Earth Cult (24 page)

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.

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.'

‘But the level of the water didn't reach the head of the mine,' Helen said, distraught.

The engineer shook his head. ‘It doesn't have to. The tunnel they were in is nearly a mile underground, and with that volume of water in the Valley there must be a hundred access points leading to the lower level. I'm sorry, but there it is – the Telluride Mine is flooded right up to the brim. Anyone in there is not only underground but underwater as well.'

Now she looked down on the bright orange steelwork above the mine-head, the helplessness so strong inside her that she felt physically sick. What if a miracle had occurred and they had managed to find a pocket of air, enough to keep them alive until a rescue team got to them? It was still possible, wasn't it? Why couldn't these people do something instead of sitting here on the side of the mountain in the
clear morning sunlight? They were alive, breathing fresh air, while underground there could be four men clinging to the last vestiges of life, counting every breath and praying it wasn't to be their last.

Helen turned her head away from the flooded Valley and looked up towards the gaunt granite peak of the mountain with its light powdering of snow. For once it was free of cloud, standing sharp and black and slab-like against the pale washed blue of the sky. It reminded her of a monolith, a monument of some kind, though she couldn't think of what event or person it had been erected to commemorate.