Take a look at this! He urged, and caused the Easter Island resonator to suddenly draw back from the acherontic struggle.
His opponents’ beams floundered in the abrupt lack of resistance, momentarily discomfited in overcompensation. Then, as if unable to believe the way was now clear, the three columns came together again tentatively.
Everybody else… out! He commanded. I’ll take it from here!
He heard chairs squeak and topple as his assistants took him at his word. Footsteps scrambled for the door. “Don’t wait too long, Alex!” someone shouted. But his attention was already focused as it never had been before. The enemy beams touched Beta, hunted, and at last found their resonance.
At that same moment, though, Alex felt a strange, fey oneness with the monster singularity. No matter how much the enemy must have learned — no doubt by snooping his files — he still knew Beta better than any living man!
If I wait till the very last millisecond…
Of course no human could control the beam with such fineness. Not in real time. So he chose his counterstroke in advance and delegated a program to act on his behalf. There was no chance to double-check the code.
Go! He unleashed his surrogate warrior at the last possible moment. Behind him, the resonator seemed to yowl an angry, almost feline battle cry.
It was already too late to flee. Alex quashed the adrenaline rush — a reaction inherited from ancient days when his ancestors used to seek out danger with their own eyes, meeting it with the power of their own limbs and their own tenacious wills. The last of these, at least, was valid still. He forced himself to wait calmly through the final fractions of a second, as fate came bulling toward him from the bowels of the Earth.
The Snake River Plain stretches, desolate and lined with cinder cones, from the Cascades all the way to Yellowstone, where outcrops of pale rhyolite gave the great park its name. As near Hawaii and several other places, a fierce needle here replaced the mantle’s normal, placid convection. Something slender and hot enough to melt granite had worked its way under the North American Plate, taking several million years to cut the wide valley.
That pace was quick, in geologic terms. But there was no law that said things could not go faster still.
• EXOSPHERE
They stopped running a kilometer or so to the west, but not because it was safe. No amount of distance offered protection against what might now be hurtling their way.
No, they halted because sedentary intellectuals could only run so far. Teresa took some satisfaction watching June Morgan pant, pale and winded. The woman was in pathetic shape. Serves her right, she thought, rationing herself a small dollop of cattiness. Since she was in charge, Teresa counted heads and quickly came up short.
Manella. Damn! She turned to the Maori security chief, “Keep everyone here, Joey. I’m going after Pedro. The jerk’s probably recording it all for posterity!”
She finished the thought as she ran downhill. Recording what it’s like to be at ground zero. The only ones to view his tape may be ETs at some distant star!
Halfway to the resonator building, she saw a dozen men and women suddenly spill into the late-afternoon sunlight, tripping and scrambling as they fled her way. Good. Alex shouldn’t have stayed in the first place.
Then she realized that neither Pedro nor Alex was among them. “Shit!”
Now she sprinted, rushing past the fleeing technicians so quickly they seemed to blur. But then, the blurring wasn’t entirely an effect of motion. A tingling in her eyeballs and sinuses barely preceded a sharp ringing in her ears, which grew until church carillons seemed to boom around her. Even the dry grass bent and swayed to the pealing notes. Her feet danced of their own accord across the shifting surface.
The next thing Teresa knew, she had tumbled to the ground and was having a terrible time figuring out which way was up. It felt as if the earth had dropped away beneath her. Strong winds whipped at her clothes.
Is it my turn to go, then? The way Jason did?
Maybe I can stay conscious long enough to see the stars. To see my ultimate trajectory before I pass out.
She drew a deep breath, preparing to meet the sky.
But then the whirling seemed to settle. Teresa felt sharp-stemmed blades of grass cut her fingers as she clutched the stony soil. Her next hasty breath felt no thinner. Lifting her head despite a roaring vertigo, she saw a tipped slope, a patch of sea… and a great horrible face!
One of the giant statues, she realized in an instant. She’d fallen near some of the aboriginal monuments. More monoliths came into view as her visual distortions shifted from focus over to color.
Now everything was clear, crisp, but tinted in a flux of unaccustomed hues — eerie shades that surged and rippled across a much enlarged spectrum. Somehow, Teresa knew she must be seeing directly in the infrared, or ultraviolet, or other weird bands never meant for human eyes. The effect encouraged illusions… that the row of statues were trembling, shaking, like ancient sleeping gods answering an Olympian alarm.
It was no illusion! Four of the massive sculptures wrenched free of their platform. Soot blew away as they vibrated free of centuries’ accumulated dross. Gleaming now, they rotated toward her.
Teresa shivered, remembering Alex’s description of his own fey insight under a lightning storm, when he first realized that other hands than human might have crafted Beta’s malign intricacy. Could that be it? she wondered. Could June be working for our alien enemies? If they’re here in person, what chance did we ever have?
In the bizarre pulse-bunching that characterized some gazer beams, the giant statues seemed to pause, circling round a common center. But even as they did a languid dance, she sensed another, more powerful beat gathering below. Teresa tried to move her arms and legs to flee, but sud-denly she was pressed to the ground as if by a giant’s hand. Tides coursed her innards, pressing her liver against her pounding heart. A cry escaped her open mouth like a soul prying its way out.
That force passed just before she thought she might burst. Teresa blinked through nausea and saw that the statues had disappeared. Into their hasty absence, a cyclone of angry air blew, just as the gravitational pulse tail left her abruptly with no weight at all.
The familiar sensation might have felt pleasantly like spaceflight, but she quickly saw where the wind was tossing her… toward a deep cavity where the stony gods had formerly stood! She clawed at the dirt and grass, grabbing at any purchase as a midget hurricane dragged her toward the pit — deep and gleamingly oval. Her feet passed over empty space, then her legs, her hips. Desperately she cried out as her fingers lost contact…
Suddenly she flapped like a flag in the gale — but did not fall. At the last moment, one outstretched arm had caught on something.
Or something had caught her! Twisting, she saw a beefy hand clamped round her wrist. The hand led to an arm and massive shoulders… merging with the head and face of Pedro Manella.
The storm ended as quickly as it had started. Aerodynamic lift vanished like a bed dropping out from under her, releasing her to fall in a horrible arc. The glass-smooth wall struck her a blow, setting off dazzling waves of pain.
Consciousness wavered, but the insults didn’t end there. Her arm was yanked again and again, in rhythmic heaves that hurt like hell as she felt herself drawn upward, slowly upward, to the precipice, over the glazed, cutting edge, and then finally onto the rough basalt-gravel surface of Rapa Nui.