Pat laughed. "Oh, we ought to be able to find a geological formation—say a gas field—that we can drill a tap hole into and pump the chlorine into under pressure. The gas—methane—would provide the required hydrogen. Should be some trap-domes in all these new mountains."
"Say." The voice was excited, from somewhere on her right, Zad decided. "Instead of using an open salt bed, why don't we look for a salt dome formation? Then we could put the chlorine back in where we extract the salt out, after we get the sodium out of it. We can put the Siva nearby, use it for the extraction and refining as well as for putting the sodium topsides. And," the voice added, "we'd better refine about twenty percent extra chlorine to take care of possible seepage losses or combination losses during storage. We want to be sure we can stop this thing."
The voices came thick and fast then. As far as Zad could tell, the chlorine sent up after the washup would combine with the sodium vapor, precipitate out, lower the planet's "armature current" and cool it about ten percent below the present temperature. The polar caps would begin to form and within a year or so the sea would be withdrawn; estimates ranged, but the consensus was that the waters would go about five percent below their present level, and probably stay there. The crew seemed to agree that the withdrawal process might take up to ten years to complete; maybe more. And that the extra land exposed—about five per cent—might well be a permanent exposure.
The group broke up, finally: excited, jubilant, happy. Technical details were being worked out as fast as they were being proposed. Nobody asked whether the crew of the Vaheva would be willing to remain to do the job. They'd have gotten a blank stare of incomprehension had they asked. Yet it would take at least two years—one to set it up, one to supervise the return to normal—and they'd be two years of hard work. That was inherent in the problem.
Zad smiled softly. What a crew, she thought. And what on Ura … she corrected herself: what on the five continents … did they need with a mentor? I'm just excess baggage, she told herself severely.
Then she went to find Lord David. It took a bit, but she finally located him in the crew cafeteria, alone at a corner table, watching the bustle of activity in a withdrawn manner.
She seated herself opposite him quietly, returned his smile, then asked, "What about your people, David? We could bring at least two thousand of them aboard the Vaheva…"
He smiled. "Better than that," he said. "This is a new race, Zad. They should be seeded in more than one spot. I think Enoch and his family and I will hitch a ride aboard the Vaheva, to a new planet, if Captain Gavarel will find us one. Enoch," he added, "has been my companion for some years; and his family is in fairly good condition. About a thousand of them, I think."
"And we'll help build boats for the others," said Zad happily.
"No." He said it positively, and Zad looked at him in surprise. "That's a decision I had to make a long time ago. It is against the nature of the problem. They must survive of themselves. They must do their own learning."
She continued to look at him, wonderingly, and he frowned a bit before going on. "When I put them in the guarded area," he said, "I selected a protected place, but they had to guard themselves. I showed them how to build a fire, but they had to build the fires. I showed them how to fire clay, but they fashioned their own utensils. I showed them how to chip stone, but they made their own implements.
"No," he said. "I will tell them of the coming floods. I will tell them what to build and how to build. I will caution them to save the animals, too—the domestic animals and what they can of the wild ones. And plants and life forms of all sorts. But they must do that job of themselves; and if they will not do it, then we shall see whether they can take to the mountain tops and survive when the time comes.
"I will," he said, "… if they build boats, I will put in remote-controlled motors—preferably without their knowing-it. I will give them a hand. That is a father's prerogative. But I will not—nor will I let any of you—do it for them. Zad, you see that, don't you? You see that they must do that of themselves?"
She nodded slowly. What a people they will be, she thought. With this man for mentor, and a clean slate from which to start—what a people must develop!
IX
"Enoch?" asked the engineer.
"Enoch. Remember 'And Enoch walked with the Lord after he begat Methuselah three hundred years, and begat sons and daughters. And all the days of Enoch were three hundred sixty and five years. And Enoch walked with the Lord, and he was not; for the Lord took him. …' "
The engineer shivered. "You make it sound so real," he said unhappily. "But of course if you fit your story to the data available …"
"I haven't tried to fit a story," said the archaeologist softly. "I started in 1936 trying to see what the stories said, when I realized that nobody had made them up; that they were, in fact, like a small child trying to explain how Momma got him a baby sister. I've tried to look at the archaeological evidence, and the geologic evidence, and the historic evidence, and listen to the myths and the legends … and hear what they had to say. Find the pattern. You gave me the missing factor when you published the theory of the solar tap.
"It's a complex pattern," he said. "But when you see the pattern, the pieces fall into place. All the pieces, if you've seen the right pattern."
"All right, then. I'll pick at your pattern again." The engineer spoke grimly. "These 'Vahnire' returning. So many of them? All immortals? Doesn't make sense. Some of them would still be here."
"Not all immortals. By no means, all immortals. Lord David, some of the crew of the Vaheva, and the seven who stayed after the flood when the Vaheva left. Perhaps—though I'm not convinced—the fifty who remained from the Vahs that arrived after the flood and who stayed behind while their ships went back to put transposer units on their home planets. Immortality, regeneration—they both take ability and consistent work and concentration. How many people do you know that can concentrate? Really concentrate? No. Immortality is the hallmark of the most able because it cannot be achieved by the unable."
"All right. But so many mortals here that were far enough outside the normal pattern to be worshipped as gods? And so little evidence?"
"But there is evidence!" The archaeologist's voice was exasperated. "Earth was a colonial planet to the far ones. In a colonial area you expect to find fine, technologically-serviced homes adjacent to native hovels. And you find them. Palaces. Temples. Count the number of really big, magnificent, necessarily technologically-serviced palaces and temples that pre-date—well take 2200 BC. There are literally thousands of them. Mostly set up with a religious order, the priests as house-servants; the people as the laborers. In some of them, the natives were just, flat-out slaves; but in a good part, the natives were serving and paying tribute to the 'gods' of the far suns."
"It's your damned transposers." The engineer, too, was exasperated. "I might even be able to swallow your starships coming back. But this transposer bit. Nah. What evidence—archaeological, historical, mythological, geological or any other damned logical—could you possibly find for them?"
The archaeologist looked out at the stars—cold, bright, hard, in the cold dark sky. "Velikovsky outlined the evidence of the three catastrophes that show the transposer. He didn't know of the potential of the solar tap. The Van Allen belts hadn't even been discovered when he published, so he couldn't recognize and tie in the evidence of the Cheops pyramid, or the palaces; or the obvious fact of electricity and a technological civilization existing as a superstructure over a primitive civilization. But he found the evidence of the catastrophes and their details and their effects. He published that evidence in three carefully documented volumes. He finally had to give credit to a comet as the cause; and he passed over all the factors that didn't pertain to a comet.
"The evidence that the natives, the new-men, were used in the struggles between the 'outsiders'—the way we're presently using the Vietnamese to stop the spread of communism—is extensive. Take just t
he tribe of Moses and its 'ark' that must be carried everywhere with them and kept at all times with the leaders. That tribe was directed by radio; and the technological assistance it was given in conquering the cities and wiping out the people therein that it was directed to conquer and wipe out—the assistance is obvious.
"When you know about the solar tap, you know how the planetary engineering job to cause the flood was done. When you know about the flood, you know what happened at Sodom and Gomorrah, and begin to see why. When you know about Sodom and Gomorrah, you know someone was here that was getting ready to mine Mars. When you know that, you know that mining Mars was possible and that someone was doing it, and was mining the fifth planet, and that the fifth planet blew in 1450. When you know about that, you begin to deduce the transposer. When you deduce the transposer, you realize that the basic theory simply takes the Einstein equations one step further. Then you estimate the amount of power needed to take the equations one step further. And your solar tap gives you sufficient power. And when you do that, you realize that the transposer is not only possible, but probable.
"When you know that, and you look at the evidence of the 'flying saucers,' you know that you have in your skies today both landing craft from the big Vahs, and small 'viewer' and 'fishing' transposers. And you figure that the interstellar transposers will be here again as soon as it can be arranged.
"And when you recognize those things, all the other factors begin to fall into place—the Aryans and the Minoans and the Aezier, the Vahstans and the Vah-saba'alem and the Pharem—the shiraphim and the cha-rubim. You know who they were and what they were and you can just about pinpoint where they came from. You know why the palaces and temples were built the way they were, and what purposes the oddly placed doors and windows served.
"The palaces and the pagans; the Crêtan and the Roman and the Pagan civilizations. The Vedic hymns and the stories of creation. The catastrophes and the brutalities; the learning and the growing and … the works.
"And we're the new race, the patsies for all that?"
"Oh, we're not the only new race. As far as I know, we're the only ones that started from an evolutionary throw-back. Call us the new-man race, the clean-slate, re-evolution people, and you can distinguish the differences.
"But all the transposer people, and a good many of the Vahnire were 'new races' in effect—they were grown from colonists planted on far worlds; and though they started with a technology—as, in essence, so did we, or Lord David wouldn't have been able to create us—some of the planets must have been real brutal, and they went a long way back from what had been known on Atalama as 'civilization.' And remember, they didn't develop the transposer on those planets. They mostly had the solar tap to start with but the transposer was developed right here, by the 'Old Ones' who took a few centuries of their new long lives to grow up slowly and do a job. The transposer people—the charubim—got their advanced electronic gadgets right here. And with those gadgets, they hit the culture growing here with all the brash, barbaric, brilliant, cocky ignorance of a child-reaching-the-dressup-stage. Much as the Huns hit Rome, and with much the same results, except that the advanced electronic gadgets they found here made them much more lethal.
"All of them—the fifty late-come Titans, the Aryans, the Miners, the Vahsatans, the Vahsaba'al, the Wyzier … even the Olympians. New people, centuries—more than a thousand years removed from the old civilization of Atalama. They didn't evolve their own transposer technologies; they inherited them from the Old Ones who stayed after the flood and developed the transposer.
"Primitive culture, are we? The transposers that whichever of those colonists are back here now are using—those transposers were developed right here on Earth. Not by us; not by the new-men; but by the ones I've been calling Pat Tos and Memph Luce and Zad Shara and Ted Promo and the other three who stayed with them and took time to grow up.
"The 'New Ones' inherited it. But we … we've developed, ourselves, the know-how you used to discover the solar tap. And we've home-grown the know-how that will give us regeneration in the next few decades. And we've home-grown the know-how that can give us the transposer before it's imposed on us—if we work fast enough.
"So—are we the primitives?"
"Well," said the engineer, "are we primitive?"
"The guys in the 'saucers' think so." The archaeologist looked at the engineer almost pleadingly. "They're about to sell us the Brooklyn Bridge again, I think. They've come back to take stock of their two-legged 'animal' pets, their race of new-man children. To see about their 'marks,' a carney would call it.
"But we have got the home-grown, basic knowledge to develop on our own the technology that was the 'knowledge of the Lord.' We don't have to have it handed to us on a platter, not that they'd give it to subjects or children! Or suckers. We've got the know-how now to develop it on our own. Every one of those 'knowledges of the lords.'
"The only question," he said softly, "is: will we do it in time?"
The planet that showed in the viewscreen was a great golden ball, glowing with the fiery brilliance of sodium atoms in extreme electronic turmoil.
It was a ghastly color, thought Zad, sitting quietly in the shadows at the side of the control room; feeling helpless because the work going on around her was something in which she could not join, sitting quietly with Memph, beside David, who, in turn, was helpless beside Pat Tos as he used radio control to maneuver the tiny craft on the lashing seas below that held Noah and his family and a moderate variety of animals and birds and plants and above all—seed.
The other tribes hadn't listened; had refused to take seriously the warnings of the Lord. Or, perhaps one or two of the tribes in the Andes had actually heeded the warning? Or the tribes in the tremendous lands far to the east of the guarded area?—the tribes that called themselves Dravidians, and that they had finally decided were the descendants of the people that Bon Hindra had taken with him. These seemed to listen.
Zad and Memph and David had spent the year going from tribe to tribe, cautioning them, imploring them, warning them. The language barrier had been terrific, for every tribe outside of the guarded area of the Aeton, the First One, had shown a new variation of the original old Atalaman; and each place they'd gone they'd had to spend weeks getting into communication; overriding the fears that the tribes almost invariably showed; before they could even start trying to convince them that the warning was real; that the floods would come; that mountain caves, even, might not be sufficient—though that would be better than nothing, if they could not or would not build boats.
The trips had convinced Zad as nothing else could have that the catastrophic flood was a necessity if the new-man race was to survive at all. The twisted bodies, the freaks, the…
She turned her mind again to the golden ball in the viewscreen.
It was a special dispensation that had gotten Memph and her into the control room, rather than the big lounge where those not on duty watched the planetary engineering feat on a repeater screen. David had asked for them, and David's was an unquestioned right to be in the control room, beside Pat Tos, who was at the controls of the tiny Ark, riding out the violent storms below.
Telescopic observation had long since become impossible through the glowing, unnatural shroud that surrounded the planet. Even electronic signals were erratic, and Pat was guiding the Ark more by the feel he had acquired over the past forty days than by actual electronic signals. Had it really been forty days now, that the floods had risen and the rains had poured? Zad thought. Time had seemed to stand still as the great job went on; every member of the Vaheva was concentrated, with an intensity that seemed impossible, on the lives that hung in the balance on their ability to control the forces they had unleashed.
Beside her, Memph stirred, and spoke quietly to David. "You're going off with Enoch and his family to a new planet, aren't you, David?"
The other nodded, but didn't speak.
"Would you mind if I stayed here with your people
? I wouldn't be a colony. Just a guardian."
David looked at him in surprise. "It's lonely," he said.
"The Vaheva won't be back, you know, for twenty-two hundred years at the earliest."
"I know," said Memph. "But … there's work to be done that I can't do aboard the Vaheva." Then, with a rush of words, as though to get it out before he lost his courage, he said, "David, you've grown up. You've grown up in a way that … I don't think it's possible to grow up that way inside the … patterns of civilization. I think you need peace and quiet and elbow room, and time to get to know yourself and to know what life is like, to grow up that way. I want to grow up," he ended lamely.
David looked at him affectionately. "You don't think it's the added years that do it? You'll have regeneration aboard the Vaheva, you know."
Memph shook his head stubbornly. "I thought that at first; but I don't think so. It's not just the added years. It's the … perhaps the elbow room? I want to find out."
David nodded. "I think you're right," he said. "I should be very happy if you were here with them," and he gestured towards the dials that connected Pat to the big atomic motors they'd installed aboard the Ark.
Pat looked over at Memph. "You'll need an engineer," he said. "I'm staying too. I've been thinking about it all the past year."
Zad smiled happily. They might have been reading her mind. She'd known for some time now what she wanted.
"You'll need a mentor," she said.
On the far side of the room, Ted Promo looked up from the meters and scopes and dials that for him spelled out the minutiae of the events below.
"Captain," he said formally, "I think we'd better release some of the retarder right away. It's getting too rough down there. We should slow it down."
Jeris Gavarel, standing at Promo's side, turned to Pat Tos. "How's the Ark?" he asked.
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