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Illustration by Nick Jainschigg
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Some sleeping dogs have friends…
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Chad Gutierrez latched the heels down on his skis. The first couple of runs had been everything he’d hoped for: untracked powder, just enough trees to make it interesting (and to stabilize the slope), and stunning views of the high country.
He now wanted to try a different area, so he’d had Charlie Jones, the chopper pilot, drop him off farther down the ridge.
He stood in snow, among which krummholz and the occasional gnarled bristlecone pine poked out, and looked down a steep open slope. Chad regarded it with trepidation: it looked both steeper and less stable than it had from the helicopter, exactly the sort of place where avalanches were likely. There was no avalanche control in the backcountry, as the boilerplate for the heli-skiing operation reminded customers.
Well. He’d try to sneak down the right side, avoiding the middle of the slope. He went through the last checkout of his equipment: avalanche radiobeacon (which doubled as the locator for his pick-up point) turned on; helmet cam on and running; backup video also on and running . . . all set. Then Chad checked the fastening on his helmet strap one last time, flexed his legs experimentally, and dropped onto the slope.
And immediately knew he was in trouble, as the snow under him began to slide with his weight. Chad promptly turned left, trying to get away from the avalanche he’d triggered, but the snow continued to fail as soon as his weight came on it. He ended up frantically skiing diagonally across the slope to stay ahead of the avalanche that formed as soon as he touched the snow. He felt a moment of relief as he reached the ridgecrest that defined the left edge of the slope—and then felt himself fall as the cornice he’d unknowingly topped collapsed under him, dropping him on the other side of the ridge. Chad in a panic threw himself forward, leaning out over his skis, trying to get beyond the collapse to the slope below—and hoping desperately there was snow on that slope.
There was. He hit hard, but managed to stay on his skis, feeling the edges dig in as he turned his impromptu jump into a traverse across the steep slope where he’d landed. Finally he angled his skis uphill to stop.
His heart was thundering and his breath gasping. Much closer call than I like, Chad thought. Avalanche was every backcountry snow buff’s nightmare—either swept away to be dashed to pieces, or else entombed in unyielding snow to suffocate. And there’s no way Charlie would get back in time for a rescue before he perished miserably. Chad laughed nervously in reaction. If he’d had Charlie taking a video from the chopper he could’ve sold that sequence as an extreme-skiing movie. Now his knees were trembling to the point he had trouble keeping his balance. Get hold of yourself, he admonished himself. If I fall again here I am done for! He wished he could sit down for a minute, but there was no way—not standing sideways on skis on a steep snow slope. Chad forced himself to take deep breaths, trying to will calmness. Maybe it was working. . . .
He was now committed to descending this canyon. He looked below: craggy, with cliffs directly below him, it was a lot rockier overall than where he’d intended to go. South-facing slope . . . it’s more melted out. But as he looked, he saw a possible route off to the left. It was serious double-diamond stuff, a narrow and extremely steep slot between rocky crags. Not a lot of margin, there. He would have to drop straight through the slot, then quickly go into a turn to kill speed as the slope opened out below, trying to beware of rocks all the while. You could break your neck like this. . . .
Not the right attitude. Concentrate! You can do this. He skied over to the left, lined up, and started down, kicking himself off with a sharp turn to the right.
The acceleration was ferocious. Chad tried to ignore his rapidly increasing speed, concentrating on keeping his skis lined up on the meager strip of snow ahead of him. It seemed to take forever to widen out into a slope. At that point Chad gingerly began a turn to the right, leaning forward slightly onto the tip of his left ski. It was working—he felt himself start to slow—but then something grabbed that ski. The sudden deceleration spun him around and he felt himself go over backwards, sliding, tumbling, rolling down the slope. He felt one ski pop off as the breakaway binding functioned just as it was supposed to; then he felt the other one pop off, too. Chad threw his body around frantically, trying to get his feet pointed downhill, trying to face the slope so he could dig his toes in, thinking of the sharp talus he’d seen below. He had to stop. Somehow he still held one ski pole. He grabbed it behind its basket with his other hand and pushed the tip down into the snow, like an old stick plow. It left a deep groove in the snow behind as his momentum dragged it along, but it slowed him down.
Finally, he stopped. Shaken, Chad lay in the snow for a minute, mentally checking for injuries before he tried to move. He was cold, too—his parka had scraped up snow like a bulldozer as he’d slid, but no doubt had helped him slow down as it did so. He blinked experimentally—things seemed preternaturally vivid for a minute, the way they do if you’ve had your eyes closed and open them up suddenly—but he didn’t seem to have any more serious visual effects. Probably no concussion, then.
At length Chad stood up gingerly. He unzipped the parka and shook out the snow, and looked back up the slope. Thank God there’d been a soft powder layer that he could dig into. He never could have stopped on glaze.
He could also see his skis and missing pole—above him. Way above him. At least the ski brakes had worked—the skis hadn’t sailed off to the bottom of the canyon—but now he had to climb back up to retrieve them. Chad sighed and started trudging back up, kicking out steps in the snow with the clumsy ski boots, using the one pole for a walking stick. Once back on his skis, standing sideways, Chad considered his route.
It looked easier from here, which was good, especially after that fall. More gentle slopes, well covered with snow and spattered with a few piñons, beckoned off to his right. He could traverse that way and eventually drop into the canyon. At which point he’d have to go all the way down out the canyon mouth, so Charlie’d have room to set down the chopper. Hopefully he could ski at least part of the way out.
First traversing laterally, Chad then turned, feeling the edges bite the snow after the initial acceleration. He dodged a rock, nearly hidden by the snow; then turned back to the right, making graceful sweeping curves down the mountain. He passed a tree, ready for the soft shaded snow underneath that can grab a ski when you least expect it. He fell into a reverie, the sheer kinesthetics of motion—and maybe something else too—pushing away all thought.
At length Chad vaguely noted he was skiing by mining scars: open adits like black unblinking eyes, old trails snow-highlighted on the surrounding slopes; spoils dumps, heaped with snow, dark rock sticking out in patches; even a few tumbledown buildings, now nearly shapeless masses of ragged stone adorned with a few sticks of gray timber. He found that he was following a trail, mostly choked with stones, and that he was moving his skis reflexively to dodge those stones. (His heels were unlatched again so he could stride as the trail flattened out. He didn’t remember doing that.)
Chad skied up in front of a low tumbledown adit that opened directly onto the trail. A crumbled pile of gleaming rocks lay next to the trail. The metallic yellow glint of the stones caught his eye . . . he picked one up absently, barely even noticing he did so, and put it in his parka pocket. Then he skied on. A distant part of his mind wondered at the haze that surrounded his actions.
Chad Gutierrez found himself walking along a canyon, skis slung over one shoulder, his ski boots unlatched to make strides easier, ski poles clutched together in his other hand as a makeshift walking stick. Snow had dwindled to discontinuous patches, lurking only in shaded areas. Up ahead the canyon opened out of the range front.
At first he didn’t wonder why he was walking. He just was.
And then Chad realized he couldn’t remember how he got here. He was on a ski trip—he had been skiing. The memory of the helicopter came back; then memories of fleeing the avalanche, and his hard fall. Then . . . nothing. Nothing. But here he was. . . .
Chad kept walking and finally emerged from the mountain front, his mind whirling. The drainage he’d been following, freed of the confines of the canyon, spread out abruptly into the broad desert valley below the Mule Deer Mountains. The sudden openness starkly contrasted with the narrow canyon he’d just left. Other mountains, low and blued by distance, stood silhouetted against the sky far across the valley.
This was not where he was supposed to rendezvous with the chopper, either. He paused for a second, then realized that the locator beacon would tell Charlie where he was in any case. That was the point, after all—sometimes in backcountry skiing you didn’t come out where you’d meant to.
Speaking of which . . . he heard a familiar buzz crescendoing in the sky. Charlie flew directly over him, waggling the craft in acknowledgment, and slowed down abruptly to a near hover. It was a relief to see the chopper setting down on the flats a couple of hundred meters ahead. Chad slogged that way as fast as he could manage. Ski boots weren’t meant for hiking.
The chopper squatted on the ground like an overgrown grasshopper, its big viewing bubble bulging low out front as if to bite the ground below. Chad dodged exaggeratedly under the lazily swishing blades and latched his gear into the rack below the cabin. Then he clambered up through the passenger’s door and buckled himself into the seat.
“How’d ya get way over here?” Charlie asked.
“Dodged an avalanche and ended up in the next canyon over after a cornice collapsed under me. So I had to come out here.” Even though I can’t remember doing so, Chad thought to himself.
“You’re entitled to another trip.”
Chad shook his head. “That last time kind of freaked me out. Dodging an avalanche is bad enough. Then I took a bad fall, too. Kind of shook me up. I’m pretty tired too . . . no point in tempting fate.” And I still have that weird hazy feeling . . . do I have a concussion?
“No problem,” Charlie said. “Come back tomorrow.” He shifted something on the controls, and the low thrum of the engine rose to a shrill whine, while the blades sped up from a lazy swish-swish-swish to a deafening thwack-thwack-thwack. The ground dropped away below them as though they were riding an express elevator. Chad, looking out through the bubble, felt an irritating twinge of vertigo. The occasional jolt from atmospheric turbulence didn’t help, either. He found himself gripping the arms of the seat.
“You heard about Gold City? The lost mining camp?” Charlie asked as he tilted the craft toward Tonopah.
Chad shook his head.
“S’posed to be someplace in the Mule Deers. There’s stories about people coming out of the mountains with jewelry rock in their pockets, but they couldn’t tell where they’d gotten it, didn’t even remember getting it.”
“Jewelry rock?” Chad asked.
“Rock that’s mostly gold. The highest of high-grade ore. You don’t find it laying around anymore!”
“I’d guess not. Pretty picked over, now, huh?”
It was hard to hear over the racket, and Chad had only half his mind on the conversation. But he was trying to be polite.
“Yeah,” Charlie answered. “Only place you find it now is underground, in a mine. Even as late as a hunderd years ago, during the Depression, there’d be tales. They said over in Tonopah that people would occasionally show up with these chunks of gold rocks, with no memory where they’d come from.”
“Didn’t people go out to look?” Chad asked.
“Course they did. That’s what’s funny, ’cause no one ever found the source. And what was even funnier is that they said the people who’d actually come out with the jewelry rock would never go back to look. It’s like it just didn’t cross their minds. Since then the whole area’s been isolated in the Bombing and Gunnery Range. No one’s been wandering around here for nigh on a century. We didn’t even get the skiing concession till last summer.”
“Yeah,” Chad said. “I saw your ad on-line, and I couldn’t resist. Right in my backyard!”
“Glad you did. Not too many jobs for chopper pilots these days, with the Air Force downsizing,” Charlie said.
“Well, at least you’ll get your chance to go prospecting.”
“That’s for sure. And I’m going to be out in the Mule Deers every chance I get!”
Chad pointed at the desert floor, checkerboarded with polygons of various colors. “That’s my gold. I work for SolarFuels. The company that grows gengineered algae for fuel.”
“So that’s how you can afford this trip, huh?”
Chad grinned ruefully. “Don’t remind me! I should be working. But you can only spend so many hours at work. And besides. To get the chance to ski, where no one had ever skied before . . . that’s worth something. It’s like you said about jewelry rock. You just don’t find it anymore.”
Charlie laughed briefly.
Chad noticed something heavy in his parka pocket. “What’s this?” he wondered aloud. Absently, he pulled out the piece of jewelry rock.
“Where did you get that?” Charlie demanded.
Chad, astonished, looked at the gleaming rock in his hand. “I . . . I don’t remember!”
The rest of the trip was very quiet, even with the roar of the rotors.
Chad had hardly left when Charlie called the fuel truck over.
“Heading out again, Charlie?” the fuel operator asked. “I thought you were done for the day.” He topped off the tank and set the nozzle back into its cradle on the truck.
Charlie was electronically filing a hasty flight plan.
“Thar’s gold in them thar hills!” he replied cheerfully, if a bit thoughtlessly.
As soon as the truck was clear Charlie took off and made a beeline. He remembered exactly where he’d picked up Chad, and figured that the gold outcrop had to be somewhere in that canyon. On skis, Chad couldn’t have done anything but follow the drainage downhill. So he might even be able to find it this afternoon.
Charlie pushed his craft for all it was worth, much faster than he would have traveled with a client, and heedless of fuel consumption. It was almost like combat flying, right on the edge, with that sense of urgency driving you to fly to the limits of your ability. Except that no one was actually attacking him.
He buzzed the pickup point to get his bearings, and then headed up the canyon where Chad had to have walked out, flying as low as he dared. Charlie had to gain altitude where the canyon narrowed, but then dropped down again as it widened out. A ghost town lay there, its gray weather-beaten buildings casting the exaggerated shadows of late afternoon. Snow still lingered in the shady parts and on the north sides of buildings, but much of the area was open and dry. Gold City! Charlie thought. He vaguely wondered how such a well-preserved town could have gone unnoticed for so long, but it didn’t seem important. More important was that he could find no place nearly big enough to set down the chopper. He’d have to set down outside the range front and hike in.
Worse, he could see lots of old dumps and adits on the hills around—which one held the jewelry rock? Well, clearly Chad would have been low down, on his skis. So he should concentrate along the bottom of the drainage. Maybe he could see bootprints or ski tracks in some of the residual patches. Trying to see better, Charlie dropped the chopper down just above the old town, moving forward slowly with intermittent hovers as he strove to locate Chad’s trail. The rotors raised dust off the dry parts, finely pulverized rock puffing up here and there from previously sunlit spots. He smelled the pungent aromas of dust and sagebrush as rotor wash reflected off the ground below and blew back into the cabin. . . .
Suddenly Charlie noticed he was flying the helicopter. In the mountains. Low in the mountains. He throttled up abruptly, twisting away from the canyon side that loomed before him. The chopper, shuddering, slewed sideways on the verge of a stall. Why was he here? He was at a loss. Then a snatch of old song bubbled up:
In a cavern, in a canyon
Excavatin’ fer a mine . . .
Charlie was singing tunelessly, aimlessly, while the chopper teetered on the edge of control. To get the gold. Yes, the gold! That was it!
Gold! Gold! Gold! Gold!
Bright and yellow, hard and cold!
Got to go back and get the gold. The chopper wheeled around, back toward the range front, barely under control. He had to get down and get the gold.
Charlie never noticed he was flying the chopper straight into the ground.
Chad turned the key in the door (How quaint! he thought, a real metal key!) and stepped into the room. He was staying at the old Silver Queen in downtown Tonopah, which for well over a century had been the highest building between Reno and Las Vegas. Ornate fire escapes still decorated the windows. In fact, the whole hotel, dating from before the First World War, affected a self-conscious Edwardian splendor.
Chad sat on the overstuffed bed, hardly noticing his surroundings. He clicked on the TV absently, out of reflex. The blank in his memory was like an aching tooth: he kept probing at it, trying to see if it had changed. And of course it hadn’t. He pulled the gaudy stone out of his pocket for the umpteenth time, glaring at it as if it were a prisoner under interrogation.
The TV abruptly intruded into his reverie. An announcer was declaiming, “No further word on the helicopter crash in the Mule Deer Mountains. The pilot’s name is being withheld pending notification of next of kin. We have unconfirmed reports that the Air Force is investigating the crash, but so far they have refused comment. We will post updates online as new information becomes available.”
On watching the TV, Chad had a sudden thought. He remembered he’d been carrying those automatic video recorders, partly for safety and partly for a memento. Why didn’t I think of that sooner? It was jarring . . . maybe even now there was a haze over his mind.
It was a minute’s work to plug the helmet cam into the TV. He paged forward, watched his brush with death in the avalanche and then his hard fall as he headed into the other canyon. Then, what . . . ? He watched as he descended farther into the canyon, and then, thunderstruck, saw himself pick up the piece of jewelry rock out of a pile broken off an obvious gold-bearing vein. Chad then watched himself skiing down through a ghost town that looked like an archeological time-warp, with artifacts like museum exhibits. An old ore car still sat on a set of rusty tracks coming out of an adit, like a Disney prop. A store front had windows intact, dusty goods still dimly visible through the glass. A hammer rested on an anvil in what was obviously a smithy, as though the blacksmith had just stepped away for a minute. A partly mended horseshoe even lay on the anvil.
The movie was even more disturbing because it triggered no memories at all.
Chad had another thought. He’d printed out a set of detailed topographic maps of the Mule Deers where he’d figured he might be skiing. He dug them out and looked at them, retracing his route . . . it wasn’t hard to identify the canyon he must have come out of. Of course . . . topo maps had been made from aerial photographs for over a century, and evidently mechanical means recorded faithfully. It was only human memory that was fallible.
A knock on the door interrupted his investigations. Chad looked up, puzzled. He wasn’t expecting anybody. He clicked the remote on the TV to the securitycam over the door; at least the hotel didn’t still have Edwardian surveillance technology. An unkempt man, maybe in his mid twenties, stood at his door, tattoos appearing abundantly around and through his torn and dirty shirt. The way he held himself, arms crossed, glaring at the door . . . “tough young punk” was the characterization that occurred, unbidden, to Chad. He clicked to another view and saw two or three other guys loitering in the hall, looking much like the first. Evidently they were trying to stay out of the line of sight from his door. Presumably they weren’t aware that there was more than one securitycam.
He called the front desk, but there was no answer. He was about to call the police when he heard scratching noises at the doorknob. They were trying to pick that old mechanical lock.
Chad set the phone down. I’ve got to do something now, he thought. Tackling a bunch of toughs in his hotel room seemed like a really bad idea. He strode over to the window and looked out. Sure enough, that ornate fire escape came right to his window. A steel mesh catwalk with a thin railing went from window to window. It linked to the catwalk on the next floor down by a metal stair so steep it might as well be a ladder.
Deciding quickly, he stuck the video card in a pocket and made sure he had his car keys. And his cell phone. The window was stiff, probably not having been opened since the previous summer. To Chad, acutely aware of that scratching at the doorway, raising it seemed to take forever as he struggled with the recalcitrant frame. At least the intruders seemed to be having trouble with the lock—mechanical lock picking was probably another quaint skill these days, Chad realized. He snorted. Criminal skills must be as prone to obsolescence as any other line of work. Finally stepping out of the window onto the catwalk, Chad got reminded of the piece of jewelry rock as it swung heavily in his coat. He thought wryly that it would have easily paid for his heli-skiing trip. Still, he could do without the hassle it seemed to have brought him. All he could figure was that somehow those thugs outside had learned about his gold discovery.
He climbed down the ladder to the floor below, trying to be as quiet as possible. It was hard because the metal creaked and popped as it flexed with his weight. Then, on the second floor, the last ladder, which went to the parking lot in back of the hotel, was raised up. Of course—it wouldn’t do to have the fire exit routinely accessible from the ground level. It would just give burglars and other nefarious types easy access to the hotel rooms. Like the ones in there now, for example.
The latch that released the ladder was obvious, but when Chad tried to lower it gently, it got away from him and dropped with a tremendous crash. As he scrambled down it, he saw someone looking down at him from the window of his room. At that point Chad jumped down the rest of the way. Should he now go back into the hotel’s main entrance? But there’d been no one at the front desk. As he dithered momentarily, the decision was made for him. A man appeared on each side of the building, coming toward him. They appeared to have been among those waiting in the hall.
“Hey, wait up!” one said, breaking into a run. Chad didn’t acknowledge the hail but dove for his car. Many people, he remembered, had gotten mugged through being polite. Social graces could get you in trouble.
Chad had made the right decision. One of the men pulled out a big wrench from underneath his tattered denim coat as Chad landed in the front seat and slammed the front door. The engine started immediately. He engaged the gears and popped the clutch to back up, forcing the fellow running up with the wrench to jump out of the way. Chad then cut the wheel sharply coming out of the parking space. He headed for the exit, gunning the motor as he passed the other assailant. That punk also had something out in his hand, and as he jumped out of the way, Chad heard a thunk on the roof. At least it wasn’t my head, he thought.
Chad paused at the driveway entrance, where Highway 95 passed through town. Now where? Then he saw a car coming up rapidly behind him out of the parking lot and once again had to react rather than decide. That car was an ancient Detroit model, probably rear-wheel drive, and probably weighing a ton more than Chad’s 4x4. It didn’t appear to plan on stopping. Chad lurched out of the driveway into the street, squealing into a right turn. He cut off an oncoming car, which shifted to the left lane quickly, its horn blaring. The old Detroit car followed Chad’s, its tires also squealing.
Chad accelerated suddenly and pulled into the left lane, ahead of the car he’d forced over. He kept accelerating, hoping if he drove crazily enough, he’d get pulled over by a cop. Or the punks chasing him would.
No such luck. He was swiftly approaching the edge of town—even with SolarFuels’ new contribution to the local economy, Tonopah was not very big.
Chad considered where to go. On the highway, his 4x4 would be no match for the muscle car behind him. Even if a cop was on his way right now, there was no guarantee he’d arrive in time.
Deciding quickly, Chad twisted the 4WD knob on the dash to engage the front wheels, and then turned sharply left onto the new graded road toward Alkali Lake. They’d been installing some new solar ponds that way, and it would probably be easier to lose his pursuers on the dirt. He had a better vehicle for that sort of road than they did. As he straightened out, he saw a plume of dust rise up behind the car. Part of his mind marveled at how snow could cap the high mountains while the valleys remain so dry.
The car behind had also turned, after a spectacular skid—and after being nearly broadsided by a vehicle in the oncoming lane. Chad smiled grimly. Well, at this point he’d hardly thought it was just coincidence they were taking the same road as he was.
They were coming up fast, too, as he glimpsed through occasional gaps in the dust. The road was too smooth to slow them down as he’d hoped.
The intermittent billows of dust behind gave Chad a new idea, though. Not far ahead were the just-built ponds, their surrounding embankments freshly sculpted out of newly bulldozed dirt. Dirt as fine as talcum powder. At the last minute Chad braked and turned onto the embankment. His pursuers missed the turn, skidding into a 360 on the loose gravel, but they managed not to roll their vehicle. And not to land in the ditch alongside the road. They started back toward where he’d turned.
Well, so much for Plan A. Now for Plan B. Chad gunned his motor, bouncing wildly over the uneven surface atop the new embankment. Dust poured up behind in opaque clouds. Up ahead the embankment bent at right angles as it turned to enclose the pond. Chad waited till the last possible moment, then braked abruptly and steered hard right to follow that bend. Blinded by his dust—and following too closely—his pursuers didn’t see the maneuver till too late. In turning they merely managed to get sideways so that they skidded down the embankment. Although they didn’t roll, their vehicle was now stuck, its tires sunk so far into the soft dirt that the undercarriage rested directly on the ground. Chad could see new plumes of dust as they revved, spinning the rear wheels uselessly.
Chad followed the embankment around back to the main graded road at a more sensible pace. Once a prudent distance away, he called the sheriff’s office on his cell to report the “accident.” He related how he’d been pursued and therefore did not stop and render aid. And then, before they could order him to come in and file a full report, he clicked off the cell.
Getting back to US 95 had been anticlimactic. Chad had picked up the main highway again out of Goldfield, and had decided to head back to Vegas that night. No way would he go back to Tonopah, not after what had happened at the hotel. He’d call the sheriff’s office back tomorrow and file a full report.
Chad yawned and shook his head, covering his mouth out of habit while holding the wheel with his other hand. It had been a long day. And a weird day—his free hand hefted that lump in his coat pocket. Jewelry rock, Charlie’d called it—and he could no more remember picking it up—he could no more remember that whole canyon—than he could the Battle of Shiloh. Something didn’t fit, though—he sensed an anomaly somewhere that he couldn’t make his tired mind bring out in the open. Something about the mine workings . . .
At length he noted a car coming up fast behind him. It was a dark late model sedan—Chad checked his speed involuntarily. This far out of town, cars were on manual control even on the Federal highway, and it looked like the sort of car the Highway Patrol would drive. And although the vehicle had no bubblelights, it could be unmarked. He was holding the speed limit, though. The car pulled up, tailgating him, and flashed its headlights.
Normally Chad wouldn’t have given the incident a second thought, figuring it was just another idiot with a death wish on the Tonopah Highway. He was suspicious now, though. He’d been pursued once today, and this seemed a bit too much of a coincidence. And it couldn’t be the sheriff—if the sheriff were that eager to talk to him he’d’ve been driving an official car with bubblelights and a siren. Chad therefore ignored the flashing lights, waiting until a primitive road came in from the right. Then he blinked and pulled over onto the shoulder, slowing down as he did so.
The dark sedan swept around, nearly sideswiping his car. He tried to look in the passenger compartment as it passed, but despite the lengthening shadows all the windows were darkened. He wasn’t really surprised when the vehicle then cut in front of him abruptly and braked, bright lights flaring red in front of him. Already prepared for some such action, he’d continued to decelerate as the sedan had passed. Now he turned hard right onto the little dirt track and gunned the engine as much as he dared. His vehicle jounced wildly as it accelerated up the ruts.
Chad, glancing in the rearview, saw the sedan stopped completely on the highway. He pushed the accelerator down even more. His vehicle responded with a bounce that would have thrown him into the ceiling had he not been wearing a seat belt. He winced as a rock slammed into the undercarriage with a heavy thunk. Well, that’s what skid plates are for. Ahead, the road was barely more than a trail, ill-defined ruts winding among the desert rocks, the occasional Joshua tree looming up like a sentinel. At least he could see ahead. He steered tightly, trying to avoid the worst of the rocks—and to miss the occasional yucca that loomed up, its spines like spears aimed at his tires.
He glanced at the rearview again. The sedan had backed up, and was now nosing slowly off the highway onto the track. Chad grinned wolfishly to himself. Good luck, guys, with a rig like that! Then he had to slow down to dodge around a rock in the middle of the track.
Another glance at the rearview showed that the sedan had managed to advance ten meters or so down the track, but now it didn’t seem to be moving. Chad hoped it had gotten hung up on the rocks. Even if not, they couldn’t possibly catch up to him. He looked to the path in front of him, seeing a stretch relatively clear of rocks. He gunned the motor even more, trying to build up his lead. He again grinned to himself, Always said I’d take on any muscle car if I could choose the track!
Now the rearview showed both the sedan’s front doors open, and two figures in dark clothing had emerged. It appeared, as much as he could tell from the bouncing, that each was carrying something—a handgun?—in one hand. They were guns: he saw one figure lean diagonally across the hood to take a shooting stance, his hands cupped around his weapon, while the other, standing in front of the grill, leaned back on the front of the car, steadying his gun in both hands.
Chad was suddenly aware of a couple of red dots dancing across the paneling and dashboard. Laser sights! He slewed the steering wheel back and forth, heedless of the alarming clunks from underneath the car. Even for pros, hitting anything with a handgun at this distance would be a matter of luck more than skill. He would do his damnedest to stack that luck in his favor. Still jouncing madly, he then swung around a Joshua tree and up a shallow draw on the right. In this open desert, he could drive most anywhere, as long as he dodged the yucca and Joshua trees, and the occasional big rock.
The red dots vanished as a low ridge now cut the line of sight back to the sedan. Chad kept going, though. He didn’t really think the suits would try to pursue on foot, but putting more distance between them and himself seemed like a good idea nonetheless. Who are these guys? he wondered. They didn’t seem like the claim-jumping punks. Those didn’t wear suits, for one thing.
After half an hour or so, he was starting to relax slightly. He’d worked his way back to the original track, and was continuing on generally southerly. When he could, he supposed, he should angle back and pick up US 95 again. Something bright caught the corner of his eye, back to the northeast. He looked back and saw the distant snowy peaks of the Mule Deers catching the last rays of the setting sun. And I was up there earlier today! Some days are too crazy to believe. . . .
Lights moving lower down, against the shadowed base of the mountains, then attracted his attention. Lights blinking, moving rapidly—it was an aircraft, he saw. A helicopter, to be exact. It was closer than he’d thought at first—in fact, it looked to be somewhere along US 95.
And furthermore, it seemed to be coming this way. . . . On a sudden thought he turned off the car. It’s surprising how being chased can make you paranoid. . . .
His vehicle had an autolocator tied into the GPS, of course. That was now a legal requirement for operation on a public street. The autoroads inside major cities used it for the automatic control. But it was common knowledge that it also provided a way to track down a particular vehicle.
At least in the twilight his vehicle would be very difficult to spot. As long as a radio beacon wasn’t shouting its position out, the car was just another dark lump indistinguishable from a rocky outcrop or a Joshua tree. And the autolocator didn’t function when the car was turned off. At least it wasn’t one of the new models that didn’t even run off the battery, but off a permanent radioisotope generator instead.
Chad crouched down and watched the chopper pass, its lights flashing, no more than a couple of kilometers away. Perhaps he was being silly—but after all the experiences today, he wasn’t going to assume that a chopper just happened by.
What in the hell was going on? A chopper certainly was beyond the means of any greedy claim jumpers. That was the government for sure, most likely the military. And it meant that getting to his destination—not to mention the destination itself—was now in serious doubt.
Chad considered. He could probably get down almost to Vegas on back roads, if he disabled the autolocator. And if he traveled by moonlight. But then, so what? Clearly they (whoever “they” were) would have his house under surveillance. And if he went to a motel instead, they’d track that almost as quickly.
Where to, then? What he needed was media attention; lots of media attention, so if he vanished into a news blackout someone might notice. So, who . . . ? He considered. What about that reporter who’d interviewed him last month? Linda. Linda McPherson. She’d done a whole piece on the solar fuels installations. She lived in Pahrump, too. That would be a lot easier to sneak into than Vegas, and Chad thought he probably could find her place again.
More than that, though—don’t just rely on a reporter. Get to a commercial interlink and post the story himself. To as many places as possible. There were resort-casinos with hotspots in Pahrump, too. He would swing by one of them before trying Linda’s.
Now he had a plan. The next step, though, was to disable the autolocator before turning the car on again. He dug out the flashlight he carried in the glove box and clicked it on. Nothing happened. Of course, it was out of fuel. Swearing, he went to look for some. He thought he had a bottle of methanol with his laptop . . . yes! Chad filled it, trying not to spill the fuel on himself, and not succeeding. You’d think that’s a technology that would be worked out by now! At least now the light worked. He got out and opened the hood, being careful to keep the beam pointed down. It took some doing to find the autolocator, but he finally ran it down by locating the GPS antenna and tracking its lead. Into a solid, hermetically sealed metal box welded to the frame.
Of course it won’t be easy to disable. Too much hazard from people who don’t want to be located. Like me, for instance.
After determining that there was absolutely no way to cut into the electronics without special tools, Chad finally picked up a rock. Grimacing—he hated doing this to his car, and he knew exactly who was going to end up paying for the damage—he smashed both the GPS antenna and receiver. He put some big scratches into the finish, too.
Gingerly, he then turned on the vehicle, being sure to leave the lights off. A red light flashed on the dashboard, warning that the autolocator was not functioning.
At least his car didn’t have an interlock that kept the car from running at all.
Chad pulled into the parking lot at Pahrump Pete’s Hotel, Casino, & RV Park, after sneaking into town the back way from Death Valley Junction. Even though it was paved, that road had hardly any traffic in the wee hours, so he’d been able to make time by using it. Whenever he saw headlights, he’d pull way off the road and turn his car off. Otherwise, he traveled without lights as much as he could, using the moonlight instead.
Chad parked as far away as possible from the garish illumination. Brilliant rippling lights in a pixelated sign two stories high promised both sure winnings and bargains on food (breakfast 24 hours!). His stomach rumbled at the thought, but he couldn’t risk a meal as well. The sign didn’t mention the commercial wireless hotspot, but he knew the hotel had one.
Chad made sure his notepad was topped off with methanol. He’d stopped for an hour or so out in the wilderness, while waiting for the Moon to rise, to write up his experiences, adding his video as an attachment. Now he didn’t want to risk running out of power while uploading.
All set. He picked up the notepad and the card from the videocam and opened the door, trying not to act surreptitious. He was acutely aware of the heavy lump of gold still reposing in his coat pocket. He walked across the parking lot and went in the back entrance of the casino without incident.
Even this late—or this early—there were lots of people about: diehard gamblers still fixated in front of the video machines, barflies, obvious hookers, dedicated drinkers, the occasional snowbird tourist checking out the local color . . . at least a Nevada casino was still a place where a stranger could drop in at four in the morning without comment or notice. He also hoped that with lots of people about, it would be hard to pick off an individual without making a fuss. If it came to that.
Chad chose a seat in the hotspot that backed against a wall so he could watch his surroundings better. No one else was linking in right now—he worried about that a bit as he thought it made him more conspicuous, but it couldn’t be helped. Trying to control the trembling in his hands, he unfolded the notepad and logged in. It was only a matter of a few minutes to e-mail his tale to a large assortment of friends and acquaintances, and to post it to some newsgroups he followed.
Done! He turned off the notepad and tried to look around inconspicuously. No one seemed to be paying attention. Standing up, he went out into the main casino area and headed for the door where he’d entered, trying to keep his pace a leisurely walk. He opened the door and with elaborate casualness looked across the lot toward his car. . . .
And spied a couple of dark figures there. He quickly shut the door again and stepped back, the jolt of adrenalin setting his heart off like a jackhammer. He figured the whole casino could hear it, but nobody seemed to notice. Trying not to break into an outright run, Chad went back across the casino, now toward the front door, threading between the garishly lit slot machines. At the entrance, multiple gaudily decorated double doors opened out onto a wide shallow staircase with faux-gold railings, across which played the shifting colored lights from the giant sign. This was no place to sneak out—it might as well be daylight. But where else could he go? All he could hope was that they hadn’t staked out this entrance yet. Out front, a SolarFuels filling station proclaimed “Methanol and biodiesel!” beside a brightly lit canopy over rows of fuel pumps. An RV was parked at a filling island.
Now what? he thought to himself. Walk to Linda’s house, that’s what. She lived only a couple of kilometers away. Not a big deal—if he could remember the way. In the dark.
And if he could get out of here in the first place. He walked confidently down the stairs, trying to act just as though he’d left the RV to go into the casino for a moment. He crossed the tarmac and rounded the rig, putting it between him and anyone who might be watching from the entrance—and then he kept walking, down and across the highway, his skin crawling the whole way, expecting a challenge at any moment. Nothing happened.
Once across the highway, Chad headed down the little feeder road that came in at right angles. Although Pahrump Pete’s still poured kilowatts’ worth of photons into the air behind him, at least there were no streetlights here. He shouldn’t stand out in his dark ski parka. And even though many houses had big sodium-vapor lights out front, the road was lined intermittently with tamarisk shrubs, which added welcome cover. A Mideastern import that had found the American West congenial well over a century previously, tamarisk had been repeatedly proclaimed a “noxious weed”—and had thrived nonetheless.
Chad was grateful it had done so.
A half hour and several wrong turns later—and after a few panicky dives into tamarisk thickets when headlights had turned down the road he was on—he recognized Linda’s place. Bits of tamarisk itched abominably under his shirt—the dry fronds crumbled to powder at the slightest touch, and he hadn’t been able to be fastidious about taking cover. And it seemed every crumb had found its way between his clothing and his skin.
Linda’s little house was completely dark. Not surprising at this hour, Chad thought. At least her car parked outside suggested she was home. Looking around one last time, he walked gingerly up her driveway, past the car, and tapped on her door. Nothing. He knocked again, much more loudly—it seemed to him as though it would wake her neighbors, though that was silly—all the lots around here must have been at least a couple of hectares in size.
Finally, the porch light directly over his head went on. He blinked in the sudden light. Then the door opened. Linda stood there in a bathrobe, hair disheveled, partly silhouetted in the open doorway. She was holding a short-barreled autoloading shotgun with an extended magazine. It wasn’t pointed at him, but it wasn’t exactly pointed away, either.
“Chad! What are you doing here at this hour?” she said, her voice both sleepy and testy.
For answer he held out the piece of jewelry rock.
Linda took it uncertainly, left handed, keeping her grip on the shotgun with her right. She almost dropped the rock in surprise at its weight. She held it up, looking at it closely, tilting it slightly to see the reflections dance off it in the light at the doorway. “This is gold!”
“That’s the problem. Or maybe it’s just part of the problem,” Chad said. “Linda, I’ve gotten myself mixed up in something I don’t understand. You’re a reporter. There’s a story in here. Maybe a big story. And I’m going to need someone who has access to the media. The big media.”
Linda looked at him sharply, but she must have found something convincing in what she saw. Maybe it was his obvious worry, or maybe it was the sincerity in his voice, guileless with exhaustion.
“Okay, come on in.” She beckoned with the shotgun, still holding the piece of jewelry rock in her left hand. He followed her into the doorway.
“Have a seat,” Linda said, gesturing to the couch. He sat down gratefully into the cushions.
She carefully placed the shotgun in a rack by the door and, equally carefully, set the jewelry rock down on the small coffee table in front of the couch. “I figure you’ll need some coffee,” she said. It was hardly a question.
Chad nodded. “Please!”
Linda went back into the house’s tiny kitchen, separated from the living room only by a low half wall. A loud whirr was followed by the aroma of fresh ground coffee beans.
“Okay, tell me the story,” she commanded. She filled the percolator with water and shook the newly ground beans into the filter. Once she’d confirmed that the drip-drip-drip had started, she came back and sat down.
And he told the tale, starting with his heli-ski trip. Linda poured them coffee once the dripmaker chuckled its last. Chad ended with, “So, when I got to town, I went to a public hotspot at Pahrump Pete’s. I e-mailed the write-up to some friends and posted it to some newsgroups I frequent. Just on the off-chance that someone might wonder if I was never heard of again. I saw figures around my car when I came out of the casino, so I turned right around and walked over here.”
She started and looked at him, a little more grimly. “You’re sure you weren’t seen? Or followed?”
“Pretty sure. I didn’t see anybody. And I hid whenever I saw headlights.”
Linda picked up a remote and pointed it at the console across from the couch. The console looked disproportionate to the room, both in size and quality—like a stretch limo parked in a working-class neighborhood. On a click, an eerie black-and-white image flickered into life. Chad recognized it as infrared video. She kept clicking, and successively he recognized what must be views out the back and sides of the house.
“Well, there’s nothing now,” Linda commented. “Let’s see if it logged anything moving since you came in.” She clicked another button, and a ghostly white outline appeared on the street. Chad thought it looked more like a dog, though. Linda barely spared it a glance. “Oh, just the neighborhood coyote.”
She turned back to him. “If they’re real pros, of course, they could still be out there, just farther away. But so far the coast looks clear.”
Chad was surprised at the sophistication of her surveillance.
She looked wryly at him. “If you’re a journalist, and you’re female, you take lots of precautions. Or you do if you’re smart.”
She clicked some more keys and a news site replaced the spectral coyote image. “Besides, I do a lot of my editing here. I need a professional-scale video system. Now, let’s see what’s been happening up in Tonopah.” She clicked some more, and they both read. Chad was dismayed, but really not surprised, to see that the pilot killed in the crash had indeed been Charlie Jones. There was also a brief, noncommittal note about a car crash near one of the new solar energy ponds. But there’d been no follow-up to that story, either.
“Look at this,” Chad commented. He’d found a little filler saying that the Department of Energy’s telepresence team was called up on standby until further notice. Linda read. “Now that’s interesting,” she said. “The military borrowing some expertise from the DOE, do you suppose? And somebody at DOE didn’t know they were supposed to keep it secret . . . Well, this all lays to rest any last, lingering suspicions about your story.” She took another sip of her coffee. “And it’s clear it’s not just the gold. They don’t impose a news blackout just for some claim-jumping thugs. The bad news is that the Feds have lots more resources for finding you. The good news is that they probably just wanted to put you on ice for a while.”
“So what do you suggest?” Chad asked.
“Let’s do an interview. It won’t be as slick as it would be with a real cameraman, but I’d be leery of getting anyone else involved right now anyway. I’ll prompt you for oversights and clarifications, just as though we were doing a show. Then I’ll post it, to my station, and to a bunch of contacts. I’ll ask them to sit on it unless they don’t hear from me by—say by noon today. And I’ll also put it into my blog, with a timed release.”
She looked at him approvingly. “Just what you’ve already done with your contacts. That was good thinking. The only way to fight something like this is to make it as public as possible as quickly as possible.”
Linda then looked down at her bathrobe and made a face. “Okay, let me first get to looking like a professional newswoman. Then you can get cleaned up a bit while I set up the camera and mic. Comb your hair, at any rate!”
“And I could get rid of the tamarisk crumbs under my shirt, too.” Chad laughed shortly. “Of course, they could be all that’s keeping me awake right now.”
“Well, I think we’re both going to want more coffee. That’s another thing you could do while you’re waiting.”
It took almost an hour—and another pot of coffee—to get the talk in the can and posted. Then Chad asked, yawning, “Okay, now what? I can’t get my car, and it’s illegal to operate on a public street in its present condition anyway. And I’m sure my place in Vegas is staked out.” He drained the rest of his coffee and shook his head. “I’m afraid the coffee’s not working very well now either. It was a long day. Long day and night,” he amended.
Linda grinned. “I’ve been thinking about that. We don’t want to stay here, because Pahrump’s too small. We’ll take my car into town. It’s turned out it’s a good thing you had to leave your car at the casino. It’ll be a decoy. There shouldn’t be any reason for them to connect you to me, at least for now.”
“So what’s in Vegas?” Chad asked.
“Well, first, it’s a big city, so it’s better for lying low if it comes to that,” she replied. “But this business with telepresence . . . one of the top telepresence guys in the country is at LVU. Professor Jim Murthy. And I’ve interviewed him several times. By the time we get to Vegas it’ll be the start of the regular work day. Even for academics. I figure we go right to his office first. If he’s not there, or doesn’t know anything . . .” she shrugged, thinking aloud, “ . . . he should be able to send us to someone who does know.”
She pulled back a curtain and peered out. The eastern sky was now distinctly gray. “If we leave now, too,” Linda continued, “we’ll blend in with all the commuters.”
Chad hauled himself to his feet. “Okay, I’m ready. As ready as I can be in my current state.”
Linda picked up the shotgun. “You know how to use one of these?”
Chad worked the action experimentally. “Sure. It’s like my skeet gun.”
“Let’s bring it. Lay it in the back. It’s not technically ‘concealed’ that way, but it’s available.” She looked at him. “We don’t want to get in a firefight with the Feds. If it’s claim jumpers who want to play rough, though, it will come in real handy.”
Linda’s car was a little late-model hybrid. She folded the passenger’s front seat forward and gestured. “Chad, lie down in the back,” she said. “Let’s not advertise that I’ve got a passenger.”
“Wake up, sleepyhead!”
Chad stirred reluctantly. “Can I sit up now?” he asked.
“Should be okay. I had the news on. There’s some activity outside Tonopah, but no official word at all on what’s going on. Which is just what a reporter likes to hear. It means something out of the ordinary’s happening. This could be big, Chad. Thanks for getting me involved.”
“You’re quite welcome.” He sat up and stretched stiffly. “I’d just as soon not be involved, myself.”
Linda chuckled. She parked and said, “Stick the scattergun under the seat.” She grabbed her notepad and mic and got out of the car, walking swiftly. Chad followed more slowly, still trying to wake up. There was something else, he knew. . . . He felt that if he could just rest for a second, an important clue would become plain.
Murthy was a successful enough grantsman to have his own secretary. Linda knocked at that office, and was rewarded with a tentative “Come in?” She did so immediately, Chad following. A strikingly pretty young woman with a long blond ponytail was standing by a desk, holding a phone handset.
“Hello, C.J.,” Linda said breezily. Having noticed the empty inner office as well as the absence of the secretary, Linda then took a stab in the dark. “Has Jim already gone up to the Mule Deers?”
“Yes, he needs another experienced teleoperator,” the other woman said, lowering the handset. “I was just about to call him, in fact. I need to double-check I’ve got everything he wanted.”
Linda then turned toward Chad briefly and winked. She then said, “C.J., I’d like you to meet Chad Gutierrez. Chad’s just come back from the Mule Deers.” To Chad Linda said, “C.J.’s Jim’s star student. I talked to her a lot when I wrote the piece on the telepresence lab. Meet Carolyn Jean Horne, but she goes by ‘C.J.’”
C.J. blushed slightly. “Linda, I’m hardly the star!” She smiled briefly at Chad as they shook hands. Chad felt as though he’d been sandbagged. Not my idea of a robotics nerd at all! he thought. But he managed to mutter some pleasantries.
Linda was saying, as C.J. returned to her telephoning, “I’d like to talk to Jim too, C.J., when you get a chance.” C.J. nodded. After an exchange involving lots of technical jargon, C.J. said, “Oh, and Jim. Linda McPherson’s here. Says she wants to talk to you too.” She then clicked on the speakerphone.
“Hi, Jim!” Linda said.
“Uh, hi, Linda,” Jim said. “I can’t really talk right now. . . .”
“You’re near Gold City, right? Where some guy skied down yesterday. And triggered some strange phenomena.”
“Well, yeah, but . . .”
“That guy’s standing right here beside me. In your office.”
“He is? And he’s okay? Boy, we’d like to talk to him.”
“You mean he shouldn’t be okay?” Linda asked innocently.
There was a pause. “Well, no. No one that came that close to the . . . the object has even . . . well, they’re not in good shape. We really need to speak to him.”
“Well, he had some rather . . . unpleasant experiences in returning from Tonopah. At least some of which apparently were due to your clients.”
Another pause, then Murthy’s voice returned. “They say they just wanted to talk to him.” Murthy paused again. “Linda, they don’t know what it is. There’s something there that disrupts humans neurologically. And drastically. They first tried sending people in with cameras and such, and they all went completely psychotic.”
“Like Charlie Jones.” Linda made it a statement.
Again a pause. “Well, yeah, he was the one that kinda triggered the investigation. Charlie still had a lot of friends in the . . . um, in my client’s organization.”
“So now you’re trying telepresence. That’s what we guessed, from Chad’s experience.”
“Yeah. That’s right.” Another pause. “Linda, sorry, I can’t say any more right now.”
“Jim, your clients are going to need an embedded reporter, keeping the real-time records.” she responded. “They can’t sit on this forever. And then they’re going to need some favorable publicity. They’d better be laying their contingency plans for when it all blows up on them.”
It dawned on Chad that Linda, in her eagerness to get the story, was perfectly willing to turn them both in at this point. He felt a flash of irritation, particularly because he realized it was too late to rein her in. She evidently thought she was now dealing from a strong position. He’d just have to hope she was right.
A very long pause. “Okay, you and Mr. Gutierrez ride out with C.J. I’ll see you here.”
The phone clicked, and shortly thereafter they heard another knock at the door. C.J. opened it to reveal two men in dark suits. They looked like retired linebackers despite their exquisite tailoring. “Ms. Horne?” one inquired.
C.J. nodded.
“I’m David Braun. We’re your transportation and escort. We understand you’re to bring some more equipment. We need to get it loaded.”
“There’s not too much,” she answered. “I’ve got it all together in my office. We can pick it up on the way out.”
“Very good.” Braun then turned toward the room. “Mr. Gutierrez,” he said. “That’s quite a rig you’ve got.”
Chad suddenly got it. “You shot at me! I saw your laser sights.”
“No, we didn’t shoot. We decided there was way too much chance of taking out you instead of a tire. So we let you go. We figured the risk was worth it. And so it was. You’re now on the team, just as you would have been yesterday.”
Whether I want to be or not, Chad thought. He still wasn’t sure he wanted to go back to the Mule Deers, Linda’s enthusiasm or no; but clearly the decision was now out of his hands.
During all this, Braun’s partner hadn’t said anything. He kept his hands inside his suit jacket, though, and Chad had no doubt one—or both—held a weapon. If necessary, he was perfectly prepared to shoot holes through that expensive fabric.
Braun had continued talking. “There’s a chopper ready at Nellis, and Colonel Toth doesn’t like to be kept waiting. Let’s go.”
Braun’s silent partner held open the door while Braun, Chad, and the two women filed through. The partner then brought up in the rear.
“You know, I’d never ridden a helicopter before yesterday—and now I’m in one again!” Chad remarked to no one in particular.
“Well, you’ll find this one a bit different, I expect.” Colonel Toth had proved to be the very model of an Air Force officer; impeccably clean cut, crisp, no-nonsense . . . and as sharp as a stiletto. They’d found out he also held a Ph.D. in physics. Chad had never fallen for the stereotype of military officers as dull martinets, but still . . . it was interesting how thoroughly Toth shattered the clichés. Remembering C.J., he then thought it must be his day for stereotypes to shatter.
The chopper was different. It was a lot bigger, for one thing. They rode in back of the pilot, on benches among a welter of equipment—monitors, data displays, even a full telepresence link for C.J. C.J. was already linked in, in fact, the VR helmet down over her head, her hands encased in the skintight wiregloves. One particularly large monitor showed the view she “saw.” To her, of course, it seemed that she was approaching that adit mouth up a narrow little canyon. Other sensors and telebots bobbed in and out of view at the edges of the display. Presumably, Chad thought, their outputs filled the other displays.
What the hell? The same thought must have occurred to everyone. C.J.’s display abruptly blurred, then steadied. Then they saw some of the other displays of environmental variables—neutrino emissions, magnetic flux, gamma rays, and so on—oscillate wildly. When one would steady, another monitor view would get all blurry. Even the outputs of the real-time analysis of trace atmospheric components spiked crazily at one point.
Linda pointed to one of the telepresence monitors. “Look at that!” C.J.—or her robot projection—was nearly at the adit mouth. By that entrance lay something clearly artificial, and just as clearly out of place in a nineteenth-century mining camp. It was a roughly cylindrical object perhaps two meters long, with odd protrusions here and there, and with a matte-type finish; not metallic, but almost like ceramic. Evidently it was putting out a crescendo of signals, and the increasing electromagnetic cacophony was disturbing the readouts.
The object exuded age, too—the finish was not only dull and scratched but mottled as though stained over the years, and some of the protrusions looked broken. “Looks like it’s been there since the Pleistocene,” Toth commented.
Suddenly Chad’s fatigue-addled thoughts came together. “Gold City!” he shouted. C.J., deep in the telepresence link, didn’t respond. Linda and Colonel Toth just looked at him as though he’d lost his mind. “Huh?”
“That’s what’s been eating at me. Look, I couldn’t remember skiing down the canyon because apparently the . . . the object disrupted my short-term memory. Yet in the 1800s they built a whole town there and started to mine gold! They even dug out that vein where I picked up the jewelry rock. How could they have done all that if that thing affected them like it affected me? Either it wasn’t there at all, or it’s changed.
“But it must have been there already, it looks so old. So somehow it must’ve learned how to confuse humans so it could keep itself secret. But it must’ve taken a while. And that would also account for why Gold City was abandoned so quickly. People just walked away in the middle of what they were doing.”
Toth said, “Well, if that’s the case it’s in trouble, because we’re throwing every sensing device we can think of at it.”
But Linda, frowning, gestured at the oddly blurry monitors, and at the wild oscillations in the other data displays. “But maybe that’s just what it’s trying to do. Confuse us.”
Chad nodded in turn. “Maybe it’s realized it’s being observed again, and it’s trying to blind the observers. By trial and error.”
Toth snorted, “It can’t confuse them all.”
Chad replied, “Well, I wonder what its Plan B is, then, when it realizes that.”
The . . . it had to be a device . . . was also moving. Some of those protrusions seemed to be extending into appendages. As they tried to make sense of the blurred view, they saw the cylinder raise itself up on an extension. It wobbled uncertainly for a few seconds, then fell over and rolled a meter or so, like a log on a skidder. They could catch glimpses, in the occasional clear images, of new projections extending, of new motions as the device continued to tilt this way and that.
“It’s broken,” Linda whispered. “It’s trying to get away, and it can’t.”
Something in the way she spoke made the hairs on the back of Chad’s neck rise. It did act for all the world like a cornered creature, injured and thrashing. And then abruptly all the monitors washed out with static and all the data read-outs flatlined, at the same time as an intolerably bright flash limned the mountains dead ahead of them. Dazzled as they were, the self-darkening windshield had nonetheless saved their eyes. That was a nuclear explosion, Chad marveled. The pilot, his training taking over, dove immediately to set them down behind the nearest mountain, to avoid the shock wave.
Even parked in the lee of the mountain range, the chopper shuddered violently when the wave went by, dust dancing up from the desert floor around them.
And then it got very quiet. The pilot worked the communications gear, but the only results were flashes of static. “Sir, I can’t raise anyone.”
Toth nodded. “The EMP has probably wiped out all the nonhardened electronics within a few hundred kilometers.” He glanced back into the rear. “Including the telepresence. Is Ms. Horne okay, Ms. McPherson?” Linda had folded back C.J.’s VR helmet. The other woman was completely unresponsive, lolling back in the telepresence booth, eyes half closed, her mouth slack and drooling. Only her seat harness kept her from collapsing onto the floor. Even in the best of circumstances, the abrupt breaking of a deep telepresence link could lead to serious psychological trauma. Linda was feeling for a pulse, checking for breathing, pulling up C.J.’s eyelids to look at her pupils. “She’s alive, Colonel, but she’s completely out of it. I think we need to get her to professional help as fast as possible.”
Toth nodded. “Can you get us back to Nellis?” he asked the pilot, who nodded in turn. “Let’s go.”
“Yessir.”
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