Catacombs (55 page)

"How did they get this way?" Tiernan Clarke asked. "How did jungle cats turn into men?"

"I don't know yet. But the answers are here; all that's needed is the time to do the research. The civilization of Zan lasted for a thousand years. Everything they learned and experienced during that time is stored here in the Catacombs. This is more than just a burial place; it's a complete time capsule. Look at that diorama."

The diorama, a convex three-dimensional mosaic of colored crystals, took up all. of the back wall of the chamber, about a hundred fifty feet from where they were standing. It depicted, with startling clarity and attention to detail, an entire city on a tropical seacoast, the center of which was a plaza composed of numerous platforms of smooth white stone, pyramidal and arrowhead-shaped buildings–also in white–and extensive terraced gardens. The plaza was well populated, and the people, if observed long enough, seemed to be moving. So did men flying above the great plaza in what looked like horseless chariots.

Other men and women, at a construction site, controlled with beams of light from headdresses huge dressed blocks of stone suspended in the air.

The effect of the diorama, of a world slowly in motion as it had been ten thousand years ago, was hypnotic.

"If you watch long enough," Erika said, "it changes from day to night and back again, over a period of about two of our weeks. We decided that the crystals are activated by vibrations from the central core, trillions of vibrations a second, too fast for any of our instruments to detect."

"How in hell," Clarke wondered, "did they excavate a room this size from solid rock?"

Then his head shot around at the first scream.

He thought immediately of the man they had left behind in the antechamber, Simon Ovosi–it was impossible to tell where the sound had come from. Ned Chakava dropped the rifle he was carrying, as if his hands had turned to stone.

"For Christ's sake!" Clarke said angrily; Ned retrieved the weapon immediately and cocked it. There was another scream, and another, abruptly choked off.

"Something got him, Guv," Ned Chakava muttered. "Something in this evil place got that man!"

Clarke shook his head. "Don't be a bloody fool! That wasn't terror we heard. It was–" He glanced at Erika, who looked horrified herself, drained of color in the eternal moonglow of the Catacombs.

"Rage," she said holding her head. "Frustration? He sounded as if–he were about to go mad."

"If that was your colleague Henry Landreth," Clarke said, "then he may not be alone. I think we should play your hunch, Erika, and search this Repository you told me about."

"We don't know–what's going on here–"

Clarke was wearing a .44 magnum revolver in a shoulder holster. He patted the butt with his right hand.

"We can take care of ourselves, Erika. Let's all have a whiff of oxygen before we start down–my head is splitting."

They were still gulping the much-needed oxygen when the second volley of screams reached them. This time the tone was unmistakable, and even more chilling: There was howling murder in his voice. Erika's eyes grew big above the clear plastic mask of the inhaler. Clarke got up restlessly from one knee, lips clamped on an unlit cheroot, and motioned to her.

The three left the chamber through one of the round ports, about five feet in diameter, that opened directly onto the central core. The path between the great core and the wall was about seven feet wide, spiraling at an easy angle down to the six remaining levels of the Catacombs. The path was not stone but made of a synthetic material that gripped the soles of one's shoes or boots. Yet it was hard enough to resist a knife point.

As for the core, the faintly blue-tinted energy source which Ned Chakava eyed with suspicion and avoided, pressing close to the wall as they descended, Erika was unable to say what it was or how it was charged. You could touch it, embrace it, fall asleep against it without ill effect. There was no measurable electromagnetic pollution inside the Catacombs, ruling out any known type of generator–except, possibly, the human mind. The core seemed inert, but it provided illumination for many thousands of square feet of chamber on each level; it also provided, mysteriously, for the circulation of the air. And it produced fireballs, attracted them. Again Erika was unable to say how or why.

They were halfway to the sixth level when an earth tremor jolted the Catacombs. A bad one; unlike other tremors this one seemed to be centered very near the core.

There was a sound of stress in the rock walls, and the core helix appeared to twist and stretch like ropy candy. They were thrown against one another, against the wall, against the core, then to the path where the tremor sent them bowling. Ned Chakava, who was carrying the bulky oxygen tank on his back, cried out in pain. There was a blushing red shadow deep within the core, pulsing swiftly from bottom to top and back again. It was like a convulsion.

When the tremor ceased, Clarke pulled Erika to her feet. Ned Chakava had a bleeding head where the oxygen tank had banged against it. He pressed a sodden handkerchief against the wound.

"Be all right," he said. "But I want to get out of here, Guv."

"So do I. After we visit the Repository." He glanced at Erika, who was studying a long crack that had appeared in the wall. Her expression was grim. He cocked his head and smiled tensely.

"Are you thinking there's a chance the Catacombs could collapse around our ears?"

"That's the first crack I've seen anywhere, but there must have been earthquakes in the past as powerful as this one. Their entire civilization vanished in a cataclysm, yet the mountain–and the Catacombs–survived."

"What sort of cataclysm?"

"A violent change in the earth's electromagnetic field resulted in a shift of the poles about ten thousand years ago. But they had no choice, really. It was that or–"

The crackling sound of a fireball interrupted her.

Erika looked around and saw it bounding slowly down the path toward them.

It was one of the largest plasmoids she'd seen, and even as she realized the potential danger she was fascinated with the glowing beauty of the yellow-orange ball. No laws of science could account for the way this one was moving, or dribbling, toward them; although it left no marks on the path or walls it was intensely hot, like the plasma of the sun.

Ned Chakava wailed as Erika felt her face glowing from the closeness of the sphere, which had a diameter of at least three feet. It bounded over her just as Tiernan Clarke snatched her roughly to one side, and hovered several feet above their heads. Then it continued on with a sound of bacon frying and settled down, just inches from the path, a few feet below them.

Ned backed up slowly, forgetting his pain, and bumped into Erika and Clarke.

"Now what?" Clarke asked.

"It's ball lightning," Erika explained. "We learned to live with them, but they are scary. This one will just float up against the core after a while and dissipate its energy."

"What if it doesn't?" he said unhappily. "It's in our way."

"We'll just have to wait."

"Until another shaker comes along? I don't think so. Ned, fire into it."

"No!" Erika said.

"Why not? That may be a way of getting rid of the damn thing . . . dissipating it, as you say."

"But–we simply don't know what it is. Matter in some inconceivable state. Some of us used to speculate–that they had intelligence."

Clarke gave her a jaundiced look. "Ned!"

The black man reluctantly raised his rifle and fired three quick shots at the fireball. There was no apparent effect as the shots echoed though the Catacombs. And there were no ricochets from the walls. The bullets just disappeared. Ned looked back slowly at Clarke, and shook his head.

As he did so the fireball began to shrink, and its color changed from a pumpkin color to a dull red. It was a new phenomenon; Erika had never seen one of the plasmoids change shape or color. She felt her heart begin to pound, and it wasn't just the effect of the thin air in the Catacombs.

The fireball suddenly shot toward Ned.

There was a popping sound as it touched either Ned or the barrel of his rifle. Ned's eyes stood out in his head. A blue flame like that from a gas jet appeared momentarily around him, like a halo, then the fireball zipped away and Ned collapsed, smoking; the back of his shirt and bush jacket had been burned away, the skin and flesh were crisp. The fireball had passed through him. The barrel of his rifle had fused into a bulbous lump.

Clarke went down on one knee and tried to find a pulse. There was none. Ned Chakava was dead.

T
he trembling of the Catacombs brought Michael Belov around. As soon as he moved, he threw up. Black waves of nausea continued to roll through him even after the tremors of the mountain stopped. There was a roaring in his head that had nothing to do with the lava gases forced through subterranean crevices and into the vents of the crater.

He didn't know where he was. His eyes wouldn't focus. He turned blindly around and around on the diamond-strewn floor like a lumpy animal trying to be born. Eventually he located the keyhole entrance to the crystal vault and crawled outside. Blood circulating in his head made it ache horribly, but his vision was improving. He sat up, fell over, sat up again.

Belov looked around the huge chamber–like so many others he'd seen–with its moody sepulchral lighting in which all flesh was the color of bone, and the faces of entombed creatures took on a life of the imagination. His head was exploding with each convulsive breath, but still there wasn't enough air for his lungs. He thought he might be dying. Like Henry.

Or was Henry already dead? Belov saw him lying, sprawled on his back, just a few feet away.

Needed oxygen, Belov thought. But the oxygen was exhausted. They'd come a long way since using the last of it, Henry dying with every step. But somehow he'd made it–here.

To the Repository.

Belov rose on one knee and waited until a surge of dizziness receded. He wondered if he was actually hearing gunshots, or if it was just a hallucination produced by his battered brain. A clock ticked inside him, faster than his frantic pulse, urging him on; getting close to panic time. But what did it mean? There was a deadline to meet, an appointment to keep–he couldn't remember. Something big, however.

He staggered half a dozen steps and went down on all fours beside Henry Landreth.

There was a great deal of blood on Henry's face, his clothes, the floor. He'd been coughing and spitting blood for more than a day, fluid from the drowning lungs, bits of lung tissue as well. But this had been a catastrophe, a final hemorrhage.

Belov tried to locate the pulse in Henry's slack throat. Bad news. Henry had been about to do something vital for him. It had to do with the red diamonds. But they were all gone, at least the ones that mattered. Plenty of red stones secure in their crystal sockets, only they weren't the right stones, and this discovery had sent Henry into a rage. What a pretty picture the stones would make for the satellite if only–

The Russian held his whirling head, and rested. It was almost clear to him now what he was doing here, but focusing precisely on his task still required too much of an effort. The odor of congealing blood sickened him. Too late for Henry, but all appointments had to be kept. Tomorrow was another day, of course, but never postpone until tomorrow what you can do today, particularly when there's only a few hundred feet of cracking, heaving granite between oneself and an unimaginable quantity of gaseous magma.

He looked at the face of his chronometer, trying to concentrate. The dial was readable. The date was the twenty-third. Of May, he remembered, and almost grasped the significance of it. But he was distracted by another scattered piece of memory falling into place. Henry trying to strangle him, his surprise at the devastating strength of a man who should not have been able to stand unaided. The power of rage. And Henry had nearly succeeded in killing him. He'd been a total fool. Off guard.

So if it was nearly ten o'clock at 37 degrees and 39 minutes east longitude, three degrees south latitude, seven o'clock Greenwich, then what time was it in Moscow? And what did it matter?

The satellite, of course!

The satellite was coming, the sophisticated Molniya with multiple antennae capable, in perigee, of scooping up the myriad tiny signals from his phototransmitter and, hours later over Moscow, in the early morning, reproducing in excellent detail the series of photos that proved the existence of the Catacombs.

He would have, he recalled, from 1:06 to 1:18 A.M. to relay the photos. He had also hoped to send a message that he'd found the bloodstones they desperately wanted. But Kumenyere had them now, according to Henry, and Moscow would just have to pay his price.

Belov had all of his equipment with him, and the photos he'd taken in other chambers. They were in the pack he'd carried with such difficulty down seven levels to the Repository, along with Henry Landreth. His problem now was to get out of the Catacombs in time.

He knew he was deep in the mountain, and he had no idea of what lay beneath him. But the floor was hot. He didn't think it had been this hot to the touch an hour or two ago. The big pancake of blood Henry had spouted onto the floor had not fully coagulated.