Twenty men had died sneaking gold out to pay for the bomb-Tommy's brother one of them. It had taken them a year to accumulate enough. This was the end result of that blood.
"Thirty seconds."
Tommy looked back to the elevator, his mind scurrying through various options. He took his hand away from the red button and breathed a sigh of desperate relief. He shook his head, trying to clear the fog demons that were scampering about, dulling his brain. His eyeballs felt as if they were going to pop out of his head as he considered his position. He knew he was dead regardless. He couldn't go up. The guards would want to know why he wasn't on his shift. He couldn't go into one of the tunnels and take his normal place, because sooner or later someone would wonder what was on board the abandoned vehicle, and when they looked, there would be hell to pay.
A soft click caught his attention and Tommy glanced down. His eyes widened even more as he watched the red button slide down of its own accord into the metal plate.
Tommy never saw the plastic reach the bottom as he became a small patch of molecules vaporized by the nuclear blast that flashed into the rock around, which in turn dissolved and flowed.
The earth burped, Nabaktu looked at Lona and then out into the dark night again. He'd expected more. Still, it was more than two miles down.
"Let's go." He grabbed Lona's arm and they sprinted back the way they had come so many hours earlier. To the truck where the two waiting men threw questions at them. Could that small earthquake have been it? That's all? Where was the cloud?
Nabaktu ordered them silent and they sped away down toward Soweto Township to hide among the hundreds of thousands huddled there in the cheap shacks.
And below the dome, two miles down, the rocks took hours to cool and congeal; microscopic bits of foreign matter that had once been men joining the minerals and stone.
The sun bakes the sandy surface around Alice Springs, the intense heat causing the light to wave and bend. The only humans native to the Australian Outback-the Aborigines-did so through hundreds of generations of adaptation to their harsh environment. Life for them was finding water and food.
Australia is the oldest, flattest, and driest continent, equal in size to the continental United States. The Aborigines are estimated to have been there for more than thirty thousand years. For all those years they were completely isolated from the rest of the world. The ancient Egyptian empires, Rome, the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, the Industrial Age-all came and went and the Aborigines remained the same until the coming of the white man.
When the first Aborigines arrived in Australia, the center of the continent was fertile, containing lush jungles and swamps. The present Red Center was born approximately ten to twenty thousand years earlier when the world's climate changed and the land dried up. As many plant and animal species died and were blown away by the harsh weather and terrain, the Aborigines adapted and survived.
The white man was an extreme latecomer to Australia when Captain Cook landed at Botany Bay in 1770. It took another hundred years before the first white men managed to cross the Red Center, going from Adelaide in the south to Darwin in the north. In the process of accomplishing this, many white men lost their lives, wandering through the deserts in desperate search of water and relief from the brutal sun.
The overland telegraph line was built in the late nineteenth century from Darwin to Adelaide, and midway across the continent the town of Alice Springs was born to serve as a telegraph station on that line. A thousand miles from the seacoast and five hundred miles from the nearest town, Alice Springs is perhaps the most isolated town in the world. Because of that isolation, in the late 1950s, the United States, in cooperation with the Australian government, established Deep Space Communication Center (DSCC 14) sixty miles outside Alice Springs. The lack of interference from other radio emitters common in the civilized world made it an ideal spot to place the large receivers.
This afternoon in 1995 eight large dishes pointing in various attitudes were spaced evenly across the sand, the sun reflecting off the metal struts and webs of steel that reached up to the sky. Thick loops of cable ran from the base of each to a junction box set in the lee of a large, modern three-story building. In that building all the incoming data that the dishes picked up were fed into a bank of computer screens, one for each dish.
Inside the air-conditioned comfort of the DSCC control building, Major Mark Spurlock, U.S. Air Force, watched his monitors with the bored gaze of one who'd been here much too long. Spurlock's primary task was receiving classified data from the network of spy satellites that the U.S. had blanketing the planet as they passed overhead, encoding and passing on the data to the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland, on the other side of the world.
The job had been exciting the first two months he'd been here-handling top-secret data and working with the codes-but the novelty had quickly been scrubbed away by the heat and stark living conditions. Spurlock was from a small town in Oklahoma, but even that place was lively compared to Alice Springs. He'd started his "short-timers" calendar last month, checking the day off each evening as he got off shift. Booze-readily available at the commissary-was the common cure at the base for the loneliness and isolation, but Spurlock had avoided that trap. He focused on his job, practicing his skill at encoding and decoding, trying to break some of the simpler codes used in the computer. He could often be found late at night, scrunched in front of his terminal, his fingers tentatively tapping out solutions.
He was in the process of realigning one of the dishes to pick up an INTELSAT that was just coming into range over the western horizon when his computer screen went crazy. A jumbled mass of letters and numbers filled the entire display. His attempts to clear were fruitless. He scooted his seat over to an empty console nearby and booted that computer up. Everything worked fine until he accessed Dish 4, the one he had been realigning.
"What's the matter?" Colonel Seymour, the station commander appeared over his shoulder. "Trouble?"
Spurlock worked the keyboard. "I don't know, sir. Could be the main drive. I get the same garbage on both screens when I access dish four."
Seymour checked the clock. "INTEL-SAT 3A is going to transmit in two minutes."
An abnormality-Spurlock was ready to see Seymour's head start spinning in circles. The Air Force didn't assign people to DSCC because they were highly adaptable to a rapidly changing environment. They were assigned because they could do routine and do it well.
As he watched, the figures on the screen began shifting in a hypnotic fashion, the numbers and the letters realigning, drifting from one place to another. He'd never seen anything like it.
"What the hell is going on?" Seymour demanded.
"I don't know, sir."
"Get that damn thing back on line. I'm going to have to file a report if we miss the burst from 3A."
Spurlock frowned as he watched the screen. "I don't think it's the computer, sir." He checked the status board. "Dish two's free for a half hour. I'm going to use it on 3A." He gave the proper commands and dish two powered up and turned, lowering toward the western horizon to catch the satellite.
"Shit," Spurlock muttered as the screen dissolved into the same shifting pattern. "Something's transmitting on very high power to the west. It's overpowering everything else."
"Air or ground transmitter?"
Spurlock played with the controls, moving the dish ever so slightly. "I think it's on the ground and stationary. I go a few degrees up and we lose it. Southwest of here." He checked the status board. "Are there any military operations going on out in the Gibson Desert? Maybe somebody failed to file their freqs with Control and they don't know they're screwing up our receiving."