“Abysmal plains,” Pacifa retorted to that statement. “Not much for tourists here.”
“You’ll just have to bus them over this stretch,” Gaspar said with a smile. The seat of his bike was higher now, and the level terrain helped too, so that he was doing better.
“Impossible,” Eleph said, taking him seriously. “No motor will operate within the atmospheric conversion field.”
“Oh?” Don was interested. “I thought it was just electricity that got fouled up.”
“Ignition is required for a motor.”
“How about a diesel?”
“That might operate, if allowance is made for continuous oxygenation in the chambers. But the exhaust would foul our limited environment very quickly and asphyxiate us. The same is true for almost any flame. Human usage is the reasonable maximum the infusion of oxygen can sustain.”
“But our radios work,” Melanie said. She too had her seat higher, and was doing better, but Don thought the bike was only a small part of the reason. For one thing, she was no longer wearing her wig. She had packed it away, and was going openly as she was. That had bothered Don at first, but he discovered that after the first few hours it didn’t matter. She was herself.
“The radios are shielded,” Eleph said. “The current they use is minor.”
“Still, if electricity does—” Don began.
“Of course electricity functions,” Eleph said sharply. “I never said it didn’t. Our own nervous systems are electrical. But the heavy-duty applications involved in a motor become complex.”
“So we use bicycles,” Pacifa said. “They always did make more sense than cars, anywhere, and are mighty handy if you want to sneak up on something.”
“Sneak up?” Eleph demanded, frowning.
“Cuba is a hostile foreign nation,” she said. “Our mission may be to circle it, spying out its secrets. We couldn’t do it if we made a lot of noise.”
“I hope it’s not that,” Melanie said. “I don’t want to spy on anyone.”
Don agreed. Exploration was fine, but not spying.
“We should know, when we are informed of our mission,” Eleph said.
“Aren’t we getting close to that depot now?” Don asked. “My meter says so.”
“Close,” Pacifa agreed. “The depot is right in these flats, or we wouldn’t be here at all. I’ve been watching for dud shells, or whatever. How’s the ankling?”
“Doesn’t seem to help much.”
“Oh, come on. Get your toes up, and don’t push with the middle of your foot. If you had proper gear, you wouldn’t be able to do that. We’ll have to lift your saddle a bit more. Lean forward; get your weight where it belongs. You aren’t tricycling around the city block, you know.”
Indeed he wasn’t. The resistive muck had sapped his scant strength, though he knew that resistance was largely in his imagination. Oh for a good long rest.
Melanie cycled close. “Mothers are like that,” she said.
They rode on for another half hour. Pacifa pulled up to talk with Gaspar. Then the two called a halt.
“We’re past the spot,” she announced. “Anybody hear a beacon?”
No one had. “A beacon is a visual indication, not a sonic,” Eleph muttered. “You must have misunderstood.”
“It’s supposed to be the same whistle we use to find each other,” Pacifa said. “But mechanically generated. Check it yourself.”
“Madam, I shall.” Eleph led the way back, watching his locator closely. There was a slight difference between units, so that when Eleph’s read exactly 84°50’ west longitude, Don’s read 84°49’, and the others varied similarly. That represented a divergence of a mile, and the whistle was limited to about a mile. No one on the surface, a mile and a half above, could pick it up, theoretically. Don questioned the validity of any claim that a sound could be completely damped out by distance, but he wasn’t going to question a physicist on that. Perhaps the phase had something to do with it.
They checked the exact coordinates as interpreted by each of their meters, then circled the entire area at one mile and two mile radii. There was no whistle, and no sign of the depot.
“We appear to have inaccurate coordinates,” Eleph said gravely.
They knew what that meant. No supplies. It would be impossible for them to find the depot without knowing its precise location, for the Gulf of Mexico was a thousand miles across. An error of as little as twenty miles would reduce their chances to sheerest accident.
“Cuba?” Don asked, remembering Pacifa’s suspicion. “If they knew—”
“They do not control these waters,” Eleph said. “They would have no clue to the location, even if they were aware of the mission.”
“Must be a simple mistake, then,” Gaspar said. “Melanie, are you sure you remembered the coordinates correctly?”
“I’m sure,” she said. “I wish I weren’t.”
“Mistakes of this nature are not made,” Eleph insisted, the tic in his cheek beginning to show again.
Pacifa began unpacking the tent sections. “If it isn’t a mistake, and no one took away the depot, it must be deliberate. Do you really think we would be set up for nothing?”
“Of course not!” Eleph said. “The depot is here, somewhere. The coordinates must have suffered a change in transmission.”
“Hey, are you saying I—” Melanie demanded.
“No. I am saying that you must have been given the wrong coordinates. Such information is routinely transferred from one office to another. Someone in the chain must have changed it, to strand us here.”
“Who?” Pacifa asked.
“A representative of anyone who wanted this mission to fail.”
Gaspar shook his head. “The simplest explanation is most often correct, correct? These government bureaucracies make a living from fouling things up. Some dolt put spoiled food-powder in Don’s pack and never checked it, and another dolt must have misquoted the coordinates. No mistake is too idiotic for a bureaucrat to make, especially when lives are at stake. Remember all the boo-boos over the years in the space program! Tying down delicate equipment with baling wire, putting faulty wiring in an oxygen chamber, sending up a manned mission when there were icicles on the rockets—”
“Icicles?” Eleph asked.
“Remember when the Challenger exploded? Because the cold had stiffened the O-rings? That mistake cost seven lives. And the Hubble orbiting telescope—two billion dollars, and then they discovered they’d put in the wrong shaped mirror.”
Eleph frowned as if confused, but rallied in a moment. “Those were isolated incidents in an operation of unparalleled complexity. Still, I fear that something of that nature is the case here.”
“We shall have to go backward to land—or forward to the mission,” Pacifa said. She had been working all along, and now had the tents assembled and was starting on supper. “We do have access to the location of the next depot, fortunately.”
“No certainty of that,” Eleph muttered.
“For someone who’s as pro-government as you are, you’re mighty suspicious!” she snapped at him.
The tic was rampaging now. “Madam, I am merely being realistic. We are already short of food, and further complications—”
“If this was an accident,” Pacifa said evenly, “the next depot may be all right. But if someone deliberately changed the number, he could just as readily have changed all the numbers. So we had better guess right.”
“Maybe if we knew what the mission is, we could tell whether it’s an accident,” Melanie said. “I mean, who cares if we’re just riding around? But if we’re spying—”
“I don’t see why anyone should try to abort undersea geology,” Gaspar said.
“Or archaeology,” Don said.
“Or a new kind of tourism,” Pacifa said.
“Or a mere testing of equipment,” Eleph said. “But—”
“But our specialties may be just a cover for what we’re really supposed to do,?
?? Pacifa concluded. “So we really don’t know and can’t guess. But it occurs to me that our smartest move, if this trouble is deliberate, might be to get on with it in a hurry and catch them by surprise. They’ll be expecting us to turn back at this point, and if something is going on under the ocean, that reprieve may be all they need to cover it up.”
“Precisely my sentiments,” Eleph said.
“If those two agree, they must be right,” Gaspar said with a smile.
“B-but if we don’t find the s-second depot—”
“Then we’ll simply blow the whistle,” Pacifa said. “Ride up on the nearest land and make a scene that’ll bring our bureaucrats scampering. They may have ignored Melanie, in her vision, but I suspect that if we made a concerted effort, we would not be ignored.”
Melanie clapped her hands. “How beautifully simple!”
Indeed, Don liked the notion too. No one could hurt them in their phased out state; they would be pedaling ghosts. The fearful hullabaloo would publicize the whole business. A drastic step, and not one to be taken short of necessity—but still a realistic alternative that would ensure prompt action. It would have to be prompt, if they ran out of food.
And probably there was no conspiracy anyway. But then he thought of one more thing. “B-but suppose no land is near?”
“Well, let’s find out,” Pacifa said. “If there’s nothing, we’ll just have to plan ahead. Save enough food to make it to land. Melanie?”
“I’m not supposed to give out the new coordinates until—”
“Until we’re at the prior ones,” Pacifa finished for her. “As we are now. Satisfied?”
“Yes, I suppose so,” Melanie agreed. “Twenty one degrees, fifty north latitude, eighty nine degrees, thirty west longitude.”
“The Yucatan,” Gaspar said promptly. He showed the relevant map segment. “North coast, about here.”
Don stared. “Dzibilchaltun,” he breathed.
The others looked at him.
“Dzibilchaltun,” he repeated. “Fabulous ancient city of the Mayans, and before. That’s the area. I don’t know it from the coordinates, but I could never forget that spot on the map.”
“I thought you were a European archaeologist,” Gaspar said, not unkindly.
“I am. I know almost nothing about the new world. But who hasn’t heard of Dzibilchaltun?”
“Who, indeed,” Pacifa said wryly. It was obvious that the name meant nothing to the others. “But at least it gives you something to work on.”
“Yes!” Don said. “Dzibilchaltun was contemporary with the Minoan culture, though of course there was no connection between them. Certainly I’ll want to compare—”
“Maybe we’d better save the exploration for when we get there,” Pacifa said. “We have a long hard ride on short supplies. At least it is near land—quite near. Right now we’d better sleep.” She served up reduced rations, and they turned in.
But Don, as always when under stress, could not get the rest he needed. The entire project had taken on new meaning. He strove to remember what he had picked up about the Mayan culture, but there were only inconsequential fragments. The Mayans had had what some reckoned to be the world’s finest calendar, and much fine handiwork in metals and cloth, and superior art—but what of their considerable history? Dzibilchaltun dated from about 3000 B.C., as did the Minoan civilization, but the Mayans hadn’t built that city. They had come later. That was all he could remember, if he had ever known more. He had been too narrow a specialist, engrossed in the wonders of his own specialty, poring over the language and script of the ancient Cretans until these seemed almost as familiar to him as his own people. He had neglected the other side of the ancient world almost completely. If only he had known of the opportunity that was coming!
As he wrestled with his uncertainties and frustrations, an unpleasant truth emerged. Pacifa was correct: their specialties were only a cover for their real mission, which had nothing to do with anything they had studied. Otherwise Gaspar would have been sent to the Bahamas platform, and Pacifa would have had a feasible tourist route to clarify. There would have been a Mayan scholar along, instead of a Minoan one. And Eleph—what was he doing, anyway? He said he was a physicist, and that he knew how to repair the breathing field, but probably that would never have to be put to the test.
If Don and Gaspar and Melanie and Pacifa were merely along for appearances, with Eleph doing the dirty work—it had to be dirty, with secrecy like this!—why had the government bothered? There were no appearances on this mile-deep tour.
The more he thought about it, the less he liked it.
Melanie was lying beside him. “You’re not sleeping, Don,” she murmured. “And I don’t suppose it’s because of frustrated passion for me.”
He had to laugh, but it was forced. “I’d rather be honest, and just admit that your hair has severely shaken my romantic notions,” he said. “But you’re a good enough person, Melanie, and—”
“Don’t belabor it. What’s really on your mind?”
“Do you ever get the feeling that we’re penned in a madhouse?”
“All the time,” she agreed.
“I mean here/now. The group of us on this mission.”
“Oh, you’re not mad,” she said. “Not really. I’ve seen much worse.”
“Worse than a militaristic physicist or a bike-toting grandma?”
“He’s not as bad as all that. And she’s not a grandma. Just—I do like her, Don. I do need her.”
“Sorry. That business between you two—”
He broke off, but Melanie didn’t respond.
“Hey, did I say something to—?” he asked, concerned.
“Oh, no,” she said quickly. “I was just thinking. About worse people. I knew some real characters at—at another place. One woman was a farmer, slaughtering and butchering her own hogs—do you have any idea how much blood—?”
“I don’t care to,” Don said quickly, not from squeamishness, but because it was an oblique way to support her. She was doing him the kindness of talking to him now, and he wanted it to last a little longer.
“And once I met a couple of young men at a John Birch meeting. I wore the wig, of course; they didn’t know. One had a gun collection—”
“John Birch?” Don demanded, surprised. “Isn’t that the far right group that— you went to—?”
“I do try to listen to everyone’s viewpoint,” she said defensively. “When I get up the nerve to go out among people. Anyway, he collected guns. About twenty rifles, eight pistols, three submachine guns, and two bazookas, with ammunition. He said he was a monarchist. He had a bottle he’d picked up in Turkey, he said—full of enemy eyeballs. Turkish enemies—I don’t know where the eyes came from originally, but they were awful. Maybe it was some other country; I don’t know whether I can believe him. But those eyeballs certainly looked real. He talked about impaling the Supreme Court justices on the front steps of the Court Building, the slow way.”
“Impalement!” Don exclaimed. “I didn’t know there were fast and slow ways.”
“Neither did I. In fact, I didn’t know what impalement was. But he explained. In detail. I think I got sick.”
“But how—?”
She was silent.
Don decided not to push the question. He was beginning to remember how the Assyrians had done it. The sharp point of a long stout pole was inserted in the subject’s posterior, and he was thereby hoisted into the air, his own weight completing the impalement, in the course of agonizing hours. Melanie had known worse people!
“I guess we’re pretty well off, here, after all,” he said.
“Yes. Despite all the doubt, it’s sort of nice. In its way. We’re together, all of us, perforce. Holding hands, as it were. I haven’t felt that sort of thing in a long time.”
He pondered briefly, and decided to take a plunge. “M-may I?” he asked.
She laughed. Then her hand came to him in the darkness, and he took it.
> Then, holding hands, they slept.
CHAPTER 7
CREVASSE
Proxy 5–12–5–16–8: Attention.
Acknowledging.
Status?
The members of the group are coming to terms with their situation. They realize that something is wrong, and that it may be because of external malice, but have resolved to proceed regardless. This is an excellent sign.
Are you sure of them now?
No. There remain too many complex currents. They are for the moment united in a specific effort, but are not melded. They need more time. Progress is being made, and the young woman is forming attachments to two of the other recruits. The outcome looks positive, but cannot be presumed. We need four attachments.
How will you achieve this?
I will continue putting challenges before them, as planned. The next one is natural: a crevasse which will be difficult to pass rapidly.
We hope you know what you’re doing.
I hope so too.
“Now we’ll have to set up rationing,” Pacifa said. “We’re already short because of that spoilage. No trouble stretching the food of four between five people; we each have more than enough. But we have five hundred miles to go with no refills, and that’s a rough haul. We’ll make it because we have to, and because perhaps some other party doesn’t think we can—but we aren’t going to enjoy it much.”
Don felt guilty, because it was the failure of his food supply that intensified the squeeze. He knew it wasn’t his fault, yet it bothered him.
“Now I’ll ration it out with strict impartiality,” Pacifa continued in her brisk way. “You will all carry your own, but we shall do a count now. You’ll get suspicious when you get tired and hungry and short of sleep—and believe me, you’ll be all three!—and that’s natural. So I want you to check the count now, so we all know exactly how many packages there are.”
There were sixteen.
“Each package is supposed to be good for one meal,” she continued. “At three meals a day for all five of us, that’s about one day. At our normal progress, we have five days travel coming up.” She paused, making sure they all understood. “So we’ll have to speed up. Our limit is food, not strength. We’ve toughened up the past few days, warming up for this effort. We’ll do it in two and a half days. And we’ll make the food stretch to cover that. Five meals a day.”