Polar Shift (35 page)

They could see the ghostly glow of lights from the main tunnel. Grisha's harsh voice was clearly identifiable as he urged his men on with threats and jokes. The ivory hunters passed the crevice, and there was an excited yell. They had seen the flashlight. The voices receded.

Schroeder's intention was to slip back into the main tunnel and backtrack, but Grisha was no fool. He must have assumed that the flashlight's placement was too convenient to have been accidental. He and his men turned around and came back to the cleft in the wall.

Schroeder whispered in Karla's ear to get moving. As they hurried through the winding passageway, Schroeder decided their only course of action was to remain on the run. The flashlight beam was growing dimmer, indicating that the batteries were weakening. He would have to pick an ambush spot before they became lost or found themselves deep in the mountain with no light to show the way.

They walked for another ten minutes. The air was musty but it was still breathable, indicating that there was a flow coming in from the outside. The cave narrowed, and Schroeder saw a narrow fissure ahead. He stepped through the breach and his foot came down on thin air. He crashed down onto a slope and rolled several feet.

He crawled over, picked up the light and pointed it at Karla, who was peering from the fissure. The opening was about six feet above the floor. She looked bewildered. One second, Schroeder had been there, leading the way. The next, he had dropped out of sight, the flashlight had gone flying, and she had heard a thud.

"I'm all right," he said. "Be careful, there's a drop."

She eased out of the hole and picked her way down the slope. Schroeder tried to stand. The fall had aggravated his injured ankle even more, and shards of pain shot up his leg when he put weight on his foot. He leaned on Karla's shoulder.

"Where
are
we?" she said.

Schroeder explored their surroundings with the flashlight. The tunnel was around thirty feet wide and thirty feet high. A section of the wall collapsed to uncover the hole. The ceiling was vaulted, and, unlike the cave they had come through, the floor was as level as a pancake.

"This isn't a cave," Schroeder said. "It's man-made." He aimed the light at the opposite wall. "Well, it seems we have company."

Life-size figures of men and women adorned the wall. They were painted in profile, as they marched along in a procession, carrying flowers, jugs and baskets of food and herding sheep, cows and goats with the aid of large, wolflike dogs.

The women wore long, diaphanous white dresses and sandals.

The men were dressed in kilts and loose, short-sleeved shirts. Trees and other greenery made a backdrop for the parade.

The people had medium complexions, high cheekbones and raven hair worn in a bun by the females, cut short for the men. Their facial expressions were neither solemn nor happy, but somewhere in between; they could have been out for a Sunday stroll. The colors were brilliant, as if the paint had only been applied the day before.

The murals covered both walls. No figure was repeated. Most were young, in their teens and twenties, but there was a scattering of children and old people, including gray-haired men who wore ornate headgear and could have been priests.

"It looks like a religious procession," Karla said. "They're carrying gifts for a god or a leader."

Schroeder leaned on Karla's shoulder as he limped beside her. As they continued through the tunnel, the figures began to number in the hundreds.

"It's good to have company, in any case," Schroeder said. "Maybe our new friends here will show us the way out."

"They're definitely headed somewhere. Look!"

The mural had changed in nature. There were new animals in the mural—large, lumbering creatures that resembled elephants except for the shaggy, grayish brown fur covering their bodies. Flowers had been twined into their fur. The animals had high-peaked heads, and trunks that were relatively stubby. Some had tusks, almost as long as their bodies, that curved like the runners on an old-fashioned sleigh. Men rode on the animals like Indian mahouts.

"Impossible," Schroeder said.

Spellbound, Karla stepped closer for a better look. In her eagerness, she forgot that Schroeder was using her for a crutch. He went down on one knee.

"I'm so sorry," she said, seeing his predicament. She helped him up. "Do you know what these pictures mean? People of an advanced civilization lived on this island thousands of years before the Egyptians built the Pyramids. Probably back when the island was connected to the mainland. That's astounding enough on its own. But the fact that they had domesticated wild mammoths is just stunning. My paper on man's exploitation of the mammoth is trash! I had primitive man depending on mammoths as a source of food, and utilizing bones and tusks to make tools and weapons. The reality here is that they had learned to use these wild creatures as beasts of burden. This is the scientific discovery of the century. We'll have to rewrite all the textbooks."

"I share your excitement," Schroeder said. "But I think we have to look on the practical side. No one will ever know of this discovery unless we get out of this place."

"I'm sorry, this is just so..." She tore her gaze away from the stunning murals. "What should we do?"

Schroeder flashed the light along the wall. "We will let our friends tell us. The pretty young ladies up there are carrying flowers
into
the mountain. I propose that we determine where they came from and see if this tunnel leads outside. As you can see, I'm not ready to run in the Olympics, and our flashlight is dimming."

Karla cast a longing glance at the figures. "You're right. Let's go before I change my mind."

They started back. They had only taken a few steps when they heard men speaking Russian. Grisha and his thugs had found the opening into the main tunnel. Schroeder and Karla had to turn around and go the other way.

Schroeder broke into a loping run. The maneuver put pressure on his swollen ankle, but he gritted his teeth and kept moving. Lean
ing
on Karla helped, but it slowed them down. He suggested that they turn off the flashlight. Its light was so dim now as to be almost useless, but it was bright enough to provide a beacon for their pursuers. Schroeder used his free hand as a guide in the dark, trailing his fingers along the wall. The tunnel seemed to stretch out with no end.

After a few minutes, the voices became louder. Grisha and his band of cutthroats were in full pursuit. Schroeder tried to take bigger steps, but the effort threw him out of synch and actually slowed their progress. He would have to stop soon and tell Karla to go on without him. He was formulating a reply to her expected protests, when Karla said, "I see light."

Schroeder blinked the sweat out of his eyes and squinted into the darkness. There was a paleness ahead that was only one shade removed from complete blackness. He was confused. Maybe he had been wrong about their direction and the wall murals had actually led them out of the mountain.

They kept on moving, and the floor sloped down in a long ramp. The tunnel fed into a vast cavern. The space was filled as far as the eye could see with two-story, flat-roofed buildings. The structures were built of material that glowed with a silvery green that cast the scene in a dusky light.

Rough voices came from behind and jerked them out of their trance. With a mixture of awe and apprehension, they began to descend the long ramp into the crystal city.

28

Housed on the tenth
floor of NUMA headquarters is the modern-day equivalent of the famed Alexandria Library. The glass-enclosed computer center that takes up the entire level contains a vast digital library that includes every book and article, every scientific fact and record on the world's oceans, all connected to a highspeed computer network with the capacity to transfer enormous amounts of data in a blink of the eye.

The center is the brainchild of NUMA's computer genius, Hiram Yeager, who dubbed the artificial intelligence entity he created "Max." It was Yeager's idea to give Max a feminine human face represented by a three-dimensional holographic image with auburn hair, topaz eyes and a soft, feminine voice.

Paul Trout had decided to forgo the flirtatious holographic image. Rather than use Max's central control panel, where Yeager communicated with the computer by voice, Trout had taken over a meeting
room
in the
corner
of the data center. He had set up a simple keyboard to tap into Max's vast store of knowledge. The keyboard communicated with an oversize monitor that took up most of one wall. Seated with Trout at a mahogany table where they faced the screen were Gamay; Dr. Adler, the wave scientist; and Al Hibbet, the NUMA expert on electromagnetism.

Trout thanked everyone for coming and explained that Austin and Zavala had been called away. Then he tapped the keyboard. A photo of a thin-faced man with dark hair and soulful gray eyes appeared on the screen.

"I'd like you to meet the gentleman whose genius brought us here today," Trout said. "Here you see Lazlo Kovacs, the brilliant Hungarian electrical engineer. This photo was taken in the late thirties, about the time he was working on his revolutionary electromagnetism theories. And
this
is what can happen when scientific brilliance is perverted."

Trout changed the picture to a split screen that displayed two satellite photos. On the left was the photo of the freak waves that sank the
Southern Belle.
The other side showed the giant whirlpool, as viewed from space.

He let the significance of the pictures sink in.

"We in this room have speculated that someone might have used electromagnetic transmissions based on the Kovacs Theorems to cause these disturbances. As you know, Gamay and I went to Los Alamos and talked to an authority on Kovacs's work. He confirmed our suspicions of human interference, and suggested the type of electromagnetic manipulation we've been seeing could cause a polar reversal."

"I assume we're talking about a reversal of the magnetic poles," Adler said.

"I wish
that were
so," Gamay interjected. "However, we may be facing
a geologic
polar reversal where the earth's crust actually moves over its core."

"I'm not a geologist," Adler said, "but that sounds like a recipe for a catastrophe."

"Actually," Gamay said with a smile as bleak as it was lovely, "we may be talking about doomsday."

A heavy silence followed her pronouncement. Adler cleared his throat. "I heard the word 'may.' You seem to be giving yourself some wiggle room."

"I'd be happy if I could wiggle out of this situation entirely," Gamay said. "But you're right in sensing that we've given ourselves room for doubt. We don't know how reliable our Los Alamos source is, so Paul has come up with a way to test the Kovacs Theorems."

"How could you do that?" Adler said.

"By using a simulation," Trout said, "much the same way you would re-create sea conditions in your lab using a laboratory wave machine or computer model."

Hibbet said, "Kovacs only wrote of his theories in
a general
way. He left out some of the specifics."

"That's true," Gamay said. "But Kovacs self-published a more detailed summary of his theorems. He used it as the basis for his published writings. There is only one copy in existence."

"If only we had it," Adler said.

Gamay slid the Kovacs folio across the table without comment.

Adler carefully picked the papers off the table and noted the name on the cover: Lazlo Kovacs. He glanced through the yellowed pages. "This is written in Hungarian," he said.

"One of our NUMA translators came up with an English copy," Trout said. "The math is a universal language, so there was no problem there. Testing was another matter. Then I remembered the work being done at the Los Alamos National Laboratory where scientists have come up with a way to test nuclear bombs from our arsenal without violating international treaty. They test the bomb's components, figuring in factors such as materials deterioration, and they feed the data into a computer which runs a simulation. I propose to do the same."

"It's certainly worth a try," Hibbet said.

Trout tapped the keyboard and an image of the earth appeared on the screen. The globe had a section cut out like a slice of orange to expose the layers of the inner core: liquid iron outer core, the mantle and the crust. "Maybe you can explain this diagram, Al."

"Glad to," Hibbet said. "The earth is like a big bar magnet. The inner core of solid iron rotates at a different speed from the outer core of molten iron. This movement creates a dynamo effect that generates a magnetic field called the geodynamo."

The picture changed to depict the intact globe. Lines looped out into space from one pole and curved back into the opposing pole.

"Those are the lines of magnetic force," Hibbet explained. "They create a magnetic field that surrounds the earth, and allows us to use compasses. Even more important, the magnetosphere extends out thirty-seven miles. This creates a barrier that protects us from the harmful solar wind radiation and swarms of deadly particles that bombard the earth from space."

Trout changed the computer image. They were looking at a map of the world. The ocean surface was splotched with blue and gold patches.