AMERICA ONE - NextGen (Book 5) Page 20
The young Matts would see Earth again, but as much older people, and by then the blue planet would certainly be a different world. They wouldn’t have recognized their current home anyway.
Chapter 13
Gold!
“What are we going to do with all these chests of gold?” Ryan asked Commander Joot, the only remaining Matt on Earth the next morning after the launch. They didn’t need suits to enter any of the cavern layers anymore, and the three rows of more gold than anybody had ever seen at one time stood dormant, awaiting its fate.
“Well, all the chest owners are long dead,” replied the commander to Ryan and Igor. He had thought long and hard about all these memories of his tribe. “You may do what you want with them. The chests themselves are only containers. You, Ryan, saved the last of our tribe. You Homo sapiens consider the yellow metal valuable, so each chest will have a badge of rank and others items of identity, which are worth as much as the chests themselves. If we could collect the contents, I will leave the use of the yellow metal up to you, and suggest you use them to purchase equipment or supplies for mine and your people to continue. The inside contents are more valuable to us Matts, and I believe we should close and seal this cavern for our own NextGen to arrive one day in the future. They will know what to do, like I did when I arrived a few days ago. It is in their DNA.”
“Thank you, Commander. We need to pay others for aiding us while on Earth,” replied Ryan gracefully. “My monetary value in America is now untouchable. I’m sure the remains have been stolen by the U.S. government, and what we can use of the gold from your tribe will benefit all of us in our new home.”
“I would now like to show you our cavern power systems, which are still behind a closed door,” continued Commander Joot—disposition of the gold chests now decided. “I’m sure that you will be surprised to see that the power systems will fit through the small door above us in one piece, and that they can be easily disconnected. Each one is about the size of one of our Ruler chests. Four of you Tall People could carry one out, I believe, and we can take three with us for our new homes.”
Ryan looked at the commander in shock. The power plants in the other caverns had not been found, or ever shown to the Homo sapiens, and these power systems were believed to be Cold Fusion electrical and power systems, something not yet mastered by the current race on Earth.
Commander Joot, with Igor and Ryan as excited as they had ever been, headed toward the rear wall of the lower level, passing through enough gold to nearly blind them.
The commander touched a part of the wall that did not show any evidence of having an opening panel, or mechanism behind it, and the Matt concentrated for several seconds. Slowly a door opened out of the blank wall as if by magic.
“Only a Matt can open this door, like the entrances into each level of this cavern,” Joot explained.
“We had better stand back for a few minutes to allow the air to mix,” suggested Ryan, and all three men headed back to the furthest gold chests away from the opened room.
For 15 minutes they opened a dozen chests, helped by Commander Joot. In each was a pin, always a small bird with gold and diamonds, or more pins. In each chest was a papyrus leaf Ryan was told was the name, birth history and genealogy of the person. Then there were a few other smaller papyrus leaves, which Joot said were reports on the education and proclivities of the person.
From the first box, Commander Joot told them about each Matt. “This was a boy who grew into a farming specialist. His name was Fon. His parents were Fod and Nad, his grandparents: Got and Fig, and Hiy and Rip. He is a third generation Matt born in our year 467, two generations before me, and he died about 300 years before I was born. He was schooled in farming, and was a helper of plant growth for seven outside farms. His education was in what you call perfecting corn, wheat, sugar cane, and the making of yeast. His pins are: a bird for a child, a bull for a teenager, and a buffalo as an adult showing he was a Master of Farming as his specialty. He died at 169 years old. He was killed by a marauding lion while out inspecting farms. His wife was Dot and he had two children, girls, Fen and Deng. We will find his family member’s boxes next to his.”
The commander opened the next three boxes and found Fon’s family members. All their personal effects were moved into Fon’s chest, and that gave Ryan three empty chests for barter, as Joot had described what they were to be used for.
Even these shoebox-sized yellow chests, which weighed about 40 to 45 pounds empty, and the three men joined five families together by moving all the effects into the father’s. Now Ryan and Igor had 20 chests, about a third of a ton of gold, and they hadn’t even made a minuscule dent in the numbers.
After replacing the filled family chests back onto a shelf, they each carried an empty chest up into the sun, three times, before a sweating Ryan reckoned it was time to check out the power room.
The inner room was not large when they returned to the coolness of the third level. The door was still open, and Ryan and Igor could see machinery and systems.
“We will need to leave one of the power units here,” said Commander Joot. “There is only one in each of the space bases. Three will give us a lifetime of power.”
The four power units standing separately in the room were about the size of large treasure chests, and had only a couple of inlet or outlet pipes. It all looked so simple.
“I’m afraid that if we leave a unit here, someone might take it and learn to use it,” Ryan suggested to the commander.
“They will never find it,” replied Joot. “Even if they get through a shield without a spacesuit. As I said, only a Matt can open the door into this room.”
“Or VIN cutting into it with a laser?” said Igor. Commander Joot thought about that for a while. He had seen the damage VIN could hand out to his walls and doors.
“I think VIN is the only person who could have thought out the problem. He also used lasers, something you told me the others here on Earth don’t yet have. But I have an idea. Each of these power machines has a tiny computer and memory. It has a complete history of the time it has been operational. I can program the fourth machine to destroy itself if it is ever moved by anybody who is not a Matt. How does that sound?”
Ryan replied that he thought it a good idea. The commander told Ryan and Igor that the machine would warn the Matt telepathically before it could be moved, and say how to disarm the protection instruction. Commander Joot then told the two that he had seen one of these machines explode once, when they were being tested. The explosion fifty miles away had vibrated the crater, and large rocks falling off the walls had killed two young boys.
“I wonder how much power these can produce compared to our Plutonium-238 running the mother ship,” Ryan said, looking at Igor.
“An explosion that big, I would say about five to ten times the power of our main power system, and that is ten pounds of 238,” was Igor’s reply. Ryan shook his head.
He had just found the mother lode of all power systems, and they had three units to use. That meant his lasers powered from one of these systems could be five to ten times more powerful.
“Jonesy is heading up with these tonight. Let’s get Bob Mathews to fly out to get more supplies so these are kept secret. Igor, get them loaded into SB-II. I want them out of here. Santa Claus has never been so good to us. He has outdone himself this year with these beauties,” replied Ryan excitedly.
“Enough power in a coffin-sized power unit to run an American aircraft carrier,” whistled Igor.
“One!” admonished Ryan. “Igor, at least two or three nuclear-powered carriers, and we have all the plans up in space. We need these up tonight. I don’t trust anybody on this planet.”
The rest of the day, and with the two caterpillars refueled, the crew sweated, swore, lifted and struggled all three of the units up the flights of stairs and into the sun-drenched hole.
By the time they had them up, the sun was already low on the horizon. They weighed about 600 pounds ea
ch and were hard to move. Once the earthmovers had lift straps underneath each block of metal, they easily carried them the rest of the way, and then lifted them into the shuttle’s holds.
Bob Mathews flew in as the third and last machine was carried up the road toward the shuttle and didn’t think to ask what the silver-colored block of metal was.
By this time, Jonesy and Maggie started their flight checks. The cargo was lifted in, tied down, the roof doors closed and sealed, the shield extended, and as soon as it was dark, the equipment then headed off into space.
Jonesy missed a boozy party that night. Ryan felt as if the whole world had been taken off his shoulders. He had worried for years, ever since finding the Matt bases, that there were secrets so valuable that a country would have invaded another country to get them. Now they were away in orbit and all safe from the Homo sapiens on Earth. He, Igor, and Bob Mathews were so happy and relieved, and the several technicians enjoyed several ice-cold beers that night.
Ryan’s next problem was to melt the gold chests and turn them into ingots, and he knew exactly where to ask for that equipment.
It was quite a shock to his contacts in Tel Aviv when Ryan flew in with Bob Mathews the next day. Ryan was certainly not qualified to fly the Chinook, but he was a quick learner. Bob instructed him on the three-hour flight. Ryan could now fly several aircraft and the shuttles as well as any copilot could. There was no other copilot for Bob, so Ryan went with. He was getting crater fever anyway.
When he asked for a gas melting kiln for temperatures of around 2,500 degrees, his Israeli friends knew that there was gold or something similar on Ryan’s property. Metal mining was the last thought they had to why Ryan wanted this piece of desert so badly, and he alleviated their many ideas of what he was doing there. He then asked if his contacts would be interested in a ton of pure gold for all the equipment he had used but not paid for yet. They happily agreed.
Ryan had deflated the precious metal and diamond prices a decade earlier mining asteroids, and the value of gold had still not risen to those values. At $980.00 U.S. dollars per ounce, a metric ton was still worth $31,500,000.00 U.S., far more than he owed the Israelis. The grading equipment and transportation already giving him a new dirt runway was to be about $1 million. The cost for the helicopters and transportation came to $2 million. Jet fuel, diesel, gasoline, food, supplies and fuel came to another $2 million, so he asked them to fill up the Dead Chicken, the Gulfstream, as Kathy and his daughters were still in Tel Aviv, and the Chinook. He was quite surprised to be told that the smelting equipment would cost him less than ten thousand.
After spending a night with his family, and having the Chinook filled with a 1,000 pound kiln, gas bottles, ingot-making equipment, water, fish, meat, vegetables, beer, champagne, diesel, and any other luxuries he could get together in twelve hours, Bob Mathews took the Chinook off to return to the crater. He hadn’t yet spent a third of the first ton of gold.
An hour before nightfall, they landed at the broken runway. It looked a little less than a war zone. Three transport aircraft had landed during the day with more equipment, and the officer in command said to Bob and Ryan that the Dead Chicken could arrive empty the next day, but with a heavy cargo, the engineers would need two more days of work before the leveled area was large and packed down enough.
All the next day the crew worked on first emptying the Chinook, and then hauling up the empty gold chests, turning them into gold ingots. The ingots weighed 27 pounds. The three chests that could fit into the kiln were turned into two separate ingots in the bottom trays of the kiln every hour. The men worked hard to keep the kiln fed with gold.
Commander Joot and Igor worked as a team to collect the family belongings together, found most families to comprise four chests, and the technicians and Ryan sweated carrying the other three up the stairs to the waiting earthmover. Bob Mathews drove the Caterpillar and helped stack the kiln with the heavy gold chests.
Getting an ingot for him and each of the girls would be enough to keep his mouth tightly closed, since Ryan told him that the gold was why they were here, and that there would be no more once this smelting was done.
For four solid days, they smelted 120 chests a day. Everyone felt as if they were on a mining expedition, and the crew began to get very fit. The filled chests were neatly placed on the empty shelves, and Ryan and Igor, when they had breaks, walked the whole of the Pig’s Snout cavern with the commander.
Captain Pete was very silent up in America One, but Ryan did get a nightly checkup from above. The mother ship was again filled with people. Every free bed was taken.
Commander Joot told Ryan that night, after they discussed whether they had enough gold, that it would be wise to take some of the yellow metal. He only had half his full cargo weight in chests in his craft, and his tanks were once again filled with 500 gallons of quality Australian ethanol. The Aussies couldn’t figure out why Ryan wanted so much alcohol. The commander also needed a copilot and could take up more supplies with the cargo of gold. Ryan did not have a copilot for Joot, and he had two choices. Either he, or Bob Mathews could go up for his first flight into space.
America One would be gone in a few weeks, and it didn’t matter anymore if Bob saw the shield around the mother ship. He had seen them on Earth. Bob couldn’t explain the workings of a shield any better than Jonesy or Ryan could, and they had been seen from Earth, in Low Earth Orbit.
“Commander Joot needs a copilot. He can actually fly his craft with just one astronaut, but needs a backup just in case. Bob, you have a chance to fly into space and see our operation up there. Want to go?”
Bob was rather shocked. Ryan was changing his ways, when the boss called him Bob instead of Mr. Mathews.
“I thought that was a no-no?” replied Bob. “Hell, for one flight into space and back, it would be a dream come true. Believe you me Ryan, as long as others down here don’t know that I ever went up with you, and since I’m the only person down here that has seen an extraterrestrial, that is, Commander Joot, who is no taller than a darn kid, why not. It would certainly be a story to tell the girls one day when you are long gone.”
“You are lucky you are six inches shorter and of a smaller build than Mr. Jones,” smiled Ryan. “He doesn’t fit into the commander’s craft too easily. Since we recently got a thousand gallons of ethanol, the commander can complete two flights. We need to move to Australia in about a week, so you could go up with the commander and return with the Jones family. I promised them some fishing time, and a couple of tons or so of frozen fish could be a real luxury for us old Earth folk up there when we leave. You will need to wear a spacesuit, and I can get Igor to give you a couple of hours of training tomorrow. The flight up to the mother ship should be about seven hours. You need to be taught how to change over the fuel supply tanks in his two craft.”
Bob enthusiastically agreed. He had wanted to be on one of the launches since day one, but that meant him joining the crew, and fishing to Bob was far more important than flying around planets.
“Have you ever thought of buying your very own island?” Bob asked Ryan, the deal into space done. “It would give you more privacy one day if you ever return.”
“I have never thought about an island, and I doubt that I will live long enough to see this beautiful planet again. But, Bob, you could be onto something. We don‘t need a 10,000 foot runway, and if our NextGen want to return to Earth one day, maybe a private island somewhere could be the answer. I have this property on watch by both the Libyans and the Israelis. I’m hoping they will watch each other. You know I will be speaking to Doug about the runway area for a 99 year lease. At the same time, I could purchase an island as a secret retreat for our children. I think Mr. Jones and Mr. Noble would prefer the Indian Ocean. Maybe I will leave you with some gold and you can find a retreat for America One’s children one day.”
“How would I get the information to outer space?” asked Bob. “I don’t think any postal service goes that far.”
“I suppose you will have a fine home one day, Bob. Actually I will leave you a supply of gold. Find an island, put up a house or some sort of accommodations, say, a hotel, and when we return I will leave a trail for our kids to find where your offspring are. You live there and we’ll come and take it over when you don’t need it anymore. Just warn your next of kin. Got any ideas?”
“Yes, that sounds like a second dream come true just today,” smiled Bob, now really excited. “There is one island I have my eye on in the Seychelles, the most northerly island in the chain. It might be on the market soon for some stupid amount. Some $35 million I was told about a year or two back. It’s small, only a few acres, and used to be a resort. Then there is one in Fiji I love. One hundred acres and very remote. I fish in both these areas all the time. This one has title and is for sale for about $55 million. The third one is in the Whitsunday Islands off Australia. This 19-acre island is a beaut, a fantastic place to live, and the whole island could be on the market soon for about $80 million.”
“I will organize you 3 tons of gold, which should be enough to purchase the island and build a nice hotel for a hundred or so people. Make it a 200 guest hotel, and we will come and find it one day. If not, it is your family’s. We can ship the gold out with the next Aussie flight. That should appease Mr. Jones, or Mr. Noble. Actually it should give a nice home to Mars and Saturn when they return. I reckon they will be our new leaders one day.”
Thinking that he was either very drunk or just dreaming about islands, Ryan checked with Bob the next morning. It hadn’t been a dream, so he and the crew got on with smelting more gold.
For three more days, Ryan and most of the technicians sweated with the gold. Commander Joot spent the whole first day rearranging the chests before taking Bob Mathews on the ride of his life that night. Two of the technicians had been pleased to teach Bob how to use a spacesuit instead of carrying gold up the stairs. Bob needed the suit, as he would be helped into America One with the commander at the end of his flight through the vacuum of space.