The Martian Pendant Page 4

  The End

  She put the paperback down, absently holding her little pendant and reflecting on what she had written. To her, the story remained fascinating. It was science fiction, no doubt about that. It also occurred to her that she was in love with the story. She realized that she had created a fantasy, yet she reveled at the prospect of discovering the secrets of such a landing site. What could be revealed? The possibilities were endless, from commercial to military. But she cared only about the science, the anthropology, and the furthering of humankind’s knowledge of its own origins.

  All she needed was confirmation of her theory, a seemingly impossible undertaking. But she was an optimist. Somehow she would find the appropriate location and also a sponsor for the anthropological dig she envisioned.

  FOUR

  The Satellite

  In 1957 a super-secret satellite was launched through a partnership between the Army and a consortium of large American oil companies. The key to the accomplishment was enlisting the aid of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, or JPL, in Pasadena, California.

  At that time, the Navy was encountering repeated problems with its own rocket, the Vanguard, in the race that was ultimately won by the Soviet Union's successful orbital placement of Sputnik. Competing with the Navy, the Army had quietly developed a reliable ballistic missile, the Redstone, under the direction of Werner von Braun, employing the technology he had developed during World War II with the Nazi V-2 missile that had so bedeviled London. There was only one problem: the Redstone didn’t have enough power to put a payload into orbit.

  Scientists at the JPL came up with the fuel that could boost the Redstone to orbital velocity. Working with the Buell Tool Corporation, they also achieved another technical breakthrough, a satellite that could record and transmit back infrared, magnetic and nuclear radiation data emanating from the earth’s crust. This achievement promised to revolutionize exploration for subterranean fossil fuel and mineral deposits.

  While the Government was busy in the space race with the Soviets, Big Oil was quietly financing this pioneer commercial venture, using a satellite dubbed GeoSat. Relegated to the back pages of the news because of the reams of print covering our competition with the USSR, little notice was taken of the successful launch of this commercial satellite. By achieving a relatively low orbit, and passing over every part of the globe, GeoSat opened the entire planet to its sensors.

  With the consent of friendly governments, receiving stations had been set up throughout the world, ostensibly as monitoring posts for radio signals from outer space. They were equipped to receive the orbiter’s signals, which were then relayed to Buell's Corporate Headquarters in Southern California’s Culver City.

  It had long been known that signals of a magnetic type emanate through fractures in earth’s crust. As GeoSat circled the earth, it became apparent that the radiation the sensors were picking up over the numerous fault lines was so intense as to make interpretation of the data obtained nearly impossible. That problem was partially overcome when the Cray Research Company came up with a version of their super computer, available to private industry. Without such processing, the readings from the satellite appeared to be massive tangles of magnetic static, punctuated by scattered infrared hot spots.

  It was recognized that the heat in the Earth’s crust indicated volcanic activity, and it was easy to see the magnetic signal complexes radiating from within. Some of the signals were solitary and linear, continuing uninterrupted from a hot spot, and others, complex in form, ringed the volcanic signal. Then there were more complex patterns of these circles, broken by energy radiating away from the source in all directions.

  A linear pattern could be seen in the Pacific’s “Ring of Fire,” with its faults defining the tectonic plates of continents as they ground against or over marine plates, the thinner crust under the seas. There, the great shield volcanoes that had formed in part by that action could be seen in infrared, reminding one of a huge game of “connect the dots.” This pattern could also be seen in the mid-oceanic ridges, such as those making up the Hawaiian Islands, and even in the Atlantic, with the northernmost point being around Iceland. For other areas on earth, the patterns were not as predictably regular, as in the volcanic chain of islands making up much of Java, and certain regions in Africa.

  The participating oil companies had rich information from the satellite, raw as the data was. It was already known that oil deposits did occur along fault lines, as on the Pacific Coast of California, but of the oil found in Africa, aside from the Southern Sudan and the equatorial belt in the west, there seemed few other likely sites. East Africa had largely turned up barren, at least before GeoSat, and this led to a focus on that area once again by oil engineers privy to the satellite data. It was evident that fault lines, especially along the Great Rift Valley, that had been unexplored previously, existed in abundance on that side of the continent, and so it was a prime area to examine more closely.

  The data was being read from the satellite signals by the big computer at the Buell Tool Corporation in Culver City, across Los Angeles from the JPL in Pasadena. Buell had the fastest computer at that time, an early Cray. Even then, there were problems because of its size, and as it ran continuously, there were difficulties with cooling.

  * * *

  How Diana, in Chicago, longed for a warmer climate in which to work, since a cold autumn, nothing like the usual Midwestern Indian summer, promised a particularly frigid winter. She may have been descended from Vikings, but as she shivered much of the time, she fancied that ice and snow must have been the reason why her Norman forebears on her father’s side, and the Swedes on her mother’s, had left Scandinavia.

  An opportunity to finish her doctorate in a warmer location came in the form of a job fair held at the University of Chicago Faculty Club, where Max had invited her to lunch. As she waited for the professor, she was attracted by a display put up by Buell. They were hiring technical writers, and their representative seemed very interested in her. When Max finally arrived, late as usual, his appraising eye still made her uncomfortable. Even after all the time she had spent working with him, she still regarded him with suspicion, concerned that he would ever settle down.

  Over BLT sandwiches and tea, she enthusiastically told him of the job offer from Buell. “Great benefits and salary, and a good chance for advancement. They need people with science and statistics backgrounds, especially.”

  “Diana, hold on a minute. I want to talk to you about staying on with me after you receive your Ph.D. You’ll have a living wage, and probably tenure in the future.”

  “No, Max, I’ve decided to take the job offer on the West Coast. It's a great opportunity, and I’ll have time to finish my dissertation in balmy Southern California. Chicago weather is getting me down. Another winter here and I’ll go bonkers.”

  * * *

  She was hired as a technical writer at Buell, translating the sometimes confusing scientific jargon of the scientists into words that could be understood by all, from the engineers who would be building from the plans, to the accountants in the finance office who would have to assure management that funds were available to cover the costs of the projects.

  Her work was quickly seen as far superior to what they needed. She would append comments and statistics to her work, further clarifying the material. This quickly brought her to the attention of the vice-president of her division, which was engaged in perfecting a reliable ICBM, envisioning the use of the Army’s Redstone Rocket technology.

  Her name came up in one of the weekly breakfast meetings in the boardroom, where over doughnuts and coffee, managers of the various projects would kick around the problems they were facing. The satellite signals were being decoded and interpreted with the aid of the huge computer, but the data obtained needed further analysis. The huge amount of material already being processed had the computer working past its design limits, constantly tripping circuit breakers, leaving little capacity for anything else. That week
they were looking over the files of employees, searching for someone with the expertise needed in that department.

  “Say,” one of the young executives exclaimed, “Here’s someone who has the right expertise. She's a recent hire, Diana Howard, young enough, and nice-looking, too.”

  “Here, lemme see,” another manager said, taking Diana's file. “Hey, look at this letter of recommendation from Chicago extolling her work there.”

  The file made it around the table, bringing the approval of all, except for one skeptic.

  “My experience,” he said, “is that beautiful blondes are rarely bright,” then adding facetiously, “and rarely are they really blondes.”

  “Oh, come off it, Mark, how can that last fact be important?” It was the man who first came across the file. “Examine her credentials before you turn thumbs up or down because of her looks. Her background is English. Plenty of natural blondes in that part of the world. Now look at her resume. An honors graduate of Cambridge University, took her Master’s there, and great recommendations. A dumb blonde? Are you kidding?”

  The chap across the table seconded him. “That gal’s a virtuoso, which is just what we need for our GeoSat data interpretation. Grab her before someone else does!” Even the somewhat chastened doubter had to agree, and before the day was over, Diana was moving into her own office in the computer wing.

  FIVE

  The Plotters

  The musty office of the Special Security Operative of the Vatican’s Swiss Guards had not received a visitor for more than a week. There was only one window, covered by the dirt and grime of the city. That obscured the view, and barely allowed sufficient light to enable a visitor to distinguish night from day. His oaken desk in the small dark room held only a few papers in its many cubbyholes, leaving ample space for the resident spiders to spin their webs. Most coming onto the scene uninformed would think it was dark humor.

  It was hardly a joke. One look at the man himself would immediately kill any impression of humor. His eyes, an unusual silvery-gray, seemed to give off a luminosity. He had oily black hair and swarthy skin, with a long beak-like nose over thin pale lips that, even at rest, revealed his pointed canine teeth. His height was concealed by a marked stoop, almost a coiling, and his muscular arms ended in grotesquely large claw-like hands. By the time the caller’s eyes adjusted to the gloom, it seemed as if the operative was some unusual predator, ready to spring.

  Armando Celestre. He didn’t look Swiss, and he wasn’t, but he had become fluent in most of the European tongues, and the Italian he spoke was that of southern Switzerland. Actually, he had been born in Sicily of a large peasant family. Grotesque in appearance, he had always been somewhat of an outcast, even among his many siblings.

  This combination of alienation by his peers, coupled with his having excelled academically, brought him early to the attention of the local Mafia. When they had approached his father regarding recruiting him to their ranks, the parental reaction was, of course, ambivalent. They had parental love for him, although he was a source of friction in the family and with the villagers. And he was so young. But you couldn’t refuse such an offer, the Mafia being what it was. Besides, he would be guaranteed an otherwise unobtainable higher education.

  The Mafia had not always been the criminal organization that reached its peak in Sicily, and which thrives even today. It was first organized by mainland Italians, in resistance to the Napoleonic incursions into their homeland. At first confined to isolated regions in the mountains and islands such as Sardinia and Corsica, it became a thorn in the side of Napoleon’s generals. The name “Mafia,” in fact, was originally an acronym for what now might be called a corporate mission statement. Morte Alla Francia, Italia Anelia. (Death to the French, Italy Cries.) After the French withdrew, and Garibaldi finally unified Italy, the organization lost its original high purpose. Its members in certain areas, especially in Southern Italy and Sicily, elected not to disband but to seek other areas of profit. In time, their power brought the usual result: corruption.

  Celestre was earmarked early for infiltration into the Church hierarchy, and so received a most Catholic education. After graduation from the Jesuit University of Sicily, he moved to Rome, studying as a novitiate for the priesthood and teaching as a scholastic at the university there. After being ordained, he applied for a position as chaplain to the Swiss Guard at the Vatican. It was quickly seen that his appearance better suited him to the enforcement arm, undercover rather than in uniform. Such a position was fine with him. After all, his mission wasn’t really a spiritual one anyway. Violence in different forms had become second nature for him as he had grown up in the Mafia organization.

  Pope Pius

  World War II began in 1939, just a few months after a new Pope, Pius XII, took the Crook of St. Peter in Rome. He would reign until his death in 1958. Long before he was even a Cardinal, he had been trying to appease Germany’s Adolf Hitler as Papal Nuncio, the Vatican’s Ambassador to Munich and Berlin. He had risen through the ranks, strengthening the doctrine of Papal infallibility, authority in which he himself would later bask.

  Born in 1876 north of Rome as Eugenio Pacelli, after ordination he was trained in law. Following the First World War, his greatest fears concerned a Communist takeover of the defeated Germany. Later, as Papal Nuncio, his mission was to preserve Catholicism in that country, but also to suppress godless Marxism. The Vatican certainly knew the power of the Church there, which in the previous century had defeated the powerful Chancellor Bismarck’s attempts to encroach on their rights. More than half of Germany was Catholic, after all.

  But now, the preservation of the Church took precedence over the rights of the people. As the Pope’s representative, he negotiated an agreement known as The Reich Concordat. To aid in the fight against Communism, no longer would Catholics in Germany play any role in the politics of that country. This meant that there would be no organized resistance to Nazi policy and tactics. In return, they were assured that the Reich would not interfere with the Vatican. The consequences were unintended. The Concordat actually aided Hitler’s rise to power by helping silence the opposition.

  Pacelli was not alone among those in the Church’s undemocratic power structure. There was much admiration for Europe’s dictators. In the Vatican, the top of the monolithic pyramid of international Catholicism, the Pope was most certainly a leader as autocratic as Mussolini, Salazar, and Franco, all dictators of Catholic countries.

  As Pius the Twelfth, despite his esthetic demeanor, he was intoxicated by his new power. But when it appeared that all Europe would be engulfed by the Nazi legions, he became frightened of Hitler. With the Nazi conquest of overwhelmingly Roman Catholic Poland soon after he was elected Pontiff, he became more concerned for the Church’s flocks than ever. The Nazi dictator was threatening to become even greater than the Church.

  So great had the Pope’s fears about Hitler’s intent become that, at the onset of the war, he began to entertain thoughts of having Hitler eliminated. It was at his direction that reorganization of the Vatican’s Swiss Guard to include men of more than ceremonial training was carried out. A new spy agency to infiltrate “Areas of Need” was organized. This, of course, had to be done in secret under the watchful eye of the Fascist authorities surrounding his little hundred-acre enclave who were also watching the numerous religious institutions that dotted the Roman scene.

  This need was the opportunity for the Mafia to further insinuate itself into the fabric of the Roman Church, and the means by which Celestre came to be the denizen of that poorly-lit little office. But throughout the war, Italy was bottled up not only by the Allies, but also by its fellow Axis partner, the Germans. Vatican spies remained therefore largely ineffective, mostly cooped up at home.

  There had thus been little enforcement work for the unhandsome priest. He had always remained behind the scenes at receptions given by the Pontiff, or in the crowd, his men in plainclothes during the Papal addresses. It was not until 1957, the
year before the Pope’s death, when an unusual new threat to the Church was perceived. Word leaked back to Rome that data from GeoSat had pinpointed a huge focus of radiation in a region in East Africa otherwise barren of such activity. The Roman Catholic missionary presence there was being undercut by several of the newer Evangelical Protestant offshoots. The African natives seemed to take to the methods of the Pentecostals and other “Charismatic” sects, with their singing, dancing and speaking in tongues that mimicked the natives’ own rituals, even if the lessons they taught didn’t match their ancient Animistic beliefs.

  Rumors started by the findings of GeoSat had led to speculation that relics of a godless or pagan people might be uncovered there, leading to further defections and other complications. That was enough to send a spy to observe, and if need be, to guard the Church’s theological interests. An alien pantheistic or atheistic belief could not be tolerated in this area of Africa that was marked for the expansion of Catholicism.

  The Mafia had a different interest in the expedition, and when Celestre reported to them, not only was approval given, but additional armed help at the scene was promised. No telling what riches such an expedition might uncover.

  The KGB

  Intelligence regarding GeoSat had always been thoroughly monitored in Moscow. The KGB, the secret police of the USSR, created an entire new office to deal with that. Spies were deployed in the U.S. to learn more of the technology involved, and in addition, one of their operatives was detailed to follow developments at the scene of the most intriguing location, East Africa.

  Sergei Dragunov, still a young man in his late thirties, was tall, muscular and clean-cut. With glacial-blue eyes set under a shock of flaxen hair, he was built like an Olympic athlete. Looks were deceiving, in his case. He had been carefully trained from an early age in both espionage and the art of liquidation in the super-secret school of the KGB’s more murderous predecessor, the NKVD, organized for that purpose. The NKVD had been started under the direction of Joseph Stalin in 1943 during what the Soviets called the “Great Patriotic War.” After the bloody conflict, at that despot’s direction, its agents were turned loose in the conquered territories to identify facilities and goods worthy of shipping back to Mother Russia.