Echoes of the Well of Souls watw-1

by Jack L. Chalker

  Theresa Perez was not amused. “what in hell are you doing here?” she asked Juan Campos acidly. “There is no room on this plane for you two. We have to work.”

  Campos grinned evilly at her. “So? We give you our hospitality and you would then deny me seeing this great sight? Even my father thought that we were owed this.”

  “What’s the problem?” Maklovitch called, squeezing into the plane. He saw Campos and the bodyguard. “This wasn’t part of the agreement,” he noted with irritation. “We’re on a tight schedule here and even tighter quarters.”

  “The agreement has been changed,” Campos responded. “We are staying right here. If you choose not to take off, then sit. My father believes one of the family should be aboard.”

  Maklovitch thought fast. Right now the deadline outweighed all else, and in this plane Campos was as much at their mercy as they were at his. “All right—you come. He goes, and now!” the newsman added, pointing to the bodyguard.

  “Ramon goes where I go.”

  The newsman thought a moment, then decided to call the bluff. “Very well. Terry, get on the horn and tell them that Don Campos has insisted on placing two armed men aboard. Because this exceeds our weight and room limits, we cannot go. Tell them the Campos file is to air rather than be sent to Don Campos. Understood?”

  The gangster jumped. “Now, wait one minute. What file? You—bitch! You radio nothing without my permission!”

  “Too late,” she told him with a smile. “We’re already live to the studio. They’re hearing every single word we say. Are you ordering me to switch us out, knowing that it means that here, on live audio, you are forcibly kidnapping us?”

  This was getting a little too complicated too quickly for Juan Campos. “What file?”

  “Your father knows,” the newsman responded. “Why do you think we were offered his hospitality? I thought you told us that you really ran things around here.” He paused a moment. “Now, since we’re going nowhere, shall we all go see your father and explain the situation?”

  Campos suddenly didn’t know what to do. His first impulse was to take them all out and shoot them, but he was in fact acting on his own and he was not at all certain how his father would react when word of that came down. Nobody had said anything about a deal, but it explained much.

  “All right. He goes, I stay.”

  “And you give him your pistol and stay in that seat as long as we’re in the air,” the newsman said firmly. He looked at his watch. “Better make up your mind right now or it won’t make any difference. That meteor won’t wait.”

  Campos threw up his hands in disgust, then handed a pistol over to the bodyguard and told him to get off and wait. The bodyguard, hesitant and not without some protest, complied.

  None of them were fools enough to believe that Campos didn’t still have various weapons on him, but at least it was one less. Now, with the bodyguard out, Lori climbed on, looking confused, and they took their seats.

  The technicians had been working steadily since they’d arrived. Gus now had a console bolted in the center rear of the plane through which he could control several exterior cameras and see what each showed on small black-and-white monitors. The pictures were being recorded in a compartment beneath the cabin and also being sent by a computer-controlled ku-band satellite uplink mounted atop the aircraft that would relay them back to the U.S. studio if, of course, conditions were right and the aircraft was level. A similar microwave system was mounted on the plane’s underside and might work for pickups in Manaus or at the makeshift hacienda uplink site. Provided that either system worked, directors far away in the States would pick the feed and also give Gus general direction.

  “Probably none of it will work,” Gus grumped, “which is why we’re also taping, but it’s worth a try.”

  Audio wasn’t a problem, and Terry had on a headset that connected her by radio with the studio. Both Maklovitch and Sutton also had similar headsets, but those were on a different frequency and would be used mostly for contact and commentary to the live anchor desk.

  They roared off into the night, climbing through a low cloud layer that bumped them around a bit and caused horrible noise on the audio. Then they broke free and had the clear sky above and all around them, with a tremendous view of the stars.

  “I’ve got us on course and ready,” the pilot reported. “We should be in position with, no thanks to the delays, about ten minutes to spare. For a region with cleared airspace, though, there’s a fair amount of traffic on the radio. Not just the two science planes and the Brazilian Air Force tracker, but it seems there’s a number of small civil aircraft up in violation of the clear airspace order. Two air force jets are trying to track them and force them down, but there’s a lot of damned fools up.”

  “Yeah, and probably all three U.S. networks and a dozen others,” Terry commented. “Wonder what would happen if they shot down an anchor or two.”

  It was very dark but very busy in the plane’s cabin as everything was checked out one last time, and they even did a last-minute on-air audio report to the news desk. Everybody tried to forget about Campos, who at least was just sitting there uncharacteristically behaving himself. Still, the time dragged impossibly.

  Lori felt keyed up but also suddenly very tired, almost drained. It was the waiting, she decided. She wanted things to start. They all wanted things to start.

  “Contact! Visual contact by Science One!” the pilot reported excitedly. Science One was the combined Brazilian-Smithsonian research plane about 350 miles out in the Atlantic. “If what they’re reporting is true,” the pilot added, “then we’re in for a dizzingly fast lalapalooza! Buckle in tight! She’s coming down dirty!”

  “What does he mean by ‘dirty’?” Juan Campos asked, breaking his long silence.

  “Shedding,” Lori told him. “Coming apart. Raining big, hot rocks.”

  The plane turned slowly and then reduced speed. Maklovitch was already on the air, and Lori knew now that she, too, was live.

  “We should be seeing it any second now,” the newsman said with a professional calmness his tense face belied. “It’s coming right over Rio.”

  “There! Got it!” Gus cried. “Oh, my God! What a whopper!”

  Things changed in an instant; the horizon suddenly turned from night into a creeping twilight, then, suddenly, it was there, coming straight for them for all they could tell.

  “Madre dios!”Juan Campos breathed, and crossed himself.

  Lori watched with a mixture of awe and fascination as the huge object sped toward them and then was suddenly past. It looked like some enormous flaming lump of charcoal, the size of a dozen full moons, blazing a yellow and white-hot tail.

  “Wahoo!”Gus roared from his console, apparently very pleased with the pictures. It was only later that Lori realized that the man was so intent on his screens that he never actually saw the meteor.

  The plane banked sharply and took a course perpendicular to the meteor’s path so they could see it go down. The pilot’s reactions were good, although suddenly the entire aircraft was rocked as if shaken by a giant hand, and unsecured items went flying. There was a roller coaster-like sensation of falling for what seemed an eternity, and then the pilot boosted power and pulled out of it.

  “Did you get it? Did you get it?” Terry called repeatedly.

  Now the plane headed back west, following a huge but ragged contrail left by the meteor. It took better than five minutes to reach the point where it dipped into the clouds, a distance the big rock had covered in seconds.

  There was no question, though, as to where to look. A giant mushroom-shaped plume was still rising from out of the clouds, and both plume and clouds seemed to be on fire.

  They tensed again as the aircraft dipped below the clouds, and there were general gasps at the scene below. It looked like the whole forest was on fire, and the impact site, many miles away, resembled nothing less than an active volcanic caldera.

  “It looks like an
atom bomb,” Lori commented, her throat dry and constricted. “Look at the blast area down there. The firestorm had to be incredibly hot to reach that distance in that wet, green growth.”

  Tremendous thunder and lightning were all around as well, making the scene look and sound like the end of the world.

  “What is all that? Blast effect?” the anchor prompted her.

  “No. It’s very wet here, and the heat and blast cloud have created massive convection currents. The heat is rising, taking the humidity in the air with it, and it’s condensing. Those are thunderstorms created by the impact. There’s no telling how long it will rain on this area, but at least it will help extinguish the fires and keep the smoke from rising too high.”

  “I see a huge crater, but there’s something glowing at the bottom,” Maklovitch noted. “Is that the meteor itself?”

  “Possibly, but unlikely,” she answered. “It’s probable that the whole thing disintegrated on impact, leaving only small fragments. More likely that is partly molten rock and mostly existing bedrock uncovered for the first time in a million years.”

  “I estimate that we are probably at least ten miles from the crater, yet it’s clearly visible. It must be enormous. A mile, maybe two miles across. The fire and blast damage extend, oh, at least twenty or thirty miles all around, possibly more.” The newsman suddenly remembered Juan Campos. “Senor Campos, does anyone live down there to your knowledge?”

  Campos stared at the scene out of hell. “Not now .”he responded in almost a whisper.

  “No, no. I mean before it hit. I know there wasn’t much in the way of evacuation because of the sparse population and the primitiveness of the people.”

  “Depends,” the gunman managed. “Where are we now?”

  Maklovitch saw what he meant. All of this region looked pretty much alike, even more so in the dark, and nothing much was left down there that might provide a landmark.

  “I’ve got the position from Science Three,” the pilot called back. “Call it, oh, a hundred, maybe a hundred and twenty kilometers south-southeast from the Campos airstrip.”

  The Peruvian nodded. “Then there were some Indians down there. Now?”

  “Can we get in closer?” Gus asked the pilot. “I’d like to go straight over that crater if I could.”

  “I could try, but with these storms and downdrafts all over the place there’s no predicting anything. You can feel her shaking now,” the pilot replied. “I’ve been circling out some fifteen miles, and you feel what it’s like. If I did it, it would have to be at a fairly fast speed.”

  “Well, the clouds and smoke are obscuring everything,” the cameraman complained. “Either we get in there or we wrap, people. I’m for giving it a try.”

  Terry nodded, giving a quick satisfied glance at the terrified face of Juan Campos strapped in the back. Welcome to the news business, she thought acidly. “One pass, as low and slow as you dare,” she told the pilot. “That’s it. Gus will have to make do with what he can get.”

  Lori wasn’t much more thrilled than Campos, as much as she wanted to see the sight closer up. With the tremendous turbulence, she found herself thinking less of the view than of headlines in the paper.local scientist and news crew die covering asteroid.

  “Hang on, everybody!” the pilot called, and circled first out, then back in toward the glow, climbing and increasing speed. The vapor, rising now mostly from the rainfall striking the still extremely hot object, obscured clear view, and the ride was the scariest any of them could remember. Then the turbulence subsided, and the fear and tension drained from all of them like water through a sieve, leaving them all more or less limp—except Gus, who was muttering that he hadn’t really gotten a decent pass.

  “One’s enough, I think,” Terry told him. “It’s only going to get smokier for a while down there.” She paused for a moment as someone far away asked her a question. “Gus? Can you replay that last pass, the straight-down shot, through a monitor here? They got it back at the studio, but they say there’s something weird about it.”

  “Huh? Yeah, I guess, if you’re finished shooting.”

  “We are for now. We’re heading back to the ranch to uplink the tapes as backup. They want us, and particularly Doctor Sutton, to look at it and see if she can explain it. You, too, Gus, since it might be a trick of the light or something with the camera.”

  “Yeah, okay. Hold on. That’s… lemmesee… three. Rewind. All right. Wait. There. Okay, it may have to run a little, but I think it’s in the neighborhood. I’ll switch it to the overhead monitor.”

  They all looked, and for a moment there was a jiggly freeze-frame of the crater and smoke cloud. Then they saw the picture flip, angle dizzyingly from one side to the other as the plane got into position, then zoom straight in. The picture was bouncy but clear enough. They saw the smoke flash past and, for a very brief moment, were looking straight down through billowing white smoke and rain.

  “There! Did you all see it?” Terry asked them. “It looks like something dark, something black, straight down as we went over, with bright stuff all around it.”

  “Sorry, it was so fast,” Lori responded apologetically.

  The picture stopped, and Gus rewound the tape.

  “Hold it!”Terry shouted. “No, up a little more. Frame advance. There! Hold it!”

  The picture was still jumpy and distorted, but they could now all see just what the control room back in the States had noticed. Through the smoke, the red and yellow glow of the crater was visible, if not completely clear. Right in the center of the glowing mass was a black shape, distorted and indistinct but still some sort of regular form.

  “I couldn’t guess,” Lori told them. “I’d need a much clearer photo than that to really say much of anything about it. It could be a different mineral, much harder than the surrounding rock, that has a higher melting point and maybe is already cooled down, or a fissure in whatever’s left of the meteor, or a trick of the light.”

  “I don’t know meteors, but pictures I know,” Gus said firmly. “That’s no trick of the light. Something’s down there.”

  Maklovitch looked back at Campos. “Any way in there? To land, I mean.”

  “This plane? No, senor. Nothing, even if it would have survived that blast. And there are no roads in this region of any sort. On foot—days under the best of conditions.”

  “You have a helicopter at the ranch,” the pilot called back. “I saw it on the field back there. What about that?”

  Campos shook his head. “No, no, no. That is our private helicopter. Besides, if you could not even safely fly this plane through that smoke and the storms, flying a helicopter in there close would be suicide!”

  “I flew choppers in hairier conditions than that in the Marine Corps,” the pilot replied. “Thunderstorms, sandstorms, and under fire. It wouldn’t be a big deal, I don’t think, particularly if we’re allowing another hour or two for things to calm down.”

  “No, no, no!” Juan Campos shouted. “It is out of the question!”

  “It may be,” Terry said, “but even as we speak, my boss is on the phone to your father, and it looks like we might just have a deal.” She paused. “Of course, you don’t have to come if you don’t want to.”

  Even Lori thought the idea bordered on madness. “It’s pretty dangerous,” she noted, “and you’ll get better pictures, as well as better conditions, after daylight.”

  “That’s true,” Terry agreed, “but we don’t know how long after daylight the first choppers will be arriving from elsewhere, full of geologists and astronomers and military people and bureaucrats—”

  “Not to mention NBC, ABC, CBS, CBC, the BBC, and maybe Fox, God help us,” Maklovitch put in. “In this business being first is everything. That’s why folks watch us and advertisers pay top dollar—we can do things like this the others can’t. Nobody remembers the second newsman into Kuwait City.”

  “Forrest Sawyer, ABC,” Terry responded instantly. “We were third!�
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  “Okay, nobody outside the business remembers. But we remember most that we were third. It’s the name of the game. Not that we’re trying to commit suicide. If Bob there wasn’t sure he could get us in and out in one piece, I don’t think we’d risk it ourselves. If you’re really against it, you can stay behind, but if we can put this together, you’d be invaluable on the scene.”

  Lori thought a moment about remaining behind with all those ruthless men on the drug lord’s ranch and wondered which was more dangerous. “I’ll go,” she told him, wondering if she was in fact being stupid.

  “Good girl! Oops! Sorry, Doc. No offense,” the newsman added.

  “That’s all right.” Mother always said I should be a good girl. I just want to know if I’m being a dumb broad by doing this.

  “You seem certain my father will say yes,” Juan Campos noted.

  “We plan for a yes. If it’s no, we haven’t lost anything,” the newsman told him.

  “Even if he agrees, the helicopter carries only six and not much cargo,” the gunman pointed out. “With you, your pilot, your cameraman, the two senoritas, and a sound man, it will be full.”

  “He’s got a point there,” the pilot, Bob, agreed. “We’re not gonna be able to truck in a suitcase unit or much of anything except a hand-held.”

  The newsman thought a moment. “All right, then, we’ll try two trips. Terry, you can handle Gus’s sound, right?”

  “In a pinch, sure.”

  “All right. A suitcase, Terry, Gus, me, and the doc.”

  “What’s a ‘suitcase unit’?” Lori asked, puzzled.

  “A portable uplink,” Gus replied. “It’s actually a kit in the form of three large suitcases. You can put it together with battery power and have it sending pictures and sound to a comsat in under an hour. The foreign correspondent’s constant companion since it was invented.”

  They had the agreement by the time they landed, but, looking over the helicopter, they discovered that it wasn’t as large as they’d hoped. When the suitcase unit was added, it left room for five, but only by a whisker.