The Beirbeek Proposition

THE BEIRBEEK PROPOSITION
Where it all begins
CHAPTER 1
May 14th
“Go right in please, Mr Jamison, the other members are already here awaiting you.” He had just closed the doors on leaving his private office, behind him, having showered, exchanged his travel soiled shirt and suit for fresh clothes after his flight in. His secretary moved to direct his attention to the double walnut doors he had installed just two years earlier, he was still impressed by the effect he had achieved. His black, highly shined, very expensive, soft leather loafers moved silently over the Italian marble floor of her office.

He had chosen the fixtures for his secretary’s front office with great care so as to create a breathtaking vista as the huge, solid walnut, double width doors opened. With them closed, his secretary’s office was in keeping with the rest of the eighteenth century Georgian mansion that housed it, still with the original wood paneling. Where any required original was not already owned by the Company or could not be bought, replicas, created with period tools, aged materials and skilled craftsmen, had been substituted. Mainly for the soft furnishings and wall coverings.

He walked toward the doors and his secretary started them opening while still sat at her writing table. The doors passed from the top floor of Beirbeek’s two hundred year old Headquarters into his addition. The first expansion the old Beirbeek Mansions had undergone in its history. It was also the first time the Company had allowed any changes to the fabric of its original building.

The doors swung outwards, away from his walking figure, into the new Boardroom, barely grazing the deep pile of the carpeted floor and adding a counterpoint to his heels clicking over the marble floor as he crossed the threshold and revealed a wide open space with a large, pure white, marble topped table well capable of accommodating a good ten more seats than the allotment for the twenty people currently around it in both comfort and style. Each seat was a large and sumptuous, black leather, high backed swivel armchair. Each seat but one was occupied. His seat lay at the head of the table in the room. For all its open aspect, it was, most definitely, a room. Three sides of the area had been contained within glass, the same type as the ceiling. And again, for all its apparent openness and transparency, the room was possibly the most secure location in the western world.

The Board had authorised the spending of many millions of dollars on the security for the new extension. From inside the room its occupants felt as if they had been set down on a roof in a warm, in an almost tropical, climate. From outside the glass was opaque and, should you be so inclined you could observe that the glass is also, continuously vibrating. This prevented any eavesdropping by laser, as it relies on reading the variations of the glass vibrating in response to the sound from inside the room. This broke up the constant surface required for sound to be transmitted.

Short of listening devices actually placed in the room itself, observed from outside the room was sound dead. To prevent anyone with the desire to plant a listening device from doing so, the room is continuously swept electronically when empty, and only trusted employees are admitted, even when the room is occupied. The only keys into the room are held by the twenty one current occupants of the room and apart from the Chief Executive Officer, any other keys must be used in groups of five. Any five keys from the remaining twenty have to be present to allow safe entry.

“Good afternoon gentlemen.” Peter Jamison greets his fellow directors of Beirbeek Incorporated (1786) as he strolled the length of the table to his chair at its head. “Some of you have not previously seen how our money has been spent within this new extension.” His arm moves around the room as though inviting comment on a colour scheme of a communal area. “I trust you are all pleased.” Although it was a statement and not a question, the other members of the Board signified the strength of their approval by gently tapping the ends of the slim, platinum barrelled, ball pens, that sat by the pad in front of each seat, on the table before them.

After about five seconds of enthusiastic tapping Jamison held up a hand for calm to be restored to the room.

“If we are satisfied with the security arrangements, shall we proceed. Mr Hopkins, I believe, has some words for us.”

Nobody rose but the chairs and their occupants turned away from the head of the table and politely faced a man sat three quarters of the way round. “I have placed reports before you in the past few days and I trust you have the time to read them. I fear our friend in Caracas is becoming greedy. I feel he is about to reduce his output and that could lead to supply challenges down the line. Our throughput of industrial diamonds can absorb a delay, not a suspension. My team estimates six weeks worth in storage and two more shipments due to us from Peru and that would be that. We shall only have our legitimate supplies to fall back on. Your suggestions please.”

Obviously this was a matter of Company Policy, Mr Jamison still held the floor for the answer. “I think its time for Mr Buckholtz to bring security in on this one, it may help us see a solution if our eyes are wide open to all possible options. We have a number of, shall we say ‘sensitive’ projects in that area, and around the Amazon basin, that I personally would hate to see compromised by that little bandit. I could follow my father’s reasoning in most things but I still fail to see why he dragged us into Columbia.”

Beirbeek Inc. had started life in the mid seventeen hundreds as a diamond cutting house in The Netherlands. Due to very wise and cautious management the Company grew in less than a century from cutting stones owned by other people to owning some of the mines the diamonds came from. Copper, zinc, gold and silver mining all had their place in the modern Beirbeek. As did oil, timber and beef. The Company issued one hundred thousand shares in eighteen seventeen to private individuals in private offers. Sixty three percent of those original shares were held by the people in the Boardroom. The remaining thirty seven percent were held by eight hundred very wealthy families scattered about the globe. Beirbeek Incorporated was a vast private company with its Registered Office just a post box address, since eighteen seventeen, in Delaware U.S.A. Due to the laws that governed limited liability companies in that state there is no requirement for any disclosure of a full list of shareholders outside the Directors of the Company.

The last remaining male Beirbeek family member, Johannes, the great, great grandson of the Founder, had been appointed to the Board in eighteen fifty two. By eighteen sixty one Johannes had grown bored with business and he had appointed, or perhaps ‘anointed’ is a more accurate description, one Peter Jamison as his deputy and successor. Johannes Beirbeek had an unfortunate, from the Company’s view point, preference for young male company. As he was the last member, male or female, of the original Beirbeek family that had started the business, his position within the Company would be passed to his appointed successor.

Beirbeek had been owned from its inception by families. Should any family die out still holding shares in the company, as it was with Johannes Beirbeek himself, those shares revert back to the company with no financial recompense due to the estate. With no remaining members, the extinct family’s assets revert to the state, unless willed to someone. Then those shares reacquired are apportioned out to the remaining families according to their current holdings. Except that Johannes’ grandfather had foreseen the possible need to appoint a new captain for the good ship Beirbeek and enshrined the requirement to appoint the new Managing Officer scenario in the Company’s constitution. Until this bloodline died out, Beirbeek Incorporated would be controlled by a Jamison. Just as it had been since Johannes Beirbeek ended his family bloodline’s association with the Company by dying ‘without issue’.

The small light above the oversized doorway flashed discreetly as it announces someone outside. As he knew who he was expecting, Jason Buckholtz rises to open the door. The Buckholtz family have provided the position of Director of Security since the family’s adoption to the Board, in nineteen forty seven, after World War Two due to an unforeseen tragedy. Caught out at sea on his yacht in a tsunami, the Director from Japan and his entire family were, unfortunately, lost at sea.

The Buckholtz family had worked for Beirbeek’s inside Germany of the Twenties and Thirties, both under a democratic government as well as under Herr Hitler, to secure the Company’s European and White Russian assets in German held or controlled territory before any hostilities broke out. The Buckholtz family actually succeeded in increasing the Company’s major European assets during the War, managing to ring fence them within shell companies and blind trusts based outside of the conflict torn Europe involved with War, brilliantly covering their involvement in the Nazi cause and emerging without taint of either themselves or the Company. Well earning the additional shares that the Buckholtz family were allotted, from the holdings returned to the Company by the deceased family, as a reward in the post war years as well as Jason’s father filling the vacancy of Security Director when it arose in nineteen forty seven.

It was Jason’s first visit to the new extension. He had heard much about it from his fellow Directors, who had been over and inspected the building works during and after construction, when they got together while holidaying at the same hotel or walking on the same beach, and that had been it. He read all the documents that had been put out for Board approval and signed them all as a matter of course. He knew, intimately, all the security details but this was his first summons to a full Board Meeting in the new extension.

As he walked silently through the carpet across to the doors, he had to admit to himself that he was very definitely impressed. Overawed could have been a more accurate description of his feelings, but belonging to and having been brought up in the world that was occupied by the Board of the Company and their shareholders, as yet Jason Buckholtz did not understand the word ‘overawed’. As his hand reached out to touch the twenty four inch long, solid gold, door handle, there was no crude door knob, the doors began the silent swing inwards.

Cyril Pyke stood awaiting admittance on the threshold. Although he knew very little about the Company’s business, he knew the Company’s security needs, and some of the people the company dealt with, inside out. Unknowingly, during the planning of the extension, Mr. Pyke had held the final word on the security for the new extension to Headquarters during its construction. He knew it now and his undisclosed numbered bank account in Banc National Du Suisse in Berne reflected how highly Beirbeek placed his loyalty.

The extension had been in the planning for five years before a single sod was turned. For Mr. Pyke, employed originally as an advisor on internal security, had taken four years to gain sufficient stature in the Company to even get a look at the blueprints covering his side of the works for the new wing. Even then, the drawings that had been made available to him had only contained information that had been directly relevant to his part of the security outline with the detail that would only interest him. It had been all of twelve months after the entire construction had been commissioned and handed over by the construction company, incidentally owned by Beirbeek, that Mr C. Pyke gained his promotion and found out just how highly the Company thought of him and his ideas. All of his suggestions he put forward with his reports on security matters had been taken up and had worked. Now he actually saw the inside of the end result. He was overawed. He was also, eventually to be fatally, overcome with a sense of his own importance.

Peter Jamison walked forward toward Jason’s guest and held his hand out in the direction of the cold buffet and hot or cold drinks amassed against the only solid wall in the room, as they met. “Please Cyril, help yourself. There are no outsiders allowed in this room. No servants or waiters, so, by all means, help yourself to whatever is there. Then please have a seat and relax. We would appreciate your listening in on our discussions. Your comments at the end would be very helpful.” His moving hand guided Pyke’s eyes to a bank of seats, across the floor, almost hidden by green plants. Peter Jamison’s usually quiet authoritative voice sounded much softer than its normal, somewhat authoritative, timbre. Pyke realised how well his sound deadening devices, that had been installed as the last act before final decoration, in the room were working.

“Well Mr. Pyke, your work is indeed impressive. I am sure the rest of the Board will concur. There is a bonus for you on your next bank statement. We hope it will go some way to express a little of our overwhelming appreciation for the work you have done and not told anyone else about.” The words were said kindly and hid a very present threat. If the Company required the extent of secrecy that he knew Beirbeek thought that they needed, what was being hidden? Cyril Pyke did not wish, at this time, to know. Even though he had risen far enough in trust to have been invited into the inner sanctum of the Company, he had some idea of the danger he was in of falling a very long way down should he slip up now in his job.

He knew that his initial brief had been to ensure that any conversation held in this room remained private. He also knew how fiercely that privacy would be protected. This was not to be an ordinary employer/employee conversation. He would not be asked about his golf handicap or his children’s education. He had the pleasure of meeting the majority of the men and women in the room at many other formal and informal get-togethers in most of the world’s five star hotels. A number of, what at the time appeared to be, chance but convenient meetings sprang to mind. The Company had kept a careful watch over Mr. Pyke, he understood why and was annoyed with himself for not spotting the correlation between the meetings in the past and something getting done about whatever he had talked about.

“Mr. Pyke.” Peter Jamison gave him time to organise a cup of coffee and seat himself. “We on the Board feel it is time we made more use of the specific skills we employed you for. Your very kind and able assistance in the design of this room has, I hope, been repaid in some small measure by our gratitude. We would like to take your expertise down another route, if we may, and lay out some theoretical situations for you. We would like to consider the solutions that you put forward alongside those from other sources. We hope that you won’t mind being used as a baseline.”

Cyril appreciated the way statements were couched as ‘almost questions’. It incorrectly gave the impression that he had a choice, as though he could hear the proposition through and still say ‘no’.

He sat back and listened to Mr. Jamison then Jason Buckholtz lay down the challenges and what the Company could be expected to do in response. “As you are aware we do not operate in countries. We have to service geographical regions to make our scale of production economically viable. We have a number of ‘sensitive’ experimental projects happening in South America at present that, should anything go wrong then, a domino effect would cause the Company massive losses in the region and that would impact badly on our trade, and the Company’s standing, around the globe.”

“We have many private arrangements with various leaders of malleable, if unstable, governments that we help to shore up because their policies are good for our trade. These alliances are in constant flux as you can imagine, some become greedy while others repress the local populace overly and are chased out of the country. So it serves us well to keep stability in any region where we work. I think we shall start with the area of Latin America and the Amazon basin scenario.”

“We hold the mining and drilling rights to vast swathes of unexplored territory in this area and we have some of the indigenous natives raising doubts over the way we acquired them. Most of the regions in question are uninhabited and uncharted so we do not yet know if there is anything of value on or under the land. If it becomes necessary we can always release beef onto the land after we have extracted the timber, it would take longer to show profit, but in the end even farming produces profits.”

The meeting moved on and Cyril placed his ideas for the solutions of various security issues that could develop from the differing situations. But the main scenario came at the end.

The reason this conversation was happening came because a radar mapping satellite took a series of mapping sequences for Beirbeek’s at a height of ten thousand miles above the Andes Mountains and down to the Amazon Basin as part of a geological survey of the land surface. Blindly the satellite recorded image after image, neither knowing nor caring what it took. Magnetometers recorded fluxes in the earth magnetic fields and this data was sent back to the receiving stations in packet bursts of picture and magnetometer readings to match the location. The receiving station, appreciating the need for sensitive handling of Beirbeek work, passed the data directly onto the Company’s intranet addressed to the main research facility in the Australian desert.

3 Years Earlier
Beirbeek had recruited her at a job market while she was still in university. Her grades were good but not really worthy of the position she had been offered. When she put this to the employment review board at her selection interview the Chair of the panel had made an internal phone call and by the time she had poured a coffee for herself the door into the room opened and her university supervising Professor walked in, he saw her and smiled hugely.

“Professor Wizemann, how kind of you to come straight across and join us. Your pupil is somewhat doubtful of her abilities. She is here being interviewed on your recommendation, would you care to enlighten her as to how highly you think of her.”

Maggie was never told the name of the Chairman of the panel, “Mr Chairman. I’m delighted to be here at your request. I hope that this young lady will join us as she has the finest academic mind I have came across for many years. Although she does not yet know her final grades I can assure Miss Spiers that, even though I will have no influence with your examiners, as far as I am concerned her Doctorate is assured. If our Company employs her, be prepared to pay her what she asks for and more. In two years the Company will be in profit on whatever we pay her.”

He then turns to Maggie, “Ask what you want, Beirbeek will pay it, happily. Come, work with me, you were my best research graduate and you’ll make one hell of a brilliant assistant for our researches. I’m due back at the lab for the conclusion of an experimental run in ten hours so, I’m sorry but, I’ll have to go. I will see you soon.” He bids the Board goodbye and takes his leave. He had been in the room for less than ten minutes. Maggie heard her fate being sealed during that short period of time. After Professor Wizemann had gone so far out on a limb for her, how could she not accept the job on offer with anything less than good grace. She had never thought of herself as being particularly promising. After a few more routine questions and general chatter she was allowed to leave for the car that had been ordered to take her back to the airport. As she walked to the ticket desk for her boarding card, she found that her ticket was upgraded to first class and the cost of her original ticket was to be refunded in full. Beirbeek, it turned out, was a majority shareholder in the airline.

Three days later, having been out for a bike ride in the autumn dusk, she returns to her apartment, on the lower west side, to find a Beirbeek introduction card under her door number. There was a local phone number and a name handwritten on the reverse. As she looked for her keys she came across her mobile phone and started to dial the number on the card as she opened the door. “Horner.” Came the terse reply as the receiver was picked up at the other end. “Good afternoon Mr. Horner, My name is Spiers. I found your introduction card under my door.”

“Yes, Dr Spiers, delighted to hear from you. I’ve heard much about you and I have some documents here in my briefcase for you from Beirbeek. They require your signature and there is some information for you, when can I see you?” As he was talking his voice softened and he sounded more relaxed.

“I’m sorry you had a wasted journey across here before but I have just got back from exercising. If you can give me half an hour I could call out and see you.”

“Dr. Spiers I have instructions to see you. Please do not trouble yourself, I shall happily call back to your apartment in, shall we say, an hour. Please take your time and be comfortable, I am happy to wait till it is convenient for you. I shall only require less than ten minutes of your time.”

“Mr. Horner, I shall have fresh coffee made in an hour and a cup shall be out for you. See you in an hour.” She put the handset down and headed for the shower. She was feeling flattered by the attention Beirbeek was showing her. She instinctively knew that in fifty nine minutes Mr Horner will be pressing her bell. She also knew that a coffee would be on the table. Maggie took every minute available to her and was smartly attired, cool, calm and collected by the time the bell went. Mr Horner was as good as his word.

She walked through to her door from the small kitchen and out of curiosity glanced out of the lounge window and saw a large foreign car parked outside the entry to her apartment block. Mr Horner stood outside the door with his right hand outstretched toward her and a friendly smile. In his other hand he held a dove grey homburg and a grey kidskin slimline briefcase. His dark blue suit was expensively tailored and his white shirt was very white showing the slash of wine red tie off as a counterpoint of colour. His eyes were a soft brown and dark hair turning white with a salt and pepper effect. It gave his hair the appearance of a silver cast contrasting with the evenly tanned skin of his face and free proffered hand. All in all giving the appearance of a very honest and trustworthy person of obviously substantial means.

Mr Horner broke the spell and spoke first. “Dr. Spiers, I am pleased to meet you. May I come in please. Some of the matters we have to discuss could be well be classed under client confidentiality.”

Maggie finally regained the power of movement and accepted his hand to lead him in. “Mr. Horner your coffee is in the cup awaiting cream and sugar. Unless you prefer it black.”

Having guided him into the lounge and left him in front of an armchair she turned and fetched the cup for him. “Black is fine, thank you. I would say it is ‘Blue Mountain’, isn’t it?” Mr Horner had sat and pulled the case up onto his lap and proceeded to unlock it. His grey homburg sat on the seat Maggie had intended to use, in front of him. The clasps clunked open with the sound of solid brass locks. Maggie sat across at forty five degrees from him in an overstuffed lounger covered with a large flower patterned throw, and from where she had been seated she could see the inside of the case was lined with red silk as well as being able to see his hands all the time. It became obvious that he was out to prove that nothing would be hidden from her. He paused to find a small signature card, the kind the banks have you sign as a check on the signature, and he asked if she would mind signing the card first. As she took the slim platinum ball pen from Mr. Horner he began to unpack a number of files and envelopes. All the envelopes had her name on them and were numbered consecutively. None of the files had a title on their sleeves.

As she returned the introduction card into his manicured hand he began to explain the employment package Beirbeek Incorporated was prepared to offer for her exclusive services. As he was talking he found the initial application letter the Beirbeek advisor at the job fair suggested she send in to personnel. He checked the two signatures he now had and smiled broadly showing white even teeth and healthy pink gums. “Thank God that bit is over with. We cannot be too careful over who we offer employment to for our top management positions. I hate getting this far to find out I’m talking to a college football player that had his Pi Kappa Beta brother apply to us for him. Why is it that the ones without any brain think we are all alike. I’m amazed at times with the tricks some people will get up to for a job with us.”

Throughout the time he had been talking he had been nervously shuffling the files and envelopes. As his speech came to an end he also grew bored and stopped playing with the folders, miraculously they had fallen into the exact order he wanted them in for his presentation. Maggie lifted one eyebrow and smiled as she began to understand there was more to this man than she, at first, thought. Every move had either been well rehearsed or had been carried out so often it had become second nature to him and he seemed to appreciate being caught out.

It took Maggie to the final document to find out what her job description actually was. Her first real job was to be Chief Scientist in charge of New Research and Development for Beirbeek. Mr Horner was the Director for Legal Affairs and accidentally she discovered the Chair of her review board had been none other than the big boss Mr. Jamison himself. The next week had involved finding a shipping agent and booking a flight to Australia. Professor Wizemann had moved on and left word to ask Maggie about taking up his gauntlet and his old job.

May 25th
But that had all happened three years ago. Doctor Maggie Spiers had been left in provisional control of the vast station while her boss, Scientific Research Director Jarvis, was away having been recalled to Headquarters for a Board Meeting. With Director Jarvis absent she had been left in control of all the Company’s affairs in Australia and around the Pacific Rim countries. She need do nothing unless an unforeseen disaster arose that none of the department heads could handle. If that happened, she would sort it. On that same day, unnoticed by Maggie, a storm was brewing and people were beginning to panic. One of the data transfer stations had been shut down after the ‘skymap’ project had passed over the Andes Mountains and down the Amazon basin transmitting all it saw back to the station that had shut down. Two short, local calls later she knew why the station had closed down and she was not a happy lady. It had sent pictures of an area that the Company would rather the world not see.

There was something down there that caused the massive anomaly in the returns from an area south and east of the Matto Grosso matching the apparent remains of a collapsed volcano in an area destined for oil extraction, gold and copper mining as well as timber development. After a few more calls, this time to satellite communication dishes and catching the various Directors in assorted activities from being fast asleep to playing golf and ruining their otherwise peaceful day. Having discharged her duty and passed the news up for action, she forgot about it over the next twelve hours that remained of her usual working day.

She had done well, she had been asleep for two whole hours. Blissfully asleep and swimming languidly in the warm, sun kissed, azure waters off Tahiti when the shell she was holding to her ear started to ring. Automatically, as she pulled her feet down through the warm, shallow and very blue water to the sands so golden it looked white in the light, until she could stand to comfortably answer the shell, as the realisation soaked through that this was not normal situation occurred to her, Maggie dropped the shell and stared at it, as it lay half in and half out of the pacific tide gently washing up on the palm tree edged shoreline, for all of five seconds until she realised she was asleep and the ringing was her phone on her bedside table. Even asleep, her hand reached the receiver and her mouth moved before her brain was conscious. “Morning, Maggie Queen of the South Seas.” Her standard childhood answer stumbled and fell off her tongue while the brain concentrated on opening her eyes to take in the time.

“Good morning, Dr. Spiers.” Suddenly Maggie was drowning in reality. The voice of Max Wizemann issued from the shell/ telephone receiver that her hand now held to her ear. “Sorry Maggie, I’ve awoken you. I’ll call back in ten when you have a coffee to hand.” He had hung up. She shook her head to clear the cobwebs of sleep from her mind and stumbled from her bed and headed for her kitchen. Fumbling around, by instinct, to find the switches that turned on the lights and the peculator to start brewing her favourite ground ‘Blue Mountain’ beans into the first breakfast bowl of coffee for the day, she wondered why Max had called her. She had last heard of him working on a series of projects in the jungles of Brazil and southern Columbia.

As she sat in the pool of light that surround her breakfast bar she idly scanned the news broadcasts from CNN and the other news channels while waiting for the phone to ring, alternately blowing on and sipping at her cup. The extension in the kitchen chimed softly for her attention. At the first tone she was wide awake and alert, feeling as if she had slept for twenty as opposed to two hours. Max’s voice came crystal clear down the phone line to her.

“Maggie you’re awake. Good. Your reports from yesterday have caused somewhat of a flurry here. I had been sat, soaking up the sun, in Antigua airport waiting for a connecting flight to La Paz when they told me that me and my flight had been rescheduled to Brasilia. I’m waiting for you here, there is a plane waiting for you at the Company airfield at Woomera for a direct flight. Now you know as much as I do, but by the time you arrive I should have seen some more people that can fill me in, and I, you, in return. There is a helicopter on its way to you so pack an overnight bag with jungle gear and stand in your hall. Your flying taxi should be there in minutes. For once, thank you for not interrupting.” Again the line went dead because he had hung up his receiver. “Hung up on twice in the same hour, and by the same man. Maggie you lost your touch somewhere.” The sound of her voice trailed after her on her journey to the shower.

As promised, the helicopter clattered to a landing on her front lawn, collected her and her one small bag, and left without the crew needing to get out of the craft. Her next ‘carriage’ awaited her at the airfield. “Cinderella would have been green with envy.” Maggie thought as she was poured into a close fitting pressurised flight suit and strapped in the co-pilots seat behind the guy that did all the flying.

It was an amazing flight journeying west. At thirty thousand feet and heading into the sunrise gave Maggie views of the planet that she had never expected or even imagined. She felt as if she were straddling a lightening bolt as the jet screamed across the Pacific Ocean in excess of two thousand miles an hour. Even Tahiti, at dawn, could be seen as it passed under the plane in seconds. Then the cloud cover that forms over the cold Humboldt Current, blocked her view of them crossing the Chilean coastline, allowing her to close her eyes for a few minutes.

“Doctor Spiers, Please wake up, Ma’am.”

For an entire second she did not understand where she was or how she got into the position of having a strange man in her bedroom addressing her as “Doctor”? Before she had the chance to speak, the memories of the phone calls and her flight across the ocean came flooding back. The smell of the air around her was filled with a mixture of decaying vegetation and aviation fuel. Her helmet had been removed and she was being gently shaken by a young man in fatigues, sporting a thatch of blond hair falling down over one vivid blue eye. The other eye, still visible, was filled with concern for her well-being.

“Doctor, are you O.K.?” Again the query came and this time she could answer. “Thank you I’m fine. Could you tell me where we are.”

“Yes Ma’am. You landed in Brasilia two minutes ago and Professor Wizemann has sent transport for you. Your driver is over having breakfast in the Company mess hall. Would you care to join him. He has some papers for you to read before you carry on into the jungle. Professor Wizemann has asked that every facility be offered to you.”

“Breakfast sounds fabulous. Can you help me climb out of this flying coffin and I’ll join my driver.” The young man already had her hand luggage out of the plane and he carried it for her across the expanse of concrete to the Company building at Brasilia airport. She followed him past the barriers that separate the general public from employees and through several doors into the dining hall. The Company employed people from every country under the sun and the selection of food, at least matched if not surpassed, any spread she had seen laid out in a five star hotel.

Her guide took her across to a table over by one of the panoramic windows along one wall. The table’s occupant was introduced to her as Rodriguez. Then the young man that had accompanied her from the plane vanished in amongst the other diners leaving her alone with her new guide, Rodriguez.

Rodriguez rose from his seat and offered her his hand. “Good Morning Doctor, how was your flight from Australia. I’ve made that trip a few times and it is very impressive. While you read these files can I get you anything to eat?”

Maggie looked at the stack of envelopes he placed before her and looked up into the dark brown eyes “ I’ll leave food in your hands. I’ll eat whatever you bring, if you could remember a toothbrush and paste for after my coffee I’ll be eternally obliged to you.” Running her tongue over her teeth and imagining the fur coats they were wearing and pulled a face that told her guide that she could also use a shower.

It took him almost five minutes to return to the table with a tray full of breads, cold meats, pastries, fresh fruit and a fresh flask of ‘Blue Mountain’ coffee. As the aroma of the coffee hit her nostrils she lifted her eyes “How did you know the kind of coffee I drink?”

“Its all in your file. We aim to keep you happy, the Company would not be happy with us if we upset you.” He gave a half bow and reclaimed his seat while Maggie reabsorbed herself in the papers before her. At first the heap of food before her seemed far too much. As she read and munched, drinking an endless cup of coffee, the pile of food before her shrank. She sat and read through the papers set before her with the same automatic movements she applied to eating breakfast. With her tray finally empty and the reports and pages of suppositions inwardly digested her eyes lifted from the table. Rodriguez was looking at her with something approaching awe in his eyes.

“Never in my life have I seem a woman eat so much without realising it.” He said as he rose from the table and again with the same slight bow pointed her toward the door that fed Beirbeek employees directly into the Company’s sealed car park. He walked across the car park in the direction of a group of brand new jeeps. “The Professor will meet you in the camp. I shall take you to your helicopter for the next leg. The chopper shall deliver you to the Professor Wizemann”.

He stepped into a vehicle and dropped the sun visor to reveal the jeep’s keys. As he turned the engine over he commented “ Good the tanks are full and so are the spares. We also have food and drink.” As Maggie had followed her driver she paused to wonder what he meant by his earlier comments as a flashback of a tray heaped with food being placed before her and she had just ate and ate until she was through reading. She had not been aware of the shear volume of the breakfast she had consumed. A sudden wave of embarrassment passed over her face, surprisingly glad to be in shadow. She also realised that the inside of the jeep was cool. This is good, she thought, a jeep with air conditioning.

Two hours of being chauffeured later she left the cool comfort of the jeep to cross a jungle strip to a ‘Sikorsky’ that was already wound up and ready to go. Her jungle fatigues clung to her limbs as the air drew every ounce of moisture her body possessed out through her skin. By the time she climbed into the cabin her hair hung down her face in dripping rats tails. The pilot threw her a towel to dry off with while the winch man resealed the cabin and allow some benefit from the air conditioning system that the cabin had been fitted with. The winch man, his name badge said ‘Hi’ I’m Dave’, touched her shoulder and pointed to her ears and a flight helmet. After she shortened the inside webbing so the earpieces sat over her ears and adjusted the chin strap to prevent the helmet falling over her eyes Dave plugged her in to the command system with a standard jack plug. All the clatter of the twin rotors ceased and for a single second there was total quite inside her head. The first time since leaving the house for her first ride of the day. Then Dave was standing on her shoulder talking in her ear. “Hi Doc. My name is Dave and the jockey up there is Chris. Welcome to flight XXT 1. The flight, I can’t tell you where we are bound, will last about two hours then you will be in the same place as the Professor. Not even Chris knows our final heading, we have to follow ground beacons, navigation controls and GPS seems to be jammed up around here. Sorry.”

As Dave spoke Maggie looked round the cabin and finally found him far to the rear of the cabin resetting the air conditioning unit. Her eye caught Chris waving a free hand to her so she carefully moved round the boxes dumped over the cabin floor toward the flight deck. He did something to a switch on his helmet and she could hear a new voice in her ear. English this time. “Hi, Doctor Spiers. Please come up and enjoy the forest scenery in comfort.” His voice went off as suddenly as it had begun.

She made her way forward to the co-pilot’s seat and made herself comfortable. Chris pointed to a jackpoint at her right hand side and mimed plugging the jack in. She did and his voice matched his lip movements. “Doc, hello again you are now on a private band shared three ways. Me to you, you and me to the ground, and you to the ground in total privacy. I have the Prof. waiting if you want until we pass the next beacon, or I can try to answer some questions first. I know what Professor Max is like. As a tutor there is none to match him. When he is on to something new that’s a different matter. He starts talking right where he is thinking. I don’t know about you, but that drives me crazy. Before I can understand him I have to know what area of science he is thinking in now.”

Chris’s comments on Max’s attitude left Maggie with memories of laughing by the remains of a broad grin on her face. They both knew the same Max. Something in common in the middle of the Brazilian rainforest, well, three hundred feet above the canopy of the rainforest, anyway. It was a good start and a good omen that neither of these men were intimidated by her reputation and intellect. If Max had allowed Chris to see so much of him, then this Chris was no intellectual slouch either. The next question that occurred to her went along the lines of, well who else has Max collected around him out here and why, what was being hidden from public gaze? It had to be something remarkable.

A soft bleeping issued from her earpieces and bullied its way into her conscious. “Sorry Doc, have to change direction and until the next beacon only have me to talk to. There only seems to be three ways into the area where we are going. As yet it has no name that we have heard of and if we stray off the route mapped out by the beacons, we lose control and crash. We don’t yet know why the safe routes are safe, we don’t know why they change or how but the best of it is we don’t know why machines crash. We never find any remains to work on. So most of the time I keep my mind on following the beacons to ensure I reach safety.”

“My entire trip over the past twenty four hours has been spent either sleeping as a passenger or wondering what am I doing. When I was a passenger in an F116 flying faster than twice the speed of sound I was just wondering, through the beauty of the backdrop outside the canopy, why the hell am I here? I have absolutely no idea. All you have told me is that you have absolutely no idea either. That can only mean that Max is pulling some very long strings. How soon before we arrive?”

“In about one and a half hours, after the next beacon, ground zero, that’s right, that’s what they call the place, will be able to call us again. Once we come on their trackers, then they can talk to us, until then we just wait. It never fails, we hit the first beacon and all comms go down. From the here and now the only thing I have control over is this chopper. We stick to this course until we hear the next beacon sometime in the next fifteen minutes. That is the furthest out any path has been. Once we complete the turn we will have full comms to base restored. The rub is that there is no communications at all out from the jungle.”

Maggie was content to wait for the stated quarter of an hour. It could be the last mental peace she saw for some time. She instinctively knew when she was having questions answered more questions would be occurring to her. She found through her researches that the first question was invariably like one of those wooden Russian dolls, brightly painted, simply presented and hiding a nest of other questions.

“Hey Doc wake up” sounded softly in her ear.

“My God, have I been asleep again?”

“No problem, only for about seven minutes” came his reply. “I’ve got Max on the line for you, we passed over the beacon 90 seconds ago and I’ve told Max to take it easy on you. He promises he’ll try and answer some of your questions in full before we touch down. Press this and you and Max can have a conversation in peace and quiet.” He handed her a black cylinder with a red button on the top that was plugged into the jack socket at the side of her.

She followed Chris’s instructions and found herself listening to Max give somebody a mathematical formulae. “Hi Max, still bullying people?”

“Maggie, it’s wonderful to hear from you again, enjoyed your trip? That view from 30,000 ft is brilliant isn’t it? Anyway, down to business. I’m glad you’ve spoken to Chris, he’s going to be working with you as part of our team, I hope you don’t mind?”

“No problem at all Max, where did you find him and has he got a brother? Anyway, what is this all about?”

She could picture Max in her mind, no matter what his surroundings he would still be wearing blazer, white shirt and stripped tie. In the middle of the jungle, or a desert, he would condescend to wear shorts or fatigues, but always, the blazer, white shirt and stripped tie. He would be that warm that the skin of his scalp would glow red through his short white crew cut. His words, more than his voice, cut across her thoughts, “Well Maggie, for the first time in the entire history of humanity we have the chance to start again. We can play with brand new sciences, look at places we’ve never been, and really imagine the impossible. I’m going to give your brain a rest now until you land, you should only be about a quarter of an hour away. Wish Chris a safe flight for me and I’ll see you soon.”

It was Chris’ movement to the left of her as he grabbed his jack out of its plug and shook his head that made her realise she was still screaming obscenities at Max and the airways were dead! When she’d finished laughing at him, half because she was amused and half because she was embarrassed, “Oh God, Chris, but he frustrates the hell out of me, did you hear any of that?”

“Only you screaming at this end, remember I told you it was a private line. I do understand though, he does the same to me and he gets the same reaction except I tend to throw things at him as well! But I can get away with that, I have the benefit of being his research assistant, and right now, you hate him, and you will do for about the next thirty seconds, by which time Dave should have a cup of coffee up here, and we should be landing in about a quarter of an hour. So, unwind and wait.”

Chapter 2

June 6th
It was 10 o’clock Monday morning, a normally ungodly hour, and the small suite of offices centrally placed behind Waldore Street was unusually active. The cleaner / receptionist had arrived at 9 o’clock to unlock the offices and had been alarmed by the fax paper still spewing out of the machines forming a heap that had spread all over the floor. In a mild panic she phoned Duncan and caught him out jogging along Birdcage Walk. He had been enjoying the pleasant late spring sunshine and apart from the vehicle pollution he was feeling fine.

First chimed his pager. Having told it to disregard the message three times, in frustration he switched it off. He was enjoying the early summer world that much this morning that whatever problems beset the world, could all go to hell in a handcart. It was 9:10, he was enjoying his jog and nothing had the right to spoil things for him today. Then Duncan’s mobile went. He was one of these people who could not leave a doorbell or a phone unanswered. He had to admit he was just too damn curious, and that would always be his downfall. “God damn it” as he leaned on the railings facing out over the Thames. He took three deep breaths and his phone was still ringing, so he answered it. “Good morning” he answered his phone in a chiming response. “Frustrated Joggers Unlimited here, who the hell’s disturbing me?”

“Sorry Duncan, it’s Mary at the office.” Her flustered words fell down the line into his ear. “Sorry I called you, but three of your fax machines are out of paper. The reason they’re out of paper is because it’s all over the floor. Some of them are headed ‘urgent’ others are headed ‘very urgent’ and for the last hour they’ve been spewing out ‘Duncan you bastard, phone me’. I thought you aught to know.”

While he was talking to Mary on the phone, his mind was picturing the wall at the left hand side of his desk and all the lists he had blue-tacked to it. “Ok Mary, sit at my desk, pick up my phone. When you’re holding the phone to your ear, if you turn your head to the right, in front of your eyes there should be a list of phone numbers just headed ‘Contact’ in red. When you find it, start off at the top and ring all the people on the list. Ask them to be at the office by 10a.m. And you better warn the coffee shop they’ll be busy afterwards.” Duncan severed the connection, headed for home, a shower and the office.

Mary, on the other hand, spent a very busy quarter of an hour, sat at his desk answering every question that came in with “I don’t know, just be here by 10. He didn’t really give me any alternatives.”

She sat in a small office, just large enough to hold three desks, two chairs and an old fashioned wooden banana case. Some of the posters on the wall could be traced back to the 1960’s and the beginnings of Greenpeace in England. Some of the posters were blow ups of photographs of the planet Earth as seen from space. In places they had been overlaid with ‘Save the Whale, Save the Dolphin, Save the Green Turtle’, and other less easily identifiable but still obvious Green activist publicity shots.

There were two other offices between Mary and the front door, well, third floor door anyway. As they were attic offices, the ceilings sloped down to meet the walls and stole half the room space. Yet on top of filing cabinets, boxes, and bookcases, in fact anywhere apart from on the floor, plants grew. Trays, cups, bottles, and even the occasional plant pot was used to help sustain green plant life in the offices. On the two pillars that supported his desk were posters from the covers of Terry Pratchett’s ‘Disc World’ stories. These novels had caused his nickname. ‘The Librarian’ had long been his favourite character, Duncan too wanted only to be left alone with his beloved books.

Duncan Kealand had broken away from Greenpeace at the beginning of the ‘seventies’ and created his own operation with ‘a watching brief’. Duncan wasn’t fond of the idea of putting to sea in little boats, or even getting cold attacking oil refineries in Scotland. What he did best was turn up unrelated facts and drag a picture out of them. So having left Greenpeace he started an organisation that lasted six weeks called ‘EcoWatch’. In those six weeks Duncan had made a lot of new friends, and no money, so he talked his friends into joining him. Shortly after the French had sunk Greenpeace’s research ship ‘Rainbow Warrior’, in New Zealand, Duncan knew he’d found his organisation’s name, Eco-Rainbow.

He was now confident he could get enough people on his side to create an ecology research organisation worthy of the name, and over the next ten years it grew until he was getting a living wage and could pay his 10 employees. The majority of his sources of information came from the people he had been at university with who had found jobs in industry, or were contacts he had made over the course of time.

At nine fifty Duncan arrived at the Eco-Rainbow offices, slightly puffing from his mad bike ride and amazed by the volume of paper on the middle office floor surrounding Mary, who was sat trying to establish some kind of chronological order for the faxes that had come in.

Brenda, Carl and Mike arrived three minutes after him. Mike having picked up Brenda and Carl on the way in, after Mary’s phone call had rudely awoken him. Carl was the last of the trio to walk into bedlam, took one look round and said “I’ll get the coffees and Danish” and vanished. Mike and Brenda joined Duncan and Mary on the floor sorting out the faxes. Nobody had bothered to read any of them yet apart from the headings. When the first hour’s faxes were correlated he took them through into his office and turned on his computer to read his e-mails. While his machine was loading he started reading the faxes themselves.

As Duncan read he realised that over the weekend the world had moved on and he’d been forgotten about. The first fax was from a long time friend he had first met at a symposium at M.I.T. telling him of a rumour that had found it’s way into his ear concerning a company dear to Duncan’s heart, Beirbeek Incorporated. He was passing on rumours he had heard about Beirbeek becoming active again in the North Amazon basin/Southern Columbia border regions and Duncan felt it could only bear ill for the rain forests. The fax was one of those ‘friend of a friend told me’ things that included nothing definite, just hearsay. Normally it would be relegated to be filed under ‘Recycle’ but because of some of the names attached to the other faxes, he put it to one side to start a small stack he intended to call ‘Beirbeek’.

As Duncan read in his office, and order was being imposed of the heaps of paper around the middle office, a chilling unanimity appeared in the subject matter of the rumours. There had been two factors that made today very different, firstly the shear volume of requests for information from N.G.O’s as well as the number of Government type Agencies asking for similar reports. Duncan was pleasantly heartened that his little organisation had even been heard of by some of the people that had faxed him.

Secondly, the subject matter of every fax had been the same question. “Have you any idea what Beirbeek Inc. has been up to in Amazonia.” Each enquiry had been phrased in a different manner, used different words and said exactly the same thing. One stray thought kept slipping out of his grasp, further away with every new piece of paper he picked up of the growing heaps before him. He, unthinkingly, reached for his coffee cup and found the spot empty. No cup. Before he realised what he was doing he had already started to call out.

“Brenda, can you call Cambridge for me. I need to talk to Piers Lofgren.” He called out at the top of his voice to be able to cut through both his office door and the chaos happening next door. As Brenda opened his door he saw three of the people off his Priority Contact List, that Mary had called before, waiting and reading faxes as if it were ‘The Final Day’.

Seen in any other setting and the trio would resemble ‘anoraks’ collecting train numbers or motor car registration plates. The two that wore glasses had the indentations that told glasses would be worn all the time as well as having the obligatory sellotape holding arms in place. Duncan knew the talents of the people Mary had called in on his behalf. “Mike, send everyone down to the coffee shop as they arrive, we need room and quiet to talk. This place will be too full to move soon.”

“Mary can you man the phone and fax lines while we are gone and send any callers down after us.” He was out of the office door, and on his way down the stairs, before his words had left his mouth. Following in an untidy ‘Indian File’ Brenda, Carl and the unintroduced trio made their way down after Duncan. Each of the five carried stack of paper of one sort or another.

“Morning Duncan,” the owner of the coffee shop stood waiting for him in the doorway that led out of the main dinning area, ‘Mary warned us earlier. Take the large front room upstairs and you won’t be disturbed.”

“Thanks Pet,” He responded as he led the human chain that followed him like a conga tail. Out through the door that leads through to the toilets, but instead of going down the single stair to follow the exit signs, he turned and climbed to the first landing and opened a door before him. The door fed them through into a large furnished apartment with a variety of hot and cold snacks and hot drinks in heat retaining flasks. The six occupants of the room needed no introductions. They all knew each other. Duncan said as much when he told then who else they could expect to drop in over the next hour or so.

As they sat and talked the numbers of people increased and the hot drinks and brunch snacks went down. By the time the remnants of the breakfast foods were removed, and lunch substituted, there were fifteen of the twenty one people expected crowded into the room above the coffee shop. Discussions and arguments, between the various factions represented in the room, could at times become intellectually fierce. Through it all Duncan knew in his heart that they were all on the same side. He had passed his time in the room acting as mediator/negotiator and pouring oil on troubled waters, perhaps not the best simile given the company he had invited, but accurate none the less.

By lunchtime he was able to step back and admire his morning’s work. At least now all minds were focused on the same set of problems, and not adding to them. He had heard all the other groups agendas and, after a brief explanation of his and a promise to tell them more after lunch, got their agreement to support his. Now, Duncan hoped, they all finally realised that there was only one ‘enemy’ and that was not the person stood/sat at your side. He thought he had them all looking in the same direction at the same culprit, Beirbeek Incorporated.

Now he stood, very theatrically with his back to the bright windows, to draw everyone’s attention away from who was lining up with whom. “Ladies and Gentlemen. Thank you, as you are all here at my request and my tiny coffers are feeding and watering us all, can I have your attentions for a few minutes to ask for your help to look at something, unusual,” Mike, who had missed most of the fun back in the office, had been running up the copier bill reprinting the faxes Duncan had passed to him. He now began to distribute the sets of notes, around each group. He had been kept up to date on the general alliances in the room, by Brenda and Carl who had been running back and forth to the office with or for various things, and tried to give ‘rivals’ their own copies at the same time. Not easy if they were across the room from each other. Mike was skilfully aided by Carl in getting his timing right.

So the uneasy peace in the room had been maintained for Duncan to drop his questions into. Everyone had the data at, as near as damn it, the same time. Half of the United Nations Departments dealing with South America, N.A.T.O. and half the world’s main charities were all clammering at Duncan for the same information. Mary arrived to pass Duncan a note. “Sorry to run right now, I’ll be back as soon as possible, meantime, read the faxes again. Let’s see if we can settle on what the question actually is, they all want the same help. We just have to figure out what it is? Use my staff as runners if need be.” By the time he was through speaking he was, already, through the door and out on to the stairs.

As soon as he was in the reception he accepted the call from Cambridge, Massachusetts. Dr. Piers Lofgren was a scientist that studied the environment and usually difficult to get hold of. Duncan needed to meet with him. He would see him anywhere he could. Piers had fallen out with every major and minor faculty in America. As a result he lived out in the wilds of whatever region he chose to study. Once, and only the once, had Duncan had the funds to hire Dr. Lofgren’s skills. He had been proved to be worth every dollar it had cost. Duncan’s clients had been overjoyed when Dr. Lofgren’s influential environmental report landed on the Planning Committee’s desks and the proposed cement works applications were quietly withdrawn.

The protest committee were so pleased they paid Duncan and he paid Piers before being invoiced. That impressed Piers. Duncan could be a good employer. So after collecting his messages on returning from a field trip over a river damming scheme, he pulled out the one from the London, England, office of Eco-Rainbow. That guy Duncan again. He has to be worth a phone call.

After talking to the receptionist, who he remembered to be a pretty dark girl, named Mary, he finally started talking to Duncan, although Piers had only met him three or four times, he only had to mention one Company in a conversation, that was more of a fishing trip for Duncan. Piers instantly felt his switch being turned. He had long been fighting a secret one-man war against the way Beirbeek did business. In the past his irritation value had been so small that he thought they hadn’t seen him. As he spoke with Duncan he was checking the Internet for flights to London in the next two hours. He found one. Concord. “See you by five your time.” He said after telling Duncan he was on his way booked on Concord and could he arrange collection from the airport. He hung up the phone and ran for his car. He had thirty minutes before his flight and not only hadn’t he checked in, he still had to drive to the airport. He hated the abuse of power, but as an accredited Coroner, he borrowed the local Police Helicopter. Understanding, as he did, that an emergency came first, not his flight.

There had been no emergency, so he caught his flight, and accompanying Duncan, walked into the room over the coffee shop shortly after six that evening. Traffic into London had been bad that night and slowed the, otherwise unremarkable, drive considerably. Duncan gave him the same sheaf of paper everyone else had earlier and asked him not to question anything until he had been back in the room for five minutes. His curiosity aroused, Piers foolishly agreed but Duncan admitted, in the car after an hour standing still, that he had expected the journey to take fifty minutes at the most. Shrugging his shoulders “If I had known we would have taken the tube in and collected the car in town.” He knew it made no environmental sense but you had to take Piers agitation at having to wait into account.

It transpired that both men kept their word, Piers to the letter, and Duncan, well after five minutes in the room Piers knew that the person keeping order had far more patience than he. Piers wanted, more than anything in the world, a quiet space to think this through. He had a good working knowledge of six unacknowledged Beirbeek projects in the Matto Grosso region and in the past five minutes he heard of eight more previously unknown to him. He also heard Max Wizemann mentioned as being missing from a seminar at Los Alamos. Others had tried calling him in Australia, It seemed the illustrious man could be missing from two places at once.

Piers had put in a graduate year training in a Beirbeek subsidiary before deciding he did not like the Company, its ethics, its thinking, it’s exploitation of native populaces or its management style he could go on telling the world all the Company’s faults and how to correct them. None of it mattered a damn. Beirbeek was privately owned and the beneficial owners really could not care any less about how the Company carried out business and its responsibilities. The dividend cheques kept them all in a lifestyle the families had come to expect and cherish. Wherever there gathers groups of the super-rich, there you will find some of the Beirbeek families.

The mere memory that the young Piers had been ignored by the Company still rankled. On that day he had declared war on Beirbeek and Beirbeek still ignored him! Every field trip he had been on that had a Beirbeek operation somewhere in the area, he had brought back notes, diagrams and information about the site. By now his file was quite comprehensive concerning their both acknowledged and unofficial operations. He had a massive amount of facts, but very little inside information. The very people he had been trying, for years, to get interested were now screaming, at someone he knew, for information. Here he was being asked to provide it.

He knew the paranoia inside Beirbeek, that existed as pride, had been stifling and was probably by now slowly choking off inventive thinking. First he had to know more about the inside of the Amazonian projects. Who was working on them? Who could he ask that would know? Good question. Next question. Who can I ask that’s still talking to me? He mused quietly in the corner. “Duncan, can I have a quick word?”

“Of course, do we need to go back to the office?”

“No, here’ll do, I just need a corner.”

They worked their way behind the rest of the tables, holding the rest of their supper, and helped themselves to coffee. It had been a busy day. Duncan’s other guests had broken up again. This time, not into factions, but into likeminded groups discussing projects of joint interest. Duncan gazed out over the small assembly and felt very pleased with himself. “I never thought I’d pull it off” as he turned towards Piers who he found was staring at him very intently.

“Duncan, what is Beirbeek up to? In a very short period of time they seem to have got a lot of people very pissed off at them. Just what are they up to?”

“I hope that’s the question you’re here to help me answer.” Duncan responded. “What’s your help going to cost us?”

“Right now I don’t know, mainly because I don’t know what I’ll be doing. I don’t know where I’ll be, or who I’ll be with. You and I have got to talk first. This won’t be professional, this is personal. If you want to know why, I’ll tell you, if you don’t, it doesn’t matter to me. But we still need to talk about the situation, what help can I expect? Who have you by way of contacts? Who can we call on, I need information but it’s got to be inside information, and my buddy list within Beirbeek is very small these days, as you can imagine.”

“You really have no concept of what you’re going against to answer the questions you have been asked. I spent time on the inside many years ago and it frightened me. The people I see here will be good for finding out things on paper or computer files but hopeless in the field. They have security guards that are armed and are well paid to do as they are told. We need solicitors and accountants to trace not just registered ownership but beneficial ownership as well. We need trained people to handle the heavy end. How many of these people can you see in the Columbian jungle having first got past the drug barons. Would any of them get past the drug barons? I don’t think so. Back home I have files full of facts on the Company. I have been planning action against them for years. If I can’t persuade somebody to send the Army in against them, this’ll be my opportunity to do just that, but I’ll use my own army!”

While Duncan remained looking at Piers his mind took a step back and wondered if the man before him had finally gone over the edge. He had always known of this man’s erratic history. From his early twenties, on leaving University, he had gone from research job to research job never getting any further than research assistant. Even though his qualifications and experience should allow him to be if not Project Manager, at least Leader. But somehow his Graduate Training record at Beirbeek had gotten out. So, after ten years, he stopped looking for jobs and found his own research projects instead. From then on, his life had been interesting, after all, he was his own boss and he didn’t have to take on anything that wasn’t interesting. So among reputable firms Piers developed the reputation of being ‘unreliable’.

After subjecting Piers to 10 seconds of total silence, Duncan had thought sufficiently to respond. “As you can tell I haven’t really had time by myself all day to think about anything. I’ve booked you in to the ‘Inn’, I’ll adjourn this session until tomorrow morning. Let’s go and have a proper supper and talk some more. I’ll bring another couple of people along who work with me, and hopefully by the time we get you to your room, we’ll have some idea of a plan of action we will be able to follow starting in the morning.”

Duncan turned to the audience gathered and said, “Ladies and Gentlemen, today’s session has been very informative for us all. I should like to adjourn until tomorrow at ten. Please spend the evening coming up with any new ideas or theories for tomorrow. By then we shall be better organised to get things done. Once again I thank all of you for your help and understanding of today and goodnight.” Duncan had managed to catch Mike and Carl’s eyes intending to call them over but decided to take Piers over to join them.

Carl, being the youngest person in the room, had been bombarded by some of the most committed ecologists in the country and was beginning to look a little frazzled. Duncan knew all they needed was a good meal and thoughts would begin to flow. He had never seen Piers affected by jet lag after flying. Turning out the lights as he left he saw Petra, for only the second time that day, on his way out, “Pet, can we have the same arrangements for tomorrow? If you sent the bill for today over in the morning, Mary will see it’s paid. Your side of today went very smoothly, thanks a lot. See you tomorrow.”

Mary, on Duncan’s instructions passed through Brenda, had booked a table for the six of them at the ‘Inn’ for eight ‘o’ clock. As she locked the final door to the offices Mike arrived back, three floors down, with a taxi. By seven fifty Professor Piers Lofgren was checked in and his luggage taken up. Next came food. By nine thirty the six were still talking but now they had moved from the dinning room into one of the ‘Inn’s’ luxurious public lounges. Sitting round a large coffee table, with an assortment of beverages before them, they talked.

“I’m sorry Duncan, your life this far had not prepared you for what you are now talking about doing. Believe me I really do know what I’m talking about. Look, take my suggestions under advisement until I can access my files at home. Then you can have all the proof you want or will need. Solid facts, not a single piece of guesswork in sight, unfortunately not evidence, but more than enough to build an investigation on.”

Duncan knew that his life had been built in Academia, a world created around ‘ivory towers’ and ‘cloud castles’ where the only infighting is intellectual. None the less vicious and blood thirsty for the lack of physical contact. He was used to a world filled with mind games and grant funded one-upmanship. Knives and bullets came in the shape of learned papers and works published. Still as ruthless, but more polite. He had to heed Piers expertise in a world that he knew about as well as he, Duncan, knew outer space.

His team had already chosen its own factions. Mike and Carl agreed with the pragmatic views of Piers and the girls back his outsiders view. He had decided to fall in with the more sensible view that to be prepared for anything was a more practical approach. Duncan starts asking for detailed plans to carry out various scenarios. He is exposed to the world of modern logistics and the equipment available to achieve the aims.

Communications systems were the focus of any plan. If you couldn’t talk to your people then you have no idea of the situation on the ground. Without intelligence your cause is lost before it started. “We are playing with the Big Boys now and we have to play by the same rules as they play by.” Duncan finally began to understand the mountain he had put himself in charge of leading his team up. Piers knew he had succeeded in his main task for today. He had convinced someone else of the inherent danger of standing between Beirbeek and its objective, it was not a safe place to stand.

Piers knew that he could now begin to put the plan he had in place into action. He had the teams and their structure in his head, just not the personnel. He had files of equipment information and data sheets separated into the team requirements. By midnight the basic plan had been covered and the six decided to meet up again at the ‘Inn’ for breakfast before going in to the fray.

After a good sleep, twelve hours worth squeezed into six, they had reconvened for breakfast by half eight the next morning. The hotel fax machine had been busy overnight and a lot of Piers files now had copies in London. His office in Colorado had been on overtime. With Duncan’s team now in possession of an amount of information far beyond any expectation they had, Piers now felt that someone else was able to assist in his work.

Duncan had made his calls, contacting his ‘think tank’ of the previous day, Piers made his overnight. “Duncan can I use your office to meet some people in this afternoon. I made a few calls after you had gone home and raised interest in some quarters that may prove to be able to supply more data and intelligence.”

“Just let Mary know when, unless you need someone manning the place all day, any calls that come in will be transferred over here.” He got no further as representatives from the organisations he had called yesterday began assembling. There came the surprise, both Duncan and Piers had anticipated having to spend time smoothing ruffled feathers but Duncan’s team had not been the only people burning the candles at both ends. Each group that arrived had set its own targets and had an individual plan that allowed the other groups to be able to slot in any expert knowledge that was lacking and would be needed.

The meeting of yesterday had been peopled by those Duncan knew to have interests that coincided with his, most of today’s attendees he had only heard of. As his guests trouped into the room people broke away from the company they arrived with to introduce themselves to him. He found that today would be filled with ‘men in suits’, most of whom were simply names on the organisations letterheads as far as Duncan knew, who were one step removed from practical Ecology. These people were policy makers for the various organisations he had contacted, and they all knew of him.

Neither Piers nor Duncan realised how far their individual ‘fame’ had spread or how well respected the work they had been involved with had been. Piers had found his ‘titular’ head. With Duncan in place to run the interference from the big N.G.O’s. Piers had the freedom he needed to run the activity side the way he wanted. He felt, at that moment, that Beirbeek had opened a can of worms that the Company would not be able to close as quietly as they could under normal circumstances. As far as Piers could judge all the world’s most respectable main eyes and ears were represented in that room. Tonight, he would have to fill Duncan in on his agenda. He admitted to himself that it may not be as simple as he first imagined, but having talked to the visitors he was due today, he was certain he could put forward a strong enough case to convince Duncan of the desperate need for the unilateral action he knew would be necessary.

Before going across to the office Piers had a quick two minutes with Duncan in private. “I will need to see you to talk over today’s events at some stage this evening. You have to be aware of more of the information that I know and will not have the chance to talk to you about today. As I will be busy over the road, and you are here with the ‘powers that move our world’. I’ll be over as soon as I am finished.”

The day went well for everyone, by seven p.m. Piers had kept his earlier promise and crossed back to the coffee shop to rescue Duncan and let everyone else go home. Duncan drove Piers back to the ‘Inn’ and accepted his offer of a swim before he bought dinner. “I saw the pool during one of my early morning wanders through the endless hallways. I hate not being able to sleep because there is something on my mind.” The conversation ceased for the time it took them to change into costumes and get in the water. After completing twenty lengths of the pool in tandem they chose the hot tub, bubbling away just off the main pool area, to relax in.

After room service had delivered a tray of coffee to the poolside, Duncan, curious, and Piers, excited and not in the least relaxed by the swim, settled back and soaked. Dinner had been booked for ten that evening giving them the time Piers thought he would need to explain his position, reasoning and theories to support the stand he had taken, to Duncan.

“Duncan, can I tell you a story, we are not due to eat until ten and that should give me enough time to summarise it all for you. I had twelve months inside Beirbeek for my practical experience before I graduated. From graduation I have not been able to work in research. Beirbeek soured that particular saucer of cream for me with my terminal report. I did not like what Beirbeek chose to show me about how they work in Third World countries. Beirbeek originally gained power by following, and supporting, the colonial powers throughout the world, establishing their two fold usefulness in ‘keeping the peace’ and trading, meaning that any objection against the colonial power had also to be taken as an attack on the power’s ability to make money. We all know that colonialism invariably leads to abuses of power. Especially when the members of the society that is being ruled is being used as economic slaves being forced into a mould that didn’t fit.”

“Rebellions were commonplace as we know from history and we also assume, also from history that companies like The Hudson Bay Company, the colonizers trading companies, changed with the times alongside colonial policies. Most either did or collapsed. The exception being Beirbeek Incorporated. It started life privately owned and still is today. The Company has share capital to the tune of one hundred thousand shares, these never had been sold by any firm of brokers that I have ever came across. As far as I have been able to trace, Beirbeek is still owned by the same families that bought shares in the Company back at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The Company is registered in Delaware and is more closed mouthed that a Swiss Bank.”

“We have to find out what they are up to both in the field and in the Boardroom. From what I’ve seen and heard, their idea of security makes God’s waterproofing of a duck’s backside look amateurish. Over the years odd rumors find their way into print, some have found a way into the business pages. The paper generally finds a way to repudiate the story within a few days while Beirbeek never, and I mean never, comments. The Company’s ‘official spokesperson’ is paid well to say nothing. I found my way into journalism a few years ago, freelance mainly but one commission was to see how closely I could look at Beirbeek Incorporated. Over the years it has bought a major stockholding in most multi-nationals giving Beirbeek shareholders total anonymity when the Company buys in to anything. The shares are held by Beirbeek, and Beirbeek tells no-one who its shareholders are. The security at the sharp end on the ground is just as tight. Duncan you have to prepare for this. Their strengths are formidable and weaknesses few, very few. Now that you are well warned, lets go eat. I promise to cheer you up later by telling you what I have already in place.”

The journey to the dinning room was now becoming familiar to both, the duty manager, having seen them at dinner the previous evening, welcomed Piers with a message from reception. “Excellent, have him shown to our table and could you arrange for an extra place to be set.” The manager bowed slightly, which both took as his acquiescence, and set off for his desk after leading them to their table. Piers’ guest arrived less that a minute later. “Rafer,” He was referring to a tall, well built and well tanned man standing beside the table. “Meet Duncan Kealand. Duncan, meet Rafer Janders, our guide through to the less obvious side to our business.” Rafer settled his powerful frame into the seat before the vacant dinner setting. He looked casual, and very much at ease in his surroundings, even in a formal ‘Giorgio Armani’ double breasted suit. Duncan started to stand but the man before him seemed to grow and tower over him forcing him to remain seated, but strangely not intimidated.

His hair was so blond as to be almost white and, if touched, looked as if it would break like bleached straw. His light brown eyes faded into the background tan of his face, he somehow managed to give off two impressions at the same time. Enormous strength and an incredibly gentle softness. His expression was of one staring out over a wide open vista to a very distant horizon. At these times, when Rafer’s self control was least, his expression became primal. Duncan had no fear of this man, but he was in awe of him. He could feel why Piers wanted Rafer along on his side. Duncan sat back to enjoy his dinner, suddenly far more confident in trusting Piers than he had ever thought possible. Rafer took his lead from Duncan and let Piers talk through his ideas and themed scenarios concerning Beirbeek. Finally winding up with the events of the past weekend and the state of Duncan’s office on Monday morning.

Wednesday night was reborn into Thursday morning, the three sat in the same lounge as Piers and Duncan had used the previous night. The porters that carried coffee and pastries to the table and empty pots and plates away stopped charging for refills at about three a.m. and just kept the pots of coffee coming.

During the course of the night Duncan found out that Rafer was fresh from quelling an uprising in a sub-Sahara ‘banana’ republic, with its government more or less owned by Beirbeek. His contract ended, as far as he was concerned, when the little contractor whose pen pushers had refused to honour his completion, by having refused to pay him. The contractor had wanted his armed security men to clear a famine relief plane for them to take a holiday in. Rafer refused and they refused to pay him. Rafer passed the contractors comments on to his men and his security force, packed and were out on the road out on the road within twelve hours. On the way a few banks were persuaded to honour the payment part of the contract. They took only what the force was owed, to the penny. No more or no less. Beirbeek heard of the happening and had become very upset with the contractor for reneging of a contract that the Company had authorised. Their government had been thrown out, now they had to start to buy the next rulers and hope they were malleable, if not, then their own revolt would be paid for.

Rafer knew that Beirbeek was also currently in the process of buying the contractors business off his widow. The more Piers spoke the more he had to tell his men. He could see another contract in the offing to be paid for by Beirbeek. If the ideas Piers had came about, they would own Beirbeek Incorporated and be able to retire. First they had to find out a lot about the South American rainforest. None of his men were old enough to have had a place in either Vietnam or Regan’s Nicaragua. Rafer slips, mentally, into his world as Duncan and Piers discuss things that interested them but had no place in his world at present. Certainly in the future their contributions would be invaluable. For now Rafer was pure military. He was putting together an ‘all eventualities’ team as well as lists of equipment that could prove useful. He accepted here and now that he would need local tribal help in retraining his men for local conditions. “Rafer, are you prepared to return to us yet?” Piers had his hand on Rafer’s leg and was shaking him to catch his attention. Rafer pulled his imagination back from the hot, green and humid banks of the river Amazon. “Sorry for the lack of attention, I was working out some logistics. If I take this back to my men without having gave it some preliminary thought they will reject it out of hand because I have.”

Piers carried on where he had stopped. “A point of interest for you Rafe, in the morning you will meet some people that have worked rainforests and lived. Think about the rainforest as being the bottom of an ocean for you as far as your current life experience to date goes. I know I need your expertise, I ask you along. This is not your operation, you know how good Beirbeek’s security teams are. In the past they have been on your side, this time its us against them. We agree they are good. We have to be better, all round. Your men need to train with Duncan’s lads and girls, and the scientists more than need to undergo your physical training. Just to keep them alive out there. We have to plan a joint operation. Not one operation with two attack routes. We will both need to know each side’s minds and how inventive they are. We do not, I must repeat that we do not, know what is happening out there or even what is waiting. It could, literally, be anything.”

“While we do what we do best, poor Duncan will have to be our liaison with the powers that be. They will have to authorise any form of operation. His job will be to ensure that the requisite authority to be in place as soon as required. If we succeed without authorisation we spend the rest of our short lives looking over our shoulders. I see an even shorter future for us if we do not succeed. With or without authorisation from anyone, should we not succeed, I very much doubt we would emerge from the jungle. Immunity only works once you have done something. As breakfast is being served in the dinning room, how about a swim, food then work, it’s been a long night and we all have a busy day in front of us.” He rose from the spot on the sofa he had occupied all night and headed for the porter’s desk to collect towels and costumes for them.

Duncan looked at his watch, it looked about right at seven forty five. No wonder breakfast felt due. Where had his night gone. He reckoned the time well spent. They each knew where their expertise would be used and he felt good for the first time in four days. As he put in the laps of the pool, with Piers and Rafer, his mind started composing the tone of the responses that the faxes, he would be sending off that day, would take. He dried quickly as Mike, Brenda and Carl were due for breakfast with them at eight thirty. He had a lot to fill them in on. He was sure Mary would fall for Rafer’s good looks on sight, if she saw him again today, and cause a drop in her efficiency. That could be lived with providing he had plenty to do, it sounded as if he would. Duncan took a mental step backwards, he had no idea of what he was getting involved with but it sounded exciting. The closest he usually came to risking his life was riding his bike around central London. How much could his rural life lived in town really change, he moved paper and played with ideas. As a child he had even climbed little trees.

Mike and Brenda were sat at the table, with orange juice and coffee, before the three arrived from the pool, Carl had absented himself to open the office early with Mary. Mike was charged with the think tank and keeping it thinking, but peacefully. Brenda was to spend the day as go-between. Going between anyone and everyone that needed her. Piers had asked that Carl shadow him as to be able to tell the others of his progress with his contacts. Duncan had yet to ask anyone for help. He needed someone to help him think.

After eating and settling the agenda for the day, they agreed the day stopped at eight that night and all came back here, in Piers case that meant Carl being here and leaving Piers free to carry on. They accepted that he and Rafer had people to see that had different working hours. On the way out, after a brief conversation with Duncan, Piers stopped at reception to collect the keys to the two four by fours he’d hired for himself and Rafer to be independently mobile.

His first objective after collecting Carl from the office would be to find somewhere to operate from. The present situation had already been outgrown. Once the teams started to arrive, he had to have a base that was discrete. An old warehouse would do. A transport company warehouse would do even better. The public are usually protected in some way from these noisy places, that protection worked two ways. He would speak to Carl when he picked him up. Piers and Rafer would make full use of his local knowledge of peaceful areas with liberal neighbours, or if possible, no neighbours at all. As luck would have it Carl had the perfect spot in mind. He knew a minor Lord that had property in the middle of the Yorkshire moors and very discrete. Also very few people would even be curious these days by military vehicles and equipment all over the place, with three sides of the Lord’s estate owned by the Department of Defence, any extra traffic could be ignored. After a quick talk on the car’s built in phone Carl and Piers started up the M1 to the peace and solitude of the North Yorkshire moors.

Rafer had his side to begin organising, the three agreed to meet up again after Piers arrived back in London the next morning. Probably very early.
Chapter 3
June 3rd
Chris left Dave to tie the ‘flying crane’ down and accompanied Maggie to flight ops where she expected to meet up again with Max. Her request to have him called had been met with “Sorry people, he is down below out of touch. He left this for you and asked for you to be escorted to main ops. I have a manager going through soon, I’ll put you through with him, if you like?” The ‘this’ that Max left was two sealed envelops. Each one had a badge attached that unsealed the package when removed. Both Chris and Maggie were used to handling and receiving confidential Company communiqués so were neither surprised nor impressed by the presentation.

The badge was a security key as well as official identification by means of a retinal scan encoded magnetically on the reverse. Everyone she saw had their I.D. tag hanging round their neck by a long chain that allowed use without removal, loss of the badge, although of no use to anyone else, would get you fired. Chris and Maggie both followed suit. ‘When in Rome’ and so on. They pick up chains from the stand on the desk and by the time the tags have settled round their necks two security guards had appeared by their sides to escort them to the meeting area to allow time for them to read the information packs. Because of the nature of the material inside the envelopes they were shown to individual booths that had both sound and video playback units installed.

Having inserted the tag in the side of the unit she started the video cassette and settled back. The first scene, after the initial snow cleared, was of Max in a lecture theatre. There were no lead in titles, you were either in the know or you didn’t receive a copy of the video. He was opening a lecture Maggie had helped him write more than ten years ago while still a student of his. The lecture content she knew by heart, the idea that some physical scars on the landscape were not natural. The theories proposed she had agreed with ten years ago, for the majority of the examples a natural cause had been, if you pardon the pun, unearthed rendering the theory outdated.

During the rendition a number of the scenes that had proposed theories in her original script now seemed, to Maggie, to be proposing facts. As she listened to the opening argument she turned the flyleaf of the accompanying report. For the next thirty seconds she heard familiar words from the playback machine’s speakers but they did not register. As she knew the script she actually missed nothing, but her eyes saw the impossible. There were a few paragraphs of descriptions then one drawing, two graphs and a radio carbon dating printout. There was where Maggie stopped, dead. She needed to talk to someone, and Chris seemed the logical choice.

She flew out of the door with Chris’s name on her lips and ran straight into Chris’s face. He had been walking toward her booth when the top of her head arrived with some force in the bottom half of his face. “If that doesn’t teach me to go where I’m looking, nothing will!” This was stated, with some feeling, through a broken tooth and a mouth full of Maggie’s hair. “Oh hell,” Maggie’s hands shot to her head catching his nose on the way starting Chris’s eyes to water even more .

“Stop, peace, pax, I surrender. Maggie please sit down, I hurt.”

By now he had hold of her shoulders and was guiding her backwards in the direction, she hoped, of a chair. “Chris, what have you been watching? We’re part of the same team. I’m so sorry about your face. Are you O.K.?” The questions tumbled out one after the other as she sat down. Chris was still standing and could now see blood oozing from a gash in her scalp and the gleam of what was possibly his missing tooth. He did not want the white thing he could see in the wound to be a piece of Maggie’s skull. Chris opened the door to the nearest office and picked up the phone. In common with most phone systems, dial zero and the switchboard answers. “Dr. Chris Sommers, I’m in the security booths in reception. I need a medical doctor and probably a dentist as well.” After a few more seconds listening he responded “Thanks very much, bye.”

He walked back out to Maggie, who by now had a wad of tissues to her head to staunch the flow of blood that started to trickle down her forehead having escaped from her hairline. As soon as they saw each other they asked “How are you?” and “Are you alright?” at, as near as damn it, the same time. “You go first Chris. Start with who did you just call?”

“Only reception to get them to send a doctor and a dentist. I think part of one of my teeth is in your scalp. At least I hope it’s my tooth, I don’t want to speculate as to what else it could be. Next in line as far as I can recall is what was I watching? It was an old lecture of Max’s. He was offering some factual evidence to back up some theories on planetary origins, from what I could gather. What really got my attention was the paperwork accompanying the video. I was coming to ask how much you knew.’

Maggie winced as she probed her scalp with tissues to mop up any excess blood from her hair before the doctor arrived. “About the lecture, probably everything. I helped Max to compose and write it, as for what accompanied it. Nothing. It’s the first time I have seen anything like it. That’s why I was coming out to find you, I wanted to talk about the original lecture I helped write and the one I have just seen. To anyone who heard the original lecture, only once, would be fooled into thinking that Max knew things, that at that time we recognised as being impossible. To me half that lecture was brand new, I never heard it before, I have heard various wild ideas thrown around in favour of there being extraterrestrial life and I’ve heard the other side’s wildest ideas. Max appears to be offering proof of ‘little green men’ here on earth. What if it’s true? Look at where we are.”

As the door to the lounge opened, Maggie shut up. Chris took her lead and stood to welcome the medical doctor. She had short cut mahogany coloured hair and a sympathetic smile as they explained what had happened. Dr. Anne Rodgers put her key into the security system and accessed the security video of the passage where the collision took place. Chris and Maggie watched the monitor as he strode into view, hands in his pockets and head down. He was approaching Maggie’s door when it opened and she flew out, also head down. You watched the collision take place and marvelled that neither had been knocked out. “Well our insurance covers you both.” Was Dr. Rodgers only comment at the video. “When you find yourselves settled in, call in and see me at the clinic and I’ll tidy up the paperwork”.

As she left a second white coat appeared. The dentist’s comments were very much the same. As he, in turn, left one of the two guards that had escorted them in reappeared with more papers to fill report files on the incident. A quarter of an hour later Chris and Maggie were free to carry on a private conversation. Their thoughts went back to the evidence that Max had proffered. Chris started with a request to continue her last comments, “What did you mean by look at where we are?”

“Fine Chris, Brazil, jungle, isolation, cut off from contact, what do you think that is saying to me? Then to add spice to the concoction you throw in those results kindly printed out in that report and what outcome do you anticipate? Max can’t think I’m a fool and I will skip over reading in favour of video tape. No matter how reliable the source.”

“So you’ve known Max longer than I have, just what is it you’re getting at. Max falsifying data? Come on now, you seriously can’t think that of him. He’d have too much to loose if he had and it came out.”

“No, not that. You’re right, but what is going on out here? The only person we can talk to is ‘below ground’ somewhere and uncontactable. I think we go through everything we have and decide after we see him. Although God knows when that will be.”

Chris dragged a chair through from another booth and collected both sets of files and returned them through to where Maggie sat waiting, an ideal situation for her as she was still feeling a little unsteady from her earlier collision. As there was only the one audio visual unit in each booth Maggie read and Chris watched. From time to time Maggie would stop the tape to show him an item or particular article from the report to remind him that there were many new ideas and concepts being introduced that had never previously seen the light of day. Some of the things that she heard Max say on tape contradicted the theories that Maggie and Professor Max Wizemann had invested so much time to define and decide. There were so many new angles on old work, that at the time explained the phenomenon being described, that created new ways to think of problems thought long solved or believed insoluble at the time then forgotten about.

She remembered back to what she had thought to be a throw away comment over the radio when she had been flying in. New science and brand new ways to think about things. “My God Chris, what if he is right?”

Chris, not being privy to the thoughts while still inside her head, looked as lost as he felt by her comment. As far as Chris knew it had just been uttered. He understood that it had been an unconscious thought spoken aloud,” Pardon Maggie, have I been asleep?”

“No, Chris, sorry. You’ve seen the lecture and had my version, the differences are obvious. Now for this lot,” she waves the papers out of the envelopes at him. “Max seems to have edited the lecture to suit the conclusions of the lines of enquiry he is currently following. At who’s behest and for who’s benefit? There really are too many questions and not enough hard information for me to even start to handle it rationally. What I’m reading is science fiction, at least you have to agree that our modern technology could not produce some of the results that Max claims to have obtained? We remembered the mockery that Von Danikin’s theories, about spacemen landing in pre-history and the marvellous ‘things’ that he attributed to them, suffered in the ‘seventies. We didn’t want that door opening again. We wrote the lecture to prevent that kind of ‘far out’ speculation. I can’t believe that he would court this type of sure and certain disaster.’

“But what if it’s true?” Chris’s words hung in the air as long as your average lead balloon and hit the floor with a thud. Was it so inconceivable?

“That’s what I’ve been trying to avoid doing, the idea of what an entire new science could damage before we understood is too horrible to contemplate. Lets find lunch or is it time for dinner, I’m starved!”

Chris looked at the only piece of jewellery he ever wore, his watch. It was a plain matt black digital timepiece. Functional to tell the passage of hours and minutes in a day and that was all he required it for. “I’d say somewhere between. You’re right we haven’t eaten since breakfast. I think we should eat before we collapse of starvation, I doubt security will object, they need us alive as far as I know. Lets go ask!”

The canteen facilities they found were similar here as they had been in the company facility in Brasilia, with the same world wide variety of foods covering everyone’s idea of breakfast through to supper at any hour of day or night. They were met at the door by Chris’s winch man, Dave, who had organised their table, he somehow found one sitting by itself in relative seclusion from the hustle of the main dining area. “Hardly the place to find lumberjacks or wildcatters,” Maggie commented, almost under her breath, as she glanced round at the collection of possibly fifty or so summer blouses, white shirts or lab coats that formed small islands of talking humanity scattered about the otherwise silent sea of tables in the hall built to seat five hundred people with ease. She continued after she had settled, “These don’t look like desperate co-conspirators out to dupe the world of science. But what else have I to fall back on apart from a deliberate attempt to, to, to what?”

Chris looked round the dinning hall and tried to take up the torch, but had no other ideas, so stayed quiet. Dave picked his way through the maze of tables from the servery back to them carrying a tray and a cordless telephone. “Dr. Spiers, a call for you.” As he placed the large tray on the table the receiver was passed to Maggie. Initially she just stared at the phone as if unsure what to do with it.” Maggie,” Chris said, “its Max. Say something.”

“Max, where are you. Chris and myself need to talk to you.”

“Calm yourself, Maggie dear. I’m about five minutes away if you’re in the canteen then I’ll see you there. If not, I suggest you are. Apart from you needing a break that is where I’ll be, so I see you in minutes.” And the line went dead. “He infuriates me when he does that.” Chris interrupted with, “I know, the pilot of your helicopter in told me you have a foul mouth at times.” Maggie grins and has the good grace to blush, but only slightly, then for revenge at having been caught out brings her elbow into his ribs as a reminder that her temper is not to be treated, or taken, lightly.

The large tray, covering a wide selection of delicacies, Dave set before the three of them steadily empties. As each comes across an empty space on the tray where there had been a taste that either he or the one she fancied then the servery would be again raided. Dave, just having emptied another refill of the coffee flask was heading back to the servery for more when Max arrived and a fresh platter of food had been called for.

He arrived like the proverbial Greek bearing gifts. Neither Maggie nor Chris were certain if he were actually welcome at this point in time. Max’s gifts consisted of a couple of large blank fronted envelopes for each of them. One envelope was labelled ‘photographs. Do not bend.’ This was the envelope each headed for first to open. A good hundred or so glossy eight by ten black and white prints slid over the table from the one Maggie opened first and Chris left his to look through the pictures already on the table.

“O.K. the two of you follow me. I have one quick phone call to make then we shall go down. Have I got something to show you?” He paused by a nearby phone to dial, the pair with him did not fail to notice that he did not use nine for an outside line. He still dialled thirteen digits then spoke. “Jason, its Max, I’m out on site and my assistants are still trapped on the surface and I want them down below right now..” A pause while he listened to the reply, “Great Jason, thanks. I owe you one, Two minutes, you promise. Bye.” He turns from the phone to wave them on “Lets go.”

He led them back from the canteen through to a bank of lifts at the side of the door they came in through. Neither had thought anything of it at the time but where did they go. It could only be down. Max fed his key card into the terminal at the side of the lift and it immediately spat back at him two new cards, already made out to ‘Dr. Christaan Sommers’ and ‘Dr. Margareeta Spiers’. “Useful having the Security Director’s personal number. Never know when you need something overriding in a hurry. Come on, big adventures await us.” Max fed his key into the lift lock and its light panel turned from blank to green. “Now your turn, lets just make sure they work before we go down.”

Maggie’s slid home the card Max gave her and the key console turned green, Chris had the same response. The doors slid open silently as Chris withdrew his key. The inside was not utilitarian in the least. Aubusson carpet covered the floor and half way up the sides of the elevator, walnut and mirrored side panels continued up to the light panels in the ceiling, and highly polished chrome inner doors. There were no floors marked anywhere that Chris could see, and as the lift started to move Max turned and faced them. “If both you’re keys had not worked then the doors would have remained closed and security would have been all over us like fleas on a backwoods dog. A nuisance at an inconvenient time, but nice to know we are protected.”

The rest of the trip down was in silence. Max smiling, while the other two knew that they would have all revealed in Max’s own good time, as always. So they waited and the lift stopped. The doors opened into a steel lined corridor with only two doors off it. “Welcome to my floor. Well cavern, really. We’ve been working down here for the best part of a year. Come I’ll show you what I mean”. And he heads off down the passage way toward one or other of the doors. “Have your keys to hand, the security system knows that there are three of us. From now on you will never be down here on your own. Even if you think you are alone. So I agree, I’m an old man babbling nonsense, just wait for this door to open. Then if you can speak to ask any questions, I’ll answer them, there and then. There is only one proviso I’ll place on that sweeping promise, that is if I have the knowledge. Believe me now and remember it later. I do not know everything about what awaits you. Now your key cards, hold them in your hands. I can’t use your cards.”

Max inserts his and withdraws it as the light panel on the console turns green. Next he ushers Chris in then Maggie and the three stand and wait. A beam of light scans their bodies from the feet upwards. As the light approaches their faces Max suggests that it is more comfortable with the eyes closed. All three close their eyes as the scanning beam reaches their faces. The doors slide apart to reveal a walkway of some kind inside a dark glass tube. “Please enter, the glass clears when we are all in and the door closed. Very strict on security, no getting round it.” Max leads the way round to the left of the door. Maggie and Chris follow like sheep. The door starts to close as Max speaks. “ We are currently three hundred foot under ground. Please feel free to ask whatever you wish. As I said, if you can.”

Max had been right, the darkened glass tube cleared to transparent after the door closed. Chris could not decide scale, perhaps it was the angle that Max had lead them in at. Other than the impact of the view. Theatrically lit, it looked like a Hollywood stage set for another ‘Indiana Jones’ movie. A gigantic golden painted ‘Inca’ pyramid type temple stood before them, its scale had to be breathtaking. It was at least two hundred foot to the floor from where they stood, two thirds of the way up the wall of ‘Max’s Cavern’ the glass tube was suspended, the peak of the building pyramid still towered above him. The place was enormous. “Please,” said Max and broke the spell. “Can we carry on to my office where I can use all the help available to me to be able to answer your questions. Besides, the walk will help you formulate them into some kind of order. Remember there was no-one to help me. Please be gentle on an old man.”

He still led them off to the left and the very occasional security door became apparent. Outside the third door the three came across Max stopped and faced it. Again he was scanned as were the other two and the door opened. As the lights increased the ambient glow in the room to useable levels Chris noticed that Max’s office resembled a lounge after nightfall. The room happily contained two contrasting sets of furniture at opposing ends, slender and graceful ‘Edwardian’ antiques on the left as you enter the room and sturdy but luxurious ‘modern’ at the right, meeting surprisingly harmoniously in the middle. Max strode confidentially into the modern area that contained a soft leather suite and a solid clear plastic desk.

His hand passed over the surface of the desk and the lights dimmed again but only to reveal a new light source emanating from the desk itself. A projector was presenting a show in thin air. Yet it appeared to have three dimensions. There was noise in her head but she could make no sense of it at all. Her eyes strayed in the direction of where Chris was sat and found him sat on the edge of the sofa staring at the image before him, fascinated. As she watched the noise in her head lessened until it became background static to her thoughts as she caught on to what had held Chris’s attention.

Whatever was on screen seemed barely human. The backdrop was even less earthly, it looked like a huge Temple under construction in a vast underground cavern. At least the site of the building work had been lit by flaming torches and oil lamps, many hundreds of each no doubt, but it was still lit by fire, yet the characters and paintings that the crystal clarity that the picture was coming through on, she had never seen before. Either the acts the paintings portrayed, or the thing that the people depicted were working on. It looked like the incredibly detailed Hollywood film set she had seen laid out before them on the way through the glass tube to this room. Why was Max showing them Hollywood ‘rushes’, Chris had offered up Max having lost touch with reality as a reason for his earlier comments and now, after the way she had been brought out into the middle of a rainforest half way around the globe from her home, her mind became open to the possibility that Max had finally gone over the edge.

“The scenes you witnessed are, as far as we can tell, accurate. I can promise you, in all honesty, that I firmly believe that those shots you have seen are at least five thousand years old and they were of that Temple when it was under construction. The Company has been working out here for the better part of a year when radar mapping of the area raised some questions that had to be answered. That was over two years ago. A ground survey team was put in and that paperwork in your envelopes is the only tangible result, apart from a new tribe found and some fabulous old stories that seem to tell about the times and the inhabitants when the Temple was being built. It took up until now to find all this. I had been sent in a year ago and I have learned much. Enough to be aware that I know nothing about this place. This appears to be a very old area of the forest, we know that the soil here is deeper and richer that in the areas around. By the applying some very cautious use of dendrochronology, tree ring dating, we know that some of the trees still growing here are many thousands of years old.

We also know that the stones that make up that construction outside this room were dressed and positioned at least five thousand years ago, there is so much to see and understand on the outside we haven’t entered the Temple yet. We have found metals that we can not yet melt or mark but we have found them to have been worked then engraved. Hieroglyphs from Egypt and Greek script. Writings in Sanskrit and marks made with river reeds in clay tablets from the Babylonian times. There are fractions of writings from every known language, the oldest aged at around ten thousand years B.C. scattered around this cavern and that is only from the surface.”

“ At present we know nothing, apart from the representations you have seen, about the people that did all that work outside here. Once I get down on the floor outside, last walked by humans five thousand years ago, and start to see the relics just left laying around, I must admit to going a little crazy as I try to sort out which of the many lines of research to follow. They all lead me in one direction and that direction troubles me, I don’t know what is inside the Temple so I’ve requested the Company to close down all news sources as to what we find. At the moment I can’t contemplate the future when so many questions about the past can be answered right here. Right now the contents of this cavern is telling me that the impossible happened right where I can stand. I need the two of you to impose some order on me. Someone needs to tell me which direction to take, new science and all that it offers both in risk and benefit on the one hand and rewriting ancient history on the other.”

“Come and I’ll take a couple of hours to show you what we found on opening the cavern.” A rear door disguised as a wood panel led to a flight of steel stairs spiralling down to the floor of the cavern. The party of three did not have to walk all of the two hundred or so feet to the floor, they descended the stairs for about twenty feet and came to a short passageway feeding to a bank of elevators. “The only way to go from here is down.” Max commented as he called for a lift to convey them down to the floor level and out onto the ground surrounding the Temple itself.

Chris had been talking with Max all the way down allowing Maggie the opportunity to begin digesting all she had seen, heard and experienced over the past twenty four hours. Their voices had merged into a monotonous drone in the background to her thoughts that were in comparative turmoil. The elevator door slid silently open and again the trio walked out of the passageway and onto a vast plateau filled with activity. People in orange and black construction safety ware and technicians in more usual white coats wandered, apparently aimlessly, about the site. There were small electric powered trucks shuttling about with loads, both covered and open, or darting about from loading bays to tented areas or to open construction sites. It had been the walls of the cavern itself that had caught her attention and walking out from the passageway onto the plateau had led her back five thousand years in time.

At first the writing that covered the walls to, what seemed to Maggie, about ten foot below the magic glass tube they had walked along earlier. Different forms of script covered every centimetre of wall, seemingly all mixed together. There were hand paintings on the lower parts of the surface but further up toward the arching ceiling murals began to appear. She began to notice similar chunks of script over large portions of the wall interspersed with other forms of writings from other civilisations. Maggie had held a childhood dream of understanding Egyptian hieroglyphics and now she could put her knowledge to the test and interpret a previously undiscovered text.

Max called her name as he approached her. ‘Wear this at all times down here on the floor.’ It was a microphone / bone conduction headset, very minimal in its design, a stem microphone and an ‘behind the ear’ earpiece attached to a slim headband to hold it all in place. She strapped it over her hair and guided the receiver to the rear of her ear and adjusted the microphone so as she didn’t catch a glimpse of it from the corner of her eye then smiled at Max.

‘O.K. Max playtime is over. What is going on?’ This time her voice was flat and unemotional. Max knew from past experience that if he did not satisfy her curiosity now there would be trouble and he would loose a fine assistant until he could talk her round. That scenario was not one that he had planned for so he relented. ‘Maggie just give Chris a minute to come across and I’ll tell all I know about this place as quickly as the two of you will allow me to. Ask any questions and I shall try to answer. If my answer doesn’t satisfy then go find your own answers and do your own research. I will be too busy with trying to put this research to date together in a way that makes sense to a senile old man like me.’ He moved his jaw and spoke into his mic, ‘ Have you worked out how to operate it yet Chris?’ She heard Max ask and the response he received raised a smile from his lips. ‘He’ll be here in less than a minute. He’s worked out how to make his set work, have you?’

“By having watched you just now I’d say you connect by sound onto a closed circuit. You may have guessed that the walls fascinate me. How did so many different forms of writing get so jumbled together in a place not known before as a crossroads of civilisation? The Amazon is not known for the number of great civilisations we have found strewn every ten miles or so along the length of its banks.’

‘I’ll strike a deal with you Maggie, you don’t ask me questions that make me feel a fool because I can’t answer them, and I promise not to hit you in the mouth because of my frustration. How is that for a bargain.’ As they had been talking Chris arrived and caught the last part of the conversation. ‘Never thought you were into violence Max?’ Chris queries with a smile of understanding the conversation he had not heard.

Max carried on as if there had been no interruption “You see Maggie, from the evidence I’ve been able to gather I am now positive we are not the only intelligent life form in the universe. There is so much down here we’ve never came across before and I can’t explain. There are the simple questions like how did people get down here and why was anything built so far underground? Then we come to the more complicated ones, some of the metals we’ve found around here, discarded on waste tips alongside bits of broken pottery and old bones, their molecular structure is so complex I can’t begin to imagine what forces were used to create them in the first place. Looking at the people that occupied this cave, they couldn’t have begun to work with the metal, let alone smelt it. Here we have to have our hands on the first hard evidence of extra terrestrial visitation. I have been putting off entering the Temple very simply because I didn’t know what I would find and I wanted someone’s hand to hold. Are you now beginning to understand why?”

Up until now to any outsider viewing in, out of the three, Chris would have appeared to have been the outsider. While Max and Maggie were talking together Chris hadn’t really wanted to ‘interrupt’, he felt as if he was interrupting a father/daughter relationship. Whilst the two participants were drawing breath, he dived in. “All right, following your scenario through, you’re saying that we have some reason to suspect that this area, five thousand years ago, was a main crossroads. That only works if you carry the assumption that in three thousand years B.C. there was trade between North Africa and South America. How do you avoid flying in face of convention that tells us South America wasn’t even populated five thousand years ago? How come there are no stories of people vanishing from Egypt, if somebody had have vanished in front of a priest’s eyes they’d have been declared a God. So, fine, we cast aside all rational thought, let’s look at the ‘gods from space’ idea. We’re out in the middle of the Brazilian Rain Forest, a thousand miles from anywhere in any direction, in a three hundred foot high artificial cavern, with the roof buried under two hundred feet of solid rock, in the middle of one of the most uninhabited spots you could possibly pick on the planet. Apart from the South Pole. The one question ‘Why?’ opens a huge can of worms.”

After Chris had wound down Maggie found herself impressed with the ease with which he talked to Max. No matter what the setting Max’s credentials assured him ‘respect’ in capital letters. Neither university principles, senators or heads of private facilities ever questioned anything Max had ever said, if they were his employers, they didn’t want to lose him, if they weren’t his employers, they certainly wanted to keep on his best side, in case they ever were. Max did something unexpected, in his perfectly tailored suit, he sat down on the dusty rock of the cavern’s floor and invited the other two to join him. It was one of the few times either Chris or Maggie had heard Max use anything other than perfect Oxbridge English. His accent slipped slightly into his native German as he said “Sit beside me children and hear a story”.

“A number of local tribes hunt and forage this area, but none of them will stay in this area after the sun sets, or even live here. Because the exploration and study of this entire area has been so fragmented in the past, nobody had really bothered putting together all of the local stories and realise just how similar they were. You see, all the anthropologists had worked for different centres of learning, and never really shared all their information. Like all good little educational institutions they did put most, but not all, their information out on the net. When the radar mapping satellite passed over this area and the data came back to us, it lit up like a Christmas tree. There was something very large down here sending back crazy anomalies and because the Company was paying for this area to be mapped we got all the data even before anybody else had looked at it.”

“So the Board wanted to know more, that’s when I was called in. I was the one that brought to light the similarity in the tribal tales. Tales of haunted forests and ancient Gods. There’s even one shaman who insists his tribal history tells of a great gathering of the world. It had been ordered by their Gods with the intention of curing a sickness that had killed too many of the local tribes and the building of the ‘Secret Temple’ had to be suspended until the bad air had been driven away. There seems to be a fifty mile perimeter around this spot in which nobody lives but everybody can hunt and forage, but nobody stays overnight. And all the local tribes seemed to adhere to the decree without really realising it is common to all their individual traditions, even though they’re not spoken.”

“All of this and a lot more I was able to find out within a couple of days, then we came out here. For the first few days there was just me and the team of diggers and we started unearthing artefacts. That was when we closed the curtains and shut everybody else, apart from Company staff, out. This research is so important to the Company that, as you noticed earlier, I have direct contact to the Board through our Security Director. You see we have found some clay tablets, at first we thought they were crude attempts at counting, but a bright young astrophysicist chose to start comparing them to some photographs taken by the Hubble telescope, they actually turn out to be constellations that are too far away even to have been seen from the surface of the Earth today, let alone five thousand years ago! So now what do we have, item one is the hole in the ground. Item two is the impossible Temple. Item three is the jumble of racial and religious relics. Item four is stellar cartography. Item five is new metals. Finally we get to item six, last but not least, what do we do with this lot.”

“Well children, as we say, ‘its up to you’, what is to become of all the work and money Beirbeek has put into this project thus far. Let me lead you to another, alternative, route. It is up to us to decide the future of mankind. Can we really make this find public, or is it that we cannot afford to trust the outside with the knowledge we uncover here. We now have our first evidence of a ‘first contact’ situation or in this case, possibly, ‘last contact’ with beings not of this world. Or did this planet once support an advanced civilisation that came to an end. Should this be the case then would we find it preferable to rebury our finds rather than expose the world to a total rethink of who and what we actually are. Until more is known I only speculate, but until we have some idea of the answers we want, I offer the idea that we carry on exploring and make some of the answers apparent to us. There, my say is done. Now the decision on the future becomes our joint responsibility and depending on the route we take rests whether or not our names go down in history or our names and this place remain hidden from humanity’s eyes for a further millennium should we choose to abandon this project. Still, whatever our decision, may God help us.”

Both Maggie and Chris murmured “Amen!” and the three of them looked out across the rock floor, covered, in the most part, by five thousand year old dust, and six eyes came to rest on the building known as the Temple. Chris broke the spell that held them enthralled for minutes, “I’ve got to know what is inside that building. I don’t know if it is a Temple, if not what else could it be? There I’ve said it. Now I’ve got to know. How hard is the entrance?”

Chris’s question found itself caught by Max, and deftly returned. “I do not know. As I said upstairs, I’ve not been inside, I did not have the courage to open the doors by myself. I now know how ‘Pandora’ should have felt when challenged to open the box. As far as I am aware the doors were closed five thousand years ago and have remained closed ever since. Remember the beginning of my little speech earlier. Well, now it really is up to you. I am too old to follow through with any decision I make here. By the time you are ninety to a hundred years old mankind must have gained some wisdom from this place or I fear for the survivors. Now I can only lend you my abilities, as few as they are, for as long as they last.” As Max shrugged his shoulders he appeared to fold in on himself, just a little, as an old man after a long day. He looked weary.

There was also a gleam of triumph in is eyes. He realised the enormity of this particular find had been passed on. ‘Thank God’ he thought, ‘They do understand.’ Max found he had a tear falling from the corner of his eye. He had been caught out in a moment of weakness by Maggie and Chris. “What the hell.” Max said to them both as he allowed the single tear to complete its journey to the five thousand year old dust on the rock floor.

Chapter 4
4th June
Duncan spent the day uncovering many pointers as to what had happened out in Brazil. Beirbeek had been moving people around like pawns in some global chess game, all aimed at disguising their final destination. Communications and G.P.S. were down over a hundred thousand square mile area, it was looking like the ‘Bermuda Triangle’ in the middle of the rainforest. Weather satellites in geosynchronous orbit had stopped transmitting data and with no signals coming out from the area nobody had the ability to oversee it.

The major powers, unused to not seeing everything through the eyes of spy satellites, became ‘uncomfortable’ and started to ask serious questions that couldn’t be answered. Yet. The requests for information filtered down from Government departments to N.G.O’s. and finally to the information gathering pressure groups such as Duncan’s own.

Duncan’s experience, whilst wide, was relatively shallow. His forte had always been in finding a way to make unconnected ideas fit. Accepting there was a lack in his depth of knowledge and due to his wide experience he knew, and was owed favours by, a lot of very knowledgeable specialists. His afternoon passed too quickly meeting with a few of these disaffected specialists. The constant flow of callers came in small groups, pairs and individuals. Some stayed hours, some stayed minutes. The top floor of the building that had once housed only six people was now permanently occupied by Mary and Brenda. Whilst a continuous meeting was being held in the furthest, Duncan’s old, office, Duncan and Mike had gained temporary access to the suite of offices downstairs. Mike was first to open the doors to the second floor offices, at 10 o’clock that morning, to run phone extensions down from upstairs, although the rooms seemed huge by comparison, he knew they would soon be full.

Duncan finally escaped the mayhem of the third floor and had joined him by half ten. They passed the majority of the next two and a half hours on the phone. It was the minority of the time that proved the most valuable. There were various groups setting themselves up in offices either on this floor or upstairs and it was down to Duncan or Mike to recognise which of the groups could best use talking to the caller. At some stage during the morning Brenda had been relieved of her duties upstairs to set up some form of focus that the rest of the groups could relate back to. Somehow the three of them had to turn this maelstrom of information into something tangible that could be of use to Piers and his team.

Mike, who upon leaving university had wandered the globe for ten years before settling back in England, had came to Duncan with a water quality problem four years ago and hung round ever since. At times Duncan thought this employee knew everyone of any use on every continent. He phoned around the people he knew and, by lunch, came back with an enormous amount of information to sift and sort during the afternoon. Whereas Duncan had put in the morning calling back the more important faxes from the previous day. As his morning progressed his diary filled with people wanting to see him.

As Duncan and Mike compared notes on their respective mornings one fact threw itself at them again and again. A large multinational called Beirbeek Incorporated had upset the majority of the world’s governments.

Chapter 5
June 7th

Rafer had enjoyed his night at the ‘Inn’. It had been nice to see Piers again. And that Donald, sorry Duncan, guy seemed ok. Interesting in a civilian kind of way. He’d have to stop thinking of him as a Donald, but God he looked like a librarian, or a Tax collector. His name was Duncan, he’d have to picture him wearing a Scottish kilt or something, but he’d have to remember his name. Not knowing who gave you your instructions from time to time was bad enough, but not giving your known employer his correct name was unforgivable. And there had been a couple of near calls, when he’d been trying to picture the kind of boats he’d need to get up the Amazon with, he’d nearly slipped up then and called him Donald. The man’s name was Duncan.

He’d worked for Beirbeek before, as had Piers, but Donald, God rest his soul,.! Shit the man’s name is Duncan, get it right. But Duncan is a complete innocent. Anyway, hopefully, he was a quick learner. He’d need to be, he seemed intelligent enough and he could swim without moaning! Piers and himself had enjoyed the twenty lengths of the pool. Duncan had done them apparently joyously and didn’t mind admitting when he had nothing to say, by keeping quiet. Rafer admired that ability. In his younger days, he’d always had something to say. His nose was permanently broken because of it.

He knew his way around London, having visited and worked here, and was out calling on some of his last squad. Rafer was happy that a spacious detached house in Todmorden would be his last call of the day and he could get back to central London for a swim and dinner. Paul Dickson had been his captain, wise and resourceful, the wisdom came from age, Paul had reached 50 and had been a soldier for hire for the last 30 of those 50 years. He was the oldest soldier Rafer knew. His resourcefulness came from an almost ‘Devil’s advocate’ way of thinking laterally. Rafer never started out able to agree with him when they argued a point during a discussion, but somehow, through twists and turns, Paul made sure his opponent always lost with honour.

There was no chance of Rafer taking Paul out in the field again, but his son held a doctorate in law and could well be a very useful source of information. Rafer was putting together his ‘all eventualities’ team, and from the men whom he’d seen today, he was a quarter of the way there. He saw himself needing, ideally, twelve teams. He already had three leaders, he was now going to see the fourth. Paul would sign on and be disappointed that he wasn’t going anywhere. That bridge would be crossed when he got to it. For now he’d concentrate on driving on the left hand side of the road.

Four hours later back safely at the ‘Inn’ and with way too much of Paul’s dusty old bottle of ‘Dimple’ Haig single malt whisky inside him he lay back in the hot tub at the Inn. Out of the eight people he’d seen today, he’d chosen four. Paul Dickson had caught onto his vague idea immediately and was so enthusiastic he had his son called out of a lecture to take a phone call. After two minutes Paul called Rafer to the phone, Adrian wanted a quick chat. It seemed that Adrian, like Piers, Duncan and Rafer himself, had somewhat of a bee in his bonnet about Beirbeek Incorporated.

Rafer remembered Adrian as a studious young lad, probably fourteen, but very serious. From the brief phone conversation Rafer knew he hadn’t changed, except he was no longer fourteen! Instead, he was a sharp young lawyer. He was probably looking at being one of the youngest Judges on the Bench, but he also had a part time job in a social law centre, one of those places where they give out good legal advice to poor citizens, and if necessary, take the case to court on their behalf. And at the moment, Beirbeek were causing a conflict for him and he wanted the conflict resolving. Rafer was offering him the chance, he grabbed it with both hands! So now they had a Lawyer on board, and four of the twelve men he needed.

Although Rafer didn’t realise it, his thoughts and actions up to now had been based on an unconscious premise. Whenever he thought of females, with anything to do with armed forces he’d seen them as doctors or nurses, or in some form of support roll. He’d forgotten about the American Army, or Navy, or Air Force, As Rafer was laying back in the hot tub, he had a realisation. He realised that if the British Department of Trade ever found out what he was up to he’d be done under the Sex Equality Bill. The mixture of steam and coffee finally has an effect on the curtain of alcohol and a Time Life cover is revealed to his memory. Almost on automatic he climbs from the hot tub and wanders to the house telephone at the Life Guard station at the side of the pool. He calls the switchboard, gives his room number and asks for an outside line. He phones his computer at home and has it dial a number. If he could persuade her away from Israel, he now has five.

An hour’s conversation passed in seconds, although Hannah had very firmly said no, he knew he’d planted the seeds of thought. He’d had the ‘pleasure’ of working with her Rapid Response Team in the past, he’d usually been called in as an advisor while her team was there to carry out the work. He believed that, only once, her government had ordered her to work with Beirbeek, she had done so under orders but she hadn’t been happy, he still didn’t know why, but he was going against Beirbeek, and that was what he was depending on. He knew if she came, he’d get her team as well. She had been the daughter of emigrant Russian Jews and had been seconded to the organisation within the Israeli Secret Service that gets the jobs that nobody else wants. For the messy work that they get, they are probably the easiest to trust. They work on the premise that if they do you a favour, you’ll do them one in return. They usually prefer to work with governments, for obvious reasons.

But.

He looked at his watch, he had better get to the restaurant before it closed. For the first time since arriving in London, Rafer dines alone. He allows himself time to enjoy the experience of eating good food, well served, in fine surroundings. But, he has to get back to work and with a sigh of contentment at the full stomach, and regret at leaving, pulls himself away from the table and heads back to his room.

Two hours later, sitting at the table provided by the room he has worked out who he can put where, and who he can expect them to bring along. He looks again at his watch and decides Piers sleep can go to hell, he phones him. He hears the mobile ring a couple of times before it’s answered. Rafer’s expectations are shattered, Piers isn’t asleep at all, he sounds wide awake and as full of ideas as Rafer is himself!

As Piers gives him the results of his and Duncan’s labours, Rafer’s plans enlarge as they fall into place. He doesn’t envy Duncan’s job at all, there he’s finally cracked it, Duncan is Duncan, he’s no longer Donald! Piers reports back to Rafer that Duncan has been talking to ‘government representatives’ for the majority of the day. It seems that Beirbeek has upset some people it is wiser not to upset! Piers gets the feeling that Duncan is slightly frightened and overawed by the terms that the ‘government representatives’ are using. “He has a list of names of people who would like us to contact them, he’s coming across to the Inn tomorrow. At the moment I’m out in the wilds of North Yorkshire, but I’m heading back to London very shortly. You can tell me all about your day when I arrive. Duncan should be with us for a swim about half seven, I think first off, he should just relax, we can pick his bones clean over breakfast. Meanwhile, get some sleep, it sounds like we could have a busy day tomorrow and I’d appreciate it if you could call at the desk and see if anything has arrived for me. If it has, can you open my room and let them in? Probably see you about three a.m.” and Rafer’s left holding a dead phone. Being told he is seeing someone in the early hours of the morning changes gear in Rafer’s mind. He automatically thinks “shower and sleep, that way I’ll be fresh.” As he is already in his room achieving his objective is easy. He is asleep inside ten minutes.

The phone at the side of his bed rings, and he hears Piers. “Good morning my friend.” Slightly acid. “Thanks for opening my room, you want to see how many of my files that have arrived. I’d forgotten how many boxes I had in storage, but I’ve arranged with the Hotel that we can use one of their conference suites as an office. They’ve installed full facilities so for the next day or two, it can be our operations base. Where do you want coffee and juice, my room or yours?”

“You woke me, how about you come up here, I can call room service whilst you’re in the lift. How do you feel about some breakfast, or have you eaten one of those motorway things on the way back?”

“Room service breakfast will be fine, providing you order enough for three. I know the way you outdoor types eat. Anyway see you in five.”

As Rafer placed the call to reception for breakfast with lots of coffee and fresh fruit juice he is ordering his thoughts and marshalling the information he has spread out over the table. As he is organising the papers prior to clearing the table for the breakfast trays arrival Piers arrives at his door.

Arriving back in London Piers had dropped Carl off outside his home and came straight to the hotel to talk with Rafer. He had enjoyed Carl driving himself and the owner of the land around seeing the selling points and wondering what the Lord, who was acting as guide, thought that Piers could possibly be looking for. About the only kinds of terrain not seen were the two extremes, arctic tundra, only because it had not been cold enough for the past ten thousand years, and Saharan desert. It was geographically close enough to Fylingdales for any communications from them could well be hidden in the general traffic of the area.

Walking into the hotel Piers found himself greeted by the duty manager and twenty plus wooden chests filled with his files, now out of storage, he understood why it had cost him as much each month as it had been doing. “Dr. Lofgren, how about the Inn offers you one of our conference suites for a temporary office? This,” as he emphasises the point by waving his hand in the direction of Piers’ imports. “ is outside the Hotel’s normal use of the term ‘a few boxes’, which we would normally be pleased to assist you with in getting to your room.”

“All the suites have fax and E-mail facilities and I’m sure we could organise one to suit your needs. At this time of the morning it should take less than an hour to arrange.” The manager obviously wanted his reception area back. It did not look as neat as it normally did with Piers’ boxes stacked up in full view. Piers felt he could afford to negotiate a better deal on the suite being offered. Then he called Rafer to have company for coffee as sleep was still eluding him.

Rafer responds to the room door to find Piers had arrived seconds ahead of room service bearing a tray of coffee and fresh iced fruit juice. A well tipped porter left them alone Rafer sat on the bed while Piers sat with his back to the curtained windows to the side of a small occasional table. For ten seconds they sat, each staring at the other until Piers smiled and said “ Rafer, my old friend, it is good to see you again. Can we still work together, I wonder. Still we shall see.”

Rafer took a sip of his coffee cup and still smiling began talking in the middle of a sentence. “ They will make life so much easier. Sorry I’ve just been filling you in on the support side staff I have lined up. You didn’t hear because you were in the lift at the time. Also a partial equipment list, admittedly its only general kit but we will need everything from water bottles to tactical weaponry. Logistic are under control, I’ve got Paul Dickson on our side. I have four out of five in England and arriving here in the morning.” Rafer stops talking to answer the door for room service and breakfast. He continues after he lets the porter out, “ Five out of twelve in the first day. Something magical is happening. I have seven more confirmed visits for tomorrow afternoon so by tomorrow evening I should have at least three quarters of my commanders in place. I wonder why, as soon as I mentioned Beirbeek, everyone’s diary is unexpectedly empty for the next six months.”

Around mouthfuls of sausage, bacon or toast Piers begins to tell of his day with Carl in the wilds of North Yorkshire, of his meeting with a Lord of the Realm and the security blanket that existed up there that could well assist them in their preparations. Although Piers had intentionally said nothing at the time, Carl had put forward some very useful suggestions that had apparently been ignored by the two who were intended to hear them. Through it all he had remained cheerful all day, from being first collected before sunup through to being dropped off at home when he knew that Piers intended going for a conference with Rafer before they met up again at the ‘Inn’ in the morning. Piers knew that Carl would be the first to arrive at the ‘Inn’ with no excuses. He also knew that he would do exactly as Duncan told him. He had kept a good and faithful eye on Piers, he also asked Piers questions that for him to have answered with a single word answer would have seemed evasive without reason. As he himself kept reminding everyone he met, ‘we are all on the same side’.

Rafer had arranged for a secluded table to be laid for a maximum of eight diners at their ‘Business Breakfasts’ and to have the guests to be shown directly to it. Rafer and Piers were first down to the table, with Carl arriving a very close third. While Rafer, Carl and Piers had coffee and fruit juice three more diners were shown to the table. All three were large, very fit looking, well dressed men with quiet, polite voices. Rafer introduced those already sat to Paul, Terry and Joe. The three newcomers knew each other and the talk very quickly left generalities and settled on specifics, mainly communications and logistical systems, where the required equipment could be obtained and what would be asked in return.

It happened that the three newcomers were Rafer’s platoon commanders of long standing and were eager to resolve some form of tactics. The three newcomers quizzed Piers and Carl about the environments in which they could be working or travelling through. For each question the three received two answers, each from a different viewpoint. Piers covered the possible terrain while Carl offered general ecological pointers to allow living off the land, and the concentration of the information was based around rainforest environments.

When Duncan arrived at ‘The Inn’ the table had six occupants and was a scene of quiet chaos. The breakfast table had been pushed up against the first empty table that became available and had been heaped with used crockery and serving dishes. Duncan’s place at the table was left set and ready to be used. He collected a tray and having selected a variety of dishes made his way to his table.

As he approached the table, Rafer stood and took the tray from Duncan’s hands and allowed him to shake hands, one by one, with the team’s new members. As each were introduced, Rafer filled in a little background on each of the men that Duncan met. Duncan found the quality of the mercenaries surprising. For some reason he had expected to meet hard, uneducated thugs. Each had First degrees in electronics or computing, as well as good Seconds in other subjects, mainly Languages. Duncan had led a life of Academic isolation and suddenly finding himself surrounded with urbane, well educated men of violence he found himself a little in awe of them.

Sitting at the table and devouring his breakfast he listened in on each conversation as he ate. Even young Carl seemed more in touch with the world inhabited by Rafer and his colleagues than he. Duncan also saw Piers in a different light. He began to wonder as to just where he had been living for the past thirty years? He realised that he didn’t belong in this side of the team, his forte lay in putting things together. Mental activity as opposed to physical. He now began to question where Piers had been during his prolonged absences.

Eventually Mike, being the last person expected, arrived and took a selection of food from the servery along with him as the rest of the party made their way to the, now converted, conference room set aside for them. Duncan felt as if the activity was speeding up without his foot being on the pedal. He began to admit to himself that this was no longer ‘his operation’, somehow this thought comforted him. As Duncan had foreseen the party broke up into teams as soon as the outside door to the conference area had hissed to a close. The three new arrivals gathered together with Rafer and Carl in a huddle while Duncan and Piers found a quiet corner to cover the past day and what each had uncovered.

There had been a lot of feedback over the last twenty four hours and it all required correlating into a form understandable by the others. The two scientists sat at a desk and spread an atlas out in the space between them and started plotting out where people had been marking out the route taken to their new locations. There were three people Duncan wanted, desperately, to find. Professor Maximillion Wizemann, with his current assistant, and Dr. Maggie Spiers. Duncan knew these were Beirbeek’s top researchers, if these people could be found then where they were, there lay the secret. He had been able to follow Maggie’s trail from Australia to Brasilia then he lost her. She landed at the airfield and never left it, officially. Rafer had some solution for this. It turned out that Terry had been to university at the same time as Maggie and he had known her quite well. Rafer happily set Terry the task of finding her.

Piers also had large holes in the enquiries he had made. Many of his contacts had promised to ‘get back to him’ and none had, yet. He had made progress in some areas that begged to be further explored, for instance, the private security sectors had been brought to play in a big way. A number of agencies Piers had been of use to in the past had operatives under contract for Beirbeek and at first were unwilling to accept his calls, their staff had been out of touch with their main office for periods of up to a week. Every contact that the Agencies made to Beirbeek concerning the whereabouts of their employees had been left unanswered. Until Beirbeek issued a blanket statement along the lines of ‘Your staff are under contract to Beirbeek and as such are the responsibility of Beirbeek. Be assured that your employees are being well treated and are not in any areas that may be construed as being hazardous or injurious to their health or well-being.’

When Rafer read the fax Piers carried he called his team together to find out who, if anyone, knew any of Beirbeek’s contract employees. The final tally turned up seven out of twenty known employees could be talked to. The rest were ‘temporarily beyond contact’ and that gave rise for concern. The remaining thirteen people were either family members or good friends of the people in the room and most of them, had at some time, been under Rafer’s command.

Each team, like Rafer’s, had been asked to contact anyone who could help and found the same response. Until Duncan and Piers sat and ran a compare and match search they all thought that the lists contained about one hundred people. After organising the lists they ended with less than forty people missing, the rest were repeats of information already held. It came out that both Duncan and Piers had the same three names on both of their personal contact lists, the names of Max Wizemann, Maggie Spiers and Max’s current assistant Dr. Chris Sommers.

As the pair talked the ‘which of them do we trust if we can contact any?’ question arose. They told each other what they knew of each of the three and how that information had been obtained. Duncan, being the more ‘reputable’ of the two knew more of what the three had been doing and who with than Piers. His information came from having worked then became friends with Maggie and Chris. Maggie had been in her freshman year as he was finishing his thesis while Chris had been doing some post graduate research for him. Both Piers and Duncan felt Chris was the better option for knowing not to let slip anything about any contact the pair made with him. His middle name, that no-one knew other that it began with ‘D’ Chris insisted it stood for ‘Discreet’.

Although Duncan had not realised at the time that Mary had not yet shown up he looked around the room for ‘someone’ to talk to. He spent sixty seconds looking round when Mary arrived carrying a variety of charts and maps from a list that Piers had left her with the previous day along with the shops where they could be bought. There was one Mercator view of the globe and a number of specialist ‘Pilot’ charts of rivers and coastlines that, when linked together, formed a large single sheet map of the northern half of Brazil and the coast of South America.

Piers had called Carl’s friendly Lord to thank him for the offer to use of his property in Yorkshire and decline to use it. A trip to South America was in the offing as England had no comparable areas to train in.

Overnight, word had travelled back about Dr. Spiers. A group of anthropologists heading out to continue a study that had commenced twenty years earlier had seen her. She had been seen leaving the Beirbeek compound at Brasilia Airport in a Beirbeek vehicle and headed into the forest. There was no trace of a flight plan or even an expected time for the journey logged with any of the agencies that cover the exploration of the Brazilian Interior. To all intents and purposes Dr. Maggie Spiers had vanished. Just as had Chris Somers and Max Wizemann.

Chapter 6

The boat handled well under river conditions but was proving, like its predecessors, that it handled like a pig when you try to carry it. Jasper’s crazy idea about how to steal a hovercraft became more appealing as the hours of carrying a boat through the rain forests of Belize passed. As the boat became heavier Rafer began to speculate on the boat ever having floated. Training in a new environment always provided plenty of drama for those involved.

The idea of the soldiers learning off the environmentalists as well as the soldiers sharing their particular skills with the men of science had produced unforeseen benefits for both.

Although a veteran of many a march in tropical Africa, rainforest action would be a different matter entirely. The team arrived in Belize one week ago and drove out of Belize City straight into a jungle. Rafer actually thanked Mike for insisting on having the 4 by 4’s as opposed the jeeps. There appeared to be a ‘green line’ dividing off the areas that the forest would allow the people to have.

Beneath the canopy of leaves, one hundred feet above the forest floor as a minimum, seemed to make the land dark, incredibly moist and dreary compared to the river. On land the air permanently tastes of rotting vegetation and fungus spores. The commanders were ordered that everyone under their command had to wear boots while on the move and this caused the talcum powder consumption to rise dramatically to fend off the voracious fungi that tried to eat into any damp flesh. Athletes foot sounds an amusing complaint for soldiers to have to protect against, but the skin around your toes could literally fall off due to fungal infections.

The blue sky that reigned over the river for most of the day reflected the heat of the sun from the green cliffs of leaves that towered high over the river’s margins. But it was also a lot cooler under the canopy than ‘outside’, which was how, after a week of exposure to river and rainforest, he had begun to think of the river and forest. Rafer felt as though the rivers of the area were the main streets of the forest and racing down them in the high speed craft they were testing allowed him to appreciate there was little difference between carrying and being carried by boat. It was hot, sticky and insect plagued work either way and just as tiring. The humidity on land or water had to be battled against day and night. The oppressively moist heat smothered them like a wet blanket and the air squeezed every drop of moisture from their bodies.

It had been in Africa where he had first experienced constant noise from other inhabitants of the forest. Out on the grasslands and plains, during daylight, the main source of sound would be from insects and the occasional larger herbivore or predatory animal. But here in South America he seemed to meet the same sounds be it day or night. There seemed no dividing line between dark and light other than the lack of sunshine during the night. Plants grew here with an almost indecent haste to reach the sun. Pathways vanished as you watched them. Where a forest giant had fallen and left a hole in the canopy and a single broad shaft of sunlight reaching the moist forest floor meant that the grasses and ferns grew feet in days and obliterated the path you had been on just the previous week; now you had to find a different way through the forest so you never covered the same area twice.

Rafer’s had lost two of his commanders number to retirement so the number of platoons remained at ten. No time to organise replacements that could slot in, easier to enlarge each command and use extra specialists as and when. His leaders unanimously agreed the good sense of creating the platoons into smaller teams to study how the environmentalists handled their surroundings while pushing the need for increasing all round physical fitness by running races between the teams after the days work. After the first run Duncan just avoided open mutiny by allowing Rafer, then Piers, to enlighten them about the Company they were going up against. The advantages soon became clear to both sides as the troops found so many new toys, i.e. curare painted on spikes made a suitably silent weapon to induce eternal sleep very quickly. The rainforest offered more in the way of disabling any opposition than the soldiers at first imagined. After the first week of training in the actual jungle the life expectancy of soldiers and scientists increased significantly to the commanders pleasure.

Soldiers learned to be scientists, they explored the ecosystems at each level of the trees and canopy. By the time any intelligence arrived at the camp any of the people, should they have to walk out of the jungle alone, could. While the scientists learned to move without leaving obvious tracks or excessive noise

Chapter 7

The First Officer was beginning to have doubts about wisdom of the orders the Captain had issued. Here they were at the far end of nowhere and the Captain tells him that they need to touch dry land soon as the hull had a small breach toward the front from the storm they had encountered the previous day. The ship, as large as it was, had been battered by the storm as if it had been like a small river boat that had been used as a ferry to cross the river close to his childhood home. The storm had claimed three of the crew and injured many more. He thought the Captain had to be right about the hull. It had been breached and they had to touch dry land if the breach, currently being held stable by a complex web of force screens, was to be repaired.

The First Officer carried out the lawful orders of his Captain and plotted a course through the obstructions that littered the space between where they were and landing place where the Captain had told him to steer towards. Landing in a strange place was always fraught with danger, while the ship was sailing very little could happen that was beyond control, but once set down on dry land the ship had no real means of defending herself. He took some, not inconsiderable, comfort in the thought that if the ship survived the next onboard cycle then they would all live to enjoy a new cycle. Shipboard time had been set at the time of leaving the home port and so it kept a constant reminder of home before the crew at all times. Duties and rotas were set to the rhythms of Home.

If it were waking or sleeping times at home then it was shipboard also. On long voyagers this contact, no matter how tenuous, with home seemed to be very helpful with keeping the crew content. The Navy had studied this phenomenon long and hard in the past and the very simple act of keeping with Home time had done the trick. Many craft had been lost in the past due to this cardinal rule not being taken seriously. Without this simple link to home the crews had, somehow, lost impetus to go on and mutinied.

Thankfully this problem was in the past although the occasional crew member could still go catatonic through shock at being unprepared to see outside the ship. All senior officers went through mandatory, very intensive, open space training that was needed by all who had to look beyond the walls that formed the hull of the ship. Still, thought the First Officer, we will soon be safe within the atmosphere of a planet. The repairs were relatively simple to make once the ship was on the ground. The scans and sensor sweeps, of the surrounding space, made by the ship, allowed the Captain to pinpoint where it would be best to set down, from the view of both the safety of the ship and the accessibility to raw materials.

First Officer set about his duties and lined the ship up with the target planet and set the automatic landing controls. Now he could join his comrades in the sleep couches that were used during landings and lift offs from gravity wells.

The Captain had selected a planet with a breathable atmosphere, the plotted approach took no account of the small satellite hidden on the other side of the planet when the course was set. As the ship began its final approach before entering the atmosphere the satellite reappeared on a course that would lead the ship into a direct collision. The proximity alarms brought enough of the crew out from the landing couches to avoid a collision but the engines suffered an almost catastrophic collapse of the magnetic chambers that contained the material that powered the ship

All that felt a long time ago for the First Officer, he wrote long diary accounts of the shortfalls of his Captain, not least of which was his contact with the natives of this planet. Their appearance was distinctly humanoid, two arms, two legs, a torso supporting the main sensory area on a stumpy neck. The First Officer felt affronted by lack of civilization the crew encountered on the surface.

After landing the first task had been the protection of the ship. On the first pass over the surface of the planet deep scans revealed a large hollow area, left by early volcanic activity, deep below the surface had proved to be ideal for their needs. The First Officer was still uncomfortable with the idea of bringing the natives down underground to the ship to act as labourers for the more simple and unsavory tasks that repairing the hulls of the ship would require. His preference was to keep as much of his race’s knowledge of advanced technology from all others. The idea of his people sharing information with any other species had been unheard of. But, if your Captain insists then his will be done.

After transferring the ship into the cavern, the native workers were brought down. These were very primitive hominids not readily distinguishable, from the crew’s point of view, from the other forms of bipeds that lived in the trees around the ship’s hiding place. The natives proved to be surprising dexterous and very quick learners, these primitive tribesmen were soon working with equipment far beyond anything their limited mental attributes seemed to allow. Fortunately operating did not require understanding, had it have been so the Captain would have sterilised the planet’s surface after they had left to continue the ship’s voyage. He could not see the point of leaving a source of rebellion at your rear. Any knowledge introduced had to be strictly contained.

The repair facility had been built around the ship, deep underground, from solid blocks of rock that the Captain had carved from different sites on the planet’s surface and shipped in on the ship’s shuttles, this was intended to disguise the scars that there had been any quarrying on the grand scale required to build the hanger, furnaces for working the metals and general living quarters as well as secure compounds for the workers.

The secure compounds were to ensure that nothing untowards happened to any of the native workers. The Captain could do well without causing any workers to develop mutations from any escaped radiation. Future history must show nothing of their visit until the natives were developed sufficiently so the information that they were not the only occupants of space. It had been noticed that some of the natives had an elementary knowledge of astronomy in that they worshiped the stars in the patterns that were observable from the surface and called them after their multifarious Gods. They actually imagined that the heavens were flat and the stars were laid out in these patterns just for them. These individuals were held in high esteem by the majority of the workers, these were the curious ones that had to be kept in as much ignorance as possible. There was much work to do in constructing the shipyard so as no contamination was left behind from any of the repairs being carried out.

There was a part of this biosphere that held a tribe that had begun developing a very basic understanding of the geometry of solids, especially pyramids, their skills would save the ship having to disclose too many of the secrets of the far future to the primitives that lived on this planet. The level of mathematics within this society was sufficient, just barely.

The pyramid grew around the star ship course by course. As the joints where two of the stone blocks abutted each other in the walls that made the pyramid were sealed from the outside, the ship’s crew were busy inside creating the sealable lining to protect the atmosphere outside of the pyramid from the ship on the inside. The workers, following instructions, constructed an airlock to take the place of a door. The Captain then ordered that the outer door of the lock be faced with the same stone that made up the rest of the shipyard to disguise the fact that it was an airlock. While the lock was being fitted by the Captain’s crew the natives were kept safely under sedation by introducing a sleep gas into their quarters. While the crew worked solidly to face then install the airlock for a seven day period the workers believed that they had slept from one dusk to the following dawn not realizing that more changes had been implemented than could be achieved in a single night.

At last all had been secured and the repairs began. The Captain had everyone working a three shift pattern to speed up the repairs and reduce any exposure of the normal biosphere to contamination from the radiation produced by the ship’s damaged power plant and engines. Apart from security measures for feeding and control of the native workers left outside the hanger all the crew were busy inside making the required repairs and improvements to have the ship space worthy as soon as was safe.