Decipher, p.33
Decipher, page 33
“The planets?”
“Maybe. But I wouldn’t go shouting about it or someone’s gonna want to see some proof,” Scott said dryly. “The number a hundred and forty-four thousand crops up in the Book of Revelation linked to time. Seven is one of those numbers that just about pops up everywhere. Seven Seals. Seven Deadly Sins. Seven trumpets being sounded seven times. Walls tumble, the world is created. Eight is associated with reincarnation, while twelve has all sorts of links—the Twelve tribes of Israel, the Twelve Apostles, the number of Chinese ‘Years.’ A hundred and fifty-three crops up in connection with the ‘enlightened ones.’ The disciples caught a hundred and fifty-three fishes, which in numerology is the sum of one to seventeen. Also, one plus five plus three equals nine.”
“Numerology,” Hackett repeated as the ship lurched awkwardly. “What is that? Linking letters to numbers, jumbling them up and coming up with some hidden answer—is that it?”
“People will always be attracted to the hidden.”
“Nature has its special numbers too,” the physicist said. “Three, five, eight, thirteen, twenty-one, thirty-four, fifty-five and eighty-nine, for example. Lilies have three, buttercups five, delphiniums eight and marigolds thirteen. Asters, of course have twenty-one.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Petals on flowers.”
“There’s a pattern in those numbers?”
“Sure. Just add the preceding two numbers together and you get the next number in the sequence. Three plus five equals eight, and so on. It’s called the Fibonacci scale, after Leonardo Fibonacci who discovered it in the thirteenth century when he studied rabbit populations. The scale reveals phi, not to be confused with pi. Phi helps you calculate proportion, from the proportion of the human body, to plant-seed spirals on sunflowers.”
A staggeringly ferocious blast of spray suddenly pelted the two men as the Polar Star crashed through another heavy wave.
“Jesus Christ!” Scott yelped, trying to get his breath back. He wiped his face down.
Hackett shuddered. Pointing to the horizon. “Look,” he said. “Our first iceberg.”
They watched the looming white jagged mountain of frozen water for a while before Hackett said: “I think maybe we should head back inside.”
Scott agreed, spitting out seawater. “I dunno,” he said. “What do you think? Reckon maybe we’ll get this all figured out in time? Honestly?”
Hackett dug his hands into his pockets. “Honestly? I don’t know.”
Scott nodded, taking it all in stoically. “I must confess,” he added mildly, “I’m starting to like you, Professor Hackett. You’re a challenging man.”
Hackett seemed genuinely taken aback. “Well, I’m, uh, starting to like you too, Professor Scott. What do you say, when this is all over we do this again some time?”
“Not a chance.”
When the two men stepped back into the lab they found Sarah sitting behind a computer with November. They were studying the Atlantis glyphs and appeared embarrassed at being caught.
November prodded the geologist. “Are you gonna tell him?”
“Tell me what?”
Sarah glanced furtively at her coffee before taking a gulp. “Aw … shit.” She looked up after a moment and confronted the men squarely. “Are you gonna get all male on me and be offended if a woman offered to help you out here?”
Scott smirked. “It’s not like stopping and asking for directions. Sure, go ahead.”
Matheson turned from his own computer to listen. Even Pearce, who looked exhausted and disheveled, wrapped up in a blanket and sitting in a corner, seemed to perk up.
Okay, Sarah seemed to be saying as she got to her feet. She ran her finger over the screen. “Ralph, could you punch up that overhead schematic of the Giza site you were working on?”
Matheson did as he was told. Angled the monitor for everyone to see. Sarah went back to the screen. “Right, y’see here, this glyph? Simplified and stylized, it’s similar to the layout of Giza. I didn’t think much of it until November mentioned that you thought this glyph right here didn’t just represent the sun, but also resembled Atlantis.”
Hackett shrugged. “Coincidence?” But it was clear he didn’t mean it.
Sarah took a breath. “I would have said so too, but this glyph resembles the layout of the series of pyramids in Peru.”
Scott narrowed his eyes thoughtfully. “Interesting.”
“I never did visit Peru,” Pearce commented bleakly.
“Tell me something,” Scott asked quietly, blowing a whisper of steam from a fresh cup of coffee and confronting Pearce. “How do you do it?”
Pearce pulled the blanket in tighter around his shoulders. He looked so tired. So drained, emotionally and physically. “Remote viewing? I dunno,” he confessed. “I just go there.”
“You have to concentrate, right?”
“I have to stay focused, but not really concentrate. Not in the sense you mean. I just get a feel for everything all around me, all at once. And I have to pick my way through it. Some call it entering the spirit plane—kind of a dimensional shortcut—but I always found that a little silly. I mean, who’s to say that it’s not all in my head, right? The point is … uh, how would you describe it?” He thought for a moment. “Okay. There are two ways you can read a page in a book. You can read it a word at a time, and follow the narrative from start to finish in a linear fashion. Or you can rip out all the pages, lay them side by side and take a snapshot of the whole thing. And understand it all in one go. See where it starts. See where it ends. You can refer back to it. Or dive in and out at any point—”
“I see,” Hackett realized earnestly. “You’re describing a photographic memory.”
“Yeah,” Pearce agreed, growing more confident with that notion. “Yeah, I guess I am. That’s a good way of putting it. It’s just a different way of thinking, is all. A different way of accessing knowledge. Our modern knowledge system is fragmentary. It actively hinders us from seeing the whole book. We’re taught to think in terms of words and concepts, to specialize in areas. To restrict ourselves to fields instead of paying attention to an entire science, or an entire art. I believe ancient civilizations thought very differently from the way we think now.”
“Could be true,” Scott agreed. “Even today, linguists can’t even agree on a definition of what a word actually is. Is it a sound? A string of sounds? Is it a combination of both? Or something else? Sounds pathetic but it has very real, practical consequences.
“For instance, when epigraphers cracked Linear C, the early Greek-syllable-based script, on the island of Cyprus, they found they couldn’t rely on the modern, everyday notion of suffixes and prefixes to explain away the patterns they detected in the glyph texts. In other words, blocks of letters at the front of words, like ‘in,’ as in ‘inaction,’ or at the ends of words, like ‘less’ as in ‘motionless’ were prefixes and suffixes. ‘Less’ was a determinative. When the object is without motion, it is motionless. This determinative could in turn be applied to any other word. Even a pronoun. If Peter doesn’t go to church, the church can be said to be Peterless.
“In either case,” Scott said, “the addition of the determinative does not create two words. It fuses to the initial word, creating a new singular word. But in Linear C the prefixes and suffixes weren’t determinatives. They were articles. Words like ‘a’ and ‘the.’ So linguists found words like ‘theking,’ ‘thetown’ and ‘agift’—the mark of a very different way of thinking. The only linguist ever to crack two ancient scripts, Easter Island’s Rongorongo script and Crete’s Phaistos Disk was Dr. Steven Roger Fischer. He pointed out that our ancestors tended to think in terms of ‘units of utterance.’ That their approach to language was very different.”
To Scott it seemed clear. “The further back in time you look, the more holistic the approach is to language.”
“Holistic thought? The whole idea in one symbol? Does that mean you think my idea might have some merit?” Sarah asked, directing Scott’s attention back to the glyphs.
“It’s possible,” he told her. “When Sir Arthur Evans tried and failed to decode Linear B and the Phaistos Disk in the early 1900s he hypothesized the glyphs had a double meaning. That each glyph was phonetic, but that each glyph also in and of itself had a religious meaning.”
“Was he ever proved right?”
“About the first part of his theory, yes. But the second? No. That doesn’t mean you’re wrong though. It’s just, why would the inventors of this language want to draw our attention to certain cities? It would have to be something somehow obvious to us. But the problem is—what? It’s like, if we drew a picture of Moscow, what would you immediately think of?”
“Vodka.”
“Potatoes,” Matheson chipped in. He was met with some puzzled looks all around. Sheepishly the engineer shrugged back at them.
“Lenin,” November said.
“Stalin. Communism. Anastasia. Red Square. Y’see, the list goes on and on. But it’s entirely socially and culturally related. It’s in our consciousness fed by the mass media. It represents an idea that fills literally volumes. So to us it has context. But in a thousand years what’s built up around that image will be forgotten. So if that’s how they’re trying to communicate with us, it’s useless. And I hope that’s not the case.”
Sarah was confused. “What are you saying?”
“In my own, roundabout kinda academic way, I’m saying that I think you’re onto something. That these cities are linked, like some part of a global machine. But to do what? You’re more than likely correct. This glyph may represent Peru, just as this one represents Atlantis. But I need more. I need the ‘why.’”
“What’s the Phaistos Disk?” November asked.
“A flat round clay tablet the size of a saucer found by the thirty-four-year-old Italian archeologist Luigi Pernier in the Phaistos Temple on Crete, Building 40/101, northwest of the Grand Central Court, July third, 1908,” Pearce announced in a monotonous dirge.
Scott was surprised. Blinked. “Thanks.”
“Photographic memory,” Pearce quipped, slugging back his coffee. He still looked depressed.
“There were forty-five individual pictograms, pressed into the clay two hundred and forty-one times, making up sixty-one groupings or ‘words.’ One hundred and twenty-two glyphs on side A. One hundred and nineteen on side B. The interesting thing is, the writing was written in a spiral, starting on the outer edge and working its way into the center,” said Scott.
“A spiral?” Hackett tensed. “I hate to state the obvious but the writing in Egypt was written in a spiral. Albeit a large one.”
“True,” Scott agreed. “But the Phaistos Disk glyphs had marker lines subdividing units of utterance. The Atlantis glyphs are in a continuous string, with no real structure. It’s like English if you took out all spaces and punctuation and printed it all in either upper or lower case.”
“There’s got to be a language that shares that trait as well, hasn’t there?” Matheson prompted.
“There is,” Pearce responded in place of the linguist as Scott drained the last of his coffee.
“It’s called Hebrew,” Scott said. “In Hebrew, in the traditional Torah, the scripture was written out with no punctuation. And no spaces to denote words. Just a stream of letters. And in Hebrew, every letter also represents a number.”
He eyed Hackett, realizing the importance of what he’d just said. The linguist followed the physicist in perfect unison, both turning on a dime to study their own computer screens once more. Matheson was on his feet, followed by November.
Numbers. Letters. Spirals. Patterns … Cities.
“You still don’t know what this number stream is?” Scott asked quietly.
“Uh-uh. I thought it might be an algorithm. But I can’t be certain.”
“The two must be linked.”
Hackett folded his arms. “How?”
Scott took a deep breath. “It took Fischer seven years to crack Rongorongo, the Easter Island script. It took Michael Ventris five or six years to crack Linear B. David Stuart first translated Mayan at the age of ten, but he spent his whole life dedicated to that one language. He found that present-day Mayan is similar to the ancient Mayan glyphs and that they’re phonetic. He translated what was written at the Temple of the Sun, at Palenque, in a day, when it had taken previous scholars a lifetime to attempt. It’s a complex language. It deserves a lifetime dedicated to it. But I’ve been at this two days, and I have—what?—a couple of days left, maximum. They had a point of reference to refer back to. A garbled modern language, or a similar script that had already been cracked—even a century of previous research to build upon. Just what the hell have I got here?”
November took it all in quietly before responding: “You have the words.”
“What?”
“Why don’t you try looking at it in a different way?” she suggested.
Scott didn’t appear moved.
“Dr. Scott, in your lecture you said, in the beginning was logos—the word.”
“Yeah, well, I oversimplified. Logos also meant ratio, reason, discourse—even account.”
“Richard, you know you’re onto something. We can all feel it,” Sarah insisted. “You said it yourself, word in action. You have the words. And in order to read them—what’s the action?”
Scott studied the screen thoughtfully. “I didn’t have enough information back in Switzerland,” he said. “Those pieces of rock didn’t make up a large enough text. I need to see what this stuff looks like spread out on a flat surface.”
Hackett was with him every step of the way. “The node,” he suggested.
“Right. Hey, Ralph, that oil node you sunk into the sea floor. That’s not too far from here, is it? Can you operate it remotely?”
“That’s what it was designed for.”
“So you could power it up? It had a camera on it, didn’t it.”
“Sure.”
“Call the bridge,” Scott said. “Tell ’em we need to power up some kind of transmitter—or whatever it is you do to access that thing. And tell them it’s imperative I take a look. I need to see what’s down there.”
USS HARRY S TRUMAN 1,524 NAUTICAL MILES NORTH OF McMURDO SOUND
The flight deck heard the engines of the approaching F-24 labor as it fought the volcanic ash jamming up its innards. In the ward room, they were preparing for a task force meeting when they got the word. Up on the bridge, Rear Admiral Dower stood side by side with Captain Henderson, counting the squadron home when a young crewman reported: “It’s Captain Ryman, sir. His eagle just blew an engine!”
All senior officers rushed for the windows to see a thick trail of black smoke billow out from behind the F-24. A Lieutenant at the window flinched as he tracked the source through his binoculars and a loud explosion cracked out across the sky. The whine of the second engine fighting to compensate was horrendous, but with all the volcanic ash it was clear that the plane was losing power.
“This ash is too thick, Captain,” the Lieutenant commented quietly. “Recommend we don’t deploy any more jet patrols for a while.” Henderson agreed darkly, issuing more orders.
“Aye, aye, Captain. Switching to choppers.”
As they watched the plane coast in, the pilot, Captain Jeff Ryman from Iowa, with two small children and a wife waiting back home, struggled valiantly with the controls, and as they all said a silent prayer he even managed to bring the nose back up for a moment. But the engine failure had hit at just the wrong moment. He was too low to bail out, the chute would never open. And he was just too far out to make it to the flight deck. In the end, Ryman was just a fireball tumbling across the surface of the ocean.
Henderson looked away. “Never lost a plane on my watch,” he said. “Never. Poor bastard. What a way to go. This fucking weather’s gonna kill us all.”
Another thin young officer approached his captain. Saluted crisply. “Captain Henderson, sir!” A slack salute back. “Major Gant aboard Polar Star is on comm requesting permission to deploy their sonar transmitter array.”
“What the hell for?” the captain barked, rummaging around in his khakis for another breath mint to chew on. The crewman explained about the camera on the Rola Corp. deep drilling node but Dower was already on it. Back at the comm desk, he hooked the radio up to his mouth. “Larry, what’s up?”
“The team wants to take a look at the Atlantis wall, Admiral. All kinds of reasons. Engineering. Geological. Is there any enemy activity in the area?” Gant asked flatly.
“All clear, Major. And Major … ? Tell Mr. Pearce thank you very much. The information he provided was accurate, as expected. We now have two SaRGE units each within seventy-five kilometers of Jung Chang. Recon reports the base is abandoned. Possibly destroyed.”
“I will tell him, sir—”
Suddenly a wave of activity shot across the comm desk. Double-manned duty officers switched over to radio-based communications. “We’ve got McMurdo on line!”
“Hold on, will ya, Major?” Dower snapped, expectantly eyeing the comm officers for more information. One young officer hastily jotted down everything he heard on a notepad and underlined key sections of his scribble with thick graphite from his pencil.
“Sir! We got a window! McMurdo reports a break in the weather. We got four hours to get the team in there by air. McMurdo requests some indication of whether to expect an airlift.” He spun on his chair to face his captain. “What do we do, sir? The longer we stay on line the more chance the Chinese will be able to tap in.”
Dower swung on Henderson. “Captain, what have you got with a 1,500-mile range?”
Henderson looked to his men. “V-TOL,” a Lieutenant answered apprehensively.
Henderson seemed unconvinced. “At that range?”
“We strap a couple extra fuel tanks on those babies, they’ll make it all the way, Captain. I’d bet my life on it.”
V-TOLS were Vertical Take-Off and Landing vehicles. Planes that took off like choppers, but flew with the speed and configuration of a fixed-wing aircraft. They were great aircraft but Dower was concerned. “They don’t have that kind of range.”
