Decipher, p.35
Decipher, page 35
Gant was furious. “I am a serving officer in the United States Marine Corps, mister!”
The ASA man shrugged and got back on his radio. “Yeah, scratch that, Dave.” He eyed Gant mildly. “Expect six beakers … and an asshole.”
Gant pushed past and climbed aboard. November leaned forward. “What are you doing here?”
“You didn’t think they were going to send you guys in alone and unsupported, did you?”
Hackett spoke from over the back of the Major’s seat. “Actually, yes we did.”
Gant shrugged it off as a third ASA man climbed up into the driving seat, shifted Ivan into gear and hauled them all down into McMurdo’s city limits. And it was as they swung around that November noticed the ship, sitting on the horizon, out across the frozen sea.
“Which ship is that?” she asked innocently.
“I don’t know its name,” Gant revealed. “It’s Chinese. It’s been sitting there all day.”
“It can’t get us here, can it?”
“Honey,” the Major explained, “we could be hovering over their base, four hours’ flying time from here, and they could still get us. The range on their missiles is that good.”
November sat back with a start, leaving the Major to his thoughts. Piss and shit.
“One, the North Face. ‘Himalayan Hotel’ dome tent. Orange.”
“Check.”
“One Quallofil-insulated sleeping bag.”
Matheson nodded once more and checked the items off the list as they were handed to him across the counter.
“One BAD Bags duffel bag. One pair of Vuarnet sunglasses. One Silva compass. One Yema watch. One camp rest sleeping pad. One fleece pullover. One pair of fleece pants. One fleece hat, headband and neckband. Blue. One Red Gore-Tex wind parka and pair of pants. One Gore-Tex one-piece jumpsuit. Red. One Thermolite and Thermoloft insulated jacket.”
“Check.”
“Two sets of Duofold Thermax thermal underwear. Two pairs of Duofold Thermax liner socks. Two pairs of Damart Thermax thermal underwear. Two pairs of Fox River Hollofil socks. One pair of Surefoot Insulator insoles. One The Masque neoprene face mask. One pair of Grandoe Gore-Tex gloves. One pair of Steiger Designs overmits. One pair of Gore-Tex boots. One pair of mukluks.”
“Check.”
“Sign here, sir, and you’re all set,” the ASA clerk advised.
Matheson put pen to paper and collected up his things, eyeing Gant apprehensively. He was collecting very little. “You’re not taking any of this stuff?”
“I have much of my own gear,” he replied. “Some manmade stuff, but mine is mostly better than this.” Matheson was curious. “Sealskin and caribou hide clothing,” Gant explained. “Like the Inuit use. It’s the best.”
And Gant headed off to their block leaving Matheson to stare blankly back at the ASA clerk. “Got any caribou skin?”
PERIODICITY
Scott slapped the oversized photographs from the node down on the table in triumph. “There aren’t sixteen letters,” he announced. “There are sixty.”
While the others excitedly gathered around the work surface of the makeshift lab, Hackett seemed less than enthusiastic as he glanced at his watch, then out through the window. “We got twenty-three minutes,” he said, “till the next gravity pulse.”
“Don’t worry about that,” November urged him. “Worry about this.”
Scott took up a red marker and circled what he’d come to call the Atlantis glyph, the circle and the cross inside it. “This glyph never changes position on any surface that I studied. Neither do these other four.”
“That’s the Giza glyph,” Pearce noted. “And that’s the South America one.”
“Right. And I’m guessing these other two are also major sites.”
“But where?”
Scott turned on Gant who sat brooding in one corner. “Major—think maybe the powers-that-be could spare some satellite time to hunt down two other megalithic structures with C60 deposits beneath them?” Gant shrugged. “You never know,” Scott persisted. “It might just save planet Earth.”
Gant got to his feet and ambled over to the table. “What do these sites look like?”
Scott indicated the two glyphs as Sarah added, “The C60 hunt began in China. I’m guessing one of those glyphs matches the layout of Wupu, in China.”
“Okay, but what about the fifth one?”
“The North Pole,” Hackett murmured darkly.
Matheson was intrigued. “You sure about that?”
Hackett seemed amused. “I can’t be certain, no, it’s just a guess. But if I was going to build a global network of megalithic structures that respond to electromagnetism, and I’d already put one at the South Pole, and three strung around the equator, or close to it, logic tells me the fifth is probably going to be at the North Pole.”
Scott turned on Gant. “Is that enough information for you?”
“It’s a start,” Gant agreed. There was a vid-phone hooked up to a computer across the far end of the lab. He dialed up Dower immediately.
Scott snatched up his pen and tapped it on the desk. “Anyway,” he said, “those five symbols don’t change position. But on this node photograph I realized that the other eleven symbols all appear to rotate randomly, for no real reason.”
“What do you mean?” Sarah asked.
“Well, it’s like writing the letter ‘a.’ But one moment it’s the right way up, the next minute you’ve written it on its side. A sentence or so later it’s upside down. Some early languages do this, and it doesn’t affect the way you read them. But those languages don’t match what we’ve got here. Of course, some languages did it because of the way you had to read them. English is left to right. Arabic is right to left. But earlier languages were boustrophedon—literally meaning ‘as the ox plows.’ The first line would be read right to left, the next line underneath would be left to right, then right to left. Your eye would have to zig zag down the page.”
“These are spirals.”
“Yeah. So I’m guessing it’s a straight line. Just pick a spiral and follow it. But from which end do I start?”
“But what does it mean?” Hackett wanted to know. “Eleven letters rotating in five different ways, making fifty-five letters, plus five vowels. Fascinating I’m sure, but what do they mean?”
Scott was stunned. “Did you say vowels?”
“Sure.”
“Why? What made you say vowels?”
“Because there are five of them.”
Scott thought it over. “I dunno, maybe they are vowels. In many ancient languages, like Egyptian, vowels were omitted. They were something the reader automatically filled in. Maybe that’s what these five symbols represent. The spaces where you fill in the vowels.”
“But what vowels?” Hackett insisted. “And sixty letters—do you have any comprehension of just how big a language would be if it had sixty letters in its alphabet? The possible permutations of letter sequences are almost endless.”
“What’s he talking about?” November asked innocently.
“Somebody give me a language.”
“Italian,” Gant said coldly, turning from the vid-phone in the corner of the hollow-sounding room.
“How many letters has it got?”
“Twenty-one.”
“Okay, so for the possible number of permutations of a twenty-one-letter sequence, each one different from the next, you need to know the factorial of twenty-one. Which is one times two times three times four times five … all the way up to twenty-one.” He totted it up in his head. “That’s roughly fifty-one billion billion twenty-one-letter-long sequences. You want to figure in repeated letters as well. That takes it up to five billion billion … billion.”
“What you’re describing,” Scott replied, “is Temurah.” Sarah looked puzzled. “Temurah is used in Kabbala for calculating the possible number of anagrams of a word in a certain number of letters.”
“And what’s Kabbala?”
“Kabbala means ‘tradition.’ It follows the notion that there are secret messages hidden in the Bible. Temurah is the art of anagrams and assumes you can decode these secrets by messing with the word of God.”
“My point is,” Hackett added, “well, shit … anybody see a calculator laying around here anywhere?” Matheson tossed him a little black Casio. Hackett punched in the numbers. “The factorial of twenty is 2,432,902,008,176,640,000. That’s the number of permutations twenty-letter sequences in an alphabet of twenty letters has. In sixty, that’s … a complete mystery because, uh, this little device can’t even work out that much.” He threw the calculator down on the table, displaying the ERROR message for all to see. “Where, Richard, do you even start trying to determine what each letter means in a sixty-letter alphabet?”
Scott shrugged simply. “Like I’ve been trying to tell everybody since the start, I have no idea. Why the sudden jitters, Professor?”
Hackett shifted uncomfortably, looking out the window at all the ice and snow. “I didn’t realize this place was so damn empty.”
November was confused. “People think there are hidden messages in the Bible?” Scott nodded. “What about the messages that are already there? Didn’t they think to just read it?”
“Guess not. Oh, it doesn’t stop there. Notariqon was a skill Kabbalists used to look at the end and beginning letters of words to find a hidden message, while Gematria was based purely on the Hebrew texts because, as you know, all Hebrew letters are numbers. So they theorized that all words that came to the same number were connected in some way.” Scott seemed indifferent to the theory. “They concluded there were seventy-two names for God.”
“What’s the point?”
Scott tried to explain. “In the sixteenth century, Bruno used a set of concentric wheels with a hundred and fifty sectors on them. Each wheel contained thirty letters made of the twenty-three Latin letters, and then a mixture of Greek and Hebrew letters that represented sounds that aren’t in Latin. And what he did was to rotate these wheels and form triplet combinations in an attempt to discern the first perfect language of mankind. What he got was a load of old nonsense, but it actually became useful in the new art of cryptography.”
“And we’ve been writing secret messages to each other ever since,” Pearce noted.
“What they eventually started doing was to wrap a ribbon around a cylinder in kind of a spiral. Then write a message vertically down the side of the tube, so when the ribbon was stretched back out you were left with a series of random letters along the length of the ribbon. Then you just filled in a junk message around it.”
“A cylinder and a ribbon?” Sarah seemed intrigued. Like it had jogged a memory of some description. “There was a geologist, a French guy named, what was that … ? Béguyer. Yeah. Béguyer de Chancourtois, in the 1800s. He arranged elements in a spiral around a tube—twenty—four elements, I think it was. Then he noted down the periodicity of their properties—y’know, which elements were intrinsically similar. What he found was that similar elements recurred after every seventh element. It was one of the first attempts at building a periodic table.”
For Hackett that seemed to be ringing some bells too, but Matheson was already putting his own ideas forward. “Maybe we should be cutting out the spirals on these photographs and sticking them around a tube.”
“Isn’t that already what they did in Giza?” Pearce indicated.
“John Newlands,” Hackett interrupted. “English chemist. He did similar work on the elements in the nineteenth century and agreed there was a numerical pattern to them. Only he used music as the analogy. There are seven notes in a musical scale, and on the eighth note you step up to a new octave. But there was a more complex structure to the rhythm that Meyer discovered in the same year.” Hackett smiled convincingly. “There were peaks at the eighth and the sixteenth elements. Then the rhythm shifted to eighteen elements apart instead of seven. It was like a wave was passing through the periodic table … Sixteen minutes, by the way.”
“A wave passing through the periodic table?”
“Oh yeah,” Sarah agreed. “In chemical theory, it means you can predict where the next stable elements will occur. In theory there’s some kind of Atlantis, an element that runs parallel to the conventional periodic table, and remains to be discovered. Somewhere around atomic number one hundred and fifteen or one hundred and eighty.”
“Orichalc,” Pearce commented.
Sarah blinked. “I’m sorry?”
“Plato. When he first described Atlantis, he described walls covered in precious metals. Gold, silver. And the one most prized of all was a mysterious gleaming reddish-gold metal he called Orichalc. It was said to shimmer like fire.”
“C60 in its purest form is reddish-gold,” Sarah pointed out.
“Orichalc isn’t a stone, it’s a metal.”
“In South America,” Scott mused, “according to local legend, when the four founding gods had completed their mission, before they left they wrapped all their power and knowledge up into a gift that was both feared and respected. The gift was a stone. The stone of Naczit.”
“Moses, when he went onto the mountain to receive the Ten Commandments, saw the stone they were written on be inscribed by the finger of God. The stones shimmered blue,” November reminded them gently. “And the radiance from the stones was such that it burnt Moses’s face and for the rest of his life he was forced to wear a veil to hide the scars.”
“Ancient stones and ancient metals,” Scott remarked as he eyed the photographs again. He rubbed his hand over his mouth. “Periodicity. Step sequences. What am I missing?”
Gant was on his feet. This was all way above his head and frankly it was irritating the shit out of him. “They’re redirecting a satellite for you,” he said. “I’m going to make sure they’re refueling the planes properly. And I’m putting in another call to the Chinese, to let them know we’re coming.”
“Which Chinese?” Sarah demanded.
“Anyone that’s listening. That ship for starters.”
“And if no one answers?”
“Then we better pray they don’t shoot us down. Coz we’re going in regardless.”
As he reached the door, Hackett glanced out the window to see an immense gray U.S. amphibious landing craft smash through the waves toward the shore and beach on the ice shelf a short distance off. The front end came crashing down but the ice was smashing for no one.
“What the hell is that?” the physicist asked, startled as a squad of marines manhandled a flat black coffin-sized box out of the craft and started marching it toward the base on the double.
“Ah,” Gant explained knowingly. “That’ll be our tactical nuclear warhead.”
He zipped up his parka and went out to meet them while Hackett sidled up next to Pearce and November. “I hope for our sakes,” he said, “Orichalc doesn’t turn out to be uranium, or we’re never getting out of Atlantis alive.”
“Just what do you think you’re doing?” November demanded angrily.
“Storing the bomb,” Gant replied frostily, directing the marines in through the front door with the box.
“In the chapel?”
“You got a better idea? The Chinese would never live down the international controversy of firing upon fine upstanding Americans who were simply engaged in prayer.”
Inside, on a pew near the front by the altar, and just to one side of the stained glass penguin, Hackett and Scott turned to see the soldiers struggle with the device before dropping it roughly to the ground. “Didn’t I see this on Planet of the Apes one time?” Hackett remarked.
Sarah took a pew next to Scott as the epigraphist chewed his pen and puzzled over another photograph, asking: “How long have we got?”
Scott glanced to Hackett who checked his watch. “Three minutes.”
Scott blew air anxiously and smacked his lips. He looked up at the cross behind the altar. His knee was bouncing up and down furiously. “Boy,” he said, “it puts a whole new perspective on this when you know these things are coming.”
Sarah took his hand in hers and squeezed it gently. “Where are you from, Richard?”
“Seattle,” he sighed. “Y’know, it’s such a pretty city,” he said with passion. “It’s condensed, see. There isn’t much in the way of sprawling suburbs so you’re never far from the countryside. You can hike, bike, sail. Mountains and lakes are all over. Forests … everything is this dark, dark green, y’know?” Sarah nodded like she did. “Douglas Fir, Broad Leaf Maple, Mountain Ash, Red Alder, Dogwood … You can go out into the country, then come back, get a coffee in Starbucks and feel like you actually went someplace. We’ve got two hundred and fifty-eight bridges in Seattle—every kind of bridge you can think of, coz of all the lakes. We’ve even got two floating bridges. Some people say it’s because it’s a city full of gaps, socially as well as topographically, but I think it’s full of bridges because it’s full of people who are going places. And nothing’s gonna stand in their way.” He thought about that for a moment. “I’ll miss that if it goes.”
Matheson groaned as he took the weight off his feet and sat down next to them. “I went to Seattle once. It pissed down all week.”
“Where are you from?” Sarah asked.
“San Francisco. You?”
“Stillwater, Wisconsin.” Sarah eyed Hackett perceptively. The physicist seemed to be deep in thought. “How about you, Jon?”
“Me?” She nodded encouragingly. “I was born on a military base in Germany,” he said. “Spent a couple years in Hawaii, then Japan. We moved around a lot. I live in New York half the year now, spend three months of the year in Santa Fe down at the Institute. Travel … I travel a lot. I’ll miss planes.”
“But not the food,” Sarah joked.
“No, not the food,” Hackett agreed. “Plane food is, uh, something else. But they do try, bless ’em.” He checked his watch again but didn’t say anything.
