The Rock Read Free Page A

through hundreds of generations of adaptation to their harsh environment. Life for them was finding water and food.
    Australia is the oldest, flattest, and driest continent, equal in size to the continental United States. The Aborigines are estimated to have been there for more than thirty thousand years. For all those years they were completely isolated from the rest of the world. The ancient Egyptian empires, Rome, the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, the Industrial Age-all came and went and the Aborigines remained the same until the coming of the white man.
    When the first Aborigines arrived in Australia, the center of the continent was fertile, containing lush jungles and swamps. The present Red Center was born approximately ten to twenty thousand years earlier when the world's climate changed and the land dried up. As many plant and animal species died and were blown away by the harsh weather and terrain, the Aborigines adapted and survived.
    The white man was an extreme latecomer to Australia when Captain Cook landed at Botany Bay in 1770. It took another hundred years before the first white men managed to cross the Red Center, going from Adelaide in the south to Darwin in the north. In the process of accomplishing this, many white men lost their lives, wandering through the deserts in desperate search of water and relief from the brutal sun.
    The overland telegraph line was built in the late nineteenth century from Darwin to Adelaide, and midway across the continent the town of Alice Springs was born to serve as a telegraph station on that line. A thousand miles from the seacoast and five hundred miles from the nearest town, Alice Springs is perhaps the most isolated town in the world. Because of that isolation, in the late 1950s, the United States, in cooperation with the Australian government, established Deep Space Communication Center (DSCC 14) sixty miles outside Alice Springs. The lack of interference from other radio emitters common in the civilized world made it an ideal spot to place the large receivers.
    This afternoon in 1995 eight large dishes pointing in various attitudes were spaced evenly across the sand, the sun reflecting off the metal struts and webs of steel that reached up to the sky. Thick loops of cable ran from the base of each to a junction box set in the lee of a large, modern three-story building. In that building all the incoming data that the dishes picked up were fed into a bank of computer screens, one for each dish.
    Inside the air-conditioned comfort of the DSCC control building, Major Mark Spurlock, U.S. Air Force, watched his monitors with the bored gaze of one who'd been here much too long. Spurlock's primary task was receiving classified data from the network of spy satellites that the U.S. had blanketing the planet as they passed overhead, encoding and passing on the data to the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland, on the other side of the world.
    The job had been exciting the first two months he'd been here--handling top-secret data and working with the codes--but the novelty had quickly been scrubbed away by the heat and stark living conditions. Spurlock was from a small town in Oklahoma, but even that place was lively compared to Alice Springs. He'd started his "short-timers" calendar last month, checking the day off each evening as he got off shift. Booze-readily available at the commissary-was the common cure at the base for the loneliness and isolation, but Spurlock had avoided that trap. He focused on his job, practicing his skill at encoding and decoding, trying to break some of the simpler codes used in the computer. He could often be found late at night, scrunched in front of his terminal, his fingers tentatively tapping out solutions.
    He was in the process of realigning one of the dishes to pick up an INTELSAT that was just coming into range over the western horizon when his computer screen went crazy. A jumbled mass of letters and numbers filled the entire