Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel (44 page)

“Fr. Ibrahim,” he declared emphatically as we left the geology base behind and soared up into the mountains on an AEC, “tell me again the detail and omit no part.”

So Dariush filled him in on every aspect of what we knew, though this was hardly conclusive.

“It
is
a road!” declared Paul. “I
know
it is a road. And no road lead to nothing. All road come to a place for reason, yes.”

“Yes, I believe so”, Dariush replied. I kept my own counsel, refraining from blurting out that many times in my life I had stumbled across surprising things, only to find they had a natural explanation, if one was willing to dig deep enough. Then I recalled the cube of turquoise I had found in the desert when I was a teenager. A big surprise, that one. Even so, we were banking an awful lot on outcroppings of rock and a depression in the planet’s shield, both of them probably flukes or freaks of nature.

Nevertheless, I felt my own excitement rising. The afternoon would be a pleasant, if imaginative, diversion.

As we flew down the middle of the valley, Paul, who was sitting in the copilot’s seat, leaned forward and pointed at the swiftly approaching trench line.

“There it is! It is what I saw. Now I see it more.” With an animated face and exaggerated gestures, he turned to us and shouted, “It is a road; it is a road!”

His fellow countryman smiled ironically at him, muttered something in Russian, and began the descent.

“Volodya, can you take us first to the kremlins?” Dariush asked. Without reply, the pilot changed course and turned to the right, ascending by hover toward the nearer of the two towers. We slowly glided over it, and looking down into its core, we saw that the satellite photo had been accurate. It was hollow.

Of course, the tower could have been created by geological forces, for it looked not unlike the natural rock towers of Arizona. Its thick walls were broken, with at least half of the circumference shattered and lying in piles at its base. The standing portion appeared to be about sixty meters in height above the surrounding terrain. It was uniformly covered within and without by what I took to be thick moss or alpine vines, and was in several places cracked by the roots of bushes growing in crevices.

“Can we land?” I asked.

“The surface is bad,” said the pilot, “but if you wish, I will hover a few meters above it, if you do not mind the ladder.”

He brought the AEC slowly down to a height just above a steeply pitched slope of jagged stones beside the tower, then he depressurized and opened the portal. Paul hastened back into the middle of the craft, found the high-tension cord ladder, and unrolled it over the side. That done, he simply scrambled down it onto the ground.

Vladimir locked the AEC stable in the air, and the rest of us descended, me last of all. For the thousandth time in my life, I cursed my bad leg, cursed all the damnable serpents in the known universe. But this mood quickly passed. Just being there was a thrill and a challenge, more than making up for the difficulties.

As we picked our way carefully toward the nearest tower wall, a portion of which had collapsed, I saw that the pieces looked like shattered slabs of granite, furred with gray lichen. Moreover, avalanches of debris and smaller scree had assaulted the area in times past, making a confusing jumble.

Paul was the first to arrive at the tower’s base. There he paused, staring down over the remnants of the wall into the hollow core, waiting for the rest of us to arrive.

The interior was little different from the exterior, in that, here too the bottom was strewn with rubble. However, because there was not much sunlight and no soil within, there was less overgrowth of vines and moss. Now we could see that the interior was definitely circular. In fact, it seemed very near a perfect circle, which had not been observable from the outside. Paul leaped over the wall, and clinging to a vine, he rappelled himself down to the bottom. There he proceeded to pull branches and clumps of moss from the walls. The other Russian joined him, and soon they had cleared a patch, which Dariush and I could not see, since it was immediately below us.

Both men suddenly paused and took a few steps back. They looked up at us, mouths open, speechless.

“What is it?” I called.

Paul cleared his throat and said in a shaken voice, “We are not alone in the universe.”

Day 160
:

I am writing in my room on the
Kosmos
. Last night, after a day of astounding discoveries, I returned to the ship quite exhausted. I was able to complete the foregoing notes, and then fell asleep without knowing it.

I awoke at 5
A.M.
this morning, and went for a thoughtful walk in the arboretum. It now seemed a cramped and tame place. I sat and listened to Mozart for a while, and realized at one point that I had tears in my eyes. A strange sensation, emotionless. I put a stop to it and went off to get myself breakfast in the cafeteria, where I sat staring at nothing as I ate.

The truth that we are not the only intelligent beings in the universe is one that gives an initial shock, yet it needs absorbing. For the moment, we know very little. Were they visitors to this planet? Explorers like us? Colonizers who gave up and went away? Are they out there still on some nearby star? Or was this always their home? If the latter, have they died out entirely, or is there a remnant of these mighty people still alive on Nova, living very differently from the way they did at the height of their power? Indeed, were they people at all—as we conceive intelligent life to be? We do not know what they looked like, what they thought, why they did what they did. We know only that they were here.

I have just returned to my room and now will complete my notes on yesterday’s events:

“We are not alone in the universe”, Paul had said.

He beckoned us to join him, which both Dariush and I did at much risk, considering our age and my infirmities. We arrived safely at the bottom of the tower and there beheld what our friends had seen: The portions of the wall they had exposed were huge rectangular blocks, unmortared, precision made, with uniform dimensions. Dariush leaned close to inspect the seams. I stepped back and gazed all around me. About halfway up the highest standing portion of the opposite wall (the side overlooking the valley), the broken edge of a shelf or a floor support projected into the room. I could see no windows, for the wall was matted with the foliage of vines, as it was on the outside.

Vladimir was wearing a backpack, and from this, he now removed a hand-held instrument. He activated it, and as he turned around slowly, it shot light beams in every direction. Adjusting his position step by step, he narrowed his coordinates until he had found the chamber’s precise center.

“It is a perfect circle,” he told us, “31.79 meters in diameter.”

“Of course, a system of measurement different from ours”, said Dariush to himself.

With another instrument, Vladimir took a sonar reading that, apparently, was able to penetrate stone.

“There is a floor 6.35 meters below the exact center of the room. It is metal. The instrument is having trouble identifying the metal, but it is certainly not iron or steel. It may have lead content or be an alloy that mankind has not yet developed.”

He fiddled with something on the instrument and took another reading.

“Measuring from the floor below to the top of the intact portion of the wall, we obtain a height of 95.37 meters.”

Dariush did some mental calculation and said, “The height of the tower, then, leaving aside the question of a roof or cap, is precisely three times the diameter of the interior.”

“Volodya, are there any openings in the wall?” I asked.

“Let me see”, he said and pointed the instrument at the intact section, scanning from left to right, rising a little with each pass. Above the ledge or floor support I had spotted, he stopped.

“A window. Circular. It is 3.179 meters in diameter.”

This demanded no complicated math. “One tenth the diameter of the tower’s interior”, I said. “They may have used a base-ten, decimal number system.”

“Did they have ten fingers, I wonder?” Dariush mused.

Vladimir said, “The window is completely closed by organic material. Vine branches, I think.”

He retraced his steps to the exact center, and digitally confirmed its position on the planet by longitude and latitude. That done, we climbed back out of the tower and returned to the AEC. It took only a minute to cross the pass and alight next to the other tower. Its condition was as poor as the first, with no significant differences in its structure that we could find. A reading of its dimensions revealed that it was an exact match of the first. The latitude / longitude coordinates were also recorded, and then we were airborne again. Our pilot plunged us down into the pass and swiftly out of it, heading due east along the trench in the direction of the mountain face on the other side of the valley. All the while he was taking readings from instruments on his flight panel.

Farther along, he shook his head and spoke in rapid-fire Russian. “What is it?” I asked.

“It is very interesting”, Paul replied. “He say this road is like arrow, very straight, to within a fraction of single degree. His instrument algorithms averaged numerous laser measurements from left bank to right bank and discovered the position of its center line. Now we learn that this line meets the line between the two towers in exact equal distance. Do you know what I mean?”

“Like a letter
T
?”

“Yes, like that. But it is so precise it is brilliant, brilliant. It is within a few centimeters of perfect symmetry, he is thinking.”

Vladimir slowed the aircraft to hover, then descended into the trees, landing not on the embankment but in a gap inside the trench, close to the cliff face. We disembarked into the soft undergrowth of aromatic ferns and walked without undue effort toward it. I noticed that Vladimir frequently consulted the instrument in his hand.

Now we stopped before the impassable blank wall of stone where we had stood three weeks before. Vladimir took a few steps to the left and one step forward. His instrument began beeping.

“What is it? What have you found?” I asked.

“Only an abstraction”, said Vladimir, whose English was more polished than Paul’s. “The mathematical line, the road’s axial line, it ends . . . here.” He put his finger to the wall.

“It is also the geographical center of the continent”, Dariush contributed.

“But there is nothing here”, said Paul. “There is no mark, no sign.”

“Yes, and if all this precision was so important to them, why did they not leave a marker of some kind?”

“There may be one here,” I said, “but if this side of the valley is anything like the other, it’s buried. Volodya, does your magic gismo detect any metal below us?”

Our pilot employed not one, but three instruments, before looking up and shaking his head.

“Nothing.”

Paul, Dariush, and I stared at the soil beneath our feet. And then, instinctively, we bent over and began to pull loose rocks away from the base of the cliff. It was a Herculean task, more a case of mad optimism than reasonable use of energies.

“Wait”, said Vladimir, turning his back to us. He tapped on one of his instruments and paused a few seconds.

“I am triangulating on the center of each tower, the place where the windows are situated. Both windows, significantly, are facing this point exactly. Why?”

None of us had any answers. We watched Vladimir frowning to himself, tapping again, and reading the results.

He looked up suddenly and said, “From the center of those windows, two hypothetical lines can be drawn. If we posit that the lines would meet here at the mountain, exactly where the trench line ends, then we may have a means to learn more.”

Paul, who was the head of Navigation for the
Kosmos
, seemed to get the point sooner than I did. He nodded emphatically. “
Da
, yes, of course. The road’s axial line is horizontal, and the lines from the towers would
descend
even as they
converge
toward the apex where these three lines must meet.”

“Must?” said Dariush with a frown. “But this is speculation.”

“I agree, Father”, said Vladimir. “However,
if
the apex is exactly here, and if we also consider the precision of all measurements we have discovered so far, would it not indicate, at least as a possibility, a determined relationship of two converging tower lines with the main axial line?”

“I see your point. It
is
a supposition, but one worth considering.”

Vladimir nodded emphatically. “So, you understand, gentlemen—if, as is supposed, we do have the meeting of all lines exactly here, we are left with one uncertainty.”

“Do you mean the depth?” I asked.

“Yes,” Paul affirmed. “He is telling us there is something below, may be, but we do not see how far down is it.”

Vladimir turned his instrument screen toward us, and we crowded close to look.

“Ah”, I said. “We’ve been thinking two-dimensionally. Your machine has been thinking three-dimensionally, and has proposed a convergence of all lines exactly where they touch the rock face, somewhere beneath the ground we’re standing on.”

“If my theory is correct, and the coordinates for all lines are correct, the convergence point is approximately 2.78 meters beneath your feet, Dr. Hoyos.”

“Really? This kind of guesswork is probably way off the mark.”

“Then let us discover if I am a good or bad guesser.”

With that, we resumed pulling loose rock away from the cliff. Paul went back to the AEC and returned shortly with a kit box that contained a variety of implements. One was a pneumatic bar with a chisel point. A squeeze of the handle drove it a foot length into hard ground, shunting rocks to the side. There were also a suction hose and two traditional shovels. Even with such tools, I could not sustain the physical labor for long. I tired first, and Dariush had to stop to catch his breath not long after. Eventually, we just sat down on the ground and watched the two young men throw themselves into the task.