Echoes of the Well of Souls

Rockfall: Upper Amazon

Theresa Perez was not amused. “what in hell are you doing here?” she asked Juan Campos acidly. “There is no room on this plane for you two. We have to work.”

Campos grinned evilly at her. “So? We give you our hospitality and you would then deny me seeing this great sight? Even my father thought that we were owed this.”

“What’s the problem?” Maklovitch called, squeezing into the plane. He saw Campos and the bodyguard. “This wasn’t part of the agreement,” he noted with irritation. “We’re on a tight schedule here and even tighter quarters.”

“The agreement has been changed,” Campos responded. “We are staying right here. If you choose not to take off, then sit. My father believes one of the family should be aboard.”

Maklovitch thought fast. Right now the deadline outweighed all else, and in this plane Campos was as much at their mercy as they were at his. “All right—you come. He goes, and now!” the newsman added, pointing to the bodyguard.

“Ramon goes where I go.”

The newsman thought a moment, then decided to call the bluff. “Very well. Terry, get on the horn and tell them that Don Campos has insisted on placing two armed men aboard. Because this exceeds our weight and room limits, we cannot go. Tell them the Campos file is to air rather than be sent to Don Campos. Understood?”

The gangster jumped. “Now, wait one minute. What file? You—bitch! You radio nothing without my permission!”

“Too late,” she told him with a smile. “We’re already live to the studio. They’re hearing every single word we say. Are you ordering me to switch us out, knowing that it means that here, on live audio, you are forcibly kidnapping us?”

This was getting a little too complicated too quickly for Juan Campos. “What file?”

“Your father knows,” the newsman responded. “Why do you think we were offered his hospitality? I thought you told us that you really ran things around here.” He paused a moment. “Now, since we’re going nowhere, shall we all go see your father and explain the situation?”

Campos suddenly didn’t know what to do. His first impulse was to take them all out and shoot them, but he was in fact acting on his own and he was not at all certain how his father would react when word of that came down. Nobody had said anything about a deal, but it explained much.

“All right. He goes, I stay.”

“And you give him your pistol and stay in that seat as long as we’re in the air,” the newsman said firmly. He looked at his watch. “Better make up your mind right now or it won’t make any difference. That meteor won’t wait.”

Campos threw up his hands in disgust, then handed a pistol over to the bodyguard and told him to get off and wait. The bodyguard, hesitant and not without some protest, complied.

None of them were fools enough to believe that Campos didn’t still have various weapons on him, but at least it was one less. Now, with the bodyguard out, Lori climbed on, looking confused, and they took their seats.

The technicians had been working steadily since they’d arrived. Gus now had a console bolted in the center rear of the plane through which he could control several exterior cameras and see what each showed on small black-and-white monitors. The pictures were being recorded in a compartment beneath the cabin and also being sent by a computer-controlled ku-band satellite uplink mounted atop the aircraft that would relay them back to the U.S. studio if, of course, conditions were right and the aircraft was level. A similar microwave system was mounted on the plane’s underside and might work for pickups in Manaus or at the makeshift hacienda uplink site. Provided that either system worked, directors far away in the States would pick the feed and also give Gus general direction.

“Probably none of it will work,” Gus grumped, “which is why we’re also taping, but it’s worth a try.”

Audio wasn’t a problem, and Terry had on a headset that connected her by radio with the studio. Both Maklovitch and Sutton also had similar headsets, but those were on a different frequency and would be used mostly for contact and commentary to the live anchor desk.

They roared off into the night, climbing through a low cloud layer that bumped them around a bit and caused horrible noise on the audio. Then they broke free and had the clear sky above and all around them, with a tremendous view of the stars.

“I’ve got us on course and ready,” the pilot reported. “We should be in position with, no thanks to the delays, about ten minutes to spare. For a region with cleared airspace, though, there’s a fair amount of traffic on the radio. Not just the two science planes and the Brazilian Air Force tracker, but it seems there’s a number of small civil aircraft up in violation of the clear airspace order. Two air force jets are trying to track them and force them down, but there’s a lot of damned fools up.”

“Yeah, and probably all three U.S. networks and a dozen others,” Terry commented. “Wonder what would happen if they shot down an anchor or two.”

It was very dark but very busy in the plane’s cabin as everything was checked out one last time, and they even did a last-minute on-air audio report to the news desk. Everybody tried to forget about Campos, who at least was just sitting there uncharacteristically behaving himself. Still, the time dragged impossibly.

Lori felt keyed up but also suddenly very tired, almost drained. It was the waiting, she decided. She wanted things to start. They all wanted things to start.

“Contact! Visual contact by Science One!” the pilot reported excitedly. Science One was the combined Brazilian-Smithsonian research plane about 350 miles out in the Atlantic. “If what they’re reporting is true,” the pilot added, “then we’re in for a dizzingly fast lalapalooza! Buckle in tight! She’s coming down dirty!”

“What does he mean by ‘dirty’?” Juan Campos asked, breaking his long silence.

“Shedding,” Lori told him. “Coming apart. Raining big, hot rocks.”

The plane turned slowly and then reduced speed. Maklovitch was already on the air, and Lori knew now that she, too, was live.

“We should be seeing it any second now,” the newsman said with a professional calmness his tense face belied. “It’s coming right over Rio.”

“There! Got it!” Gus cried. “Oh, my God! What a whopper!”

Things changed in an instant; the horizon suddenly turned from night into a creeping twilight, then, suddenly, it was there, coming straight for them for all they could tell.

“Madre dios!”Juan Campos breathed, and crossed himself.

Lori watched with a mixture of awe and fascination as the huge object sped toward them and then was suddenly past. It looked like some enormous flaming lump of charcoal, the size of a dozen full moons, blazing a yellow and white-hot tail.

“Wahoo!”Gus roared from his console, apparently very pleased with the pictures. It was only later that Lori realized that the man was so intent on his screens that he never actually saw the meteor.

The plane banked sharply and took a course perpendicular to the meteor’s path so they could see it go down. The pilot’s reactions were good, although suddenly the entire aircraft was rocked as if shaken by a giant hand, and unsecured items went flying. There was a roller coaster-like sensation of falling for what seemed an eternity, and then the pilot boosted power and pulled out of it.

“Did you get it? Did you get it?” Terry called repeatedly.

Now the plane headed back west, following a huge but ragged contrail left by the meteor. It took better than five minutes to reach the point where it dipped into the clouds, a distance the big rock had covered in seconds.

There was no question, though, as to where to look. A giant mushroom-shaped plume was still rising from out of the clouds, and both plume and clouds seemed to be on fire.

They tensed again as the aircraft dipped below the clouds, and there were general gasps at the scene below. It looked like the whole forest was on fire, and the impact site, many miles away, resembled nothing less than an active volcanic caldera.

“It looks like an atom bomb,” Lori commented, her throat dry and constricted. “Look at the blast area down there. The firestorm had to be incredibly hot to reach that distance in that wet, green growth.”

Tremendous thunder and lightning were all around as well, making the scene look and sound like the end of the world.

“What is all that? Blast effect?” the anchor prompted her.

“No. It’s very wet here, and the heat and blast cloud have created massive convection currents. The heat is rising, taking the humidity in the air with it, and it’s condensing. Those are thunderstorms created by the impact. There’s no telling how long it will rain on this area, but at least it will help extinguish the fires and keep the smoke from rising too high.”

“I see a huge crater, but there’s something glowing at the bottom,” Maklovitch noted. “Is that the meteor itself?”

“Possibly, but unlikely,” she answered. “It’s probable that the whole thing disintegrated on impact, leaving only small fragments. More likely that is partly molten rock and mostly existing bedrock uncovered for the first time in a million years.”

“I estimate that we are probably at least ten miles from the crater, yet it’s clearly visible. It must be enormous. A mile, maybe two miles across. The fire and blast damage extend, oh, at least twenty or thirty miles all around, possibly more.” The newsman suddenly remembered Juan Campos. “Senor Campos, does anyone live down there to your knowledge?”

Campos stared at the scene out of hell. “Not now .”he responded in almost a whisper.

“No, no. I mean before it hit. I know there wasn’t much in the way of evacuation because of the sparse population and the primitiveness of the people.”

“Depends,” the gunman managed. “Where are we now?”

Maklovitch saw what he meant. All of this region looked pretty much alike, even more so in the dark, and nothing much was left down there that might provide a landmark.

“I’ve got the position from Science Three,” the pilot called back. “Call it, oh, a hundred, maybe a hundred and twenty kilometers south-southeast from the Campos airstrip.”

The Peruvian nodded. “Then there were some Indians down there. Now?”

“Can we get in closer?” Gus asked the pilot. “I’d like to go straight over that crater if I could.”

“I could try, but with these storms and downdrafts all over the place there’s no predicting anything. You can feel her shaking now,” the pilot replied. “I’ve been circling out some fifteen miles, and you feel what it’s like. If I did it, it would have to be at a fairly fast speed.”

“Well, the clouds and smoke are obscuring everything,” the cameraman complained. “Either we get in there or we wrap, people. I’m for giving it a try.”

Terry nodded, giving a quick satisfied glance at the terrified face of Juan Campos strapped in the back. Welcome to the news business, she thought acidly. “One pass, as low and slow as you dare,” she told the pilot. “That’s it. Gus will have to make do with what he can get.”

Lori wasn’t much more thrilled than Campos, as much as she wanted to see the sight closer up. With the tremendous turbulence, she found herself thinking less of the view than of headlines in the paper.local scientist and news crew die covering asteroid.

“Hang on, everybody!” the pilot called, and circled first out, then back in toward the glow, climbing and increasing speed. The vapor, rising now mostly from the rainfall striking the still extremely hot object, obscured clear view, and the ride was the scariest any of them could remember. Then the turbulence subsided, and the fear and tension drained from all of them like water through a sieve, leaving them all more or less limp—except Gus, who was muttering that he hadn’t really gotten a decent pass.

“One’s enough, I think,” Terry told him. “It’s only going to get smokier for a while down there.” She paused for a moment as someone far away asked her a question. “Gus? Can you replay that last pass, the straight-down shot, through a monitor here? They got it back at the studio, but they say there’s something weird about it.”

“Huh? Yeah, I guess, if you’re finished shooting.”

“We are for now. We’re heading back to the ranch to uplink the tapes as backup. They want us, and particularly Doctor Sutton, to look at it and see if she can explain it. You, too, Gus, since it might be a trick of the light or something with the camera.”

“Yeah, okay. Hold on. That’s… lemmesee… three. Rewind. All right. Wait. There. Okay, it may have to run a little, but I think it’s in the neighborhood. I’ll switch it to the overhead monitor.”

They all looked, and for a moment there was a jiggly freeze-frame of the crater and smoke cloud. Then they saw the picture flip, angle dizzyingly from one side to the other as the plane got into position, then zoom straight in. The picture was bouncy but clear enough. They saw the smoke flash past and, for a very brief moment, were looking straight down through billowing white smoke and rain.

“There! Did you all see it?” Terry asked them. “It looks like something dark, something black, straight down as we went over, with bright stuff all around it.”

“Sorry, it was so fast,” Lori responded apologetically.

The picture stopped, and Gus rewound the tape.

“Hold it!”Terry shouted. “No, up a little more. Frame advance. There! Hold it!”

The picture was still jumpy and distorted, but they could now all see just what the control room back in the States had noticed. Through the smoke, the red and yellow glow of the crater was visible, if not completely clear. Right in the center of the glowing mass was a black shape, distorted and indistinct but still some sort of regular form.

“I couldn’t guess,” Lori told them. “I’d need a much clearer photo than that to really say much of anything about it. It could be a different mineral, much harder than the surrounding rock, that has a higher melting point and maybe is already cooled down, or a fissure in whatever’s left of the meteor, or a trick of the light.”

“I don’t know meteors, but pictures I know,” Gus said firmly. “That’s no trick of the light. Something’s down there.”

Maklovitch looked back at Campos. “Any way in there? To land, I mean.”

“This plane? No, senor. Nothing, even if it would have survived that blast. And there are no roads in this region of any sort. On foot—days under the best of conditions.”

“You have a helicopter at the ranch,” the pilot called back. “I saw it on the field back there. What about that?”

Campos shook his head. “No, no, no. That is our private helicopter. Besides, if you could not even safely fly this plane through that smoke and the storms, flying a helicopter in there close would be suicide!”

“I flew choppers in hairier conditions than that in the Marine Corps,” the pilot replied. “Thunderstorms, sandstorms, and under fire. It wouldn’t be a big deal, I don’t think, particularly if we’re allowing another hour or two for things to calm down.”

“No, no, no!” Juan Campos shouted. “It is out of the question!”

“It may be,” Terry said, “but even as we speak, my boss is on the phone to your father, and it looks like we might just have a deal.” She paused. “Of course, you don’t have to come if you don’t want to.”

Even Lori thought the idea bordered on madness. “It’s pretty dangerous,” she noted, “and you’ll get better pictures, as well as better conditions, after daylight.”

“That’s true,” Terry agreed, “but we don’t know how long after daylight the first choppers will be arriving from elsewhere, full of geologists and astronomers and military people and bureaucrats—”

“Not to mention NBC, ABC, CBS, CBC, the BBC, and maybe Fox, God help us,” Maklovitch put in. “In this business being first is everything. That’s why folks watch us and advertisers pay top dollar—we can do things like this the others can’t. Nobody remembers the second newsman into Kuwait City.”

“Forrest Sawyer, ABC,” Terry responded instantly. “We were third!”

“Okay, nobody outside the business remembers. But we remember most that we were third. It’s the name of the game. Not that we’re trying to commit suicide. If Bob there wasn’t sure he could get us in and out in one piece, I don’t think we’d risk it ourselves. If you’re really against it, you can stay behind, but if we can put this together, you’d be invaluable on the scene.”

Lori thought a moment about remaining behind with all those ruthless men on the drug lord’s ranch and wondered which was more dangerous. “I’ll go,” she told him, wondering if she was in fact being stupid.

“Good girl! Oops! Sorry, Doc. No offense,” the newsman added.

“That’s all right.” Mother always said I should be a good girl. I just want to know if I’m being a dumb broad by doing this.

“You seem certain my father will say yes,” Juan Campos noted.

“We plan for a yes. If it’s no, we haven’t lost anything,” the newsman told him.

“Even if he agrees, the helicopter carries only six and not much cargo,” the gunman pointed out. “With you, your pilot, your cameraman, the two senoritas, and a sound man, it will be full.”

“He’s got a point there,” the pilot, Bob, agreed. “We’re not gonna be able to truck in a suitcase unit or much of anything except a hand-held.”

The newsman thought a moment. “All right, then, we’ll try two trips. Terry, you can handle Gus’s sound, right?”

“In a pinch, sure.”

“All right. A suitcase, Terry, Gus, me, and the doc.”

“What’s a ‘suitcase unit’?” Lori asked, puzzled.

“A portable uplink,” Gus replied. “It’s actually a kit in the form of three large suitcases. You can put it together with battery power and have it sending pictures and sound to a comsat in under an hour. The foreign correspondent’s constant companion since it was invented.”

They had the agreement by the time they landed, but, looking over the helicopter, they discovered that it wasn’t as large as they’d hoped. When the suitcase unit was added, it left room for five, but only by a whisker.

Juan Campos wasted no time at all calling in from a dedicated phone at the aircraft parking area. When he returned, he did not look all that happy.

“My father, he says that I must go with the helicopter,” he told them. “This time it is not my idea!”

“He’s right,” Maklovitch told them. “I just spoke to him myself on the same line. Mr. Campos is a little nervous about somebody taking up the chopper without one of his men along to see that we go only where we’re supposed to go and shoot just what we’re here to shoot, particularly since we’ll probably be gone well into daylight and they do expect others from the Brazilian side there not long after that. There was no talking him out of it; either Campos here goes or it’s no deal.”

It didn’t need to be spelled out. After daylight in particular, coming in on this side of the border would reveal some sights camouflaged from routine aerial or satellite surveillance. If they saw them, it wasn’t any big deal, since they couldn’t be sure of their exact location. But no pictures. No more blackmail possibilities or nice photos for experts and their computers to mull over.

“With the suitcases, that leaves only five seats, including the pilot,” Terry noted, not at all pleased by this turn of events. Flying into a disaster area fraught with sudden dangers and possible horrors didn’t faze her, it seemed, but the idea of being stuck out in the middle of nowhere with Juan Campos sure did. “Who stays?”

“Well, I want you and Gus out there setting up and getting what you can,” Maklovitch told her. “They want me to do some more standups here and an initial wrap piece, so it looks like I come out with the second flight. They’re not at all sure if we can uplink with the rain, so you’ll need the extra setup time. I’ll bring a sound man and Brazil network people with me on the second ride. We’ll be in contact by radio.” He edged closer to her and added in a low whisper, “Besides, he’s got to come back with Bob to ensure he flies right.”

Terry nodded. “Okay, then. Doc, you want to come with us now or wait for the second run? It’s probably going to be pretty wet and rough out there, but if you want to come along, feel free. At least you’ll be the first person with any scientific training at all to see the thing.”

Lori didn’t like it, but she knew she had to go. “I’m coming. Nobody in the history of known science has been able to get this close to an impact of this magnitude so soon. What about rain gear?”

“Senorita Doctor,” Juan Campos said, “you could wear anything you wished and it would not help when the rain falls. Even with little wind, the rain is so strong and so powerful, it cannot be described but must be experienced. Best to seek shelter when it starts, dress light except for the mud boots, and have one or more dry changes of clothes packed away.”

“Well, we don’t have any rain slickers, anyway,” Gus noted. “Got some wide hats that’ll help and a couple of umbrellas, for all the good they’ll do, but that’s it.”

“We’ll manage,” Lori said, not at all certain that it was true. “I’ve been drenched before.”

Once up in the air, they didn’t need a map to find where to go even in the darkness of the jungle. There were still fires burning all around, and the eerie yellow glow from the crater seemed almost like some great aircraft beacon.

“What’s causing that pulsing?” Terry asked the scientist. “I mean, I don’t know much about this, but that’s not normal, is it?”

“Nobody quite knows what’s ‘normal’ in a situation like this, but I can’t explain it and wouldn’t have expected it. It could be rapid heating and cooling, but it seems almost too regular for that. That’s one of the things we might be able to find out if we can get close enough.”

“Looks pretty promising,” Bob told them. “There’s still lightning and thunderstorms all around, but the area immediately around the crater looks like just smoke from the thing itself.”

“The white smoke coming from it now is probably mostly steam,” Lori told them. “Groundwater or runoff from the storm is going down the crater, hitting that very hot bottom, and instantly coming back up.”

“Kind of like a geyser,” Gus said, nodding.

“Something like that. Or a fumarole. That’s a relative of the geyser that erupts constantly, spouting steam with a roar. It may be days, weeks, even longer before the crater is cool enough to allow people to descend, although the scientific teams probably have moon suits and could do it in a matter of a day or so. They go into still-active volcanic calderas in them.”

“Too bad we don’t have any of those suits in the budget,” Gus commented. “I’d like to get a down-the-throat shot.”

They were quite close now, close enough to see the strange yellow-gold shape at the bottom, even though that bottom was a quarter of a mile deep and still shrouded in steam.

“Funny,” Terry said, looking at the unearthly scene. “I don’t see that dark spot now. Maybe you were wrong, Gus. Maybe it was just a trick of the camera.”

“Not like that,” Gus maintained. “There’s nothin’ to cause that kind of thing.” He frowned. “I tell you, Terry, if that thing opens up and some Martian machine pops out, I’m runnin’!”

“I’m more curious as to why the crater isn’t deeper,” Lori commented. “It’s amazingly shallow for something that large coming in at that kind of speed.”

“Looks plenty big enough to me,” Gus replied.

“Sure, but the velocity at impact had to be close to Mach 3, maybe more. You crash anything going at close to three thousand kilometers per hour and you’re going to get one whale of a deep hole. With an object twenty, maybe thirty meters across or more—it was very hard to tell—the crater should be many times deeper than it is. There are a lot of unexpected phenomena here. Enough, I’m afraid, to shake up several disciplines. They’ll be years figuring this thing out! And that firestorm—it shouldn’t have happened. An asteroid’s just a huge piece of rock, and there’s nothing in the jungle to ignite or explode that way. There must have been some sort of gas or explosive material that went up on impact. This is a very strange thing, indeed, we have here.”

“Like that place in Siberia you were talking about?” Terry asked.

“As mysterious as that, only very different in the phenomena. At least this time we’re on the scene.” She sighed. “I wish I had some instruments here. At least I could take initial measurements. It might be nice to know if this area’s now radioactive, for example.”

“Radioactive!” Gus exclaimed nervously. “You mean we might be going into something like that?”

“It’s possible. We don’t really know what’s orbiting out there in space.” Another cheery thought, that comes too late, she mused to herself.

Terry looked down at what was rapidly resembling a moonscape. “Think any natives are down there? I heard all sorts of stories about some of these tribes.”

“Impossible!” Juan Campos responded. “You see it. What could have lived through that impact, not to mention the firestorm?”

“I wouldn’t be too sure of that,” Bob noted. “I’ve seen bombardments so thick you couldn’t believe a gnat could live through it, but when they went in afterward an amazing number of people were still alive and in fighting shape afterward. You never know. Still, I’d think that any of the primitives alive in these parts are still running. To them, this had to feel like the end of the world. It’s possible to live through a bombardment, but those who have say it’s the most terrifying thing imaginable, and they knew what was going on. Imagine how afraid these savages must be with no idea of what was going on.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve seen that sort of thing, too,” Gus admitted. “But I ain’t so sure about the reaction. I wish we’d brought along a couple of those guns.”

“You would never be able to use them, senor,” Campos said matter-of-factly. “The Indians would not be seen until they wished to be seen. The darts in their blowguns are tipped with poisons and sharp enough to go through clothing, and they are accurate. These people also know what guns do and will guard against them. There may be a tribe or two that still are ignorant of the outside world, but I doubt it. They just do not like our world and ways, rejecting them in favor of the jungle and their own ancient life-style. But I think our pilot friend is right. This would have frightened them and awed them far too much for them to become curious. In a few days, or weeks, they might investigate, but not right off.”

The pilot surveyed the area. He didn’t need the helicopter spotlights to see the general area, not with the glow from the crater and the illumination of the newly risen moon, but the searchlight gave detail to the immediate ground surface. “I can’t tell how hot it is, particularly with all the charred vegetation, but there’s a clear spot over there about a kilometer from the crater that looks like good, solid rock. It’s not raining now; you might just get lucky if it’s cool enough.”

“I don’t see why it wouldn’t be,” Lori responded. “The immediate area was burned quickly in the firestorm.”

The pilot set the helicopter down gently. Terry cautiously opened the door, looked down, grabbed a large flashlight, and then stepped out onto the surface. Fine dust and ash blew around from the backwash of the rotor blades, but she reached down and felt the soil and nodded. “Slightly warm, but no big deal,” she shouted back into the cabin.

They all got out now except the pilot and Campos, who handed down the three large silver suitcases containing the portable dish unit to Gus. The three quickly moved away so that the helicopter could lift off. They all had their canteens, first-aid kits, and sufficient rations for the short time they would be there.

They watched the chopper rise, hover a moment as if reluctant to leave, then head out to the west toward the Campos compound. It was quickly swallowed up in the clouds and night. The blowing ash settled, and when they moved back in to retrieve the equipment, they were startled to see a form standing there.

“I decided to remain with you,” said Juan Campos. “Even under these conditions, this is a dangerous place for two senoritas and one unarmed man.”

All three of them had an uneasy feeling about the man, but there wasn’t much they could do. Forty minutes, Terry thought frantically. Maybe less, each way, with maybe twenty on the ground. Not even two hours. He has to know that. But the animal lurking under that civilized veneer of his wasn’t buried very deep, and it might not think that far ahead.

“I thought you had to guide the helicopter back and forth,” Terry said aloud to him.

“Oh, he does not have any equipment in the helicopter. It is ours, after all. He will have no trouble finding his way back, either—he is a good pilot—and there is little for him to see until dawn. It is safe enough for now.”

She sighed. “Well, then, help us lug this stuff over to a reasonably flat, stable area and help us set it up.”

There was the sound of not so distant thunder. “Is all that waterproof?” Lori asked. “I think it might well get rained on, and us, too.”

“Oh, it’s pretty well sealed,” Gus assured her. “Just keep the control box lid down tight and latched in a direct downpour. The big problem is stabilizing the dish, particularly in a heavy wind, along with the fact that ku- bandsignals are real bad in rain and heavy weather.”

“We better think of some shelter for ourselves, too, just in case,” Lori said. “This place looks pretty blasted, but over there the trees seem scorched but still standing.”

“You can take the small flashlight and have a look-see,” Gus told her, “but I wouldn’t go too far ‘round here. There’s all sorts of mean, nasty critters live in these places, and it’s pretty damn sure not all of ‘em got blown to hell or had the sense to run.”

“Thanks a lot,” she came back sarcastically. What she really wanted to do was have a look at that crater, but until they were set up, there wasn’t much she could do about that. She could see it, though, so tantalizingly close, with its eerie yellow glow and its strange, regular pulsing. It might be irresistible after a while.

From the jet, the whole region had looked more like the landing zone, but here, on the ground, it was much different. A surprising amount of the jungle was intact, although it showed the effects of blast and fire. Huge areas had been uprooted almost instantly, the giant trees lying there, all pointing away from the crater. Still, even here, the roots of some were so deep, and the underbrush was so thick below them, that large stands survived, and it appeared that the blast had affected barely another kilometer or two of the jungle beyond their camp. It indicated that the blast had been far less powerful than she’d originally thought and that the firestorm had occurred not on impact but ahead of it, not destroying the jungle but burning away the top instead.

She suddenly thought she saw something moving in the darkness and swung the flashlight toward it. The beam fell on an enormous, hairy multicolored spider standing atop one of the blasted trees. For a moment she couldn’t tell if it was dead or alive, but then, suddenly, it jumped out of the beam and to her right.

She decided that she’d had enough exploring for the night and hurried back to the others.

“Find anything?” Gus asked as he finished the assembly of the main dish with a socket wrench. “Jumping spiders,” she told him nervously. “Bird spider,” Campos elaborated, helping Gus mount the dish into the suitcase console. “Very common here. They will attack if threatened but will try to run away if they can. So something did live through all this, then?”

Gus was a little more worried. “Sounds like we was talkin’ sense up there. I bet there’s more life still around here than anybody’d thought.”

“Perhaps you are right, senor,” Campos agreed. “In which case it will be a very good idea to stay away from the trees unless we must use them for shelter. The spiders and most insects are not big problems, but the snakes can be very dangerous, and if anything would survive all this it would be la anaconda and her kin.”

The satellite dish was mounted into the main suitcase unit; Gus took out a small sledgehammer, pounded stakes into the rock and anchored the dish to them with a strong wire. He jiggled the thing a few times, then seemed satisfied.

“Next thing we do is see if we have juice from the battery pack, and then I’ll try and align this sucker,” he said.

One whole suitcase, it appeared, was a battery. “How long does that thing last?” Lori asked him.

“Oh, about an hour at full power, maybe more at a lower setting.” He used a small electronic device to take a preliminary sighting, then switched on the unit and plugged in a tiny Watchman-style television that showed only snow. Checking the instrument often, he turned a few cranks on the dish mount, and suddenly a very snowy test pattern came in. It was somewhat distorted, weak, but it was there.

Terry plugged in a headset and threw a small switch. The television went black, but she paid no attention and instead said, “Hello, Atlanta. Hello, Atlanta. This is Terry at the crater. Do you receive us? Over.” She toggled the switch down.

“Audio is fair,” a tinny voice in her ear responded. “No video. Over.”

Toggle. “We don’t have a camera plugged in yet. Because of power limits and distance to the crater, we are unable to do live shots from the rim, but as soon as John gets here, we’ll go out with the hand-held and then immediately feed tape. Over.”

“Understood. There is a storm over the base at the moment delaying everything. Best guess is that it’ll be about two hours until it clears and they can get to you. Advise you use the time for pickup shots if the weather is still clear there. If Sutton is up to it, try her in a standup. Feed what you get when you get it, but leave at least fifteen minutes. Over.”

Two hours!“Uh—we might have a problem before that,” she said low into the mike. “We have the nonteam member present and armed. Over.”

“Can’t do much about it. Handle it the best you can. We are advised of the situation from the pilot at base. Do whatever you have to. Suggest you shut down now until you are ready to feed. Over.”

When you make deals with the devil, make sure it is you making the deal.

“All right. As you said, nothing much can be done about it. Out.” She looked over at the cameraman. “Shut it and seal it, Gus,” she told him. “They want us to do pickups at the crater if the weather holds.”

The thunder rumbled across the ghostly landscape.

“That storm is toward the rancho,” Campos noted. “I can tell. The storms do not last all that long, but they are fierce and they can be a problem. I think perhaps the helicopter will be late.”

Damn it!Terry thought sourly. At least he could have been a little less clever. “It’s raining there now,” she admitted to him. “But they don’t think it’ll be a serious problem unless it comes this way.”

There was a sudden, extremely bright bolt of strobo-scopic lightning close by, and then a very loud explosion of thunder.

“I hate to say it,” Gus yelled, “but I think we got that serious problem!”

Before anyone could reply, there was a sudden rush of wind and the heavens opened with a vengeance. It wasn’t like any storm Lori had ever known; the rain was so heavy and dense, it was nearly impossible to see, and the roaring sound was deafening. Campos and the two women grabbed the flashlights and Gus snatched up the portacam unit, fortunately still in its case, and they headed for the shelter of the trees, spiders and snakes be damned. There was no hope of staying dry; as Lori ran toward the jungle, she was soaked through in an instant, and she could feel the intensity of the downpour as it pounded her through her clothing.

The trees were not the shelter they would have been only hours before, but there were places where the rain was deflected by higher foliage in spite of the fire damage. Surrounded by gushing waterfalls of runoff from the tree tops, the spot she found was fairly well protected.

She’d been afraid that she would slip and fall on the rock or trip over some wreckage of the destroyed forest, but somehow she’d managed to make it without mishap. Now, sheltered and catching her breath, she was aware of a series of sharp, thundering explosions that reverberated through the jungle. In a moment she realized that they were all coming from the same direction—the crater!

Either it was still extremely hot or some sort of reaction was taking place the nature of which she couldn’t guess. She suddenly worried that it might somehow explode and take them all out, or shatter, or who knew what?

She wondered where the others were. Not far, surely, in spots just like this. There wasn’t any sense in going looking for them in the incessant rain, and a few attempts proved the futility of trying to yell over the constant roar.

A crazy thought came to her of Gus’s fears of a live rerun of The War of the Worlds. The repeated explosions from the crater certainly did sound very regular, like something, well, venting. Nerves, she told herself. Just nerves.

Terry, too, had found shelter, leaning against the tree and gasping for breath. She had fallen, and it felt like she’d bruised and skinned her knee. It hurt like hell.

God! This is one I’m gonna remember for an awfully long time, she told herself. Like all the rest of my life. I been shot at, chased, slapped around, and treated like shit, but this may be the worst. And all for a damned hole in the ground! Maybe this is it. Maybe this is God telling me that it’s time to pack it in, demand a studio job, or find something else. And those damned explosions! Bang! Bang! Bang! Like some kind of ghostly war.

She had just decided that it couldn’t be much worse when she felt something press against the side of her head. She started; powerful hands pushed her back, and there was a gun right in her face.

“Go ahead!” Campos yelled at her in Spanish with angry satisfaction. “Yell your head off, bitch! They could be five meters away and not hear you!”

He grabbed her, and she tried to kick him in the balls, but he sidestepped her attempt, which was weak because of the pain in her knee and her general state of near exhaustion. He twirled her around and pinned one of her arms behind her back, twisting it painfully as he drew her to him.

“Try anything more like that and I will break it! I will break your arms and your legs.”

“My God, Campos! What do you want? You can’t get away with this!” she yelled back defiantly.

“You know what I want, you whore!” he snapped. “And what if you do not turn up when the rain stops? They will suspect, but they will not know. Do you not remember where you are? Your friends come at our invitation and leave at our demand, and if they reject our story of your disappearance, they can do nothing. We are already on the wanted lists of a dozen countries. Your only hope is to do what I say and pretend you like it. If you convince me, then maybe, just maybe, I will let you live!”

He pushed her back against the tree and grabbed with his free hand for her rain-soaked khaki safari shirt, the other hand still holding the pistol, now pointed at her abdomen.

“Why? You’re gonna kill me anyway. You must! And we both know it.”

He grinned evilly. “Perhaps the rain will stop. Perhaps then they will hear us, no? You can never tell.”

And, with that, he ripped the shirt, almost literally tearing it off her.

She closed her eyes and sank down, resigned now to her fate at the hands of this monster. She waited and waited, and nothing came.

Finally she opened her eyes and frowned, then her eyes grew wide in amazement.

Juan Campos had collapsed in a heap and was lying there facedown, more in the rain than out of it. The pistol had fallen from his hand, and she moved painfully to retrieve it, not comprehending what sudden miracle had saved her. Gus? But where was he? A falling branch? It didn’t look like anything like that.

And then, only a few meters beyond, she saw shapes. She was so shaken that for a moment she imagined they were Gus’s Martians or some other kind of creatures from the crater, and they did look like nothing on Earth. Their faces were tattooed with elaborate designs, with great earrings of wood or bone. Small, dark, and threatening in their own right, each figure held a small blowpipe in its hand, eyes wide but fearfully flinching with the sound of each small explosion.

She made a movement for the pistol, and the pipes went up. She stopped, backed away into the tree, and the pipes came down. Primitive, yes, like out of some National Geographic special, but they knew what guns could do.

Terry tried to think of how to say “friend” in every language that she knew, but only English and Spanish came to mind. She tried them, but only blank stares were returned.

And then, as dramatically as it had started, the rain stopped, as if someone had turned off a faucet.

Quickly, almost without sound, a trio of the primitives moved in toward Juan Campos’s body, first turning him over, then going through his clothing with a thief’s skill.

Inanely, Terry could only think, If only I had a camera here! What a story this would make!

With sudden amazement coming over her, she realized that the three stripping Campos were all girls—no, women, and, from the look of them, ones that had already lived rough lives. Their faces and bodies were decorated with well-worn designs, and they wore that primitive jewelry but not a stitch of clothing. Their black hair was long but obviously not without attention; it was shoulder-length on some, waist-length on others, and trimmed at the ends. Nor was it matted or tangled; much attention was clearly paid to keeping it groomed. Their awareness of how things connected on the clothing and of the gun and its purpose showed some knowledge, but everything about them said that they, if not ignorant of anything beyond the Stone Age, rejected all such things totally.

They were, however, thorough, and before two minutes had passed they had extracted from Campos’s body an incredible assortment of weaponry, from two more small pistols to an assortment of knives and other instruments of violence. One of the women in the rear brought up a thick tray of woven straw, onto which all the weapons were carefully placed. By the time they were through, Campos was nude, his clothing put in a heap, and signs of various wounds and scars could be seen all over the man’s body. Clearly his life hadn’t always been one of idleness and ease.

Terry heard noises to her left and looked over to see several more of the women with a very frightened Dr. Lori Sutton in tow and others dragging another form which the newswoman recognized. “Oh, my God! Gus!”

She started to go to the cameraman, but for the first time, one of the women made a sound, saying sharply and menacingly, “Azat!”

Blowguns went up, and Terry got the message. When Lori saw Terry’s torn shirt and Campos on the ground nearby, she gasped, instantly putting two and two together. The scientist reached the newswoman and whispered, “Did he…?”

“No. They stopped him. If they hadn’t—”

“Azat! Azat!”came the menacing protest again. Gus by now was also stripped, and they gestured that the two women were to strip as well. Clearly they trusted nobody, not here.

Oh, God! The damned bugs are already eating me alive as it is! Lori thought, but she was too frightened not to comply.

“Guza! Guza!”the seeming leader said, pointing, indicating that they were to move toward the rest of the primitives, who still had their blowguns trained on the captives. They’re not going to give us back our clothes and equipment! Lori thought with sudden panic, but there wasn’t much else to do, and she didn’t want to argue, not right now.

They went back into the forest, and the tender feet of the two civilized women were soon feeling bruised and cut by the rough forest floor, compounded by insect bites that the natives seemed to just ignore.

They’re taking us away, away from the base camp!Terry thought in panic. The rest of the news team would search, of course, but what chance did anyone have of finding them in the natives’ jungle, even if it had just recently undergone massive alterations?

It seemed like a very long march, but hardly hours considering that dawn had not yet broken. Finally they reached what the two women first thought was a village but which, on closer inspection, appeared more to be a temporary camp rather than a permanent settlement.

Terry’s curiosity competed with her fear, and she wondered if these women had been here when the meteor had hit. There were signs of debris about, a number of recently fallen trees and the remains of a crude stone fire pit that had apparently blown over. A camp fire burned in the wreckage, giving the whole area an eerie, flickering glow. On one side of the camp several women were lying on thick grass mats, and they had what looked like dried mud and leaves over parts of their bodies, some secured with vines. At least one showed signs of singed hair and had the natural bandages over part of her face and one eye.

Yes, they’d been here during impact. It was a wonder any of them had survived unscathed, let alone so many, and it was equally wondrous that any of them could still hear.

The two captive women were taken near the fire, although they hardly needed the extra heat, and with signs were ordered to sit. It was mostly mud there, thanks to the runoff from the rainstorm.

To their surprise, they saw the bodies of the two men being dragged into the camp, bound with vine ropes. Then they aren’t dead! both thought almost at once, for why bind dead bodies? Some sort of paralyzing drug, then, rather than a lethal poison. Terry was happy that Gus wasn’t a casualty, after all, but couldn’t help wondering with a little bit of satisfaction what Campos would be like as the captive of a tribe of female savages.

Now what?they both wondered. Neither had any experience with anything like this, but it wasn’t hard to think of movies, television shows, and books that told of the savage nature of the jungle people of the upper Amazon. And if they were taken far into the jungle before searchers could find them, what hope would there ever be of escape?