Aurona, page 3
“Hold on!” the man interrupted, rolling away.
There were several loud pops in rapid succession. Terror pulsing through his veins, Adam cracked his eyes open a slit to see the man lying flat on his back, his ion gun blazing into the shadows. After a loud, electronic screech in the darkness, there was an ominous silence. He watched the old man rise slowly to his feet, hesitate, and then creep inside. His teeth began to chatter. Sweat was now evaporating off his thin body, making him shake uncontrollably in the cold wind from the tunnel. After a moment of indecision, he leapt to his feet, briskly rubbing his arms.
“Grandpa! Where are you grandpa?… Grandpa?”
There was a distant, muffled cough. “Come over and see this, boy!”
He let out a short breath, relieved. He sprinted to his side and knelt down, his eyes taking a moment to adjust to the shadows. His grandfather was bending over a strange-looking, smoldering object fastened low on the wall, the tip of his ion gun gingerly poking at a bunch of smoking gold wires.
Without a word, the boy dropped to his hands and knees, turned, and crawled along the floor into the shadows, tracing another set of gleaming rails to another massive stone sphere! He scrambled to his feet and walked around the back of it, his hand sliding over the surface. This one was way bigger, as big as a truck, and it seemed to be aimed lower, probably to pick off any stragglers. The melted gold wiring gleamed brightly in the darkness.
“They had a giant catapult! You took out the trigger mechanism, Grandpa!” His muffled voice echoed out from the depths. “You zapped the sensor!”
The man peered around the sphere. “Good for you, Adam! Dead on!”
Indeed, a very old and very sophisticated catapult mechanism stood tautly poised, its strange metal alloy still gleaming brightly after eons. “Stand back, boy!” he whispered. “I just want to make sure.” A single, well-aimed blast from his ion gun fused the trigger mechanism for good. He gathered up a few slivers of the alloy and stowed them into a specimen bag to analyze later.
Adam looked up fearfully into his grandfather’s eyes. “W-we woulda’ been squashed, Grandpa!” His teeth chattered. “Like b-bugs!”
“It’s okay,” he reassured. “Well, the show’s over! Let’s go! We gotta make time!”
As they lit their powerful Asron gas torches, the stone’s highly polished surface bounced the thin pencil beams back into their faces like dazzling mini suns. They turned a dial and widened the focus into a flood. Moving quickly, the man slipped out a small, pressurized vial of strange fluid, cranked open its needle valve a bit, and then clipped it firmly onto his utility belt.
The boy watched in fascination. A thin, glowing stream of phosphorescent vapor wafted into the air, solidified, and settled to the floor in a glowing tracery.
“Wow! Way cool, Grandpa! What’s all this shiny stuff for?”
He shrugged. “Just preparing for any eventuality, right? We might have to ditch these heavy torches and come back in the dark. Hey! I kinda like the effect, don’t you?”
The boy nodded emphatically, scuffing some of it around with his boots and watching it smear. “We’ll just follow the glow back up here, right?”
“Right! Let’s go!”
As they entered and the floor began to angle steeply downward, Adam started to slide on the polished surface, losing control. Leaning against the wall, he trained his torch into the depths and squinted down the shaft. Far below, a strangely patterned wall appeared. As they slid closer, picking up speed, he could finally make it out. Bristling ominously at the end of the ramp, great, sharp spikes were sticking out nastily from the surface.
He panicked. “Grandpa! A booby trap! We can’t stop! What do we…?”
“Your grippers, Adam!” He snapped. “Do it!”
“Oh! Right!”
Even though they’d spent months preparing for the trip, the foot grippers were thrown in as a last-minute addition, almost an afterthought. The results were instantaneous: at the flip of a switch on their utility belts, a set of small vacuum pumps hummed and their footgear’s gripper cups pulled tightly to the polished surface. They skidded to a halt, their feet making popping sounds as they approached the wall of death.
Adam’s teeth were chattering. “F-first they t-try to f-flatten us, and then they make a slippery ramp that leads to this?” He played his torch over the glistening needles, and then impulsively reached out to test the spikes’ sharpness with a fingertip.
A big hand clamped over his wrist. “Uh-uh, Adam. Poison! Nasty stuff.”
He drew back in alarm. “W-why? Why are they trying to keep us out?”
Grandpa shrugged. “Secrets, boy. Great secrets.” He motioned silently with his head toward a small opening on the right. “You still game?”
They entered cautiously. A set of meticulously sculpted stairs spiraled downward. Adam slipped off his gloves to run a wondering touch over the curved walls as they descended. His fingertips sensed almost nothing; the white alabaster walls were as smooth as glass and perfectly seamless. After many twists downward, the echoes of their excited breathing began to sound entirely different: more delay, more distant-sounding. They’d reached the bottom.
Hesitantly, they stepped out into a huge, domed vault, their twin torches picking out glittering architectural details on the far wall. What was that? It was an entirely different kind of reflection…. They turned their Asron torches upward.
Gasping, they stared open-mouthed at the distant ceiling. An intricate, heavily embossed fretwork of pure, hammered GOLD covered the entire inner surface of the dome, ending in a magnificent, twenty-foot medallion far over their heads!
Their awestruck gazes locked and then lowered as one to the vast, polished floor. The majestic dome overhead suddenly seemed to pale in comparison to the delicate work of art at their feet.
Glowing softly, spiral galaxies and dustlike groups of stars completely unknown to the Earth had been set into a deep, transparent blue glass background. Hair-thin wires of pure gold had been poured along microscopic grooves, connecting the star systems. Without question, this was obviously the creation of exquisitely sensitive hands and a vastly superior intelligence.
They sharpened the focus of their torches to probe deeply into the three-dimensional universe under them, backing their way up the stairs for a wider view: all around the perimeter of the floor, right up under the surface of the glass, a wide band of intricately embossed, cryptic patterns revealed themselves. Runes!
“H-holy cow, Adam,” the old man stuttered, his throat tightening. “This-this is it! We’re really here!” His mouth worked noiselessly as he translated, reading random descriptions of this lost section of the universe. In a second, he began to hop in a tight circle, his fist punching the air. “Yes! Yes!” He croaked in loud whispers.
Adam blinked at him, wide-eyed. “What is this place?”
Grandpa couldn’t speak; his voice was too full of emotion. Hands shaking, he fell to his knees, rummaging excitedly through the large pockets of his backpack. Finally, he regained his voice.
“All the years,” he whispered. “All the searching! This is it! The Galaxy Room!”
“Wow! The Galaxy Room?”
“You’ll never know how long I’ve been dreaming about this moment, Adam!”
After a few minutes of frantic tinkering, he stood up and sent a tiny balloon aloft with a microcamera attached. It bumped and scudded upward along the curved surface of the dome, tracing every contour of the lavish gold embellishment until it reached the medallion, where it stopped dead center. As he triggered the camera remotely, it buzzed to life, faintly whirring and clicking its myriad lenses into place. Wide angles or zooms, every shot seemed to have an endless array of light filters. There was a short pause, followed by a small beep. Autosequence had stopped.
He walked way out to the center of the vault. Taking dead aim, he popped the balloon with his ion gun. Adam flinched at the mini explosion as it echoed sharply around the perimeter of the room. The camera tumbled through the air.
“Grandpa?” His hands fluttered. “How-how are you…?”
A net was already poised. He caught it deftly and impulsively knelt on the spot to examine the images on the bright viewing screen. Adam watched in wonderment. Out in the vastness of this incredible room, his grandfather appeared as a tiny figure out in the center of a colossal blue universe, floating, lost.
“Excellent!” The single, percussive word hung in the air, repeating over and over. He jumped to his feet and scuffled back toward Adam, waving the viewing screen, exuberant and almost uncontainable. “I-I got ‘em! The keys to open many doors!” In a rush of impulse, he swept up the boy and swung him around and around. Finally dizzy, they both slumped to the floor in a heap. He lifted the small, swirling screen to Adam’s eyes.
The boy tried his best to focus on the confusing, moving images and soon found himself gazing into what appeared to be a deep, endless, nighttime sky. He pulled back with a start. A hologram? Yes, but nothing, absolutely nothing seemed familiar! Not a single star! He studied the image again. All along the edges, running in a band around this fantastic, far-flung capsule of stars and space was a border of golden runic symbols describing the scene in detail.
Giggling at his elbow, Grandpa flipped a lever. “Now watch this,” he gushed. He was excited, a boy again. A filter suddenly highlighted something else, something delicate, shiny and weblike: Thin, brightly glowing threads jumped out of the glasslike blue, connecting specific galaxies into … a Star Map! Adam was stunned.
“Wow! Where’d all those lines come from?” He looked up into Grandpa’s face, his forehead wrinkling. Rising slowly to his feet, he handed the camera back, walked out to the center of the floor, and dropped to his knees to examine it more closely. What in the world? Absolutely nothing he’d seen in the viewpiece was visible now! Not one thread! He lay flat on his stomach and put his eye right up against the surface of the cold, transparent glass, peering into it deeply, his sensitive child’s fingertips running over the surface.
What was that? He pulled back abruptly, his finger on the exact spot. Heat? Yes, heat! With growing excitement, he traced out an invisible line between two golden starbursts, following the warmth. Infrared! The camera’s filters and special heat-sensitive films had picked out the hidden, infrared tracery.
The old man’s face beamed as he watched his grandson running back with a grin plastered on his face. The boy had solved the complicated puzzle and was rightly proud. As Adam hugged him tightly around his waist, he pivoted awkwardly on his heels to point at the staircase behind them. “We gotta hurry, now, boy. I wish I’d seen this before we came in. I just read something very troubling in the runes, something we didn’t count on. Go over there and push down on those last three steps. Take a second and study them closely. It’s very important.”
He let go and ran to the staircase, dropping to his knees and skidding the last few feet on the slippery glass floor. Wow! Grandpa was right, there seemed to be tiny gaps along the bottoms of the last three stairs! He pushed down hard on one of them and it moved a fraction of an inch. Maybe it could be…. He looked up, putting the scenario together. “A-another Hetex, Grandpa?”
“You got it, boy! Another trigger! We activated the infrared in the Star Map when we came into the room, and now….”
As Adam caught his implied meaning, a disturbing thought began to rumble through his mind: if this infrared map had lain dormant for eons, waiting for someone to enter the room, now maybe some kind of irreversible sequence had begun? As he stared into the distance, lost in thought, he felt a presence beside him. Grandpa’s big hand tugged his reluctant chin upward to gaze intently into his eyes.
“No!” Adam’s face fell. “Please say no! All this will be gone? Forever?”
“Yes,” the man nodded firmly, with finality. “In the wrong hands, the knowledge contained in this Star Map could upset the balance of power in the universe.”
“Aaargh!” He closed his eyes, his hands covering his ears. “No! Don’t tell me anymore, Grandpa! It-it’s all so beautiful! All this amazing work! You can’t be serious!” Suddenly, he felt alone again. There was a distant popping sound.
“Grandpa?”
The man was intently peeling off heavy sheets of gold with his ion gun. “I may be scared, boy, but I’m not stupid! Quick! Take as much as you can carry!” He was rolling up some heavy sheets on the floor and stuffing them into his backpack. “With a few antigrav pods, I know I can carry a bit over a thousand pounds. You should be able to carry about three-fifty! At today’s prices, that’s a king’s ransom!”
It didn’t take much coaxing. The boy rolled and stuffed madly, wondering how much ‘a king’s ransom’ was worth. Science he knew. Fairy tales were, well, just fairy tales.
Somewhere, way off in the distance, a small chime sounded, growing rapidly in volume until it became a painful, pulsing cacophony. A thin, angry red line suddenly appeared around the perimeter of the floor!
Adam let out a gasp: his footgear was smoldering! As a hiss of smoke erupted, he danced backward, his eyes wordlessly imploring his grandfather’s face.
“Yes, Adam! Now we run!” As a hellish blast rose, he bellowed louder. “Go for it!” They ditched their heavy Asron gas torches and bolted up the spiral staircase, following the bright, phosphorescent trail.
As they reached the ramp and began to pick up speed with their footgrippers, a muffled roar and powerful blast of hot wind propelled them up the slope. Adam felt his feet leaving the ground and looked down. They were! Like a windmill, they were churning emptily in the air! “Grandpa!” he screamed. “What are you…?”
The big man shouted out instructions as he lifted him high, but the boy couldn’t hear him over the roar. He finally caught the tail end as they approached daylight.
“And when you hit the ground,” he concluded, “roll!”
Without another word, they heaved their knapsacks out into the jungle and dove headlong after them. Side by side they splashed down into a river of mud. The earth was trembling violently as they slipped and scrambled to their feet, pulling mightily on the straps of their weighty knapsacks. Their hearts in their mouths, they spun around in time to see the huge wall buckling, tipping backward into a gaping maw! With a sudden rush, a great wall of water hit their legs and sent them scrambling once again. The stream was diverting its course; in fact, the whole terrain was beginning to tilt alarmingly, with torrents of muddy water beginning to cascade down into the smoking abyss. Speechless, Adam stood riveted, the whites of his eyes rolling. Grandpa pushed him, bellowing.
“Bad news!” he cried. “Steam! Move it!”
Splashing and slipping frantically up the muddy slope, they half-ran, half-swam to the antigrav sled and dove aboard. Grandpa threw up the shields, hit emergency power, and catapulted the sled off the ground at full throttle. They screamed through the air as a cataclysmic explosion rocked the jungle.
The Galaxy Room was no more. Far beneath them, a great circle slumped and disappeared into a stupendous sinkhole. As the swollen river poured over the edge of the abyss, a mammoth, roiling cloud of steam churned upward into the stratosphere. The molten mass tunneled down through the Earth’s crust, the crucible’s heat mixing untold tons of melted gold, alabaster, and glass with the magma of the depths. On the grand scale, a mere speck of debris was sliding into a bottomless pit.
The volcano had a secret, and they were the only two people on Earth who knew about it. Far more importantly, they had the Star Map in their possession: keys to a whole new chapter in human existence.
Swooping low, they circled the steaming lake for a while, flying free in their shielded bubble, co-conspirators in one of the greatest adventures of their lives. Of course, Grandpa had seen far worse in his youth and began recounting it all now. Adam grinned and rolled his eyes as his endless stories began anew, stories of the years as a young Planet Hopper, stories of the apprenticeship as a deep-space astronomer on the far side of Mars Base. His grandpa had seen worlds colliding, stars exploding, and whole species of alien life forms exterminated on distant planets.
But somehow, deep inside, the boy knew that someday he’d see far more.
Chapter 2: SEEDS
A week passed. As early afternoon sunlight poured through an open window behind his chair, Adam sat enraptured with his grandfather’s company. It was just plain fun experiencing him in his natural element, delivering his colorful illustrations. Animated, alive and enthusiastic, he lit up obscure, hard-to-understand concepts with easy word pictures and storyboard scenarios and painted difficult and abstract problems with the brushes and pigments of familiarity.
Now, take a seed, Adam,” he mused, raising his brows. “It’s an easy concept to understand. If you sow a single seed it’ll produce a handful of seeds, right? But then after that handful there’ll be bushels of seeds to produce an unimaginable harvest.
“Uh-huh.”
“Right. Okay now, wait….” He fished around in his vest pocket a moment and then ever so carefully drew something out. Something tiny. Adam squinted at it, reaching out to pull his big mitt closer. The thick fingers uncurled to reveal a bright, miniscule dot, a mere wedge of gold the size of a fingernail paring. As brilliant blue-green eyes bored into him, the boy’s face lit up with sudden understanding.
He glanced up quickly. “A seed?”
The old man chuckled, nodding in satisfaction. “You got it, kiddo. Exactly an eighth of an ounce, weighed it myself this morning.” He rolled the glinting speck around in his palm, making it flash brightly in the sunlight. “Now imagine this: back in the olden days when I was your age, the price for a whole ounce or eight of these little seeds averaged about two thousand dollars.”
Adam whistled in appreciation and eagerly stuck out his hand. Grandpa handed the chip to him. He poked it around in his palm a moment, contemplating. “So eight of these little guys used to go for two thousand? What about today? How much are they asking for these chips right now?”
