“The question asks itself. Did Ryland discover something that suggested such energy beams? We don’t know. Perhaps the fever interfered with his memory. Partial amnesia resulting from tropically induced fever is not that rare.”
“You said this Peruvian intelligence officer—”
“Colonel Simon Viejo, Mr. Mueller.”
“Thank you,” Mueller said affably, in some contrast to his earlier attitude of annoyance. “You said Viejo sent people into Ayabaca. Did they report anything about those European trading outfits that would be of interest to us?”
“I said it could be nothing more than coincidence, but at the time Major Ryland returned from the jungle there were on hand in Ayabaca two men who aren’t normally there.” Goldman flipped open a folder. “One was Odd Fossengen, a Norwegian national. He owns his own international trading company and he also represents a consortium of major importers and exporters . . . some of the companies represented are from such countries as Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Poland and Finland. Is there a connection between Fossengen and Ryland? If there is, we can’t find it. Is there any significance to his representation of a power bloc that would be most interested to obtain any such energy device if such exists? If so, would they go so far as to commit murder in the manner and place they did? If there is hope for discovering such an energy device, would Fossengen, if he’s involved, proceed on his own, hoping to sell to the highest bidder? I mentioned two men. The other is Julio Ruperez, a Peruvian national who has worked for about four years with Fossengen. We’ve checked out both Fossengen and Ruperez, for any sign of involvement.” Goldman shook his head. “None was apparent. Both men, by the way, were in Ayabaca at the time Ryland was murdered.”
“Any records of telephone calls from Ayabaca to the States?” Philip Wayne asked.
“We checked it out, of course. It’s not possible to make a call from Ayabaca itself. No direct lines exist for patching through the call. One would have to go to Cuzco. Neither Fossengen nor Ruperez did so. It’s certainly possible they had someone else travel there, to make such a call, but that’s supposition. We’re checking, though. But why kill Ryland—the question persists. Of course one can assume that whoever was behind it was aware of the memory problems that could be brought on by fever. They could have assumed that what Ryland told them would be blocked from his conscious mind for some time afterward, but that drugs and treatment could bring it back. So get rid of Ryland before that happened. They would then have the advantage of knowing more of what Ryland had to say than we do, and if he did have something to say when he was in Ayabaca, it could be more significant than we realize . . .
“Trouble is, what we’re doing is stringing together different possibilities with some rather weak ifs. Truth is, we simply do not know. I suggest, though, that you bear in mind that if there is an effort on the part of those unknown to us who killed Ryland to discover this alleged energy source, then your presence will most likely draw them out.” He paused. “That’s essentially why you’re more heavily equipped with weapons than would normally be the case. And it’s overwhelmingly why Mister Austin will be the leader of this expedition.”
He closed his folders and dropped them into his briefcase, snapped it shut. “Gentlemen, we’re running out of time. From here out control of this mission goes to Mister Steve Austin.”
“The first thing,” Steve said, “is to be sure you’re able to survive. We’re going into rough country—heat, humidity, undergrowth, mountains, isolation . . . the works. First stop—the obstacle course. No applause, please.”
It was just past midnight when Steve Austin led four exhausted men into a small business jet chartered by OSO for the flight to Los Angeles. Steve grinned as the men who would soon be hauling their packs into the high Andes dragged themselves to seats, strapped in, waved away the offers of coffee and sandwiches and abandoned themselves to blissful nonmovement. All except the State Department’s Aaron Mueller were soon fast asleep.
Mueller had proved a pleasant surprise. Beneath his abrasive coloration he proved to be tough, determined and in excellent shape; Mueller had kept quiet about his experience as a mountain climber—for a surprise, and the honor of the Department, he said to an impressed Steve. He had even outpaced Phil Wayne. The scene had been nearly hilarious with Rudy Wells, a startling figure as he stood at the beginning of the obstacle course in his own version of Peruvian expeditionary splendor: gleaming green trousers tucked neatly into jump boots, a striped shirt open at the neck and adorned with a bright-red paratrooper’s scarf. On his back was a well-distributed seventy pounds. At his hip the .38 revolver (wisely, he had inserted the machete into his backpack to keep it from skewering him). In his hand was the modified deer rifle, and atop his head, directly over pilot’s sunglasses, an Australian-style bush hat complete with fanned-out feather. Steve stared.
“Shut up and let’s go,” Wells told him. “The honor of the profession is at stake.”
Steve only hoped he didn’t overdo it.
Phil Wayne was anxious to test and prove himself against the others. He was quite a package—an electronics specialist and self-described “rock-hound” who got interested in the subject when he began working with crystals as applied to electronics. “Besides,” he had told Steve, “I’ve done plenty of time in the mountains of Colorado and around New Mexico so I don’t think you could lose me if you tried.” He’d do. In any case, Steve would pace the expedition by its weakest physical link, Dr. Harold Jennings. Tennis and golf didn’t quite add up to the conditioning a man needed for where they were going.
He would restrict Dr. Jennings to a pack of only thirty pounds.
“Just so long as you don’t prevent me from making this expedition. There is much about this that has drawn me for a long time.” His eyes became intense. “People are familiar with the Aztecs, the Mayans, the Inca. But the Caya? Well, they have been too little attended to. They have been, really, not much more than a rumor. It appears there is more reality than rumor. I am delighted—and determined to learn more.”
Mueller, in surprisingly good shape, got an eighty-pound pack assignment. So did Phil Wayne. Rudy Wells was affronted when his pack was pared down to sixty pounds, and Steve didn’t improve his friend’s disposition when he explained within earshot of the others that Wells was really carrying a load of ninety pounds, if one added in the mass of pink flesh hiding beneath his belt.
Jim DiMartino had packed Steve’s gear to a weight of one hundred and fifty pounds. Phil Wayne shook his head in disbelief. Mueller just stared, and Dr. Jennings wondered if someone had made a mistake in computing the weight. Rudy Wells busied himself elsewhere to avoid questions only he or Steve could—but wouldn’t—answer.
Seated now in the plane bound for L.A., Steve was reasonably satisfied with his group—and had no time to worry about it if he wasn’t. He idly watched the blue taxi lights of the airport sliding by his window as the Sabreliner turned onto the active. In his mind Steve went through the procedures with the two pilots, reciting to himself the final elements of the checklist, the verbal exchange between cockpit and tower, the final turn onto the active. He felt the fingers of his right hand clench, then flex as they grasped the imaginary throttles. The jet swept smoothly down the runway and as the pilot rotated the nose wheel off the concrete, Steve felt his body stiffen. Unaware of the movement, he nodded to himself as the gear thunked into its wells and the doors slapped closed. They banked, the airport lights snapped into view, and he had a glimpse of the glowing beam from the rotating beacon. Only then, as they rushed into the night, did his fingers loosen.
“You just don’t know when to quit, do you?”
Startled, Steve turned his head around. In the dim glow of night lights, he saw the smile on Rudy’s face.
“I thought you were asleep.”
“Me? Sleep in a plane? You know I hate to fly.”
CHAPTER 6
“I don’t remember a single thing about that flight last night. I don’t remember
taking off or coming down or landing. Absolutely nothing until you woke me up in Los Angeles.” Dr. Jennings had just seated himself next to Steve, coffee and pipe in hand, shortly after takeoff from Los Angeles for the flight to Lima.
“We aim to please, doctor. Take advantage while you can.”
He smiled, then turned to stare at the ocean six miles below. “What do you know of the Caya?” he asked Steve without looking up.
“That’s the so-called lost race we’re looking for, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” he said, and turned to face Steve. “As distinct from the Inca, the Mayan, the Aztec—in fact, from all other groups or tribes or races or societies. Distinct at times in only subtle ways, because certainly there had to be some intercourse in ideas. The priests, if no one else. Or their medicine people, who needed knowledge beyond their own capacities. But the Caya were unto themselves, to be sure.”
“How did you come on the Caya?”
“I never have. No one has. It’s really all a matter of supposition, inference, extrapolation. There have been too many wondrous things not accounted for in the known societies and races, somebody else influenced the civilizations we have managed to find and study. There’s a thread between many of these departed societies and races that can’t be ignored—feats of construction, especially at altitudes where such work would have been impossible through manual effort, and certainly they did not have machines.”
“Depends on how you define a machine,” Steve said. “What do you suppose, doctor, will be the reaction of visitors from some other world if they land on the moon, near the site of Apollo Fourteen?—that’s the mission Al Shepard and Ed Mitchell flew. Know what those other-galaxy astronauts will find? A two-wheeled, ungainly, hand-pulled cart, a sort of lunar rickshaw. It will be the only thing at the Fourteen site with wheels. Now, here’s a remnant of society with the power to transport three men and their machines from one world to another, but too dumb to figure out how to build a powered vehicle with wheels.”
“I never thought of it that way. You’ve given me a fresh perspective, Steve. And what about the landing sites of those first two missions—Eleven and Twelve? No surface transportation of any kind. But what you said about Fourteen is something to think on. We who will be ancient history to our visitors used the wheel for a hand-powered vehicle, but not as a machine. The similarities are fascinating.”
Jennings leaned forward, excited. “We know that the past civilizations of South America who built empires and then vanished apparently had incredible—by our lights—powers to move stone blocks weighing twenty, forty, more than a hundred tons—blocks that were shaped and measured with extraordinary care. How they moved and shaped and built their edifices is still a mystery today. But one thing we do know . . . none of them used the wheel for transportation.”
“Because they didn’t know about the wheel?”
“No. The toys, the things they made for their children, even the small jeweled sculpture they made for their homes and temples, did have wheels. Don’t you see the parallel, Steve? If someone examined the landing site of Apollo Fourteen, they’d face the same problem!”
“They certainly would,” Steve said.
“What’s really important for me, Steve, is that you may have given me a new way to look for things where we’re going. I realize that perhaps the Caya can’t be proved to have existed. Not yet. But a first sign of what may have been the Caya could be this strange roadway reported by the major who was killed. It opens possibilities . . .
“You know, I’ve been fascinated by the whole structure of what took place thousands of years ago, perhaps even longer than that, in South America. For such a complex and carefully structured society to vanish is hard to accept. What I’m looking for, I believe, is beyond artifacts and constructions. I’m looking for the challenge, the key to intelligence these people must have left behind. They must have . . .”
“Develop that for me some, if you don’t mind.”
“What we’ve seen on the sites of these ancient people represents the homes and the public buildings of what I surely were great civilizations. Let’s use the singular or collective for the sake of this admitted theorizing . . . Good morning, Dr. Wells,” Jennings said as Rudy Wells joined them and motioned for him to continue.
“Well, I was about to ask, rhetorically, what is the greatest mystery of this ancient people. What they left behind, what we poke through today, tells us nothing about the people themselves. It’s frustrating. And can it be accident alone that nothing of the humans who peopled a vast continent has been left for us to try to understand them?”
Steve smiled to himself. Jennings was on a podium somewhere, but he was giving them an insight they’d not be able to get as fast elsewhere, and he was grateful for it.
“Throughout Europe, Africa, the Orient,” Jennings went on, “we have found what we needed to reconstruct pretty well how people lived, even how they thought. But from the sun kingdom? Silence.
“Whoever these people—the Caya, or whatever we choose to call them—were, they built structures that rivaled or surpassed other ancient races. But only those of the sun kingdom buried themselves in some vault beyond our understanding.
“They were able to create highways, or roadways, of material similar to macadam—but not macadam—that rivals the best you’ll find in highways today. It’s there. I’ve walked it. These roadways were never built less than twenty-four feet in width, often as wide as thirty-two feet. They run straight and true with consistent elevations from one city complex to another. They built their highways across chasms, rivers, gorges, and even swamps. Now how did they build suspension bridges carrying the loads we find in modern structures? They built stone embankments that even today baffle engineers. They knew about the wheel but, as I’ve said, chose not to use it for transportation.
“They built a city on top of a mountain—a city built of stone quarried thousands of feet below the city. How did they build their city, without the wheel as transportation and using stone blocks weighing at least fifteen tons, cut so smooth that even today a knife blade can’t be slipped between those unmortared joints?
“And there is proof these people charted the planets. They mapped the intricate rotation of the solar system and they did it with greater accuracy than any other people before Kepler’s time. I have studied their stone carving of a man seated in front of a long, tubular object mounted on a tripod, and looking into the sky. The telescope. Where did they get the lenses?”
“I thought,” Steve said, “they didn’t have optics.”
“That appears to be the case,” Jennings replied. “No optics. No sign, ever, of optics. No signs of grinding. No suggestion even of glass. A blank. And yet here is that bas-relief of a man seated in front of a telescope.”
Rudy Wells broke in. “And their reaction to Cortez and the Spanish is remarkable. The records are rather clear on this. They seemed to know that Cortez represented disaster for them. And they accepted his arrival as the working out of whatever providence they believed in. They knew he and his men would destroy them. Not Cortez personally, but the forces he represented. Their religion apparently offended the priests who accompanied Cortez. Their conversion efforts were not gentle persuasion. The conquerors were out to do more than banish the local idols. They went after the compiled records, everything in writing. They burned out all the years these people had achieved. Later generations had only the legacy of the mumbling of the withered shamans of their own people and the newcomers’ so-called culture. Except by then, of course, the Spanish weren’t newcomers. They ruled everything with an iron hand. Only what was in stone, and only a part of that, could survive.”
“There’s something else, Steve,” Jennings said. “It’s been my theory—and I’ve not got too much company here—that these departed people estimated accurately the intelligence level of the Spaniards, and then left a record for some future generation to read that was beyond the capabilities of their conquerors. It’s been wrap
ped in silence for ages—an enigma in a riddle of time, so to speak. Anyway I just don’t believe they destroyed everything. Again this is theory on my part, but I believe the intelligentsia of these people took their own lives. There was no way—they seemed to have an ability or thought they had an ability to foretell the future—that they could resist the alien social structure represented by the Spanish. They couldn’t survive against their gunpowder, their military discipline. In any case, if they did intentionally remove themselves from the scene, it would seem that, like the Japanese they prepared well for their exit and removed nearly everything that could tell us about them. Nearly, not completely. Somewhere on the continent the key waits for whoever can decipher the instructions.”
Wells moved into the conversation again. “There’s some who believe the Caya behaved like the Egyptians and built a huge pyramid or temple that conceals a vault or chamber with their secrets—in this case, secrets kept from the Spanish. Maybe we ought to look for a rosetta stone.”
“I hope one of you is an expert on ancient languages?” Steve said.
“I don’t believe it will be language,” Jennings answered quickly. “I suspect it will be with a device, or a tool, or some kind of equipment that only a well-advanced society—such as ours would appear to the Caya—could interpret.”
“Can you take that any further?” Steve asked.
Jennings nodded. “Well, I think the clue is in stone. The Caya revered stone. They revered what they could do with stone, its strength and durability. They did not have metal alloys as we know metal. In a very advanced way theirs was a stone-oriented society. So a people who left behind them—visibly, anyway—only stone would reasonably be expected to use that stone to conceal their holiest treasures. Remember, theirs was a sun kingdom. They used stone to reach to their greatest heights. I believe the two must link. If there is this hallowed place of theirs, then I think it will be in stone.”
“And when and if we find it,” Rudy Wells said, “look out. Presumably they also knew how to protect what they wanted hidden.”
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