He reached the top and he was temporarily blinded by the bright sunshine.
"Hurry, this way! You too, he's the last one, hurry!"
Alex blinked as his eyes slowly adjusted to the light, he could see the outline of who was talking, "Sarah! What are you still doing here? I told you to go!"
"I'm not leaving anyone behind. Come on, you're the last ones, we have a jeep waiting."
Alex saw the crane operator running for the jeep and realized why Sarah was talking in the plural. She grabbed Alex's arm and started pulling him to the vehicle. He finally was able to get his legs moving and jumped into the back seat with Sarah while the crane operator jumped into the front seat next to the driver.
"That's everyone, go!" commanded Sarah.
The jeep speedily took off towards the road that led to the helicopter landing.
Sarah shouted at Alex, "How far do we need to go to get a safe distance?"
Alex just shook his head sadly. How could he possibly tell her that the resulting explosion will probably split the Earth and end all life? The look of resignation in Sarah's eyes told him that no more was needed to be said.
The jeep hit the road hard painfully bouncing its passengers. Its wheels spun looking for traction on the muddy surface briefly finding it and moving the vehicle forward and upward in a jerky fashion before losing the traction at the next section. The crane operator shouted something to the driver that Alex couldn't make out, but it caused the driver to ease off the gas and allowed the jeep to move forward at slower but steadier pace.
Suddenly there was a deafening 'WHUMP!' sound. The ground shook hard causing the driver to lose control. The jeep drove off the road into the trees and upending onto its side spilling its passengers. A thick cloud of dust billowed over them and up the roadway.
Alex laid face down on the ground stunned and coughing violently from the dust cloud. After long seconds, perhaps it was minute, he turned over. Apart from the hard bump he was unhurt. He tried opening his eyes, but was forced to blink furiously in an effort to keep the grit out. He could make out that the cloud was already dissipating, and through it he could make out blue sky. He struggled to get to his feet. He could see that Sarah, the driver and the crane operator were all unhurt but like him were coughing from the dust and tried to clean out their eyes. He had to get back to the site and see what happened. He quickly clambered down the road back towards the clearing. He didn't need to go far to see what had happened.
The dust cleared and settled, and what was left was a sinkhole, rounded like a bowl some forty to fifty metres in diameter. The elevator crane lay at the bottom broken, its long boom twisted, reaching out of the hole and lying on several crushed tents. Some tents had slid down the embankment into the hole. The rest flattened from the resulting shockwave. The boring crane stood teetering on the far edge of the chasm unable to decide between staying put and joining his crushed brother.
Alex started to giggle uncontrollably. He was never so happy to be so wrong about a hypothesis.
"Well that was…disappointing."
Alex stopped giggling and looked at the voice. It was Prof. Morton; he somehow managed to run down the roadway to join him. At first he thought that Morton was unimpressed with how spectacular the explosion was, it took him a couple of seconds to realize that he probably meant something else.
"Does that look like and explosion or implosion to you?" asked Alex.
Morton raised an eyebrow at the question, "Implosion most definitely. There is no raised crater rim, no spread of debris other than dust. Why? Does that mean something to you?"
"I think so."
Alex could hear the voices and footsteps of approaching people. He turned around and could see the two colonels and half a dozen military personnel racing down the path as well as Sarah, who was covered in mud and dust slowly approaching. It wasn't hard to imagine what he must have looked like at the moment.
"I'm so sorry Alex," apologized Sarah, "I should have listened to you."
At first Alex was confused to what he she was referring to before he remembered his early objections about plowing ahead with the trial and error approach. "Actually Simon wasn't completely wrong."
Alex received confused looks from everyone around him, he decided to explain; "He believed that such an advance piece of technology would have fail-safes to prevent us from accidentally blowing ourselves up. He was right up to an extent. Even though we set off an uncontrollable reaction, The Obelisk had a fail-safe built in that sent it into extra-dimensional space, apparently taking a small chunk of our universe with it so it would explode harmlessly there. However it waited until we were safely out of range before the fail-safe activated. It says something about the builders and their respect for life."
"So there is no chance of it still being down there?" asked Col. Brock.
"Well you can still dig to check it out if you want to, but I'm pretty sure everything that was down there will be gone. Shame really, it was probably the most important find in the history of the world."
"Well we still have all our recordings, data and scientific analysis of the artifact. We can gather it up, organize it and publish it. Should still be an 'earth-shaker'."
"Actually Col. Brock, I think I would prefer that we keep it a secret for now. I firmly believe there is another one out there."
This time everyone turned to Sarah to look at her in surprise, even shock.
"When I was in the cave, I came across some Egyptian hieroglyphs. With a little bit of work I was able to make out a couple of words and a name: Khasekhemwy. He was the last pharaoh of the second dynasty and was noted for reuniting Egypt into a single kingdom. I suspect I know how. I figured if a bunch of ancient Egyptians could operate an Obelisk without blowing themselves up, we could."
"Do you have any idea where this second Obelisk could be?" asked Alex.
"Well there are a number of areas it could be. I suspect perhaps Abydos or Umm el-Qa'ab are the most likely locations. As you may or may not know, I pioneered a process of using ground penetrating satellite radar to map the ancient ruins of Egypt. Since I know what I'm looking for now, we might be able to find it on the radar maps."
"The current Egyptian government isn't exactly going to be receptive us poking around for it," observed Col. Brock.
"I know, but I have an archeologist friend there that will help us. He's a Coptic Christian and not exactly enamored with the current president. But we need to keep this very hush-hush, or we will lose access."
"I'm not sure how this will make any difference," remarked Morton, "The Obelisk can't be moved. Eventually somebody is going to figure that it's there."
Alex smiled, he had been waiting for this moment; "Actually, I think I can help you with that."