Walt and Leigh Richmond

by The Lost Millennium (html)

  Kilocubit after square kilocubit of frozen wasteland boiled. Watt after watt of ever-increasing avalanche energy lit the polar cap with a glare that had never before been seen on Atalama.

  Avalanche.

  The passengers on the shuttle were unaware of their narrow escape. While the hellfire of unquenching avalanche burned at the pole they had just left, they calmly boarded the Vahsaba.

  But there were those on board who knew of the disaster; who were watching the ever-increasing fury of the avalanche, driven wild by the unaccustomed force of the solar ultra-violet light being driven out in tremendous floods by the flare.

  From this altitude, 19 radii out, the avalanche was brighter than the sun itself, even on the apparently miniature replica of a world; the ring of compression advancing across the ice-field was clear, but also miniature. A shock-wave, racing at the speed of sound, it seemed merely to expand like a small smoke ring across the polar wastes. But it did not stop. It reached the edge of the ice and swept on down through the northerly latitudes, toppling great cities; and on down over the coastland. And yet the avalanche increased.

  Its awesome fury was now sending fingered rivers of fire down through the continental faults, seeming to divide the continent itself into segments traced by a fiery knife.

  Rahn spoke to his communications officer. "Contact the Atalos, if you can. Let them know that we will stand by for whatever aid we can render."

  But there was no contact. The roar of electrical energy was beyond the power of electronics apparatus to penetrate.

  Forming in the great ring of shock-wave, billowing clouds of steam from the polar cap were already obscuring the details of the fiery rivers that seemed to split the continent But the rivers themselves were growing in length, reaching ever southward towards the mighty ocean.

  The men in the Vahsaba were helpless. They could only sit and watch the destruction of their world.

  Seven days they watched; and the globe beneath them was now an unrecognizable shambles glowing with its own eerie light that centered the continuing finger of brilliant discharge at the pole.

  Yet it depended on what time-table was accepted, the number of days. For now the planet no longer had the slow, majestic rotation that had once seemed as stable as eternity itself. Now it whipped about on its axis like a thing tortured, taking a mere one-fourth of its former time for a revolution of day and night.

  Life was gone from the planet—of that Rahn was sure. Nothing, he told himself, could have survived the destruction they had witnessed. Just the radiation level that they could measure with the instruments aboard precluded the thought that anything there could still live.

  Yet he could not bring himself to give the command to take off that he knew he must give.

  The theoreticians aboard predicted a final explosion of the planet itself, though not for some time yet.

  "Consider it," Dade had explained the reasoning. "Consider the planet as a parallel field motor. The short circuit is robbing power not only from the ionosphere, but from the trapped charged particles in the radiation belts beyond the atmosphere.

  "And in doing so, they are changing the magnetic field of the planet. It is as though you had decreased the magnetic field on an electric motor while maintaining power to the armature. The rotation will inevitably increase until the armature explodes. I advocate that we leave immediately, for fear of being caught in the explosion!"

  "You expect, then, this avalanche effect to create that explosion?" Rahn asked carefully.

  "Only indirectly. The explosion—which is now inevitable," Dade said fiercely, "—will come about purely through centrifugal force, caused by the increase of rotation overcoming the gravitic force that holds the planet together.

  "At the present rate of increase of speed, I predict that the continent will be torn apart some time tomorrow—on its eighth day of increased spin. And that the planet itself will be subjected to a disruptive force sufficient to tear it apart within twenty-four days. It will explode, Rahn! And if you do not order the Vahsaba to leave now, you will be murdering the last remnants of our race!"

  Rahn felt anger surging through the hopelessness that had come over them all. He spoke in a low, harsh monotone.

  "Very well, Dade. I have heard you out. Now get off the bridge."

  Yet when the man was gone, he knew he could not ignore the warning much longer. One more day, he told himself; one more day and night…

  But even while he debated, Dade's first prediction was proven accurate. Below him, the continent of Ura began to tear—slowly, and then more rapidly as the hours passed, the continent was ripped asunder—ripped and torn, though the action could be seen only in bits and pieces through the tremendous storms that raged across its surface.

  There was no longer any question. Rahn ordered the big motors warmed for the start of flight; and while they warmed, he watched. It would be a matter of hours before the Vahsaba was sufficiently powered, and he hoped he had not waited too long.

  In those few hours, the precise gyroscope that was the planet unbalanced. A distinct precession appeared in the polar location …

  Rahn checked his dials. The Vahsaba could not move—not yet—not for another two hours.

  Below him the great fragments of the continent were thrown violently across the surface of the planet; and then, with a mighty heave, the planet itself turned and tilted majestically, rotated nearly forty-five degrees…

  And the avalanche, now in a latitude where the planet's magnetic force could have effect, went out as suddenly and as completely as it had started.

  The avalanche was ended, but Atalama was destroyed; her land mass in huge blocks torn one from the other; mountains where there had been plains; churning seas beating savagely against the wounds of the land.

  The two hours clocked past, and the big atomic motors that powered the Vahsaba roared into true life. Rahn made no motion to stay the ship, though Atalama's crisis was past and the planet subsiding into a wounded quiet.

  There was no other course than to take off, to find a new home for man. The planet was quiet, but the radiation raging in Atalama's atmosphere would not abate for centuries.

  But men would return to their planet, Rahn told himself through clenched teeth. The Vahsaha would return.

  VII

  The engineer stared at the intense archaeologist. This was not a man telling a story. This was a man repeating a nightmare.

  The desert stars pierced the night sky with a brilliance that the dry air did little to dim. Vaguely the engineer realized that he was shivering in the cold of the desert night.

  "Who are you?" he asked. "And why have you told me this?"

  "No," said the archaeologist in a deeply weary voice. "No. I am who you think I am." Then he stood suddenly and looked down on the seated engineer, and his voice became fierce.

  "I'm telling you this," he said, "because they're back. Because they're using the same technology that has been used on this planet for our good three times since the flood. They built Cheops in 3000 BC, and blew up Sodom and Gomorrah over a misunderstanding in 2200 BC. They nearly threw this planet into the sun when they blew up the fifth planet—Typhon—with their engineering in 1450 BC. And they nearly blew it out again when their grid system backfired in 776 BC.

  "Not the Old Ones," he added in a softer tone, still fierce. "Not the ones who took a couple of thousand years of their new long lives to grow mature on a quiet planet with room to think and a job to do. But the new ones; the ones who came back and took the long-grown know-how of the Old Ones and gadgetried it with their go-go ideas, and brought prosperity—and havoc.

  "They're back. And I can describe for you how their most recent—since about 2500 BC—technology works. And you've got to figure out how to build its duplicate. Their technology hasn't changed since they inherited it from the Old Ones in 2500 BC, so we know they aren't growing; they haven't changed. And they may be ethical now and they may be high-minded; I don't know. Some of them were then, so
me weren't—but they're not growing or their technology would have grown. And we're their run away and play now children.

  "If we want any say-so at all in what happens next, we have to grow up and match them now. Right away. Yesterday, preferably.

  "That's why I'm telling you."

  The engineer stared long and hard out into the desert night. Finally he answered.

  "It's a good thing," he said softly, "that I don't believe you. Because if I did …" He paused and took a deep breath. "If I did I'd have to try to do what you ask."

  The archaeologist slumped down onto his seat. "Will you hear the rest?" he asked.

  "Oh, I'll hear the rest," the engineer answered. "If you wanted to stop I'd have to try to persuade you to keep going. I've got a couple of sweaters," he added. "It's getting cold."

  He pulled himself to his feet and went to a cardboard carton beside the small refrigerator, from which he pulled two sweaters, old army pullovers that had seen a bit of wear. He tossed one to the archaeologist, shrugged into the other. Then he grinned happily.

  "By they're back, I suppose you mean the flying saucers?"

  The archaeologist nodded. "The landing craft of the Vahs, and the viewer transposers. There is no indication that the big transposers are in use again yet."

  "I'm glad you brought those in," said the engineer, his voice gay now. "You had me going for a minute. I was beginning to believe you. Now I can get my sense back and listen to the rest of the story. You haven't even gotten to the solar tap insulators—the pyramids—yet. How do you jump so fast to the—transposer?"

  "Just one big pyramid in each was a tap. The Cheops, in Egypt. The others are copies."

  "No." The engineer's voice was stubborn. "If you're going to use those pyramids as proofs, be consistent. If you were right, the other pyramids would not be just copies, but very necessary to the system itself. You'd have one major laser-base and control system in a major insulator; and a series of lesser bases with satellite systems of laser beams. A single laser won't work. A single laser might ionize, if it were powerful enough, say one hundred meters of path length near its focal point. A group of lasers packed together with slightly different focal points could ionize a nearly straight path of, say, a thousand meters. But you wouldn't want a continuous ionized path from the ionosphere to ground in one fell swoop, anyhow. If you did that, you'd get much too big a splaat of energy to be able to handle with any reasonable technology.

  "So, say you take fifteen pyramids, just as a guess, and set them up in a pattern. Not all of them are very large, of course, and they serve two purposes. The lasers are mounted on them so that they have just the proper angle to form a step-ladder path from the ionosphere to ground. Firing them in sequence, you get the same sort of step-ladder reaction that you get from lightning bolts, that zig and zag this way and that across the sky before finding a completely ionized path.

  "I've no idea yet what the optimum zig-zag path would be; but it probably wouldn't be exactly geometrical in terms of the location of the smaller pyramids. Anyhow, as I said, those lesser pyramids serve a second function. If you do get an avalanche, there'll be one hell of an explosion over your main pyramid, and the shock wave from it will go racing across the plain on which your installation is located. So the second function of the smaller pyramids is to protect your multiple-installation of secondary lasers. They will, of course, be mounted on the far side, away from the center of the explosion, and the pyramids will act as blockhouses."

  The archaeologist looked thoughtful. "So they all had their lapis lazuli. Their polished lasers. Not just the big ones." He smiled. "Thanks," he said. "You may be a scoffer, but you've just cleared up a mighty important point for me."

  "But how do you jump from solar taps to transposers?"

  The archaeologist looked at his host quizzically. "You developed the solar tap," he said. "You recognized the mechanics of the electro-magnetic forces controlling the rotation of this planet, and you worked out the facts behind that pattern; and you devised a means for tapping into that power potential. You worked out that pattern in spite of the fact that traditional physics refuted you. Once the Van Allen belts were discovered, it became obvious to you how the planet is powered. So you could look behind the 'myths' of traditional physics and see how to tap that power.

  "Yet when you read, almost daily these days, of the factual use of transposers and landing craft here on this planet, you find it nonsense? Never mind," he added as the engineer started to interrupt, "there's more, and most of it I think you will be able to recognize as well within our own technology, once we're using the tap. The planetary engineering job that was done to create the flood, for instance. You'll recognize that you could do the same job with the tap. The …"

  "The flood?" The engineer smiled. "I gather you know how they did it?"

  "I haven't described a thing," the archaeologist stated almost fiercely, "that isn't possible to our own technology; that isn't in our own near future. And I don't think anything that's beyond us now has occurred in the last 8,600 years."

  The engineer leaned back, his pipe going nicely now, his interest real, his skepticism unalloyed. "I'm still listening," he said. "The flood?"

  "Soon. When the Vaheva came back about 4400 BC, she went into orbit, and searched the radio bands for a signal. Finally she caught the radio beam that Lord David had kept going …"

  David Lyon was busy at a small bench, checking through a standard chemical analysis, paying no attention at all to the occasional snap, hiss or mutter of electrical energy faithfully reproduced by the webwork of gold and ceramics that was the electronic equipment he had set up so long ago to operate as a standby code beacon and receiver.

  Aside from occasional inspection, it had required little of his time over the past centuries, and it was some minutes before he realized that the signals it was now emitting were not the random electronic noises of nature.

  Faithfully the pendulum switch ticked over and the device emitted a measured pulse of radio frequency energy unheard on its own speaker, but radiating into space as an obvious man-made signal. Then, with the pendulum swing, the receiving function listened, the tiny gold-leaf speaker replicated the electronic signals that impinged upon it.

  David's head came up. Signals. Not noise.

  He listened with a feeling of unreality and a deep surge of—grief ?

  It's over, he thought.

  Grief? he asked himself. Grief? It should be pleasure. The race of man exists outside of myself. It still exists. The time-space equations must have worked.

  But the grief persisted, deep and full and very real, and he held from the switch and the key that he had kept in readiness. For how many years? For how many centuries?

  I can hold my hand and they will go away, he thought … and the thought brought a rush of action that took his hand out to switch off the pendulum; and then to the key; and he began spelling out, in the old pulse code, the letters that he'd planned to use if this time ever came.

  "This is Atalama. Who…"

  Behind him there was a splatter of tiny hoof-clicks on the plastic floor, and the faun's hard little head bumped his arm abruptly from the key, its soft nose damply investigating the spot where his fingers had been. The instrument buzzed sharply, and the tiny animal sprang back, ears pointed, eyes bright with alarm.

  David laughed and patted the rough velvet over the bony cranium absently, then turned to the transmitter again. But the operator on the far end had recognized that the machine pattern had been replaced by a live transmission and had not waited, was already breaking in with a jittering, high-speed code—dots and dashes much too fast for the unskilled to read. David missed it completely.

  Carefully he spelled out, "Slower, please. This is Atalama. Who calls?"

  But the faun, its distrust of the buzz allayed by the assurance with which its master called forth the noises, was inquisitively bumping his arm again, ineffectively at first, then harder. Firmly, David took a grip on the slender
neck and led the animal through to the garden area of the ship, closing the port behind him.

  He returned quickly, in time to hear, pulsed slowly now, as slowly as his own transmission had been, "… Vaheva, returning to Atalama. Where are you? We had given up hope that intelligent life was left."

  David paused, then began the detailed pinpointing of his location. He couldn't use the grid system that had been in effect before, but he'd planned a system. "My area," he transmitted carefully, "is approximately twenty-eight degrees north of the equator. And I am in sunlight now, approximately …" he looked through an open port to the shadow dial on the foredeck, "… ten degrees past high noon. That, with the beacon signal, should give you sufficient information to find a large inland lake. The Juheda is in that lake, near the confluence of three rivers. We will leave off communication until you arrive since this is slow. Welcome home," he added. Then he paused a moment before he spelled out, "David Lyon, lord of molecular biology, University of Crêta." and released the key.

  It was almost ten minutes before the instrument chattered again. "We plan to make planetfall about noon twenty-four hours from now," it spelled out, still slowly. "It will be good to see you, Lord Lyon." And the message was signed, "Jeris Gavarel, commanding, Vaheva; and all the crew."

  David stood up from the small instrument that had quietly been sending its signal outwards over the centuries, and walked restlessly to the big easy chair on the far side of the laboratory that centered his activities these days. But his body refused to relax, and he stood again, and began striding.

  The race of man. It had returned in the persons of the crew of the Vaheva. Which meant that the other ships, too, might return.

  But what of my people, he thought? What of the new-man race? There will not, now, he the chance for them to demonstrate that a different evolutionary sequence can take a better form … or a worse…