"For instance, the Sumerians weren't historiographers, as the Hebrews were, but S. N. Kramer, one of the foremost of our Sumeriologists, thinks they wrote their tens of thousands of clay tablets before the Hebrews wrote down the Old Testament. I think Kramer's wrong original records were simply written on destructible material, though sketchily kept from 4400 to 2200 BC, and have been lost; but that's a moot point. Certainly the Sumerian tablets go back to almost 3000 BC, and show the same pattern until the race was wiped out when Typhon—the fifth planet of our system; where the asteroid belt is now—when Typhon blew in 1450 BC.
"At any rate, the Sumerian records show Lord David as 'An,' probably pronounced 'Aeion,'—the first one. And they list the immortals—the 'seven originals and fifty who came later'—as Anunnaki—the 'Aitons of An?" In Greece, Lord David is 'Ur-Aenos,' born from the wind-blown egg of the sea of chaos in the beginning. Zad, Memph, Pat Tos and Jack Kronus and the other three who stayed behind when the Vaheva left after the flood, are the Taetons. The fifty who stayed behind from the next ships are the lesser Taetons.
"In Egypt (or 'Aegypt'), the Aetum, or Amon was the first one, while the seven (or eight, there is some question) who stayed from the Vaheva were the Eniad, or Aeniad. Then came the transposer people and you get the Cha-ra and the Pha-rae. By 2200 you have at least four ships back, and at least two sets of transpower people—people who have come in the big ships, then gone back to their planets to build transposer 'gates' and come through. You have the Aryans, and the Minoans and the Vahsaba'alem and the Vahsatana'an …
"Or take the word for solar taps. 'Cheops,' in Egypt; or maybe 'Shi-ops' is a closer pronunciation. And the other sites that provided multi-phase control: the one in Cambodia at Angkor Wat; and on the Yucatan peninsula, Teotihuacan, which I will bet was originally pronounced 'Shi-opihuacan' and may be today. There's one in South America, too. In India, the name comes down as 'Shi-vah;J and probably China took originally from the same source. In Greece, the taps were known as the Cyclopes. In Sumerian, the tap is the 'Enlil,' or 'Aenlil'—the eye of the Anunnaki. On your dollar bill, it's just a pyramid with an eye.
"Or the sites of the various transposers? I can tell you where most of them were, and it's not guesswork. Exact spots. They're in every mythology, too—the monsters with the hundred hands and fifty heads, that spit fire and brimstone three times. They were also the dark entrances to the 'nether' worlds, as 'far below earth as is the earth below heaven.' The nether world that is sometimes to the north and bitter cold; and sometimes to the south and is hell-hot; and that during the time of the transposer people was guarded by—well, Enki, in Sumarian, to protect the 'divine laws'—the electricity of Enlil, the Cheops, from the original immortals who didn't at all like what the transposer people were doing.
"If you want evidence, I can give you an Encyclopaedia Britannica of it. It's there. Geologic, historic, mythologic, semantic, archaeologic—factual. But … you're determined this is just a story, remember?" And he laughed again.
"Hmmph. A melting pot of civilized peoples and technological barbarians existing as a superstructure over a culture—even a primitive people would have noticed what was going on and questioned it."
"But—you don't understand! The new-man race didn't begin to reach the primitive level until about 60 AD. The early primitive level. Lord David started with—well, does your dog question electricity? Human beings with no patterns in the cerebrum! A full cerebral structure—and none of the patterns of thought that had built with it over the millennia to make a race capable of technology. They were biologically capable of holding the detail you handle today, but with none of the cerebral patterns of that thought written in! Blank. Survival abilities at an animal level.
"Of course, given those factors inherent in the problem, an exponential scale of development is predictable; and you have what John Campbell called the 'exploding genetic heritage' factor. A tribe develops patterns of know-how. This makes it possible for them to dominate their neighbors, to conquer and spread. Their know-how genetic structure is diluted when they spread … and their neighbors now have the gene patterns in diluted form too, and begin to grow faster…
"But… in those early stages I rather imagine that the psi-high animals brought in by the Cha-ras and probably used as monitors over the people had actually more cerebrally effective intelligence than the humans. They didn't have the cerebral capacity to acquire more; but what capacity they had had the written-in information intact."
"All right," said the engineer, surprised to find himself growing furious. "It's just a story. So I'm going to pick at it in an area where I have some know-how. That flood. The carbon 14 was a diffuse gas admixture of the carbon-dioxide content of the atmosphere. How does a flood get it out?"
"Oh," said the archaeologist, chuckling. "You diluted it and added carbon 12. Or rather, first you increased the carbon 12 dioxide … It wasn't just a flood, of course. They had to take all the factors into consideration in their planning. …"
It began as a captain's conference, in the small quarters he used as an office.
Zad sat in a straight chair beside Memph, against the wall, watching the captain making notes at his desk as they talked; watching Lord David, sitting quietly in an easy chair in the corner; watching Ted Promo, the Vaheva's chief engineer, and his second, Pat Tos, in the formal chairs beside the captain's desk; while Jack Kronus sat on a corner of the desk, his lanky frame relaxed against the wall.
From the corner of her eye she watched, too, as one or two and then four or five crew members paused beside the open office door to listen, leaning against the doorjamb and the far wall. The Vaheva, having planted its colony, had taken on an informality that—that makes us a team, she thought; an informality that is compounded of respect from top to bottom … and from bottom to top. They obeyed him as a leader, not a master. They respected him as an able man and his authority was unquestioned.
The captain, his face away from the door, had not apparently noticed the growing audience, so that it caught Zad by surprise when he remarked dryly, still without looking towards the open doorway, "This is a matter for the entire personnel, most of which seems to be interested already." Permitting himself a small smile, he turned towards the door. "We will adjourn to the lounge," he said.
By the time the formal conference members reached the lounge, most of the crew was there already waiting. The absentees could be counted as those on duty roster. The word spread fast, thought Zad, and grinned at the thought. The grapevine was still the fastest means of communication.
The captain seated himself on the edge of a big table that centered the lounge, and gestured to Promo and Pat to take places beside him. David selected an easy chair at the corner of the table, and Zad and Memph found chairs nearby.
"The problem appears to be twofold," Jeris Gavarel stated formally, letting his eyes range over the gathering. Young, all of them. Able, again all of them. Well, she told herself, we've a test, here, of that ability.
"First there's Lord David's people—a new race, with a fast evolutionary potential that may take them past the rest of us, if given the opportunity. What we need to do is set up the opportunity for a race that may prove to be superior to us in the long run. Anybody object to that?" He paused a moment, but there was no answer except for a muttered, "Chelt, no. If they can do better, let 'em," from somewhere nearby.
"Okay." The captain's voice sounded pleased. "The parameters of the problem are the race doesn't have one evolutionary chance in ten thousand so long as they're up against the heavy carbon 14 radiation that the avalanche put out. That's one.
"The other parameter is this: the new race of man still doesn't have one really evolutionary chance in ten thousand if we put a technological colony down beside 'em. They'd just grow up as subsidiary members of a civilization already established. I don't know what their true potential is, but Lord David thinks it's a very superior potential. He's spent two dozen centuries getting them this far, and he ought to know.
Now, given the parameters of the problem, what's to do about it?"
"Get rid of the radiation, and then get damn well out," came a deep voice from Zad's right.
Gavarel waited a few minutes, but that was the only suggestion, with a few scattered assents following.
"Very well," he said. "I take that as consensus. That leaves us with only one major problem. Getting ourselves out of here is easy. How do we get rid of the radiation?"
At his side, Promo stirred, and the captain turned to his chief engineer.
"Well—first you'd have to put heavy concentrations of carbon 12 into the atmosphere. Until you got, in the carbon-dioxides themselves, a normal proportion between the 12's and the 14's. You always have some 14, of course," he added.
"Then you'd have to wash out all the carbon dioxides you could—get the atmosphere back to the normal carbon dioxide percentage. Once you'd gotten the proportions between the 12's and 14's right, you have to get the total percentage in respect to the atmosphere back to normal. Then probably add some more carbon 12-dioxide for good measure. Not too much. That ought to do it."
Lord David was looking at the engineer with some awe. "You're talking about the entire planetary atmosphere?"
Ted Promo looked back at the biologist, pleasure on his face. "You were talking about the whole race of man, when you thought you were surviving them," he said. "Yes. I'm talking about the whole atmosphere of one planet. In one sense, though, you should remember that the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere is less than one percent of the atmosphere; and we need change it to not more than—say—five times its present amount. It helps to get some perspective to realize that by weight the whole atmosphere is less than one part per 100,000 of the planet. There's enough carbon dioxide trapped in the rocks, as carbon dioxide, to replace the whole of the atmosphere several times over without even referring to the trapped fossil carbons such as coal.
"But it's going to be drastic, if we do it," he added solemnly. "I'm talking about volcanoes and floods. I'm talking about taking the atmosphere up to near-lethal before bringing it back down again to a livable level. You sure it's a good idea? I'm talking about floods—real floods. We'd have to melt the polar caps. That ought to get a water table rise of—say—two hundred feet. Nothing but mountains above the flood level. Of course your new-men could go to the mountains, but there'd be real violent storms, and … then there would be the volcanoes. We'd have to—chelt, we'd have to activate a hundred or more of them to throw up enough carbon 12. They'd throw up everything and its brother besides, but the rest of the stuff would precipitate out. It normally does. But, raising the carbon 12 level would mean volcanoes erupting, and then erupting again.
"I'm talking about a clean-up job, David, that may be more lethal than your mutations."
"I think," David Lyon replied quietly into a room of such intent silence that his words fell like pebbles into an abyss, "I think that my people are doomed if the radiation continues to its own natural decay point. I've been graphing the increasing mutations and they've nearly reached the exponential break. In another few hundred years, there would be no recognizable new-men left. So that it becomes a question of extremes. Your planetary engineering would at least give some of them a chance."
He was silent then, and no one in the room interrupted the silence until he continued, "We on the Juheda were a very small group—but we survived the avalanche, which included the breakup of the continent and the creation of mountains. I doubt if you will match the fury of that event. And we survived in a ship. I could have my people build similar ships. Then, they have at least been given a chance. If they survive, they survive. They will have had a chance."
Zad felt a shiver run down her spine. How—how old he is, she thought. But—how right.
Slowly Promo uncoiled his lean figure from the edge of the table, reached as though for a pen, then stuck his hands determinedly in the pockets of the ship's regulation coveralls that he wore. He thinks better with pen and paper, thought Zad.
"Well, look," he said. "The planet's an electric motor; its design is somewhat similar, actually, to the design of the Vaheva—or rather, that's backwards. We built the Vaheva on the planet's design, more or less. At any rate, it's a form of electric motor and electric generator, and it generates a lot more power than the Vaheva. So what we have to do is use the power of the planet itself to create the effect we want—volcanic action, floods, and torrents of rain. The minimum necessary effect; but it'll be a real doozy of a minimum.
"Now the electrons from the solar wind come in at the pole and take two directions—three actually, but the third's a minor one. They split off through the ionosphere and out through the proton and electron belts held in the magnetic field. There's some seepage of atmospheric electricity at lower levels—that's the minor effect.
"But by far the largest portion of the planet's electrical current is self-generated by dynamo action, and exists as a flow through the silicate layer above the core—just under the mantel—where there's the least resistance. It creates sufficient heat to keep the silicate layer molten and its conductivity high. That current represents a drag on the motor, a conversion of a large part of the motor's energy to heat. And incidentally, creates the sustaining magnetic field that regulates the motor.
"Now if we speed the rotation of the planet up about ten percent, we'll increase the flow of electrons from the solar wind across the ionosphere, and also increase the dynamo effect in the core. If we put sodium vapor into the ionosphere, we cause additional current from the combination photo-electric effect and the reduction of the ionization potential. At the same time, the sodium vapor will act as a radiant energy absorber, taking in and trapping a larger quantity of heat directly from the sun, heating the atmosphere by greenhouse effect, and incidentally making some beautiful sunsets.
"The combination should melt the polar caps. There's your floods. At least two hundred feet extra of water. Then, the heat from the core and the increase of speed of the jet streams of air high in the atmosphere should cause torrential rains. The electric pressure on the atmosphere should increase—I'd think you might build up to as much as two atmospheres pressure; and this should increase the 'Shi' effect which builds storms into self-sustaining hurricanes. You've got your volcanoes going by now, which should contribute to the greenhouse effect, and to the storms, as well as adding their own little side-show to the circus."
"What's the trigger on the volcanoes?" some one called.
"Oscillating magnetic flux in the crust." That would be Jack's quiet voice, Zad decided, but he was off to the right where she couldn't see him.
"How you gonna get that magnetic flux to oscillate?" another voice asked. "It's got to be a pretty active oscillation."
Promo smiled briefly in Jack Kronus' direction, and the youngster climbed to his feet. "Throw up some copper wires. Tiny ones. Get a few bales of them spread out and orbiting in the ionosphere—you'll get your oscillations of flux," he said. Then he added, "Ever read about the time back on Atalama, when we were experimenting with rocket power before the Baron discovered the Shis? They orbited a batch of copper wires—I think they meant to get radio reflection or something. Had the damndest series of earthquakes from the oscillating-flux-effect, but they never did recognize what caused them.
They didn't send up enough to get more than minor grumbles out of the volcanoes, though. We'll orbit, I'd think, about twice as many as were used then, and get some real sweet volcanic action. Inch long, hair fine, orbiting copper wires. Best things possible to stir up crustal action." He grinned at the group and sat down again.
Promo's voice took up again. "The whole pattern should build up to critical in a very short time, say a few months. Should take only one Siva, if we can find a salt bed somewhere. We can use the Siva to refine the sodium vapor, and to throw it into the ionosphere when we get enough refined." He stopped as abruptly as he had started, and leaned against the edge of the table.
"How're we gonna stop it, onc
e we get it started?" a voice called. "That should work to start it. Now—how're we gonna turn it off and get the floods gone and the volcanoes quiet?"
"Chlorine." This time it was Pat Tos who spoke up, his freckled face bright with excitement, his blue eyes turned on Ted Promo with almost embarrassing admiration. "You've got to get the chlorine out of the salt to get pure sodium vapor. Just combine it with hydrogen—that'll even help the effect—and store it under as much pressure as you can get it in a dark place. Then—well, you could explode it with a light bulb when you were ready, and it would generate sufficient energy of explosion to take it up to where the sodium vapor was. You couldn't operate a Siva from beneath a flood, so you'd have to have some method like that for getting your brakes' up to the proper spot. Once the chlorine got up there it would combine with the sodium vapor and precipitate."
Promo nodded hugely. "Chlorine would do it," he said, "and it would combine the two operations into one. You take out the chlorine while you're refining the sodium, store the one and toss the other up."
"How would the chlorine work?" asked David.
"Well …" Promo reached towards his pen again, then stopped himself. "Its first effect would be to reduce the ionosphere ionization; it would have a tendency to stop the electron flow. It would also combine with the sodium vapor to create sodium chloride which would precipitate out of the atmosphere. The precipitation will take quite a while longer than the time it takes to get the stuff up there in the first place, but … well, the electrical action should stop rather quickly. We'll have to send the chlorine up a bit at a time, or the brakes would go on too hard."
"Just tank the chlorine, Pat says," called a voice. "You think we've got a metallurgical civilization here to build us tanks? Or that we could set up for that in … well, it would take decades."
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