“Dear Jesus,” she whispered.
“Remember when you told me the only way we’d get together again was when hell freezes over?” he told her. “Well, here we are.”
The mist lifted and the light from below flooded the entire wall. In an instant Serena could see hundreds of human beings, their faces frozen in fear. All of them seemed to shout out at once. Serena covered her ears, only to realize that she was the one screaming.
12
Descent Hour Three
Habitat Module
An hour later ,inside the warm P4 habitat module, Conrad was concerned as he looked at Serena on the fold-out surgical table. Her eyes blinked rapidly beneath the high-intensity lights, an oxygen mask over her mouth and several EKG electrodes attached to her chest. Her hair was brushed back from her face and the belt around her cargo pants loosened.
Conrad pointed out the fogged-up porthole at the American flag Yeats had planted atop the pyramid summit.
“Focus on the flag and breathe deeply,” he told her as he administered the oxygen from a heavy yellow canister.
Her parka and outerwear were gone, and he tried not to gaze at her full breasts rising and falling beneath her wool undershirt. She had been hyperventilating since they reached the bottom of the ice gorge, spooked, it seemed, by the frozen graveyard that entombed them. Conrad glanced at the EKG monitor. Only now was her heart rate returning to the upper register of the normal range.
“Better?” he asked her after a minute.
She looked at him like he was a lunatic for asking.
Conrad looked around the cramped habitat perched atop P4’s flat summit at the bottom of the gorge. It was a single module, fifty-five feet long and fourteen feet in diameter. Yeats was huddled with the three technicians by the monitors. One was Lopez, a female officer Conrad recognized from Ice Base Orion. The other two were fair-haired steroid freaks who answered to the names of Kreigel and Marcus. They were clearly Yeats’s muscle down here.
Conrad turned to Yeats. “Was there any particular reason why you forgot to mention the frozen bodies?”
“Yeah,” said Yeats. “I wanted to see your reaction.”
Conrad gestured at Serena and glared at Yeats. “Satisfied?”
“Quit whining.” Yeats stood up, a hypodermic in hand. He flicked the syringe with his finger, and a clear liquid squirted into the air. Serena squirmed.
Conrad watched in alarm as Yeats grabbed hold of Serena’s arm. “What are you doing to her?” he demanded.
“Giving her a shot of the stimulant eleutherococcus,” said Yeats, injecting it into Serena’s arm before Conrad could stop him. “It’s a plant extract of the ginseng family. Deep-sea divers, mountain rescuers, and cosmonauts take it to resist stress while working under inhospitable conditions. About the only damn usable thing the Russians ever contributed to our space program.”
The drug seemed to be working. Conrad looked at Serena, who was breathing more evenly now, although there was anger in her eyes. Clearly this wasn’t a woman who was used to being taken care of.
“She’ll be fine,” said Yeats. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve got to check my drill team’s search for that mythical shaft of yours.”
“As mythical as P4,” Conrad called out as Yeats opened the hatch and stepped outside. Subzero polar air whooshed inside.
“You seem to be holding up just fine, Conrad,” Serena said, catching him off guard. She had removed her oxygen mask. “I take it this isn’t the first time you’ve seen frozen bodies at least twelve thousand years old?”
He looked down at her, barely able to contain his excitement. It wasn’t every day he found evidence for his theories, or proof that he wasn’t crazy. “Those bodies explain how the pyramid got here.”
“Got here?” She managed to sit up, the color returning to her high cheekbones. “What are you talking about? Did it move?”
Conrad dug into his pack and produced a frozen orange. “I chipped this out of the wall,” he said. “This proves Antarctica was once a temperate climate.”
Serena looked at the orange. “Until it suddenly froze over one day, I suppose?”
Conrad nodded. “Hapgood’s theory of earth-crust displacement.”
“Charles Hapgood?” Serena asked.
“That’s right. Dead for years. So you’ve heard of him?”
“The university professor, yes, but not this displacement theory.”
Conrad always relished an opportunity to tell Mother Earth something she didn’t know. Holding up the orange, he said, “Pretend this is Planet Earth.”
“OK.” She seemed willing to humor him.
He snapped open a pocket knife and carved an outline of the seven continents on the thawing peel. “Hapgood’s theory says the ice age was not a meteorological phenomenon. Rather, it was the result of a geological catastrophe about twelve thousand years ago.” Conrad rotated the orange upward so that the United States was in the Arctic Circle and Antarctica was closer to the equator. “This was the world back then.”
Serena lifted an eyebrow. “And what happened?”
“The entire outer shell of Earth’s surface shifted, like the skin of this orange.” Conrad rotated the orange downward until it resembled Earth as they knew it. “Antarctica is engulfed by the polar zone while North America is released from the Arctic Circle and becomes temperate. Ice melts in North America while it forms in Antarctica.”
Serena frowned. “What caused this cataclysmic shift?”
“Nobody really knows,” said Conrad. “But Hapgood thought it was an imbalance of ice in the polar caps. As ice built up, they became so heavy they shifted, dragging the outer crust of the continents in one piece to new positions.”
Serena eyed him. “And you’d be willing to stake what’s left of your reputation on this earth-crust displacement theory?”
Conrad shrugged. “Albert Einstein liked the idea. He believed significant shifts in Earth’s crust have probably taken place repeatedly and within a short time. That could explain weird things, like mammoths frozen in the Arctic Circle with tropical vegetation in their stomachs. Or people and pyramids buried a mile beneath the ice in Antarctica.”
Serena put a soft hand on Conrad’s shoulder. “If that helps you make sense of the world, then good for you.”
Conrad stiffened. He thought she’d be as excited as he was by the evidence. That they were two of a kind. Instead she was attacking the conclusion he had drawn. More than that, she was attacking him personally. He resented this cavalier dismissal-by a woman of religious faith, no less-of a plausible scientific hypothesis from one of the greatest minds in human history. “Does the Vatican have a better theory?”
Serena nodded. “The Flood.”
“Same difference,” Conrad said. “Both fall under the God-Is-a-Genocidal-Maniac Theory.” But as soon as the words were out, he was sorry he had said them to her.
“Hey, mister, you watch your mouth,” said a female voice from behind.
Conrad turned to see Lopez looking cross at him. Another Catholic, he realized. Lopez looked at Serena and asked, “You want me to kick his ass for you?”
Serena smiled. “Thanks, but he gets it kicked enough already.”
“Well, the offer stands,” Lopez said before returning to her work. The Aryan twins, Kreigel and Marcus, looked disappointed. Conrad figured they must be Lutheran, agnostics, or simply of good German stock who in another time and place might have distinguished themselves as poster boys for Hitler’s SS.
Serena reached for her parka and slipped her arms through the sleeves. “What are you suggesting, Conrad?” She was trying to zip her parka, but the EKG wires were in the way. “That God is to blame for humanity’s every famine, war or lustful leer?”
He realized she was looking straight at him now, her warm, brown eyes both accusing him and forgiving him at the same time. It irritated the hell out of him. So maybe he had been watching her breasts a little longer than he should have, he thought. He was onl
y human. So was she, if she’d only admit it.
“I saw the way you looked at the little girl in the ice,” Conrad said softly. “It was like you were looking at yourself. Hardly the wicked sort the Genesis flood was intended to punish.”
“The rain falls on the just and the unjust,” she said absently. “Or in this case the ice.”
Conrad could tell her thoughts were someplace else. She couldn’t see her EKG numbers jumping again.
Conrad pointed to the monitors. “Look, maybe we should take you back up and bring down an able-bodied replacement.” He reached over to help her with the EKG wires. “I don’t want you to get hurt.”
She angrily knocked him away with her shoulder and ripped off the EKG leads. “Speak for yourself, Doctor Yeats.”
Conrad rubbed his head and stared at her in disbelief. “Could you send signals that are possibly more mixed?”
She zipped up her parka and jumped to her feet. “Who’s mixed up here, Doctor Yeats?”
Conrad stood still, aware of Lopez staring at him with interest. So were Kreigel and Marcus. The soldiers looked like they were just itching for the good nun to give the evil archaeologist a hard knee to the groin.
Then the hatch door opened and another blast of cold shot into the module with Yeats.
“You’re right, Yeats,” Conrad said coolly. “She’s fine.”
“Good. Now gear up. We’re going into P4,” Yeats said. “The drill team just found your shaft.”
13
Descent Hour Four
Upper Chamber
The shaft was about seven feet wide and seven feet high, Serena guessed, and sloped into total darkness. A coin toss had won her the bragging rights of being the first inside, this after the drill team had sent a twenty-two-pound, six-wheeled modified Mars Sojourner down the shaft with a blowtorch and camera. The remote robot confirmed what Conrad had suspected: the shaft led directly to a chamber in the heart of P4.
As Serena stood on the landing the Americans had erected along the north face of P4 and looked into the mouth of the shaft, she could feel her heart racing. She was still disturbed by the little girl frozen in the ice, she realized, not to mention the sudden, cataclysmic end to an entire society. If only the child hadn’t looked so terrified.
She had always taken comfort in the theory that Genesis was a myth and the flood a theological metaphor. Yes, fossil evidence suggested a natural cataclysm. And no, she harbored little doubt that there was some sort of global deluge. But as divine retribution for humanity’s wickedness? That was simply Moses’s opinion. Unfortunately, she found the alternative worldview, that impersonal cycles of nature wiped out entire species in random fashion, even more distressing, if only because it sapped any meaning from her righteous indignation.
Perhaps it had something to do with her own childhood, she could hear the Holy Father telling her. She had seen herself as a child, an innocent victim, encased in ice, frozen in time like parts of her own personality. Or maybe it was simply the failure of her faith to provide any genuine comfort regarding the inexplicable evil and suffering in this world. It was as if Satan had his own guardian angel-God. But then that would make God the Devil, a thought too terrible for Serena to dwell on.
Her trance was broken by Conrad’s voice behind her.
“If you’d like, Serena, I could always take the lead.”
She glanced over her shoulder at Conrad and frowned. He was cocky now that he had found a back door into the pyramid. The implication in his eyes was that once again he was right, as always. Not just about P4 but about everything else, including her. As if in time he could figure her out like any other archaeological riddle.
Infuriated, she said, “So you can translate ancient alien inscriptions too?”
“The written word is but one form of communication, Sister Serghetti, as you well know,” Conrad replied.
She hated this sort of academic posturing, probably because she was so often guilty of it herself. Or maybe because, like their exchange in the habitat module, it denied the intimacy she felt they had established during the descent down the ice chasm.
“Besides,” Conrad added, “I don’t think we’ll find any inscriptions inside.”
“How would you know that?”
“Just a hunch.” Conrad ran his hand across the shiny white surface of the pyramid. “Now notice the interlocking casing stones that sheath the whole structure.”
If there were any fine grooves, she couldn’t see them because of the brilliant reflection. “So how come our pyramids don’t shine white like this?”
“The sheathings were stripped for mosques during the Middle Ages,” Conrad explained. “The pyramids became cheap quarries. Feel it.”
Serena ran her glove across the surface. There was a glassy feel to the stone. “A different ore?”
Conrad smiled. “You noticed. No wonder radio-echo surveys never detected the pyramid. You were right, Yeats. This stuff is slicker than a stealth bomber.”
“And harder than diamonds,” Yeats added impatiently from somewhere behind Conrad. “Broke all our drills trying to bore holes before we found the shaft. We don’t have a name for it yet. Now if we could move ahead and-”
“Oreichalkos,”Conrad answered.
Conrad’s voice seemed to bounce up and down the shaft walls. Serena asked, “What did you say?”
“Oreichalkosis the name of the enigmatic ore or ‘shining metal’ Plato said the people of Atlantis used,” Conrad said. “It was a pure alloy they mined, an almost supernatural ‘mountain-copper.’ It sparkled like fire and was used to cover walls-and for inscriptions. I’m betting the outer six feet of the pyramid is made of this stuff.”
He seemed way too sure of himself. She said, “You think you have all the answers, don’t you?”
“We won’t know until we get inside, will we?”
“And what if the builders laid a trap?” she said.
“The Atlanteans are the ones who got trapped, remember?” Conrad said. “Besides, the builders never intended entrants to penetrate from the sky, through this shaft. The only booby traps, if any, are scattered around P4’s base and any tunnels leading up to key chambers.”
She looked over Conrad’s shoulder at Yeats, whose brow was furrowed with either concern or, more likely, impatience. Lopez, Kreigel, and Marcus, standing next to him, were as stone-faced as ever.
“Let’s find out,” she said and stepped into the shaft.
Conrad was right about the oreichalkos, she soon discovered. About seven or eight feet into the shaft, the surface of the walls changed to a rougher, darker kind of stone or metal. It scraped lightly on her Gore-Tex parka, but she found that she could creep down the shaft with both feet by leaning back and holding her line taut. The light from her head torch could only pierce about fifty feet of the darkness ahead.
“How are we doing down there?” called Yeats. His voice sounded flat and tinny in the shaft.
“Fine,” she replied.
But she didn’t feel fine. The air was heavy and suffocating. The wet, dense walls seemed to close in on her the farther they descended down the thirty-eight-degree grade. As she crept along the shaft, a tingling sensation started in the small of her back and slowly rose up her spine.
Twenty minutes later they emerged from the shaft into a massive, somber reddish room that seemed to radiate tremendous heat and power. It was completely empty.
“There’s nothing here, Conrad,” she said, her voice echoing. “No inscriptions. Nothing.”
“Don’t be so certain.”
She turned and watched Conrad rappel off the wall from which the shaft emptied, followed by Yeats and his three officers.
Conrad swept the room with his floodlight, revealing walls made of massive granite like blocks. The floor and ceiling were likewise spanned by gigantic blocks. The chamber was longer than a football field and Serena guessed more than two hundred feet high. Yet it felt like the walls were pressing down on her.
“T
alk about megalithic architecture,” Conrad said as he ran his light beam across the ceiling. “The engineering logistics alone for this are amazing.”
Conrad was right about the architecture, she thought. It revealed much about its builders. That’s what made linguistics so intriguing to her. Language often tried to hide or manipulate meaning. In so doing it revealed the true nature of the civilization behind the artifacts.
But there were no inscriptions here. There was nothing. Even in the sparest of digs she could usually find an object that connected her in some way to the people of those times. A shard of pottery, a figurine. They were more than artifacts. They belonged to thinking, feeling human beings. It was like looking through her father the priest’s personal items after he died and finding the most trivial yet telling clues about her past.
She felt no connection here. Nothing. Just absolute emptiness, and it was chilling. Not even a sarcophagus-a burial coffin, which if her memory of Egyptian pyramids served her, should have been at the western end of this chamber, but wasn’t. At least a tomb was built for someone. But this place was cold, utilitarian, aloof.
“I don’t see any other shafts,” she said. “You said we’d find another one. And there are no doors. We’re stuck.”
“There it is.” Conrad’s beam caught the shaft in the southern wall. It looked just like the one they had emerged from.
Serena said, “All we’re going to find at the end of it is the ice pack.”
Conrad took a closer look and nodded. “In the Great Pyramid in Giza, the southern shaft led the deceased pharaoh to his reed boats to sail his earthly kingdom. The northern shaft was for him to join the stars in the celestial kingdom.”
“That’s nice,” she said. “But I don’t see the burial coffin of a deceased pharaoh in here.”
Serena watched as Conrad walked to the center of the room. His footsteps seemed to reverberate more loudly the closer to the center he went.
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