Expedition Beyond Page 25

  “We usually pile boxes next to the wall so nobody will hit the switch by accident,” Mallory said.

  “What is this for?” Fishand asked.

  “We collect evidence on the hunters, usually whale parts that we retrieve from the sea, and put it in cold storage in the wall, so it’s hidden from unfriendly eyes when we refuel. When we get home, we have the pictures we took from above and the evidence we collected from below. Neat, huh? We’ve sent lots of criminals to trial in international courts, and some get locked up for a very long time. Heavy fines, too.”

  Inside information like this could be lucrative if sold to the right people, so Mitch knew they were providing Fishand with a valuable commodity.

  “Proceed,” Fishand said.

  The second cargo bay was empty and without cabinets.

  The “dogs” sat in the third cargo bay.

  “What do we have here?” Fishand asked.

  Mallory said, “We call ‘em ‘fish.’ When we spot whale hunters, we drop these and they swim underwater behind the whaling boat, scooping up the whale entrails they throw overboard.”

  Fishand walked around the vehicles; one had a gray space blanket inside the cockpit.

  “Open this one.”

  Mitch hoped it wasn’t filled with guns.

  When the hatch hissed open, Fishand jerked off the blanket, revealing only the control panel and stick.

  “This fish controls the rest. The panels are heat- and light-sensitive—got to keep ‘em covered,” Mallory said.

  “You’re an expert on whaling?” Fishand asked him.

  “Not a clue. I just fly where he tells me to.”

  “You have someone who can find these illicit hunters?”

  “You betcha.”

  As if on cue, a lanky man shuffled in.

  Mallory said, “There you are, Hans. I want you to meet somebody. Hans, Fishand.”

  Hans nodded.

  “You are the one that knows about whaling?” Fishand asked.

  “Ja, I do.”

  Chapter 34

  T-minus (10:05:22:59)

  “Bored yet?” John asked when Bill answered the phone.

  “Hell, no. If you keep paying me for just sitting here, that’s what I’ll do. Just send down the essentials, and a few more books,” Bill replied.

  “Listen, I have a couple of developments to tell you about. I’m bringing in a team to inspect the lower levels and try to spearhead across the void. Time is limited. We want to complete this operation in the next three weeks.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Anderson said that’s all the time we may have left. We’re cutting holes in the upper platforms to perforate the floors and help with airflow and working our way down. Anderson thinks air is being sucked into this vent, and I don’t want the platforms to be pulled down. We’ve finished drilling One and Two and are working on Three and Four.”

  Bill said, “Did you ever fix the floor edges on One and Two?”

  “Fix what?” John asked.

  “One and Two are not on rollers. If the vent closes any more, they could buckle. If you’ve cut holes in them, you may have destabilized them even more.”

  John said, “Honestly, I don’t know. But I’ll check into it personally.”

  “When?”

  “Now.” John cradled the receiver, then said to Amy, “If Henry calls, I don’t want to talk to him. Not now, maybe never.”

  “What’s up?” she asked.

  “Trouble at both ends of the vent.”

  Approaching Anderson Vent One, John and Amy passed a “closed to the public” sign, then John slowed at a makeshift RV park filled with press cars and television transmission vans with satellite dishes trained in seemingly haphazard directions. John stopped at the guard gate to display his pass. A throng of reporters gathered behind the chain-link fence on both sides of the roadway and shouted questions.

  “Are we there yet?”

  “What’s it like at the center of the Earth?”

  “What’s happening now?”

  John ignored them. The gates were opened, and he drove through.

  “I wish we hadn’t built it directly over the vent,” John muttered.

  The three-and-a-half-story, forest-green metal structure he referred to had been constructed on steel girders spanning the vent. John drove down the wood plank ramp to the interior and parked.

  The ground foreman appeared, his hardhat and sunglasses covering his face. He was dressed in a dusty florescent orange shirt and baggy orange pants.

  “Jimmy, we’re going down,” John told him.

  “How far?” Jimmy asked.

  “Levels One and Two.”

  “Okay. I’ll get the cage ready.”

  John strode across the checkerboard of holes drilled through Level One’s flooring and dropped to his knees.

  “What are you looking for?” Amy called from the elevator.

  “This.”

  He inspected the buckled board along the edge. Underneath, the I-beam was twisted and ruptured where it had been set into the granite.

  “Remove two or three of the floorboards around the edge and make sure the foundation struts are well-anchored. Do the same on Level Two,” he told Jimmy.

  “Will do,” the foreman replied.

  John stood, brushing off his hands. “That should fix it.”

  John was enjoying his first chance to relax in days when Bill phoned his hotel room to report, “Level Eighteen looks normal. Level Nineteen, where we are now, has a slight dish to the floor.”

  John asked, “How slight a dish?”

  “About three centimeters downward in the center.”

  “Is that significant?” The blind leading the blind, John thought.

  “Well, probably not. Our main problem is that we can’t shoot across the void from here. We need another platform, closer.”

  “We don’t have time to build another platform. What’s wrong with shooting across?”

  “The cable’s not long enough. We have one hundred kilometers of cable, and the void is almost one hundred kilometers away, so we can shoot to it, but not across it,” Bill explained.

  “Can you splice cables together?” John asked.

  “Yeah, but I don’t know if the splices would hold.”

  John said, “Maybe not normally, but where you are—and, especially, where the void is—you could run a freight train across it; it wouldn’t weigh even a pound.”

  “You’re right,” Bill agreed, “OK, we’ll give it a go. The air’s fine—no carbon monoxide. There’s two percent higher oxygen content, and five atmospheres of pressure. Otherwise, it’s about the same as what you’re breathing, maybe a little cleaner. We’re taking off our suits.”

  “If you send Sam through the void, I want him in a suit. Understood?”

  “Understood.”

  “Let me speak with Jack.”

  “Hold on.”

  Jack Squires answered. John asked him, “Are your rocket birds ready?”

  “We haven’t unpacked.”

  “Well, get them ready. I want a complete tomography of what’s below you as soon as possible. Skip the void and send me what’s on the other side because I’m not risking another man without knowing. Are you as good as you said you were?”

  “Better. I’ll get right on it,” Jack replied.

  Ninety minutes passed before he telephoned John.

  “You gotta see this! Check your computer. I’ve already uploaded,” Jack said happily.

  John watched his monitor as the corkscrew image drawn by the rocket’s electronics became a spiraling three-dimensional column. He typed commands to rotate the image turning it lengthwise, allowing him to simulate traveling downward through the void, then bisected the column from points o
utside. The digitized tomography program was working beautifully.

  The bird became lost in the void and couldn’t be retrieved, but John now had a map of the vent, including the cone-shaped entrance to the void.

  A second rocket bird was launched with an altered program. It swooshed down the center of the column displayed on John’s monitor. Numbers rolled by on the lower right hand side: 150 km…200 km…300 km. At 500 km, a spiral line was drawn that transformed into another column, and the numbers decreased as the bird returned. At 360 km, the spiral flared inward into a cone; at 350 km, the bird was lost.

  John brought up the entire image on his monitor, rotated it, cruised through the fuzzy void and sliced through the columns. He was impressed by what had been produced. He now knew the void was 100 km away from Jack, and 250 km across.

  On the far side were a mirror image cone and a tunnel to the core.

  There was a light knock on John’s hotel room door, then Amy let herself in without waiting for a reply. She was wearing a short black skirt, white blouse and three-inch heels; makeup coated a reddened blemish on her neck.

  “I was detained,” she said.

  “So I see,” John said, adjusting the laptop’s volume. “We can hear them, but I need to use the phone for them to hear us.”

  He dialed Level Nineteen, then panned the remote camera across the platform by keyboard. Jack was typing at the table, but didn’t answer John’s call. There were three other men: Lyle Emery, the mustached foreman of the group; Sam Hilderman, the cocky teenager who had already traveled into the void; and James Westmore, a forty-two-year-old aerospace engineer.

  When Emery picked up the receiver, John asked, “Are you ready now?”

  “Let me check,” then he asked Jack, “Have you figured out the trajectories yet?”

  John told Amy, “Jack figured out the trajectories yesterday with Westmore, so I wonder what he’s working on now.”

  Jack said, “Yes. Tell John we’re ready.”

  “Ready,” Emery relayed to John.

  “Go for it.”

  A tubular structure at the far edge of the platform housed a three-meter-long rocket pointed down through a two-meter-diameter hole cut into the floor. Coils of cable were attached to its side and four drums were lined up nearby; over four hundred kilometers of cable had been spliced together. Emery unbuckled the straps securing the rocket to the frame.

  “Let it ease out slowly. I’ll take over at fifty meters,” Jack said as he began typing on his laptop.

  “All clear!” Emery announced. He hit the remote launch, and the rocket flashed slightly before it disappeared. “Power bird away!”

  Ten seconds passed before Emery said, “Fifty meters.”

  “I got her,” Jack said.

  Cable snaked off the floor, then continued to play out from the first drum.

  John focused the remote camera onto Jack’s monitor and enlarged the image; he saw numbers flash across the bottom.

  Jack announced, “Twenty kilometers per hour...forty...eighty, one-twenty...two hundred...two-fifty.”

  A cone-shaped image appeared in three-dimensional graphics and a bright white dot raced toward the bottom of the cone. The image rotated as Jack sliced through the tubular wall and tailed the flashing beacon.

  “Three-fifty KPH. Four hundred. Interface,” Jack said.

  “The first drum’s empty. We’re on to the second,” Emery told John.

  Jack said, “Five hundred.”

  The scrolling numbers slowed.

  “Trajectory?” Westmore asked.

  Jack said, “It’s in the eye of the needle.”

  Emery announced when the second drum emptied, and the third. John followed the flashing dot on Jack’s monitor. Thirty minutes passed.

  Jack said, “Past interface. Gentlemen, the rocket is climbing.” And when a new set of numbers appeared: “Impact in t-minus eight minutes.”

  “How does he know when it will impact?” Amy asked John.

  “Radar. The time is extrapolated from the speed.”

  “T-minus seven minutes, forty-three seconds.”

  As the distance increased, the timeline moved rhythmically to zero.

  “Impact,” Jack announced.

  Claws snapped forward from the base of the rocket and planted it firmly in the rock wall past the interface.

  John watched Jack swirl the image to hone in on the white dot; numbers flashed, calculating the bird’s position. John panned the remote camera around the platform. Motors on the fourth drum roared, tightening the cable. Emery fired a stake gun to affix the taut cable to the floor. Sam was getting into a spacesuit.

  The men carried the Boster Denton Luge Glider to the floor opening. Emery snapped electromagnets on its underbelly around the cable and the men positioned its lightweight body with handgrips downward.

  “Ready?” Emery asked.

  Sam nodded and put on his helmet. The spacesuit had been deemed unnecessary. Emery helped him into the luge harness that held him prone against the machine.

  Emery then turned on the power and the encircling magnets sprang off the cable.

  “Neat, huh? No friction,” he called over to Jack.

  Jack was fully absorbed with his computer and didn’t acknowledge him.

  “Jack! What are you doing?” Emery asked.

  Jack answered, “His beacon is on; I’ve got him. You better check his microphone.”

  John enlarged his view of Jack’s monitor just in time to see the program he had been working in change to another one, displaying Sam’s beacon and the vent.

  Amy was watching over John’s shoulder. “I’ll run a more thorough background check on him,” she said.

  Westmore sat next to Jack and looked at his monitor. “Slide him away easy. Ignition at one kilometer.”

  Jack pulled his headset microphone close to his mouth and said to Sam, “Ease out slow, then fire-up at one K.”

  SSPS jets fired momentarily and Sam dropped through the floor.

  Four minutes later, Jack announced, “One kilometer. Extend wings for rotation control. Ignition.”

  The flashing light on the monitor moved downward. Jack rotated the view so the display followed the dot.

  He told Westmore, “He should be in the void in less than an hour.”

  Chapter 35

  T-minus (08:12:59:59)

  “All clear!” Des called.

  None of the fifteen warriors moved.

  “Des, what does ‘all clear’ mean?” Anastasia asked.

  The keg of explosives was half-buried in the sand; the thinly covered fuse snaked away from it and down the beach.

  “That’s going to explode. Ka-boom!”

  “Ah-ee-comralla-ralla. Ka-boom!” Anastasia called.

  The warriors scattered.

  “That’s better,” Des said. He rolled out another fifty meters of fuse. “Alée, torch please.”

  She handed him the lit torch.

  “Ready? All clear? Here we go.”

  He touched the torch to the fuse and backed up another thirty paces.

  The fuse burned until it was twenty meters from the keg…then it fizzled out.

  “Stay back! It still might blow!” Des said, reinforcing his words with pantomime before inching along the blackened fuse towards the keg.

  “What the—?”

  He removed the charred, wet body of a crayfish from the fuse, then heard a pop, crackle and fizz. He started running, then leaped just as the gunpowder ignited; the explosion carried him fifteen meters through the air. He landed uninjured and the keg staves pummeled the sand around him.

  “It worked! God Almighty, it’s a success!”

  Everyone clapped hands and whooped.

  Des stood, brushing sand from his tunic. “We need to load the ne
xt one with flak.”

  “What is ‘flak?’”

  “Shards of metal to maim and kill beasts.”

  Des jogged on the beach with Alée, her warriors and some of the stronger men.

  “Pick it up, pick it up,” Des chanted.

  Alée stopped ahead of the group and surveyed the horizon. She pointed past Oom’s hut.

  Des looked, but saw nothing. “What is it?”

  “Elantros,” Alée said.

  “Where?” Des inquired.

  The sand shifted slightly as the ground thundered.

  “There!” Alée said as her troops whispered in anticipation.

  As the thundering sound grew louder, Des saw children running towards the beach from the village.

  Anastasia said excitedly, “Many have never seen elantros!”

  “Alée, have your troops hold the children back. If they have never seen elantros, they won’t understand their power. Don’t spook them.”

  Alée lined her troops along the beach to stop the approaching villagers.

  Now, Des saw dozens of galloping horses. Elan rode a chestnut thoroughbred with a braided mane and tail that glistened in the sun. Following her, each warrior held a war club crosswise above a well-groomed steed: a bay quarterhorse, paints, pintos, Arabians and Appaloosas. Most of the riders were women, but there were a few men. All the horses had braided manes and tails, war paint and gaily colored woolen blankets, but no saddles. Two hemp ropes encircled each throatlatch and withers; the horses’ heads were free of bridles or halters.

  Now the entire village was turning out to see them. Alée’s warriors faced the gathering crowd.

  The horses slowed to a trot, then stopped.

  Des guessed Anastasia had seen elantros before, because she had gone down the beach with some of the warriors to place husk-covered coconuts in rows on the sand.

  “Yi, yi, yi, yi, yi,” Elan shouted. Her horse was pawing and neighing. She held her hand high in the air towards Des and bowed her head.

  All the riders saluted him in the same way.

  Des returned the gesture, then walked in front of the line of standing horses to review them. He counted forty-two, all in excellent condition.