Page 108 - Psychoceramics and the Test of Fire

Secrets of the Endosphere

care Al Magnus’s support staff always took in covering our tracks:
this time others became very curious about the crackpot’s funding
source. I did not return to his city for several years, despite my
disguise effectively blurring the memory of anyone who had seen
me—including Cade himself.
The reason for his secrecy became apparent after he went public
with what he had unearthed (too bad that contract wasn’t real!). He
used about half the money to buy a tract of land in Tennessee near
the ruins of Fort Charles. It was a hilly area, of no value agriculturally
and many miles from any developer’s suburban dream. Its owner had
fallen on hard times and was selling off his investment piecemeal. He
must not have known about the cave on his property. Cade did;
having scouted the area already, and having no scruples about
trespassing, he had found the entrance to a branching network of
mainly vertical shafts. He never intended to drill: the Russians had
shown the folly of that exercise, leaving behind the deepest borehole
in the world. It simply became too hot to continue beyond a certain
point. Nothing remained of that attempt but an Internet hoax, the
“Well to Hell.”
Barry Cade presumed the aliens would not have wasted their time
and resources drilling into the unknown. Rather, if they were looking
for a specific mineral they would have used remote and robotic
sensing to locate likely sites. If what they sought could be accessed
through a cave, they could have found it without great expenditure of
energy. Although an unknown number of caves remained hidden
throughout the world, Cade knew the topography of the Eastern
Mississippi Basin concealed some very deep recesses. On determining
with sounding equipment that the cave he’d found had several shafts
extending to depths beyond three kilometers, he waited for the land
to become so cheap he could afford to purchase it by selling his
business and everything else he owned. Unfortunately that wouldn’t
have left much to pay for a serious spelunking team—including a
geologist—to descend until they got past limestone to something less
common.
The fake television company took care of those financial
limitations. After Cade announced to the world that he had found a
rich vein of antimorphium at 2,300 meters, and my contract had been
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