Evil Star

think.
    What would happen if there was a moment, perhaps no more than a few minutes in a thousand years, when all the lines pointed to all the visible stars — at exactly the same time? Now that would be . . ."
    She stopped. "Am I boring you, Matthew?"
    Matt's head was craned upward. His eyes were search-ing the night sky. He had been listening to begin with, but something had distracted him. What was it? There were no sounds in the desert.
    Could he have imagined it? No. There it was again, a soft beating in the air like a flag caught in the wind. He waited, his ears pricked.
    But it had gone.
    "Are you listening?" Professor Chambers asked.
    Matt turned to her. “Yes. Of course."
    "Good. Because this is where things get a bit more com-plicated.
    "As I was saying, I wondered if all the stars could align with the all the Nazca Lines. But how would this happen? Well, imagine that you could lie on your back on the desert floor and take a photograph of the night sky. You'd end up with a big sheet of paper with lots of little dots on it. Then you could go up in the air and take a photograph of the lines, making a second picture. What I was Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star looking for was a time when the stars in the first picture would fall exactly on the lines in the second picture. . . ."
    "A sort of connect-the-dots on a cosmic scale," Richard said.
    "Exactly. Of course, this wouldn't happen very often. It might never happen at all. You see, the stars always seem to be moving when you look at them from the Earth. The reason for this is that it's the Earth that's actually moving — spinning on its own axis. That's why the stars never seem to be in the same position.
    "And the Earth isn't only spinning. It's also orbiting around the sun.
    And as it orbits, it wobbles. Astronomers call this wobble
    precession. And what it means is that the Earth is in exactly the same position only once every twenty-six thousand years.
    "So to go right back to where I started, what I wondered and what I wrote about in my book was, suppose that the Nazca Lines were drawn as a sort of terrible warning. Sup-pose that what they were doing was recording one moment in twenty-six thousand years when they would finally line up with the stars, and the world would come to an end. That would explain why the pictures were so frightening.
    It would explain why they had to be drawn in the first place."
    "And you think the lines will align with the stars two nights from now?" Richard asked.
    "I was never able to test my theory before now because I never had an observation platform. Don't forget that this desert covers five hundred square kilometers! I had to know exactly where to stand to see the stars in their right position."
    "And now you do."
    "Yes. ..."

    Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star Suddenly, Pedro sprang to his feet.
    "Pedro?" The professor examined him. "Cual es él?"
    "Esta. . . " Pedro began.
    Matt stood up, too. "I heard it just a moment ago," he said.
    The stove was still burning, the little gas jet throwing a blue glow across the ground. The Jeep stood where it had been parked. The night had grown cool and now there was a faint touch of breeze in the air. Matt looked up at the sky, at the millions of glistening stars.
    For a moment, he thought he saw two tiny green lights. He shook his head. There was no such thing as a green star.
    “You're imagining things," Richard said. "There's noth-ing out here."
    Unwillingly, Pedro and Matt sat down again. They couldn't leave until they had covered their tracks, and they weren't ready to begin work again yet.
    "The platform marks the exact position where you have to stand to see the alignment of the stars," the professor con-tinued. "That's what it said in the verse you showed me. 'Before the place of Qolqa, there will the light be seen ...'"
    '"The light that is the end of all light.'" Matt finished the poem.
    Professor Chambers nodded gravely. "There you have it again. This is the place. And we also know the time. Two days from now. Inti Raymi."
    "That's when the gate opens."
    "Except we don't know where the gate is," Richard cut in. "There are no stone circles in the desert."
    "What makes you think it has to be a stone circle?"

    Horowitz, Anthony - [Gatekeepers 02] - Evil Star Atoc was the first to see them. Suddenly he cried out and pointed.
    And there they were — two green lights, burning in the air, high above them but already moving downward. Matt