The Rock

REACTION

The room was silent for a long minute after Lamb's question. Debra Levy was the one to break the silence.

"Why don't we ask the Rock?"

"What?" Hawkins asked.

Levy seemed nervous to have everyone staring at her. "If you've broken down the code, then we can send messages into the Rock. We can use the code and the same frequency to transmit. Why don't we ask whoever, or whatever, is in there, why we were selected?"

"I think first we need to have a better idea what we're dealing with," Hawkins interjected.

Lamb seconded that. "It has been decided not to attempt any communication with the Rock quite yet.

"That's if there is anything in there to communicate with," he added. "Despite the fact that something apparently transmitted out of there, we can't be sure that it can receive."

"Well, what are you doing?" Fran asked.

"Colonel Tolliver's people have secured the immediate area of Ayers Rock with the help of the Australians," Lamb answered. "By the way, the Australian government is aware that there was a transmission out of the Rock and that it is somehow tied in to the explosion at Vredefort Dome and the missing bombs, but they do not know we have decrypted the message."

Fran rolled her eyes. "Besides guarding the Rock and keeping the message secret, what else are you doing?"

"It's more a question of what you're going to do," Lamb replied. "We are setting up living areas on top of the Rock. We're also bringing in mining equipment in case we have to dig down to the chamber. The Australians will not be very keen about that, since the Rock is a national landmark and legally it is set aside as a place of worship for the Aborigines, but if this is connected with the bombs, we might have to do that and they'll play along."

Batson raised a hand. "Can you show us the slide with the locations that the first transmission went to again?"

Lamb backed up the projector. "The one in North America is centered in northeast Arizona. Near the town of Winslow. The one in South America is in Argentina near a place called Campo del Cielo. The one in Europe is centered around Nuremberg, Augsburg, and Stuttgart in Germany. The one in Russia is in Central Siberia."

Don Batson was suddenly alert. "Do you have an atlas?"

Lamb pulled one off the table and handed it to Batson, who eagerly thumbed through. "Campo del Cielo is similar to Ayers Rock and Vredefort Dome in that there is a unique geological feature. I want to see what's in Germany and near Winslow."

He flipped open to Germany and looked. "I've been here-Nordlingen is right there in the center of a triangle formed by those three cities. There's a feature called Ries Basin there. And I know what's outside Winslow." He started turning pages, then stopped and looked up, his finger pointing down at the page. "Meteor Crater is only twenty miles outside of Winslow."

"I don't understand," Fran commented. "What does that have to do with the message?"

Batson was tapping his finger on the atlas. "Campo del Cielo and the Ries Basin are also suspected of having been formed a long time ago by meteor impact. As is the area around Vredefort Dome. I think it's very interesting that four of the five areas the transmissions were sent to are very close to suspected meteor strike spots."

"What about Siberia?" Hawkins asked.

"I don't know about that," Batson admitted. He thought for a few seconds and tapped the map, which was open to Arizona. "But there is someone who might."

"Who?" Lamb inquired.

"Dr. Susan Pencak. She lives by the crater in Arizona. She's the best-known authority on it in the world. If anyone can make a connection between those various sites, it would be her. She makes her living studying strange geological formations and teaching." Batson smiled wryly in remembrance. "But she's also a little bit flaky. She has some weird ways of looking at things."

"I'll bring her here," Lamb decided. "We need every piece of information we can possibly get our hands on."

"Right now"-Lamb pointed to three boxes full of documents stacked on a table-"you have access to all information concerning these events. There are also computers linked into our main data base for your use. If there is anything else you need, please contact me immediately. We'll be moving to the Rock in about twenty-four hours, once everything is set up out there."

Lamb made his way out of the room, followed by Tolliver. Fran glanced around at the other members of the "team." Hawkins was hiding any reaction he might have. Batson looked befuddled after his insight into the transmission reception sites. Levy looked mildly interested in what was probably to her an interesting intellectual problem.

"He's lying to us," Fran announced.

"What?" Batson blinked at her.

"They're going to drill into that Rock the minute they have the equipment there to do it," she replied. "They're scared, and when they're scared, they usually overreact and keep everything a secret."

She'd expected Hawkins to get upset by her comments but instead he nodded slightly. "That's true. I'm sure they will start or probably have already started drilling." He looked at Batson. "You're the mining engineer. How long will it take them?"

Batson shook his head. "I'd have to know what kind of rock it's made of. Where they're starting from. What kind of equipment. What diameter bore they're making. It's impossible to just-"

"Just a SWAG, Mister Batson," Hawkins interrupted. "A simple wild-ass guess. A day? Two days? A week? A month?"

Batson rubbed his chin. "He said center of mass of Ayers Rock. They'd go in from the top. Say five or six hundred feet of tunnel through solid rock." He looked up at the ceiling briefly. "Five days. Give or take two days either way. That's if they only drill and don't blast, and I don't think they'll be blasting here on a national landmark."

"That's all well and good," Fran commented. "So we have a week of sitting around with all this data and no earthly idea where to start and no idea where we're going with it."

Hawkins stood. "Listen up for a second. You all are the scientists. I'm just a dumb soldier, but whenever I get a mission tasking, the first thing I do is organize the information I am given. I do that before I start making my plans." He pointed at the boxes. "I suggest we break down the stuff in there. Mr. Batson-"

"Don," Batson interrupted. "Call me Don. Mister makes me nervous."

"All right, Don." Hawkins nodded. "You can call me Hawkins-I'm used to that from the military and I probably wouldn't respond if you used my first name." He glanced at the other team members and they introduced themselves.

"Fran."

"Debra."

"All right. Don, since it's your area, you become the Rock expert. You find out everything there is to know about Ayers Rock and then brief us on it later today."

Don looked relieved to have something he could handle. "All right." He moved across the room and began digging through the books and folders in them.

Hawkins swung his gaze around. "Fran, I hate to show my ignorance, but what is statistical projection?"

Fran was used to the question and was impressed that Hawkins was admitting his ignorance up front. "I take information, collate it, and then make a computer program that gives probabilities on future trends."

"You predict the future, then?" Hawkins asked.

She graced him with a slight smile. "It's not that simple. Let's say I predict possible futures and give you the percentage chances of them occurring."

"How about the present?" Hawkins asked.

"What do you mean?"

"Could you try to make some sort of connection between the Rock, Voyager, the explosion at Vredefort, and the messages?"

Debra Levy spoke. "You're making a flawed assumption."

Hawkins didn't seem bothered by either the interruption or the negative comment. "In what way?"

"There are too many unknowns here to even begin to think all those events are interconnected," Levy said. "We know the message and Voyager are connected because of the use of the information from the record on board the probe. We don't know that the messages and the explosion at Vredefort Dome are connected. If they are, then the explosion occurred first and we know-or at least Mr. Lamb has told us-that was caused by radicals in South Africa. So I would say that it is very unlikely that those same radicals are causing the messages to be sent."

Hawkins considered that. "Then the explosion prompted the message."

"Maybe," Levy answered. "Why not do a time line of events, so we can see them more clearly? That's always the first step in trying to understand a problem."

"Sounds good," Hawkins concurred.

"I'm really not sure where my area of expertise enters into all of this," Debra commented. "I think I'll just look through what's accumulated in the computer so far and see if I find anything interesting."

"I have some things I have to check on," Hawkins said as he left the room.

Lamb sat in the secure communications center and waited impatiently while a technician finished making contact with the appropriate satellite and, through it, Washington.

"You're good to go, sir." The man scuttled out the door and locked the thick hatch behind him. The center was now impervious to external eavesdropping. The microphone was voice activated and the television screen in front of Lamb showed a large desk and chair. He fought the urge to stand as the President entered the field of vision of the camera and sat down at the desk.

The weight of three years in office showed in the lines on the President's face. "What do you have, Steve?"

Lamb looked at the camera looming a few feet in front of him, just above the screen. "The team is working on the data we've accumulated. Nothing very surprising so far. None of them has a clue as to why they were chosen-or let me say that none of them has indicated having any idea. Volkers and Batson have clearances from Hermes, so they should be all right. Levy worries me. We've given her an interim clearance but we know little about her. I've got my people checking on her in the States. The strange thing is that Levy's name was on the roster to be considered for addition to the Hermes Project in a couple of months."

He looked down at his notes. "We're bringing in another person. An expert on meteor craters from Arizona."

The President frowned, as if this detail was bothersome. "Meteor craters?"

"It looks like four of the five reception sites for the message have suspected meteor strike spots in the immediate area. It may be nothing, but it's worth checking out."

The President was reading a note someone had handed him from the side. He returned his attention to the camera, dismissing the meteor issue. "So, nothing on the people so far. What about the Russians?"

Lamb wanted to sigh but held it in. The term Russians now covered a score of various independent republics, all with their own agendas, their own set of severe economic problems, their own nuclear weapons, and worst of all, their own deep sense of historical paranoia. Lamb knew the Russians very well and like any other student of that country, he knew that they were almost impossible to second-guess because their mindset was so different from that of someone from the West. In the years since his release Lamb had tried to subdue his visceral emotions whenever he had to deal with anything about the country he had been a prisoner of-at certain times he did that more successfully than at others.

"They had to have picked up the transmission into Siberia. I'm sure they have a better idea than we do of where it was aimed. I'm checking on that. They definitely know about the explosion under Vredefort Dome-their sensors had to have picked it up just like ours did. I'd say they probably have a good line on Ayers Rock being the source of the transmission, because their space lab was overhead when the transmission occurred. They're going to want to know what's going on. We can't hide the equipment we're putting on top of the Rock. It's totally exposed to satellite imagery.

"The Seventh Fleet has picked up movement from Russian Pacific Fleet elements. They're moving a carrier task force south toward us."

"Are you sure it's connected to the transmission?"

Lamb glanced down at the satellite imagery of the fleet movement he'd been faxed less than an hour ago. "Yes, sir. They've got the research ship Kosmonaut Yury Gagarin as part of the element. That ship is their floating version of this station. It has two large steerable aerial dishes and two smaller ones built on top of the deck. Looks like they want to be in a better position to pick up any more transmissions. They've also got the Krym, one of their Primorye-class intelligence-gathering ships, among the flotilla."

"Christ," the President muttered. "They're going to push this, Steve. I've been on their case concerning the bombs, telling them they need to be more open. Now we're holding something back from them. Do you think they might have something to do with all that's happened?"

"I don't know, sir," Lamb answered honestly. "But it seems to me that they are reacting just as much as we are."

"That could be part of a deception plan," the President noted.

"Yes, sir, it could. Until we find out what's in the Rock, we won't know. We may be holding what we know back from them, but at the present moment I see no reason we should share anything with them," Lamb said. "This doesn't concern them."

"What about the Aussies?"

"They're not happy, sir, but they're going along so far."

"All right. Keep me informed if anything comes up."

The screen went dead. After a short pause Lamb flicked a switch on the console. The door to the shelter opened immediately and Hawkins walked in, a bundle of file folders crammed under one arm.

"What's the latest on South Africa?" Lamb asked.

"This is the most current satellite imagery of the site." The words flowed across the small room and sank into the special acoustic tile that lined the walls and ceiling, as the analyst laid the photos on the desk.

Lamb flicked his gaze from the folder to the speaker. "I don't see anything."

"That's because there's nothing to be seen," Hawkins said. "As far as can be determined, the explosion occurred over two miles underground."

"Any fallout?"

"No. It was all contained."

Lamb swiveled his chair around to face the console. "Well, then, since the damage seems to be minimal, our main concern must be to find out who was behind this and where they got the bomb from. Which is what we've been trying to do now for a week. The question is, how did the bomb get to South Africa?"

Hawkins sat down in a chair on the far side of the desk and rubbed his left temple. "We don't know that. All we know is that the underground yield and signature are similar to the AG35 Russian warhead. Our friends in the SVR are not being very cooperative, but as you know, they did give us enough information two weeks ago to confirm that two of those type warheads are unaccounted for in their arsenal holding area."

"So where's the other one?" Lamb demanded.

"It wasn't in Colombia," Hawkins snapped.

Lamb gazed across the table. "I'm sorry about that. Faulty intelligence."

"There's a little part of my mind," Hawkins said, "that wonders if maybe there wasn't any intelligence at all and you just used it as an excuse to take out that member of the Cartel."

Lamb's eyes didn't waver from Hawkins's. "If I had wanted your team to take that asshole down, I'd have simply ordered you to do it-I wouldn't have had to make up a cover story. I think the intelligence may well have been a setup by the source who fed it to us, but that's in the past and we have a whole big mess right here we have to deal with.

"We've got to get that other bomb tracked down. The President's talked to the Russian President to try and get some support from his people, but he's not having much luck. We were lucky with this one. The next one might end up in a city."

Hawkins tapped the folder. "While you were talking to D.C. I went through the latest analysis on the explosion and found out we weren't lucky on this one."

Lamb settled his eyes on Hawkins. "Go on."

Hawkins tapped the satellite photo. "The damage is only apparently minimal. That bomb obliterated the Red Streak series of mines. It is-was-the richest deposit of gold and uranium ever found. The loss of that mine will cripple the South African government economically. "

Lamb already knew that. "So what?"

Hawkins opened a folder in front of him. "Your whiz people did a projection on the worldwide economic effect, and the results were extremely startling." Even as he said it, Hawkins wondered if Fran Volkers had had something to do with what he was looking at. Hawkins scanned the page that he himself had only just read. "There is a fifty-six-percent chance that the loss of that mine will trigger a global depression on the order of the crash of 1929-most likely worse, since it will come on top of the recession we've only just started to recover from."

"WHAT!" Lamb leaned forward. "How can that be?"

Hawkins slid a piece of paper across the table to his boss and tried to keep it as simple as possible. "I'm not an expert, but it's laid out pretty clearly there. As you can see, a large number of the world's countries still have a gold-based economy. Most of those nations are in the Third World. Over the past twenty years South Africa has been propping up many of those economies with gold that was not yet mined in exchange for various economic, military, and political concessions. Mandela hasn't changed that policy. Most of that gold is now lost inside what used to be the Red Streak mine.

"Without the gold to back up their currencies many of those countries will slide into economic chaos within a year. The ripple effect will take another year or so to reach us and the other industrialized nations."

Lamb quickly scanned the document, then looked up. "All right. If this projection is correct, what can we do to avoid the depression?"

Hawkins slowly closed the folder. "According to the last page of the report there's not much we can do. We are barely able to maintain our own economy-there's little we could do to help others."

Lamb flipped to the indicated page and read it. When he looked up, his eyes showed his despair. "If the projection on the first page is correct, this is like spitting in a fire. I'll get this thing reworked. I need some better suggestions before I go to the President with it. He'll tear my head off if that's all I give him." He stood, his body hunched over in weariness. "We've got to get that other bomb."

Hawkins gestured around them, taking in the entire complex. "What about all this? Is there anything you didn't tell us in the briefing?"

Lamb shook his head. "You know as much as I do. We assume it's related to the first explosion because of the down link to Vredefort Dome. We have no idea if there is any connection to the second bomb, but it's the only thing we've got."

"But in and of itself," Hawkins asked, "what do you think we have here in the Rock?"

"I have no idea. I hope the other members of your team can figure that out." He paused and then softened his voice. "I need your help with this, Hawk."

Hawkins shrugged. "I'm here. I'll do my best."

"I know you'll do your best. You always have." Lamb looked down at his desk for a second. "I heard what happened in Colombia. I was in the air on Looking Glass already heading here when I gave you the go and I received the after-action report on the secure line. Your men did a good surgical job."

"If you consider putting a nine-millimeter round through the brain of a young woman a good surgical job," Hawkins said, bitterly, "then I suppose it was."

"I heard about that too," Lamb said, his eyes fixed on his subordinate. "I also heard you were acting strangely in the exfiltration aircraft."

Hawkins stood. "I'm fine." He turned on his heels and left the room, the door swinging securely shut behind him with a dull thud.

“What are you doing?" Hawkins asked, gazing over Levy's shoulder at the screen of the computer she was working at.

"I'm looking at the original form of the message," Levy answered.

"Looking at it for what? Haven't they already decoded it?"

"They decoded it one-dimensionally," Levy said. "I'm checking to see if there might be another dimension to it."

Hawkins blinked. "You've lost me."

Levy removed her hands from the keyboard and swiveled her head to look at him. "This is an unknown communication. We don't know who or what sent it. Therefore we should not assume that simply because it has been deciphered one way, there might not be other ways to decipher it. There might be two dimensions to this message or even more."

She closed her eyes briefly in thought. "To give you a simple example, a stop sign has three dimensions: the shape of the sign, the color, and the actual word STOP itself. Anyone of those by itself gives you a message if you know what you're looking for. In that case, it's the same information-but you can also send different information on different dimensions of the same original message. In this case," she said, turning back to the computer and tapping the screen, "the actual physical arrangement of the characters might be informative in and of itself."

Hawkins looked at the arrangement of 0's and 1's. "Doesn't look like anything to me," he noted.

"I agree," Levy said, "but it was something I wanted to check."

Hawkins sat down and scooted his chair close to hers. "I looked at your record-as I'm sure you did mine, in the folder they gave you-and I'm quite impressed with your academic and intellectual achievements. If you were to speculate, what would you say we have here?"

Levy fixed Hawkins with an intense gaze. "You qualified your question quite interestingly, Major. Should I accept the inverse of what you said and assume that you are not impressed with me outside of my intellectual achievements?"

Hawkins returned her steady gaze. "Why should you assume something negative? I phrased it that way because I know nothing about you other than what was in the file and all that was in there was your academic and scientific record. So I assume nothing about you as a person."

Levy broke the eye contact. "I'm sorry. I've never really learned much social tact."

Hawkins softly laughed. "Hell, that's all right. They don't teach that stuff in school. I've been told I don't have too much tact either. My profession isn't noted for it." He paused. "Have you ever worked for the government before on a classified operation?"

She shook her head. "I've done quite a bit of consulting work on various research projects, but never anything like this."

Hawkins leaned back in his seat, feeling very uncomfortable. He was out of his element here. Even Levy's simple explanation of what she was doing had thrown him. He'd never considered a stop sign a three-dimensional message. Always before he'd used great innovation and expertise in his missions, but that was after someone else had given him the rules of engagement and the target. Here he had none. And not only that, but he had somehow automatically assumed the unofficial title of leader of the team. He wasn't sure if he had taken it, or if the others had handed it to him. But the other three all seemed to be immersed in something worthwhile-Batson looking at data on the Rock, Fran with her nose inches away from a computer screen, and Levy exploring the message. Hawkins felt somewhat useless.

His wife, Mary, would have laughed at his being so uneasy, Hawkins thought. She was the only person he had ever allowed to penetrate the hard shell his upbringing in the foster home in New York City and his time in Special Operations had wrapped about his emotions. And the great thing was, Hawkins would have laughed along with her. In their first two years of marriage she had started changing him. But all that had ended four years earlier, and if anything Hawkins was even harder than he had been. He savagely twisted his mind away from thoughts of Mary and focused on the young woman sitting next to him.

"So you have no idea why your name was on the list?"

"I have no idea why there was even a list," Levy answered.

"Fran and Don were on this Hermes project," Hawkins noted. "I work for the government. But you say you had no previous ties with the government." He shook his head. "It doesn't make sense."

"But the government didn't send the message," she noted.

"We can't be sure of that," Hawkins said. "We only have their information saying they didn't."

Levy regarded Hawkins for a few seconds, then a slight smile graced her pale lips. "Very good, Major. I like that. I was just looking at a specific aspect of the problem, trying to view it from a different angle, but you are looking at the entire situation in a different light."

Hawkins leaned forward. "Let's get back to the original question-what do you think we've got here in the Rock?"

"I think we have a touchstone," Levy said.

"A touchstone?"

"Did you ever see the movie 2001?" Levy asked.

Hawkins nodded.

"The stone they uncovered on the moon-that was a touchstone. It's a term used in scientific circles to describe an artifact planted by a more advanced race on a planet where there is a probability of intelligent life developing. To make sure it is activated at the proper time, it is located in such a place that a certain level of civilization is required in order to be able to uncover it."

"You think that's what we're uncovering?" Hawkins could see that this conversation had gained Fran's interest, and she moved her chair over to listen.

"It may be," Levy said. "However, it has always been assumed that a touchstone has to be physically uncovered. In this case the touchstone may have already been 'uncovered,' so to speak."

"What do you mean?" Fran asked.

"I mean that either the nuclear explosion under Vredefort Dome or the arrival of Voyager at a certain distance away from the sun might have activated the touchstone in the Rock and caused it to transmit-that's if my theory about it being a touchstone is correct."

"And if it is," Hawkins asked, "what should we do?"

"We," Levy said, emphasizing the word, "might not be able to do anything. Unlike the story in 2001, it is more likely that a touchstone is a warning for the more advanced race that set it up than a beacon for the less advanced one that sets it off."

"So we may have hit a trip wire," Hawkins said.

"Yes," Levy acknowledged. "And we have no idea who's heard it go off and what their reaction might be."