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  The mountain, it seemed, had heard his exhortation, and was about to heed it, for a fierce shock ripped through the sub-strata and the floor of the chamber split open in a series of jagged diagonal cracks. The concrete foundations on which the gantry rested crumbled away to dust and the entire steel edifice tilted and heeled over towards the tanks so that they were both thrown against the rail, like passengers clinging to the stern of a sinking ship.

  The tanks too had been disturbed, their stainless steel sides creaking and buckling as the floor of the chamber shifted, and with the sound of a screeching live thing caught in a trap the metal was torn apart and 600,000 gallons of radioactive perchloroethylene poured from the shattered tanks and rose up in a green tide.

  Frank held on to the rail as the foaming flood raced towards the leaning gantry, bracing himself for the shock of impact, and from the corner of his eye saw Professor Friedmann’s mad staring face infused with an expression of joyous exultation, almost one of rapture as if in anticipation of the moment of fulfilment.

  The structure tilted even more as the wave hit and rushed between the struts so that the two of them were suspended above the swirling green fluid, looking down on it with only the metal rail to cling to, separating them by no more than a couple of feet. But Friedmann – even had he wanted to – couldn’t hold on: his hands had atrophied to raw peeling flesh and crude bone claws which were no longer able to maintain their grip, and he slithered between the rail and the angled floor of the gantry. In less than a second he was gone, his black one-piece overall ballooning in the manner of a comic cartoon figure, his grey razored head soon lost in the swirl of green fluid which lapped at the supports. The last image Frank had of him was a skeletal hand clutching uselessly at nothing before it was sucked under; there was a final eddying slurp as the perchloroethylene claimed its first victim, the self-proclaimed prophet of the Telluric Faith.

  He’s fulfilled his mission, Frank thought, and brought about the awakening of the planet. Either by design or accident he’s unleashed the radiation which will trigger the antineutrino-antitrimuon interaction – like placing the electrode in the vital spot in the human brain and generating enough electrical energy to stimulate a violent seizure.

  He looked at his own hands gripping the rail, expecting to see them deteriorating from the radiation which must now be filling the chamber – penetrating everything with needles of pure energy – and was amazed that they were still recognizably his own, apparently suffering no adverse effect. This couldn’t be: it was plainly impossible: it was like being inside the core of an atomic reactor, the level of radiation so high that living tissue couldn’t withstand for more than a few minutes this sustained attack on its cellular structure. Yet he was still (he thought he was) thinking rationally, aware of his surroundings, knowing that Professor Friedmann was dead and he remained alive and in possession of his faculties.

  There was only one possible explanation – an intelligence beyond his comprehension was exerting a greater force to counteract the intense storm of radioactivity caused by the release of argon-37.

  And it could only be the same intelligence that had communicated to him during his mysterious ‘fall’ towards the inner void, when the voice had entered his mind and spoken of the secrets of the Galaxy: a conscious being amongst thousands of millions of others in the Universe.

  The perchloroethylene was draining from the chamber, its green frothing surface sinking away from him as it poured deeper into the Earth through the fissures which had been opened up by the tremor. Gradually the shattered tanks were revealed and the buckled leaning structure of the gantry, poised at a precarious angle as if defying the law of gravity. The recording equipment lay in a mangled heap, wedged against the rail, its weight threatening to overbalance the spindly framework of twisted girders.

  Moving slowly from strut to strut, Frank descended to the floor of the chamber, now covered with a sticky green substance that reminded him of the mouldering decay on the barks of trees. There was no sign of Professor Friedmann’s body, which must have been swept underground and was by now several miles deep within the mantle of the Earth. The cracks which had split the chamber were too wide to cross; the only way out, as far as he knew, was through the main tunnel which led to the shaft, but he couldn’t get to it; after all this, was he to be trapped in the depths of the mine amidst the wreckage of the solar neutrino research experiment? It seemed the ultimate point of futility that so much had happened, so much had been revealed, and yet everything had finally conspired to place him in this seemingly impossible situation.

  The mountain began to shake. It was like a huge prehistoric beast coming alive after millions of years, a slow grinding awakening as one by one its senses became alerted. He felt it move, and again he experienced the feeling that he was inside the body of a living animal, a tiny parasite in the stomach sac of something too huge to notice it.

  He thought: Supposing Friedmann was right? What if the Earth had coalesced out of ‘conscious’ plasma and was now, five billion years later, regaining its awareness? But he didn’t know what to think any more. The rationality of his thought processes, in which he had taken so much pride and smug satisfaction, was no longer able to cope with the sequence of fantastic circumstances, the apparent irrationality of the Telluric gospel, the existence of vibrating mirror-like black rocks …

  He had forgotten the black rock. It was sealing the main tunnel, shutting off the detection chamber from the outside world. Or had it fulfilled its purpose in allowing Friedmann to prepare the way? Now that the mountain was alive had it returned once more to the inner depths, the Ultimate Void?

  The ground lurched beneath him and he was jerked off his feet and sent sprawling in the odious green slime. The jagged gaping cracks were widening, crumbling away at the edges, the entire floor of the chamber pattered with them like a pool of splintered green ice. He was marooned on a diamond-shaped piece of rock whose surface was smooth and slimy, providing no purchase for his slithering arms and legs. It seemed that the mountain had saved him twice in order that he might witness its final cataclysmic triumph – and now it was done with him and he was to follow Friedmann as the next sacrificial victim.

  Above him the roof of the chamber began to disintegrate. The arc-lights swung crazily, like revolving searchlights, flickered and went out. He was in complete and utter darkness, spreadeagled on a splinter of rock, feeling the vibrations of the Earth in every part of his body as if he were joined to it; his body and the living Earth were as one, the same substance, the same flesh, the same rock.

  And he knew that this was so. The molecules and atoms and subnuclear particles throughout all creation were made up of the self-same constituent parts. The matter in the stars was identical to the matter in his own body – the ingredients for life had been formed within stars, so he himself and every other living creature was a product of star-stuff. I came from the stars, He told himself, experiencing a strange, an almost wondrous, excitement. The stars live through me, they find their living form and consciousness through my being. We are all the same throughout the Universe: all matter and energy emanating from the same source. The Sun and the Earth and my body are all living entities in the sight of the Conscious Universe.

  He felt like weeping. The rock shook against him like a release of emotion. There was a strange sense of relief as if it didn’t matter any more how or in what form his consciousness found expression. Why should it make any difference when everything was of the one indivisible substance, each after its own fashion alive and equally sacred? And just as the stars lived through him, he would live through the Earth, become part of its sentient being.

  They were all one: as above, so below.

  The calm he now felt seemed infinite. The blackness all around soothed him, and He thought: When Friedmann spoke of the Ultimate Void he was referring to the still small centre which exists inside every living thing. Every creature. Every plant. Every stone. There is a secret inner place which even sci
ence can’t penetrate, no matter how deeply it probes into the subnuclear world. An area of stillness at the centre of all things.

  He lay on the rock. It was very quiet. Looking upwards he saw a shape picked out in pinpricks of light: the seven stars forming The Plough, their pointers marking the position of the Pole Star. And further beyond the great spangled W of Cassiopeia, situated in the Milky Way.

  Then the sky was ablaze with stars, from horizon to horizon, more than he could recall ever having seen before. They were spread across the dark heavens like a million eyes looking down on him, even as he watched them; and when a faint chill breeze touched his face he knew that he was gazing into the Universe from the Mount of the Holy Cross.

  SIX

  The fierce tremors had ravaged the townships along the Roaring Fork Valley from as far east as Malta through Eagle to Rifle in the west – and worse, had opened up the fault line which ran parallel with Eagle River and underneath the great Eagle Dam. But so far the Dam had held. During the night the tremors continued, inching apart the two mountain ranges, topped by the Mount of the Holy Cross on one side of the Valley and Mount Powell on the other.

  Radium had been unaffected, though the tremors had been felt with sufficient vigour for many of the townspeople to pitch tents in the fields and spend the night wrapped up in sleeping-bags.

  It was cold on the granite heights of the mountain but even so Frank waited for the dawn with a kind of stoic forbearance that amounted almost to fatalism. It seemed that he was alone on the top of the world, with the vivid stars near enough to touch, and below him the dark Earth shaken and trembling by the forces at work in the inner core of the planet.

  The starlight was brilliant, coating the rising granite peak with a soft silvery sheen. He thought about how that light had travelled for thousands of years to bathe the mountain in its radiance; it had begun its journey when the Universe was young, before the Earth had been born, and had survived those countless light-years with the sole purpose of expending itself here on the mountain. He wondered if the light from the stars knew this, knew of the purpose planned for it so long ago, and decided that light was selfless and therefore wouldn’t care what it was used to illuminate. But he was glad to be there to perceive the beauty of the light bathing the mountain; somehow it made the journey seem worthwhile that a sentient creature had seen and appreciated the starlight’s effect on this speck of matter circling in the void. His senses told him it was beautiful, and this was reason enough.

  He was on the eastern slope and so the Sun’s first rays struck like lances across the Valley from the distant peaks of the Rocky Mountain range, directly into his eyes. They lit up the severe granite face of the mountain, and then farther below the golden banks of aspens which descended into the shadowed pool of the Valley itself.

  Below him he could see the bright orange tracery of the winding gear, etched like a hierograph against the dull red circle of the compound with its cluster of huts, and as the light intensified he could even make out dark specks of figures moving to and fro.

  Helen and her father were probably amongst them, waiting for news of the rescue teams … and this made him wonder what had happened to Lee Merriam and the two men trapped on the ledge. They would assume he was dead, and if they ever made it back to the surface that was the story they would tell. And by rights he should have been dead, if not from the fall, then from the radiation released into the chamber by the argon-37. Friedmann had been affected by it, corroding away to nothing, but he had escaped physical harm. The knowledge of this he found discomforting; it was almost as if he knew himself to be morally responsible for a crime and by some mysterious quirk of circumstance had been let off; retribution suspended.

  From far off in the distance a noise came to his ears. It was the sound of someone tearing huge sheets of cardboard, very slowly and methodically, with great patience. His eye was attracted by a pale glimmer along the Valley and he knew even before his senses had registered the fact that the fault had crept inexorably wider and the waters of the Dam had burst through the concrete barrier and were now rushing in a white fury towards the townships along the Eagle River.

  It was what he had been waiting for.

  The rolling wall of water gathered force and speed, and, hemmed in by the two mountain ranges standing shoulder to shoulder, swept along the Roaring Fork Valley in a smooth imperturbable flow that swallowed up one by one Red Cliff, Mintburn, Avon, Eagle, Gypsum, Dotsero, New Castle, Silt, Rifle and De Beque. It was accomplished with such ease, and from this distance, high on the mountain, lacking all sound and fury, that he wondered if it was a vision of things to come, a silent dream that foretold a disaster that had yet to happen.

  But the reality lay before him, just as Cabel had prophesied. In place of the Valley there was now a long narrow body of water upon whose turbulent surface the fractured reflection of Mount Powell glittered and broke in a thousand fragments. Beyond the mountain, safe and untouched by the waters, the town of Radium, and the hospital, and… the Tellurians?

  The cold had penetrated right through him but he didn’t seem to mind. Physical sensation had left him and he was quite content to look down on the shimmering flatness of water which lay before the Mount of the Holy Cross; this was his resting-place, a high vantage point from which he could observe what had become a tranquil scene of sky, mountains, and water, with no human habitation in sight. It seemed he would be happy to remain here forever, a passive observer of this natural landscape: unspoiled, silent except for the wind, returned to the condition as it must have been before man trod upon the Earth.

  Strangely, the fact that people had perished down there in the Valley didn’t stir in him the pity or anguish that he might have expected. It wasn’t that he regarded their lives as worthless, but rather that he now firmly believed that nothing could ever die. Just as matter was indestructible, assuming another form or being transferred into energy, so he was convinced that life couldn’t be destroyed but was simply transmuted into another form of life, the atoms of a human being merging once more into the great body of the Earth from whence they had sprung.

  Everything contained life in one sense or another and it made no difference if you lived as a warm-blooded creature, as a plant, or a rock, or as whirling gas in space. Matter and energy were the only true life-forms, the basis for being throughout the entire Universe.

  By a random interaction of particles (pure chance? an accident?) something that called itself Frank Kersh had been brought into existence. He might have been any one of a billion people, or not a person at all, the molecules that made up his body scattered far and wide at the ends of time and space. The physical machine which housed him was a temporary accommodation, of no real significance, lasting less than a fraction of a nano-second on the cosmic timescale. The machine would eventually decay and die and the atoms would assume some other form; the part of him that constituted his conscious awareness would be transferred to something else – he would continue to live, to physically exist, in the greater body that some called the Conscious Universe, and others called God.

  Looking down the slope of his body he saw a small group of people climbing towards him, seeking the higher ground above the encroaching flood-water. One of them was a young girl with red hair, and another a short fat middle-aged man who was labouring with difficulty, pausing every few steps to grunt and wheeze and catch his breath. They were still a long way below him and perhaps wouldn’t need to climb up to this height, which he hoped was the case, because he was perfectly happy to remain undisturbed, high above everything else, gazing out across the placid pond which separated him from his neighbours.

  SEVEN

  They came to a gentler part of the slope where it was possible to stand almost upright without overbalancing. There was a thin patch of harsh dark-green grass, sprinkled with a few pale flowers, adhering tenaciously to the grey shale, and in the clear horizontal sunlight it was like a little oasis of warmth and comfort on the bleak mountainside. />
  Cal Renfield said, ‘This is for me. I stop right here.’ He stood for a moment holding his stomach with both Hands and then lowered himself to a reclining position. His chest heaved with the effort of climbing and the effect of the more rarefied air at this higher altitude.

  One of the other men said, ‘I guess we’re safe enough here. The level is static, seems to me. Wouldn’t you say so?’ he appealed to the others.

  Nobody took the trouble to reply, but for an answer flopped down on the grass, taking in deep lungfuls of air; their mood was sombre and withdrawn, their stamina exhausted as much by the long night’s vigil as by the exertions of the climb.

  The group was what remained of the personnel on the Deep Hole Project: six technical staff and two maintenance engineers. The mine had claimed five more victims in the past twelve hours, including the Project leader, and that numbing fact along with the severe tremors and the breaching of the Great Eagle Dam had drained them of everything but the most dazed noncommittal response. There was simply nothing to say that would alter what had happened or make sense of it: they had to accept and come to terms with it each in their own way.

  Helen found it impossible to accept. Even now she hadn’t given up hoping, and for only the second time in her adult life had prayed to an invisible being, offered up a silent but heartfelt prayer to something in which she didn’t believe in a last desperate plea that a miracle would happen and the four men who had gone looking for Professor Friedmann would suddenly, magically appear from the mineshaft, faces streaked with dust, eyes red-raw, but safe and sound, alive and breathing, not maimed or injured or harmed in any way. She still believed it to be possible, even though the engineer who had led the back-up team had insisted that any hope there might have been had long since faded.

  ‘Any chance they had disappeared the second the Dam broke,’ he told her. ‘That’s if the radiation didn’t get them first.’