The Dreaming Dragons Part 6

'Way back when, the third lunar landing mission took off for the Fra Mauro uplands. Apollo 13 was commanded by Jim Lovell, with Fred Haise as LEM pilot and John Swigert replacing Tom Mattingly, who was grounded with suspected German measles. Mattingly lost his chance at history, though he still doesn't know it. Do you recall the flight?'

'Well, I caught the Tom Hanks movie on cable. s.p.a.ce flight is a G.o.dd.a.m.ned wasteful boondoggle, even if NASA does fund most of my fun.' Bill watched the ground monitor; faintly, morning light was streaking the earth. 'No offence intended.'

'I'm amazed, Bill,' the astronaut said with some sharpness. 'That's the sort of narrow, reflex response I've come to expect from c.o.c.ktail party accountants and vitamin-deficient health-food fanatics. I think you'll change your opinion.

'On April 13, 1970, the No. 2 liquid oxygen tank exploded in the service module. The landing mission had to be abandoned. They were not on a "free return" trajectory, and they needed a major burn to avoid falling into solar orbit. MIT computers ran out an optimum program, and Lovell altered the trajectory so the s.p.a.cecraft would swing past the moon and switch them back to earth. As they rounded the moon, out of radio contact with Mission Control, their instruments were thrown into a tizzy by signals from a crater on Farside.'

DelFord felt his tongue cringe from the liquor. With wild surmise he said, 'Intelligent signals?' Then his common sense returned. 'A Russian base. But I thought their s.p.a.ce technology -- '

'No, Bill. The signals were overlaid on half their instrumentation tapes. As soon as the craft emerged from lunar shadow, Lovell employed a contingency security measure: he masered the unknown data to Mission Control through a comsat in synchronous...o...b..t, which microwaved the signal down to the 64-metre dish at Goldstone in California.'

'You really _do_ mean -- '

'I do. Defense Department computers examined the lunar signals and concluded that beyond question they represented a non-human, extraterrestrial intelligence. The signal itself resisted translation and has done so during the intervening decades. The most favoured current hypothesis is that it's so garbled with noise we'll never retrieve it.'

'So we're not alone.' His abrupt, soaring delight startled delFord. Inner s.p.a.ce was his realm, he had never felt anything but contempt for those who sought comfort in celestial chariots. Yet this was intelligence, he told himself. Minds capable and dexterous, other than human. Moved by pa.s.sions as alien, perhaps, as those which Lilly had posited for dolphins. He snapped his head forward intently.

'You said that was back in 1970. What's happened since then? Contact?' Suddenly, the whole thing rang false. 'Come on, there were the rest of the Apollo missions, the Mars landers, Ca.s.sini, the s.p.a.ce Station program ... Oh. I dare say they couldn't cancel that last program, but they did a nice job with the missing and crashed probes.'

Hugh nodded, teacher commending an apt pupil. 'Apollo itself was run down much faster than originally planned. But of course if there'd been any major inexplicable deviations from the announced itineraries, interested parties all over the world would have p.r.i.c.ked up their ears at once. All launches are alarmingly public, to those with adequate equipment. As you surmised, those "failed" Russian and American Mars probes were dummies, a cost-cutting exercise just for show. Keeping the facts restricted has taken the most ma.s.sive, thorough security operation of all time. There was one moment when the whole schmear almost came unstuck. Do you recall the eighteen-minute "secretarial error" blank on Richard Nixon's Presidential transcripts?'

Throwing his head back, Bill roared with glee.

'The b.a.s.t.a.r.d always had a good nose for diversionary tactics. What stopped him?'

'I don't know the details, this is all scuttleb.u.t.t. Presumably his lunatic Huns possessed enough vestigial sanity to see the potential consequences. On the other hand, it's quite likely they simply thought he was insane, hallucinating deliverance. Fortunately we have plumbers of our own; the incriminating tape was expunged within hours, and I believe certain persuasions were brought to bear.'

'Immunity from termination with extreme prejudice?'

'Perhaps.'

Bill helped himself to more liquor. 'You mentioned the Soviet Union.'

'It was inevitable. Both nations had so much hardware in lunar orbit it would've been impossible to monopolise the phenomenon for long. One of the Soviet's Luna series automatic probes picked up the signals some months later. It was diverted to a soft landing in the crater. That was the field they'd specialised in after they chose to forego manned landing missions. As it was, a top-ranking Russian selenologist managed to tip off his American counterpart at an international Congress at Baku, Azerbaijan, in the USSR. Plans were already afoot for the Apollo-Soyuz docking, which helped ease tensions. There was no alternative but for both of us to pool our data and form a joint security screen.'

'What happened to the Russian scientist?'

Hugh gave him a thin smile. 'Poor old Anatoli Kubolayev came within a hair of the firing squad. In the event, though, it was a _fait accompli_, so the Central Committee gave him a severe reprimand, a medal, and put him in charge of the Soviet end of the Project. In the meantime, a covert US military launch put a modified Viking survey craft into the alien's crater. Its findings complemented those of the less sophisticated but more mobile Luna probe. They were perched on the remains of a complex built somewhere on the order of 25 million years ago.'

A deep, numinous chill worked through Bill's bones. His eyes drifted to the monitor showing the vast, snow-covered terrain, a sunlit relief map, they were crossing at such speed. We're heading across the Pole, he thought. It would take them -- where? Eastern segment of Russia? j.a.pan, with some slight course changes? But he was wearing a summer suit. Australia, he told himself in astonishment. The enormous, empty island continent at the edge of the Pacific, a bleached sunburnt place, as he recalled, as far removed from this icy landscape as it was possible to conceive.

Yet he knew that his parameters were too narrow. The land below him, and the land he was aimed at like an arrow, were old -- far older than 25 million years. The Oligocene, he thought. The Pyrenees and the Apennines had already been born, and the Alps of Europe were getting uplift surgery. To the far west, a land bridge had linked Alaska to Asia. Or was his geology out of date, retired by plate tectonics? He felt terrible weariness. How little time there was to know everything, when everything changed so fast, so much. The land below him, and its mirror on the world's far side, was old -- did it learn? Or did it merely suffer change? Harsh, inhospitable to man and beast, it was of the earth; it knew the long cycles of climate, its rocks wore down under ice or sun to sand, and its sand turned, when it was permitted, to soil, and as the planet wheeled the soil received sun or water and brought forth flowers in profusion. No terrain on earth was utterly barren of life; nowhere had the land suffered the frigid nights and the scorching days of the moon's marias and mountains. Life was possible, below, in the howling winter, at the world's extremities, even if it was not welcomed. But the alien complex had waited patiently through 25 million years of lunar desolation...

The astronaut sat in decent silence while Bill regained himself. Deftly, then, he took a disk from his jacket and pushed it into the audiovisual control panel. 'I have some digitised videotapes of the alien installation. This has been edited down from a series of Viking and Luna probe transmissions. Considering that the data had to be transmitted from the surface of the moon through a relay satellite in lunar orbit and a second comsat to earth, the quality is pretty good.'

A NASA emblem briefly lit a second screen, followed by an identification tag. Then Bill was looking along a vast, black scarp, its upper edge brilliant as molten metal. He drew a deep, reflex breath, felt himself falling into the blackness, felt the enormous gulf of ebon sky above that sun-scarred cliff merge with the black of the inner crater wall to form an emptiness that seemed to suck at his soul ... The camera angle started to s.h.i.+ft, panning across the crater; the moment of paralysis was broken.

Lapp registered his expression. 'It's awesome enough, I think you'll grant me that. These shots are from the modified Viking, which landed just at the beginning of a dawn period. The camera is now tracking toward the source of the signals. You can't see anything much yet because the crater's far wall blocks the sun, so they've edited out ... ah, there we are.'

Bill's pulse jumped. The floor of the crater, far below, had sprung into visibility. Without atmosphere to scatter light, the image was preternaturally acute. For a moment, in the loss of its customary cues to depth, his eye was baffled. This segment of the moon was not the grey-tan-brown of all the lunar features he'd seen portrayed in the past. If a giant had taken a huge black gla.s.s ashtray, heated it until the gla.s.s was ready to flow, then flung a t.i.tanic cube of blue steel into it so that streaks and ribs and filaments of gla.s.s had exploded outward to cool and set in grotesque patterns, his work would have looked like this.

'My G.o.d, what happened to it? A s.p.a.cecraft impact?' A forgotten image leaped to his mind: the catastrophic detonation over the Tungus _taiga_ in June, 1908, the colossal cosmic fireball which a journalist named Baxter had claimed was a crashed interstellar craft. Brother to this ancient ruin?

'No, it was definitely a base of some kind. We've code-named it "Selene Alpha", though to date we've found no further traces of the aliens elsewhere on the moon. That mess, as far as we can tell, is the end-result of a nuclear attack against Selene Alpha.'

'_Nuclear?_' Finally the pieces slotted together. He could have kicked himself. The vast metal cube, tilted and battered, had not been volatilised, though the crater in which it stood had been devastated by those stellar fires. 'The gluon s.h.i.+eld. It was protected. That's where you got it.'

The astronaut leaned forward, pressed his hands together until the bones cracked. 'We weren't ready to build the screen in 1970, Bill. Decades later, our theoreticians are still tearing at their hair. Selene Alpha was partially protected by a gluon s.h.i.+eld system, but the weapons which attacked it were even more advanced. Most of the critical mechanisms overloaded, fused into slag. There was just enough for us to work from. Our experimental rigs are still at the stage of Fermi's Chicago football stadium pile. But there's more to it than that.'

The picture had s.h.i.+fted to the vantage of another robot probe, this one situated on the gla.s.sy crater floor. Sagging, one corner sunk in melted rock, Selene Alpha loomed in view. It was magnificent: a lonely, timeless, equivocal tribute to some ancient species who had conquered the stars before humanity's ancestors had left the African gra.s.slands. And perhaps, Bill brooded, it was tombstone as well, for many of that race must have perished in the nuclear blast. Or had they found their escape? Had the screen done its job, as a fuse melts by design under power overload, even as its components flared to slag?

'If the Alpha complex is a ruin, what sent the signals the Apollo 13 crew intercepted?'

'Alpha isn't entirely a ruin. All of its mechanisms were solid state -- no moving parts. Apparently the few still in operating condition recognised the crew as life forms within orbital range and switched themselves on. We're a.s.suming the signals const.i.tuted a part of the aliens' navigational network. Their technology was fantastic, Bill.'

Indeed, he thought. Considering that even some residue of the system works 25 million years after a nuclear bombardment. If it had all been abandoned in mint condition, he knew, such longevity would still have been all but inconceivable.

The picture had jumped again. Now the camera was crawling slowly around the Alpha base, jiggling up and down and in and out of focus as the clumsy servomechs tried to cope with the slippery gla.s.s surface.

'Hey!' Bill cried, and immediately felt foolish.

The Soviet machine moved stupidly on, past the great dark jagged rent. Then earth ground controllers had responded, stopped it, turned it gingerly back. A searchlight sprang into life. The robot lumbered into the airless, lifeless, devastated structure.

Time ceased for delFord as he followed the slow, careful investigation of the crippled complex. He forgot he sat in a UN courier jet hurtling across the North Pole; he forgot how strange, indeed daunting, it was that he should be privileged to view this incredibly secret film. From time to time the astronaut beside him commented quietly on the picture, detailing various conjectures concerning this melted lump or that peculiar shape. Bill said nothing at all, lost in appalled wonder, until the searchlight caught the great, glimmering, cloudless map.

'The earth. But the continents -- '

'As it was during the late Palaeogene. As you can see, most of Europe is under water. The Low Countries, and Germany and Poland, are inundated. There's a seaway from France to Russia. The Americas still haven't joined, and much of their coastal regions are drowned. Australia's only slowly breaking away from Antarctica. The Himalayas are being built as India collides with Asia. It's a remarkable map; you can't tell at this distance but it's holographic and can be magnified without loss of detail to the degree that single trees and animals can be identified. It's told us more about the pongid predecessors of _Ramapithecus_ and other primitive hominids than all the fossil records of paleoarcheology. But of course the most significant feature is -- '

' -- that violet flare of light in central Australia.'

'Exactly. We infer that the site so designated was a base belonging either to the beings who constructed Selene Alpha, or to those who destroyed them.'

Bill felt his pulse pounding wildly as the robot camera tracked more closely across the vast map to zoom in on the point of light. The nimbus glowed steadily around a huge pyramidal pile of eroded sandstone, a shaped mountain. 'That's some rock,' he said.

'Uluru,' the astronaut told him. 'It's a natural monolith in the middle of nowhere. The sand has cut it down a lot since then. The alien base itself is nearly three kilometres under Uluru. It's protected by something that makes our gluon s.h.i.+eld look like mosquito netting. We call it the Vault.' Lapp looked down at his hands for a moment, spread his fingers wide, closed them convulsively into fists. 'Bill, thirty-six men have died so far trying to get into the Vault. A couple of weeks ago, an adolescent autistic boy blithely walked out of the place -- into our tunnel, three f.u.c.king klicks deep in the earth -- and told us we were going about it all wrong. Well, not "told" exactly. He's barely capable of speech. But he's very hot with a pencil. If he was a member of the Spiritualists' Union they'd call what he's doing automatic writing, and take up a collection.

'The only problem is, Doctor, we don't have the faintest idea what it is he's trying to convey.'

*Three: A Conclave of the Dead*

*6. Uluru*

Poor Selma, Bill delFord thought distinctly. Caught in that cold bath for days on end with her toe, swollen tremendously, jammed in the plug-hole. The courier's indirect lighting brightened as he lay blinking on his tilted couch. Reaching up, he brushed the small silver-chloride electrodes from his forehead and consulted his watch. G.o.d only knows what time it is at whatever longitude we're racing down, he thought. He hadn't corrected his timepiece. With the aid of the sleep-induction electrodes, he'd rested supremely well for a little over four hours. Despite the flat, conditioned air, with its taints of plastic and alloys, Bill felt the wholesome recovery rightfully due to nine hours in his own bed.

A rufous symphony in abstract expressionism was displayed on the ground monitor: red, mottled desert, long rounded shadows of summer daybreak. Bill was hungry. He went forward, searching for wrapped sandwiches in the discreet bar. To his delight, he found several cartons of milk, and a turkey-on-cracked-wheat. The automatic timer had roused Hugh Lapp when he turned back with his breakfast.

'Plain milk or chocolate?'

The astronaut reached unerringly for the brown carton. 'Where's the hot dog?'

'You're sick, Lapp, sick. Is this tomorrow or yesterday morning?'

'Beats me, Doctor. The earth's flat. I know -- I've seen it from the outside.'

An amber light began flas.h.i.+ng above the display screens. A crisp voice told them: 'We're on the fringes of the heavy weather now, gentlemen. Better strap up and hold tight. It'll be a rough ride in.'

'Thanks, Carl,' Lapp said. 'How long before we land?'

'Five, ten minutes, sir. There's a wild old storm blowing down there. They have so many cross-winds this morning we'll go the final thousand metres in Vertical Descent Att.i.tude.'

Already the hull was thrumming as the edges of the weather buffeted the jet. They lost alt.i.tude and speed. On the exterior screen the parched red earth became obscured by vast c.u.mulo-nimbus clouds.

'I thought this was a desert.'

'The Vault,' Lapp said. 'It doesn't like being goosed. Fortunately the EM field disruption doesn't extend this far up or we'd be dead.'

The engines bellowed as they dropped toward the thundercaps. Bill gulped his sandwich and grabbed the arms of his couch. They fell into blackness.

Had the jet possessed portholes, the morning sunlight would have been whipped away from them exactly as it had from the screen. It was necessary for Bill to remind himself of that fact, for the screen somehow had lost its power to convince. Its heavy grey might as well have indicated a malfunction in the circuitry. I don't want to believe it, he realised.

His stomach lurched, and his hands went into the air. It's trying to kill us, he thought irrationally. For seconds they dropped in the air pocket, then they were flying normally again, battling against the purely natural force and power unleashed in every storm. He gave the astronaut an unconvincing grin.

'Sorry about this, Bill. Usually we come through the weather zone in heavy trucks, but my superiors thought no time should be lost getting you here. You can start worrying after we've landed.'

Then they were through the cloud, and rain was streaking the camera lens. Thousands of metres below, the land was a dark sodden obscurity. Lights danced across the picture, were lost again. Had he seen, for an instant, a great black kite-shaped mound, distorted to a wedge, its edges eroded by an eternity of scouring sand?

'We're very close to the Rock facility now,' the pilot told them. 'I'm rotating the jets through 90 degrees for setdown, so don't be alarmed if we drop a little.'

The engines faded to a whimper, letting the howl of the storm enter the layers of insulated hull. The drone became a growl, picked up power again, and the courier settled vertically into the nest of brilliant lights that had swung slowly into the screen. The sensation was little different from a fast descent in an elevator well. There was a slight jar and the engines screamed, then died.

'It's still pelting down, gentlemen,' the faceless pilot told them. 'I've ordered a plastic umbilicus. If you just stay seated for a moment we'll make base without getting our tootsies damp.'

'Fine, Carl,' the astronaut said. 'Thanks for the smooth ride.'

The external viewer showed two drenched ground staff, water cascading from their yellow sou'westers and macs, guiding one end of a huge concertinaed plastic cylinder toward the jet. At its other end loomed a coppery geodesic dome the size of a football field.

'I'd have been just as happy with a pair of stout umbrellas,' Bill grumbled.

'They fall into the way of treating people on these kinds of planes as celebrities.'

Bill blew his nose. The sound of heavy rain persuaded him that nothing had changed with the translocation of hemispheres, that winter had skidded ahead of him with its gloomy burden of colds and drab skies. The door swung open. He followed the astronaut into the dead, smell-numbing greyness of the umbilical tube. At the far end, a pair of beefy military men waited for them.

'General Vladislav Logunovich Sevastyianov, Colonel Thomas Chandler, this is Dr Bill delFord, our expert in weird s.h.i.+t.'

Chandler grinned. He was a ruddy man, mesomorphic and sleepy-looking. 'Your brief sojourn in California has corrupted you, Hugh. Welcome to the madhouse, Bill.'

The Russian shook delFord's hand perfunctorily. 'I am delighted to meet you, Doctor. Perhaps you would enjoy some breakfast?' He had a West Point accent, and Bill came close to laughing outright.

The dome was enormous. A wide access corridor circled the perimeter, branching off into specialised areas clearly designated by signs in Russian and English. Evidently, security distinctions prevailed even among the many men moving in UN uniforms about the corridor. Soldiers with open holsters stood at the entrance to certain pa.s.sages, checking papers before permitting entry.

The Russian general, as far as Bill could make out, was in charge of surface operations. An American counterpart controlled all the on-the-spot investigations into the Vault, at the end of the prodigious tunnel that plunged back and forth more than two kilometres into the earth. Colonel Chandler headed the US team on the surface, and doubtless the Russians were equally represented below: revived Cold War protocol, Bill thought, in Dante's Inferno.

Nor could that be the whole story. Every three months or so, the entire bunch swapped roles, and there were frequent surface furloughs for scientists and military working in the claustrophobic horrors of the deeps.

Bill found the whole place increasingly distasteful. He responded, inevitably, to the faint background zing of excitement, the authentic note of nervous delight in risk and the determinate response to risk which every bar-room warrior tried to recapture from the single great episode of his drab life. But Bill had always hated regimentation, and the sight of this well-oiled military machine stifled him, transformed him into no more than an object of impersonal scrutiny. It was hard not to feel that if some functionary decided he const.i.tuted a threat to the place he might be wiped out of existence without the smallest trace of compunction. It was the opposite of Zen egolessness. It was a vile exercise of inordinate power to a machine's end. The fact that the Vault itself, relic of some unspeakably ancient paranoia, might effect the same unthinking extermination was not comparable. The Vault was precisely alien, without human intention. To find the same qualities in people always made his skin crawl.

They paused outside a door marked: DO NOT ENTER -- AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY. A pair of recessed television cameras studied them from the corridor ceiling. The colonel stopped a pa.s.sing private, turned to delFord.

'You must be uncomfortable after your trip. You can take a shower in your quarters, have a bite to eat, maybe catch up on your sleep.'

Bill glanced at Lapp. 'Well, I could use some coffee, but if you -- '

'That's a good idea, Bill,' the Captain said briskly. 'I'll be in conference for an hour or so, so make yourself at home. You'll have the room next to mine -- I'll give you a yell when I'm through. Just one thing.' He tapped delFord on the chest. 'If you do have a shower, go easy on the water. We're in the middle of Australia's biggest desert.'

When the private deposited Bill at his door, the man hesitated and said: 'Uh, sir, what the captain said about the showers -- '

Bill smiled at the boy. He seemed hardly more than a year or two older than Ben. 'That's all right, son, I know.'

'The rain -- '

'Really, I quite understand. My friend the captain has a distorted sense of humour.'

The private smiled uncertainly.

To Bill's delight, he found a tray waiting for him when he emerged from the shower, replete with ham, flapjacks, maple syrup, a tall gla.s.s of orange juice, and a pot of coffee. A serviceman had bundled up his sweaty s.h.i.+rt and underclothes, and laid out fresh garments. The new s.h.i.+rt was white, and in the correct size. Someone had been doing some forward planning.

'Sir, the general conveys his compliments and would like you to make yourself familiar with this information before the conference begins.' The soldier handed him a sealed package. 'If you need anything at all, sir, there's a buzzer by the door.'

'Fine.' The moment the door was closed Bill threw the package on the bed and sat in front of his breakfast. He scoffed the orange juice (freshly squeezed!) and single-mindedly pushed food into his face. Belching, he got out of his towel and into his clothes, opened the seals, poured another cup of coffee, and sat back on the bed to read. His face still felt hot and tight, but the electrical flicker had gone.

The doc.u.ment had been printed on premier stock, bound st.u.r.dily, and stamped SITUATION REPORT in gold. Much of it bristled with hideous equations. Bill stopped flicking the pages and started in at the beginning. He skimmed the historical resume Hugh Lapp had covered, but forgot his coffee when he hit the details on Uluru.

The events following the discovery and exploration of Selene Alpha moved straight into tragedy. A year earlier, and a little more than five kilometres from where he now sat, the search for the alien base on earth triggered a totally unexpected disaster.

The map on the moon had shown that the aliens of Selene Alpha were deeply interested in Uluru. Yet the Rock itself was nothing more than a monolith of hardened sandstone rising almost vertically 348 metres above a virtually barren desert plain that extended for more than 150 kilometres. It was little more than an enormous mound but its size was startling: nearly nine kilometres around the perimeter.

The Oligocene hologram showed it as an eroded pyramid. Clearly, it had been there for scores of millions of years before Alpha was built on the moon.

Had it been carved into that shape? The conjecture seemed insane, but it led to testable hypotheses. Perhaps an alien base might exist inside the Rock, like the tombs of pharaohs found buried deep inside pyramids. X-rays were not powerful enough to penetrate such a ma.s.sive outcrop. Instead, the team employed natural radiation: cosmic rays pouring down isotropically from s.p.a.ce, solar neutrinos detectable in huge tanks of industrial tetrachloroethylene. Such techniques were fairly new and presented great practical difficulties, but eventually one essential fact was established. Uluru was solid stone.

Yet the aliens had marked the place distinctively. a.s.suming a ground installation existed, it had to be under the Rock. The research crew began concentrated probing of the deep strata.