ENCOUNTER by Hep Aldridge (bill gates books recommendations .txt) 📕

Joe got up, pulled out his gear, and started putting together a rig that I hoped would work. I wasn’t keen on leaving someone outside on guard duty the whole time we were searching the city.

Dimitri looked around and said, “And after we deal with all this stuff, we still have to figure out where the library is. And we have no idea if or how the crystal artifact we’ve been toting around is going to help us. We only have that professor guy’s notes that say it should; who knows if there’s any truth to that?”

“Here’s something else to chew on,” Doc said, “we were hoping to find some clue in the City of the Gods to help us find it, and now we are considering the idea that there may be another city close by. So, we don’t even know if that one or this one is the right starting point.”

As I thought about those comments, something clicked in my brain. I said, “Hang on for a second. In the priest’s journal, he said the chief told him the library was not in the city he had been taken to, right?”

“Yeah, that’s what he said,” Doc replied.

“And we are now of the opinion, based on his description, this isn’t the city he was taken to,” I paused before continuing, getting excited about where this logic thread was taking me.

“We also believe this to be a more important city than the one he saw, based on the roadway leading in and the cloak hiding it from outside view.” I saw people perk up as the light bulbs in their heads lit up.

O’Reilly jumped in, “So, if he never knew about THIS city, and since he was told the library was hidden somewhere other than the city he saw, maybe this is the secret location of the library. It could be in any one of these buildings.”

“Bingo,” I said. “We could have stumbled into its hiding spot and not realized it.”

Now there was some real excitement in the camp as we all talked through the logic thread that I had followed. For every question, we could find an answer. Of course, we knew we did not have all the facts and had to make some “logical” guesses, but in the final analysis, it still stood as a workable hypothesis, a solid starting point for our search. So, by pure luck, we found the trail to this city instead of the other one. If the drone hadn’t given us solid clues in our aerial search, we might not have found it.

It sure beat the heck out of stumbling around the mountainous jungle looking for the library, I thought. We should be able to do a search of the city and determine whether the library was here.

Then, as often happens, reality reared its ugly head. We still had the mercs to deal with, and our rations were going to become an issue soon. Joe had been working at the top of the staircase on the platform, going in and out of the cloak, checking and re-checking his work. We were still buzzing with this new level of excitement when Joe said, “Colt, get your tablet and turn it on.”

I turned and started digging through my pack. I pulled out the tablet, turned it on, and said, “Okay, Joe, I’ve got it,” as its screen came to life. We all had our own tablets, all the same as Joe’s, but we usually relied on his and didn’t often use ours.

“Okay, got a signal yet?”

“No, not yet.”

“Okay, how about now?”

My screen jumped for a second, then nothing.

“I got a blip, but now nada.’”

“Alright, give me a second.” There was a pause, and then, “How about now?”

My screen came to life, and I could see the menu for choosing which trail cam I wanted to view.

“Got it,” I said as I tapped the icon for camera five, and a view of the road appeared.

“Hot damn, Joe, you got it. I can access all the cameras from my tablet now.”

“Great,” he said as he descended the stairs and walked over to me. I handed him my tablet as he sat down on the step.

He proceeded to go through and check each camera. They all came up when he remotely activated them.

“A little fuzzy but good enough. The cloak is still messing with the signal a bit, but the hardwired link worked. I can set the alarms now, and when the motion sensor on the camera spots movement, it will send an alert to your pad and show you the image from that camera.”

“Nice going, Joe,” Doc said as he and the rest of the team peered over his shoulder from the steps behind us.

“I think I can safely say we can roam about the city and still have a signal. Let me give it a quick check,” and took my tablet and headed down the main street. He must have gone a couple of hundred yards and disappeared into some of the buildings before returning to us.

“Yep,” he said, “had a good signal everywhere, even in the buildings.”

“That’s beyond good news,” I said and then explained our library hypothesis to him.

“Now, that would be cool,” he replied, “if the library were actually located here.” After a slight pause, “Oh, here’s some more potentially good news. While I was working on this set-up, I had the camera on at the village, monitoring the mercs, and guess what?”

Not waiting for the answer, he said, “There was a big argument going on. I turned up the volume on the camera remotely but couldn’t really hear much. It was evident that one of the mercs was upset with one of the locals because there was pushing and shoving going on and loud cursing; I could hear that. They were working this guy over pretty good.

“Sounded like there may be trouble brewing in their ranks. And, Colt, I think the