The breeze blowing in through the open windows carried with it the sounds and smells of a world that was nothing like the austere concrete landscape of Manhattan. The pungent odor of wood smoke, spices and animal excrement was oddly refreshing; she hadn't ever realized that she had missed it.
Though they both bore the unmistakable stamp of their colonial landlords, Delhi was nothing like the rugged backwater port of Leopoldville in the Belgian Congo — the nearest city to the rural mission where Hobbs had raised her. There had always been an undercurrent of desperation in the Congo, especially among the native population, who were virtually enslaved to their European overlords. India was…alive.
Enfolded by a juxtaposition of modern British buildings and magnificent ornamental Indian architecture, with arches and arabesques, the streets were teeming with activity. Chadwick was compelled to slow to a mere crawl as they pushed through a sea of pedestrians, oxcarts and rickshaws. Molly was dazzled by the array of colors swirling around her — red orange, saffron yellow and creamy jade. And yet, amid the bright hues, there was also misery and suffering. Naked beggars, many of them gaunt children, shared the street with fat merchants. Men in perfectly tailored suits and beautiful women wrapped in diaphanous saris walked seemingly unaware, past persons so ravaged by leprosy that it was impossible to tell whether they were men or women.
Winterbourne must have read the conflicting emotions in her gaze. "They call them dalits," he said. "The word literally means 'ground to pieces.' They are the outcasts, untouchables. Their life is one of unending suffering."
Molly was no stranger to human misery. It was woven into the fabric of life in the Congo and she had found it waiting for her in the Big Apple, where thousands of unemployed men and women lived in Hooverville shanties in the shadow of the tallest buildings in the world. But somehow, the contrast between rich and poor was much more pronounced. "Can't someone help them?"
"It's their way. The good or evil you do in this life will come back to you in the next. That’s called karma. It is one's duty… one's dharma… to play the hand he’s dealt."
"These people are paying for the sins of a past life? That's horrible."
Chadwick looked over his shoulder. "Actually, there is an effort afoot to improve their lot. A fellow named Gandhi has been working to end the oppression of the untouchables. He's even coined a new word for them: Harijan. It means 'Children of God.'"
"It's a sin to ignore the suffering of our neighbors. I've got to believe that's as true for karma as it is for Christianity." She glanced over at her father, hoping for an approving nod, but although Hobbs was sitting right next to her, he might as well have been in a different universe.
Hurley finally broke the awkward silence. "Looks like rain,"
Antarctica was now many hours and several hundred miles behind them, but it was hardly a distant memory for Dodge. The thought of what must be happening deep beneath the ice haunted him and the thought of what might happen kept him wide-awake behind the Tin Goose's control column long past the point when most people would have dropped from exhaustion.
If I sleep now, the world may die. And I'm not even sure I can stop it.
Despite what Jocasta had said about the man she called Schadel, he could not bring himself to believe that mere destruction was his aim. Self-preservation, not self-destruction, was the instinct of every creature. Despite the fact that Fuller — or Schadel or whatever his real name was — had deceived him from the outset and in the end even tried to kill him, he felt there had to be some kind of basis for reasoning with him, for convincing him to, if nothing else, put the brakes on the runaway engine of destruction he had set in motion.
If that was even possible.
As they waited for the plane to be refueled in Cape Town, they discussed their next move. Dodge expected the physicist to supply him with facts and figures and timetables, but what Newcombe revealed was even more unsettling.
"I touched that column," the scientist began, "and I saw things. Unbelievable things."
"You saw things? I don't understand."
"I don't understand either." He sounded bewildered. "I'm a scientist, I need to be able to understand how things function, but I never could figure out what made the things from the Outpost work."
"You once told me that the technology utilized the earth's magnetic field." Dodge recalled his first meeting with Newcombe, at the White House, of all places. "You mentioned principles similar to what Tesla proposed."
"It's one thing to know what is happening and quite another to know why. Yes, the devices did tap into that abundant energy, but I could never make sense of how they were able to do that. We can harness the energy of rivers to make electricity, but it requires dams and turbines and generators. The same is true of the earth's electromagnetic field. It's there and it's powerful, but that doesn't mean we can just reach out and take whatever we need.
"But that's exactly what these devices do and I could never explain how." Newcombe sighed and gazed out through the windscreen at the clear skies ahead. "Until I touched that column."
"You called it the Source," Jocasta supplied.
Dodge regarded her across the table. She seemed to have cast her lot with them, but Dodge was unsure of her motives. He had no reason to trust her and many reasons to be suspicious. In the end, Jocasta would do what was best for Jocasta above all else.
And of course, there was the kiss.
Surely it had been an impulsive thing; a good luck gesture and nothing else. What troubled him most about it was not the question of her motives, but rather his own uncertain reaction.
No time to worry about that now, he told himself.
Newcombe launched into his lecture. "Tesla theorized that it might be possible to take electricity out of the magnetic field using metal towers. The column served a similar function, acting both as a receiver and a transmitter. The flying devices did not draw their energy directly from the magnetic field, but rather from those columns."
"Columns?" Dodge asked. "There’s more than one?"
"Several actually, strategically placed at different points around the planet, to tap into the flow of electromagnetic energy. They were placed there thousands of years ago by the same prehistoric civilization that built the Outpost. Most, if not all of them, lie buried and forgotten, just like the people who built them, but they are still active."
"Could there be other places like the Outpost?" For just a moment, Dodge thought he saw a straw of hope to grasp at. "Maybe we could find the means to stop what's happening in Antarctica."
"It's possible I suppose. The ancients had a capital city; if we could find it, then I suppose we could…"
"But?"
"When I touched that column, it felt like I was remembering things that had happened to someone else. In this case, the memories of the men that lived and eventually died at the Outpost. They were not omniscient. They knew about the power network, but not necessarily where all the columns were located, much the same way that the average person on the street knows that the electricity they need for their light bulbs and radios comes from a power station and is delivered by copper wires, but may not know exactly where that power station is. I have memories of that city, but I don't know if I could find it. The world does not look the same way as it did ten thousand years ago."
"Schadel seemed awfully keen to learn where the city was," Jocasta said. "It was all he asked about."
"That makes sense. The real power would be at the heart of their empire, not some backwater station at the bottom of the world."