The Reply

CHAPTER 14

“Will Kelly report our mission?” Duncan asked.

The three of them were in the forward part of the 707, left alone by the Air Force crew. The takeoff from Easter Island had gone smoothly, and now they were heading toward Osan Air Force Base in South Korea as quickly as possible.

“No,” Nabinger said, “she won’t.”

“What makes you so sure?” Duncan asked.

“She wouldn’t put us in harm’s way.”

“Seemed to me,” Duncan said, “that her take on it was that we were putting ourselves in harm’s way.” She looked at Turcotte, who hadn’t said a word since they’d boarded. “What do you think?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think she will.”

“I can give the order to shut her off from the outside world,” Duncan said. “To have her put into custody.”

“Then what’s the difference between us and Majestic?” Turcotte asked.

“Point made,” Duncan said. “I’m just a little worried, is that all right?”

“I’m worried too,” Turcotte said. He didn’t want to dwell on Kelly Reynolds and the way she had been acting. “When is Viking going to be over Cydonia?”

Duncan looked at her watch. “Five minutes.” She pointed to the rear of the plane. “We can access the secure link to Viking and get the images it sends back. At least we’ll be up to speed on that.”

Turcotte and Nabinger followed her down the aisle and through the door into the communications section. Rows of computer consoles filled the space between the bulkheads, and the light was turned down low, emphasizing the glow from the screens. Turcotte recognized the plane as a command-and-control version that the Air Force kept deployed around the world.

“Over here,” Duncan said, leading him to a particular computer. A young Air Force lieutenant was seated there, her screen empty except for a cursor.

“Hook us in to the NASA downlink from Viking, Lieutenant Wheeler,” Duncan ordered.

“Yes, ma’am.” Wheeler quickly typed in several code words. Her screen cleared, then a dire warning came across the screen telling anyone who had gotten this far that they were violating federal law if they were looking at this screen without proper access and to stop now.

Then the warning was gone.

“Is that our time or Mars time?” Turcotte asked.

Duncan was confused, but Lieutenant Wheeler figured out what he was asking. “Our time, five minutes,” she said. She looked up at Duncan. “It takes two and a half minutes for a radio or data transmission to make it from Mars to Earth. Five minutes for us is two and half minutes for Viking plus two and a half minutes for the transmission to reach.”

“You ever wonder why NASA never checked out Cydonia before,” Turcotte asked Duncan, “if they could move Viking so easily over it?”

“I looked into that,” she replied. “From what I’ve found out, there wasn’t that much fuel to move it around. I think this shift has burned all they have left. They used up the fuel that would have kept its orbit from decaying for a few more years.”

“Going over the same route, year after year?” Turcotte asked. “Maybe Majestic-12 had something to do with that,” he suggested. “Maybe they knew more than they let on.”

“That’s very possible,” Duncan said. “But we’re looking now.”

There was a pause.

The screen cleared and then both Duncan and Turcotte leaned closer as the Face on the surface of Mars came into view, the image twice as large as the one they had seen from Surveyor.

“Jesus,” Turcotte muttered. “How could they say that’s a natural formation?” There was no mistaking the image.

“Look at the ears,” Nabinger said. “The lobes are long, just like the megaliths on Easter Island.”

“Well, at least we know what they look like,” Duncan said.

“There.” Turcotte put his finger on a rectangular object on the screen. “That’s the Fort.”

“What’s that in the center of the panels?” Lisa Duncan asked.

“I can’t quite make it out yet,” Turcotte said.

>VIKING: SCANNING IN.

The image began to get larger when suddenly there was a bright light in the center of the solar panels. The light grew larger. At first Turcotte assumed it was consuming the panels, but then he realized it was getting larger because it was coming toward the camera.

The light expanded until it was the entire image, then suddenly there was nothing but static running across the screen, like the beginning of The Twilight Zone.

“It’s gone,” Turcotte said.

“This wasn’t being fed live to the media?” Lisa Duncan asked.

“No, ma’am, NASA was letting it out on a five-minute delay.” Wheeler shut off her computer.

“So what do you think happened?” Turcotte asked the others, but there was no reply.

As they headed back to the front of the plane, Nabinger stopped at one of the computer stations. He rejoined them in a few minutes with information. “Cing Ho was a Chinese admiral in 656 B.C. He was commissioned by the emperor to lead an expedition to the Mideast. They traveled into the Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf. According to historians, the expedition mysteriously turned back and the Chinese never again mounted any sort of naval exploration.”

“So Cing Ho carried the ruby sphere to the Rift Valley, then went home” was Turcotte’s take on that information.

“Looks like it.”

“I wonder why,” Duncan said. “This was thousands of years after the rebellion among the Airlia was supposedly over. What happened in 656 B.C. to make the Chinese undertake such an expedition?”

“Hopefully we’ll find out in the tomb,” Turcotte said. “And after what just happened to Viking, I think it’s all the more important we do this.”

At JPL they were focused on Viking and asking the same questions everyone else was about what had happened to it. Larry Kincaid knew the answer to the what: Viking II was gone. The how and why were two other questions altogether, with the latter predicated upon there being a deliberate act involved in the former.

He had watched the backup view from the IMS and seen the bolt of light come off the surface of Mars and envelop Viking. When the light was gone, there simply wasn’t anything there, as far as the IMS could see.

He sat in the back of the conference room as the JPL bigwigs were still working over what had happened. The most immediate problem was what to do with the tape of the incident. It had not been made public yet, and the networks were screaming bloody murder as they’d had to extend their programming preempt waiting for the first pictures of the Airlia Cydonia compound from Viking II. So far the only decision made had been to hold the tape and issue a statement saying there had been equipment malfunction and that they would have to wait until Viking II completed another orbit and was over the site again in three hours. The networks weren’t happy with that, but at least they could put their shows back on.

It took the top JPL people another fifteen minutes of arguing before they did what they usually did and turned to Kincaid. He’d spent that time pondering the other aspects of the incident that preyed upon his mind.

“Viking II is gone, gentlemen,” Kincaid said when finally asked. “Whether it has suffered a severe malfunction or no longer exists doesn’t matter, as we have lost all telemetry with the probe. Even if it is still up there in orbit and does go over Cydonia, it won’t do us any good.

“Our instruments from Earth and in space, including the Surveyor IMS, recorded a bright flash of light from the center of the solar panel array at Cydonia just as Viking passed overhead.”

“What was the light?” someone asked.

“I don’t know,” Kincaid said.

“Your best guess?” the head of JPL asked.

“My best guess is that it was some sort of power discharge,” Kincaid said. “The key question is whether it was incidental or intentional.”

The JPL head frowned. “What?”

“It could have just been a release of excess energy from the panel’s processor, which logically would be in the center of the array. Such a burst would be like that which comes off the sun occasionally, although on a much smaller scale. The electromagnetic pulse would have been more than enough to fry every circuit on Viking. If it was a very strong pulse, then it could have physically destroyed the probe. If this is the case, then it was simply bad luck that Viking was passing overhead when that occurred.”

“And if it wasn’t?” a new voice asked from Kincaid’s right. He turned. A man with white hair stood there. His face was unlined, making his age indeterminate. He wore sunglasses despite being indoors and he was dressed in black pants, shirt, sport coat with no tie, and the collar buttoned at his neck. He had an access badge clipped to his coat, the color of which told Kincaid the man had the highest clearance available.

Kincaid chose his words very carefully. “If it wasn’t coincidence, then the destruction of Viking was deliberate.”

The room burst out in pandemonium at that statement.

“Hold on!” The head of JPL finally got everyone’s attention. “Let’s not go off half cocked here. It was most likely just coincidence. But even if it wasn’t— even if it wasn’t,” he repeated over the low roar that produced, “we have to remember that the message we received from Mars was from a guardian computer, not from Aspasia himself. The message said that Aspasia would be waking up, not that he was already conscious.

“And what does a guardian computer do? It guards. Perhaps there was some sort of defensive system that was brought automatically on-line when the pyramid opened and the solar panels were exposed? And what if Viking flying overhead triggered that system? I do not believe this was a deliberate act, and that is the position I will take with the President.

“As far as the media are concerned, we will continue to tell them we have an equipment malfunction, which is basically the truth. We’ll tell them the malfunction was caused by moving Viking’s orbit.”

Which is a lie, Kincaid thought but he kept his tongue still. He’d worked at JPL too long to say anything out loud. Besides, the strange white-haired man who was standing in the back of the room bothered Kincaid. The man was looking at Kincaid’s boss with just the slightest trace of a smile on his pale lips.

“We will also tell the media that the malfunction was so severe,” continued the head of JPL, “that we will not be able to receive any incoming transmissions from Viking.” The man broke off and looked at Kincaid. “Is there anything we can do?”

“We have Mars Surveyor,” Kincaid reluctantly said.

“I thought you had no control over Surveyor.”

“We’re working the problem,” Kincaid said. “As you know, we’ve been using the IMS as backup to Viking.”

“How long until Surveyor achieves stable orbit?”

“It will take us a few days,” Kincaid answered. He glanced to his right, feeling the intense pressure of the white-haired man’s gaze burning into him. The man turned and walked out of the room as abruptly as he had come in. “That is all, gentlemen.”

As the other administrative and bureaucratic members of JPL’s hierarchy walked out of the room, Kincaid remained seated. He had a feeling the white-haired man might be waiting in the hallway, and Kincaid had no desire to get any closer to the man. Plus he didn’t want to run into any of the press, some of whom he passingly knew, who were also waiting outside, and be forced to lie to them.

So instead, he simply sat there and thought, and the more he thought the unhappier he became.