Catacombs (7 page)

Dr. Kumenyere entered, carrying an attaché case and two gold, leather-bound notebooks under his arm. He stood aside for Jumbe Kinyati, who followed him with his great old head bent at what seemed to Morgan an alarming angle. He had a black wood staff in one hand. He was wearing a plain red-ochre shuka and a strip of leopard or cheetah pelt that was bound around his forehead like a sweatband. Morgan had never seen Jumbe when he wasn't wearing a western-style business suit, usually with a white shirt open at the throat; frequently he had also affected a tarboosh, as a gesture of solidarity with the Muslims of Zanzibar.

His feet were in sandals that softly slapped the concrete floor. He took his place at the head of the table, where there was no chair, and stood contemplatively with his fingertips pressing down on the onyx. He didn't look at the assembly. Kumenyere placed the two fat loose-leaf notebooks and the case near Jumbe, and went to close the windows. Jumbe seemed to tremble as the louvers snapped shut.

"Good evening," Jumbe said. His voice gained strength as he drew a deep breath and raised his head slowly. In Africa the buffalo, nyati, and not the lion, is the most respected of' all the animals, for its speed and power and unpredictability. Jumbe's head was, unmistakably, the head of a buffalo, with even the suggestion of horns in the way his hair grew back over his ears from a kind of tough, wiry gray pompadour. For an African he had small eyes. They were yellow as egg yolk, and widely spaced. His face was angular, narrowing to a clump of gray beard. His massive shoulders were rounded, and there was a hump between them that had grown more prominent with the years. Even in illness–it was obvious Jumbe was not well–he continued to be impressive.

"To my friends Morgan Atterbury and Victor Kirillovich Nikolaiev, welcome. I regret I haven't had the opportunity to be with you before." Now he looked at the other faces around the table. "Much of what I am about to relate is already known to the majority, but I would like to bring our visitors from America and the U.S.S.R. up to date."

Kumenyere took a chair beside Jumbe and sat back, folding his hands, surveying the company with his beautiful, imperturbable eyes. The president stood gazing at the fire for a few moments, then continued softly, "Nearly a year ago the Chapman Institute of the University of London applied to our government for the necessary permits to conduct an archaeological investigation along the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika, where some evidence of a prehistoric burial ground had been found. Permission was granted. An expedition funded by the Institute was mounted, with the famous archaeologists and explorers Chips Chapman and Erika Weller as field directors."

At mention of Chapman's name Morgan glanced at Robeson Kumenyere, recalling the scene at the airport, the impassioned young man who had said he was Chips Chapman's son. His glance went unacknowledged.

"Their expedition," Jumbe continued, "established a base camp near the designated site in one of the more remote and least accessible areas of Tanzania. There are no roads and few villages in a mountain fastness of some eighteen hundred square miles.

"Shortly after they began their explorations, all radio contact with the camp ceased. After several weeks of silence, government troops were sent into the district to search for the explorers. Remains of the camp were found, but they had all disappeared. We believed that they had set out along the lake in rubber boats to reach otherwise isolated cliffs, and were drowned in one of the frequent storms that strike without warning during the northeast monsoons. Needless to say, areas of Lake Tanganyika teem with crocodile, so the prospect of recovering bodies was dim."

Jumbe paused, to allow Boris the opportunity to catch up in his translation. He apparently wanted to be sure that Marshal Nikolaiev understood him perfectly.

"How large was the party of explorers?" Morgan asked.

"More than thirty, and a score of Tanzanian laborers and service staff."

"Surely some of them would have remained in camp."

"As it turned out," Jumbe said, smiling at Morgan, "our assumptions concerning the fate of the explorers were wrong. They had seemingly vanished from the earth, but they were alive and well. Just six weeks ago, following months of silence, we learned what had happened to them."

"I don't remember reading about any of this," Morgan said. "An expedition of that size, out of touch with the world for several months? Every bureau chief in East Africa must have been nodding off on the job."

"The expedition was conceived and conducted with utmost care, to guard against unwanted advance publicity. For reasons I think will be evident. The Chapman/Weller discovery is of awesome proportions, unprecedented. They have found the burial place, or Catacombs, of the elders of an advanced civilization that flourished on this continent ten thousand years ago, a civilization that left a complete record of its one-thousand-year history for modern man to study."

"Fascinating," Morgan murmured, looking at the faces of the other men.

Most of them were rapt, already true believers.

Henry Landreth's black eyes reflected firelight, his face was impassive, but his foot nervously tapped the floor: Nikolaiev sat back with his arms folded, wheezing. Morgan was familiar with his expression, a glazed stoicism common to all Russians who think they are in for a healthy dose of
vranyo
, or snake oil.

Kumenyere had left his chair to lower the already dim lights in the room. Jumbe complacently absorbed the skepticism of Morgan and Nikolaiev. Then he pulled the attaché case slowly toward him and unlocked it with shaking fingers.

"Here is a part of that record," he said.

The case was opened; two spotlights in the rafters lanced down.

The case contained a two-inch-thick block of Lucite. Mounted in the Lucite were- twenty-four gemstones, egg-shaped, red as rubies, each cut into what seemed to be a hundred dazzling facets, like those of a geodesic dome.

The beauty of their combined fire stunned everyone. Morgan's throat dried up; he couldn't look anywhere else. Jumbe moved the case inchwise turning it to the left and then to the right. Within the icy redness blazed other colors, equally intense: lavender; pink; a shade of gorgeous, lethal blue, like a poisoned sea. Jumbe selected one of the stones and held it between yellow-horned fingers in the dark, where it had its own brilliance, the distant violence of an exploding star.

"They are red diamonds," Jumbe said, looking at Morgan and then at Nikolaiev. "The rarest of the precious stones known to man. Those few previously discovered are far inferior to the stones you see here. Each of the bloodstones, as we have come to call them, weighs approximately fifty carats. The odds against more than one turning up in the course of centuries is astronomical. Yet the bloodstones you see are part of a store of hundreds, preserved in the Catacombs, along with the crystal tombs of ancient men. A priestly caste of yellow men, with straight eyes, who were known as the Lords of the Storm."

He selected another of the bloodstones, passed one to Morgan and one to Nikolaiev. Two more spotlights shone down for their benefit as they examined the stones.

"Damon Paul will vouch for their authenticity," Jumbe said.

On close inspection Morgan discovered that the facets had been etched, almost microscopically, with some kind of writing.

Damon Paul got up and stood beside Jumbe.

"In association with Dr. Markey," he said, nodding in the direction of the crystallographer, "I've studied the bloodstones for several days, and run some tests. They're diamonds, absolutely authentic. Some of the stones are less than perfect, but those minor flaws only enhance their beauty. Any one of them, on today's market, is worth in the neighborhood of two and a half million dollars. Even if they were marketed in this quantity, they would be snapped up at extraordinary prices.'

"Don't the etchings detract from their value?" Morgan asked.

"Not in the slightest. By the way, it would take a skilled man working for several months to cut and polish a single stone."

"How long would it take to complete the etchings?"

"I can't imagine. I'm sure there's no way to accomplish the work mechanically. One thing you should bear in mind: Only a diamond can cut a diamond."

"What about a laser?"

"There's a possibility. But technically not within our means at this time."

"Has anyone deciphered the etchings?"

"Yes," Jumbe said. "The Chapman/Weller expedition spent nearly six months in the Catacombs, sustained in rooms of crystal that were as bright as a meadow beneath a full moon. With the aid of computers they were able to translate the language and interpret the mathematics of the vanished civilization, known as Zan. The stones we have assembled here are etched with hundreds of equations, some of which indicate that their physicists were successful in unifying the forces of electromagnetism and gravity. Dr. Zollner; Dr. Ambetti; their distinguished colleagues–all agree that the ancient people achieved a sophisticated technology, based on quantum mechanics, solid state, and high-energy physics. And their greatest feat, recorded on another cache of diamonds secure in the Catacombs, was FIREKILL."

A few moments of silence; Dr. Zollner looked up from the pipe he was stoking.

"FIREKILL, Jumbe? What is 'FIREKILL'?"

"Forgive me, Dr. Zollner. You and your colleagues were shown only selected bloodstones, for purposes of attribution and to compare certain models by the physicists of Zan with current research. Someday I hope you will have the opportunity to study the full range of achievements recorded on the bloodstones. For now, I would like to keep explanations as brief as possible. Let me say that the country of Zan included most of what today is East and Central Africa. Many great cities were built, of which only the ruins of Engaruka and Zimbabwe are extant; other ruins remain to be excavated in the dense forests of Zaire and Mozambique.

"Nearly one hundred centuries ago, the people of Zan were endangered by 'fires from space,' which might have been a periodic meteor shower of great intensity, or the explosion of the large planet that existed where the asteroids now circle the sun. To prevent certain devastation, they devised a shield called FIREKILL, a spatial distortion achieved by combining the forces of electromagnetism and gravity to create unusually strong gravitational fields. A force field, if you will. It was one-hundred-percent effective. This shield, if erected today over an area as large as, let us say, the city of Moscow, U.S.S.R., would serve as a foolproof antimissile, antinuclear device. No explosion that modern man can create will disturb it. The cost is moderate in terms of expenditures necessary to maintain present defensive postures, the technology available. The necessary knowledge–" Jumbe spread his hands like a conjurer over the array of bloodstones.

Zollner chuckled edgily. "Force field! Jumbe, the concept is a total absurdity. Mathematically, the major problem with gauge theory has always been one of infinities . . ."

Almost instantly the physicists were quarreling.

"Not according to the Zurhellen-Dzaluk models, which predict . . ."

"No, no, the interaction cannot be assumed to be manifestations of the same effect . . ."

"But my work in photon stability . . ."

". . . Super gravity . .

". . . Acceleration phenomenon . . ."

Only Henry Landreth, Morgan observed, was silent, sitting back aloofly. Morgan glanced from the red diamond in the palm of his hand (which was sweating, although the bloodstone seemed cold) to Nikolaiev. He now had a good idea of the attraction that had been offered to persuade the old soldier to come to Chanvai. Nikolaiev was impatiently trying to follow the arguments of the physicists.

Jumbe had the floor again. "Although I have no background in the physical sciences, I know that much of your work is based on speculation, and is necessarily incomplete. A lifetime of intellectual drudgery may result in two minutes of truly creative insight. The physicists of Zan, whose genius you have acknowledged, had a thousand years in which to develop their theories."

"If they did contrive a viable force field," Morgan said, "we should all be speaking dialects of Zan today."

"The story of the annihilation of the people of Zan is frightening and fascinating; it will be told, in the course of time, but tonight I must hurry on."

"One more question, Jumbe?'

"Yes, Morgan."

"The discovery of these stones, apart from what may or may not be engraved on them, would seem to be an archaeological triumph. The credit, apparently, belongs to Chips Chapman and Erika Weller. Why aren't they with us tonight?"

"The answer is quite obvious," Jumbe said with a placating smile. "The members of the expedition were exhausted from their work in the Catacombs, where they knew no division between day and night. They are now recovering, as honored guests of the Tanzanian government, in a location that must remain undisclosed for now. At their request they will be incommunicado, untroubled by representatives of the media, until they have had time to recover their strength and put all of their valuable data into an acceptable form for presentation to the world's scientific communities."

Almost before he finished speaking, the doors to the conference room burst open, startling the men inside. Somalis and Sikhs in uniforms of pale green and blue filled the hall. They were heavily armed. Their commander, who was carrying a submachine gun, walked in. His finger was on the trigger. With a swagger stick he turned the lights in the room all the way up. His eyes glittered. He had pox-scarred cheeks and shavings of curly white in his full beard. He crossed the room to Jumbe and Kumenyere and spoke urgently to them.