The Pandora Directive

Chapter Thirty

The pilot Witt had hooked me up with was named Smitty. He didn’t ask questions. In fact, he only spoke when absolutely necessary, which was fine with me. I hadn’t slept well, and I was weary beyond description.

Smitty threw my backpack into the back of his Avatar and curtly told me there was room to sleep in the back if I wanted to. I gladly took him up on the offer. Witt had apparently given him all the information he needed to get me where I needed to go. We took off, and I almost immediately fell asleep. Surprisingly, I slept deeply and thoroughly, the kind of dead sleep when you’re too tired to dream. At one point, I woke up disorientated, only to slide back into the tar pit of the subconscious.

When I finally awoke, I had no idea how long I’d been out. I rubbed my eyes and sat up. Smitty was like a statue at the helm. I climbed up to the passenger seat and pulled out my pack of smokes. “You mind?”

Thankfully, Smitty shook his head. I leaned back in my seat and stared out the window, taking a deep drag. We were up high, higher than I’d ever been in a speeder. Of course, the avatar was no ordinary speeder. We were out over the ocean. “Where are we?”

Smitty glanced down at the console. “Fifty miles off the west coast of Colombia.”

“How much longer?”

Smitty shrugged. “Ninety minutes, maybe.”

There didn’t seem to be much hope of conversation, so I turned my full attention to the window for the remainder of the flight. After about an hour, we moved in over the coast and headed inland. The terrain below was green and hilly. A few minutes later, we reached the beginnings of a mountain range, covered in tropical vegetation. Smitty began the approach, eventually getting down to an altitude of no more than five hundred feet. He began checking his instrumentation more frequently. We dropped even lower, and Smitty looked out the window, apparently searching for a likely place to set down.

Five minutes later, we touched down on a large, exposed piece of rock in the centre of some very tall trees.

“This is it. I can’t get any closer to the coordinates.”

“Which way should I go?”

Smitty pointed, then reached back and grabbed my backpack. He thrust it toward me. “I’ll meet you back at this spot in three days, at exactly 10 a.m.”

“Is that Pacific Daylight Time?”

He didn’t smile. I wasn’t sure he could. I opened the door and stepped out of the Avatar. Smitty shut the door and lifted off immediately. I didn’t bother to wave.

After the speeder disappeared over the trees, I looked around. I’d only been in the jungle once before, during the Martian Memorandum case. Being here confirmed my lifelong status of urban junkie. I was already missing coffee.

I threw the backpack over my shoulder and trudged off in the direction Smitty had pointed me. I climbed steadily for ten minutes. Above me, a canopy of intertwined branches filtered out most of the sunlight. The jungle floor was matted with vines and plants, but was fairly easy to cross.

Suddenly, up ahead, I saw a wall of stone covered with a thick layer of vines. The wall was comprised of square, cut stones, man-made. My pulse began to race.

I hurried to the wall and followed it. After thirty feet or so, I turned a corner and saw the facade of what might have been an ancient Mayan temple, set into the side of a hill. The undergrowth had almost swallowed the surface of the stone, nearly obscuring the structure. Climbing a set of inlaid stone steps, I reached an opening in the facade. Vines hung across it like a beaded curtain in a 1960s dance club. The vines were surprisingly thick and strong, but I managed to pull them aside. I fished a flashlight out of my backpack and stepped into the darkness.

I’d taken only a few steps when a flock of startled birds, or maybe bats, fluttered past my head. I dropped my knees automatically, shielding my head. Quickly, my sense of fear turned to disgust. The floor was coated with a thick layer of dusty bat guano. I stood up and didn’t bother to brush off my trousers. passage I was standing in was quite narrow, about six feet across. The ceiling was only about six feet high, causing me to stoop. The walls were surprisingly smooth; if they’d been cut out of stone, they’d been well-polished. The ceiling, as well, was smooth and glassy-looking. The passage led upward at a fairly steep pitch. I climbed from least five minutes before I reached a junction.

I had no idea where I was going, or even what I should be looking for, but all paths seemed to lead upward. I encountered numerous tunnels, always at right-angles to those they intersected. There was no way these passages had formed naturally. In fact, they resembled old air-raid shelters more than cave corridors.

After several twists and turns, I spotted a light emanating from a point ahead of me. Following it led me into a massive, cavernous area. High up in the cavern, regularly placed slits in the rock allowed beams of light to enter. Whoever had designed the layout had been ingenious. The cavern appeared to be empty, except for several figures carved into the walls. These tunnels were obviously ancient.

Around the perimeter of the cavern were seven openings, leading into hallways similar to those I’d been walking through. I took a stroll around, looking for any indication that would tell me which doorway to take.

Then I saw the footprints. They led from one of the doorways into the centre of the cavern. After some milling about, the person had made a decision and entered the opening opposite where he’d come in. The prints were from fairly small, well-shod feet and had definitely been left recently. The natives in this area were small-statured and had had access to modern conveniences, such as hiking boots, for decades. Maybe these prints were left by some local adventurer. Or maybe not.

I decided to follow the prints and walked to the third doorway, keeping the beam trained on the trail in front of me. I followed through numerous twists and turns, sometimes retracing my steps, other times crossing our two sets of prints. I began to doubt that whoever I was tracking knew where he was going. It wasn’t a comforting thought.

Eventually, the tracks led into a small chamber, approximately twelve feet square. The shoe prints led to the far side of the chamber, then seemed to vanish. I leaned over and followed them to where they ended. Suddenly, I was off balance. The floor seemed to be dropping out from under me. Before I could tell what was happening, I was sliding down a long ramp, heading straight for a rectangle of light. I dropped my flashlight and was now grasping and scraping for something to get hold of. The ramp was smooth, and I continued to gain speed until I entered the opening at the base of the ramp. Abruptly, there was nothing under me. My stomach turned over as I free-fell for what seemed like an eternity. Eternity ended unceremoniously as my locked legs hit a hard surface and buckled.

Lying on my back in a blanket of bat guano, I stared up at the distant ceiling and wondered if I’d ever walk again. I was fairly certain that the adrenalin in my system was temporarily blocking a tremendous amount of agonising pain, and that it would be merely a matter of minutes before it wore off. Even if I wasn’t broken, I seriously doubted that I would ever smell good again.

After several moments, I looked around and took in my new surroundings. I was in another cavern, but this one was perfectly cylindrical and very tall, like the interior of a giant, stone beer can. Near the top of the cavern, probably fifty feet up, I saw a large window, or maybe a small door, with golden light streaming through it. The opening I’d come through was right in front of me, about twenty feet up the cavern wall. A large stone statue sat in the centre of the floor.

I began to think that I’d survived my fall intact. There’d certainly be a tremendous amount of bruising involved, but I’d gone that route before. I rolled onto my side and saw a figure sitting off to the side. It was Regan. Her knees were drawn up to her chest, with her hands clasped around her legs. She was staring at me placidly, her expression somewhere between annoyance and amusement.

I got up from the floor and checked for broken bones. Everything seemed to be in place. I dusted off my trousers and gave Regan a nonchalant look. “Fancy meeting someone like you in a place like this.”

“I could say the same thing.”

“Been waiting long?”

“No, I just got here. Came in the same way you did. You all right?”

“I think so. A little confused.” I walked over to where Regan was sitting against the wall and sat down beside her. “So, what are you doing here, if you don’t mind me asking?”

She looked at me with more than a little resentment. “Oh, I should be waiting back in my hotel room like a good little girl, right? Well, I’m sorry. It’s not in my nature to sit around and let someone else make my decisions for me. As soon as I realised you were bailing on me, I got a charter down here.”

I pulled out a Lucky Strike. The pack must have cushioned my fall — the cigarette looked like an albino candy cane. “So how is it you got here first?”

Regan shrugged. “Maybe I had a faster pilot. Or maybe I left before you did.”

I took a drag off the lucky and handed it to Regan. She took it without any intention of giving it back. I pulled out a second cigarette and lit it. “What are you doing here?”

Regan stared straight ahead as she smoked. After a minute, she turned toward me. “I could see that you were gonna go along with those two old doddering idiots. What do they know? Here we are, sitting on the greatest discovery in the history of the world, and they say let’s get rid of it. Great idea! Who cares how valuable it is, how much the technology would be worth? NSA would pay billions just for the antihydrogen!” She took a final drag and flicked the cigarette across the chamber. Her frustration was almost tangible.

I looked at her face, trying to understand how she could be so blind to the implications. “There is no question that whatever we find in the ship would be worth a lot of money.”

“Exactly! That’s why we should — “

“But that’s beside the point. Didn’t you hear what Witt and Fitzpatrick were saying? We’re not ready for it. We would destroy ourselves.”

“And maybe we wouldn’t. Why, we give society the benefit of the doubt? Maybe what happened during the war taught everyone a lesson. In the hands of people like my father, the new technology could open doors to possibilities we’ve only been able to imagine.”

“Listen, Regan. The problem is that it wouldn’t end up in the hands of people like your father. Things like this never do. They always end up in the wrong hands. We can’t take the chance.”

Regan stared silently at the ceiling of the chamber. After several minutes, she stood up and brushed herself off. “I suppose we should find a way out of here.”

Apparently, our discussion was over. I had no idea if she had decided I was right or not. Not that it really mattered. The only choice had already been made. I got up and began to look for a way to escape from the chamber. The only visible exits or entrances with the chute door and the Rapunzel window. Maybe there was some kind of hidden door or trap, like the one I’d stepped into up above.

The chamber had a diameter of eighty feet, more or less. The statue in the corner of the room was at least fifteen feet high. It resembled the drawings and photographs I’d seen of what UFOlogists described as “ancient spacemen.” the face was typically childlike and lacking in detail, but the large eyes, halo around the head, and strange garb made the figure look vaguely odd and ominous. On the floor around the statue, a square mosaic pattern was carved into the stone. On the perimeter of the chamber, placed at four equidistant points, I saw what appeared to be perfectly cubical stones. I approached one of them and examined it. Clearing away a layer of guano, I could see that the cube was not sitting on the surface of the floor, but was set into a hole cut in the floor. I tried to lift the stone, but it wouldn’t budge. When I stepped onto the stone, it sank to the point where it was flush with the floor surface. It had to mean something, but I wasn’t sure what.

The other three stones all did the same thing.

“Hey, Tex, look at this.”

Regan was staring at the mosaic pattern around the base of the statue. She cleared off the dusty droppings to reveal his strange pattern. At each of the four compass points on the mosaic, a figure of a bizarre looking creature had been carved into the stone. The creatures were slender and long-limbed, with large, black eyes and no mouths or noses. All of them had their arms raised and were looking up. I didn’t think it was coincidental that the position of these creatures corresponded exactly to the positions of the square stones. I told Regan that I suspected the pattern was showing us how to get out of the chamber. All of the stones depressed when I put my weight on them. I had Regan stand on one of the stones, with the same results. We tried standing on two of the stones simultaneously, but it had no effect. Maybe all four had to be weighed down for anything to happen. Come to think of it, I wondered what would happen.

I needed to find two heavy objects. Regan’s backpack contained nothing more substantial than a small pickaxe. It certainly wasn’t heavy enough, but the statue was. Maybe the pickaxe would be sturdy enough to pry a few big chunks of rock off the statue.

I picked away at the statue for several minutes. Eventually, I got a pile of sizable stone pieces. I piled them on to two of the square stones until they finally sank to the level of the chamber floor. Excitedly, I directed Regan onto one of the remaining stones. Taking a deep breath, I stepped on to the final stone.

Nothing happened for several seconds; then the whole chamber shook slightly. Suddenly, to my dismay, the walls started sinking. Regan was craning her neck around, trying to take in what was happening. I glanced up and was startled to see the ceiling slowly descending. The whole chamber floor was being raised. We were halfway to the high window. I wasn’t sure what would happen if I stepped off the square stone, so I stayed on it and yelled for Regan to do the same. The ceiling was approaching quickly.

When the distance from the floor to the window reached about six feet, I stepped off the stone. Regan followed, but the floor kept rising. I sincerely hoped that we wouldn’t continue on past the window and get smashed between the floor and the ceiling. When the floor reached the base of the window, the chamber came to an abrupt stop, throwing both of us to the floor. I got up and helped Regan to her feet. Across the chamber, I looked at the doorway and saw the sky.

Regan reached for my hand and held it tightly. We walked to the doorway and stepped out of the chamber. It took about twenty seconds for my eyes to adjust to the sunlight. When my vision cleared, we were standing on a massive rock ledge. Out over the horizon was the roof of the jungle. I heard Regan gasp and turned to see where she was looking. Fifty feet to our left, under a layer of twisting vines, I saw the spacecraft.