I checked my watch. “Okay,” I said, “we leave in twenty minutes.”
At the appointed time the guardian started off at a good walking pace. He used his walking pole as he went along. Keeping up was easy enough to do. Ed, Trent and I followed his lead.
Then we started up the side of the mountain. He didn’t slow down. He kept the same pace going uphill. I checked my watch. We had been walking for seven minutes and already I was getting short of breath.
“Is he going to keep this pace up for the whole four hours?” I asked Trent.
“Probably,” he replied.
“Me and my big mouth,” I said.
“I told you, don’t underestimate him.”
We scrambled along, doing our best to keep up with the guardian. I had to stop several times to catch my breath and drink some water. The guardian never varied from his pace the entire way up the mountain; neither did he stop for water.
Eventually he stopped on a narrow ledge, turned and waited for the rest of us to catch up with him. He smiled as we struggled up to where he was. I checked my watch. We had two minutes before the satellite would come into range of our position.
“Are we there?” I asked, horribly out of breath.
The guardian took a necklace off from under his robe. It had some sort of a round medallion hanging from the cord. He pressed the medallion into a recess in the rock and held it there. At first I could feel the rumble in my feet, and then I heard the sound of the rock parting. The entire wall of rock along the narrow ledge began moving slowly inside the mountain. The guardian smiled and waved his arm, inviting us inside the cave.
I could see just enough of the floor to be able to walk ten feet into the cave. As the four of us moved inside, the rock wall began to close. I looked at the door as it closed and glanced at the guardian. He simply stood there, smiling at me.
As soon as the rock door closed the pitch blackness surrounded us. I felt like I had been swallowed up in eternity and my feelings of panic rose again. Just then lights began to come on from the top of the cave. I realized “cave” wasn’t an apt description. The floor was smooth and polished stone. I couldn’t see the roof, but it had to be at least fifty feet above us, judging from the placement of the lights. The room we were in went back at least three hundred yards and had to be one hundred yards wide. The center section of the room was higher than the side sections and clear of support posts. Stone support columns were evenly placed throughout the side sections of the room approximately fifty feet apart.
The huge room was filled with strange machinery and pieces of equipment. I began examining one of the machines closest to me. It was saucer shaped, about thirty feet in diameter and ten feet tall. The surface was smooth as glass and metallic gray in color.
The guardian spoke. Trent translated, “He says it’s one of four different types of Vimana, or flying machines that are stored in here.”
“Does it still work?” I asked.
Trent spoke with the guardian and turned back to me. “Probably,” he said “He never tried to get inside of it before, so he really doesn’t know.”
I wandered around looking at the various machines and then stopped dead in my tracks. In front of me, a six foot tall robot stood in a small alcove. It was metallic gray with red and white markings on it. The head of the robot had a red and white striped band around the mouth on the upper and lower jaw, convex lenses for eyes and a small nose. The head was identical to the one back in John’s communications room, only this robot was complete and undamaged. The robot’s body was designed after the human frame: solid titanium where we have bones and laminated pivot points where we have joints. The robot’s hands were a duplicate of the human hand and appeared capable of doing anything a human could do.
After examining the robot closely, I moved on. The level of technology present was well beyond anything in our current civilization. My mind wandered back through history and our primitive lives, comparing what we know to what I saw here. The loss of this height of technology must have been devastating to the people. I wondered how people managed to cope and just tried to stay alive after the meteor storm.
About halfway down the left side of the room was a small section carved back into the rock. The walls were smooth and rounded, almost like a surround theater, but there didn’t seem to be any controls or interface devices.
Ed, Trent and the guardian followed me through the massive hall. We passed machine after machine, not knowing what they were used for or what they might do. It felt like my first visit to a museum, where everything was unfamiliar. At the far end the floor ended and a large cavern dropped off into complete darkness.
“Does the guardian know how far this goes down?” I asked.
Trent spoke with the guardian and then explained. “He says there are three more floors, similar to this one, all filled with machinery. What you are looking at is actually an elevator. The floor, now four stories below, moves up and down so equipment can be moved from one level to another.”
“So how do you get it to move?” I asked.
Trent translated. “He says the rounded alcove you passed is a control center for the entire complex. You need the medallion to activate the system.”
“Okay, then let’s go back to the control center,” I said.
We walked back to the rounded alcove. The guardian took the medallion and placed it into a small recess in the back section of the rounded wall. The walls lit up with images and strange symbols.
“So where’s the keyboard?” I asked. “How do we interface with the system?”
The guardian stepped forward and reached up to one of the displays. He put his finger in front of one of the gold colored symbols and moved it slightly to the right. Lights came on over the dark pit at the end of the hall. I could hear the sound of equipment operating. The sound stopped as the elevator floor appeared and stopped level with the floor in our section of the hall.
“How does he know which symbol does what?” I asked.
Trent conferred with the guardian. “The language is similar in some respects to Sanskrit, but much older. He says the previous guardian taught him the language, which he learned from the guardian before him.”
“Swell,” I said, “has he taught the next guardian the language?”
“He says there is no next guardian. He is the last one.”
“We can’t lose this knowledge,” I said. “How can we preserve what is here?”
Just then the hair on the back of my neck stood up and I became aware of something moving behind us. I turned and the others followed. In front of us stood the six foot tall robot from the alcove near the front of the hall. Ed pulled his knife and stepped in front of me, determined to protect me at all costs.
The robot quickly tracked his movements and looked at the knife. I slowly stepped in front of Ed and turned to face him.
“Ed, give me the knife,” I said. Ed looked me in the eye, but didn’t move. “Ed, you aren’t going to win against the robot. Remember the invincible warrior that guards the cave? This is it. You have to trust me. Now, give me the knife.”
Ed slowly handed the knife to me. I turned and slid the knife across the floor, handle first, toward the feet of the robot. After a short pause, the robot quickly reached down, picked up the knife and broke it into small pieces with its hands, and tossed the pieces off to the side. It stood there watching us, apparently deciding our fate.
CHAPTER 10
I stepped forward. “Look,” I said, “I am the one responsible for the intrusion into your domain. If anyone is to be punished it’s me. The others are not to blame.”