The Rock (12 page)

"We know about the transmissions," Fran said, "but what about the disappearance of Voyager? How could that have happened?"

Their new place of business was a government issue nuclear-biological-chemical (NBC) shelter, designed for MASH units to be able to operate inside while deployed in severe climactic conditions. Central Australia certainly fit that bill, Hawkins thought, as the unit's air conditioner strained to keep the temperature barely tolerable inside the inflated white walls.

"I've studied what happened there," Levy answered, her eyes taking in the entire team from behind her thick glasses. "I've done some consulting work in the past for JPL--Jet Propulsion Laboratory--which runs Voyager, so I have some background on the subject."

"Do they have any idea at JPL what happened to it?" Fran asked.

"No." Levy shrugged. "Their best guess is that Voyager hit another object, perhaps a small meteor or comet. At the speed it was moving, such contact would have been disastrous."

"What do you think happened to it?" Hawkins asked.

"I don't know," Levy replied. "There is no data to work off, other than the lack of a bounce back. It could have been destroyed in a collision with another object, but the odds of that are slim. The fact that the message was sent using data off the plate from the probe indicates that perhaps there was some other agent at work."

"Some other agent?" Hawkins voice was sharp. "What do you mean by that?"

"I don't know."

"Can I throw something out?" Don Batson asked.

"Go ahead," Levy said.

"I don't think we should get closed-minded here and totally focus on the four items you've listed on that chart. Those are the four things we've been given, but they don't stand alone. Each is part of a larger scheme or tapestry, if you prefer to look at it that way."

Hawkins frowned. "What do you mean?"

"Take the nuclear explosion at Vredefort Dome, for example," Don said. "You say there's a second bomb missing, right? Well, you have to factor that second bomb into the situation. The same with Voyager. Where was it located when it disappeared? What was its last message? What about the entire history of Voyager--maybe there's something there that has a bearing on the situation. Do you see what I mean?"

"You're saying let's not get tunnel vision," Hawkins replied.

"Right."

Hawkins briefly drummed his fingers on the tabletop. "All right. Don has a good point. Let's get back to work and keep in mind that there's a hell of a lot more to all this than is readily apparent." The four went back to their hastily installed computer terminals, each lost in his or her own direction.

Hawkins was tapped in to the secure line to Orion headquarters, updating himself on the search for the remaining bomb and also going back over all the intelligence they had previously obtained, looking at it in light of present circumstances. Batson was studying all the geological data on Ayers Rock and the other sites, trying to determine possible links. Fran was reworking her projections, trying to figure out how all that had just occurred could affect things.

Debra Levy cleared her screen and sat in thought for ten minutes, her mind flitting over the information. She glanced up at the little diagram Hawkins had drawn and considered it in light of what Batson had said. She leaned forward and her fingers flew over the keyboard.

LOCATION: AUSTRALIA

DATE: AUGUST 6, 1945.

< ACCESSED. SIX HUNDRED AND FORTY-TWO ENTRIES. TO BRING UP FIRST RECORD, HIT F-1.

PENCAK

     Ayers Rock. Australia

22 DECEMBER 1995, 0815 LOCAL

21 DECEMBER 1995, 2345 ZULU

Fran forced herself not to let her shock show as Dr. Pencak was introduced by Lamb. They'd been briefed that the older woman had been severely injured as a teenager in a car accident, but Fran had never seen anyone so scarred. Surely modern plastic surgery could have corrected some of the deformities, Fran thought as she viewed the older woman.

Pencak took a seat and her single gray eye took in each of them, one by one, betraying no emotion. She laid her finely engraved cane with a large silver handle across her knees. "So. You went through quite a bit of trouble to get me here. What do you wish to know?"

"You were briefed on the transmission?" Hawkins asked.

"Yes. But my name was not among those on the message. So why am I here?"

A voice snapped across the room. "You know why." Fran was surprised at Batson's testiness. He seemed uneasy with Pencak, and the information Levy had uncovered just prior to Pencak's entrance had upset him. "One of the reception sites was very close to, or actually in, Meteor Crater."

Hawkins stood and gestured at the geologist, trying to calm things down a little. "Don says you're the world's foremost expert on Meteor Crater. Is there something there like what we have discovered so far in Ayers Rock?"

"From what I've been briefed, you haven't discovered anything in Ayers Rock yet," Pencak replied calmly. "All you have is a radio transmission and sonar and EM reading of an anomaly in the Rock indicating there may be an open space down there."

She waved her withered hand as Hawkins started to reply. "No, no, young man. Don't get all excited. You have a problem and you are approaching it in the manner almost everyone in the population approaches problems. That's by butting the top of their head against the wall they perceive the problem to be and hoping that sooner or later they will break through and the solution will be on the other side."

She graced Hawkins with a twisted smile. "But that's not the way it should be. You need to use what's inside your head. Let me see your analysis of the reception sites."

Lamb put the overlay on the overhead projector and turned it on. Pencak looked at it for a moment and then picked up an alcohol pen. She circled the site in North America.

"Meteor Crater. My home. You have all the numbers about size and depth and all that gobbledygook. All I can tell you is that there is nothing in the crater to receive the transmission from Ayers Rock. Nothing at present in the crater, that is. The bottom has been extensively swept over with various types of sensing devices-all searching for the core of the meteor that supposedly made the crater. It has never been found. Nor has anything like what you think you have in Ayers Rock."

She waved the dead hand again, once more cutting off Hawkins. She tapped the projector. "Despite its name it is not certain that Meteor Crater was created by a meteorite hitting the earth. That is simply the most widely accepted theory. There are others."

She circled the site in South America. "Campo del Cielo, Argentina. Actually, there are several craters there. All very close together. The theory is that several meteors hit, or one broke apart prior to impact and produced the same effect.

"Ah--Ries Basin." She put an X over the site in Europe. "Very interesting. Very large. Diameter almost fourteen miles. They've found boulders over thirty-five miles away that were ejected from that crater. Some think Ries was formed by volcanic action. Others by multiple meteor strikes." Pencak idly rubbed the dead side of her face. "People are so secure nowadays. They think it has all been solved. All the riddles of the world. Many even think most of the puzzles of space have also been solved."

She tapped the overhead. "Ries Basin hasn't been solved conclusively either. By the present school of thought sixty percent of researchers regard meteors as the agent that formed Ries Basin; forty percent volcanic action. Correct, Dr. Batson?"

Don was startled to be called on. "Well . . . yes, that's true."

"Thank you. The bottom line is neither answer fits exactly." The marker crept south to Africa. "Vredefort Dome. Here the experts are very confused. The topography and the geology fit no existing pattern. No crater there, but the earth around the dome appears to have been buckled and in many places literally inverted by some massive force a long time ago. Unexplainable?" She laughed. "Of course not. The accepted theory is multiple meteor strikes.

"Funny, isn't it? Multiple meteor strikes. Throughout recorded history we have never had even the slightest mention of a single large-scale meteor strike. But here they are saying several major strikes occurred at approximately the same time on the cosmic scale."

Pencak pointed down at the tent floor. "Do you know that less than twenty miles from here there's a place called Henbury Craters? Twelve craters of various sizes. The explanation was a shower of meteorites. All landing within a half mile of one another and a hair's breadth away from this very spot, when you consider the surface area of the Earth."

Pencak sighed. "Ladies and gentlemen, this is the point at which I am usually asked to shut up and the class professors give their students the information they need to ingest to get an A on their next test."

"This isn't a test," Hawkins said quietly. "We need to know what the connection may be among these sites. What you think the connection is."

Pencak regarded him for almost half a minute and then nodded. "All right. I think there is little doubt but that meteors have occasionally hit the Earth over the course of millions of years. But most of those strike sites have traces of the meteor somewhere in them. Others occurred so long ago, or are so massive, that it is impossible to tell. Indeed it was only when we were able to look back down on the Earth from space that we were able to see some of the patterns.

"There are those who believe that a massive meteor once hit Earth near what is now the east coast of Hudson Bay. There is a four-hundred-mile-long indentation in the Earth's crust, called the Nastapoka Arc that suggests an impact. This might even have been the meteor that scholars have postulated helped cause the extinction of the dinosaurs. But that occurred much longer ago than the sites we are concerned with here.

"Our atmosphere eats up well over 99.9 percent of all meteors that come close. Those that get through have to be rather large and on a very direct azimuth; otherwise the atmosphere bounces them back into space.

"That latter occurrence happened back in 1972, although most don't know about it. On August tenth of that year a meteor traveling at about ten miles a second and estimated to be about fifteen feet in diameter and weighing almost a ton hit Earth's atmosphere. The first visual sighting was over Nevada, although I would assume that NORAD in Colorado Springs had been tracking it for a while.

"Ninety seconds after being seen over Nevada it was over eastern Canada and then bouncing back out into space. A meteor of that size--if it had had the slightest change in trajectory and actually hit the Earth--would have had the explosive force of about twenty kilotons. If it had landed on Las Vegas you could have said good-bye to the entire city and an area twenty miles around it.

"The government kept word of this secret for over two years and then released it in a manner calculated to generate as little attention as possible. Think about it!" Pencak leaned forward and Fran found herself drawn in by the older woman. "Las Vegas came within a hair--at least by astronomical measurement--of being obliterated and nothing was mentioned for two years.

"So what else hasn't been said? The sad thing is that when we can't explain something by knowns, we throw out the possibility of the unknown. We ignore it." Pencak then proceeded to outline the same theory about the physical evidence concerning Meteor Crater that she had for the class the previous week. That made Hawkins sit up and take notice.

"You're saying that the most likely cause of Meteor Crater was a nuclear explosion?"

"It is the only thing that fits all the evidence--the intense heat; the silica; the fused quartz sandstone; the lack of meteor fragments; the shape of the crater--all of it. The same is true of Campo del Cielo, Ries Basin, and Vredefort Dome. All explained away so glibly as the result of meteor strikes, yet there isn't sufficient evidence to conclusively demonstrate it."

"Vredefort Dome is not a crater," Don Batson pointed out. "How can you link it with the other sites?"

"The Dome itself is not a crater," Pencak agreed. "But what do you know of the Bushveld Igneous Complex?"

"It's one of the richest, perhaps the richest, mining areas in the world, most particularly for diamonds."

"And what forms diamonds?" Pencak asked.

"Intense heat and pressure," Batson replied testily.

"And what is the shape of the Bushveld Complex?"

"An elongated circle," Batson replied. "But that doesn't mean-"

"Patience, young man. How was the Complex formed?"

"Well, that's not quite certain. Some suggest massive lava flows along with strong magnetic effects in the area." Batson shifted uncomfortably in his seat, used to being on the other side of the questioning.

"And the Dome?" She turned her attention from Batson when he didn't answer. "It's been called one of the most unique geological structures in the world. About sixty miles southwest of Johannesburg a ring of hills rises, surrounding an almost flat plain. Research has shown that the subsurface rock of the plain has been upturned to a depth of almost seven miles, thus forming the Dome. Imagine the forces involved to do that! Again, no one can quite explain this phenomenon occurring naturally."

"But how could all these formations have been caused by nuclear explosions?" Fran wanted to know. "How old are they?"

"Estimates vary from site to site. Anywhere from five to thirty thousand years old; some perhaps much older. That sounds like a large span of time, but when you balance it against the age of the Earth, in astronomical terms, it's almost the blink of an eye."

Fran shook her head. "Then I repeat my question: How could these craters and formations have been caused by nuclear explosion? That doesn't occur spontaneously in nature."

"No, it doesn't," Pencak agreed. "My theory is that the explosions were caused by some extraterrestrial life-form."

"What!" Batson could no longer sit still. "You're saying Earth got nuked thousands of years ago by aliens?"

"Putting it in layman's terms--yes."

Fran looked at the other members of the team. Debra was just staring at the old woman, as if soaking in her words. Don was shaking his head angrily. Hawkins was looking between Pencak and Lamb, whose face indicated his obvious disbelief. Fran wasn't sure how she herself felt.

Pencak explained herself further. "Originally, I'm not sure whether the explosions were deliberate-by which I mean weapons; or accidental--perhaps mishaps aboard nuclear--powered spacecraft. Based on the events you have witnessed here, though, I now believe the majority of the explosions to have been deliberate."

"But"--Hawkins paused and shook his head--"I'm just a dumb soldier. I don't quite understand this."

Pencak gave her twisted smile. "I'm sure you are anything but a dumb soldier, Major, or else you would not be here. I don't understand it either. Mind you, I am not saying I am certain that these craters were formed by extraterrestrial life-forms or even that they are the result of nuclear explosions. It is simply the solution that most closely fits the facts.

"Look at it logically based on the additional information you now have: You have an unknown entity--whether organic or purely mechanical--inside this Rock that is communicating with you using the data off the record on Voyager 2. The probe was out of the solar system proper when it disappeared. No one on Earth could have caused the destruction of the probe."

She tapped the overhead. "This entity attempted communication with these sites-perhaps there was a series of colonies at each of those locations thousands of years ago. Or more likely just research facilities. Perhaps what is in the Rock is simply an automated relay site, left behind by a race that might not exist any longer."

Fran glanced at Levy, thinking about her touchstone theory.

Pencak waved her good hand about. "It's a good place to hide a site, don't you think? In the middle of the world's largest rock in the middle of one of the world's harshest deserts. The Aborigines certainly have numerous legends about Ayers Rock, don't they? It has long been theorized that many ancient legends might be based on the reality of extraterrestrial visitors."

Pencak shrugged, her one shoulder lifting and the other remaining dead. "I don't know the answer. I can only offer possibilities. I would suggest that the Henbury Craters that are so close by here may be the results of near misses caused by weapons that were meant for Ayers Rock. Maybe there was an interstellar war a long time ago and these were military bases."

Fran saw Hawkins swing his gaze to Lamb at that last sentence and then back to Pencak. She knew what he was thinking-if Lamb had had an idea that this was true, that explained the obsession with secrecy. Had Lamb given them the entire message? What did Lamb really hope to find in the Rock?