Read Online Atlantis Endgame by Andre Norton, Sherwood Smith - Free Book Online Page A

vision, would change color if the concentration became too much for the mask to handle; another indicated the mask's remaining capacity. Both were green.
    They climbed on, easing around a crumbling rock, and felt intense heat. The hardy little tufts of grass and weed that they had seen here and there, more evidence that the rainy season had begun, had long since withered away.
    Another ten paces and air shimmered from escaping heat. Ashe paused to glance out toward the sea. Tiny boats and single-masted ships dotted the horizon.
    "Go ahead," he said. "I'll do a visual scan."
    Linnea nodded once, her intense investigative expression widening her eyes again, She opened her robe, revealing plain cotton shorts and a fine cotton-silk undershirt beneath. Round her waist she wore a sturdy belt, onto which, like a superhero of the comic books, she'd attached pouches and holders.
    She undipped several vulcanology instruments—infrared thermosensor, a sensitive sniffer to measure gas types and concentrations, and other devices Ashe didn't recognize— then edged closer to the vent in order to start recording.
    Ashe turned in the other direction, pulled out the mini-field glasses the science team had furnished him, and shaded them with one hand so the glass wouldn't glint in the sun as he closely and minutely swept the bay.
    Bravely decorated boats circled about, some hung with decorations from prow to stern, others painted along the sides with leaping dolphins and swarming octopi, some with stylized lilies and crocuses. The people, flattened by the distance, talked back and forth or rowed, or sailed, or fished, or gazed off into the distance. These, then, were the people the scientists called "the squatters"—the people who remained behind after the first great quake that destroyed parts of the city and who had begun to rebuild.
    What exactly was he seeking? Some anomaly, some sign that there were others here, perhaps in disguise as well, from the future.
    A sigh made him turn around. Linnea was holding one of the instruments he hadn't recognized, a flattened ovoid with a pistol grip. He saw the tendons in her hand flex as she pulled the trigger: a click, a whirr, and several sets of antennae uncurled from the front and fanned out rigidly. She stared down at the instruments and then pulled the trigger again, and the antennae curled back into the casing.
    Linnea crossed to his side. "Well, the brains at home will love these readings," she said. "Isotope concentrations and types, gas readings, just about everything is either off the scale or close as makes no difference." She hefted the odd instrument. "The piezo-EM strain detector, too—and it's not terribly sensitive."
    "Meaning?" Ashe asked, though he knew.
    "Even without strain readings from fixed laser interferometers, which we didn't bring because we don't have time for them, everything points to a big blow, bigger than anything recorded in modern times. Far bigger," she added seriously.
    So it was time for Ashe's own test.
    He undipped from his belt a flat meter that was about the size of a video cam. Inside it, though, was a little of the strange tech that had come from the future by way of the past, about which they were still learning. The materials, how they produced their strange effects, including their signature temporal distortion, were still largely a mystery, but scientists, patiently experimenting for twenty-five years, had learned to use the tech for several applications useful to Project Star.
    He tabbed the power on and watched the little LED screen light up. Then it was his turn to brave the ferocious heat of the vent, as close as he could get, holding out his meter.
    The graph bar on it trembled but did not move.
    They looked at each other. Despite the danger, he'd have to get closer.
    Ashe edged closer, hearing a whooshing rumble deep below, as if air were being forced through inconceivably big compressors.
    Suddenly the graph bar flickered and then leaped