41
He took two trips and had to use the tranquilizer gun once.
The first trip reprogrammed the MROVs, switched them
over to robotic self-control, and the digging progressed at a
tremendous pace, but he had to tranquilize the technician
accompanying him before they reached the surface.
The man gave him a fair amount of advance warning,
growing more and more irritable and then finally lashing out.
He waited to tranquilize until he was absolutely sure he was
violent and as a result almost waited too long. Indeed, the
man was trying to choke him to death as the tranquilizer
took effect and his hands slowly relaxed and he collapsed.
The other trip, strangely enough, was with Stevens, the
psychologist, who applied electrodes to both his and
Altman’s heads, reading changes in their brain waves as
they descended.
“So I guess this means Markoff agrees with me that
Hendricks’s mental problems might have been caused by
the signal,” Altman asked.
Stevens smiled. “How can I know what Markoff thinks, Mr.
Altman?” he answered.
Altman stayed ready the whole time, one hand on the
tranquilizer gun, but like him, Stevens didn’t seem to suffer
any adverse affects. He just stayed crouched over his
equipment, looking up at Altman from time to time and
smiling.
“Learn anything?” asked Altman.
“Yes, I did,” said Stevens. “But I’d learn more if one or the
other of us had an attack. I don’t suppose you’d like to
oblige me, would you?”
Altman shook his head.
“I didn’t think so,” said Stevens. “Maybe another time,
then.”
The next trip consisted of himself and a jovial engineer
named David Kimball descending to retrieve the driller
bathyscaphe, though Altman wasn’t briefed until they were
already on the way down.
“It’ll be simple,” said Kimball, patting a large chromeplated
machine that had been bolted to the console just for
this trip. “Just a matter of a few minutes. All we have to do
is direct an electrical pulse at the bathyscaphe.”
“What’ll that do?” asked Altman.
“It’ll release the latches for the ballast chambers,” said
Kimball. “This will cause the ballast to rush out. After that,
the bathyscaphe will rise on its own.”
“Sounds easy enough that a robot could do it,” said
Altman.
“A robot could do it,” said Kimball. “But Markoff thought
it’d be better to have us do it.”
“Why?” asked Altman.
“I don’t know,” said Kimball. “He didn’t say.”
In case anything goes wrong, Altman added in his head.
When they reached the ocean floor, they continued to
move downward into the inverted cone that the robotic
excavators had created. Having completed their tasks, the
units now stood motionless, strange statues in the
darkness. The bathyscaphe descended, the cone slowly
tightening on them.
He brightened the lights and turned on the vid cameras.
Altman glanced over at Kimball. He seemed like he was
doing all right, though he looked a little distracted, slightly
jumpy. Nothing to worry about yet, thought Altman, but just
to be safe, he checked to see that the tranquilizer pistol
was cocked and ready.
“You been down here before?” Kimball asked.
Altman nodded. “Nothing to worry about,” he said.
“They showed me the vid,” he said. “You seen that?”
“Yes,” said Altman.
“I had no idea,” said Kimball. “Do you think it’ll be as bad
as it looks?”
“Yeah,” said Altman.
They fell silent. Down below, they could see something, a
vague shape that slowly became clearer.
It was a huge structure, two tapering pillars twisting
sinuously around each other and rising to a point. It seemed
to be made of stone, but there was no doubt in Altman’s
mind that it was constructed rather than a natural
phenomenon. Coming closer just confirmed it; it was
covered with symbols, weird hieroglyphics unlike anything
he had ever seen. They covered every inch of the object,
winding downward around its body and up to the twin horns
of the thing. It was massive and gave off the impression of
great age. At once beautiful and vaguely menacing, it was
completely alien. It had not, Altman knew immediately upon
seeing it, been built by human hands. Why had it been built,
and how? The stone showed no breaks or cracks or joints,
as if it was a single gigantic piece. And the shape: it
reminded him of something. But what was it?
And then suddenly he knew. “The tail of the devil,”
whispered Altman.
“Holy shit,” said Kimball, awe in his voice.
The symbols were either luminescent or catching the
bathyscaphe’s light in a very particular way. He checked the
displays. The pulse signal was negligible at the moment.
Probably a good thing, he thought.
“Do you think it’s safe to get close?” asked Kimball.
“What is it?” wondered Altman aloud. “Who made it?”
He moved the bathyscaphe slowly around just above it,
filming it from all angles. It was the most impressive thing
he had ever seen. Then he zoomed the camera in closer to
record some of the symbols. He would have kept doing it,
but Kimball’s nerves were rising.
“This is freaking me out. Let’s get the other sub and get
out of here,” Kimball said.
There it was, sunken at the base of the artifact. Altman
descended farther, got as close to it as he could and shone
the light into the observation porthole.
Even from that vantage, the inside of the cabin was a
nightmare—blood spread over the windows and the walls,
smeared in odd patterns. He moved the lights quickly away
before Kimball could get a better look.
He played the lights along the side of the craft, looking for
signs of damage, but the air seal seemed intact. In theory, it
should rise, albeit slowly.
“Ready?” he asked Kimball.
“Ready,” Kimball said.
Altman moved around until there was no danger of hitting
the Marker and then fired the pulse. It struck the driller
bathyscaphe full on, an eerie electric glow fizzling along its
hull. Then its ballast chambers began to empty, the lead
pellets pattering down and raising a cloud of silt. Slowly it
began to rise. He watched it come, passing just a half
dozen meters away from them, and move upward. It tilted
and a disembodied arm rolled against the observation
porthole.
Ready or not, he thought, and then their own
bathyscaphe started up in pursuit.
42
This is getting to be a habit, Altman thought, carefully
easing the chunk of rock out of the core sampler. Nobody
seemed to notice. They were all too preoccupied with the
interior of the bathyscaphe itself, the wash of blood and
gore inside, the rotten, damaged bodies. Markoff quickly
had the area quarantined, but not before Altman had gotten
away with the sample.
Now he took it to his bedroom to examine it. He was
certain it was from the artifact itself. It was seemingly
ordinary rock, but one that he couldn’t identify. The bit he
held had an indentation on it, where something had been
carved or inflicted on the rock, but it was too small a
sample to give a clear sense of what it was.
Sneaking into an unlocked lab at night, he tested it. The
substance was not unlike granite but harder, almost as hard
as corundum. One face was smooth; he could see where
the rest had been cut, was surprised the cutters hadn’t
burned out. Within the rock he found mineral veins that
struck him as too regular to be natural. But if they weren’t
natural, what were they? In the end, puzzled, he decided to
assume they were natural formations: there was no
technology that he was aware of that would allow someone
to manipulate solid rock in this way.
· · ·
Whatever had happened to the others in the bathyscaphe,
what Markoff had been able to determine about it, Altman
was never told. Once quarantined, the bathyscaphe
disappeared and was never seen again. No doubt Markoff
and his inner circle had analyzed it to death. Altman was
eager to see the rest of the vid from Hennessy, but his
request to Markoff was met with silence.
Now that the bathyscaphe was up, the floating compound
was frantic with preparations to raise the artifact itself. It
was impossible to have a conversation that didn’t turn to
the monolith lying down at the bottom of the crater, and
people seemed both excited and incredibly nervous.
Whatever it was, whatever was down there, could change
everything, and they would be the first to come into contact
with it. The signal had returned but seemed to be
broadcasting differently now, intermittently, on and off, in
fairly regular bursts. Some researchers speculated it was a
distress call, though who or what was in distress nobody
dared guess. Perhaps it was a result of a failing piece of
technical equipment, the artifact itself faulty or breaking
down. It was, after all, very, very old. And many believed,
Altman among them, that it was old enough that it couldn’t
possibly be of human origin, that the artifact was clear proof
of alien life.
“If you’d seen it,” he told Markoff in his debriefing, “you’d
agree with me. There’s nothing human about it.”
The pulse signal was now interfering with radios and
vids, creating a static communication wave and fuzzing
images. Often when he descended in the bathyscaphe
Altman was out of touch very quickly because of the
interference, and stayed out of touch for a good part of the
trip. He was piloting descents daily, with several members
of Markoff’s inner circle, all of whom showed no signs of
cracking. He questioned whomever he was with, trying to
find out anything he could. Mostly they were closed-lipped,
but every once in a while they let something slip.
A scientist called him in from the hall while he was
walking past a lab and, thinking he was someone else at
first, began asking him questions about a winch
mechanism. Was it really enough? Would it lift the thing?
And what about the cable? What sort of cable would you
need for something like that?
Altman played along as long as he could, finally admitted
he didn’t know what he was talking about.
“You’re not Perkins?” the scientist asked.
Altman shook his head.
“Never mind,” said the scientist, retreating quickly into his
lab. “Forget I said anything.”
Showalter, too, was almost as much on the outside as
Altman, though he knew geophysics well enough that he
was somehow consulted.
“Always just bits and pieces,” Showalter confessed to
Altman in a low voice over coffee. “They think if they give
me just a little, I won’t be able to figure it out. That’d be true
if it was just them, but their colleagues sometimes consult
me as well. I know more than anybody realizes.”
“And?” asked Altman.
“I think we’re very close to bringing it up,” said Showalter.
“Almost all the theoretical problems have been solved. A
few more tests and they’ll just be waiting for an okay.”
Ada had made friends with the medical team, even
helping out informally when she was needed. And she was
needed more and more. In the floating compound, Ada told
him, reports of scientists and soldiers beset by insomnia
and hallucinations were on the rise.
“According to Dr. Merck,” she claimed, “he’s never seen
anything like it. Violent incidents of all kinds are on the rise,
nearly double what they were just a few months ago. The
suicide rate has skyrocketed and the assault rate has
climbed considerably.”
“It’s a tense time,” said Altman, playing devil’s advocate,
the role Ada usually would play. “Maybe that’s all it is.”
“No, you were right. It’s more than that,” said Ada. “Even
Merck thinks so. There are signs of widespread paranoia,
people having visions of dead relatives, and more and
more people speaking in a trancelike state of
‘Convergence,’ without being really able to explain what
that meant exactly once they were themselves again.
Everyone is on the verge of paranoia or panic. Goddammit,
you’ve got me thinking like you.”
Altman nodded. “Then my nonscientific inquiry was right,”
he said. “Everyone is on edge. Something is going on.”
“What do you think it means?” Ada asked him.
“What does it mean?” said Altman. “If you ask me, it
means were fucked.”
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