Decipher (33 page)

Authors: Stel Pavlou

BOOK: Decipher

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He tugged on the chains, put his radio to his lips and announced, “Okay, let her up.”

He could hear the distant roar of power as mechanical motors cranked into gear. Saw the tension build in the chains. And stood back as the Carbon 60 block was suddenly dragged across the floor.

He monitored its progress gleefully, making sure his prize made it over every rut it encountered. This one block alone was worth a quarter of a million U.S. dollars. When it was time for payday the only certainty he knew was that the whores in Mexico City better be geed up on something a little stronger than Pro-Plus, coz there was gonna be some ridin' goin' on. And it wasn't gonna stop till Christmas.

When the block scraped its way over the right spot, Carver radioed to the surface for them to stop. It was time to unhook from the pulleys so the block could be raised directly to the surface.

He paid scant regard to the translucent bug on his shoulder. Or the glass tube-like roots that jabbed at his throat as he grabbed the chains and yanked them free of the pulleys. He was just about to radio back again, however, when he
heard something odd. He stopped what he was doing mid-whistle.

There it was again. Like a fall. Some kind of muffled cry. Very faint. But it was coming from the direction of where his two teammates had just headed.

He peered into the darkness. Angled his flashlight and shone it into the distance. Tentatively he called out to them: “Hinkley? Gerome?”

Nothing. Not a single response.

Carver tugged on the chains, a clear signal that they could start lifting the block again. As he went for his radio to confirm the order, he heard what could only be described as a scream. Guttural. Explosive. Like the knotting of entrails being wrenched from within.

Carver brought the radio to his mouth as he reached for the semiautomatic rifle slung over his shoulder. He was only going to say this once. “Guys,” he said, “quit fucking around. Now what's going on?” But all he got back was static. He put his radio away, raised his gun, and tugged on the chains sharply. Twice. To let them know there was a problem.

The block jerked to a halt and was left dangling at eye-level.

Carver peered into the darkness once more. As each lightning strike above lashed out across the sky, its light reflected down into the tunnel. And for Carver it gave the briefest glimpse of something disturbing. A figure was approaching.

CROSSED WIRES

The lab door flew open, right around where Ralph was busy tapping away on his computer and across from where November sat cataloguing the Atlantis glyphs. A belated sharp knock accompanied the intrusion. A redhead in jeans and a T-shirt hung her head around the door.

“Anyone in here called Jon Hackett?”

Hackett was startled. “Uh, yes. That's me.”

“Hi. Rebecca Devonâmicrobiologist. I think they made some sort of a screw-up, upstairs. They're pumping data into our lab across the corridor. Number streams. Mean anything to you?”

Hackett was on his feet. “How long?”

“About an hour.”

“That's the completed crystal data from CERN,” he glowered, heading for the door. “I've been waiting for that. How come you didn't notice before?”

“Well, uh,” she grinned apprehensively, “it's an easy mistake to make. It looks just like biological data.” Hackett pulled up short. Checked with his colleagues. Did he just hear that correctly?

“Complexity,” Scott winked, “is the key.”

“What? YeahâI guess you're right,” Hackett agreed as Matheson pulled out his lemon and started joining the dots across its bumpy surface. He had a rotating globe on his monitor and had started to copy the pattern onto that image too.

“This is some machine,” he murmured.

Hackett eyed it briefly. “You think these sites are all interconnected, like some kind of network, don't you, Ralph? Like an ancient Internet?”

“YupâI'm convinced of it.”

“You know what this is? This is a monkey puzzle, my friendâon a global scale.”

“Gee, you make it sound like the ancients built all this so we'd have something to while away the hours with in our dying days,” Bob Pearce commented sourly. He looked exhausted.

He stood in the doorway, made his apologies and squeezed past Rebecca, who continued to wait patiently. She grinned at him in an overly condescending, overly friendly manner. “Hi,” she said. But Pearce didn't respond.

“Those sites are connected, all right,” Pearce said. “Ever wonder what the hell ley lines were? Ancient channels of force. Maybe an entire ancient tunnel system is what we've been detecting all this time.”

Hackett said playfully: “Did I miss a meeting? Did you go dowsing without me again? Bob, you know how I hate to miss that.”

Pearce shrugged it off and grabbed Matheson's lemon with the gridlines marked on it, joining the five ancient sites and traced his finger over them.

“Hey, I'm not finished with that,” Matheson complained. “I was just about to scrawl the Giza tunnel system on that thing.”

Scott shook his head. “I'm not convinced,” he said. “There's no way a tunnel system could stretch all the way from Egypt to South America to Antarctica. It's just physically impossible.”

“Besides,” Sarah added, “the tectonic plates are moving. Continents are continually shifting. Those tunnels wouldn't last longâthey'd be destroyed. Ripped apart or flooded.”

Pearce held up the lemon. “In relation to this puzzle,” he said, “the five sites and the earth? We are but a flea on the ass of an elephant. In relation to the sun, we are a tick on the ass of a flea on the ass of an elephant. We're nothing. So until we step back, and get far enough away, like going into orbit, we can't possibly see the whole picture. The
bigger
picture.”

“Trouble is,” Rebecca the microbiologist added without thinking, “you step too far back and you wind up falling off a cliff.” All eyes settled on the woman who had spoken out of turn. “It's just an observation,” she added meekly. “What are you guys talking about?”

Hackett inclined his head toward her and said quietly: “Why don't you go on ahead, huh? I'll be along for my data in just a second.” Rebecca made her excuses and left. Hackett held up a hand defensively. “Bob, calm down. We're on your side on this thing. No one agrees with your assessment more than I do. I also happen to agree with Ralph. But whether these sites are linked physically or any other way, unless I challenge him we'll succumb to fuzzy thinking and that won't help any of us. We have to be very clear about our conclusions and the science that gets us there.”

Pearce rubbed his head, and seemed to be shaking from the cold. “I'm sorry,” he said. “I'm just â¦ very tired.”

“I'm not surprised. Must take a lot of effort to do what you do.”

Pearce was unsteady on his feet and allowed November to guide him to a seat. “For all we know,” he murmured, “the sun is a living breathing creature. It just takes it four million
years to say a word, let alone string a sentence together. We are gone in the blink of an eye on a cosmic scale. We don't live on the same time-scale as the sun so we wouldn't recognize life that way. We only recognize life that lives roughly at the same pace as ourselves â¦”

Hackett looked to November as he tiptoed out the door. “And get him some coffee,” he advised. “Lots of sugar.”

“Hi, This is Ted,” Rebecca annouced, introducing everybody. “Ted, this is Jon and Sarah. Ted's a marine biologist. He studies jellyfish.”

“Oh,” Sarah commented brightly. “They must be very interesting animals.”

“They're not animals per se,” Ted responded icily. “They are planktonic marine creatures. Protoplasm.” Ted wore sandals and had long greasy hair, like a surfer with a personal hygiene problem. He also didn't know when to break eye-contact, which made conversation with him awkward and uncomfortable. “Some of them are not single creatures at all, but a collective of tiny creatures that choose to work, live and hunt together in a form we call the jellyfish.”

“Oh,” Sarah replied with an air that she hoped suggested she stood corrected.

“Ted's a little edgy at the moment, aren't you, Ted?” Rebecca interjected apologetically.

The other biologists steered clear of their little gathering. They also wore their hair long, were in the process of growing beards, and were more interested in the spores they were cultivating in glass dishes than infiltrators from the lab down the hall.

“We studied C60 before,” Rebecca announced sweetly, tapping the screen of her computer and signaling to her colleagues that everything was fine. “There you go. That's your transfer started. Shouldn't take long.”

“Thank you,” Hackett replied dismissively, aware Sarah was hovering beside him. “What, uh, what do you mean you studied C60 before? Why on earth would you do that as a microbiologist?”

“Fullerenes,” Rebecca explained, “are a good candidate for seeding life through space. Didn't you know?”

Sarah folded her arms tightly across her chest. “Obviously
not,” she said, thinking of the hand back in the tunnel in Egypt, and shivering.

“Oh,” Rebecca cooed dreamily, watching the data on the screen. “Carbon's a really special little element. And C60's a really smart little molecule.”

“Carbon's very adaptable,” Hackett agreed. “It's in the ink we write with. It's in the flesh we live by. It goes from being a gas to being part of the human brain, able to contemplate its own existence.”

“Which is incredible considering that, as an element, it's so mediocre,” Rebecca added. “It does most things, but isn't an extremist, like say potassium, which blows up at the drop of a hat. Carbon only makes up 0.2 percent of the earth's elements, but is part of more compounds than any other element. Hundreds of thousands of compounds.”

“But
why
the C60 molecule as a candidate for spreading life?” Sarah persisted.

“Because it's hollow,” Rebecca replied, as if Sarah, since she knew so much about carbon, should have known the answer to that question already. “It's the shape of a soccer ball.”

“The Carbon 60 molecule,” Hackett objected, “is only approximately three angstroms across. That's enough space for about one atom only.”

“Yes, but think about it. What atom?” Rebecca threw right back at him. “You choose the right atom and you wind up creating the world's most powerful non-metal magnet. You make C900, which they've done in the lab. The same enclosed structure as C60 emerges but with 900 carbon atoms. And that isn't a ball anymoreâthat's a capsule. You put a combination of the twenty standard amino acids into the heart of that structure and it'll end up sprouting legs and walk off.”

“I'm not following you,” Sarah interjected.

“There are three forms of carbon on earth, but which type did we evolve from?” Rebecca asked. “Graphite has edge contaminates. Diamond has a monolayer of hydrogen on its surface. And soot, which is pure and the most closely related to ourselves, is formless. Life had to evolve from
something
. But it can't be any of these three. Diamond is not only too rigid, but the hydrogen renders it useless. Graphite's too.
malleable, and soot so formless it's useless. The guess is, there was a fourth type of carbon that was pure
and
had form â¦ That's what C60 is. Pure. And it has form.”

“You got proof of this?” Sarah asked suspiciously. Suspicious because she was afraid of the answer. Afraid because she had
seen
the answer.

“Twenty years ago Buseck and Tsipursky found C60 and C70 in shungite,” Rebecca offered.

Hackett looked puzzled.

“Rare carbonaceous, pre-Cambrian rock,” Sarah told him. “I know. Traces were detected around crater sites and in the KT boundaryâthe boundary that marks the end of the Cretaceous and beginning of the Tertiary eras, sixty-five million years ago when the dinosaurs were killed.”

“Absolutely. And on that basis we had our guys back at the Max Planck Institute fire C60 molecules at a hard surface at over 17,000 miles an hour. Around the same type of forces you would expect it to have been put under if it had just crashed to earth on the back of an asteroid. The molecules bounced back. They weren't destroyedâthey survived! Now the idea of Dr. Frankenstein throwing a switch and zapping his monster is a little extreme, but heat and the odd lightning bolt are the ideal conditions to kickstart life. Or at least mutate it. And Carbon 60, as a pure form of carbon, with no contaminants
and
structure is biologically active.”

“Which came first?” Hackett mused. “The chicken or the Carbon 60 egg, huh?”

Rebecca eyed him up and down as if seeing the physicist in a new light. “That's very funny,” she smirked. “I like that.” She tapped her screen, bringing up images. “The reason this looked like biological data,” she explained, “is because the numbers and some of the data show a symmetry very similar to that of life forms. When I realized it was C60 it made perfect sense.”

“Symmetry?” Sarah probed further.

“Life, as we know it, has two basic shapes,” Rebecca said. “There's the double helixây'know, the spiralâwhich is what our DNA conforms to and what many larger life forms are based on. And then there's the soccer-ball symmetry of viruses. Sometimes the helical-screw-like shape manifests
itself in the very shape of the animal in question, like some gastropods. Like the twirl shape of the Nautilus sea shell.”

“But C60 is only soccer-ball-shaped, isn't it?”

“No, not at all,” Rebecca corrected. She punched up another image. “If you pass C60 through an electrical field during its creation, it forms a carbon nano-tube that develops on a screw-like basis. A helix shape instead. A spiral. But a spiral
tube
âwhich is also the basic requirement of all larger life formsâfor circulation of the blood.”

Two basic shapes of Carbon 60. Two basic life forms on earth. Both evolved from carbon. But from the same
type
of carbon?

“It's like C60, if we were going to design it,” Rebecca added, “would be the perfect starting point for life. We know chloroplasts, true bacteria and mitochondria evolved from eubacteria. Methanogens, halophiles, sulfolubus and their relatives come under archaea. Protists, plants, fungi and animals stem from eukaryotes. We know that eubacteria, archaea and eukaryotes together all stem from the same first branch on the tree of life. But viruses are a mystery: they don't seem to fit in. However, if you have one type of carbon structure that can take on two distinct shapesâthen that explains the connection.

“Carbon 60 could be the precursor to some sort of protolife form. Have you seen this?” she asked as an image of a soccer-ball-shaped molecule appeared as seen under a cryo-electron microscope.

“C60, right?” Sarah offered.

“No,” Rebecca corrected. “This is a virus.”

“Which one?”

“The human herpes virus.”

“Herpes?”

“Uh-huh. And it has exactly the same symmetry as C60. Admittedly it's not the best example, but then, what virus is?”