In the Beginning: Mars Origin I Series Book I

by Abby L. Vandiver

  Why do I even try to have a conversation with Claire?

  “Claire!” I practically yelled. “I read the newspaper clipping. Man, Claire. Sometimes I really wonder about you.” I hit the brakes suddenly as we rounded a slick corner.

  “Yeah, well, okay, Justin, but if you kill us no one will ever know what was in the manuscripts.” She was holding onto the dashboard.

  “Don’t worry. I am not going to kill us. I don’t want to have to spend eternity, all the way from day one, with you.”

  “I just thought of something.” Her eyes got big again.”

  “What?” I mimicked her face.

  “Maybe the manuscripts are cursed. You know, like King Tut’s tomb. Everyone that has them dies. Dr. Sabir, Dr Margulies, Dr. Margulies’ mother. And it sure has made you bonkers.”

  “I was already that way so that doesn’t count. And nothing happened to Dr. Yeoman. Don’t you remember that interview with Life that you showed me and the article in Time Magazine?’

  “Yes. But he put the manuscripts back in the cave.”

  “Ugh, don’t be silly. There is no curse. Dr. Margulies mother had the envelope for fifty years.” That didn’t seem to matter.

  “Dr. Margulies’ mother didn’t know what was in the envelope. She was safe.” Claire was beginning to sound like me. I really was scared about what was in those manuscripts. My ‘conspiracy theory’ flooded my mind. What if there’s a curse on it? I know I hadn’t had anything but grief since I discovered them.

  We got to my house and took everything in my study. We sat on the floor and looked through every journal, article and paper that was in the three boxes of things Mrs. Margulies had given me. Twice. The translation was nowhere to be found.

  “Shit!”

  I glanced at Claire. “Excuse my language.”

  “Oooo, do we need to pray?” she said with a teasing glint in her eyes.

  “No. I’m okay.” I hung my head and pouted. “What am I going to do now?”

  “At least you have the full copy of the manuscript. You may have to translate it but this time you have it all. And,” she smiled brightly, “you’re the only person in the world that does. You’ll be the only one who knows what it says.”

  Like I cared about that? I just wanted to know what it said. Right now.

  “Yeah, you’re right. But do not tell anyone about this,” I cautioned her.

  “About what? Everyone already knows about the manuscripts.”

  “No, I mean, let’s not tell anyone that I have this notebook with the complete manuscript.”

  “Why?”

  “Just because, Claire, okay? I don’t want anyone bugging me or teasing me about this thing until I can get it figured out. For some reason I just feel nervous about this whole thing.”

  “You’re not going to tell Mase?” She couldn’t believe that.

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Yes, I’ll tell Mase. But under no circumstances do I want you to tell Greg, okay?”

  “What about Michael?” she asked.

  Did she really not understand the meaning of don’t tell anyone?

  “Michael already thinks he has this thing figured out. But, no. Don’t tell him either. This is just between us. Me and you. Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  I held the notebook in my hands and remembered how Dr. Yeoman had written ‘God help us’ in Latin, in his journal. Now I could see why. I didn’t even know what it said yet, and I knew I was going to need God’s help to get me through this.

  I flipped through the pages of the notebook. It was going to take me forever to figure this out.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  I got the manuscript from Mrs. Margulies the fifteenth of January. The museum tour was to start February 7. I knew that I could neither translate the copy of the manuscripts in three weeks (I wondered if I could do it in three years), or start the translation and then stop when it came time to kick off the tour. I didn’t have that much will power. Although I hired someone to travel with the tour, I still had to go to Atlanta for the kick-off. So, I put off translating the manuscripts.

  The tour was going to seven cities in twelve months and had been offered the opportunity to continue to five more cities including Israel the following year.

  I hired Elise Eckland, an Associate Professor of History at Brown University to travel with the tour although after the tour she’d be moving to DC for a position she got at the Smithsonian.

  There was no way that I could leave and travel the year with the exhibit, even if the translation didn’t have me hypnotized, I couldn’t be away from Mase, the kids, or the museum that long.

  Elise was young, petite and pretty, but she hid that behind brown tortoise-rimmed, rectangular glasses, her long blond hair pulled tightly in a ponytail and wearing clothes that looked like they were possibly her grandmother’s hand-me-downs. Nonetheless, she was an expert in ancient history, and had worked as assistant curator of the Art Museum in Chicago for five years before teaching at Brown.

  Per her contract, she brought along a grad student who worked only for college credit, to help her. Still, as the chair of the consortium and the initiator of the tour, some things I had to do.

  The tour was to travel to cities that had museums within the consortium, and a few that were not. Mase was tagging along with me for the week I had to be there and then Elise would take over. The kids were going to stay with Michael and Regina.

  But between now and then I had to log and tag all the pieces that were steadily coming in on loan from other museums. In addition to the regular museum business, I had to make flight arrangements for pieces that would come in directly to Atlanta. I had to meet with lawyers to draw up contracts, and get insurance and security for the exhibit pieces that covered every city of the tour. Elise worked by my side every step of the way. She was more than ready to take it over.

  I designed a brochure for the tour, describing the pieces in the exhibit. But my real purpose for putting it together was for Dr. Margulies. I wrote a tribute to him, his life and his work and how he was the inspiration for the tour.

  Once we got to Atlanta there wasn’t a lot for me to do. Elise took over and I, it seemed, was just in her way. She made the curator at the Atlanta museum change the area for display, the lighting and she arranged for a group of fifth graders to come and draw their rendition of the pieces, which she put out on display.

  “Get everyone involved and loving our history,” she said.

  So, Mase and I just spent all that time together. He hung out with me at the museum whenever I had to be there, and then we went out at night, holding hands, eating at great restaurants, and meeting up with old friends in the area.

  When I got back from Atlanta, I had Claire pick us up at the airport and bring the notebook with her. I snatched it from her when she met us at baggage and cradled it in my arms all the way home. Mase wanted to stop and pick up the kids from Michael’s on the way.

  “No, take me home first. I have waited a month since I first got the copy of the manuscripts, and I am not waiting any longer.” I didn’t care what they thought. “You can just go back and get them after I go home,” I told him.

  But Mase and Claire kept trying to get me to, “Stop first and get them because Michael’s house was on the way.”

  That didn’t matter to me.

  “Fine. I’ll just get out of the car and walk home,” I said stubbornly folding my arms and creating a brick wall to their pleas.

  Finally, they conceded. Not that they had much choice. I went home. Mase went back out and got the kids.

  Once inside the house, I went straight to my study, locked the door, and prepared to start the translation. I sat down at my desk, with a smile curling around the edges of my mouth. I licked my lips, clapped my hands and rubbed them together. I turned on the computer and double clicked on Sean’s program, and then I slowly turned to the first page of the notebook.

  I became Howard Hughes. Other than going to work and the
bathroom, I didn’t go anywhere.

  I definitely didn’t go out for pizza.

  I spent every waking moment working on the translation and every minute of sleep dreaming about the translations. I didn’t let anyone or anything distract me.

  Translating the manuscript was the hardest thing I had ever done.

  It took me a couple of days to scan all of the pages of the notebook into the computer. I’d have to use an OCR to convert the scanned pages to text. Then I saved a copy on floppy disk. I had to use a few floppy disks to save it because of its size, but I knew I needed to use some sort of back-up just in case my computer crashed or I lost the notebook. I hid the disks in a safe place. Then I visited the library at Case to try and find the books I needed to help me with the dialects. I collected the tools I needed - three different thesauruses, three Hebrew and two Latin dictionaries and a whole slew of books on different Hebrew and Aramaic dialects.

  I could very easily read a text in Hebrew or Aramaic without looking up every other word but I couldn’t do it here. The intertwining of the three languages made it almost impossible to do and I was so surprised how the dialects could change the meaning of a word so dramatically.

  “Nothing is hidden to the trained eye.” Dr. Margulies’ words kept ringing in my ear. I wanted to translate the manuscripts for Dr. Margulies just as much as I wanted to do it for myself. It was his father that had made the initial discovery and it was Dr. Margulies who had helped to cultivate me as a historian and Bible scholar. This translation, I felt, was a legacy to them.

  But what was even harder than translating those manuscripts was trying to figure out what it was that the author didn’t want people to know. What had made him encode it like this? It didn’t make any sense. I wondered how much trouble Dr. Sabir had when he translated it.

  I worked on the Aramaic first. There wasn’t as much of it and it was easier for me to do. The program that Sean had designed for me had a ‘Find and Replace,’ so when I figured out a word, I just had the program find all instances of it in the document and change it to the English equivalent.

  Claire had already found a lot of the Latin words that I remembered from the original manuscripts, which helped a lot. And she was always bringing me the new words I would find in the notebook as I worked on the translation. There was a page of Latin at the very back of the notebook. It didn’t seem to fit in with the rest of the notebook. Something he maybe added afterward. I didn’t want to really deal with it, so I figured I wouldn’t translate it unless my translation seemed incomplete once I finished.

  I don’t read while I translate. I find that when I do that, I tend to jump to conclusions about what’s really written, not getting a full understanding of what the author wrote. I translate like I type, I see each word as I type it and that way I can’t usually get the meaning of the entire writing. Plus, with the ‘find and replace,’ I filled in words without ever looking at that part of the text. I must admit, it was pretty hard for me not to go back and read what I had already translated because I wanted to know its secrets so bad. But I was determined to get the true meaning of this thing. Michael had jumped to conclusions from just a few of the words and I didn’t want to make that same mistake. I was sure that Michael was wrong. There was no way that I was going to believe that Man had evolved from anything.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  Oh happy day!

  I finally finished translating the copy of the manuscripts in Dr. Sabir’s notebook. It was Thursday, May 21, 1998 at 8:07 a.m. It took me three months, seven days, two bottles of Extra Strength Tylenol, and four-and-a-half cases of Pepsi, but I did it.

  Time had really flown by. The seasons had changed just like they do in the movies - fast moving skies. I looked down at the notebook when the ground was covered with snow, in the biting cold. When I looked up the trees were starting to blossom, birds were singing and gentle breezes blew in the smell of spring. During the interim, I can’t remember anything else.

  At the time I finished the translation, Mase had left to drop the kids off at school, and then was headed out to do some research on an article. I was home by myself and was just printing out the translation when the phone rang. It was my assistant Nichelle. I hadn’t been to work since the previous Friday, and lo and behold there were things she needed me to take care of. There were papers she needed me to sign, a few phone messages I needed to return. A couple of them were from Elise. She asked if I wanted her to bring the papers and messages to my house. I told her “No.” I decided I’d better make an appearance at work.

  I was so excited about reading the translation. I knew that I was getting ready to learn history that was unknown to anyone else. Finally, what was put in clay pots, two thousand years ago, would be revealed to me. But, so there wouldn’t be any distractions, I put off reading it until I got to the museum and took care of things there.

  I showered, washed my hair and put on a pair of khaki pants, a pink striped oxford shirt, a pair of navy boat shoes and a navy Polo jacket. I put my hair in a ponytail and pulled it through the back of my pink AKA Sorority baseball cap. Not my usual office attire but I’d just go in the back way, no one would see me. I would take care of the museum business first, then not take any other calls, lock myself in my office and read the translation. Reading the translation at home wasn’t a good idea I reasoned, too many distractions, even though I had learned to ignore most of them.

  I got to the museum about ten-thirty. It only took me about forty-five minutes to finish the museum’s business. I didn’t think I hurried through it, I just worked with such diligence that it didn’t take me hardly any time to finish. I realized that if I worked with the same attentiveness every day, I probably wouldn’t ever get behind in my work.

  Finally, 11:47 am, I sat down to read my translation of the four, 2,000 year old manuscripts found in Cave 4 at Qumran.

  I read the translation of the manuscript for the first time with trepidation.

  The second time with repudiation.

  Maybe I read it wrong. Perhaps, it was my translation.

  The translation was sketchy. I’ll admit to that. The sentences didn’t really flow like they should. It sounded more poetic than prophetic. Maybe that was the problem. And, maybe I should have translated those odd pages found at the end of the notebook that had been written entirely in Latin. It was on the last pages of the book, pages after the end of the manuscripts’ pages. I’d thought it must be unrelated. Now, I wasn’t so sure.

  I took a deep breath, rubbed my hands over my face several times, and went back over my translation. This time I tried to use better sentence structure, putting in commas, and paragraphs. In some places I had used two English words for one Hebrew or Aramaic word when I wasn’t exactly sure what was being said. I thought perhaps some of the words I had chosen in the translation process were inaccurate. So, now I picked one that was closer to the real meaning as I understood it. The word that would best fit and made the most sense. I was anxious but I tried not to rush through it.

  I went through the whole thing. It took me about two hours. Then I read it again.

  “Oh my God. Oh. My. God.” I cried out loud. I can’t believe this. This can’t be true.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  In one swift movement, I grabbed the notebook, my jacket, purse, and keys and opened the door to the outside. Fumbling, dropping the keys twice, I finally got the car started and headed out of the parking lot. I drove around for more than an hour, crying, talking to myself and stopping in the middle of traffic to reread parts of the translation. I decided that I needed to talk to someone. Someone that I knew would not just be a sounding board but who would fiercely object to the things I said. I decided to go and see Greg.

  I made a U-turn in the middle of Euclid Avenue and drove downtown to his law firm. Blindly, guided by blaring horns, I weaved my Passat recklessly through the unusually frantic midday traffic. My abrupt arrival found Greg in with a client. I sat on the edge of the front office c
ouch, right leg shaking, rocking back and forth, and clutching the notebook in my arms, the wait made even more unbearable amidst cautioned stares of Greg’s associates.

  Greg’s downtown office was modern and sleek. Its upscale interior, with its smooth lines and neutral colors, epitomized Greg. Through the glass and chrome doors many of Cleveland’s privileged and influential denizens had come. Now, here I sat, sullen, disheveled, looking unkempt and out of place. My face streaked with the stain of my tears, eyes red and my hair standing on end from me pulling at it. I had my arms in my jacket but not pulled up over my shoulders making me have to strain to lift up my arm to try and smooth down my hair. I wiped my face with the sleeve of my jacket. Digging through my purse I pulled out a pair of sunglasses and put them on. I tried to look presentable. In actuality, I probably looked like a drug addict needing a fix.

  As soon as Greg rounded the corner from the hallway of his office into the lobby, he saw me. One look and he handed his client over to Anne.

  “What is wrong with you? Are you alright?” He studied my face.

  “I didn’t think you would ever come out.” The words barely edged out around the knot in my throat.

  “Why didn’t you just say it was an emergency?” He took my arm and led me back to his office. “I would have come right out. What in the world happened?” He sat me down in a chair in front of his desk and then walked around it and sat in his desk chair.

  “I’ve got something to tell you.” I wanted so desperately to stay calm. I got up and walked back over to the door and closed it. I turned around and met the worried expression that had unfolded on his face.

  “What?” he asked. The worry on his face seemed to have spilled out over into his voice.

  I took off my sunglasses and stuffed them in my purse. “Greg, remember at Claire’s house, right before I went to Jerusalem with Dr. Margulies? Remember you said that whatever was left to be translated in those Scrolls would not cause any new revelations?”