them, terraces of rock slabs flanked a narrower, inner gorge that looked like a dried-up creek, giving way to mounds of scrubby sand and boulders at the bases of both the canyon's walls, but higher along the south side. In several places, the lines of shapes that were not natural protruded. Although they had been long corroding and disintegrating, Kyal was still able to make out some of them as the remnants of machinery and artificial constructions.
The lander had settled among the sand flats a mile or so short of the indicated zero point. Zaam walked from there with the advance party toward the base of the mountain. The sensation of being outside under an open sky, surrounded by trees and formations of natural rock, and breathing natural air again was a wonder in itself. Above, the golden Sun of Earth seemed to welcome them home with its radiance.
They came to the southern rim of a canyon. Below, almost as the records from old described, they saw a fast-flowing river channeled between rocky shelves, flowing from a bend northward to their right, below the mountain. Excitement rose. If this was indeed the location of the entrance to Providence—which would be below the mountain, there was no sign that it had been found. The roadway serving it had been removed after it was sealed.
After some exploring around, two of the crew members from the lander found a way leading down the side of the canyon. From the floor, Xoll consulted the plans again and looked up at where the concealed entrance should be, with the mountain rising behind. All that they could see appeared to be featureless rock.
One of the officers looked at Xoll with a worried expression. "Is this really the place?" he asked.
"The sign should be around here somewhere," Xoll replied. Once again, groups dispersed from the party to search among the rocks. Within minutes, a jubilant shout came from one of the same two who had found the path down. The others hurried over to converge around the place where they were standing. Carved into the rock, recessed beneath an overhanging sill, was the symbol for Providence, passed down from the long-gone builders:
Xoll turned and clasped both Zaam's hands while the rest of the party looked on. "You did it, Zaam." The commander's voice choked as he struggled to fight down his emotions. "After all our doubts and our complaining. But just like your father, you never wavered. You brought us back."
Circling slowly out again above the flats to the south, Kyal was able to pick out the outlines and remains of several other objects constructions. Here and there were traces of what might have been the line of a former road. From orbit it would easily have passed as just another piece of eroded devastation from the war of long ago.
He brought the drone back over the canyon again. The northern wall seemed to be intact and unbroken. He followed the line of mounds and rock falls on the southern side to the point where the canyon turned north. Just visible behind the scrub topping the sand mounds was the top of what looked like an opening. Kyal brought the drone down to a point high among the mounds. If the opening extended down to the rock shelf below the sand, it would be pretty sizeable. The edge that Kyal could see was weathered but looked too straight to be natural. He increased power again and nudged the drone to a different angle, revealing a squared corner at one end. The sun was to the south, putting that side of the canyon in shadow, so he was unable to make out anything inside. He cut the drone's engine, shut down its controls, and removed the remote piloting helmet that he was wearing. The others around him were already closing around and showering him with congratulations. A screen above the room displayed the completed flight plan.
"I think we've arrived," Kyal told them. "We won't find out anything more now until we go there."
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
With the location of Providence finally established, the possibility offered itself of now being able to identify, or find the former site of, the mysterious "High Lake." The Terran records showed that there had indeed been a lake not far to the north. But it had been called Mono Lake. It was Elundi, down in Rhombus, who eventually tracked down how the confusion had arisen.
In Terran English, the prefix "mono" meant one of something, in other words, something that was rare. "Rare" was also used in a different sense to describe a condition of being thinly dispersed, as with the air of the upper atmosphere. As a consequence, a translator back on Venus who was not very experienced had mistaken the word as meaning "high," and used the Venusian equivalent accordingly. Hence, had arisen the misdirection to Lake Titicaca, which had seemed to corroborate the first guess of Providence being located in southern America.
A team was sent by helicopter from the Regional Base to investigate the places where radar echoes from east of the flight path had marked the right-hand side of the approach lane converging on Shasta. They found the sources to be metalized reflector surfaces carved into rock features at the appropriate places and angles to mirror the locations of the two Marker peaks bounding the lane on the west.
Another party traveled overland to Providence itself. The opening that Kyal had found in the south canyon wall was, as he had surmised, the top of an entrance. It opened to a tunnel that led beneath the mountain overlooking the canyon, which turned out indeed to be where the Providence survival cache was located. The interior was vast, excavated to accommodate the huge stock of materials, tools, and equipment that had raised doubts about the intended repository being Triagon. The strange thing, however, was that most of the inventory was still there, crated and packaged in preservatives and unused. If the place had been found and opened up by survivors of the war, why would they not have availed themselves of everything that was to be had? On the other hand, if it had remained undisturbed until the evacuees or their descendants returned to reclaim it in the manner intended, it appeared that they had stayed only briefly. If so, why, and where had they gone? Just when it seemed that answers had started coming together, nothing was making sense again. Kyal, Yorim, and Casselo decided it was time to go down and have a look at Providence for themselves.
Lorili looked at Kyal and Yorim despairingly. "It's the same as last time, only the other way around," she told them. "No sooner have I gotten myself posted up to Explorer, than you're going back down to Earth. If you're trying to get rid of me, Kyal, it would be far easier to just say so." They were in the docking bay area, waiting to board the shuttle that Casselo had organized to take them down to the Western North America Regional Base. Lorili had come to see them off.
Kyal grinned. "It should only be for a few days—a week at most. You've enough going on to keep you and Mirine busy anyway."
Lorili had long recovered and was back to her normal self. That was more than could be said for Jenyn. Far from healing without complications as had been expected, he had developed some kind of an infection involving fever and delirium. The latest report described purple blotches breaking out on his face and upper body, which was something new to the
Venusian physicians. Tests conducted so far on the affected cells gave conflicting results, but some of the data at least were consistent with an infectious agent. The doctors had seen nothing like it before. Their guess was that Jenyn had picked up something from the scalpel that had pierced his stomach, which Lorili had been using earlier to dissect the Terran corpses. Jenyn had taken it from a sterilizer in the clean rooms at the rear of the laboratory where he had entered. The area was normally kept at a small under-pressure to maintain a flow of air inward from the surroundings.
The likely culprit, then, was thought to be some ancient Terran micro-organism that had been carried to Triagon long ago and managed to survive since then in a dormant state under the ultra-cold, totally sterile, lunar conditions. If so, it might help explain the sixty-eight Terran corpses that had been found in the Rear Annexe—undamaged physically but removed and isolated from the main complex. On top of their own planned schedule of work, Lorili and MIrine were going through the results of their Terran gene and protein sequencing studies for possible corroboration and hopefully more information on the agent responsible.
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