Ark

by K. B. Kofoed

  Stephie didn’t hear her father. She was talking to her collie.

  Jim got up and went to look for Kas. He found her in bed with a book.

  “Feeling okay, pooks?” he asked gently.

  “I’m fine,” she said in a tone that proved otherwise.

  “I’m sorry, hun,” said Jim, “I really screwed up, didn’t I?”

  “You could have called,” said Kas, not looking up from her book.

  “You’d have said no way, I guess, huh?”

  She looked up at him. There was still love in her eyes. “I wanted to help pick out a dog for Stephie, is all,” she said. “It was like you cheated, or something.”

  “Yes, I guess so,” he admitted. “I was at the studio, all alone. I heard this dog barking outside, somewhere. Later, there was this ad on the radio for the Morris shelter; whimpering dog sounds and all. I guess I got carried away. I just felt like I’ve been away. Out of touch. I wanted to do something.”

  “Well, you did it, all right,” said Kas with a wry smile. “Stephie loves the puppy, Jim. So do I. He’s beautiful, but won’t he get huge? I wonder if PC will ever accept him. He’s still in the back yard, and it’s snowing.” She gave the window a worried look.

  “The cat will be okay,” said Jim. “And no, the man at the shelter said he probably wouldn’t get too big. He’s not pure collie. There’s some border collie in there too.”

  Jim sat down on the edge of the bed and looked into her eyes. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me, Kas,” he said sadly. “It’s the ark thing, I guess.”

  “It’s getting the better of you, maybe. Maybe you should back away from it.”

  Jim shook his head. “I’ve told myself to do that a number of times, but it’s no good. I can’t. I hate to admit it but I think the thing that bothers me – keeps tearing me up – is that I’m not in control. Like it’s going to happen without me.”

  “Like WHAT’S going to happen?” asked Kas, closing her book and putting it on the bedside table.

  “That they’ll build it without me, and I’ll never know.”

  “I understand,” she said. “Don’t worry, Jim. I’m not that mad at you.”

  “That’s something,” said Jim. “Quite a lot, really.” He laid his head in her lap and sighed.

  As Kas stroked Jim’s temple he thought back over the events of the last few days. When he’d returned from New Mexico he was jubilant and couldn’t wait to tell her that the simulation had worked. Then nothing. No calls. It began to eat at him again. It was like he was being haunted.

  “I’ve tried to do something about it,” said Jim. “Get my head into other things. I was thinking I should maybe write it down, like a journal. Maybe that’d help get me out from under it. I tried to start it today at the studio.”

  “How did it go?”

  “Shitful,” he admitted. “I can’t write worth a damn.”

  “No one expects you to be a great writer,” said Kas, “least of all when you write your own journal. Don’t worry about getting it perfect. It’s a good thing to do. Call it coming to grips with a problem.” She kissed the top of his head, noticing that his hair was thinning slightly. She gently pushed some locks over it. “It’s hard to start something new. Especially if it’s important to you.”

  Jim listened to Kas’s voice resonating in her chest. Her words comforted him and provided the solace that only Kas could bring to his life. “I love you.”

  Suddenly Stephie and her collie came bounding into the room. “Taught Woolsey some tricks,” she said proudly. “Can’t wait to show Val tomorrow.”

  “Woolsey?” Kas screwed up her nose. “That’s its name?”

  Stephie ignored her, threw the saliva covered tennis ball into the next room, and off they went in a thunder of footsteps and paw scratchings. “Get it Woolsey,” Stephie yelled.

  Jim chuckled. “Woolsey? Where did that …?”

  “It’s the last name of her history teacher, a blonde stud from Australia,” explained Kas with a knowing smirk.

  “She’s just a kid,” said Jim. “Maybe she just thinks the name is cute.”

  “Sure,” said Kas, straight-faced, “that’s got to be it.”

  “Stephie!” yelled Jim. “Why did you choose the name Woolsey?”

  There was a moment’s interruption in the play in the next room, then Stephanie yelled, “Thought it was cute!”

  Jim and Kas looked at each another and sighed. “Woolsey,” Jim repeated, and they both began to laugh.

  “What?” yelled Stephie.

  #

  Sunday morning at ten the phone caught Jim in the shower. He’d intended to sleep in but something had gotten him up at seven. He’d gone out and walked Woolsey, but not without rousting Stephie to help with the chore. After a half hour of dragging his daughter and her dog around the neighborhood and running into Mr. Brussels, the talkative neighbor who regarded the weather as personal enemy, Jim had decided that the day would continue without redemption.

  The call changed that. It was Dan Slater, in town and needing a place to stay. The wheels of employment were grinding slowly for Dan. On Monday he had to attend yet another interview. “I know this is abrupt,” he said apologetically, “but I thought I’d take a chance that you’re not busy before I booked a room downtown.”

  “No way you’re paying for a room,” said Jim. “We still have a lot of catching up to do.”

  “Okay, then,” said Dan, “I’ll be right over if that’s all right.”

  Moments after they hung up, Gene called. He was in town, preparing to run the simulation at Penn’s computers to correlate the results. He asked if it would be possible to arrange to have Jim’s friend Dan there to see it too.

  “This is weird,” said Jim. “He just called to say he was in town because he has a Monday meeting with a prospective employer. Would you believe he has nothing to do this afternoon? Can I get Lou to see it too?”

  “We’d rather not get everyone in on this, Jim,” replied Gene cautiously. “There’s already the three of us. With my friend at Penn that’s four. That’s quite a crowd for the computer room. Also, we won’t have much time. You understand.”

  “Sure,” said Jim.

  #

  They met Mr. Megabyte on the green in the center of the Penn campus. “We’re the sweater boys today. Ain’t it great? What’s your excuse, Jim?” said Earl in a boisterous voice.

  They were all wearing sweaters except Jim, who wore his heavy leather jacket. The weather was still unseasonably cool. Jim looked at Dan in bemusement. “Gee, should I go home and get a sweater?”

  Gene introduced Dan as an old friend, and they made small talk for a few moments before Earl pointed to the building behind Gene. “We’re all here, then. Let’s go.”

  “Even without a sweater?” said Jim with a big smile.

  Mr. Megabyte glanced at him coldly. Apparently he didn’t like people encroaching on his jokes. As they walked down the hall Jim noticed there were very few people around. “Well, it is a Sunday,” explained Earl. “Not too many students here today. Generally we do maintenance work and data filing on Sunday. I’m supposed to be doing that too, but there’s time to play.” Earl looked at Dan and raised his eyebrows playfully. “So what is it you do, Mr. Slater?”

  “I’m a microwave geek,” said Dan passively.

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  “Neither do I,” Dan said, straight-faced.

  Earl roared with laughter. When they got to the computer room Earl punched a code into the digital lock and the door unsealed with a hiss. As they entered the lights came on automatically. “What’s the media?” asked Earl, holding out his hand to Gene.

  “CD this time,” said Gene, reaching under his sweater into his shirt pocket. Gene gave Earl a small jewel box that contained a black labeled disk. He opened it and stuffed it into a slot in a unit sitting on the main console.

  “What am I going to be looking at?” asked Dan.

  �
�Nothing for a while, Mr. Microwave,” said Earl. “Mr. Megabyte has to boot up and load a program or two. Then Mr. Cray has to...”

  “Spare us, Earl. Really,” said Gene. “If it’s going to take a while maybe we should get a coffee somewhere.”

  Mr. Megabyte glared at Gene. “This will only take a minute.” The screen in front of him displayed the emblem of the Columbia University Sciences Department.

  “Booo, hiss!” said Earl. “This sign you put before me, this does not please Mr. Megabyte.” He crossed his index fingers before the screen as if expelling an evil demon.

  “If that’s for my benefit it won’t work,” said Gene. “Don’t work for them anymore.”

  The emblem faded from the screen and was replaced by a message in glowing white letters that scrolled from right to left. “RESONATOR MODEL -- V TEST”

  “V-TEST,” noted Gene. “Virtual test.” The screen turned solid blue and Jim’s drawings of the tabernacle began to appear in white lines as a wire frame structure. A duplicate appeared directly above it. The two images took only a few seconds to assemble.

  “Cool,” said Jim, “but why two views?”

  Gene nodded. “You’ll see.”

  Next to be added to the model was the furniture inside the tabernacle. Finally the Ark of the Covenant appeared looking exactly as Jim had drawn it, perfectly positioned in the rear third of the tabernacle separated from the rest by four pillars and a curtain.

  “So far so good,” said Jim. Without taking his eyes off the screen he nudged Dan with his elbow. “What’d’ya think?”

  “They’re your drawings, all right.”

  Now that the ark and the tabernacle were in place the computer began to render it in full color, then the ground appeared, and finally a desert landscape with stark distant mountains completed the scene. The computer flashed a warning sign in bold red letters that filled the screen: “START – MICROWAVE RADIATION.” They disappeared as abruptly as they appeared. Nothing happened. Then another message flashed in red: “BEGIN FREQUENCY SWEEP.”

  Jim held his breath. On the monitor, microwaves were displayed as a wide yellow beam with dark bands sweeping through it. The virtual beam stayed in a fixed position aiming into the tabernacle at an angle from above. Small white letters in the corner of the screen showed the angle to be 25°. Slowly the angle rose toward 90°.

  When the beam reached 56° a light switched on, exactly where Jim expected it. “Above the Mercy Seat and between the two cherubim,” he mumbled in awe as the glowing orb above the ark brightened. The beam continued to increase its angle until it reached a 90° vertical position, but the glowing light never faded. The beam held that position for a few seconds before beginning to lower. When it got to the 45° position Jim expected the glow to stop, but it did not, nor did its effect on the ark when the beam reached its lowest point, horizontal to the ground.

  “That’s weird,” said Jim. “The ark started glowing when the beam got to about 60 degrees.”

  “Fifty-six degrees,” said Gene. “It’s the same every time. I watched it run at Columbia more than ten times. It was always the same. It’s like the effect on the ark sustains itself somehow.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Jim.

  Gene explained that the experiment was set up to shift frequencies near the meter bandwidth until a reaction occurred. Then the simulation would test other variables, angles of activation and such.

  “Did you vary the signal strength?” asked Dan.

  “Not while the program is running. For the test we needed to simplify the variables. We are assuming a power of one megawatt.”

  “Isn’t that a lot of power?” asked Jim.

  “Relative to what?” asked Dan. “To God?”

  Jim scratched his head and looked back at the screen. “Can you run the program again, only zooming in on details?”

  “Now that it’s been through the Crays you can do what you want,” said Earl. “They have it all stored away.”

  Jim told Earl that he wanted to see the ark in operation in close up and from different angles. “Can you do that?”

  Earl grinned and tapped the keyboard. He hummed a tune as his fingers danced across the console. Jim recognized it as Spirit in the Sky. He smiled and wondered if Earl was getting his own joke. Before he could ask, his eyes were arrested by something on the screen. It showed a view of the ark as only Aaron, the high priest, might have seen it, hidden mysteriously, flickering behind a veil. The curtain did not bear the cherubim motifs described in the Bible. It was only a scrim or fog that diffused the light pouring out from between the twin angelic parabola that covered the Mercy Seat.

  Dan looked around at everyone. “Isn’t this fuckin’ incredible?”

  “Maybe you should watch your language,” Jim whispered.

  “Yeah, maybe I should,” said Dan. He wasn’t smiling.

  “Can you slow down the action? Can we follow the pulses?” asked Gene.

  Without a word Mr. Megabyte hit a few more keys. The bands of dark waves that flowed along the beam slowed but did not reveal to Gene what he wanted to see. He shook his head. “That’s odd,” he said, “I wonder ...”

  Everyone looked at Gene. “What?” said Jim and Earl simultaneously.

  “Well, I kind of expected to see waves being emitted from the ark, too,” Gene offered. “Like the waves going in. But there aren’t any. Why? Is that a problem with the simulation or a real prediction, I wonder?”

  Except for the whirring of the Crays the room fell silent. Jim looked at Dan. “Any ideas?”

  “Sure. Well, I think so,” said Dan. “The thing has converted microwaves to other forms of energy: heat, photons, maybe electrical and magnetic energy too.”

  “Like a laser?” asked Earl.

  “More like a maser,” replied Dan.

  “Maser? What’s that?” asked Jim.

  “Stands for ‘microwaves amplified by the stimulated emission of radiation,’” said Gene. “Coherent microwaves instead of light.”

  “A microwave laser,” Dan added, watching the screen in awe.

  #

  It seemed inevitable that everyone should go back to Jim’s house to think things over.

  As they said goodbye to Earl, Jim wondered what effect the experience might have had on him.

  They picked up the car at the garage on Thirty-fourth Street. No one had very much to say until they got to the car. “Do you think Mr. Megabyte will be Mr. Blabbermouth?” asked Jim as he headed the station wagon toward the Schuylkill Expressway.

  “I’ll deal with him through a friend. So, Jim,” said Gene, changing the subject, “What did you think of the simulation?”

  “I keep telling myself that it was a simulation,” said Jim, “but I wish I hadn’t held back. I’m dying of curiosity and I’ll probably never get the chance to test it.”

  “What’s that?” said Gene.

  “I wanted them to up the amplitude and the power in a burst,” said Jim.

  “To show us what?” asked Dan from the back seat.

  “If it could have roasted anything in the courtyard, like the Bible says it did.”

  “It did?”

  “Read your Bible,” said Jim. “The ark did a lot more than that.”

  “I never heard that,” said Dan.

  Jim nodded. “Well, not to get on a rant here, but since I started studying the Old Testament I’ve come to realize that very few people have ever heard that.”

  “Most people don’t have any reason to pay attention to the story,” observed Gene. “Christians focus on the New Testament while the Hebrews focus on the rituals and the law without considering the details. Religion puts a kind of veil over all that information. When you’re born and raised with it, you generally don’t question it.”

  “Yes, but it’s right there in the story,” said Jim. “It tells us that the ark killed 25,000 people. They were burnt to a crisp. It describes the ark being used in battle with fire or lightning bolts shooting out of i
t. A devout Israelite lost his life by touching the ark when all he did was to stop it from falling to the ground. Touch the ark and you’re dead. It also tells how the Israelites carried the ark across the Jordan River. This was after they’d carried the thing around for forty years. The Jordan was flooding at the time, but as soon as the priests carrying the ark stepped into the water the river receded and they crossed into their promised land.”

  “You’re talking about the parting of the Red Sea, I think,” said Dan.

  “No,” said Jim, “that was before the ark was ever built; when they were crossing the Red Sea or the Reed Sea after the Exodus from Egypt.”

  “I never heard about the parting of the Jordan River,” said Dan.

  Gene Henson had been listening quietly. “He’s right, Dan,” he said. “All those details are in the Bible, spread out throughout the three books of Moses. Fact is, they carried the ark around with them for a long time. Like Jim says, forty years.

  “I guess that’s what impressed me when I first looked into this thing with Jim, the fact that at least two generations of people grew up and lived with the ark as they toted it and all their stuff around in the desert for forty years. When you think about it, you come to realize that there were thousands of witnesses to all the events described. The way I see it, Dan, there are only two possible views of this story. Either you buy it or you don’t. That means it’s either a complete fabrication or the plain truth.”

  “Couldn’t it be somewhere in between?” asked Dan. “I mean isn’t that where the truth generally lies, in the gray areas?”

  “Not here,” said Jim. “I have to agree with Gene. There were all those witnesses. It even says that when Moses came down from the mountain the first time, he’d apparently convinced God that the elders needed proof. So the book says that a whole bunch of them met with God face to face, in a tent at the foot of the mountain. These were the tribal elders. If it is true it’s analogous to God visiting the White House or the U.N.”