METEOR STORM

by David Capps

  “But everything in the photos is brown and red,” Trent said. “There’s no green on anything.”

  “That’s because Daryl Spinoza at the JPL shifts all of the color to the red side of the scale before any photos or videos are released.”

  “Isn’t that time consuming?” Trent asked.

  “Not at all,” I replied. “All of the images are digital, meaning each pixel is represented by three binary numbers, representing the intensity of red, cyan and yellow. The numbers are always in the same position, so Daryl wrote a program that simply adds a number to the red value, shifting everything into the red side of the color scale.”

  “So the sky on Mars isn’t really red?” Trent asked.

  “It’s blue, just like it is here.” I could almost feel their heads spinning. I know mine did when I first found out about Mars.

  “And the brown rocks?”

  “Most of them are covered with green moss and lichens that change with the seasons.”

  “And the green moss uses sunlight to convert carbon dioxide into oxygen,” Trent replied.

  “Mars has a breathable atmosphere,” Ed stated.

  “Yes, it does,” I replied.

  “Wait a minute,” Trent interjected. “For there to be moss, there has to be water.”

  “There is. That information actually comes from the Mars Orbiter, not the rovers. I’ve seen photographs of water in melt pools, huge conifer trees along the edges of massive sand dunes and evidence of migrating animals of some kind.”

  “Trees and animals?” Ed shouted.

  “Hey,” I said. “Keep your voice down.”

  “Why?” Ed said, “We’re the only ones who speak English within two hundred miles.”

  “Good point,” I said.

  “Trees?” Trent asked.

  “Yep.” I replied, “From the size of them on the photograph, they are about twenty feet across at the base of their trunk and close to a thousand feet tall, very similar to the giant Sequoias in California.”

  “Bloody hell,” Trent said, “and animals, too?”

  “The Mars Orbiter tracked a large herd of animals traveling single file for over three days between water melt pools.”

  “Bugger,” Trent replied. “Animals need to eat. What are they feeding on?”

  “In the late 1800’s astronomers mapped a huge canal system on Mars that changed color with the seasons. It turns out those are massive moss and lichen fields that feed the animals,” I replied. “The moisture in the air condenses at night to form dew, and the dew waters the moss and lichens on the ground and on the rocks.”

  “And the ancient civilization?” Trent asked.

  “The rover photographed a large pyramid with a sphinx in front of it,” I said.

  “Just like in Egypt?” Trent asked.

  “Almost,” I said. “The head on the sphinx is different, but my understanding is that the head of the sphinx in Egypt was re-carved at some point. It used to be larger.”

  “And that’s in a photograph?” Ed asked.

  “Not anymore,” I replied, “Daryl Spinoza digitally modified the photo so you don’t recognize the sphinx, but yeah, it’s clearly there on the original.”

  “Can’t an expert tell that the photo has been modified?” Trent asked.

  “Ordinarily, yes,” I replied, “but Daryl is an absolute master at graphics. He modifies the photo pixel-by-pixel. When he’s done every expert on the planet will testify it is an untouched original.”

  “Let me guess,” Trent said, “the face on Mars?”

  “Really is a face,” I replied. “Carved out of a mountain, just like Mt. Rushmore, only larger.”

  “Now I know why John asked me to guard you from harm.” Ed said.

  “There’s probably more to it than that,” I replied. “Tomorrow we get to see what’s inside the cave. That’s when the rest of the story may be revealed. From what I have learned about the ancient civilization from 63,000 years ago, they had an outpost on Mars. The same people who built the pyramids and Sphinx in Egypt may have built similar structures on Mars.”

  CHAPTER 9

  After breakfast I returned to my tent and activated my iPhone. I had created an app that tracked the surveillance satellites anywhere around the planet. I checked my watch and made a mental note of the windows where there would be no satellite coverage. I tucked my iPhone into the inside pocket of my jacket and exited my tent.

  “Did the guardian come to a conclusion regarding my requests?” I asked Trent.

  “He has,” Trent replied. “He says if you screw this up we’re all going to die.”

  “If I screw this up?” I asked.

  “Not his exact words,” Trent replied, “but words to that effect.”

  “Does he say we can make it to the cave in four hours or less?”

  “He said he can. He doesn’t know about the rest of us.”

  I laughed. “Just how old is he, anyway?”

  “Best guess?” Trent said. “Ninety, ninety two?”

  “And he’s going to beat us up the hill?”

  “Hey,” Trent said, “don’t under estimate him. They live a very different sort of life in this part of the world.”

  I checked my watch. “Okay,” I said, “we leave in twenty minutes.”

  At the appointed time the guardian started off at a good walking pace. He used his walking pole as he went along. Keeping up was easy enough to do. Ed, Trent and I followed his lead.

  Then we started up the side of the mountain. He didn’t slow down. He kept the same pace going uphill. I checked my watch. We had been walking for seven minutes and already I was getting short of breath.

  “Is he going to keep this pace up for the whole four hours?” I asked Trent.

  “Probably,” he replied.

  “Me and my big mouth,” I said.

  “I told you, don’t underestimate him.”

  We scrambled along, doing our best to keep up with the guardian. I had to stop several times to catch my breath and drink some water. The guardian never varied from his pace the entire way up the mountain; neither did he stop for water.

  Eventually he stopped on a narrow ledge, turned and waited for the rest of us to catch up with him. He smiled as we struggled up to where he was. I checked my watch. We had two minutes before the satellite would come into range of our position.

  “Are we there?” I asked, horribly out of breath.

  The guardian took a necklace off from under his robe. It had some sort of a round medallion hanging from the cord. He pressed the medallion into a recess in the rock and held it there. At first I could feel the rumble in my feet, and then I heard the sound of the rock parting. The entire wall of rock along the narrow ledge began moving slowly inside the mountain. The guardian smiled and waved his arm, inviting us inside the cave.

  I could see just enough of the floor to be able to walk ten feet into the cave. As the four of us moved inside, the rock wall began to close. I looked at the door as it closed and glanced at the guardian. He simply stood there, smiling at me.

  As soon as the rock door closed the pitch blackness surrounded us. I felt like I had been swallowed up in eternity and my feelings of panic rose again. Just then lights began to come on from the top of the cave. I realized “cave” wasn’t an apt description. The floor was smooth and polished stone. I couldn’t see the roof, but it had to be at least fifty feet above us, judging from the placement of the lights. The room we were in went back at least three hundred yards and had to be one hundred yards wide. The center section of the room was higher than the side sections and clear of support posts. Stone support columns were evenly placed throughout the side sections of the room approximately fifty feet apart.

  The huge room was filled with strange machinery and pieces of equipment. I began examining one of the machines closest to me. It was saucer shaped, about thirty feet in diameter and ten feet tall. The surface was smooth as glass and metallic gray in color.

  The guardian spo
ke. Trent translated, “He says it’s one of four different types of Vimana, or flying machines that are stored in here.”

  “Does it still work?” I asked.

  Trent spoke with the guardian and turned back to me. “Probably,” he said “He never tried to get inside of it before, so he really doesn’t know.”

  I wandered around looking at the various machines and then stopped dead in my tracks. In front of me, a six foot tall robot stood in a small alcove. It was metallic gray with red and white markings on it. The head of the robot had a red and white striped band around the mouth on the upper and lower jaw, convex lenses for eyes and a small nose. The head was identical to the one back in John’s communications room, only this robot was complete and undamaged. The robot’s body was designed after the human frame: solid titanium where we have bones and laminated pivot points where we have joints. The robot’s hands were a duplicate of the human hand and appeared capable of doing anything a human could do.

  After examining the robot closely, I moved on. The level of technology present was well beyond anything in our current civilization. My mind wandered back through history and our primitive lives, comparing what we know to what I saw here. The loss of this height of technology must have been devastating to the people. I wondered how people managed to cope and just tried to stay alive after the meteor storm.

  About halfway down the left side of the room was a small section carved back into the rock. The walls were smooth and rounded, almost like a surround theater, but there didn’t seem to be any controls or interface devices.

  Ed, Trent and the guardian followed me through the massive hall. We passed machine after machine, not knowing what they were used for or what they might do. It felt like my first visit to a museum, where everything was unfamiliar. At the far end the floor ended and a large cavern dropped off into complete darkness.

  “Does the guardian know how far this goes down?” I asked.

  Trent spoke with the guardian and then explained. “He says there are three more floors, similar to this one, all filled with machinery. What you are looking at is actually an elevator. The floor, now four stories below, moves up and down so equipment can be moved from one level to another.”

  “So how do you get it to move?” I asked.

  Trent translated. “He says the rounded alcove you passed is a control center for the entire complex. You need the medallion to activate the system.”

  “Okay, then let’s go back to the control center,” I said.

  We walked back to the rounded alcove. The guardian took the medallion and placed it into a small recess in the back section of the rounded wall. The walls lit up with images and strange symbols.

  “So where’s the keyboard?” I asked. “How do we interface with the system?”

  The guardian stepped forward and reached up to one of the displays. He put his finger in front of one of the gold colored symbols and moved it slightly to the right. Lights came on over the dark pit at the end of the hall. I could hear the sound of equipment operating. The sound stopped as the elevator floor appeared and stopped level with the floor in our section of the hall.

  “How does he know which symbol does what?” I asked.

  Trent conferred with the guardian. “The language is similar in some respects to Sanskrit, but much older. He says the previous guardian taught him the language, which he learned from the guardian before him.”

  “Swell,” I said, “has he taught the next guardian the language?”

  “He says there is no next guardian. He is the last one.”

  “We can’t lose this knowledge,” I said. “How can we preserve what is here?”

  Just then the hair on the back of my neck stood up and I became aware of something moving behind us. I turned and the others followed. In front of us stood the six foot tall robot from the alcove near the front of the hall. Ed pulled his knife and stepped in front of me, determined to protect me at all costs.

  The robot quickly tracked his movements and looked at the knife. I slowly stepped in front of Ed and turned to face him.

  “Ed, give me the knife,” I said. Ed looked me in the eye, but didn’t move. “Ed, you aren’t going to win against the robot. Remember the invincible warrior that guards the cave? This is it. You have to trust me. Now, give me the knife.”

  Ed slowly handed the knife to me. I turned and slid the knife across the floor, handle first, toward the feet of the robot. After a short pause, the robot quickly reached down, picked up the knife and broke it into small pieces with its hands, and tossed the pieces off to the side. It stood there watching us, apparently deciding our fate.

  CHAPTER 10

  I stepped forward. “Look,” I said, “I am the one responsible for the intrusion into your domain. If anyone is to be punished it’s me. The others are not to blame.”

  The robot quickly walked over and stood directly in front of me. My heart was racing and I was breathing heavily. I was trying to guess which arm of the robot was going to strike me first, but it just stood there looking at me. My previous impression of a robot was a slow, lumbering machine. This robot was quick and obviously quite nimble.

  “I came here because the human race is in danger,” I said. “I hope the information here can help save millions of lives.” That’s when it occurred to me; it doesn’t know my language.

  The robot continued to stand there. It tipped its head slightly to one side and opened its mouth.

  “Carl?”

  Panic flooded through my body. How the hell did it know my name?

  “How did you…?”

  “NETCOMM,” the robot replied. “When you activated the console NETCOMM was also activated. One other node on NETCOMM. We have your voiceprint and language in the system now. How can we be of service to you?”

  Relief poured through me like a huge waterfall. Then it dawned on me. All the time we were working with the robot’s head back in the States, it was listening to us, voice printing us and creating files on us, and it never let us know.

  “The meteor storm that destroyed the civilization that built you, is coming again, soon,” I said. “I need to know exactly when.”

  The robot quickly walked over to the console and began moving different colored symbols around on the display.

  “Difficult to be precise,” the robot said. “Based on galactic position and historical records, seventy two to seventy six days before the meteor storm strikes.”

  “How long did it last?”

  The robot moved some more symbols. “Fifty nine days,” it said.

  “Meteor concentration?” I asked.

  Again the robot moved some more symbols on the display. “Average of one meteorite strike for every ten square meters.”

  That meant that there would be trillions of meteorites hitting the Earth. Nothing would survive.

  “Size of the meteorites?” I asked.

  “Five millimeters up to 500 millimeters at the largest.”

  “Okay,” I said. “That gives us some hope. Can you keep NETCOMM active from this point on?”

  “Certainly,” the robot answered.

  “I understand that 300 million people perished in the last meteor storm,” I said. “Is that what your records show?”

  “No,” the robot replied. “The 300 million people included only the Rama Empire, which was the most advanced, with mining operations on the moon and on Mars. Worldwide, the population was 650 million people. As the meteor storm started, the Royal Rama Family and a thousand faithful followers were flown to the planet Mars. That’s all we had ships to carry. I remained here to guard the technology secured in this facility. For the next four thousand years, they lived on Mars, communicating with me from time to time. Then all communication stopped. There has been nothing since then.”

  I looked at Ed, Trent and the guardian. “Mars suffered a cataclysmic event,” I explained. The entire southern part of the planet is heavily pock-marked with huge craters. The northern half is covered with dust and debri
s, which partially covers some of the structures. Whatever happened either wiped out the people living there or drove them deeply underground. There are signs of underground transit tubes that have become exposed, but so far no signs of any people.”

  “Transit tubes?” Trent asked. “Like a subway system?”

  “Yes,” I replied. “But more like the tunnel from England to France under the English Channel.”

  “If the animals survived, the people could have, too,” Ed added.

  I thought for a moment. “If we don’t survive our own meteor storm, we’ll never have the opportunity to find out if they’re still there.” I turned toward the robot. “Thank you,” I said. “We have a lot of work to do. We need to get back.”

  The guardian walked over to me and bowed. He took the necklace from around his neck and placed the cord over my head.

  “What?” I said. “No, I can’t.”

  The medallion was heavier than I thought it would be as it settled onto my chest. The guardian bowed again and spoke. Trent translated. “He says you are the new guardian. He believes you are trustworthy and wants to know if you believe you can find this place again.”

  “This isn’t right,” I protested. “I’m not really the person you think I am.”

  “The guardian is very wise and perceptive,” Trent replied. “If he thinks you are trustworthy, then you are. Do you think you can find this place again?”

  “Yes,” I replied, realizing it was an argument I wasn’t going to win.

  The old guardian smiled and patted me on the shoulder and bowed again. I reluctantly bowed in return.

  The robot looked at the medallion on my chest and said, “Guardian.”

  “Congratulations, my boy,” Trent said. “And the piece of hardware from the old knowledge in your possession, another robot?”

  “Just its head, I’m afraid,” I replied.

  “I see,” Trent said. “Well it bloody well will have to do, won’t it?”

  “I just hope it’s enough,” I replied. I checked my watch. We needed to go. The old guardian showed me the indent in the rock door where the medallion fit. I pressed the medallion into its spot and the massive rock doors slowly swung open. Trent, Ed and the old guardian headed down the path. I stood outside the door and watched the robot as the rock door closed between us. I pulled my iPhone out of my jacket pocket and recorded the GPS location for the cave entrance in longitude, latitude and altitude. I was good to go.