Part 7 (1/2)

As the probes echoed back from 2500 metres the twenty one men at the instrumentation post died in a single explosion. Their equipment fused into melted desert sand.

The data they had been telemetering out, however, showed results at the moment of the explosion. There was a ma.s.s discontinuity at 2.8 kilometres. The Vault.

Nor did tragedy close there. Cautiously, heavy machinery was brought in to begin drilling an access tunnel. Another ten men died confirming that the Vault would not tolerate substantial electromagnetic activity in its immediate vicinity.

A raft of speculations had been advanced to account for that effect. Bill found most of it, as described in the Situation Report, utterly beyond his grasp. The best bet seemed to lie in Lennox Harrington's realm. Most phenomena in the universe, perhaps all, appeared to be generated by a limited number of underlying symmetrical interactions. But that symmetry was not visible; it was 'broken spontaneously', and expressed itself in radically variant forms. The Vault suspended symmetry-breaking between two forces, electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force governing radioactivity.

'I can't stand it,' Bill said aloud. He put down the report and went for a p.i.s.s. For a moment he regarded the buzzer, and wondered if he could persuade someone to bring him a drink. It seemed unlikely. The coffee had gone tepid, but he refilled his cup anyway. Groaning, he picked up the report.

By pretending the equations weren't there, he managed to get some sense out of it. The Vault unkinked kinks. But only in the presence of electromagnetic fields, charges in motion. The fields suffered a 'gauge glitch'. Maybe it's like a laser, he thought, and the power comes from the Vault. EM forces suddenly thought they were weak nuclear forces, and multiplied. Nuclear protons turned into neutrons, emitting positrons and neutrinos. Neutrons did the reverse. The beta-particles, plus and minus, got together fast and annihilated, turning into gamma showers of hard radiation. The neutrinos and antineutrinos ran off at the speed of light. In a brief, lurid flash, flesh and metal and gla.s.s and plastic convulsed in radioactive meltdown.

It was appalling. However it managed it, the Vault was a killer. But only if you offended it with electromagnetic fields, or by venturing into its proximate defence zone. That last, it seemed, was optional. The child and his uncle had come through unscathed. Others who'd breached the zone had left it babbling, and were now full of fluphen.a.z.ine. Three had come out only mildly dazed; sent in again, they'd died instantly. It didn't make any sense, but it looked as if there were rules.

There was a knock at Bill's door. The astronaut came into the small room. He had a black wiry man with him, apparently another civilian.

'Sorry for the delay.' Hugh glanced at the remains on the tray. 'Just as well you've eaten, it could be a long session.'

'When can I see the kid?'

'Later today, maybe. He's scribbling again. It's almost as though we wound him up. Or he heard the jet arriving. Bill, this is Alf Dean, the guy who teleported into the Vault.'

'Hi.' Bill regarded the Australian with interest. It had not occurred to him that Dean had joined the team. Given the man's gruelling ordeal, he'd a.s.sumed Dean had been flown out for medical and psychiatric treatment. 'Tell me, Alf, have you noticed any peculiar sensory effects since you were brought out of the Vault?'

'I spent several days hallucinating pretty wildly, if that's what you mean. They tell me I was rather sick.' Slumped in the doorway Alf Dean still looked ill.

'Sure. More specifically -- when you were back on your feet, did you notice anything when you were in the vicinity of electrical equipment?'

The anthropologist considered him warily. 'Yeah, for a while. Flickers of light, a sort of, uh, visual hum. I was worried about epilepsy for a few days. How did you know?'

'The same thing happened to me after I came out of the gluon field. Hugh?'

The astronaut shook his head. 'Believe me, I would have hollered.'

Bill tucked the Situation Report under his arm. 'Let's not keep the general waiting, or they'll cancel our leave.'

The conference room was long and dull, furnished in pale Scandinavian dreck. Half a dozen men lounged at a table bearing briefing folders, pads and felt-tipped pens, jugs of orange juice, cla.s.sy notepads. A huge flat-screen monitor stood in one corner next to a shredder and color copier.

Sevastyianov rose from a foam-and-blonde-wood armchair as they entered. 'Gentlemen, I would like you to welcome Dr Bill delFord, whose field of competence is altered states of consciousness.' A restrained mutter of welcome. The Russian gestured around the table as the three men found their places, naming names. A couple were recognisable; one was electrifying. A grey-bearded civilian studied the newcomers with focused, intent intelligence, pus.h.i.+ng his gla.s.ses more firmly to the bridge of his nose. Victor Fedorenko, Bill thought, impressed. The man everyone was tipping for the n.o.bel in physics, following his astounding experimental success in proving the reality of faster than light non-local connectivity. Not to mention his much-publicised criticism of the continuing racism and thuggery in Russia, and corruption at the highest levels. They must have needed him badly, Bill thought.

'Let us begin this morning's session with a review of the group trial under the gluon s.h.i.+eld. Dr delFord, you have the floor.'

Bill stuck to the facts, and was brief. He remained unsure of the connection between the Vault enigma and the experience he'd shared with Anne and Hugh. Presumably the Caltech field was seen as a diminutive version of the Vault's primary defences. His report evoked animation in the men before him.

'Sounds like the stuff we got from the guys who came out of the Vault with their wires crossed,' said one of them. 'Except that they stayed that way. Bill, you seem to be relating this to your previous research. Can you amplify that point?'

DelFord glanced at the general. 'Is this the right moment to -- ?'

'Go ahead, doctor. Until Mr Lapp suggested your special expertise might be helpful, I do not believe any of us had heard of out-of-body-experience. Personally, I must confess that I am still highly sceptical.'

Someone hummed the _X Files_ theme. The astronaut winked at Bill. You b.a.s.t.a.r.d, delFord thought with some affection.

'Okay, I don't blame you. The study of OOBEs isn't new, but it's been dogged by crackpots. It got a boost in the right direction a couple decades back, when some of us were awarded the estate of a miner named James Kidd who'd set up a bequest to investigate survival after death.'

There was a snort from further down the table.

'Don't blame me, brother, I'm an agnostic. The fact is, though, a h.e.l.l of a lot of people have reported the experience of, well, physically leaving their bodies and trucking around the neighbourhood with nothing on but their souls. Fallout from our tank experiments in sensory deprivation and overload led us to correlate the details. We found considerable consistency from astonis.h.i.+ngly diverse sources.'

'Sergeyev's bio-plasmic body hypothesis,' said a heavily accented Russian voice. 'The Kirlians proved that long ago.'

'Wrong,' said Bill. 'Radiation field photography is completely irrelevant. The so-called ”aura” is the creation of fields applied externally, with a lot of volts.'

'Corona discharge,' said Lapp. 'The air molecules are ionised, and get mixed up with organic c.r.a.p and out-ga.s.sing. I thought,' he added with a satirical scowl, 'your commie atheists would have got on to that back in the good old days when you _had_ commie atheists.'

Bill cut them both off before a dispute could get started. 'Let's stick to OOBEs for the moment. My Inst.i.tute has concluded provisionally that some cases of ”astral projection”, as it used to be called, are authentic. We've had people identify distant places in great detail while they experienced projection. And the vital signs agree. We get decrease in alpha rhythms, and a drop in electrical activity in the occipital or visual cortex. The greater decrease is in the right hemisphere, where most ESP data seems to be handled.'

'd.a.m.n, it does correlate. We found the same states from EEG printouts on the guys from the Vault.'

Alf Dean said, 'The same thing has happened with Mouse. They get a drastic reduction in his EEG when he's in trance.'

Bill sat back, and poured himself an orange juice. Christ, I've got to get my hands on that kid, he told himself. An engineer began a droning report on the status of some new protective clothing his group was testing, aimed at the paramount task of getting a man into the Vault, and out again, without poaching his brains. His attention drifting, Bill became conscious of the white buzz, the flicker hazing the table. A recording system, he decided. The absence of a secretarial flunkey had surprised him, but of course these days the tapes went direct to secure word processors. He gazed along the table. That sleek p.r.i.c.k LowenthaI, the psychologist, looked away. The b.a.s.t.a.r.d thinks I'm a madman, Bill thought with a breath of anger. My G.o.d, the ancient Egyptians knew more about OOBEs than that Skinner rat freak. I wonder what the aborigines thought about it? They were here long enough. 's.h.i.+t,' he said, lurching up in his seat.

Fedorenko had just begun to speak. The physicist stopped at once. 'Yes, Dr delFord?'

'I'm sorry, my mind was wandering.' You're not in the Grope Pit now, f.u.c.kface. In this hard line company, his question would seem merely ludicrous. They were not accustomed to the non-logical starters of heuristic reciprocity.

'Feel free to speak. We cannot afford to be governed by the rules of formal debate.' Unlike the general's, Fedorenko's accent was a slightly thickened version of Oxbridge British. It reminded Bill of Anne's rather than his own 'red brick' Liverpudlian. As a very young man, the Russian physicist had worked in England on radio telescopes, before the Cold War had started in earnest.

Sevastyianov was giving him the nod. What the h.e.l.l. Bill leaned forward toward Alf Dean. 'Do the local aboriginals have anything to say about the Rock?' It _was_ ludicrous. _Oligopithecus savagei_ might have been on the scene 25 megayears ago, but any word-of-mouth observations would have got a mite garbled in the interim.

Fedorenko apparently did not think so. Raising an eyebrow to Dean, he nodded in grave approval. The black man, clearly far from recovered after his ordeal, seemed happy to allow Fedorenko to pick up the ball.

'A penetrating question, Doctor. We did not consider the possibility at the outset. The earliest date for human arrival on this continent is roughly 100,000 years ago. Selene Alpha was a radioactive ruin long before that. Until Dr Dean's unorthodox appearance in the Vault chamber, we had not bothered to consult any anthropologist familiar with the local ethnographies. Of course, we had provisional a.n.a.lyses from exocultural specialists from our respective s.p.a.ce programs.'

Unconsciously, the physicist had picked up a calculator, and his fingers played at random over the keys. 'Uluru is the traditional domain of the Pitjandjara tribesmen. Fortunately, by the time we started our probes the team were authorised by the Australian government to relocate the aborigines outside the area -- '

'Which wasn't easy,' Chandler cut in. 'The bleeding hearts started screaming ”concentration camp” when we s.h.i.+fted the blacks.' The colonel stared blandly at Dean; clearly there had been words between them on the subject.

It was Fedorenko, though, who scowled angrily. 'I used the word ”fortunate” only because the lesser evil forestalled a potentially greater one.'

There was a shadow in the room. Bill found nothing of sympathy within him. No doubt some of the men here had colleagues among the dead, among the ruined bodies in the melted desert. Though the mourning was done, some dull ache remained at the uselessness of their deaths. Yet these men in their military uniforms, and the civilians who served them, had shared, perhaps, in the deaths of scores of thousands. With a surge of hard bitterness that surprised him, Bill thought: The gluon s.h.i.+eld might be used by just such men to murder thousands of millions. This time men had perished searching for traces of creatures from the stars, surely an enterprise touched with n.o.bility, but there was no simple, honest way to grieve their pa.s.sing.

Chandler had thrust his chair back gratingly. 'Yes, Dr Fedorenko, those men are dead, and more might have been if we hadn't used our muscle. h.e.l.l, I watched my boys coming out of Libya with their bellies blown open, with their guts flopping out in the sun.'

'Thank you, Colonel,' the huge Russian general said drily. 'I do not believe there is any need to stand.'

Chandler sat down. 'With respect, sir, I have to stress that we're moving into unknown territory. The excavation accident didn't stop us reaching the Vault chamber. We must get in there. The knowledge locked into that one facility will advance our technology a hundred years, maybe more.'

The general raised his formidable hand. 'I believe we all share a common motivation. Dr delFord, your conjecture about aboriginal legends was an inspired one. It also occurred to Dr Dean.'

The Australian straightened in his seat. 'I'm no expert on the Pitjandjara tribe, but I've had all the journals flown in during the last couple of days and it fits. As Victor mentioned, they've been relocated for their own protection. That's a tragedy in its own right, since it's only in the last decades that they've been ceded rights over this territory. They have clan territories adjoining Uluru, and I believe their sacred mythmakers had a lot to tell us about the Vault. Most myths are regional -- one of theirs isn't, and it's found among tribes thousands of kilometres away, tribes that don't share the same language.'