7
For a while, nobody spoke. They just stood there, watching
the bruja, who, in her turn, steadying herself on Chava’s
shoulder, just watched the creature.
“You see,” she said in a whisper that was nearly drowned
out by the creature’s wheezing. “It is growing bigger.”
She reached deep into her pouch and pulled out a
handful of something. She began to dance, tracing a slow
circle around the creature, just at the edge of the cloud the
creature was creating for itself. She dragged Chava along
with her, sprinkling something in the sand before her. It was
a wandering dance, off-kilter, almost drunken. At first the
others just watched; then slowly one or two began to follow,
then a few more. Some shook their heads, as if breaking
out of a trance.
When she stood directly across from the creature’s head,
she stopped and began turning in place. Soon everyone
was doing this, watching the bruja, falling into place, slowly
forming a complete circle. They turned around the creature,
some of them standing knee deep in the surf.
She swung her staff before her, stepped back, and
stepped forward again. The others followed. Chava
stepped too far and found himself coughing, having
breathed some of the gas the creature was emitting. His
eyes stung; his throat itched.
The bruja lifted her hands, her index and middle fingers
crossed. Chicxulub, she murmured, and turned again. The
word went up mangled from the mouths of the others, like a
groan.
The bruja slowly turned and walked away, her back
straighter and her stride firmer than on the walk over. She
walked a few yards back from the circle and dug into the
sand until she unearthed a piece of driftwood, then turned
and rejoined the circle again. She nodded and gestured at
Chava until he, too, left the circle and came back with
driftwood. One by one the others followed, wandering out of
the circle and coming slowly back.
The skin that formed the gray sacs on the creature’s
back had thinned and thinned as the sacs grew. Now it was
almost transparent. The sacs slowly billowed up until they
were taut and then deflated, going about halfway slack
before swelling again. It was a terrible thing to watch.
Chava kept expecting them to burst.
The bruja was dancing again. She lifted her chunk of
driftwood high, gave a toothless smile, and threw it at the
creature.
It struck the creature softly in the face and fell to the sand
just below it. The creature didn’t react at all.
“Now you,” said the bruja to Chava. “Higher. And harder.”
He threw his piece of wood high and hard, at the leftmost
sac. It struck the sac near the bottom and tore it just slightly.
Air began to hiss out. The bruja raised her hands and
brought them down and the others threw their pieces of
wood as well. One or two missed, one or two bounced off,
but more than a few tore the sacs, some quite deeply. Air
rushed out of them; the acrid cloud slowly began to
disperse.
“Now, go,” the bruja said to Chava, her voice hoarse.
“You see the nameless man there, stumbling drunk as
usual. Run to him and take his bottle and bring it back to
me.”
He ran quickly around the circle and to the small but
dignified dark-haired drunk who had gotten too close to the
cloud earlier and almost died. The man turned and smiled
at him. Before he could react, Chava grabbed the bottle
he’d posted between his feet and fled back to the bruja.
She took it from him and uncorked it. Behind them the
drunk was protesting, some of the others holding him back.
“Hold your breath,” she said to Chava as she gave him the
bottle. “You must pour this on the wood and on the creature
itself.”
His heart pounding, Chava took a deep breath and
rushed forward. The torn skin of the sacs had already
begun to knit itself back together. The bags were still mostly
deflated but were beginning to rise. He upended the bottle,
splashing the creature and the wood around it, and then
rushed back to the bruja, his eyes swollen and stinging.
The bruja lit the top of her staff on fire and carefully
moved forward, touching it to the creature’s head.
Both the creature and the driftwood caught fire
immediately. She dropped her staff, letting it burn, too. The
creature hissed and thrashed, but never tried to escape
from the flames. The gray sacs on its back turned to ash
and blew away. Eventually it stopped moving altogether.
The bruja, swaying, led them once again in a slow,
stuttering dance. Chava found his feet naturally following it,
adapting to it, almost as if someone else were moving his
legs. He wondered how many of his fellow villagers felt the
same way. The village drunk, he saw, wasn’t part of the
circle; he stayed at a little distance, swaying slightly, staring
at the fire, his brow furrowed. They kept on, tracing slow
curving motions in the air, until all that was left of the
creature was a charred, smoldering skeleton. Stripped of
its flesh and burnt to a crisp, it looked almost human.
8
He ordered a bottled beer and made sure it came with the
cap still sealed. As he waited on his change, he scanned
the bar, trying to determine who might have telephoned
him. The small bar’s only inhabitants were half a dozen
scientists from the North American sector—it could have
been any one of them.
He sat down at a table. He’d just opened the beer and
taken a sip when a man approached him. The man was
pale skinned and thin, wearing a jumpsuit, his hair cropped
short. Altman guessed he must be a technician of some
sort.
“You’re Altman,” the man said. It wasn’t a question.
“That’s right,” said Altman. “And you are . .”
“I only give my name out to friends,” he said. “Are you a
friend?”
Altman stared at him.
“All right,” said the man. “Maybe you don’t make friends
right off the bat. Okay, whatever you think of what I tell you, if
anybody asks, you didn’t hear it from me.”
Altman hesitated only a moment. “All right,” he said.
“Shake on it?” the man suggested.
The man extended a hand. Altman took it, shook.
“Hammond,” the man said, “Charles Hammond.” He pulled
out the table’s other chair and sat down.
“Nice to meet you,” said Altman. “Now suppose you tell
me what’s going on.”
Hammond leaned in closer. “You’ve been noticing
things,” he said. “You’re not the only one.”
“No?” said Altman coolly.
“I’m in communications. Freelance, mostly industrial
installations.” He reached out and poked Altman’s chest
lightly with a finger. “I’ve been noticing things, too.”
“Okay . . .”
“There’s a pulse,” Hammond said. “Slow and irregular,
and very weak, but strong enough to fuzz up other signals
just a little. I’m a perfectionist. When I set something up, I
like it to be crystal clear. Things that don’t bother other
people bother me. That’s why I noticed it.”
He stopped. Altman waited for him to go on. When he
didn’t, Altman took a sip of his beer and asked. “Noticed
what?”
Hammond nodded. “Exactly,” he said. “At first I thought it
was a problem with the communications terminal I was
installing for DredgerCorp.”
“I didn’t know DredgerCorp had a place here,”
interrupted Altman. That, as much as anything, was an
indication to him that something odd was going on.
DredgerCorp was one of the shadiest of the resource
retrieval corporations, the sort of company willing to swoop
quickly into an area under the radar of the local
government, strip-mine or bore and take as much as they
could before it was noticed, and then swoop quickly away
again.
“Officially they don’t. Just got here. Very hush-hush,” said
Hammond. “I’m not supposed to know who they are.
Anyway, at first I thought it was a loose connection,
something off just enough to give a minor electrical
discharge that gave the line an occasional slight hiss every
so often. So I took the thing apart. Nothing wrong with it. So,
I put the thing back together. The hiss still came.
Sometimes once or twice a minute, lasting a few seconds,
sometimes not even that. Maybe you missed something, I
told myself. I was just about to take the fucker apart again
when I thought maybe I better check another terminal in the
same system. Same problem. I was just about to tear
DredgerCorp’s whole system apart when something
dawned on me: maybe it wasn’t just in this system but in
other places as well.”
“And?”
Hammond nodded. “Everybody’s picking it up, but
nobody’s noticing. It’s not a problem with one system. It’s
an electromagnetic pulse, weak and irregular, broadcasting
from somewhere.”
“So what is it?”
“I did some investigating,” said Hammond, ignoring
Altman’s question. “I set up a few receivers, triangulated the
pulse. It’s irregular enough that it took me a little while to
figure out where it’s coming from. And when I did, I decided
it couldn’t be right. So I moved the receivers, triangulated
again, and this time I was sure of where it was coming
from.”
“Where?”
Hammond leaned even farther in, putting his arm around
Altman’s shoulders and bringing his lips close to Altman’s
ear. “Remember,” he whispered. “You didn’t hear this from
me.”
Altman nodded.
“From the crater,” whispered Hammond. “From the exact
center of Chicxulub crater, under a kilometer or two of muck
and rock. Right where you found your anomaly.”
“Oh my God,” said Altman. He explained to Hammond
what Ada had been hearing. “Three different things,” he
said. “All of them leading back to Chicxulub crater.”
Hammond leaned back, nodding his head. “My thoughts
exactly,” he said. “Maybe the pulse has been there all the
time and nobody noticed it until now. Maybe we’re only
hearing it now because our equipment is more sensitive.
But I think I would have noticed it before now. That’s not the
kind of thing I miss. But here’s my question to you: Is it a
pulse or is it a signal?”
“A signal?”
“It’s a little irregular, but it still has a pattern to it. I can’t
swear to it, but I think it’s something that’s being
deliberately made. Down there, under millions of tons of
water and rock.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” said Altman.
“No,” agreed Hammond. “And it gets stranger.” He came
in close again, and this time Altman saw something in his
eyes, a haunted look. “I told DredgerCorp about the pulse,
figure it’s my job to do so. I don’t want them blaming me for
it, want to make it clear that it’s something that everybody is
experiencing, even if no one’s noticing it. And what do you
think they say?”
“What?”
“ ‘Have you told anybody else?’ That’s an exact quote.
Before I know it, they’ve got me signing a gag order. In
exchange for certain monetary considerations, I can’t talk
about the pulse, not to anybody. I haven’t, until now, with
you.”
“What do you think it means?” asked Altman.
“What do you think it means? Let me ask you something.
Who is the only person that a secure communications
system isn’t secure from?”
“Who?”
“The guy who installs it. From me. If you’re putting a
system in, you can loop yourself into it in a dozen different
ways without anybody being the wiser. I do that from time to
time as a matter of course, just to keep my wrist limber. A
hobby, really.” His voice grew almost inaudible. “I did it with
DredgerCorp.”
“And?”
“It didn’t last long,” he said. “Ten days after I put the
system in, they tore it out. Flew someone in from the North
American sector to do it, someone in-house this time.”
“They must have known the system wasn’t secure.”
“No way for them to tell,” said Hammond. “They couldn’t
have known for sure. They’re on to something. There’s
something at the bottom of the crater, something valuable,
maybe even something unique. Lots of speculation about it
from the communications I was able to intercept. But after
about three days, things went cryptic; they started coding
everything.” He reached into his pocket, took out his
holopod. “Take a look at this,” he said. “Up close. Don’t let
anyone else see.”
“What is it?” asked Altman.
“You tell me.”
Altman shielded the holopod in his hands, watched the
image that appeared, rotating slowly between his palms. It
was just a digitally imaged representation. It was
impossible to know what it was made of or what it looked
like exactly, but he could get at least some idea. A
shimmering three-dimensional shape, in two parts, thick at
the base and coming to two points near the top. It was
clearly something man-made rather than a natural
formation, no doubt about that. Or was that just the digital
model making him think that? It reminded him of something.
It looked like two separate strands, joined at the bottom, but
twisted around each other, though it might have been a
single tapering structure with a perforated center.
He stared at it a long time, watching it slowly turn. And
then he remembered. It was the shape Ada had made with
her fingers, crossing them over each other, the sign she’d
said many of the villagers were now making.
“Tail of the devil,” he whispered, not realizing he’d said
anything aloud until he saw Hammond’s startled
expression.
He clicked the holopod off, handed it back to Hammond.
“I got that off the com system before they tore it out,”
Hammond said. “According to the message appended to
it, they cross-indexed all the information they had—worked
with the pulse and the anomaly and probably some other
things that neither you nor I are aware of yet. And this is
what they came up with. This is what’s at the heart of the
crater.”
They sat in silence awhile, staring at their glasses. “So, a
pulse starts up,” said Altman finally. “Maybe a signal of
some sort. Something at the center of the crater, something
that appears to be not a natural geological formation but a
man-made one.”
“Constructed, yes,” said Hammond, “but who’s to say
man-made?”
“If not man-made, then . . . ,” said Altman. And then
suddenly he got it. “Shit,” he said, “you think it’s something
inhuman, something alien?”
“I don’t know what I think,” said Hammond. “But yes,
that’s what some of the folks at DredgerCorp thought.”
Altman shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. He
looked nervously around the bar. “Why are you telling me
this?” he asked. “Why me?”
Hammond jabbed his chest again with his finger.
“Because you were asking. This stuff has been going on for
a while,” he said. “Others must have noticed it. But you’re
the only one who contacted everyone you thought might
have the answer. You know what that tells me? That you
don’t work for anyone. That you want to know for yourself.”
“Surely other people are thinking about it, too.”
“Let me put it this way,” said Hammond. “Someone is
trying to suppress this. Maybe DredgerCorp, maybe
someone bigger than that. A lot of people know what’s
happening, but nobody’s talking about it. Why? Because
they’ve been bought. Why did I talk to you? Because I don’t
think you’ve been bought.” He drained his bottle dry, then
gave Altman a steady stare. “At least not yet,” he said
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