"Look at it logically based on the additional information you now have: You have an unknown entity-whether organic or purely mechanical-inside this Rock that is communicating with you using the data off the record on Voyager 2. The probe was out of the solar system proper when it disappeared. No one on Earth could have caused the destruction of the probe."
She tapped the overhead. "This entity attempted communication with these sites-perhaps there was a series of colonies at each of those locations thousands of years ago. Or more likely just research facilities. Perhaps what is in the Rock is simply an automated relay site, left behind by a race that might not exist any longer."
Fran glanced at Levy, thinking about her touchstone theory.
Pencak waved her good hand about. "It's a good place to hide a site, don't you think? In the middle of the world's largest rock in the middle of one of the world's harshest deserts. The Aborigines certainly have numerous legends about Ayers Rock, don't they? It has long been theorized that many ancient legends might be based on the reality of extraterrestrial visitors."
Pencak shrugged, her one shoulder lifting and the other remaining dead. "I don't know the answer. I can only offer possibilities. I would suggest that the Henbury Craters that are so close by here may be the results of near misses caused by weapons that were meant for Ayers Rock. Maybe there was an interstellar war a long time ago and these were military bases."
Fran saw Hawkins swing his gaze to Lamb at that last sentence and then back to Pencak. She knew what he was thinking-if Lamb had had an idea that this was true, that explained the obsession with secrecy. Had Lamb given them the entire message? What did Lamb really hope to find in the Rock?
"Excuse me." Debra spoke for the first time.
"Yes, dear?" Pencak twisted in her seat.
"You've talked about only five of the six sites. You haven't said anything about the one in Russia. Is there a crater there?"
Pencak stood up. "Ah, yes. Russia. That is the one I've been thinking about ever since Mr. Lamb briefed me. Could you put the overhead with the Russian site on the screen, please?"
Lamb sorted through the slides and then slid the correct one on top of the glass and turned on the power. A map showing the central part of what used to be the USSR was lit up with a circle drawn in the south-center.
Pencak walked up to the screen. "You have narrowed this down to a diameter of what?" she asked Lamb.
"Four hundred kilometers."
She ran her finger along the map, below the top edge of the circle. "The Trans-Siberian Railway runs here along the southern edge of your circle. North of that-stretching for thousands of miles up to above the Arctic Circle-is the Central Siberian Uplands, one of the most least populated and most desolate places on earth. To the south, Mongolia and the Gobi desert."
She looked at Lamb. "I believe I know the exact spot that message was sent to."
"How do you know?" Lamb demanded.
"Because there is only one place out there that makes any sense."
"Where?" Hawkins asked.
Her finger stabbed the screen. "Here. Tunguska."
She nodded at Lamb. "You thought perhaps the Soviet facility at Semipalatinsk?"
Lamb was startled. "No. That's farther to the west."
"Yes." She pointed a few hundred miles to the left of the circle. "Semipalatinsk is where the Soviets used to test high-energy lasers and charged-particle weapons," she explained to the others in the room. "Also, quite a bit of underground nuclear testing went on there. I imagine it is still open for business by the new people in charge. But, no, I believe the message was aimed at Tunguska."
"What's at Tunguska?" Fran was impatient with Pencak's sparring with Lamb.
"It's not so much what is at Tunguska-it's more what happened at Tunguska and what may have been there," Pencak replied cryptically.
"Please tell us," Debra asked.
"This is crazy," Batson said. "I don't think we need to sit here and-"
"We need to explore every possibility," Hawkins quietly interrupted. "If you don't want to listen to it, you can leave."
"I'll listen," Batson grudgingly said.
"Go ahead," Hawkins said to Pencak.
Pencak sat down with a sigh and was quiet for a moment. When she started, her gravelly voice was very low and Fran had to lean forward to hear her over the rumble coming from the mine tent a hundred meters away. "The Trans-Siberian Railroad was completed in 1906. Four thousand miles long, it opened up perhaps the loneliest place on earth. Siberia is half again as big as the United States and in the first decade of this century the population in that area was well below one million people.
"In 1908, on June thirtieth, a little after seven in the morning local time, passengers on the railroad saw something sear across the sky and disappear below the horizon to the north. There was an explosion. Thirty-seven miles from the epicenter, at the trading station called Vanavara-the nearest populated location-the shock wave knocked buildings down and people in the open were dosed with radiation. At the site itself trees were obliterated for miles around and blown outward in a concentric pattern for dozens of miles. Herds of reindeer were blasted.
"In London, five hours after the explosion, instruments picked up the shock wave in the air-that was after it had already traveled twice around the world. They thought nothing much of it until that night, when there was a strange glow, bright red in the eastern sky. For two months afterward the night sky over England-indeed all of Europe-was much brighter than normal.
"Yet no one immediately made the connection with what had happened in Tunguska. The site itself was not formally investigated for twenty years. You have to remember that that was a turbulent time in Russian history. You also have to understand the remoteness of the Siberian tundra. It is the most godforsaken place on Earth. Miles and miles of pine trees growing in permafrost. You can travel for thousands of kilometers without any noticeable change in the terrain or any relief from the monotony. It is horrible!"
Fran was surprised at the rise in Pencak's voice and her strong emotion. "You sound as if you've been there."
"I have. I visited Tunguska in 1965 as part of an international team investigating the site. Although it was fifty-seven years after the explosion, the actual area still had not recovered. You could see the old deadfall blown outward with the new trees struggling to grow among it."
She sighed. "Ah-again they say it was a meteorite that caused the explosion. This time, though-no crater. So they say it exploded in the air instead of in the ground. The ice in the meteor head overheated and caused it to blow apart just before impact.
"Fools." Pencak shook her head. "Any ice would have been gone shortly after entering the atmosphere. Amazing how they will try to jam the data into the solution rather than find the solution that fits the evidence."
"What did you find?" Hawkins asked.
"We found the signs of an air-burst nuclear explosion. I would say the equivalent of a thirty-megaton blast. That is ten times the size of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.
"We found traces of the radioactive isotope cesium one thirty-seven in the ring structure of trees on the outskirts of the blast that corresponds to the year of the explosion. We found no sign of a crater. In fact, the trees at the very center of the blast were found still to be standing-the shock wave propagated outward from there, knocking the trees down in concentric rings. It was impossible to do any sort of soundings in the ground with the instruments we had available because of the permafrost.
"But despite all that evidence my colleagues agreed that it was a comet. All the non-Russian scientists, at least. The Russians themselves said nothing. They had their own theories."