“Yes.”
“We understand what hardship this is. Very anxiety-making, Doctor.”
Quebat wiped his mouth with a Hardee’s napkin and said something in Persian.
“What was that?” Tauber said
“Quebat said that you must take comfort in knowing that whatever is to happen has already occurred long ago,” Parviz said and reached for a jar of jam.
It took Tauber the rest of the day to find the location detailed in Roenbach’s last transmission. He found it as the sun was setting. It was a half-circle of wind-smoothed volcanic rock with a cleft in the face at its center, the base of what was probably a volcanic remnant at one time, the edge of a rocky coastline. Now it was just a hump of granite and gypsum. The half-circle was dotted with clumps of Joshua, brittlebush, yucca, and sage. This was it. This place was where Caroline and the others found themselves a thousand centuries ago.
The sun was sinking fast. Tauber parked the Land Rover with its rack of lights aimed at the cave opening. On hands and knees, he crawled over a hump of sand at the cave’s mouth and down a slope into the dark. A powerful handheld flash showed him the interior. The cave opened broader inside and was floored with fine silt blown in here over the millennia, some of it probably washed in here by storm surges on the great inland sea that once lay just outside the cave opening. The sea emptied sometime in the distant past during one tectonic upheaval or another.
The stark glare of his flashlight revealed no sign of any human habitation. That would be below him, under the silt. The floor of the cave as it was occupied by the people of the time could be twenty feet or more beneath his boot soles. He’d come back and dig. He wasn’t sure why but he knew he’d come back and dig. It was something to do other than waiting, a way of connecting to the events unseen and unknowable on the other end of the Tube.
It wasn’t until Tauber was halfway back to the compound, driving under the light of a half-moon, that he realized he’d just crawled on his belly into a dark desert cave that might have been inhabited by anything from a nest of angry rattlers to a coven of rabid bats or a pack of half-starved coyotes. He shivered at the wheel then smiled. It wasn’t fear, it was anticipation. He’d come back tomorrow. He’d have all day, and rather than simply wait for the Iranians to crank up the reactor he’d have something to do.
The following day Tauber winched the backhoe onto its trailer and hitched it behind the Land Rover. The service road off the mesa ended at a dry wash, and this generally led west and north, so he followed that within a quarter-mile of the cave opening. From there he drove up the bank and slowly picked his way between rocks and around thick tangles of brush. It would be a long, hot walk back if he got stuck out here.
He reached the cave and quickly had the backhoe off the trailer. He wasn’t terribly adept at operating it. Caroline and Phil had done most of the digging to cover the building that housed the Tube. But he soon had a handle on how the levers and pedals worked and spent the hottest part of the day pulling sand and rock away from the cave opening to make an easier passage.
He created an entrance large enough to let the hoe’s arm inside the cave and carefully as he could Tauber scraped back at the fine silt within to reach the lower tiers of gravelly soil. Tauber got off the hoe and crouched to examine what he was digging up. Beneath the top layer of silt were strata of grainier stuff. He ran some though his fingers. Crushed shell and rounded stones that the sea had washed in here at some point in some long-ago storm surge.
The cave was filling with shadows as the sun dropped behind the hump of rock above. He should have brought work lights. He could keep going under the glare of the headlamps on the backhoe, but that was asking for trouble. If he had an accident, Parviz and Quebat would have no idea where he was or even that he was missing until he’d died of thirst and been eaten by the local wildlife.
He left the backhoe where it was and drove back in the dark to the compound. He could see the glow of the pole lamps atop the mesa from the wash and followed the light back to the service road. If there were no positive results when he re-opened the field in the morning, he’d come back and dig further. In its own way, it was a method of reaching out to Caroline that seemed more real to him right now than the promise of the Tube.
The following day brought nothing from the Tube. Not a sound. Not a text. Not a hint of what was going on at the other end of the field.
Another sullen breakfast with the Iranians. Tauber pushed some eggs around a plate until they were rubbery and cold.
“Maybe you would enjoy going to Las Vegas along with us,” Parviz said. “See a show and get your mind from your troubles.”
“Michael Buble,” Quebat said.
“I have something I have to do,” Tauber said.
“In desert?” Parviz said. “What is there to do for two days in desert? You were gone until after dark.”
Tauber explained about the message from Roenbach, the half-circle rock face, and the cave. Soto voce, Parviz translated the parts for Quebat that the other
