The Martian Pendant (15 page)

“By Jove!” He exclaimed, “I believe you have something there. There could be a thousand pounds in that for them, if in fact, he is truly important. They are always short of funds, holed up in the wilds just over the border in Kenya, and are forever in need of supplies of food and ammunition. But if they were hired guns after all, to what purpose?”

Diana looked him in the eye, saying, “This is squarely in your department. Who might be planning to interfere with our work out there by force?” 

Neither had an answer. Then they went in together to see the boy again, impressed with how grateful to Diana and her companions he was. Kindred, translating, turned to her, “He says he’ll never forget you.” As they left, he added, “There is no question as to his feelings for you. How his gratitude will play out, God only knows. It could be just a simple artifact you might find at your tent flap one morning. Time will tell.”

Thirteen

Crocodile Bait

The night was clear and moonlit, the hulk of the spaceship glowing a soft reflected silver, partially obscured by the camouflage netting. It was ideal for the hunt that Dan and Crowley planned. The bait for the crocodile was the leavings of a newly slaughtered lamb they had obtained from the cook, placed where they could get clear shots from above if the big reptile came out. Maybe they could at least get in a headshot if the creature couldn’t make it through the round opening. With Crowley covering, Dan threw the bloody chum inside and then placed the carcass remnant and head on the ground about eight feet away. After taking the steep trail to the top of the hulk, Dan could look down at the bait, only a little more than ninety feet below. An easy shot.

Crowley and two of his men were sitting on the huge mounds of rock and dirt left by the excavation. There, they were deployed to guard Dan from the hyenas and other nocturnal predators. He had told them to avoid being directly opposite him, in order to avoid injury from ricochets and flying rock. As promised, he did bring a thermos of coffee, as well as a folding chair. They all sat down to wait as the moon neared its zenith.

Chet whispered to his men, “The noises of the hyenas seem to be gettin’ closer.”

Calling over to Dan, he said, “They’re comin’ from the open south end of our cut. That way, they might get ta our bait before the croc does. We could go after ’em with our BARs, but our gunfire would spook that big varmint in the ship for shit sure.”

Dan replied, “Yeah, I see your point, Crowley, We’ll just have to wait and hope those pests don’t screw up our trap. Keep an eye out for them, but let me do the shooting unless they attack us.”

“Roger that,” came the reply from across the way.

It was several hours before a gentle breeze came up, carrying the scent of the bait to the hyenas. The moon was in the west, the wall of the excavation close to shadowing the ship’s ports. Finally, the hungry pack came slinking forward in the cautious way of all carrion feeders, to ascertain that their meal was either dead or dying, minimizing the chance of a debilitating injury. There was always the possibility that they themselves could become carrion. Hyenas have been known to tear into a wounded pack member if hungry enough.

The alpha male, larger than the rest, grabbed the lamb’s head in his mouth, just as the several members in the pack fell noisily on the rest of the bait. Holding the head in his teeth, he backed quickly away toward the ship, to preserve his prize from the others.

It all happened so fast in the subdued light, Dan’s shot came too late. In a flash, the crocodile’s head shot out from the port, its jaws snapping shut on the hyena’s hindquarters. The hapless animal, the lamb’s head still clutched in its teeth, was yanked quickly into the opening. Dan did get his headshot, but it was on the hyena. Only then did its jaws relax, the bullet’s impact sending the lamb’s head rolling across the narrow brook and into the shadows. For a moment the dead beast’s chest and front legs became caught on the edges of the opening. Then, yielding to a final tug, it disappeared into the hulk, leaving only a wreath of skin and fur lining the metallic rim. Sorely disappointed, Dan and Chet returned to their tents, cursing their luck.

Breakthrough        

The mechanical and metallurgy shops at the Lincoln Avenue facility of Buell in Culver City were always full of activity. Most of the work continued to be on the SynCom satellites, three of them, to be placed in geosynchronous orbits 22,000 miles high, so that they could serve the communications needs of the entire world. None of the U.S. rockets, lacking the thrust needed, had been able to place a satellite into such a high orbit. The Redstone rocket had been sufficient to lift GeoSat and others into much lower orbits, scanning relatively narrow belts of terrain with each pass. Virtually all of the technological personnel, mostly recruited from Bell Labs and Caltech, were busy refining SynCom, aiming to have it ready when a suitable vehicle became available.

Only one man was working with the fragments of the nearly impervious shell from the second spaceship. Diana’s drawings were posted on the bulletin board, and a nearby workbench displayed the pieces of equipment thought to be essential. Combining the two larger components had been easy, integrating the key elements of a large hammer drill with an electric arc welder. Electro-cutting was thought more practical than the oxyacetylene torch would be, with its cumbersome tanks of gas.

Just one power source would be necessary to run what had come to be called the “impact torch.” The biggest problem was with the nuclear component in the hammer tip. Because of the success with depleted uranium in the antitank missile, rods of the same material were tried, but despite the high melting point, that metal proved too soft for sustained impact. After that, the project progressed more slowly, the personnel only remotely aware how critical the tool was for the project in Africa. They had started out with a half-dozen scientists, but with priority given to the SynCom project, loss of personnel had stalled work on the impact torch for weeks.

Mike Williams, into whose lap the project had been tossed, was discouraged. Sitting over a cup of strong coffee, he grumbled to himself about Monday really being the worst day of the week. He had come in over the weekend when he thought ideas would be easier to come by in the deserted shop. No dice, he found. Now the place might as well have been a noisy foundry, so stuck was his brain on the subject of workable cutting tips.

A nuclear scientist happening by stopped to look at Diana’s drawings. He had known of her ideas before, when they were working on GeoSat, and had admired her work then. After studying the drawings for a few minutes he then continued on his way, mumbling, “Interesting.” It didn’t take more than a minute for him to return for a second look.

Seeing Mike, he said, “If it doesn’t matter what type particle you need, you could use a plasma through the tip, or implant your spent uranium into a very hard high-melting-point metal or alloy tip, to get your radiation to the point of impact. Either a hard-enough impact tip with nuclear delivery capability, or a steel tip, through which, say, radon gas could be delivered?” 

That got the project restarted, and within a month, Williams had a working model. It was found capable of quickly cutting through the shards of alien material on hand. The initial elation was only slightly dampened when it was found that, in the process of cutting, the material in the path of the tool just disappeared. As had been the case at the dig, no melted residue could be recovered from the cutting process to use for welding experiments on the mysterious material, or to furnish samples minute enough for chemical analysis. That would be another project. Like carbon, although it tolerated heat as high as 8,000 degrees Fahrenheit, rather than melting, it then vaporized.

The crucial component, which would deliver the cutting current and would form the hammer tip, was initially fabricated by using a hard metal rod of tungsten steel, which had many tiny holes drilled into it before tempering, later to be filled with depleted uranium. This meant that replacement tips would be necessary for extensive cutting, as the uranium would slowly melt away. Work continued on the use of radon, ducted through the center of the tip, and this would prove to be the most practical, obviating the need for complicated machining and the consequently prohibitive cost for that particular component.

The initial prototype, with a dozen spare impregnated tips, was immediately sent by chartered air freighter, to be picked up in Dar-es-Salaam. The radon unit would follow later. The boxes would be aptly marked “welding equipment,” their code word for anything secret.

*    *    *

Two days later in Dar, while Diana was supervising the refueling of the L-5, Kindred rushed up, accompanied by a worker pushing a cargo dolly.

Diana whimsically remarked, “It’s too early for any presents from the Maasai boy, and Christmas is months away. What have you there?”

“Nothing a lady will find useful, I’m afraid,” he said, “It’s some sort of welding equipment from the States, Culver City, I think. Just came in by air freight.”

Diana looked closely at the label. It was the answer to her prayers. She exclaimed, “Buell has finally come through!” Sighing with relief, she realized there would be no need to go into that Martian ship alone again.

He was puzzled by her excitement, but decided it best not to question her. Giving some instructions to the porter, he turned to her, saying, “This delivery is obviously important. I suppose with all your other talents, you’re capable of welding too?”

“You don’t know the half of it,” she happily replied.                                                              

Watching

As the Mau
Mau warriors kept watch from the hills to the west, their leader was concerned not only with the added number of men at the camp, but also with the fate of the five men who had been sent out onto the plain to rustle cattle and kidnap herdsmen for ransom. The Maasai, with their close tribal ties and reverence for their animals, were known to be susceptible on both counts. He had no way of knowing that his men were dead, only that his band was now five men and five rifles short.

To the north, in the distant Maasai settlement, life went on as usual, the Kraal crowded at night with their generous herd. The circle of mud and thatch huts, or
Bomas
, that housed the maturing young warriors,
Morani
, was again fully occupied. The tallest among his class, a lad of sixteen, who had been missing from his bed for almost a year, had returned. It was said that he had sought further blessings needed to become a great warrior, and at the supper fires, it was rumored that he had gone after lion. It was an ancient tradition, by then illegal, as that custom had decimated the population of those great cats on the Serengeti and the northern highlands far more than Maasai
Morani
.                                                            

Spying

The Mafia priest continued to visit the camp on Sundays, and Staltieri, the head truck driver, attended confession and communion almost every time. Some remarked that it seemed odd that he would have to confess his sins so often, considering he didn’t get into Arusha enough to commit that many mortal sins. If they only knew.

In the little confessional, Staltieri whispered,  “There is a promise of a solution to the apparently impervious outer shell of the ship. To the south, the drilling is still not very deep and has hit water, not oil. The digging on the port side of the ship continues slowly, with no artifacts yet recovered. So far we have nothing the Vatican need be concerned with. Nothing religious has happened, not even a visit from a Jehovah’s Witness.”                                                 

Staltieri was right. The dig was going slowly down through the layers of soil, broken rock and hardened volcanic ash. The professor had laid out the confines of their painstaking excavation, parallel to and several feet from the spaceship hulk. It seemed a likely spot to him, on a little hillock of the sort that in previous digs had marked the presence of a primitive settlement, shell mound, or burial chamber.

Of his six workers, all graduate students from the University, the three men were impatient. Once they had seen the full extent of the broken strata revealed by the excavation on the other side of the ship, they wanted to expose their side quickly. But under Max’s direction, they had to continue meticulously uncovering the subsoil, and patiently sifting through the rocky earth, finding absolutely nothing except for the cow patties that littered the surface. Max’s experience had rightly shown that where there was wholesale excavation, there was usually destruction of precious artifacts or bones, but the careful technique of the archeologist proved a waste of time near the hulk. 

Ballard, the geologist, had closely studied the strata of rock exposed on the starboard side, hoping his observations would help avoid a sterile search. He said to Max, “We’re on the edge of a fault. The layers of rock have been broken and jumbled by ancient quakes and continental plate drift. It seems unlikely that anyone would have settled here. The same should hold for the dig side too. The evidence tells us that the present buried position of the craft is in part due to a fall into a deep crevasse. If that mound of yours holds anything human, it certainly won’t be from people of the era of the Martian landing.”

Standing on the edge of the dig, Max, undeterred, replied, “If beings had left the shelter of the ship, they would have camped nearby, perhaps for some time. As you point out, the buried position of the ship is mostly due to its having been swallowed up in a quake. Why then,” he asked, “wouldn’t the first signs of their exploration be where the original surface was before that crevasse opened? And no real entrance to the craft has yet been found. It has to be over here. Wouldn’t they have been more likely to encamp on this side?” And so the dig progressed slowly deeper, seeking signs of a Martian settlement.

The Torch

High excitement greeted Diana’s landing of the L-5, with its cargo and mail. She had radioed ahead with all the news. Dan and Chet were doubly happy to hear of the early progress toward recovery of the Maasai boy, and the arrival of the equipment. As Ron supervised the unloading of the long-awaited cutting tool, with special precautions taken with the radioactive tips, she took the mail to Max’s office tent.