It was an aggressive schedule. Visit the Colonel’s base at 1:00A.M.; be done with it and at the rendezvous to pick up Paris and Erin at 04:00A.M. This time I would go in alone. Erin and Paris seemed to be doing fine. Near midnight they visited a coffee house near the park and were now getting ready to start the hike back. We broke orbit and headed to Colonel Cameron’s base. As we set up for descent, he floated up next to me in the airlock and held to the ceiling.
“The elevator will give you three floors down. On the third floor you’ll exit into the top-secret documents room. Beyond it, a door will take you to a hallway that leads to a security station with a twenty-four-hour guard. Next to his station is a storage closet with a keypad lock. It’s actually a stairwell to the fourth level. That’s the one you want. I sure would like to see what’s down there.”
“Why the change of heart?”
“Because I’m not convinced you’re the bad guys, and if you get caught down there I’ll be screwed for life.”
“I had thought of that. How about alarms?”
“There are no active alarms unless the base is put on alert. The lower levels are visited periodically twenty-four hours a day, so switching the alarm system on and off all the time became a headache. There are a few closed circuit cameras, one on the third level main hallway, others on the fourth. They aren’t monitored. They just feed tape twenty-four hours a day. The tapes record over themselves every twenty-four hours. If you are not detected they will never be looked at and your entry will automatically be recorded over.”
“How about if RJ sets you up with a communicator so I can talk to you if I need to while I’m in there?”
“Agreed.”
“I hope to be quick. If all goes well I’ll show you some photos from level four.”
“One other thing: in the bottom right-hand drawer of my desk there’s a file folder titled Patrick Manning. It’s the medical report of what killed Manning, your RJ. I’d take that and study it, if I were you.”
It caught me off guard. His RJ had passed away at fifty-five. Mine was not there yet. A spike of fear went through me. I nodded a thank you and got set at the door. “Colonel, that neck collar works even at a distance. If you make a play for the open hatch, you’ll be sleeping in the grass.”
He gave a sarcastic laugh. “Yeah. I figured.”
“Try to enjoy the ship. You won’t have it for much longer, then it’ll be gone forever.”
“Promise?”
We slowed and stopped. Danica’s voice came over our coms. “Clear.” I popped the hatch and waited for the hiss to die, then tugged it open. A short jump to the grass and I turned to watch Wilson and the Colonel pull it shut behind me. The sedan waited.
Headlights bouncing through woods were a real attention getter. Fortunately, no one was around to notice. As I approached the lighted guard shack, Colonel Cameron’s voice came over the com. “Stop at the gate. Show him your badge. It’s a gesture of respect.”
I did as he said.
“Working extra late, Colonel?”
“Tie up some loose ends.”
“What’s loose ends?”
“Left over work.”
“Okay.” He waved me in.
I pulled up to the office door and went in. The desk was still cleared. The lamp on the floor would not light. By the inside door, a wall switch brought on caged lamps overhead. I took a moment to check the hall. There was no one; only a few hallway lights were on. There was no reason to wait.
The secretarial desk at the end of the corridor was deserted and dark. I looked down the passageway that led to Blueprint. All the lights were off. This time the double doors were locked. A quick scan with F6 on the hand scanner gave me the numbers. The place was spooky. The air was cold from lack of human heaters. The door at the back had the same lock. Once again, the hand scanner decoded it. I entered into shadows and searched. No lights, no people. The elevator waited.
The keypad lock was a bit more sophisticated. The scanner took longer. There were red security seals on the cage door. I tore them carefully away and let the pieces hang for a reseal later. Inside the elevator there were three floors, just as the Colonel had promised. I tapped 3 and drew my weapon, checking it for stun. The ride was quick and smooth.
Level 3 was a dark maze of document shelves. One emergency light flickered against a wall. I got lost for a few moments but final caught the dim glow of a windowed door. Beyond it, the long hallway led to the security desk, also just as Colonel Cameron had promised. A guard sat tilted back in his chair, head down staring at a newspaper. I exchanged my weapon for my phony letter of authorization and held it out in front of me as I headed for the guard.
He was snoring. I tucked the letter back in, drew my weapon, said a prayer of forgiveness, and pulsed him with a stun. He jerked in his seat, but remained in the same position. It occurred to me that there were now two of us who hoped the security tapes were never reviewed.
The secure storage door was right where it should have been. The keypad lock was the more complex one, but again the hand scanner broke the code. Spiral stairs led steeply down. At the bottom, pneumatic doors opened automatically. Security doors at uneven intervals lined both sides of a long, shadowy passageway. The white tiled floor was dirty. The white walls had black scars from push-tables bumping against them. There was crumpled up paper and other trash on the floor. There was a faint smell of formaldehyde in the air. It gave me the creeps. One by one I opened and photographed the rooms. Most of it was a tangled mass of unrecognizable junk. Janitorial services seemed to be infrequent here. Every garbage pail was overflowing. Some areas looked heavily used, others abandoned. Several rooms had what looked like old-fashioned x-ray machines. Another room had chemicals, a small furnace, and a tabletop centrifuge.
The fifth door on the right was the one. It had red tape seals, something the others had not. I tore them open as carefully as possible and scanned the keypad. The door pushed open to a room dimly lit by yellow light. On a custom metallic stand in the middle of the room sat a weathered, gold colored, egg-shaped spacecraft. A big window wrapped over the front revealed a single center seat. No engines. Ports for braking rockets. A shark-fin piece missing from the tail section. The spacecraft and everything else in the room were covered with a layer of brown-gray dust. The light from my scanner showed my footprints on the floor. Specially designed consoles sitting around the room were covered with clear plastic tarps. They had either finished testing the spacecraft or given up. I made my pictures and scanned the ship’s electronics. To my amazement the scanner showed biological circuits, all long dead. I scanned the surrounding consoles for data and headed back.
The trip up was easier than it should have been. I rejoined the security seals using a clear plastic tape of my own, brought along for just that purpose. The level-three guard was still knocked out. At the door to the Colonel’s office there was a note taped to the window I had not noticed when I left. It was a drop time for the next supersonic flight test. Inside the office, I opened the desk file drawers and found the file folder for RJ’s duplicate. I left and locked up, and getting into the sedan I noticed bushes sticking out of the front bumper on the driver’s side. I pulled them off and headed out. The sleepy gate guard nodded and waved as I went by.
We sat around the oval table in gravity staring at prints of the Nasebian spacecraft. This time Colonel Cameron accepted my peace offering of coffee. We drank and stared in silence.
“It’s not actually a spacecraft. It’s an escape pod,” I said.
RJ added, “No engines.”
The Colonel finished his coffee, and looked at me with distrust. “So what now, Commander? You say I have a test flight the day after tomorrow. I do not want to miss it.”
I stood, reached over and unbuckled his metal collar, and dropped it on the table.
“Starting to trust me, are you? You shouldn’t.”
“On your next test flight you’ll be the first man to break the sound barrier, Colon
el.”
“That’s not at all guaranteed. There have been control problems.”
“I got pulled into your lab while you were passed out in the office. I gave them the answer, or I should say you gave them the answer. A trim system on the horizontal stabilizer. You’ll be able to trim out the instability.”
“So you’re letting me go? I can just walk right out that hatch?”
“Not exactly.”
“There are four of you but it would be worth a shot, wouldn’t you say? What’s to stop me from trying?”
“Six to eight hours.”
“What?”
“The coffee. You’ll be out six to eight hours.”
“Oh shit.”
“We’ll lock you in your car. Our scans indicate you’ll be safe there. When you wake up be careful driving out. You’ll still be under the influence a little bit. The six to eight hours will give us enough time to finish what we need to do. You will not see us again. We’ll be light years away.”
“I guess you don’t like long goodbyes.”
RJ added, “If you remember this Colonel, invest heavily in silicone doping. It will end the age of vacuum tubes.”
His eyes began to glaze, but he shook it off. “Thanks for a look at the future, I guess…”
And he was gone. Carefully, we put him back in his own flight suit, making sure there were no accidental souvenirs in any of the pockets. We dared to use external lights on the Griffin and with a newfound affection, carried him out into the damp, dark night. Seat recline happened to be one of the sedan’s few amenities. Shelly covered him with a blanket from the Griffin’s linen supply, the only material keepsake to be left behind. We said silent goodbyes, boarded, and lifted off to pick up Erin and Paris.
They were waiting for us with irritated attitudes. There had been a problem. A new kind of flying insect had shown up in droves and attacked. There had been no escaping the bastards. We pulled the two wounded warriors aboard covered with tiny welts on the face and hands. We did not strap in. We went straight to the med lab and worked on the bites while Shelly took us gently up. Fortunately, the topical applications were more than a match. The redness and inflammation faded quickly.
Despite the beating they had taken, they were beside themselves. They had discovered something incredible. They did not want a rest period. They wanted to meet right away. Their excitement was contagious. We raided the galley en masse and gathered around the oval table, completely ignoring the transition to weightlessness. Wilson wasn’t prepared; his feet came off the floor and he bicycle-pedaled his way to a seat.
Erin began. “There are duplicates of some of us down there. Once we picked up on the first one we began looking for more and found they were everywhere. They’d been there all along; we just hadn’t noticed.”
Paris added, “It began with Einstein. Going through newspaper copies on the microfiche machine, his photo was on one of the archeology magazine pages. His name is Alexander Porvios. He’s a physicist at a university. No surprise there.”
The rest of us looked at each other. I nodded in agreement. “We’re with you. We ran into another me at the military base. We had to bring him aboard briefly.”
It was probably the only thing that could have stunned the two of them, and it did. There was a long pause and Erin asked, “You made contact? You made first contact?”
I recounted the story. They sat and listened with keen interest. When the story was told Erin looked around the table, then back at me and asked, “What does it mean?”
RJ locked his hands behind his head and said, “It’s easy.”
We all looked at him and waited.
“What kind of a ship did you say the Nasebian craft was, Adrian?”
“A repository. They use it to document life in the galaxy.”
“And how long did you say Nasebians live?”
“At least two thousand years, usually longer. They never die, they just sort of fade in and out over many years, and eventually do not reappear.”
“So don’t you all see? Shelly’s original guess was that humans were brought here to seed the planet. It was a good guess, but not completely accurate. We found an escape pod at the military facility. An escape pod means there was a problem with the Nasebian’s ship. The escape pod was used to get to Earth II. The mother ship was a repository, records of the explored galaxy. Records like DNA records. The Nasebian that escaped here brought along everything he would need to rescue himself. He brought the ingredients to create an advanced culture out of the Homo erectus that lived here at the time. They would provide him with the things he needed to survive as well as the industrial manufacturing base to recover and repair his mother ship, and he had two thousand years or more to do it.”
We sat stunned. Another long, silent moment and Paris spoke, “That fits the rest of it.”
“Rest of it? There’s more?” asked Shelly.
Paris nodded. “Earth II’s great pyramids were constructed on the banks of the Euros River in the Salara Forest in the Salara Province. Legend has it that is the birthplace of Earth II’s culture. The Salara forest is made up of flat, forested plains and high surrounding plateaus. Archeologists have barely scratched the surface exploring caves there. Evidence of modern man first appeared in that area. They do not have carbon dating here yet, or any kind of radio dating for that matter, but they are very good at geological layering. They’ve dated the oldest evidence of modern man to fifteen or sixteen hundred years ago. That’s when the big jump in evolution took place. From Neanderthal to modern man, overnight. What’s more, it was an explosion of modern man. Somewhere around eleven hundred to twelve hundred years ago construction of those great pyramids began. They were completed in record time. From there, you know the rest of the history. Those are the archeological facts, but there are legends of the great god Capal who guided man in those times. The same Capal whose chariot descended from the heavens to teach and help mankind.”
“Wow!” said Danica over the com.
“Wow!” agreed Wilson.
Shelly asked, “Well, the next question kind of worries me a bit. Where is our Nasebian god Capal right now?”
Paris answered, “That part of the story is incredulous. You will need to be open-minded.”
Wilson said, “Compared to what we’ve already heard? Are you kidding?”
Paris ignored him. “The hieroglyphs are much more complete here than they are on our Earth. Because Earth II’s history is so corrupted, they have not been able to translate them with much success. The records here tell how the pyramids were built and what they are used for, something that has been argued on our Earth for thousands of years. The records here say that the great pyramid not a tomb. It is a machine.”
Wilson scoffed, “A machine made out of stone?”
Paris remained undeterred. “The interior of our great pyramid has always been a mystery. It does not seem to have been designed for humans to enter and move about in. You enter the pyramid and are immediately confronted with the ascending passage, a smooth, narrow corridor too steep for humans to ascend without a railing or climbing gear. It leads you to the grand galley, another narrow, ascending corridor with an extremely high ceiling and just as difficult to climb without help. When the pyramid was first entered, these passageways were blocked in spots by huge stone slabs nearly impossible to remove. When they were finally extricated, an empty coffer with no lid was found in the King’s chamber. There are many small airshafts leading to the surface pointing at different places in the sky. None of this has made much sense, except for some relationships to stars and constellations.”
Paris paused to catch his breath. He waited for dissenters, then continued on. “Look at it this way. Imagine a primitive tribe happens to come across a diesel engine the size of a house in the wilderness. The thing is so huge they can enter the exhaust pipes and actually walk around inside the piston shafts, coolant lines, and fuel lines. They would have no idea what those things were for or why they were mad
e. That’s exactly what we are doing with the Great Pyramid.”
Wilson asked, “Are you actually going to tell us what the thing does?”
Paris nodded. “Like any sophisticated machine, it has several applications. It’s a power generator, a communication device, and a transport unit. You fill the empty coffer in the King’s Chamber with the proper materials, flood the chambers beneath the pyramid with the correct fluid, replace the capstone with the precise, gigantic polished crystal. Then you wait for the proper alignment and the machine comes to life.”
“Wow!” said Wilson.
“That’s not all. I’m sure most of you are familiar with the Mayan calendar, the one that predicted the coming of Disclosure, when humans learned we weren’t the only intelligent species in the solar system. Well, there is a similar calendar here. It uses the same design, hubs interconnected with larger and smaller wheels that turn to represent time. It’s an artifact in the museum, only this one not only tracks Earth II’s movement through the heavens, it also has a wheel that tracks something called Capal’s star. Capal’s star can be only one thing: his spacecraft. He tracked his ship and when he was ready, used the pyramid to transport back to it.”
“Talk about science fiction,” said Erin.
“A leap of faith to believe,” added Wilson.
“So by that reasoning, that’s it. He’s long gone,” said Shelly.
Paris nodded. “Capal is always referred to in the past tense, as though he died or left. But, there is one other thing. The few records relating to the Udjat allude to a story of it being housed in the smaller of the two pyramids. We will need to go there to get more information.”
Everyone looked at me. I had to shake off the story I had just heard. The com was open. “Did you get that, Danica?”
“Yes, Adrian. And, I have the coordinates. We may as well just drop to a lower orbit and let Sir Isaac pull us around.”
“Make it so.”
Chapter 40