“Goddamn it, son.” Yeats stepped back from the ledge. “You certainly know your way around this place. You sure you’ve never been here before?”
“Only in my dreams.”
“Looks like a nightmare to me,” Yeats said as he peered over the ledge. “Where does it go?”
“Only one way to find out.” Conrad unraveled rope from his pack. “The slope is about twenty-six degrees and the floors are slick. We’ll need to use lines. Just stick to the ramparts and try not to slide into the channel.”
They had descended about a thousand feet when Yeats suddenly lost all sense of direction. It was the same sort of vertigo he sometimes felt back at Ice Base Orion on the surface. He couldn’t tell which end of the tunnel was up or which was the floor or ceiling. Yeats rubbed his eyes, which stung from the salt of his cold sweat, and continued down the Great Gallery.
Conrad said, “You didn’t really bring Serena as an observer, did you?”
Yeats sensed that Conrad actually missed the nun. Good grief, he thought, they had only just left her. “Hell, no,” Yeats said. “I want to see how much she knows about this thing. It’s more than she’s letting on.”
Conrad asked, “What makes you so suspicious?”
“My job description.”
“Then maybe Serena shouldn’t be alone.”
“I’ve got three good officers standing guard.”
“I just don’t think we needed to leave her behind.”
“Yes, we did. And now you can tell me whatever you couldn’t tell the good sister. Namely, what you’re really thinking.”
“It’s probably nothing,” Conrad said. “Pure coincidence.”
“No such thing in this place,” Yeats replied. “Talk.”
“Look around.” Conrad gestured across the vast, gleaming gallery. “No inscriptions, religious iconography, or any discernible symbolism in this gallery or the pyramid.”
“So?”
“So this isn’t a tomb. It’s not even a puzzle for initiates to wander through and solve like I proposed earlier.”
“Then what the hell is it?”
“It feels like we’re inside some enormous machine.”
Yeats felt a deep and disturbing jolt inside his bowels. The news was like some sort of prophecy, both expected and alarming. “Machine?”
“I think it’s supposed to do something.”
There was a heaviness in the air. Yeats cleared his throat. “Do what?”
“I don’t know. Maybe disaster struck the builders before they ever got a chance to turn it on.”
“Maybe.”
“Or maybe,” Conrad went on, “this machine caused the disaster.”
Yeats nodded slowly as the words sunk in. Somehow he had felt it all along. He wanted to tell Conrad more. But now was not the time. Conrad would hopefully figure it out on his own anyway.
Descending to the Great Gallery, Conrad was sorry he had left Serena behind in the upper chamber. And not just because he wanted her to see for herself how right he was about P4. He could tell from her eyes how put out and excluded she felt. He knew the sensation well and felt a twinge of guilt for not sticking up for her with Yeats. But he wasn’t about to blow his own chance to explore the lower levels and lead the way to the greatest archaeological discovery in human history.
As soon as he reached the bottom of the gallery, however, Conrad’s mental map of the pyramid’s interior began to unravel. He faced a fork branching off into two smaller tunnels. There should have been three.
He could hear Yeats’s heavy breathing behind him. “Well?” Yeats demanded impatiently. “Which way?”
Conrad studied the two “smaller” tunnels. Each was more than thirty feet high. One continued along the twenty-six-degree slope of the gallery. The other dropped ninety degrees into a vertical shaft. Neither satisfied him.
Conrad instinctively turned around and began to search for a third tunnel that would double back beneath the gallery. But he couldn’t find it.
“What are you doing?” Yeats asked.
Conrad patted the cold wall and said nothing. He was positive the central chamber he was looking for was on this level. And if the Great Pyramid in Giza was indeed modeled after P4, then the corridor leading to that central chamber should have been there at the bottom of the gallery.
But it wasn’t.
Perhaps he was assuming too much to think the ancient Egyptians got it right from the Atlanteans. Even if his initial hypothesis was correct, that didn’t mean the Egyptians had the knowledge or means to fashion an accurate copy of P4.
“The chamber we’re looking for is on this level,” he said. “But we’ll have to access it from below.”
“Fine,” Yeats said. “Which tunnel?”
“Theoretically, both corridors should lead to the burial chamber,” Conrad said, hesitating.
Yeats said, “As long as it isn’t ours.”
“You don’t understand,” Conrad said. “The burial chamber at the bottom of the pyramid serves as a kind of cosmic dressing chamber where the king can dance and celebrate the completion of life. At the top of the pyramid is the phoenix or benben stone, symbolizing resurrection. There’s an ascension to all this.”
“I get it,” said Yeats. “And somewhere in between, the hocus-pocus happens.”
“At the central chamber,” Conrad said. “That’s where we can expect to find a repository of texts or technology to unlock the meaning of P4.” Conrad took another look around. “Since the access corridor isn’t here, I suspect the burial chamber will point the way.”
“So which tunnel leads to the burial chamber?”
Conrad could feel Yeats’s brooding stare. The reality was that he was still getting used to attacking this pyramid from the top down, when every previous experience in his life was from the bottom up.
Conrad looked down the first tunnel. It would be natural to continue along the slope of the gallery they had just passed through. But he suspected that tunnel led to the main entrance of P4. It was probably blocked at some point to keep outsiders from entering P4 at the ground level.
“Make up my mind, son.”
“Door number two,” Conrad said. “We’ll take the vertical shaft.”
“OK.” Yeats leaned over the shaft and dropped a new line.
Conrad emerged from the bottom of the vertical shaft a half hour later, dropping into a lower north-south corridor. This, too, was more than thirty feet high. Yeats had just landed behind him when the alarm on Conrad’s watch started beeping.
“You’ve got an appointment somewhere?” Yeats asked.
“We’re under the base of P4.” Conrad pulled back his left glove and tilted his wrist to reveal the blue electroluminescent backlight of his multi-sensor watch face. In addition to a built-in digital compass, barometer, thermometer, and GPS, it included an altimeter graph. “We’ve descended almost a mile and a half. I set the alarm for my target altitude.”
Yeats pulled out his own USAF standard-issue altimeter. “You were off by more than a quarter mile,” Yeats said. “We’re barely a mile down.”
Conrad looked at his altimeter doubtfully. His father wasn’t cutting him any slack now. Not an inch. Much less a quarter mile. This might as well be the first human landing on Mars as far as Yeats was concerned, Conrad realized, and NASA allowed no margin for error. As Conrad rolled it over in his head, he concluded Yeats was right. If anything, P4 was more significant to humanity than Mars. It was certainly closer. Palpably so.
“So which way now?” Yeats pressed. “North or south?”
Conrad cut his line and instinctively turned to the north. “This way.”
After about 1,200 feet, the floor sloped suddenly and almost doubled the height of the ceiling. Fifty yards ahead was the entrance Conrad was looking for. He could feel his blood starting to really pump.
“This is it,” he said.
They entered a vastly larger space. The beams of their head torches disintegrated into nothingness as the
