4. Echoes of the Present
“Are we getting a signal now?” Jodi asked, having adjusted the reception parameters again and checked the fifth probe’s functioning.
“We get signal,” I said in a monotone. “Main screen turn on.”
“You run through that stupid routine once more, wise guy, and all your mouth is belong to duct tape.”
“What you say???”
“I mean it!”
“Anybody want a peanut?”
“C’mon, Clint, stop the comedy, I want to see if this works!”
“So do I,” I said seriously. “I was making the last adjustments. You do the honors.”
It had been, for me, a tense couple of days, as she’d seemed almost on the edge of asking questions I couldn’t have dodged well, and they had assuredly been active. Like asking about the steel shutters, which we’d explained with older history about local feuds and some later paranoia born of the Cold War and survivalist themes. Fortunately she’d been with Mamma, talking nonstop about dresses and color schemes, when Jonah had come running in to me and Father to give us the news about the hole in the storage shed and the concrete all going missing. I’d made a virtue of that necessity, heading into town with Jodi so we could be together while picking up the concrete—and while Father and Adam fixed the shed so it looked okay. After getting the road repaired the last two days—well, making new road, really—Jodi and I had finally gotten around to setting up SUITS, the Subterranean Ultra-Infrasonic Tracking System.
“Here goes,” she said. “Igor, throw the switch!”
The screen flickered, then began to show a multicolored jumble of lines and dots all over the place. There was a big central blob, some dark and light areas, and so on. To a layman, it would look like a modern art piece, but we could tell there was some kind of structure there. “Oooooooy vey,” Jodi moaned. “Look at that, the signal’s such total schmootz I can’t make out anything.”
“Hey, don’t worry. That’s the raw signal. Looks like the gadget’s working just fine. I just have to clean up the signal. I could do averaging, but if we’re looking for individual signals that might really screw up things.”
“We’re sampling at two GS,” she pointed out. “We could probably take five, ten and average them without losing too much, unless all the signal we want is on the really high limit.”
I nodded. “Probably. And it’s already sorting by band . . . maybe I can take each band separately and focus on individual strong-signal regions.”
We started fiddling with the various algorithms I’d already coded into SUITS. Slowly a more clear-cut image began to appear on the screen, although it would have been no less arcane to a layman.
Jodi stared at it. “What sort of cockamamie signal is that?”
I had to admit it had me stumped too. There was a huge zone under the Hollow that was . . . different. Signals changed going through it. I tried some analysis on it. “Dense. Really, really, really dense, Jodi. Specific gravity over five, at least.”
“Totally meshuggeneh, Clint. There’s almost no natural rock even close to that density, except—” Suddenly she stood and stared around her. Then she bent back to the display. “Clint, look—gimme a better look at some of the signals coming in from here. Yeah. Now, what’s that say to you?”
I was starting to get her drift. “I think I see. That’s why the Hollow looks like it does.”
“One big mass of nickel-iron. Your Hollow is a meteor crater.”
“Darned if you ain’t right.” I caught myself before commenting on how much sense everything made now.
“And look here, around the area—these deader spots. Clint, I think you’ve got caves running through your property!”
Ice seemed to pierce my heart. I tried to act casual. “Where?”
“Look. You know there’s karst all over around here, it isn’t unlikely. Isn’t this part over near the road? Maybe that’s why it slid, some kind of small cave-in or sinkhole.”
She wasn’t far wrong, of course. “Yeah, that would make sense.”
“Maybe there’s even an entrance around somewhere!”
“I’d think we’d have found it in the past few centuries.”