Decipher (42 page)

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Authors: Stel Pavlou

BOOK: Decipher
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“Then what do we do?” Matheson asked apprehensively.
“We have a Hercules C-130 that's prepared to take us in. It's like the one we flew down in from Geneva.”
“Woah,” Pearce objected, concerned. “Those things are huge. A C-130 can't land there. There's no landing strip and no re-fueling dump.”
“No one said anything about landing there,” Gant observed.
Scott was confused. “Then how do we get on the ground?”
Hercules, the Romanized name for the Greek hero Herakles, son of Zeus and Alcmene. Legendary for the murder of his wife Megara and their children after succumbing to a fit of madness sent down by Hera, and consequently consigned to carry out twelve monumental labors. These included slaying the nine-headed Lernean Hydra, capturing the mad bull of Crete, taking the girdle of Hippolyte, Queen of the Amazons, and bringing back the golden apples kept by Hesperides at the world's end. In Roman mythology the broad, powerful and charismatic hero rescued men from danger.
As a U.S. Army C-130, he was delivering them
into
danger.
Richard Scott stood by one of the windows in the rear of the plane, and looked down bewildered at all the strapping and clips he had stretched around his body in a harness.
“Now let me get this straight,” he said thinly. “You're gonna toss me out the back of this plane at just over a thousand feet above ground level?”
“You won't be alone,” Gant explained, trying to make his voice heard over the drone of the engines. “None of you will. Tandem jumps are fairly common. You'll be assigned to Lieutenant Roebuck here. He'll make sure the parachute opens. Just you make sure you're tied to him or then you'll be in trouble.”
“I dunno,” Scott moaned, as if he actually had a choice in the matter. “A thousand feet? That's awfully low, isn't it?”
“It's the minimum height required to get our chute open,” Roebuck said confidently. “It's the same height that base jumpers use. Y'know, those nutballs who hurl themselves off buildings? Don't worry, Professor. You won't be in the air that long. It'll all be over in ten seconds. You'll be on the ground before you even know it.”
“That's what I'm afraid of …”
“Just remember,” Roebuck said, taking the linguistic anthropologist aside and guiding him through the procedure as Gant went off to introduce Sarah to her partner. “Bend your legs on impact. Don't keep 'em straight out, you could break something. Feet together, like this, see. Then turn it into a roll.”
“Which way?”
“I'll tell you which way when we get there. I'll release you on impact. You'll dive to the side. Turn it into a roll. And when you want to stop you
hit
the ground with your arm. It's all to do with energy transference so it hurts as little as possible.”
“I wish you wouldn't keep calling it ‘impact,'” Scott said, much to Roebuck's amusement.
Over by another window, Matheson stood watching the retreating ice floes as the plane banked off into the mainland interior. Just a couple of weeks ago all he had seen was frazil ice, chaotic crystals that formed in stormy waters, clumping together to form grease ice, long wavy strips of ice that looked like oil slicks. But today all he could see was pancake ice that was rapidly forming into ice sheets. Pancake ice was formed by the rough seas spinning the ice around to form plates, some as large as ten feet across, like giant ice lily-pads for giant ice frogs. As winter drew near, these plates crowded and eventually froze over completely to form continuous sheets.
But it was all growing distant now, to be replaced by the desolate, inhospitable-looking snow flats that were being pounded by high intensity winds which occasionally whipped into an updraft and buffeted the plane viciously.
The ridge of the Trans-Antarctic Mountains would be looming soon. Among them were the Dry Valleys, places so arid that it never snowed, since all the moisture in the air was sucked right out and creatures were freeze-dried. The temperature regularly fell to minus 52 degrees Celsius and the ground was frozen solid up to a depth of half a mile. Conditions were so extreme that NASA regularly tested its latest robotic probes destined for Mars there.
This place put the fear of God in Ralph Matheson. Antarctica was a place where human life wasn't just insignificant—it was totally irrelevant.
Ralph found a cup of hot tea thrust in his hand. The marines were handing out steaming coffee and Mars bars for energy.
“Drink all the hot drinks you can manage. It'll help keep you warm. But when it
gets
to an hour before the drop I suggest you visit the head. It'll be the last heated toilet you'll see for a while. If you want to pee once we're on the ground, it'll be so cold it will freeze before it hits the ground. And until I have orders otherwise, war zone or no war zone, you will have to scoop it all up and bring your waste with you. There is no littering in Antarctica. Eat high-energy foodstuffs too. Getting around in the snow expends more energy than you'll be used to. Mars bars are good because of all the glucose. Feed up too, because once we're down there then only square meals you'll have will be the ones you carry with you and what we can salvage from
Jung Chang.
”
There were ten marines in all, kitted up and ready, eating their candy bars and drinking their hot drinks. Light on conversation and even lighter on comedic banter, they were not as gung-ho as the scientists had expected.
“We're about to go into a potential war zone,” Roebuck explained quietly to Scott. “Shouting yessir and polishing our boots is for the parade ground. I gotta tell you, Professor, I'm shitting my pants. And you should be worried if I didn't feel that way. I don't wanna shoot someone or get shot any more than you do, but the difference is, it's my job.”
Matheson let the warm steam waft across his face before downing the hot, sweet liquid. “All right,” he said, tugging at the lap-top by his feet. “We got about another three hours stuck in this tin can. Let's get to work.”
“You're tryin' to decode
this
?”
Scott looked up from where he was slumped against the vibrating green bulkhead and growled. He was tugging at his hair with one hand, clutching yet another photograph of the Atlantis glyphs with the other.
“I'm sorry,” Roebuck apologized, backing up and chewing his Mars bar. “I guess I should just leave you to it.”
Scott shook himself out of his crisis. Passed the photograph over to the young officer and invited him to slump down with him. “Here, have a try,” he offered. Then he asked: “Aren't any of you guys a day over thirty?”
Roebuck smirked as he looked over the image. “The military does like to pick 'em young, sir.”
The officer didn't seem daunted by the arrangement of bizarre-looking glyphs, which surprised Scott if he was honest. In fact, Roebuck's mild appraisal of the patterns actually started getting the despondent epigraphist excited.
“So these are the glyphs, right?” Roebuck asked, referring to the slip of paper stapled to the top. There were three horizontal lines of data. The middle line featured the glyphs.
“Right.”
“What are these numbers above it?”
“When you try to decipher a language you assign each glyph a number, arbitrarily. Then you reduce the text down to a series of numbers to see if you can pick out a pattern,” Scott explained. “We call it Retrieval Stage One. That's a line of text reduced to numbers. I haven't got past that yet.”
“And what about this set of numbers underneath—that a text too?”
“No,” Scott replied, and briefly explained about the number stream, found written inside the crystal.
“I see,” Roebuck nodded. “I see what you did. You converted the text to numbers. But no amount of re-jigging, changing what glyph was what number, got it to match the number stream from within the crystal.”
“Right. You making any sense of that? Do you know anything about decipherment?”
“Uh, kinda,” Roebuck revealed. “I was manning the communications array my end of the line when I contacted you guys in Geneva, remember? I've been trained leftways of Christmas in the art of data encryption and decryption.”
That made sense. “Ah,” Scott replied condescendingly. “Computer codes. Yeah, well, sorry to disappoint you, but this is a language. Not a code.”
“Which in some respects should make cracking it a whole lot easier, sir,” Roebuck replied flatly, for a moment completely unaware that he had just shattered the epigraphist's reputation among his peers. Roebuck looked up sheepishly as Sarah and November stifled a laugh. “If you don't mind my saying so, sir. No offense.”
“None taken.” Scott ripped open his own Mars bar and with a mouthful of chocolate said: “So tell me more. Why should it be easier?”
“Well, I would assume there's been no attempt to hide the information. If anything, if this is a warning from the past, surely they would have built in clues to help decode the information.”
It seemed a startlingly obvious and simplistic thing to say, but Scott knew that Roebuck was making sense. Maybe he did need to take a different approach to all this and not base his analysis on purely linguistic terms.
“Cryptography,” Roebuck added, “requires coding and decoding. As such, you require a key. Maybe they realized time would naturally encode something as the original language corrupted and altered, so something that time doesn't affect would become the key to decoding it.”
“That's remarkably perceptive, Lieutenant,” Hackett interjected enthusiastically. “You're wasted in the military.”
He turned to the others. “Part of the basis of complexity theory is the notion of the arrow of time. Certain laws of physics are dependent on it, others are not. Entropy is the amount of disorder in a system. It only works one way—our way. If we reverse time, smashed cups would put themselves back together. However, things like gravity work the same whatever direction time is running.”
Roebuck shrugged. “That makes sense.”
“So, do you have any idea what might be the key to decoding this little, uh, quandary?”
“Hell, I don't know, Professor,” Roebuck scoffed. “That's for you to figure out. Maybe the key's a law of physics, or mathematics. Some kind of constant as a frame of reference. Maybe it's a physical manifestation. I just know a little about encryption. In the 1970s, which is way before my time, they had this Data Encryption Standard, DES—a product block cipher. It used sixteen rounds of substitutions and transpositions in a cascade, encrypted in sixty-four-bit binary encoded plaintext, controlled by a fifty-four-bit key—producing a sixty-four-bit ciphertext.”
“What?”
“Basically you needed a DES chip to encode or decode the text. Or incredible software. But there was just one key and you needed the key to decode it. It falls into the wrong hands and the whole thing is useless to security agencies. By the 1990s we had this asymmetric, two-key cryptosystem. With the encryption system in the public domain, but the second key, the decryption key remaining a secret. Again it's computer based. The point is, the whole thing rests on an algorithm that encodes and decodes. Perhaps this number stream here is an algorithm, kind of a key.”
“It's not an algorithm,” Hackett explained. “Believe me, I tried.”
“That still doesn't stop it being a key,” Roebuck replied eagerly. “Those numbers have to mean something or why put them there?”
“Are you saying,” Scott probed, sitting up and taking note, “that maybe there are several keys to unlocking this thing?”
“Well, yeah, why not?” Roebuck said matter-of-factly. “If this is a warning from the past, or they wanted to contact people
in the future, people with technical capabilities, they'd try to reach out on every level. At least, that's what I'd do.
“It might be an attempt at a universal language, in order to cross time and racial boundaries. This may have to have been invented. Hell, the key to it could be down to something as simple as the shape of the damn building it was standing in. The design of the pattern here plays on the human eye's ability to detect patterns. The spiral and the arch seem particularly important to these people.”
 
That stung. Sharply. An
invented language
. Scott had considered that possibility. Why had he not pursued it further?
Matheson was on his feet. Something was clicking into place. He sat down with the others and put his lap-top to one side. “What if Roebuck's right? What if they made their megalithic constructions in such a way that they were
intended
to impart a message to us?”
Sarah was intrigued. “The design of the building as a key?”
“In Giza, above ground, the design of the Pyramids and the Sphinx correspond to how the ancient sky looked in 10,500 B.C. Like a mirror. Roughly the time we talked about for the first flood. I think maybe the tunnels underneath have a message too.”
Scott was nodding. “The Egyptian Hermetic dictum was: ‘as above, so below.' But a message in the design of the stonework?”
Matheson pulled out a pen and a notebook. “These people are masters of sound—correct? All things sonic and the physics of wave propagation.” The others nodded. “So what does a sound wave look like?” He drew a squiggle across the page.
“So what would one of the Giza tunnels look like if you drew it from its side? It's a spiral, remember? Sarah, you were standing in a sound wave set in stone.”
“Wait a minute.” Sarah was skeptical. “A sound wave—are you sure? What's the wavelength on audible sound waves?”
“Anything from two centimeters all the way up to twenty meters,” Hackett replied without even having to think about it.
“How do you measure a wave's length?” November asked.
“A wave has a peak and a trough,” Matheson explained. “Y'know, like a real wave in the ocean. The wave's length is measured by determining the distance between two peaks.”
“Couldn't the wave in the tunnel equally be a representation of a light wave?”
“Absolutely not,” Hackett replied dismissively. “The wavelength of visible light is 0.00000055 meters. That's ridiculously small. Radio waves are on the same kind of scale.”
“Not all of 'em,” Roebuck corrected.
Sarah shuffled forward. “So what is the wavelength of the spiral in the tunnels?”
“Exactly ten meters,” Matheson confirmed, “according to your data. That's the longest wavelength divided by the shortest: twenty divided by two. The exact middle ground of audible wavelengths. And the Atlantis glyphs only appear on the spiral Carbon 60 strip, which we already know can produce standing waves in liquids because of the quasicrystals … My God, that's it!
That's it!
” He was sketching furiously on his notepad again. “That's how the network—
works!
That's how these five sites are linked. The tunnels that go out from them go down into the water table. If they go all the way out to the coast then all five sites are linked through the oceans.
“Sound travels at 340 meters per second in the air—but 1,500 meters per second in the water. At extreme depths there's a layer of water that has a temperature and pressure differential to the ocean above it. It's what whales use to communicate over vast distances at incredible speeds. Increasing pressure increases the speed of sound. This layer of water traps the sound so it has no choice
but
to travel great distances.”
“Why?”
Matheson eyeballed Roebuck consciously. “Excuse me?”
“Why?” the Lieutenant asked again. “I mean, I'm sure you're correct. Our submarines regularly pick up acoustic signals in the oceans they can't explain. I'm sure this network of yours exists. My only question is:
why
does it exist?”
Matheson sat back on his haunches, exchanging a look with the rest of the team as Sarah told him: “Lieutenant, we've all been asking that same question since day one.”
“Lieutenant Roebuck?” November said tentatively. “We're not at radio silence or anything, are we?”
“No,” the marine confirmed. “Command wants the Chinese to know we're here.”
“Then why doesn't Ralph give you the map references where these five sites are and you could contact a few submarines. See if they can't pick this network up in the water?”
“November,” Matheson scoffed mildly. “We still don't know where these other two sites might be. We're still waiting on confirmation from Gant.”
“You're a smart man, Ralph,” she smiled. “Can't you best-guess it?”
 
Gant had his arms folded tightly across his chest as Roebuck took him through the charts at the rear of the cockpit, illuminated under a snake lamp.
“There's the
Connecticut
and the
Jimmy Carter
in the North Atlantic.”

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