"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."
THE RUSSIAN
The land was empty of animal life. Trees still struggled to grow, but it was obvious even they were losing the war to live. Vast splotches of dead vegetation pockmarked the area as far as the eye could see. Just off the crumbling tar road, where the Zil135 ten-ton truck was parked, a large splatter of hastily poured concrete lay barren of the blown snow that was whipping through the area. There was nothing to indicate that the concrete marked the resting place of eighteen men.
In the distance the cooling towers the men had given up their lives to cover stood under dozens of feet of concrete-concrete that had been flown in underneath the men's helicopters while the radiation had penetrated up through the thin skin of the aircraft and killed them with the slow death.
The Russian had spent eight days getting here. It was a detour he would never have allowed himself on an assigned mission, but this was different. This was personal.
He didn't consciously feel the cold wind whistling in from the Ural Mountains to the east. He was a hard man, his face leathery from years out in the weather. The mouth was set in lines that had known no laughter for many years.
His gray eyes pondered the concrete. They hadn't even put a marker up. Of course, the reasoning was, why put a marker up when no one could come here and see it anyway? The Russian knew he was the first person in years to stand here. And by doing so he had effectively condemned himself to the same slow death by radiation. That bothered him little-in fact, it gave him a feeling of connection with the men under the concrete, one of them in particular.
"For you, Gregori, I do this." His words were grabbed by the wind and spirited away among the sickly pine trees.
He saluted the grave and then turned to his truck. It was going to be a hard trip-about three days using back roads, he estimated-and he needed to start. As he clambered into the cab he glanced at the gauge on the instrument on the passenger seat. The rad count told him that he should survive and be reasonably functional for those three days. After that nothing would matter anyway.
Securely fastened in the cargo bay rode a large crate, the twin to the one that had exploded in South Africa. The Russian threw the truck into gear, and with a lurch it lumbered down the abandoned road, nose pointed southeast, away from Chernobyl.
METEOR CRATER
The sun highlighted the desert to the west in a purplish haze. The old woman stood on the top of the rim, with the class gathered below her, their breath puffing out into the chill air. She was nothing more than a silhouette to them, but that was enough to display her deformities. Her right shoulder was hunched down as if she were permanently trying to squeeze her body through a narrow opening. That arm ended in a withered stalk instead of a hand. As she turned her gaze, the right side of her face absorbed the dying light across a series of slashes and wrinkles, as if the skin had been burned badly a long time ago and healed poorly. Where the right eye had been, there was simply the same scarred skin in the socket.
The class was looking up at her because she stood on the lip of the crater, the bowl before her, filling the horizon. Her voice was gravelly, as if her throat had also been afflicted by whatever disaster had befallen her. "Meteor Crater used to be called by several names, Coon Butte being the most popular. While it was known to the Indians of the area for generations, it first attracted the attention of the white man in the 1880s when it was thought there might be silver here. Although unfounded, the rumor interested A. E. Foote, a geologist from Philadelphia. He made the first scientific study of the crater in 1891."
She gestured with her dead hand as she spoke. "The far rim is twelve hundred meters away. It's roughly one hundred seventy-five meters from the surface level to the bottom, but, as you can see, the rim I am standing on adds another forty-five meters in height from the plain." The hand stabbed down and eighteen pairs of eyes followed. "There is no standing water in the bottom, but flat-lying sediments found there contain small shells, which indicates that a lake once filled the crater.
"The earliest studies of the crater initially speculated that it was formed by either a volcano or an underground steam explosion. However, the discovery of some iron fragments lying very close to the surface soon challenged that theory. In November 1891 two members of the U.S. Coast and Geological Survey examined the area intensely. They speculated that because the crater is round, a meteorite must have struck at a nearly perpendicular angle.
"They did a careful magnetic survey of the crater floor and discovered little evidence of buried metal. Using what I could best describe as the myopic-eyeball estimating technique, one of the men postulated that the amount of material on the rim would fill the crater completely." A snort indicated what the old woman thought of that. "Later, other more scientific studies clearly showed that the rim material is not sufficient to fill the crater.