The Engines of God

by Jack McDevitt

  Okay, I recognize this.

  You sure, George?

  Yeah. Yeah, no question about it.

  All right, let’s go. Where the hell’s the goddam projector?

  “Hutch,” said Carson. “Another hour here may be worth years of research at home. Be patient.”

  “Another hour?”

  “That’s my guess. But it still gets us out of here with time to spare.”

  “Hutch.” George’s voice. “Do you have a winch on board?”

  “Yes. I can activate a winch.”

  “Okay. Plan is that after we free the printing press, we’ll lift it into the Upper Temple. We’ve got everything in place to do that. You drop the line. As soon as the press is clear of the shaft, we’ll connect it, and you can haul it in. The rest of us should be on board a few minutes after that.”

  She shook her head. “This is crazy, George. You haven’t even found the press yet.”

  “We’re working on it.”

  Richard came back. “It’s okay,” he said soothingly. “We’ll make it. And we’ll have the printing press with us.”

  She watched the shoreline unroll below. It was a brilliant, sun-washed day, white and cold, filled with icebergs and needle peaks and rocky islands. Long thick waves slid across snow-covered beaches. Beach monkeys walked and played at the edge of the surf.

  The inlet came into view, and she started down. The Temple shuttle, resplendently blue and gold in the sunlight, waited on the shelf.

  Hutch landed clumsily. As if her haste would change anything. Carson stood on the rock. He was too courteous, or too distracted, to comment on her technique.

  0837 hours.

  The particle beam cast an eerie blue-white glow through the chamber. Water bubbled and hissed. George was firing blind. He was cutting through that most dangerous of obstacles, loose rock and sand.

  The digging strategy was to pick an area that looked stable, if you could find one, divide it into individual targets, and attack each separately. You sliced a hole, and stopped. If nothing happened, you enlarged the hole. Then you braced everything and moved on. “The problem,” he told Henry, “is that the tunnel will have to be widened further to get the printing press out.”

  George was pleased with himself. In the field, engineers tend to exist in a somewhat lower social stratum than pure archeologists. Not that anyone mistreated him. The Temple team had always been a close-knit crew. But he was taken less seriously as a professional. His was a support role, and consequently he was something of a hanger-on. When celebrations broke out, they never drank to George.

  But this time, he had made the discovery. George’s Printing Press. And he was leading the assault on the Lower Temple. It was a good feeling. A good way to wrap up his efforts here. It was a little scary, maybe. But he felt immortal, as young men invariably do, and he did not believe that Kosmik would actually pull the trigger if there were still people down here.

  Moreover, the timing was perfect. He was entranced by Hutch, infected with her brilliant eyes and her vaguely distant smile. His own tides ran strong when she was nearby, and she was now watching him in action. How could he possibly fail to stay the course? And during those dark, claustrophobic moments when an appreciation of the risk seeped through, he drove it away by imagining the hero’s reward that waited.

  Maggie’s voice cut in. “We have a preliminary reading from the ‘sex’ tablet.” She was referring to the character group that appeared atop the wedge, and in the Oz inscription. “We don’t think it’s a sexual term.”

  “What is it?” asked Richard.

  “We’ve located parts of the same cluster of symbols elsewhere. We’ve got the root, which suggests duration, maybe infinite duration.”

  “You’re right,” said Sandy. “That does it for sex.”

  “There’s a positive connotation. It’s linked with sunlight, for example. And ships in peaceful circumstances. I would be inclined to translate it along the lines of good fortune rather than pleasure.”

  “You sure?” That sounded like Tri.

  “Of course I’m not sure,” she snapped. “But there’s a fair degree of probability.”

  “So,” said Richard, “we have good fortune and a mythical beast. What’s the connection?”

  Ahead, George turned off the projector, and waited for the water to clear. “I think we’re through,” he said. “We have a tunnel.”

  Henry and Sandy moved forward to insert the braces. George poked at the roof. Gravel and silt floated down. “No guarantees,” he said.

  Henry shrugged and plunged ahead. “George,” he called back, “do what you can to widen it.”

  “Not while you’re in there.”

  “Do it,” said Henry. “My authority.”

  Your authority’s not worth much if you’re dead. Suppose George started cutting and the roof fell in? He shouldn’t even allow Henry to proceed before he conducted a safety inspection. But things were happening too fast.

  Obediently, he activated the particle beam, and chipped away at the sides of the tunnel.

  The chamber had partially collapsed. Henry crawled between broken slabs and decayed timbers. His lamp blurred. “Up ahead somewhere,” he told his throat mike. The printing press should have been close enough to show on the sensors. But he was getting no reading.

  He came to a wall.

  He floated to a stop and laid his head against it. That’s it, he thought. He hated this place the way it was now: squeeze past rock, dig through mud, grope in the dark.

  Richard moved up behind him, held his lamp up. “Over there,” he said. “It’s open to your right. Look.”

  He pointed and Henry saw that it was so. But he knew it was getting desperately late and that he had a responsibility to get his people out. While he hesitated, Richard pushed past. His lamp moved in the dark.

  “I think I can see it,” he said softly.

  Sandy’s hand gripped his shoulder. “We ought to wait for George,” she said.

  “Attaboy, Richard,” said Maggie. She was ecstatic.

  Henry followed the light, turned a corner, and swam down into the small room that he remembered from his previous visit. “We’ve got it,” Richard was saying. He knelt two meters away, blurred in the smoky light.

  The frame was half-buried. They scrounged around, digging with their fingers, trying to work it free. They found a rectangular chase. A gearbox lay beneath loose rock. “It’s the press bed,” said Maggie.

  A second chase was wedged under a cut slab.

  Sandy’s scanner revealed something in the floor. She dug it up. At one time, it had been a compartmented drawer or case.

  Henry poked at the chases. “There is type set in these things,” he said.

  “Good!” Maggie egged them on. “It’s enough. Let’s go. Get it out of there.”

  The frame was stuck tight. “We need the pulser,” said Henry.

  Richard touched his arm. “I don’t think we want a beam anywhere near it.”

  It was large, almost two meters long, maybe half as wide. Sandy and Richard tried to pry it loose.

  It did not give.

  “This is not going to work,” Sandy said. “Even if we get it out, it’s too big to take back up the tunnel.” She looked at it in the lamplight. “How about just taking the chases?”

  “Why the chases?”

  Maggie’s voice crackled. “Because that’s where the type is set.”

  Hutch broke in. “It’s about to get wet up here. If you’re planning on leaving, this would be a good time.”

  Henry measured the chases with his hands. “We’ll still need to widen the exit,” he said.

  “How about just taking a good set of holos?” George suggested.

  “No help,” said Maggie. “We need the chases. And we need the type. We’re going to have to do a major restoration if we’re ever going to read those.”

  Henry was playing his light around the room. “Should be some type trays around somewhere.”
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  “Forget it.” Richard tugged at the chases. “Sandy’s right. Let’s make do with what we’ve got.”

  “If there’s more type down there,” said Maggie, “it would be nice to have it. The type in the chases will be pretty far gone.”

  “Goddammit, Maggie,” Hutch exploded. “You want the type, go down and get it yourself.”

  The common channel went silent.

  “Okay, let’s do it,” said Henry. “Cut it. We’ve no time to be particular.” The particle beam ignited.

  George cut with a will. He broke the press apart and dragged the chases free.

  “Sandy,” said Henry, “get to the top of the shaft and be ready to haul when we’re clear of the tunnel. Richard, why don’t you go up and give Hutch a hand? No point in your hanging around.”

  “You’ll need help with these things,” he said. “I’ll wait.”

  Henry nodded. “Okay.” He checked the time. “We can manage it.”

  “Hurry up,” said Maggie. Henry remembered an incident years before when a football had rolled onto an ice-covered lake and the older boys had sent him out to recover it. Hurry up and throw it in, they’d cried, before you fall through.

  0935 hours.

  The tide sucked at the Tower. There were a couple of icebergs on the horizon. The coastal peaks glittered in the sunlight.

  Hutch, angry, close to tears, swung the winch out, hooked a ten-pound ring weight to the cable, and punched the button. The ring fell into the sea, followed by fifteen meters of line. The shuttles lay side by side in the water. Carson stood on Alpha’s wing, rocking gently with the motion of the waves. “This is crazy,” he said. “I can’t believe this is happening.”

  It was a gorgeous day, clear and gold. The hour before the end of the world.

  Four of Quraqua’s flying creatures, animals that resembled manta rays, flowed in formation through the sky, headed north.

  “Maybe,” he said, “we should talk to Kosmik.”

  Hutch stared at the cable.

  Inside the military chapel, George, Richard, and Henry had completed their work and started down the tunnel at last.

  Kosmik Station. 0945 hours.

  Truscott stood behind Harvey Sill with her arms folded. Her face was dark with anger. “Any progress yet?” she demanded.

  “Negative.” Harvey pressed his earphones tight. “They’re still on the surface.”

  “Can you tell what’s happening?”

  “They’re in the tunnels. That pilot, what’s-her-name, is pretty upset. She’s got something going for her, that one. But I don’t know what it’s about. It’s even possible this stuff is all prerecorded to drive us nuts.”

  “You’ve gotten paranoid, Harvey. Have you asked them what their situation is?”

  Sill shook his head. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I thought it would encourage them if they thought we were worried.”

  Truscott was beginning to feel old. “Harvey, get them on the line.”

  “Might not have to. Incoming from the Wink shuttle.” He put it on visual. “Go ahead, Alpha.”

  The woman pilot looked down at him. “We’ve got an emergency, Kosmik. Please let me speak with Dr. Truscott.”

  The director stepped forward. “I’m here. What’s the problem?”

  “We still have people in the tunnels. They aren’t going to make it out before the deadline.”

  “Why not?” Truscott bit off the words, like pieces of ice.

  “They were trying to finish up. Sorry. I don’t have control over this. Can you delay the firing?”

  Truscott let her hang a moment. “How long?”

  “An hour,” Hutch said. She sounded desperate. “One hour.”

  “You have any idea how much trouble this makes for us? What it costs?”

  “Please,” said Hutch. Her eyes were wet and red. “If you go ahead, you’ll kill them.”

  She let the pilot see her contempt. “One hour,” she said, finally. “And that’s it.”

  Hutch nodded, and looked relieved. “Thanks.”

  When the link had been broken, Sill said evenly, “That’s a mistake.”

  “We’ll argue about it later. Get the word out. Tell everyone to stand down. One hour.”

  Kosmik Ground Control South, Aloft. Friday; 0954 hours.

  The first white lamp lit. The nuclear weapon at Delta Point had just armed. Ian Helm sat in the right-hand seat of his shuttle. No clouds obscured his view. The south polar ice sheet spread out below him, from the ridges along the Koranda Border, which masked the line of the northernmost volcanoes, to Dillman Harbor, where they’d set up the first base camp two years ago. He remembered standing in that great silence, cold even through the Flickinger field because his heating unit had malfunctioned, warmed rather by the exhilaration of the moment, by the knowledge that he would one day annihilate this ice continent, melt its mountains and its foothills, fill its valleys and rills with steam and rain. In a single glorious sequence, he would convert this wasteland into the stuff of regeneration. No one would ever really give him credit, of course. Caseway and Truscott would take all of that. And they deserved it; he didn’t begrudge them their due. He was satisfied that the design was his. And the finger on the detonator.

  “Ian.” A green light flashed on the instrument panel. “Sill’s on the circuit. Wants to talk.”

  The blue and white glare from icecap and ocean hurt his eyes. Helm looked at his pilot. “Jane,” he said, “do we have a disconnect?”

  She frowned. “Just pull the plug.”

  He yanked it out. “Let everybody know that we’re worried about the possibility of bogus instructions. Set up a code word. No one is to accept a transmission without it.”

  “What code word?”

  He thought briefly. “Fidelity.” Jane looked troubled. “I’ll put it in writing.”

  “Truscott won’t be happy.”

  “I’m saving her from herself,” he said.

  Two more lamps blinked on. One at Little Kiska close to the pole, and the other at Slash Basil inside a volcano.

  “Eventually, she’ll thank me.”

  LIBRARY ENTRIES

  The velocity of a tsunami equals the square root of gravitational acceleration times the depth of the water. Depths in the ocean surrounding the southern icecap on Quraqua are relatively modest; the velocity of the wave could be expected to diminish in the narrow confines of the Yakata. Calculation shows that a major tsunami, traveling at the unlikely average speed of 850 kilometers per hour, could not reach the Temple within four hours. At WOO hours, Jacobi was correct in believing he still had a substantial safety margin from waves originating at the ice pack.

  However, in their concern about tsunamis, the Academy team overlooked a more immediate danger: shock waves triggered by the collapse of the ice pack would travel at 7.1 kilometers per second, arriving at the Temple area in about six minutes.

  A major fault, running east to west across the Yakata, would react to the shock waves by triggering a seismic response. This secondary earthquake would almost certainly generate sea waves. It was these waves which struck the coastline approximately eleven minutes after the initial detonation.

  —Barnhard Golding,

  God on Quraqua: The Temple Mission (2213)

  Eberhardt & Hickam, Chicago

  Let your courage shine before you, fear nothing, take no thought for your well-being. Live by the law, and know that, in your darkest hour, I am at your side.

  —Fragment from Knothic Hours

  (Translated by Margaret Tufu)*

  *Original hard copy includes notation “Let us hope so” in translator’s handwriting, dated Friday, June 11, 2202.

  14.

  Temple of the Winds. Friday; 0943 hours.

  The two chases constituted the essence of the find. Rescue these, with their text relatively intact, and they would have all they could reasonably hope for. Therefore, despite the urgency, Richard moved with caut
ion. He and Henry took the time they needed to extricate the artifacts from their tomb and start them up the tunnel. George moved ahead of them, removing obstacles and where necessary widening the passage.

  They reached the vertical shaft at four minutes to ten.

  Henry shone a light upward. “What do you think? Wait it out here until after zero hour? If there’s a quake while we’re in the shaft, the chases could get damaged.”

  Richard could not help but admire Henry’s singlemindedness. A quake in the shaft would damage more than the chases. On the other hand, he couldn’t see that they were any safer staying put. “Let’s keep moving,” he said.

  A line stretched up into the dark. George passed it to Henry, and they secured it around the first of the artifacts.

  “Melanie, we have a problem.”

  She had known there would be problems. There were always problems when you tried to shut down an operation this size. “What is it, Harvey?”

  He looked unhappy. “Helm won’t answer up.”

  They were inside two minutes. “Forget him. Call the control posts direct.”

  “I tried. Signals are locked out. We need a password.”

  “Hutch.” Truscott’s voice.

  “Go ahead, Kosmik.”

  The director’s face was red with anger. “I’ve been unable to get through to our stations. Detonation will proceed as scheduled.”

  “But we’ve still got people down there,” Hutch protested.

  “I’m sorry. We’ll assist any way we can. Keep us informed.”

  Ten o’clock.

  The southern sky brightened. A second sun might have ignited just below the horizon. Hutch looked away. “Richard.”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s started. I can see it from here.”

  “All right. Keep cool. We’re coming. We’ve got time.”

  The sea was calm.

  “Ready here,” said George. He was at the top of the shaft.

  “Look okay?” Henry asked Richard.

  “Yes. Let’s do it.”

  George took in the slack, and they lifted the chase into the shaft, and commenced to haul. Henry swam up with it, guiding it.

  Richard stayed with the second unit. He brushed silt from it; ridges of individual characters passed under his fingertips. What a treasure it was.