Covert Alliance

by Blair Wylie

  “The lake is remarkable! It is oval in shape, and very deep, with vertically-sheer, solid-rock sides. It did not take much in the way of sophisticated investigative work to confirm that this lake is in fact a quarry that has filled up naturally with ground water. Without any doubt, we know that this quarry was the source of the stone that was used to build the pyramid.

  “Furthermore, we initially thought our camp site was located in a recent forest fire area. But we found to our horror that it was a relatively recent blast site!

  “Dead trees that were lying under the thick foliage and accumulated compost were arranged in a precise radial pattern, as one would expect to find around the centre of a ground-based explosion! Furthermore, we detected unusually high background gamma radiation at our camp site, with the highest intensity noted in a shallow central crater. We gathered soil samples in that crater, and subsequent isotopic analyses confirmed a relatively low-yield thermonuclear device must have been detonated there!

  “Furthermore, half-life radioactive isotope analysis was used to estimate the probable time of the detonation. We believe the explosion happened when the Masters last visited us, just after we first arrived on New Earth!

  “So, incredibly, we believed we had found yet another potential link with the Masters! And we used these links, and the many mysteries surrounding the pyramid itself, to lobby for a second, more extensive and yes, for all you critics out there, a more expensive and logistically complicated investigation of the site.

  “What we really wanted to do next was to find out what exactly is inside this remarkable pyramid. And we wanted to do our follow-up investigative work in such a way as to not damage the pyramid.

  “Since it is obviously unique, it is, after all, of great historical significance and value. And as our military friends pointed out to us, most emphatically, there may be cleverly-placed defensive devices installed within the structure, especially if there could indeed be some sort of link with the mysterious, technologically-advanced and aggressive Masters who are now part of our folklore.

  “So, we agreed that we did not want to unwittingly set off, for example, a hidden, embedded explosive device of some kind by physically tunnelling into the rock, or by doing any blasting.

  “Fortunately, after seven arduous years of lobbying, my close colleagues and I eventually obtained the funding we needed for the next phase of the Pyramid Project through an obscure budgetary line-item included in the federal government’s Resource Allocation Plan. The Pyramid Project was classified as ‘Top Secret’ because no one knew where it might lead us.

  “We invited the military to participate directly in our operations, but they declined without providing an explanation. Thankfully, the government magnanimously decided to let us proceed anyway.

  “As an aside, to this day, our military leaders have been openly opposed to the Pyramid Project. When pressed, they always cite its perceived high cost and quote ‘low probability for success’ unquote. They have been continually creating logistical and supply-chain barriers wherever they can.

  “But I’m not here tonight to cry over sour grapes! After all, as you will soon see, in the end we successfully managed to manoeuvre our way around the many bureaucratic barriers that were put up to block our quest for knowledge.

  “We started by re-designing, manufacturing and mobilizing highly-specialized equipment. We borrowed heavily from the vast experience of oil and gas explorers.

  “We are not allowed by law to drill for oil on New Earth, of course, but we do drill for natural gas. Liquefied natural gas is used in some transportation applications, and we use the heavier-hydrocarbon, liquid condensate that is sometimes associated with natural gas for making plastics.

  “But the technology used for drilling and evaluating oil and gas wells has not changed much since we left Earth, where it was highly developed. And of course, we have access to all pertinent archived technical records.

  “We expanded our campsite by the lake to provide space for our vast array of specialized equipment, and for the hundred or so technical people comprising the expanded investigation team. And we roped-off the crater, of course, to keep people safely away from the low-level residual radiation.

  “Our first challenging operation was to remove the capstone. We employed expert climbers, and a helicopter with a number of sling-loads, to install a work platform just below the capstone. We used suction cup devices to fix the platform to the hard, slippery surface of the pyramid. Then a heavy-lift helicopter was manoeuvred overhead, and the capstone was successfully plucked straight upwards and out of the way!

  “Thankfully, we found that the capstone had not been fixed in place with some kind of mortar or adhesive. Rather, we found out that it must have just been sitting there contentedly under its own weight, for eons.

  “Subsequent analysis has confirmed the capstone is entirely stone, and nothing else.

  “But surprisingly, just beneath the capstone we found a perfectly smooth, vertical conduit with an inside circular bore of about a hundred and five centimetres! It runs straight down into the pyramid. The stream of air we noted earlier coming out from beneath the capstone was still coming up that conduit.

  “The conduit is lined with a twelve centimetre thick ceramic casing, fixed in place with a cement or adhesive made from crushed volcanic ash and fired limestone. The conduit has many silver conductive wires embedded in its ceramic matrix. The technology used to make it is therefore very advanced! Electrical power, data and telemetry could all be fed through those wires. But please, just store that information away somewhere in your brains for now.

  “We then installed a mast with a weight-compensating sheave directly over the conduit opening. Then, as gas-well drillers would say, ‘we rigged-up for wireline logging’. Our modular winch and data management control shack were firmly anchored to the ground at the base of the pyramid. The idea was to treat the conduit as a wellbore, and run passive and active probes, or ‘sondes’, up and down the conduit.

  “Our goals were to investigate near wellbore rock and pore fluid properties, and to see if there was anything of interest inside the pyramid near the conduit. Our cased ‘well’ was filled with air, so direct resistive measurements were not possible. But we used cameras, gamma ray detection tools, electromagnetic induction tools, sonic tools, ‘compensated neutron’ tools, ‘densilog’ tools, nuclear magnetic resonance imaging tools, calliper tools and cement bond evaluation tools. You see, gas field ‘roughnecks’ have lots of interesting tools at their disposal, not just wrenches!

  “We successfully confirmed that the conduit is completely and securely bonded to nothing but the same, rather boring, dense basaltic rock right to the base of the pyramid, where the conduit terminates. The small bit of porosity in the rock is water-filled, and the entrained water is probably primordial, since the rock has essentially no permeability.

  “But we also confirmed that there is a sump at the base of the ‘well’, with an intersecting pipe about five metres above the bottom of the sump! The entrance to the intersecting, horizontal pipe is screened off, with what appears to be a ceramic baffle. We then confirmed with spinner surveys that the air flow originates from behind the screen or baffle.

  “So, frustratingly, our primary questions remained unanswered. We still wanted to know if there is anything of interest inside this pyramid that can tell us something about its builders, and why they built it!

  “We then switched our efforts to three-dimensional internal mapping, using natural cosmic ray muon tomography, combined with ground-penetrating radar, and an elaborate seismic geophysical data acquisition program.

  “Seismic surveys are another vestige of the ancient Earth mineral and petroleum exploration era. We used caissons to dig down to the bedrock on the four sides of the pyramid. Then we lowered heavy-weight ‘thumper devices’ down each caisson. Then we installed geophones and muon sensors with great precision all over the pyramid itself, and around the pyramid.

  “
Then we started thumping, one thump at a time, so we could listen and monitor carefully, and record all the reverberations at each geophone. We also staged a geophone and muon sensor in our ‘well’ at regular intervals so we could further improve our three-dimensional imaging. And of course, we took a ground-penetrating radar shot at each of our external geophone locations.

  “The dataset we gathered was obviously immense! We now had in our possession a very large, mixed-bag of muon scatter plots, seismic squiggles and fuzzy radar images! We used complicated algorithms, and the awesome number-crunching power of the liquid helium cooled, quantum, multi-parallel, supercomputer in this university, first to analyse these data, and then to integrate and refine the resulting images to achieve a reasonably high resolution.

  “And you people here tonight, both enthusiastic colleagues and diehard sceptics alike, will now join the very small, extremely privileged group of people fortunate enough to know the results of our comprehensive analyses!

  “Now, please study the screen behind me carefully as I continue speaking. To help you along, I’ll use this laser pointer to highlight a few things as I talk, and as the recording rotates the three-dimensional synthesized images around for us.

  “As you can see, the pipe that intersects the bottom of the ‘well’ inside the pyramid leads to a cavity. This cavity is a perfect cube, with sides about eight metres long. Observe that there are four things that look like boxes adjacent to opposite walls in the cavity, two on each side. These boxes are also perfect cubes, and about two metres long per side. But we cannot tell what they are! Two boxes on one side appear to be mostly filled with liquid, possibly water or an aqueous solution, and the other two boxes appear to contain solid objects, and possibly metallic objects.

  “The rest of the pyramid is entirely made of stone. Except for… wait for it… wait for it… a scale model of the New Earth Solar System! See!

  “Imagine that our star Sol is in the centre of the ‘well’, and the flat base of the pyramid is the orbital plane. Moving away from Sol, along a natural logarithmic scale, here we find the three rocky planets, Shinwari, Fisher, and our adopted home, New Earth!

  “And see, here is our moon Addy around New Earth! And here are the seven outer gas-giant planets, Abubakar, Tarantino, Smith, Rasmussen, Langlois, Mercado and Bahazhoni… complete with all of their many moons!

  “And everything, everywhere, is exactly to scale, except for the distances between planets, which we presume had to be displayed logarithmically so everything would fit nicely within the pyramid.

  “And everything, everywhere, is frozen at a moment in time, as one would expect with a static representation of a very dynamic system.

  “The position of planets in Sol’s system recurs about every three thousand, five hundred and seventy-one New Earth years. The last time the planetary system looked like the static representation in the pyramid was about five hundred and twelve years ago. And if you recall, our analysis of the organic material built up around the pyramid indicated that the massive stone structure must be at least two hundred and forty times older than five hundred and twelve years!

  “But, when you include the position of all the many moons in this analysis, the last time the entire Sol-system looked like the pyramid representation was about one hundred and twenty-nine thousand years ago!

  “People, colleagues, and scientific friends, I strongly suggest this analysis is in very close and excellent agreement with our independent estimate of the age of the pyramid derived from the depth of the organic material surrounding it!

  “But here is where it gets especially interesting, if any of you could still somehow be bored! The builders must have used a very dense metal, perhaps lead or uranium, to represent the planets and moons in their physical model because they show up so clearly in our suite of non-invasive imaging techniques.

  “And I therefore believe that the builders must have known, or at least hoped, that we would first try sonic and radar-probing methods to investigate the interior of their pyramid.

  “Yes, we could have just dug it all up, and found their impressive solar system map that way, in the manner I suppose that primitive treasure-seekers or pioneer amateur archaeologists on Earth sometimes employed.

  “But, our sonic and radar energy must have stimulated something within the pyramid to cause this particular moon around this particular gas-giant planet to vibrate like a transponder!

  “You see, around Tarantino, the fifth planet out from Sol, is this moon, Adatia, the third largest moon around Tarantino. When vibrating, Adatia is much ‘brighter’ in sonic waveforms than every other planet and moon in the builder’s Sol-system map! It is pulsing in our three-dimensional seismic image to highlight the fact that it would only vibrate for a few seconds after every one of our thumps or radar pulses! There must be an energy source in the pyramid to trigger, control and induce that vibration! Perhaps the solar cells at the top of the pyramid provide electrical current that runs down the silver wires that are embedded within the ceramic conduit, to some sort of battery?

  “And furthermore, perhaps a virus-producing machine of some kind is also positioned inside the cavity near the base of the pyramid? And perhaps that device is also powered to some degree by solar cells?

  “Surely, colleagues, I have sparked your interest by now?

  “But before we start taking your many questions, please also consider this aspect!

  “The builders must be trying to draw our attention, in a very sophisticated and rather ostentatious manner, to a very particular, very distant moon.

  “Why? Why would they do that?

  “And what do we know about this particular moon, that we have named Adatia?

  “Well, we have only looked at it from a very long way away using our New Earth telescopes, and with the help of a single, multi-planet, exploratory satellite that quickly flew by it, on its way somewhere else, about ten years back. But we suspect that Adatia resembles the moon Europa that orbits Jupiter, a gas-giant planet in Earth’s solar system.

  “Adatia is about the same size as Earth’s moon. It probably has an iron-nickel core. Its surface is smooth, frozen water, with a deep ocean below the ice layer. It has a very thin, mostly nitrogen and oxygen atmosphere. Tidal flexing is probably heating the underlying ocean to some degree, and moving the surface ice around like tectonic plates. And it might be a place where life could originate and evolve, that is, if the ocean is not too salty or toxic. Earth-based explorers unfortunately found that to be the case with Europa.

  “Now, there is a lot more I can tell you, but not all of it will be of general interest. So, with Doctor Mugabe’s help, I think we should now move to our question… our question and answer…” He stuttered to a stop.

  Doctor Rabinowitz and everyone else in the hall now realised with stunned surprise that General Kepler must have quietly risen from his seat and climbed up on to the stage. He was now striding at a brisk pace towards the podium. The moderator leapt to her feet, but the General ignored her. Armed guards were also streaming through the main auditorium door, and the lights suddenly came up everywhere in the amphitheatre.

  With an angry, grim expression on his face, General Kepler firmly pushed Doctor Rabinowitz away from behind the podium by pushing on his left shoulder with the back of his massive, hairy right hand.

  Then the general leaned towards the microphone and boomed loudly, “This presentation is now over, people! There will be no question and answer session, by military order! You all signed secrecy and confidentiality agreements to get in here. Remember that, or suffer very grave consequences!

  “All right, everyone, stand up now, and leave, immediately, and in an orderly manner, through the main door at the back of the hall. Upon departure, your face will be recorded on video, to confirm your presence here today.”

  Then the general placed his large, hairy left hand over the microphone and said quietly, “Except for you, Doctor Rabinowitz, and your co-conspirator Doctor Mugabe. You two
will come with me now, and the minister of science, and an escort of armed guards. You are not under arrest, yet. But, we now have many questions of our own for you, as you bloody well should know!”

  2

  After an unexpected and frustrating hour long wait, General Kepler, the Minister of Defence and Security, and Doctor O’Shea, the Minister of Science and Technology, were finally told they could enter Prime Minister Wong’s office.

  As the ministerial pair were entering the foyer of the large, open-plan suite, Patricia Hernandez, the Minister of Resource Planning, almost bumped into them. She seemed to be eager to leave the office in a great hurry. She was young, ambitious, pretty and red-haired. She was also considered super-intelligent, and a bit nerdy, by everyone who knew her. Minister Hernandez was also struggling to hang on to a large bundle of documents. The blank look on her face suggested her mind was completely focused on something else.

  “General Jorge, Doctor Abdul, sorry to keep you guys waiting so long!” Prime Minister Wong said pleasantly as he greeted them with firm handshakes in the middle of the cavernous office. “Please, gentlemen, have a seat… no, no, over here! Let’s use the lounge area today where it will be more comfortable for everyone. You know, I’m frankly tired of sitting behind my humungous and cluttered desk! It constantly reminds me of how much more work I have to do today!”

  After the three men had taken their seats, Prime Minister Wong took a moment to study the faces of his two visitors. He noted they both looked a bit stressed, and maybe even a bit fatigued. Phillip Wong felt a bit that way too, but like Minister Hernandez, he had no intention of revealing that to anyone.

  Phillip Wong was slim and fit, and looked a lot younger than his forty-one years. His hair was still jet-black, and he exuded youthful confidence at all times. He was inwardly pleased about his many accomplishments without appearing to be vain about them. He was at heart a very good man. He was quick to publicly praise the members of his Cabinet whenever he could, and by extension, the elaborate government apparatus they collectively controlled.