As the probes echoed back from 2500 metres the twenty one men at the instrumentation post died in a single explosion. Their equipment fused into melted desert sand.

The data they had been telemetering out, however, showed results at the moment of the explosion. There was a ma.s.s discontinuity at 2.8 kilometres. The Vault.

Nor did tragedy close there. Cautiously, heavy machinery was brought in to begin drilling an access tunnel. Another ten men died confirming that the Vault would not tolerate substantial electromagnetic activity in its immediate vicinity.

A raft of speculations had been advanced to account for that effect. Bill found most of it, as described in the Situation Report, utterly beyond his grasp. The best bet seemed to lie in Lennox Harrington's realm. Most phenomena in the universe, perhaps all, appeared to be generated by a limited number of underlying symmetrical interactions. But that symmetry was not visible; it was 'broken spontaneously', and expressed itself in radically variant forms. The Vault suspended symmetry-breaking between two forces, electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force governing radioactivity.

'I can't stand it,' Bill said aloud. He put down the report and went for a p.i.s.s. For a moment he regarded the buzzer, and wondered if he could persuade someone to bring him a drink. It seemed unlikely. The coffee had gone tepid, but he refilled his cup anyway. Groaning, he picked up the report.

By pretending the equations weren't there, he managed to get some sense out of it. The Vault unkinked kinks. But only in the presence of electromagnetic fields, charges in motion. The fields suffered a 'gauge glitch'. Maybe it's like a laser, he thought, and the power comes from the Vault. EM forces suddenly thought they were weak nuclear forces, and multiplied. Nuclear protons turned into neutrons, emitting positrons and neutrinos. Neutrons did the reverse. The beta-particles, plus and minus, got together fast and annihilated, turning into gamma showers of hard radiation. The neutrinos and antineutrinos ran off at the speed of light. In a brief, lurid flash, flesh and metal and gla.s.s and plastic convulsed in radioactive meltdown.

It was appalling. However it managed it, the Vault was a killer. But only if you offended it with electromagnetic fields, or by venturing into its proximate defence zone. That last, it seemed, was optional. The child and his uncle had come through unscathed. Others who'd breached the zone had left it babbling, and were now full of fluphen.a.z.ine. Three had come out only mildly dazed; sent in again, they'd died instantly. It didn't make any sense, but it looked as if there were rules.

There was a knock at Bill's door. The astronaut came into the small room. He had a black wiry man with him, apparently another civilian.

'Sorry for the delay.' Hugh glanced at the remains on the tray. 'Just as well you've eaten, it could be a long session.'

'When can I see the kid?'

'Later today, maybe. He's scribbling again. It's almost as though we wound him up. Or he heard the jet arriving. Bill, this is Alf Dean, the guy who teleported into the Vault.'

'Hi.' Bill regarded the Australian with interest. It had not occurred to him that Dean had joined the team. Given the man's gruelling ordeal, he'd a.s.sumed Dean had been flown out for medical and psychiatric treatment. 'Tell me, Alf, have you noticed any peculiar sensory effects since you were brought out of the Vault?'

'I spent several days hallucinating pretty wildly, if that's what you mean. They tell me I was rather sick.' Slumped in the doorway Alf Dean still looked ill.

'Sure. More specifically -- when you were back on your feet, did you notice anything when you were in the vicinity of electrical equipment?'

The anthropologist considered him warily. 'Yeah, for a while. Flickers of light, a sort of, uh, visual hum. I was worried about epilepsy for a few days. How did you know?'

'The same thing happened to me after I came out of the gluon field. Hugh?'

The astronaut shook his head. 'Believe me, I would have hollered.'

Bill tucked the Situation Report under his arm. 'Let's not keep the general waiting, or they'll cancel our leave.'

The conference room was long and dull, furnished in pale Scandinavian dreck. Half a dozen men lounged at a table bearing briefing folders, pads and felt-tipped pens, jugs of orange juice, cla.s.sy notepads. A huge flat-screen monitor stood in one corner next to a shredder and color copier.

Sevastyianov rose from a foam-and-blonde-wood armchair as they entered. 'Gentlemen, I would like you to welcome Dr Bill delFord, whose field of competence is altered states of consciousness.' A restrained mutter of welcome. The Russian gestured around the table as the three men found their places, naming names. A couple were recognisable; one was electrifying. A grey-bearded civilian studied the newcomers with focused, intent intelligence, pushing his gla.s.ses more firmly to the bridge of his nose. Victor Fedorenko, Bill thought, impressed. The man everyone was tipping for the n.o.bel in physics, following his astounding experimental success in proving the reality of faster than light non-local connectivity. Not to mention his much-publicised criticism of the continuing racism and thuggery in Russia, and corruption at the highest levels. They must have needed him badly, Bill thought.

'Let us begin this morning's session with a review of the group trial under the gluon shield. Dr delFord, you have the floor.'

Bill stuck to the facts, and was brief. He remained unsure of the connection between the Vault enigma and the experience he'd shared with Anne and Hugh. Presumably the Caltech field was seen as a diminutive version of the Vault's primary defences. His report evoked animation in the men before him.

'Sounds like the stuff we got from the guys who came out of the Vault with their wires crossed,' said one of them. 'Except that they stayed that way. Bill, you seem to be relating this to your previous research. Can you amplify that point?'

DelFord glanced at the general. 'Is this the right moment to -- ?'

'Go ahead, doctor. Until Mr Lapp suggested your special expertise might be helpful, I do not believe any of us had heard of out-of-body-experience. Personally, I must confess that I am still highly sceptical.'

Someone hummed the _X Files_ theme. The astronaut winked at Bill. You b.a.s.t.a.r.d, delFord thought with some affection.

'Okay, I don't blame you. The study of OOBEs isn't new, but it's been dogged by crackpots. It got a boost in the right direction a couple decades back, when some of us were awarded the estate of a miner named James Kidd who'd set up a bequest to investigate survival after death.'

There was a snort from further down the table.

'Don't blame me, brother, I'm an agnostic. The fact is, though, a h.e.l.l of a lot of people have reported the experience of, well, physically leaving their bodies and trucking around the neighbourhood with nothing on but their souls. Fallout from our tank experiments in sensory deprivation and overload led us to correlate the details. We found considerable consistency from astonishingly diverse sources.'

'Sergeyev's bio-plasmic body hypothesis,' said a heavily accented Russian voice. 'The Kirlians proved that long ago.'

'Wrong,' said Bill. 'Radiation field photography is completely irrelevant. The so-called "aura" is the creation of fields applied externally, with a lot of volts.'

'Corona discharge,' said Lapp. 'The air molecules are ionised, and get mixed up with organic c.r.a.p and out-ga.s.sing. I thought,' he added with a satirical scowl, 'your commie atheists would have got on to that back in the good old days when you _had_ commie atheists.'

Bill cut them both off before a dispute could get started. 'Let's stick to OOBEs for the moment. My Inst.i.tute has concluded provisionally that some cases of "astral projection", as it used to be called, are authentic. We've had people identify distant places in great detail while they experienced projection. And the vital signs agree. We get decrease in alpha rhythms, and a drop in electrical activity in the occipital or visual cortex. The greater decrease is in the right hemisphere, where most ESP data seems to be handled.'

'd.a.m.n, it does correlate. We found the same states from EEG printouts on the guys from the Vault.'

Alf Dean said, 'The same thing has happened with Mouse. They get a drastic reduction in his EEG when he's in trance.'

Bill sat back, and poured himself an orange juice. Christ, I've got to get my hands on that kid, he told himself. An engineer began a droning report on the status of some new protective clothing his group was testing, aimed at the paramount task of getting a man into the Vault, and out again, without poaching his brains. His attention drifting, Bill became conscious of the white buzz, the flicker hazing the table. A recording system, he decided. The absence of a secretarial flunkey had surprised him, but of course these days the tapes went direct to secure word processors. He gazed along the table. That sleek p.r.i.c.k LowenthaI, the psychologist, looked away. The b.a.s.t.a.r.d thinks I'm a madman, Bill thought with a breath of anger. My G.o.d, the ancient Egyptians knew more about OOBEs than that Skinner rat freak. I wonder what the aborigines thought about it? They were here long enough. 's.h.i.t,' he said, lurching up in his seat.

Fedorenko had just begun to speak. The physicist stopped at once. 'Yes, Dr delFord?'

'I'm sorry, my mind was wandering.' You're not in the Grope Pit now, f.u.c.kface. In this hard line company, his question would seem merely ludicrous. They were not accustomed to the non-logical starters of heuristic reciprocity.

'Feel free to speak. We cannot afford to be governed by the rules of formal debate.' Unlike the general's, Fedorenko's accent was a slightly thickened version of Oxbridge British. It reminded Bill of Anne's rather than his own 'red brick' Liverpudlian. As a very young man, the Russian physicist had worked in England on radio telescopes, before the Cold War had started in earnest.

Sevastyianov was giving him the nod. What the h.e.l.l. Bill leaned forward toward Alf Dean. 'Do the local aboriginals have anything to say about the Rock?' It _was_ ludicrous. _Oligopithecus savagei_ might have been on the scene 25 megayears ago, but any word-of-mouth observations would have got a mite garbled in the interim.

Fedorenko apparently did not think so. Raising an eyebrow to Dean, he nodded in grave approval. The black man, clearly far from recovered after his ordeal, seemed happy to allow Fedorenko to pick up the ball.

'A penetrating question, Doctor. We did not consider the possibility at the outset. The earliest date for human arrival on this continent is roughly 100,000 years ago. Selene Alpha was a radioactive ruin long before that. Until Dr Dean's unorthodox appearance in the Vault chamber, we had not bothered to consult any anthropologist familiar with the local ethnographies. Of course, we had provisional a.n.a.lyses from exocultural specialists from our respective s.p.a.ce programs.'

Unconsciously, the physicist had picked up a calculator, and his fingers played at random over the keys. 'Uluru is the traditional domain of the Pitjandjara tribesmen. Fortunately, by the time we started our probes the team were authorised by the Australian government to relocate the aborigines outside the area -- '

'Which wasn't easy,' Chandler cut in. 'The bleeding hearts started screaming "concentration camp" when we shifted the blacks.' The colonel stared blandly at Dean; clearly there had been words between them on the subject.

It was Fedorenko, though, who scowled angrily. 'I used the word "fortunate" only because the lesser evil forestalled a potentially greater one.'

There was a shadow in the room. Bill found nothing of sympathy within him. No doubt some of the men here had colleagues among the dead, among the ruined bodies in the melted desert. Though the mourning was done, some dull ache remained at the uselessness of their deaths. Yet these men in their military uniforms, and the civilians who served them, had shared, perhaps, in the deaths of scores of thousands. With a surge of hard bitterness that surprised him, Bill thought: The gluon shield might be used by just such men to murder thousands of millions. This time men had perished searching for traces of creatures from the stars, surely an enterprise touched with n.o.bility, but there was no simple, honest way to grieve their pa.s.sing.

Chandler had thrust his chair back gratingly. 'Yes, Dr Fedorenko, those men are dead, and more might have been if we hadn't used our muscle. h.e.l.l, I watched my boys coming out of Libya with their bellies blown open, with their guts flopping out in the sun.'

'Thank you, Colonel,' the huge Russian general said drily. 'I do not believe there is any need to stand.'

Chandler sat down. 'With respect, sir, I have to stress that we're moving into unknown territory. The excavation accident didn't stop us reaching the Vault chamber. We must get in there. The knowledge locked into that one facility will advance our technology a hundred years, maybe more.'

The general raised his formidable hand. 'I believe we all share a common motivation. Dr delFord, your conjecture about aboriginal legends was an inspired one. It also occurred to Dr Dean.'

The Australian straightened in his seat. 'I'm no expert on the Pitjandjara tribe, but I've had all the journals flown in during the last couple of days and it fits. As Victor mentioned, they've been relocated for their own protection. That's a tragedy in its own right, since it's only in the last decades that they've been ceded rights over this territory. They have clan territories adjoining Uluru, and I believe their sacred mythmakers had a lot to tell us about the Vault. Most myths are regional -- one of theirs isn't, and it's found among tribes thousands of kilometres away, tribes that don't share the same language.'

'The Rainbow Serpent,' Bill said, nodding. 'Hugh told me you were looking for bones when you found the teleport gate. But isn't the gate itself the source of the myth?'

'That was my first thought, but it doesn't go nearly far enough. Let me explain. Like most Australian aborigines, the Pitjandjara believe that during the _tjukurapa_ times -- the world's creation -- a number of cosmic ent.i.ties performed various stupendous and valiant tasks which ultimately gave the universe its present shape and laws. When the Dreaming mysteriously ended, hills, watercourses and boulders appeared wherever these deeds had been done. Uluru itself is a huge catalogue of mythic beings and their deeds.'

'You figure they were aliens?'

'Certainly not.' The anthropologist looked offended. 'In the main, this is standard cosmogonic material, an animist version of Plato's theory of Forms. The beings commemorated in myth are the great totems: the Lizard men Kanju and Linga, the w.i.l.l.y-Wagtail woman Tjinderi-tjinderiba, the Mala Hare-Wallabies, Kulpunya the Spirit Dingo. These all obviously derive their liturgical importance from the daily search for food, shelter, and safety. They're the stuff of legend in any equivalent pre-technological society. But there's one creature which is quite different from the other _tjukurapa_ figures, the Rainbow Serpent -- known to the Pitjandjara as Wanambi.'

'Jung would probably locate it in the collective unconscious,' Bill said. 'If I may say so, I'm irresistibly reminded of other phallic potency symbols -- Quetzalcoatl, the Plumed Serpent on the pyramid temple at Teotihuacan, the Midgard Serpent, the Egyptian Buto, and the Great Serpent of the Hitt.i.tes who fought the weather-G.o.d. It's certainly a common primary process image emerging in altered states of consciousness.'

'You did not mention the most famous one,' Victor Fedorenko said softly. 'Satan -- the Serpent who tempted us to our ruin with knowledge.'

'Oh, f.u.c.k,' Lowenthal said with disgust. 'Why don't you come right out with it and tell us there are some things man was not meant to know.'

The Russian physicist smiled ruefully. 'Harris, Pavlov would have loved you like a son. Did you know he used to fine his students every time one of them uttered a mentalistic word? Bill, Dr Lowenthal is our chief psychologist. He holds a low opinion of our working hypothesis. If you would find it amusing to witness an excellent mind weaving Ptolemaic epicycles around a barren worldview, ask Harris for his explanation of the automatic writings produced by young Mouse Dean.'

'Gentlemen, gentlemen, I must insist on decorum,' the general growled. 'Such personal exchanges are unseemly.'

'I don't maintain that the Serpent is an archetype or a Freudian symbol,' Bill said quickly. 'I'm merely stressing the great geographical and historical ubiquity of the image. Alf, are you attempting to relate the Wanambi to this more general datum, and also to the Vault itself? If so, I'm tempted to side with Harris.'

'How else does it add up? Look, I'm a structural-functionalist. I wrote a paper tearing the s.h.i.t out of Castaneda before it was fashionable. I'm no fan of the occult.' There was something wrong with Dean's breathing, and he paused. His pupils seemed contracted. 'Bill, I don't know how they did it, but I think the Pitjandjara sorcerers were tuned into something from down in the Vault. They couldn't understand it, so they expressed it in terms of their own hunting-gathering view of the world. It's built into their legends.'

Pointedly, Lowenthal turned away from the discussion. Yeliseyev laughed with delight. He was the Russian Army engineer who had headed the design team for the tunnel down to the Vault. 'Despite our colleague's scepticism, I've heard stories from Science City in Novosibirsk that make me wonder. Perhaps I was too quick to accept the Kirlians' claims. But psychics have certainly achieved effects we engineers cannot match. So they offend us by calling themselves sorcerers? We must watch and learn. Sneering is no subst.i.tute for open-minded study.'

'Two weeks ago,' Alf Dean said, 'I wouldn't even have considered such a possibility. Since then I've seen what this G.o.d-awful place can squeeze out of a kid with ma.s.sive cerebral damage.'

'Jesus! The entire Project is reverting to the Middle Ages.' The psychologist swung around, nodded toward Bill without meeting his eye. 'Bringing in this mystic from the lunatic fringe went against my express recommend -- '

The general's tone was ominous. 'Dr Lowenthal, you will observe the civilities.'

'There's a radical distinction,' the man said angrily, 'between being open-minded and having a hole in the head. So okay, little grey men in flying saucers set up house on the moon 25 million years ago. We know that. Big deal. There's absolutely no warrant for jumping from that slender datum to the insane conclusion that they're alive and well and lurking under the Big Rock to gobble us up.'

'No one -- '

Bill said, blinking: 'Gobble us up?' The room hummed with silence.

'Uh, the Wanambi isn't the most cordial beast in the world,' Alf Dean admitted. 'According to the Pitjandjara, the one under Uluru is particularly bad news. It was said to live in a cavern beneath the Uluru waterhole, at the top of Tjukiki gorge. If anyone drank from the hole, or started a fire there, the wanambi got a bit stroppy.'

'The return of the repressed,' Bill said feebly. The anthropologist took him seriously, and shook his head.

'Freud would find it rather tricky to account for the location of the Vault. It's almost directly under the Uluru waterhole ... three kilometres straight down.'

'If the tribal elders saw the weather outside right now,' Lowenthal said scornfully, 'they'd doubtless blame that on the Wanambi's foul temper.'

Fedorenko pounced. 'And in a sense they'd be correct. The meteorological disruption is due entirely to our interference with the Vault. But I imagine they'd be more discriminating than that. Bill, despite what you say about human auras, you might find one fact peculiarly suggestive. If the wanambi is angered, it's said to appear as a rainbow before it kills the offender.'

Incredulously, Bill said: 'You think the wanambi is an alien, still alive after all these millions of years? And the survey probes ... woke it up?'

'Perhaps it has been awake all along.'

'We can't take any chances,' Chandler told him. 'There are strong arguments indicating that the wanambi is a representation of a living interstellar alien. If it is, we've aroused it. And it's not likely to be friendly.'

'For Christ's sake,' Lowenthal said in fury. 'Colonel, you've got Russians sleeping in the next room so now you need monsters under the bed.' He splayed out fingers. 'One. Elements of Selene Alpha are still functioning after 25 million years on the moon. Two. The Vault has been totally sealed up for at least that long, in far better shape. Three. Its activity to date bears all the hallmarks of automatic defensive equipment and nothing more. Four. The teleport gate is deadly, gives off pretty colours like a rainbow, and has aboriginal KEEP OUT signs all over it. Five. The boy you're all pinning your absurd hypothesis on is clinically r.e.t.a.r.ded, insane, and no doubt regurgitating chunks of information he's picked up over the years and recorded eidetically. Six. The answer's inside the f.u.c.king Vault, and if we get off our a.s.ses and develop a working shield to get us in there we can flush all this c.r.a.p out where it belongs.'

Mildly, Bill said: 'Why can't you go into the Vault? All I know so far is that it destroys electromagnetic fields. Surely the human EM output can't be powerful enough to trigger it off or you'd never have got your tunnel dug.'

'It's a bad place,' Alf Dean said. His face was suddenly beaded with sweat. 'If Mouse hadn't got me out I'd be dead.'

Fedorenko told him: 'The Vault does -- something -- to men who go into it. It hurts their bodies and it wrecks their minds. Alf is the only one so far who has recovered after deep penetration of the Zone. At the fringes it's not impossible. Close to the Vault, it drives them irretrievably insane. They don't all die. There's not a mark on them.' He struggled for further words, and failed to find them.

'The Wanambi zapped them?'

'Or maybe the laws of s.p.a.ce and time are different inside that place. Perhaps they saw the _Ding an sich_ unclad by the categories of perception we impose. Cameras don't work in there. The Vault does something to the chemistry of film emulsions.'

Bill stared around the room, from man to man. They met his gaze in silence, faces cold and pale. Apprehension began to worm in his belly. He sought to deny it, reached numbly for objections.

'Harris is right. Nothing could live that long.'

'Perhaps the Rainbow Serpent is an intelligent computer,' Yesileyev said quietly, 'perfectly preserved until now by the Vault's force shields.'

'We don't know for sure that they all died on Selene Alpha,' the astronaut said. 'They could have fled to the safety of suspended animation. NASA is working on it. We know they're from the stars -- artificial hibernation is almost a prerequisite. Believe me, Bill, it's feasible that one or more of the aliens have returned to consciousness in the Vault, and are simply gathering strength and information before they choose to emerge.'

Ironically Bill asked: 'To conquer the world?' But his mind presented the loathsome image of a giant snake coiled on a throne, an image from childhood, gorged on human meat, red eyes gleaming in the dark with dreadful intelligence.

'Or to set us free from ignorance and want,' General Sevastyianov said ponderously. 'As your horror story writers have never understood, it is certain that the more complexly evolved a species and its material culture the more generous and humane its members will be. And one must expect star folk to be highly evolved.'

'With nuclear weapons,' Lowenthal muttered cynically, 'and Gulag galaxies.'

'Perhaps the aggressors have destroyed themselves in the interim.'

A band seemed to be tightening around Bill's forehead, white haze of gauze moving in slow waves over his visual field. They want me to go in there, he told himself. I won't do it. They must be insane. With as much false briskness as he could muster, he leaned on the table and said: 'I take it the fourteen-year-old is the sole key you've found to date. Are there any testable indices that account for his immunity to the field?'

Major Northcote, the chief MO, said: 'There's nothing useful. The kid's been tested from h.e.l.l to breakfast. He's a mess, but he was a mess before he went in. We have two facts. He was functionally almost totally aphasic. Now he babbles like a tape-recorder let loose inside the Library of Congress. And his presence in the Zone somehow saved his uncle from permanent psychosis.'

'Other than that,' Hugh Lapp added, 'semantic a.n.a.lysis of his verbal and written reports suggests that he has become a conduit from the hypothetical Vault intelligence to us.'

'Soph.o.m.ore sophistry,' Lowenthal said. He opened the folder in front of him, flicked out several sheets of pale green paper. 'If you wish to be edified by our spirit guide, delFord, I suggest you study these transcripts. Let's go back to the first interview with Northcote: '"However much techno-environmental factors are determinants of behaviour, the relationship between human beings and their environment and technology is mediated by their ideas and beliefs about themselves, their fellows and indeed, the universe itself. Myrna? h.e.l.lo, is that -- We seem to have a crossed -- Appears to be little profit in it because the essential task of theory building here is not to codify abstract regularities -- Why, this is h.e.l.l, nor am I out of it ... not to generalise across cases but to generalise within them."'

Thunderstruck, Bill said: 'And you don't find that significant, Harris? An aphasic fourteen-year-old -- '

'Most of it,' the psychologist stated dismissively, 'is straight quotation from Clifford Geertz's _The Interpretation of Cultures_. The child's guardian, as you might have noticed, is an anthropologist. Let's go on: '"Viewing schizophrenia as a phenomenon of interaction within a given family makes the circ.u.mstances intelligible. Ill-advised attempts to transpose this emic apprehension into a systematic set of principles, as Laing himself did, results only in a parody of the etic approach he initially found inadequate." We haven't been able to trace that, but it's almost certainly the residue of some overheard conversation. Does it sound like a communication from interstellar aliens to you, Dr delFord?'

Bill had found his own copy of the green transcript, and his eyes sped down the neatly typed columns in pure astonishment. He put a mint in his mouth. 'He's talking about empathy,' he said distantly. 'My G.o.d.'

An italicised comment glossed: _The following two paragraphs are from Nigel Calder's 'The Life Game', 1973, p. 130_.

All too little is known, though, about why particular species or groups of species die out. New species may be in some respects "better" in the prevailing environment, but speculations about the genetic deterioration of the dying species turn out to be wide of the mark. For example, it was said that animals living a long time in a stable environment would narrow down the choice of alternative genes available in their populations, thus forfeiting all capacity for evolving once circ.u.mstances changed. This simply does not happen.