The Rock

INITIATION

With each mile traversed Tommy Meduba felt the death force rise up in him. Lona leaned over and crooned his name and whispered of warriors and revenge as the sweat slowly dripped down his body, splashing unseen onto the floor of the truck. Blood pounded in his temples, the sound of the truck's engine faint in his ears.

Lona had searched him out and found him in the gutter yesterday, covered with dirt, sweat, and blood. His brother was dead and there was no family left to him, so he'd bought eight cartons of Bantu beer and tried to obliterate reality. Lona and Nabaktu had offered him another way-a warrior's way- that would strike back at the killers of his brother.

The drugs she'd given him had done something to his body. He'd never felt like this before. He could barely feel the bumps as the truck negotiated the thin road leading to the back entrance to the mine, but he could acutely feel Lona's hand on his arm. He wanted to avoid her dark eyes staring intently at him and not hear the words she mouthed. He ran his eyes around the enclosed interior, taking in the large crate squatting in the center, but again his eyes flickered back up to hers and his ears listened as if he had no control.

"Soon you will be the greatest warrior. Your name will be spoken of across the land with the deepest respect. You are a man-not an animal. You must die a man's death, not lie in the street like a dog. You must avenge your brother."

A small part of Tommy's brain wanted to think, but it would require too much energy. The truck came to a halt with a squeal of brakes. The tarp covering the tailgate was thrown back and a large figure dressed in traditional robes appeared, silhouetted against the night sky. "It is time to go." Lona leaned over and placed something in front of Tommy's face. He snorted reflexively and felt the power kick in.

Tommy looked from Lona to Nabaktu. Their eyes were locked on him, willing for him to move. He stood and stepped out of the truck.

Security was oriented inward at the entrance and that was logical. The powers-that-be were concerned with what could be taken out of the mine, not with what could be taken in. The long line of dust-covered workers emerging like moles from their twelve-hour shift below the surface was subjected to strip searches by guards with cold hands and blank eyes. At random, a few men were having their bodily cavities invaded by gloved fingers, probing and searching. Behind the initial row of security, personnel looking for the gold were other guards watching the searchers. And above the second rank were video cameras, overseeing the watchers. And all that redundancy was logical, too, as this toothless opening less than eighty miles southwest of Johannesburg led to great coiled intestines of gold and uranium-laced rock.

Tommy had been working here for eight years, six days a week, in twelve-hour shifts-long enough that any other existence before the mine was forgotten. He smothered his hatred and tried to avoid looking at the guards as he went past. That most of them were black also didn't matter. Some of these same guards had beaten his brother to death two days ago after finding a piece of rock in his pant cuff. No matter that it could have gotten there by accident. No matter that it contained no gold. The rule was that nothing came out that hadn't come in. When done they'd thrown his brother's body into the putrid shaft of an abandoned mine where all the other bodies had been dumped over the years. That the guards who had beaten his brother to death were Xhosa did matter very much to Tommy-they were the favorite of the ANC and the change in power had brought little change to the mines-and the Sothos, of which Tommy was a member, migrant workers from Lesotho, still suffered at the hands of the overseers.

Night or day mattered naught in the black holes of the mines. The caged electric lights strung along the rock roof cast a dingy glow on the dark, perspiring bodies below as the line of arrivals trudged forward. Their shift started at three, but they weren't paid for the time spent getting there-only the toil of their hands started the clock.

Tommy Meduba was pouring sweat also as he drove the small electric cart at a walking pace down the right side of the double set of rails. He was on the ground level leading to the massive elevator that would carry the cart and forty workers down into the depths. Tommy was sweating not so much from the thick air and scorching heat, though. Large beads of perspiration beaded his skin, forming rivers that gravity dragged down his body, because this was to be his last night alive and he hadn't assimilated that concept.

No guard spared him or his cart more than a glance as he rumbled onto the wrought-iron floor of the elevator. With a slight start, and then a steady stuttering, the platform descended. Dank rock walls on four sides guided them straight down. For twenty-four minutes, at a steady pace of more than four hundred and seventy feet per minute, they went down. They had to switch elevators twice and use horizontal tunnels that pushed them more to the southwest. More than two and a quarter miles into the earth. Straight to the heart of the richest vein of gold and uranium in the world: the Red Streak, a treasure trove that angles under the mystifying geological feature known as Vredefort Dome, so many kilometers directly above.

Never before had a mine been dug so deep and so directly under the Dome itself. But the upper regions had been plundered for more than a hundred years, forcing the engineers to probe and invade the earth farther down into the dark nether regions in search of their mineral gods. The Red Streak had been touched less than three years previously and had already produced two thousand tons of gold bullion and a classified amount of uranium.

Gold and uranium were the fuel that ran the South African economy, and Tommy was the cutting edge of a plan bent on stopping that engine and gaining the notice of the ruling ANC. He glanced over his shoulder with deadened eyes at the bulky metal container perched on the small flatbed. The casing was stenciled with English, Bantu, and Afrikaaner words indicating: DRILLING EQUIPMENT.

It was so easy that even Tommy's drug-infused brain felt a certain euphoria at having gotten in. Nabaktu had said it would be easy. Dear, sweet Lona had whispered it in his ear as she took his body and mind. And they had been right.

As the platform came to a final halt, Tommy fought the hysterical urge to laugh at the dulled men on either side of him as he slipped the cart's stick shift into drive and slowly rolled off the platform. A rock foyer beckoned with three dark openings less than twenty meters away. Wealth that would make most Third World nations weep with envy slithered back out of those holes and up the cables to the surface every day.

Tommy stopped the cart as the other workers disappeared into the various tunnels. He walked around to the rear of the vehicle and flipped open a panel. Nabaktu had made it as simple as possible, but still Tommy hesitated. A worm of fear pierced the core of his being as his hand hovered over the red button. Through the drugs and the scent of sex a part of his mind rebelled.

Twelve miles away, on the slope leading to the edge of the Witwatersrand Basin, Kamil Nabaktu swiveled his pitch-black irises from the fluorescent dial of a cheap Mickey Mouse wristwatch to Lona. "He's down by now."

The two were crouched in a thicket of scraggly, stunted trees that had never known enough water, just as Nabaktu's people had never known enough freedom since April 1652, when the first white men had set foot to stay on the southern end of the Dark Continent. They had hoped it would change in April and May of 1994, when the whites had amazingly given up power, but from their perspective, huddled in the shacks among the other tribal minorities, little had changed. In reality, the fact that the face now in charge in Pretoria was black made it all so much more galling.

"He is a weak man," Lona said. "You should have let me take it."

"No women in the mines," Nabaktu replied patiently. They'd had the argument hundreds of times. He checked his watch again. At the very least he hoped Tommy had gone down. If not, things were going to get very ugly, very soon.

Twenty men had died sneaking gold out to pay for the bomb-Tommy's brother one of them. It had taken them a year to accumulate enough. This was the end result of that blood.

"Thirty seconds."

Tommy looked back to the elevator, his mind scurrying through various options. He took his hand away from the red button and breathed a sigh of desperate relief. He shook his head, trying to clear the fog demons that were scampering about, dulling his brain. His eyeballs felt as if they were going to pop out of his head as he considered his position. He knew he was dead regardless. He couldn't go up. The guards would want to know why he wasn't on his shift. He couldn't go into one of the tunnels and take his normal place, because sooner or later someone would wonder what was on board the abandoned vehicle, and when they looked, there would be hell to pay.

A soft click caught his attention and Tommy glanced down. His eyes widened even more as he watched the red button slide down of its own accord into the metal plate.

Tommy never saw the plastic reach the bottom as he became a small patch of molecules vaporized by the nuclear blast that flashed into the rock around, which in turn dissolved and flowed.

The earth burped, Nabaktu looked at Lona and then out into the dark night again. He'd expected more. Still, it was more than two miles down.

"Let's go." He grabbed Lona's arm and they sprinted back the way they had come so many hours earlier. To the truck where the two waiting men threw questions at them. Could that small earthquake have been it? That's all? Where was the cloud?

Nabaktu ordered them silent and they sped away down toward Soweto Township to hide among the hundreds of thousands huddled there in the cheap shacks.

And below the dome, two miles down, the rocks took hours to cool and congeal; microscopic bits of foreign matter that had once been men joining the minerals and stone.

The sun bakes the sandy surface around Alice Springs, the intense heat causing the light to wave and bend. The only humans native to the Australian Outback-the Aborigines-did so through hundreds of generations of adaptation to their harsh environment. Life for them was finding water and food.

Australia is the oldest, flattest, and driest continent, equal in size to the continental United States. The Aborigines are estimated to have been there for more than thirty thousand years. For all those years they were completely isolated from the rest of the world. The ancient Egyptian empires, Rome, the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, the Industrial Age-all came and went and the Aborigines remained the same until the coming of the white man.

When the first Aborigines arrived in Australia, the center of the continent was fertile, containing lush jungles and swamps. The present Red Center was born approximately ten to twenty thousand years earlier when the world's climate changed and the land dried up. As many plant and animal species died and were blown away by the harsh weather and terrain, the Aborigines adapted and survived.

The white man was an extreme latecomer to Australia when Captain Cook landed at Botany Bay in 1770. It took another hundred years before the first white men managed to cross the Red Center, going from Adelaide in the south to Darwin in the north. In the process of accomplishing this, many white men lost their lives, wandering through the deserts in desperate search of water and relief from the brutal sun.

The overland telegraph line was built in the late nineteenth century from Darwin to Adelaide, and midway across the continent the town of Alice Springs was born to serve as a telegraph station on that line. A thousand miles from the seacoast and five hundred miles from the nearest town, Alice Springs is perhaps the most isolated town in the world. Because of that isolation, in the late 1950s, the United States, in cooperation with the Australian government, established Deep Space Communication Center (DSCC 14) sixty miles outside Alice Springs. The lack of interference from other radio emitters common in the civilized world made it an ideal spot to place the large receivers.

This afternoon in 1995 eight large dishes pointing in various attitudes were spaced evenly across the sand, the sun reflecting off the metal struts and webs of steel that reached up to the sky. Thick loops of cable ran from the base of each to a junction box set in the lee of a large, modern three-story building. In that building all the incoming data that the dishes picked up were fed into a bank of computer screens, one for each dish.

Inside the air-conditioned comfort of the DSCC control building, Major Mark Spurlock, U.S. Air Force, watched his monitors with the bored gaze of one who'd been here much too long. Spurlock's primary task was receiving classified data from the network of spy satellites that the U.S. had blanketing the planet as they passed overhead, encoding and passing on the data to the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland, on the other side of the world.

The job had been exciting the first two months he'd been here-handling top-secret data and working with the codes-but the novelty had quickly been scrubbed away by the heat and stark living conditions. Spurlock was from a small town in Oklahoma, but even that place was lively compared to Alice Springs. He'd started his "short-timers" calendar last month, checking the day off each evening as he got off shift. Booze-readily available at the commissary-was the common cure at the base for the loneliness and isolation, but Spurlock had avoided that trap. He focused on his job, practicing his skill at encoding and decoding, trying to break some of the simpler codes used in the computer. He could often be found late at night, scrunched in front of his terminal, his fingers tentatively tapping out solutions.

He was in the process of realigning one of the dishes to pick up an INTELSAT that was just coming into range over the western horizon when his computer screen went crazy. A jumbled mass of letters and numbers filled the entire display. His attempts to clear were fruitless. He scooted his seat over to an empty console nearby and booted that computer up. Everything worked fine until he accessed Dish 4, the one he had been realigning.

"What's the matter?" Colonel Seymour, the station commander appeared over his shoulder. "Trouble?"

Spurlock worked the keyboard. "I don't know, sir. Could be the main drive. I get the same garbage on both screens when I access dish four."

Seymour checked the clock. "INTEL-SAT 3A is going to transmit in two minutes."

An abnormality-Spurlock was ready to see Seymour's head start spinning in circles. The Air Force didn't assign people to DSCC because they were highly adaptable to a rapidly changing environment. They were assigned because they could do routine and do it well.

As he watched, the figures on the screen began shifting in a hypnotic fashion, the numbers and the letters realigning, drifting from one place to another. He'd never seen anything like it.

"What the hell is going on?" Seymour demanded.

"I don't know, sir."

"Get that damn thing back on line. I'm going to have to file a report if we miss the burst from 3A."

Spurlock frowned as he watched the screen. "I don't think it's the computer, sir." He checked the status board. "Dish two's free for a half hour. I'm going to use it on 3A." He gave the proper commands and dish two powered up and turned, lowering toward the western horizon to catch the satellite.

"Shit," Spurlock muttered as the screen dissolved into the same shifting pattern. "Something's transmitting on very high power to the west. It's overpowering everything else."

"Air or ground transmitter?"

Spurlock played with the controls, moving the dish ever so slightly. "I think it's on the ground and stationary. I go a few degrees up and we lose it. Southwest of here." He checked the status board. "Are there any military operations going on out in the Gibson Desert? Maybe somebody failed to file their freqs with Control and they don't know they're screwing up our receiving."

Seymour shook his head. "As far as I know we've got nothing out there, and the Aussies haven't told us anything."

"Well, sir, there's a very high-power transmitter out there and until we get it off the air, we're not going to pick up anything in a twelve-degree arc from the horizon."

Seymour ran a hand through his thinning gray hair. "I'll get a helicopter up. If it's that strong they ought to pick it up pretty quickly and get it shut down. Contact Goddard and inform them of the situation." Seymour left the room.

Spurlock cleared the computer and accessed the direct satellite modem link to the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

There was a long pause-much too long. Spurlock grew worried and repeated his message. The reply was not what he had expected.

Before he could react, a new message from Maryland appeared.

Spurlock reflexively checked his screens.

Spurlock paused and rechecked the other screens and the dish alignments. He tapped the keyboard.

A new message from Goddard Space Center.

Spurlock typed in another rebuttal with sweaty fingers.

The person on the other end seemed slightly mollified but more confused.

Spurlock turned and looked out of the large plate-glass windows at the eight dishes and then beyond that to the beginnings of the Simpson Desert that stretched westward for almost a thousand miles. As if drawn by a string his eyes looked upward at the pollution-free air.

Something out there in the desert was sending a message, but what? What had the capability to overwhelm their receivers here at DSCC 14 on the ground and at the same time bounce radio waves off the belt of meteors out in space and back to Earth? Spurlock knew that meteor burst was a capability that only the military used-it was the same as bouncing a message off a satellite except the military anticipated few satellites to be up there in case of an all-out conflict. Therefore in the late seventies they'd begun using the belt of meteors farther out in space for the bounce points. As far as Spurlock knew the Australians did not have the capability to do multiple messages with such power.

Spurlock slowly typed in his answer.

Spurlock leaned back in his seat and stared at the screen. Whatever was transmitting this was powerful and very quick. No human hand could be sending that data without the aid of a computer. The figures danced in front of him, continuously changing. There was something about parts of the message that seemed tantalizingly familiar.

Spurlock went to work. He copied a portion and slowed it down, reading the figures, trying to make some sense. He attempted a few simple transfiguration codes. None worked.

Some of it looked almost like mathematical equations, but none that he'd ever seen. Another part had what appeared to be a rhythm. That last word stuck in Spurlock's mind and he tried something different. He fed a portion of the data into a different program on his computer.

Turning the volume up he ran the program.

He almost dropped his coffee cup when classical music, played at an extremely rapid beat, piped out of his computer. Why was someone sending out classical music in digital form on a frequency reserved for space communication?

The music suddenly changed into a country-western beat played at breakneck speed. Then rock. Then back to classical. Then it turned to unintelligible garbage.

Suddenly a mechanical voice spoke. It was speaking so quickly, he could understand none of what it was saying. Spurlock reran the tape, this time slowing it down so it was intelligible. The machine-generated voice rasped out of the computer.

"Dos vadanya. An yong haseo. Maasalama. Hello… " Spurlock listened amazed as numerous languages, most of which he couldn't even identify, whispered greetings.

It struck him suddenly. He spun around and raced over to the bookcase on the far wall, his eyes flashing along the shelves until he found what he was looking for: the master data binder on Voyager 2. He ran his finger down the index and turned to the appropriate page.

There was no doubt about it-he was hearing the record that had been placed on Voyager 2 being played back in digital form at high speed. But why was it coming from land to the west?

He had no more time to puzzle over the problem as an extremely perturbed Colonel Seymour burst in the door and stormed over to the radio in the room. Spurlock started to explain what he had found, but Seymour cut him off.

"Listen to this crazy son-of-a-bitch!" the colonel exclaimed as he turned the set on. He picked up the mike and keyed it. "Rover Two, this is DSCC fourteen. Repeat your message, please. Over."

"DSCC, this is Rover Two. I say again. I have located the source of the interfering transmission. It is two hundred miles from your location directly along the azimuth you gave us. We are hovering directly above. Over."

Spurlock frowned. "Why haven't they shut it down?" Seymour hissed at him to be quiet. "Tell me again where the source is located. Over."

"Ayers Rock. Over."

Spurlock frowned. Ayers Rock was the most spectacular of the three great tours of Central Australia, rising out of the desert floor as if some giant had accidentally dropped it there. Spurlock had visited it on a tour after he'd first arrived on station.

"You must mean someone on Ayers Rock. Over." Seymour shook his head at the idiocy of the helicopter pilot as he released the send button.

"Negative. I mean Ayers Rock. I've got my skids less than ten feet above the top of this damn thing and that signal is coming out of solid rock directly below me. The needle is off the gauge on my receiver. I don't know what is going on, but something inside the rock itself is sending you a message. Over."