by Bill Napier
To stop the cage they only had to press the emergency button. But the plan was to destroy it. To do that, they had to kill the circuit which told the winch far above to stop unwinding the cable. They had to pour a ton of steel cable down on to the cage. And they had to be out of it.
‘The green wire,’ Petrie shouted. ‘Nine–eight–seven…’
‘No, the yellow. Svetlana got it wrong. The yellow feeds up to the cable.’
‘Five – four – Do something! – two – one.’
Freya wrenched fiercely at a thick green wire. There was a vicious spark of current, she yelped, and then a nerve-shattering screech! as electromagnetic clamps tried to strangle the metal shafts and the cage juddered to a halt, its overhead light flickering.
Petrie found that his eyes were level with a roughly hewn floor. He scrabbled up and out of the cage, his nose catching painfully on a sharp rock.
Up top the big winch, unaware that the elevator had stopped, was still unwinding its steel cable, which was now raining down on the wire mesh above them. The noise was deafening. He turned and to his horror the cage lurched down. Freya, halfway out, fell back into it with a frightened cry, landing on her backside. For a ghastly moment he thought it was headed down the shaft but it stopped, groaning, inching down in little jerks as the overhead cable poured down.
And now, steel was beginning to tear. The screeching was painful on Petrie’s ears. He had a brief, claustrophobic fantasy: he was trapped inside a ship on its way to the sea floor.
And Freya was on her toes, arms extended, her face white with fear. She was now out of arm’s length.
If we both go down the shaft the project is finished.
And thick metal cable was still pouring down.
Two corpses rather than one. Leave her.
She was reading his mind, pleading with her eyes.
I can’t risk the project for one individual.
Freya’s hands were stretched up, but Petrie, hanging halfway into the elevator, could only touch her fingertips.
The wire mesh was buckling. The elevator was now juddering down more rapidly, inches at a time.
Any second now.
She jumped. Petrie grabbed her wrists but the lift lurched suddenly and she slipped from his grasp. She jumped again, and again he made contact with her hands; desperately, he dug his nails in, but Freya’s hands were slippery with sweat, and again he lost them and she fell back on the elevator floor with a despairing cry.
Oh, what the hell! He scrambled back down into the elevator. He cupped his hands. She clambered, there was a painful heel on his collar bone, and then their positions were reversed; Petrie was in the cage and Freya on her knees in the tunnel and turning to catch him.
The foot of the tunnel was now about nine feet above him. The gap between tunnel floor and sagging elevator roof was now about eighteen inches and shrinking. Petrie leaped up, aware that he had only this one chance. His fingers clutched at the rim of the tunnel floor. It was wet and slippery. Freya leaned down, grabbed his hair and pulled. Slowly, he bent his arms until his elbows reached the tunnel floor. Then he levered himself up by the elbows and rolled on to wet, freezing ground and pulled his feet clear just as the wire roof of the elevator gave way with a crash! and tons of thick metal cable clattered on to its floor and started to spill into the tunnel mouth.
They leaped away from the mortally wounded elevator. In the confined space of the tunnel the thunder of the falling cable was like hammering on a steel drum. They scrambled back just as the elevator gave way with a final scream and the cable which had been overflowing into the tunnel started to accelerate swiftly down the shaft after it.
The tunnel lights failed.
Petrie cursed, and waved his arms in the dark like antennae. The cable was now whipping the air and he had another brief fantasy, that of decapitation. The noise seemed to come from all directions and he broke into a sudden sweat with the realisation that he had lost his sense of orientation.
A voice in the dark, surprisingly faint. ‘Where are you?’
Seconds later there was a bang! from below, like an explosion, but by now Petrie had found the damp tunnel wall and was feeling his way along it – away, he hoped, from the elevator shaft. From somewhere in the distance he began to hear another sound, the thunder of a torrent. He edged towards it.
‘Over here!’ Freya shouted. Again her voice came over faintly, and Petrie thought his hearing had temporarily gone. There was a scraping sound, like metal on wood, as if she was struggling with a metal clasp on a box. Petrie stopped, trying to locate the direction in the pitch black.
And then there were four pinpricks of green light, making a rectangle before Freya’s body interposed itself on the line of sight. Petrie quickly crossed the twelve feet to the lights. He bumped into Freya and she gave a startled little scream. Four torches, each charged up: the beams were dazzling. And four yellow helmets. They selected helmets and clipped the torches into place.
‘I wonder how long we’ve got?’ Even at a couple of feet separation, Freya’s voice was faint, and he understood her more by lip-reading than by the sound of her words. The torchlight from her helmet was painful, and she was screwing her eyes up.
Petrie tried to calm down, collect his thoughts. His whole body was beginning to shake. ‘Depends,’ he said. He noted with surprise the calmness of his own voice, which contrasted with the turmoil in his mind and body. ‘If the officer thinks it was an accident, we have a good start. If not, he’ll know we must have an escape route in mind and he’ll start finding out about the cave system…’
‘Let’s hope he’s stupid. Hold it.’ She clicked her torch off and Petrie did the same, following her alarmed gaze to the tunnel mouth.
Little specks of dust were wafting up from below. They were visible because, far above, someone was shining a powerful light down the shaft.
‘Surely they couldn’t abseil down?’ Petrie wondered.
‘Or climb down the cable?’
‘Let’s get out of here.’
The tunnel was broad and flat and the torchlight showed a spray of water about two hundred yards ahead of them. Freya led the way towards it at a brisk trot. The end of the tunnel was marked by a black metal railing with a red and white lifebelt attached to a long coil of rope. They found themselves inside a much larger, natural tunnel, about thirty feet wide and as high. Water below them was surging, tumbling, roaring along this channel; Petrie felt the ground vibrating. Their torches made rainbows in the cold spray, but showed only that the subterranean river curved out of sight on either side of them, piling up steeply at the corner.
Petrie said, ‘The Styx,’ but his voice was lost in the roar.
He felt an urgent tug on his arm. Freya was pointing to a flight of stone steps on the left, going down to a concrete path running alongside the river. Just before they took them, he glanced back. It might just have been the dark adaption, but the light shining down the elevator shaft seemed stronger.
‘Tyson’s entrance is two sixty metres along,’ Petrie shouted.
‘I can’t judge distances.’ In the torchlight, Freya’s face was glistening wet. ‘I’m relying on you.’
Petrie said, ‘Hell. I was relying on you.’
They hurried along, gripping the handrail. Here and there the river was almost level with the concrete path, and in some places they had to wade knee-deep, the force of the water threatening to knock them off their feet.
‘The water level must be up,’ Freya shouted. She was shivering.
‘And it’s rising.’ Petrie didn’t try to hide the fear.
After two hundred metres the path seemed to dip into the water. Their torches picked out the railing for another twenty yards or so before it, too, vanished under the waves.
He looked along the tunnel wall, searching for footholds. About fifty metres ahead, his helmet light picked out a natural recess about seven metres above the river.
‘What do you think?’ he shouted. ‘Tyson’s Worm
hole?’
‘There’s nothing else. We’ll have to swim for it, try to grab that ledge in passing. Think you can do it?’
Petrie was appalled. ‘You’re mad. What if we miss?’
‘We drown.’ The river was thundering round the corner, heading for an uncertain destination.
‘I can’t swim,’ Petrie confessed.
‘You idiot! Why didn’t you say so at the castle?’ She turned away from him, her light scanning the recess and the smooth tunnel wall. Then: ‘Go back for the lifebelt. And be quick.’
Petrie waded back along the path. Without question, the river had risen, and the concrete was now almost wholly under water. To Petrie, the journey seemed to take an hour. He climbed the steps, gasping. To his horror, he saw that a light was still shining down the shaft but that it was much brighter than before. And it was swaying rhythmically, as if it was attached to a descending human. Hastily, he hoisted the lifebelt on his shoulder and put the coil of rope in the crook of his elbow. With a last fearful look at the light he ran back down the steps.
By the time he reached Freya the water was up to her chest and she was gripping the handrail, under the surface, with both hands. She was shivering violently and Petrie thought she looked ready to faint.
‘They’re coming.’
‘Put your arms and head into that,’ she ordered in a shaking voice. Petrie obliged. ‘Wait until I’m on the ledge and then float. Let’s hope the rope’s long enough.’
‘What if it’s not?’
She ignored the question, tying the end of the rope crudely round her waist before wading along the path. In a moment she was caught up in the surge and bobbed along, seemingly helpless in the flow of freezing water. More than once her torchlight shone underwater, but then she was climbing on to the ledge and waving at Petrie.
The next ten seconds were amongst the most frightening in his life, but Freya was pulling the rope in as fast as the distance between them was shortening and he found himself gasping and spluttering face-down on a big slab of rock.
Freya was saying, ‘Look!’ Set in the natural recess about seven metres diagonally up was a gnarled pillar of rock, vaguely resembling a faceless woman wrapped in a shawl or cloak. ‘The Madonna!’
With an effort, Petrie got to his knees, his clothes heavy with icy water. Freya was already skimming up the smooth rockface instinctively, like a spider. Water was pouring off her clothes. Petrie couldn’t see what she was gripping but forced himself to follow. He found he could hardly grip the rock for shaking. He inched his way along, the torrent roaring angrily below. Once he glanced down and saw that the ledge was no longer below him: the helmet light showed only swift churning water.
Freya was shouting something. It took all his nerve to look up. He had passed under the Madonna, but now he was only a few metres from the recess. He warily edged towards it; and then Freya was gripping him by the elbow and at last he was being pulled behind the pillar of rock.
The recess went in about five metres, and their lights showed that it narrowed to a crack about six feet wide and barely a foot high. Over it, someone – it could only have been Tyson – had scraped a T.
She pointed triumphantly. ‘We’ve found it! The Wormhole!’
The beam from Petrie’s helmet lamp shook from side to side. ‘I’ll never get into that.’
Freya was looking up the river. ‘Douse your light. Quickly.’
The first time it might have been an illusion, but not the second. Far upstream, torchlight had reflected briefly off the swirling waves of the Styx.
33
Rapunzel
Bull was taking time off for the Iraqi crisis and she had three hours at the most.
There was a harsh cry and she almost jumped with fright. A large, long-legged pink bird with a yellow head fluttered past at eye-level and settled on a palm frond about six feet away, eyeing her curiously. Hazel Baxendale began to wonder if the Baltimore aquarium, even in the depths of the Baltimore winter, had been such a good idea.
She stepped carefully past the bird and carried on through a winding path, surrounded by lush greenery. An emerald-green iguana blocked her way. She moved respectfully past it and, a little further on, sat down on a wooden bench.
The tropical house was hot. And humid. Hazel draped her synthetic fur coat over the back of the bench, but kept her sunglasses on. She waited.
The MIT engineer, Professor Gene Killman, was first to arrive. He was overweight, bald, with a gaudy yellow tie and dark glasses. He was licking his thin lips nervously, and looking around. He was almost comically furtive. The President’s Science Adviser rubbed her forehead in despair and groaned inwardly. The man spotted her, looked around again, and sidled up to the bench, sitting down without once looking at her.
Something rustled in a tree. A small creature with long golden fur peered at them. ‘What the hell is that?’ she said.
‘They call it a tamarin, ma’am. Cute, isn’t it? So many have been taken for pets that it’s now an endangered species.’
The Harvard philosopher, a small, cheerful, grey-haired woman in her forties, appeared a few minutes later and sat down on the other side of Hazel. The woman was dressed for the winter, in a heavy coat and scarf. It was ninety degrees hot and ninety per cent humid, but the philosopher kept her winter clothes wrapped round her. Just looking at her put the Science Adviser in a sweat.
Hazel said, ‘Rosa Clements, meet Gene Killman.’ There was an exchange of cautious nods. ‘I’d like to emphasise again that this discussion is off-the-record and highly confidential. You won’t understand what’s behind it and all I can tell you is that it involves a matter of national security. Don’t tell a living soul that I’ve approached you for advice, not even your partners. Especially not your partners.’
‘I’m between wives,’ Gene Killman volunteered.
‘You have my full attention, ma’am,’ said Rosa Clements.
‘Okay, here we go. I’m going to ask three questions and I need the best answers going. You mustn’t go jumping to any goddam conclusions; treat them as hypothetical. Number one. Is there life beyond the Earth? Or are we just a mega-fluke? Professor Killman.’
The MIT man replied. ‘In my opinion the Universe is teeming with life.’
‘I thought the odds against life forming by chance from simple molecules were super-astronomical. There are more ways to combine amino acids than there are atoms in the Universe, but only one way forms them into proteins.’
‘That’s a problem,’ Killman admitted. ‘I don’t have the answer except to say here we are, and life got established down here just as soon as the meteorites stopped smashing our crust. Take a walk over Slave Province in Canada and you’re walking over micro-organic sediments a hundred feet thick and two and a half billion years old. In bits of West Greenland you’re walking over iron-rich layers just as thick but four billion years old laid down by primitive microbes. If life was some sort of mega-fluke, how come we’re here and how come it got started so early?’
‘But what about intelligent life? I’ve been told that’s a quadrillion to one chance.’
Killman said, ‘Again, as soon as the conditions were right on Earth, there was a transition from single-celled life forms to multi-celled ones. Once you’ve done that, there are selective advantages all the way from the formation of nerves, then synapses, then cerebral ganglions and all the way to brains, intelligence and societies.’
Hazel studied the man closely through her dark glasses. ‘Are you saying intelligent life should be common out there?’
‘It should be everywhere.’
‘So why don’t we see it everywhere?’
‘That’s a problem too,’ Killman admitted frankly. ‘There have been lots of suggestions but I don’t believe any of them.’
But Hazel had stopped listening. The message had come home loud and clear: ET is on the cards.
‘Okay.’ She sensed that something was slithering in a branch above her. ‘Question number two. Say
we receive an intelligent signal from space. Say that all sorts of information, including genetic recipes to improve ourselves and our children, is in this message. That’s all the information you have to work on. I need the answers to the following questions. What sort of creatures would send it? What are we dealing with? Could it be on the level, or some sort of trap?’
‘Ms Baxendale, at MIT we’ve developed a doll. We call her Rapunzel on account of her long hair. She uses sensors to pick up movement and sound. She feels heat and she has a sense of touch. We have a couple of hundred facial expressions programmed into her and a few billion sound combinations. Would you believe she has moods? That she needs attention? Rapunzel can fool a child into believing she’s a real baby.’
‘Call me Hazel. What’s your point, Gene?’
‘This, ma’am. Rapunzel is just a dumb machine made of plastic and wire, programmed by a few silicon chips. We’re still in the steam age.’ Killman leaned forward. His voice was beginning to carry a zealous edge. ‘But give it fifty years. A hundred at the outside. By then we’ll have molecular and even quantum computers a billion times faster than anything on the market today. We’ll have dolls that fool adults, not just kids. They’ll be more mobile, smarter, and more imaginative than us. We’re moving into the age of intelligent machines.’
‘But they’re still just machines. They can’t think.’
‘Ma’am, I’m a machine and I can think. What am I but a collection of atoms, every last one obeying the laws of physics? Same as the doll.’
‘So a hundred years down the line we’ll have robot slaves. I still don’t see what you’re driving at.’
‘Hazel, these slaves as you call them will be smarter than us. A lot smarter.’
Hazel Baxendale peered into the MIT man’s eyes. ‘Rapunzel will take over?’
‘As surely as night follows day. It goes further than smart robots, ma’am. We’ll have so many implants to boost us, neural circuits inside our heads, networked into grids, that we’ll be hybrids ourselves. The need to outstrip rival nations or even just rivals will drive this. Eventually the carbon-based part of us will be redundant. Organic life – carbon-based – is on the way out. This is inevitable whenever intelligence develops technology. Sooner or later the technology takes over, supplants the primitive organic life. Therefore the signal – this make-believe signal – hasn’t come from a life form like us. It’s been sent by a machine.’
