“Not much daylight remaining.” Vosnesensky’s voice sounded as remote and unemotional as a computer.
Jamie glanced up, then leaned a booted foot against the rock wall to turn himself around in the harness. His leg flared into a million pinpricks. Hanging in the harness, both legs had gone asleep. Jamie muttered and cursed to himself as he flailed his legs and wiggled his toes to get some circulation going again. He felt as if a whole colony of ants were gnawing at his legs.
“What is it?” Vosnesensky’s voice was suddenly urgent. “Are you all right?”
“My goddam legs are asleep,” Jamie answered.
“I will pull you up.”
“No… it’ll be okay in a minute or so. I want to get down to that third tier, where the yellow stuff is.”
“Time is getting short.”
“Isn’t it always?” Jamie looked out across the vast chasm, saw the shadows creeping toward him. “We’ve got another hour, at least.”
“One hour,” said Vosnesensky, with implacable finality.
“Yeah. Okay.”
Jamie pushed the sample bag into the pouch strapped to his right thigh, next to his fetish, then started to reach up to the keypad on his chest that controlled the winch. And froze.
His eyes caught a dark rift in the cliff wall a kilometer or more off to his left, a horizontal cleft with a flat floor and a slightly bulging overhang of rock above it. Like the cleft at Mesa Verde where the ancient ones had built their village of dried mud bricks.
And there were buildings in the cleft.
Jamie felt the breath rush out of him, felt his insides go hollow, drop away as if he had been suddenly pushed off the edge of the tallest mountain in the universe.
They can’t be buildings, a part of his mind insisted. Yet as he stared he could make out square shapes, walls, towers. There was no haze to obscure his vision; the air was as clear as a polished mirror at this level.
Fumbling at his belt without taking his eyes from the vision, Jamie found the video camera clipped there and yanked it free. He banged it against his visor, his head jolting back in surprise, then held it steady and adjusted its telescopic lens.
His hands were shaking so badly all he could see at first was a blurry jumbled image. Fiercely, snarling inwardly, Jamie forced himself to a desperate calm, like a frightened man who knows he must aim his gun accurately or be killed.
The dark cleft in the rocks steadied and pulled itself into sharp focus. Deep inside it, well into the shadows of the overhang, Jamie saw the flat surfaces and crenellated outline of whitish rocks.
He was icy cold now. They’re rocks, he told himself. Not buildings. Just a formation of rocks that look roughly like walls and towers made by intelligent creatures.
And yet.
Jamie cranked the lens to its fullest magnification, then squeezed the camera’s trigger until its tiny beeping told him the cassette had been used up. Only then did he take the vidcam from his eyes.
“I’m coming up,” he said, shouting even though the microphone built into his helmet was bare centimeters from his lips.
Vosnesensky sounded surprised. “Is something wrong?”
“No, Mikhail, nothing’s wrong. Something’s right.”
“What? What did you say?”
It took more than fifteen minutes for the winch to lift him back to the rim of the canyon. Jamie had not realized he had traversed so far down. He spent the time trying to see more of the cleft, trying to convince himself not to let his imagination run loose, trying to stay calm and not babble once he got up there with the Russian again.
From the rim he could not see the cleft. As he shrugged himself out of the harness he said hurriedly to Vosnesensky, “Get into the rig, Mikhail. Quick! There’s something down there you’ve got to see.”
“Me? Why…”
“No time for discussion,” Jamie urged as he slipped the harness over the Russian’s fire-red backpack and started buckling it across his chest.
Puzzled, reluctant, Vosnesensky pulled the thigh straps tight and clicked them to the locking mechanism on his chest while Jamie reloaded the camera.