They all looked, and for a moment there was a jiggly freeze-frame of the crater and smoke cloud. Then they saw the picture flip, angle dizzyingly from one side to the other as the plane got into position, then zoom straight in. The picture was bouncy but clear enough. They saw the smoke flash past and, for a very brief moment, were looking straight down through billowing white smoke and rain.
“There! Did you all see it?” Terry asked them. “It looks like something dark, something black, straight down as we went over, with bright stuff all around it.”
“Sorry, it was so fast,” Lori responded apologetically.
The picture stopped, and Gus rewound the tape.
“Hold it!” Terry shouted. “No, up a little more. Frame advance. There! Hold it!”
The picture was still jumpy and distorted, but they could now all see just what the control room back in the States had noticed. Through the smoke, the red and yellow glow of the crater was visible, if not completely clear. Right in the center of the glowing mass was a black shape, distorted and indistinct but still some sort of regular form.
“I couldn’t guess,” Lori told them. “I’d need a much clearer photo than that to really say much of anything about it. It could be a different mineral, much harder than the surrounding rock, that has a higher melting point and maybe is already cooled down, or a fissure in whatever’s left of the meteor, or a trick of the light.”
“I don’t know meteors, but pictures I know,” Gus said firmly. “That’s no trick of the light. Something’s down there.”
Maklovitch looked back at Campos. “Any way in there? To land, I mean.”
“This plane? No, senor. Nothing, even if it would have survived that blast. And there are no roads in this region of any sort. On foot—days under the best of conditions.”
“You have a helicopter at the ranch,” the pilot called back. “I saw it on the field back there. What about that?”
Campos shook his head. “No, no, no. That is our private helicopter. Besides, if you could not even safely fly this plane through that smoke and the storms, flying a helicopter in there close would be suicide!”
“I flew choppers in hairier conditions than that in the Marine Corps,” the pilot replied. “Thunderstorms, sandstorms, and under fire. It wouldn’t be a big deal, I don’t think, particularly if we’re allowing another hour or two for things to calm down.”
“No, no, no!” Juan Campos shouted. “It is out of the question!”
“It may be,” Terry said, “but even as we speak, my boss is on the phone to your father, and it looks like we might just have a deal.” She paused. “Of course, you don’t have to come if you don’t want to.”
Even Lori thought the idea bordered on madness. “It’s pretty dangerous,” she noted, “and you’ll get better pictures, as well as better conditions, after daylight.”
“That’s true,” Terry agreed, “but we don’t know how long after daylight the first choppers will be arriving from elsewhere, full of geologists and astronomers and military people and bureaucrats—”
“Not to mention NBC, ABC, CBS, CBC, the BBC, and maybe Fox, God help us,” Maklovitch put in. “In this business being first is everything. That’s why folks watch us and advertisers pay top dollar—we can do things like this the others can’t. Nobody remembers the second newsman into Kuwait City.”
“Forrest Sawyer, ABC,” Terry responded instantly. “We were third!”
“Okay, nobody outside the business remembers. But we remember most that we were third. It’s the name of the game. Not that we’re trying to commit suicide. If Bob there wasn’t sure he could get us in and out in one piece, I don’t think we’d risk it ourselves. If you’re really against it, you can stay behind, but if we can put this together, you’d be invaluable on the scene.”
Lori thought a moment about remaining behind with all those ruthless men on the drug lord’s ranch and wondered which was more dangerous. “I’ll go,” she told him, wondering if she was in fact being stupid.
“Good girl! Oops! Sorry, Doc. No offense,” the newsman added.
“That’s all right.” Mother always said I should be a good girl. I just want to know if I’m being a dumb broad by doing this.
“You seem certain my father will say yes,” Juan Campos noted.
“We plan for a yes. If it’s no, we haven’t lost anything,” the newsman told him.
“Even if he agrees, the helicopter carries only six and not much cargo,” the gunman pointed out. “With you, your pilot, your cameraman, the two senoritas, and a sound man, it will be full.”
“He’s got a point there,” the pilot, Bob, agreed. “We’re not gonna be able to truck in a suitcase unit or much of anything except a hand-held.”
The newsman thought a moment. “All right, then, we’ll try two trips. Terry, you can handle Gus’s sound, right?”
“In a pinch, sure.”
“All right. A suitcase, Terry, Gus, me, and the doc.”
“What’s a ‘suitcase unit’?” Lori asked, puzzled.
“A portable uplink,” Gus replied. “It’s actually a kit in the form of three large suitcases. You can put it together with battery power and have it sending pictures and sound to a comsat in under an hour. The foreign correspondent’s constant companion since it was invented.”
They had the agreement by the time they landed, but, looking over the helicopter, they discovered that it wasn’t as large as they’d hoped. When the suitcase unit was added, it left room for five, but only by a whisker.
Juan Campos wasted no time at all calling in from a dedicated phone at the aircraft parking area. When he returned, he did not look all that happy.
“My father, he says that I must go with the helicopter,” he told them. “This time it is not my idea!”
“He’s right,” Maklovitch told them. “I just spoke to him myself on the same line. Mr. Campos is a little nervous about somebody taking up the chopper without one of his men along to see that we go only where we’re supposed to go and shoot just what we’re here to shoot, particularly since we’ll probably be gone well into daylight and they do expect others from the Brazilian side there not long after that. There was no talking him out of it; either Campos here goes or it’s no deal.”
It didn’t need to be spelled out. After daylight in particular, coming in on this side of the border would reveal some sights camouflaged from routine aerial or satellite surveillance. If they saw them, it wasn’t any big deal, since they couldn’t be sure of their exact location. But no pictures. No more blackmail possibilities or nice photos for experts and their computers to mull over.
“With the suitcases, that leaves only five seats, including the pilot,” Terry noted, not at all pleased by this turn of events. Flying into a disaster area fraught with sudden dangers and possible horrors didn’t faze her, it seemed, but the idea of being stuck out in the middle of nowhere with Juan Campos sure did. “Who stays?”
“Well, I want you and Gus out there setting up and getting what you can,” Maklovitch told her. “They want me to do some more standups here and an initial wrap piece, so it looks like I come out with the second flight. They’re not at all sure if we can uplink with the rain, so you’ll need the extra setup time. I’ll bring a sound man and Brazil network people with me on the second ride. We’ll be in contact by radio.” He edged closer to her and added in a low whisper, “Besides, he’s got to come back with Bob to ensure he flies right.”
Terry nodded. “Okay, then. Doc, you want to come with us now or wait for the second run? It’s probably going to be pretty wet and rough out there, but if you want to come along, feel free. At least you’ll be the first person with any scientific training at all to see the thing.”
Lori didn’t like it, but she knew she had to go. “I’m coming. Nobody in the history of known science has been able to get this close to an impact of this magnitude so soon. What about rain gear?”
“Senorita Doctor,” Juan Campos said, “you could wear anything you wished and it would not help when the rain falls. Even with little wind, the rain is so strong and so powerful, it cannot be described but must be experienced. Best to seek shelter when it starts, dress light except for the mud boots, and have one or more dry changes of clothes packed away.”
“Well, we don’t have any rain slickers, anyway,” Gus noted. “Got some wide hats that’ll help and a couple of umbrellas, for all the good they’ll do, but that’s it.”
“We’ll manage,” Lori said, not at all certain that it was true. “I’ve been drenched before.”
Once up in the air, they didn’t need a map to find where to go even in the darkness of the jungle. There were still fires burning all around, and the eerie yellow glow from the crater seemed almost like some great aircraft beacon.
“What’s causing that pulsing?” Terry asked the scientist. “I mean, I don’t know much about this, but that’s not normal, is it?”
“Nobody quite knows what’s ‘normal’ in a situation like this, but I can’t explain it and wouldn’t have expected it. It could be rapid heating and cooling, but it seems almost too regular for that. That’s one of the things we might be able to find out if we can get close enough.”
“Looks pretty promising,” Bob told them. “There’s still lightning and thunderstorms all around, but the area immediately around the crater looks like just smoke from the thing itself.”
“The white smoke coming from it now is probably mostly steam,” Lori told them. “Groundwater or runoff from the storm is going down the crater, hitting that very hot bottom, and instantly coming back up.”
“Kind of like a geyser,” Gus said, nodding.
“Something like that. Or a fumarole. That’s a relative of the geyser that erupts constantly, spouting steam with a roar. It may be days, weeks, even longer before the crater is cool enough to allow people to descend, although the scientific teams probably have moon suits and could do it in a matter of a day or so. They go into still-active volcanic calderas in them.”
“Too bad we don’t have any of those suits in the budget,” Gus commented. “I’d like to get a down-the-throat shot.”
They were quite close now, close enough to see the strange yellow-gold shape at the bottom, even though that bottom was a quarter of a mile deep and still shrouded in steam.
“Funny,” Terry said, looking at the unearthly scene. “I don’t see that dark spot now. Maybe you were wrong, Gus. Maybe it was just a trick of the camera.”
“Not like that,” Gus maintained. “There’s nothin’ to cause that kind of thing.” He frowned. “I tell you, Terry, if that thing opens up and some Martian machine pops out, I’m runnin’!”
“I’m more curious as to why the crater isn’t deeper,” Lori commented. “It’s amazingly shallow for something that large coming in at that kind of speed.”
“Looks plenty big enough to me,” Gus replied.
“Sure, but the velocity at impact had to be close to Mach 3, maybe more. You crash anything going at close to three thousand kilometers per hour and you’re going to get one whale of a deep hole. With an object twenty, maybe thirty meters across or more—it was very hard to tell—the crater should be many times deeper than it is. There are a lot of unexpected phenomena here. Enough, I’m afraid, to shake up several disciplines. They’ll be years figuring this thing out! And that firestorm—it shouldn’t have happened. An asteroid’s just a huge piece of rock, and there’s nothing in the jungle to ignite or explode that way. There must have been some sort of gas or explosive material that went up on impact. This is a very strange thing, indeed, we have here.”
“Like that place in Siberia you were talking about?” Terry asked.
“As mysterious as that, only very different in the phenomena. At least this time we’re on the scene.” She sighed. “I wish I had some instruments here. At least I could take initial measurements. It might be nice to know if this area’s now radioactive, for example.”
“Radioactive!” Gus exclaimed nervously. “You mean we might be going into something like that?”
“It’s possible. We don’t really know what’s orbiting out there in space.” Another cheery thought, that comes too late, she mused to herself.
Terry looked down at what was rapidly resembling a moonscape. “Think any natives are down there? I heard all sorts of stories about some of these tribes.”
“Impossible!” Juan Campos responded. “You see it. What could have lived through that impact, not to mention the firestorm?”
“I wouldn’t be too sure of that,” Bob noted. “I’ve seen bombardments so thick you couldn’t believe a gnat could live through it, but when they went in afterward an amazing number of people were still alive and in fighting shape afterward. You never know. Still, I’d think that any of the primitives alive in these parts are still running. To them, this had to feel like the end of the world. It’s possible to live through a bombardment, but those who have say it’s the most terrifying thing imaginable, and they knew what was going on. Imagine how afraid these savages must be with no idea of what was going on.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve seen that sort of thing, too,” Gus admitted. “But I ain’t so sure about the reaction. I wish we’d brought along a couple of those guns.”
“You would never be able to use them, senor,” Campos said matter-of-factly. “The Indians would not be seen until they wished to be seen. The darts in their blowguns are tipped with poisons and sharp enough to go through clothing, and they are accurate. These people also know what guns do and will guard against them. There may be a tribe or two that still are ignorant of the outside world, but I doubt it. They just do not like our world and ways, rejecting them in favor of the jungle and their own ancient life-style. But I think our pilot friend is right. This would have frightened them and awed them far too much for them to become curious. In a few days, or weeks, they might investigate, but not right off.”