Old Earth

by Gary Grossman

  “A bent flag?” was Katrina’s first thought.

  “Interesting how we tend to look for relatable images within even the most rudimentary shapes,” McCauley said. “It’s been something people have done since, I suppose, the dawn of time.”

  “You sound like you’ve figured it out?” Katrina said.

  “Oh, yes. It’s right in front of me. The most recognizable design ever known. The one that guided travelers and quite likely pointed Galileo to the stars. He was fascinated by it. So of course he recognized it. Father Eccleston would have, too. Ursa Major. The Big Dipper.”

  Eighty-five

  “What’s the Big Dipper got to do with anything?” DeMeo asked.

  “Back to ‘La chiave.’ It’s more than just the key to the lock. The whole sentence,” Katrina explained. “Galileo’s complete thought was ‘La chiave per sbloccare i misteri della paura.’ The key to the mysteries of time.”

  “That helps a lot,” DeMeo said facetiously.

  “It’s a sign post, a guiding way. The Big Dipper points to Polaris, the North Star, the most identifiable star in the sky,” McCauley explained. “The star that doesn’t rise or set, but remains relatively in the same position above the northern horizon while other stars circle it. It’s all because the axis of the earth is pointed toward it. We’re being pointed toward it.”

  “But where?” Katrina wasn’t sure of the position.

  “I know.” Jaffe, the army veteran volunteered. “It’s a straight shot up from lower right to the upper right.” Jaffe came around to McCauley’s side. “From the two stars, Merak to Dubhe,” he continued, “and onward. At least that’s what it is in the night sky.”

  McCauley thought more about the design. The position of the stars, the meaning Galileo or even Father Eccleston would have recognized.

  “The number!” he said aloud. He counted the stars represented by the coins. “Seven. Another prime number.” He looked at the layout, this time as a path. “If I start at the far end of the dipper’s handle and end at, what’s the name of the last star?”

  “Dubhe,” Jaffe replied.

  “Ending at Dubhe…then? Well, let’s find out.”

  Quinn McCauley removed the coin on the last star point and pressed the space. Then he moved in toward the corner, repeating the action. He was pressing on representations of Alkaid, Mizar, Alioth, then Megrez at the upper left of the bucket, down to Phecda, over the base to Merak and up to Dubhe. One after another, all in order. All seven.

  Instantly the environment darkened, but not to the deep black. Now a warm blue-black enveloped them. It was punctuated by a bright point of light straight ahead on the wall and in line with the last two stars.

  “Polaris,” Katrina gasped.

  “Walk toward it,” McCauley implored.

  They did, side by side. Without a sense of space, they weren’t sure how far they walked, but soon other areas began to illuminate. Not with a pinpoint of light, but blurry images.

  “Like it’s dialing through filters,” Jaffe said.

  “Video projections?” DeMeo articulated.

  “Right, but I can’t tell what they are,” Katrina replied.

  McCauley couldn’t either. The resolution and focus were still adjusting. McCauley stepped forward from the team and looked directly at the Polaris star projecting his own desire for answers. Suddenly a beam of light shot directly into his eyes.

  “Quinn!” Katrina screamed.

  McCauley was frozen in place for nearly thirty seconds, breathing, but not able to speak. Then it was over. The beam faded but Polaris remained.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes.” McCauley shook his head to gather his thoughts. “I felt like my eyes were being examined. Like an ophthalmologist trying out different corrective lenses on me. And I felt things.”

  “Felt? What kind of…” Katrina didn’t finish her question. Images suddenly exploded throughout the chamber with the sounds of wind and water.

  Now they sharpened, popped up above, below and all around them, expanded in size and then merged into one moving conceptual display which surrounded them. It was an astounding sight—colorful, emotional, overpowering—as beautiful as it was mystifying.

  They rotated, looking up, around and down. Katrina was the first to put impressions to words.

  “A, a planet forming,” Katrina exclaimed.

  “Yes, but not… .” McCauley stopped short.

  The image now began to spin quickly, form and reform over and over until it slowed and merged again, but this time into one huge landmass surrounded by water. It looked like an inverted L, but thicker on the side than on top.

  “Not just a planet,” McCauley proclaimed. He recognized what it was. More than that, he sensed it.

  “Pangaea. Or what we know as Pangea. The super continent. Earth from three hundred million years ago. Early Paleozoic.” He spoke with authority, with knowledge, not speculation. Like the idea was implanted within him. “When all the continents were fused as one. Before the continental shifts.”

  They continued to pivot, watching the single image morph again into dozens, if not hundreds of different displays.

  “Look there and there,” Katrina exclaimed. She pointed to specific moving images. “Those plants and animals; fossils to us. But…”

  “Old Earth,” McCauley declared. “We’re seeing Earth as it was.”

  “How?” Jaffe asked the question for everyone.

  “We’re in a library, an archive. These pictures were recorded for earth’s heirs and pre-programmed for discovery. Somehow the intelligence behind this had the technology to make sure it survived.”

  “But, humans didn’t evolve until hundreds of millions of years later,” DeMeo declared.

  Katrina watched as the pictures revealed emerging life forms, changing landscapes, undersea organisms and soon animals moving across the land. Then they saw upright creatures, not completely familiar, but not unfamiliar either.

  “Quinn, what are they?”

  McCauley reached for a memory now ingrained.

  “This is what his Inquisitors must have feared. It’s the secret guarded for centuries.”

  They watched in awe as lanky people-like bipeds established communities in clans, then families and cities. Cities that were transformed through inventions, and technology unknown today.

  They stared at the images trying to make sense of the ancient history that unfolded before them; a virtual other-world that preceded modern times.

  Beings. Families. Communities. Births. Children growing into adults. Institutional buildings and even houses of worship. Teachers and students. Scientists and doctors. Heroes and villains. All accompanied by a cacophony of sounds.

  “We’re witnessing life that came before us…civilization that existed and flourished…and died.” McCauley now embraced the ultimate realization. “And we’re the reboot.”

  Just as the images had sub-divided, they now reassembled into one shocking faster moving master video revealing a staggering saga.

  “Oh my God,” Katrina sighed.

  Massive earthquakes unhinged the plates. Volcanoes spewed toxins into the air. The giant continent broke apart.

  McCauley exhaled. Katrina wrapped her arms around him.

  “This is the last record of a prior version of humankind,” McCauley solemnly said. “As the forces acted on the earth, it also changed what was breathable. The air was on its way to becoming ours. They couldn’t evolve quickly enough. It ended up being a false start, with their archives surviving beyond them.”

  “I don’t know a lot about the constellations, but wouldn’t the Big Dipper have appeared completely differently back then?” DeMeo asked.

  McCauley again subconsciously sensed the answer. “Yes. It was still forming in their time out of a cluster of scattered stars. But the beings projected that movement into the future for when they believed—or hoped—intelligent life would return. Our time. Us.”

  “It’s the gre
atest discovery of all time.” Katrina gasped.

  “It is,” McCauley agreed. “Like Greene said, when the continents formed, conditions gave life an opportunity to exist. Intelligent life emerged. And we’ve looked back some three hundred million years or more to see it.”

  “What should we do?” DeMeo asked.

  The decision was being made for them. The images began to fade from brilliant colors to shades of gray. The sharp focus dissolved into the soft blurs. The sound returned to ocean waves and then nothing. Soon the only light was the North Star. Then that faded and the chamber began to darken.

  “We have to leave,” McCauley urged. “The old man was right.”

  Katrina Alpert understood. They all really did.

  “The world isn’t ready. Religions, governments, people,” McCauley proffered. “Not ready. Initially other scientists will feel excited, as we are. But how can civilization possibly reframe guiding belief systems, rewrite histories already in stone, or replace principles and laws that hold society together. Here’s proof that there’s so little we know or can possibly understand. Our fields of science are just that. Vast open fields. We plow through facts. We plant seeds of interest in students’ minds. We cultivate their thinking process. And we hope our study will bear fruit. And yet, sometimes we harvest an apple we just shouldn’t bite.”

  “And who’s to say it won’t happen again,” Katrina said. “What kind of record will we leave behind?”

  “I hope it’s not one filled with failure,” McCauley offered. Failure? he thought. Not today.

  “I understand why the old man asked us about Cardinal Francesco Barberini,” he said. “Why he let us live.”

  He took Katrina’s hands in his. “Remember, what Eccleston told us? Barberini was on the Inquisition panel. He headed it. All that responsibility. All that knowledge and yet he abstained when it came time to convict Galileo of heresy even though he knew about these secrets. And so they allowed Galileo to live. The old man did the same for us.”

  “Why?” Katrina asked Quinn.

  “A dying man’s gift. He might have seen in us, what we see in each other—stewardship.”

  “And now?” she continued.

  “Now?” McCauley replied. “We have our duty.”

  They retreated from the cave, climbed down the ladder and silently walked one hundred yards more. Jaffe attached wires they had strung from inside the cave to a generator. The former corporal had had real experience with such things in Afghanistan before going to graduate school.

  There was one more thing to do.

  “You want the honors, Dr. McCauley?”

  It had been his discovery. Now it was his path.

  “Yes.”

  The Yale professor placed his right hand on a detonator cobbled together from electronic supplies bought at the local hardware store. He shook his head. “Too much responsibility,” he quietly offered. “It’s better this way.”

  McCauley took a deep breath and pressed the button. The explosion rumbled across the valley floor. Tons of earth, representing millions of years of history billowed up, then slowly drifted down making a new layer of strata at Makoshika State Park.

  What the Cessna had not done, the team of paleontologists accomplished. They covered up history of Old Earth.

  Past is Prologue

  By the order of Inquisition, Galileo was placed under house arrest at his villa in Arcetri, near Florence, Italy. For the rest of his life, his writing and his movements were restricted by the Pope and the Vatican courts.

  By 1638, he wasn’t even able to gaze at the stars any more. He went completely blind. The result of looking at the sun through his telescope. Some in the Church called it God’s punishment.

  Galileo died in 1642.

  It wasn’t until 1992, 359 years after he was wrongly convicted, that the Roman Catholic Church formally admitted its mistake in condemning Galileo’s assertion about the earth’s relationship to the sun. Pope John Paul II expressed regret and issued a declaration acknowledging errors made by the tribunal.

  In 2008, the head of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences announced that the Church would honor the work of Galileo by erecting a statue within the walls of the Vatican. A month later, the plans were suspended.

  • • •

  Venice, Italy

  Winter Break

  Pete DeMeo was vacationing with Lucia Solera. She’d managed to seduce him in every shape and manner, including finding out about the discovery in Montana and what they had done to keep it a secret. Of course she passed along what she learned in a detailed report. That was her job. Falling in love wouldn’t change anything.

  • • •

  The following Spring

  The news was hardly reported. Two research spelunkers escaped with minor injuries after a catastrophic collapse within a two mile section of Western Kentucky’s remarkable Mammoth Caves. They’d been mapping the one thousand mile cave system for National Geographic. Some six hundred miles had remained unexplored. Now it appeared a good section would be inaccessible forever because of the massive internal rock slide, perhaps triggered by unstable earth.

  The Associated Press gave it two paragraphs. USA Today, the fifth page. The cable news channels didn’t cover it at all. But in London, Simon Volker, Martin Gruber’s successor, considered it business as usual.

  • • •

  Yale University

  One year later

  McCauley’s phone rang. “Jesus, who the hell… ?”

  He picked up his cellphone from the nightstand and answered in a whisper, hoping not to wake Katrina. “Hello.”

  “Hey there, Dr. McCauley, it’s Robert Greene.”

  “Oh man, do you have any idea what time it is?”

  “Sorry. I never do. Anyway. I finally got great info for you. Don’t ask how I tracked it down, but the book you were asking about led to a… .”

  “Stop! Bury it!” McCauley said. “Trust me. Bury it now and forget you ever saw it.”

  “You’re serious?” Greene asked.

  “Beyond serious.”

  “But you’ve got my juices going.”

  “Turn them off. Not this.”

  “Okay, if you say so. Consider it buried, deleted, erased, and expunged from the record.”

  “Thank you,” Quinn said. “Now may I please go back to sleep?”

  “Wait! I have to tell you about something else I’m onto. Ever hear of mokele-mbembe?”

  “Sure. It's rumored to be a living dinosaur stalking somewhere in west central Africa. About as real as the Loch Ness Monster.”

  “Maybe you'll think differently after I tell you what I have. Up for an exploration, Dr. McCauley?”

  Acknowledgments

  I have so many people to thank for their help and support through the research, writing, editorial, and marketing stages of Old Earth. I’ll start with Bruce Coons, my oldest friend and retired Army Officer with a distinguished 40 year military career. Once again, he gave me true guidance on technical detail. Special thanks also go to Brian Aubrey for his attention to earthly issues. Where I bent geological history for the sake of suspending disbelief, he helped me maintain a sense of reality and, dare I say, grounding.

  To Jan Greenhawt, Barbara Schwartz, and Chuck Barquist for their assistance reviewing the manuscript. To Debbie and Mark Masuoka and Stan and Debbie Deutsch. To Susan Mitnick and all my friends from Hudson, NY, for their unending support for my latest work.

  Of course, thanks to my family. To Helene for her help and excitement in the project, Sasha for her infinite curiosity that always inspires, Zach for our fossil hunting some years back where the idea for Old Earth began to gestate, and Jake for introducing me to a key element in the novel, which by now you’ve read: Vantablack.

  Additional thanks to the executives, members, and the community of writers and fans of the International Thriller Writers Association, the great Michael Palmer who launched me in the mystery and thriller genre, and Kimberly Howe for her
ongoing attention at ITW convention time. Added thanks to friends and colleagues Jeffrey Davis, Dick Taylor, Robb Weller, along with researcher/investigator/producer John Greenewald, Jr., KTLA Entertainment Anchor/Reporter Sam Rubin, WBZ Radio talk show host Jordan Rich, and thriller author WG Griffiths. To esteemed PBS television host Barry Kibrick for booking me again and again on his remarkable Emmy Award winning series Between the Lines, and to Adam Cushman at Red14Films for his company’s creative approach to my book trailers. Thanks as well to Lake Arrowhead Jurassic Fossils, Lake Arrowhead, CA.

  Of course, special thanks go to the wonderful team at Diversion Books in New York, led by Publisher Scott Waxman, Editorial Director, Mary Cummings, Editor Randall Klein, the Marketing team of Hannah Black and Brielle Benton, Production Manager Sarah Masterson Hally, and Caroline Teagle for her inspired cover design. Thank you. You’re all amazing!

  Finally, my interest in the area goes back to my parents, Stanley and Evelyn Grossman, who encouraged me to be a rock hound. I dug and scraped for fossils in limestone quarries left behind by the Columbia County, NY cement factories and chiseled great finds out of the cliffs that overlooked my high school athletic field. I’m sure this will resonate, too: I have to point to those classic Random House All About Books and Landmark Books on earth sciences, dinosaurs, and history. They were fascinating reads as a kid, that definitely created a through-line to my writing today.

  More from Gary Grossman

  GARY GROSSMAN’s first novel, Executive Actions, propelled him into the world of political thrillers. Executive Treason, the sequel, further tapped Grossman’s experience as a journalist, newspaper columnist, documentary television producer, reporter and playwright. The third book in the series, Executive Command, brought his trilogy to a conclusion…or has it? He has written for the New York Times, Boston Globe, and Boston Herald American. He covered presidential campaigns for WBZ-TV in Boston, and has produced television series for NBC News, CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS, FOX and 40 cable networks. He is a multiple Emmy Award winning producer, served as chair of the Government Affairs Committee for the Caucus for Television, Producers, Writers and Directors, and is a member of the International Thriller Writers Association. Grossman has taught at Emerson College (where he is a member of the Board of Trustees), Boston University, USC, and Loyola Marymount University, and is a contributing editor to Media Ethics Magazine.