She stood up and looked at the green radiating off the blue water. A small bubble surfaced, followed by another one. Her eyes narrowed, and she studied the slight change in the water. She tried to get Adrian’s attention, but he was dipping under the water, swimming to the bottom and searching for different colored stones to show her.
The bubbles started to surface quickly — one after another — and she felt the irrational agitation of fear rising in her throat. “Adrian!”
He didn’t hear her as he dived down again.
She quickly walked to the opposite side of the hot spring, carefully jumping across the volcanic stones, racing to get his attention when he surfaced.
Bubbles more than a foot wide were now surfacing with the speed of a rapid-fire machinegun. She watched Adrian’s head break the surface.
“Get out of there!” she shouted.
Adrian turned to face her. “Hey, there’s an opening down here! It looks like the entrance to a tunnel or something that leads even deeper!”
She screamed, “Get out! Something’s not right!”
He glanced at the bubbles, making their way to the surface next to him. The last one was nearly five feet in diameter. His eyes widened. “Yeah, I think you’re right!”
Adrian tried to swim, but even larger bubbles broke directly below him. The surface tension broke way to the gas filled liquid below, and he sank.
Airlie watched, helplessly, as he fought to reach the surface again.
When he did a few moments later, his face was bright red and he was screaming again. Airlie wanted to yell at him and tell him not to make any more jokes, but even after the first glance, she knew that he wasn’t joking. His skin was blistering over. His face aghast with horror.
Airlie’s dark brown eyes fixed on him and she wanted to scream. His eyes stared vacantly back at her, and she knew there was nothing more she could do — Adrian was already dead.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Sam walked along the northwest corner of Mountain Avenue and Speedway Boulevard. He glanced at the large building on the right. It appeared to have been designed to look more like an oversized aircraft hangar than a university building. Over the main door, were the words, Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering.
He stepped inside and gave his name to a receptionist.
The receptionist, a twenty-something-year-old man with a poorly grown blond beard, glanced at him with recognition and said, “Professor Capel is waiting for you inside the metallurgy labs on level E. I believe your associate is already with him.”
“Thank you.” Sam ran his eyes across a map of the building.
The receptionist noticed, and said, “If you take the stairs down three flights, the metallurgy labs are the first on the right.”
“They’re underground?” Sam asked.
“Yeah, it’s a precaution. Some of the experiments performed here can be dangerous.”
Sam nodded. “Thanks.”
He found the metallurgy labs a couple of minutes later and tried to open the door. It was locked. He glanced at the obvious security camera fixed on him and then knocked loudly at the door. Another minute later, the door opened.
Professor Douglas Capel greeted him. He was tall for his generation, standing eye to eye with Sam. Wiry gray hair sprouted from his head, and made his eyebrows look like those of a mad scientist. The same hair sprung from his ears like coiled antennae. His skin was surprisingly smooth in contrast. His blue eyes twinkled with good-humor. A ready smile, somewhat crooked, gave him the appearance of smirking below a large, well-shaped nose.
“Ah, Mr. Reilly, I’m so glad you could make it.” The professor offered his hand.
Sam took it. The man had a firm handshake. “Thank you for your hard work, Professor Capel.”
“Not a problem. Come with me. There’s a lot for us to get through with, and your associate, Dr. Billie Swan, tells me that time is… how did she put it?” He sighed. “Of the essence.”
Sam followed the man through a series of long, empty passageways. The professor carried his head at a slight tilt, as if questioning everything about the world around him. At the end of the third corridor, the professor put his ID card to yet another security barcode reader, and a heavy steel door — the sort you might find onboard a space-shuttle — opened.
Inside, the room was a perfect sphere. Stainless steel metal shined from every end of the room like the inside of a giant globe. A thin sheet of see-through cargo nets — made of cotton rope that appeared like a direct anachronism in the otherwise space-aged lab — cut the sphere in half, providing a means of reaching the center of the room. There, the Göbekli Tepe Pillar Number 44 stood, suspended by a series of ropes, like an island at the center of the Earth. Next to it, Sam spotted Billie already examining the markings.
Sam turned to the professor. “What’s the story with the stone’s new storage facility?”
Capel grinned. “Ah, you’ll see.”
They walked across the cotton-mesh rope to the tiny island at the center.
Sam looked at Billie. “Find anything new?”
She shook her head. “No. It’s amazing, but I haven’t seen anything I couldn’t get out of the multiple photographs I’ve seen of it. But professor Capel tells me he’s been waiting until you get here to reveal the most amazing thing about it.”
He turned to the professor. “What did you find?”
Professor Capel grinned. “I can’t tell you. This, you have to experience for yourself.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Sam asked.
“You’ll see.” The professor squatted down, behind the large T-shaped astronomy stone. Four openings had been meticulously cut into the back of the Mesolithic stone. “Here, Mr. Reilly, slide one of these out, and place it on the scale.”
Sam glanced at the digital, scientific scale. “Okay. Can I examine the four stones, themselves?”
The professor nodded. “In due time. You won’t find anything extraordinary by looking at them. You already have the photos I sent you, and so you know of the pictographs depicted on them. Just go weigh it for me, will you?”
Sam nodded. Older people in general were rewarded with the respect of a greater amount of his patience, but once-in-a-generation experts like Professor Capel were granted an infinite amount of his tolerance. Instead, he turned to Billie. “You know what he’s getting at?”
“No.”
“All right. Here goes.”
Sam carefully reached into the opening. A hollow section, like a handle, had been cut into the stone inside. He slowly pulled it out. The image depicted on the outside was that of the Horseman of the Apocalypse known as Famine, below which was the Greek letter, Theta. He braced for the weight of the stone, but found it surprisingly light in his hands, as though it was made out of some sort of porous material. It was lighter than that. More like a feather. Certainly, no more than a few grams, at best.
“What is this made of?” Sam asked, staring at the strange material.
The stone itself was an intense shade of darkness, as though without the direct light shining on it, Sam wouldn’t have been able to see anything at all.
Capel ignored the comment, and urged him onward. “Okay, put it on the scale, quickly now.”
Sam carried the dark stone the three or four feet required, and then waited while the professor zeroed the scientific scale. A slight nod from Capel indicated that the machine was ready, and Sam placed the dark stone gently inside.
“Good!” The professor was grinning now. “How do you feel?”