Atlantis Found (21 page)

Pat looked at Yaeger. “If Max can decipher the star coordinates as engraved in the chamber when it was built, we might be able to date its construction.”

“It’s worth a try.”

“I deciphered a small part of the numbering system,” said Pat. “Would that help you, Max?”

“You shouldn’t have bothered. I have already interpreted the numbering system. I find it quite ingenious for its simplicity. I can’t wait to dig my bytes into the inscriptions that spell out words.”

“Max?”

“Yes, Hiram.”

“Concentrate on deciphering the star symbols and put aside the alphabetic inscriptions for now.”

“You’d like me to analyze the celestial map?”

“Do the best you can.”

“Can you give me until five o’clock? I should be able to get a handle on it by then.”

“The time is yours,” Yeager responded.

“Max only requires a few hours for a project that should take months, even years?” Pat asked incredulously.

“Never underestimate Max,” said Yaeger, swinging around in his chair and sipping from a cup of cold coffee. “I spent the better part of my prime years putting Max together. There isn’t another computer system like her in the world. Not that she won’t be obsolete in five years. But for the present, there is very little she can’t do. She is unique, and she belongs heart and soul to me and NUMA.”

“What about patents? Surely you must turn your rights over to the government.”

“Admiral Sandecker is not your average bureaucrat. We have a verbal contract. I trust him, and he trusts me. Fifty percent of any revenue that we make on patent royalties or charges for the use of our accumulated data to private corporations or government agencies is turned over to NUMA. The other fifty percent comes to me.”

“You certainly work for a fair-minded man. Any other employer would have given you a bonus, a gold watch, and a pat on the back, and taken your profits to the bank.”

“I’m lucky to be surrounded by fair-minded men,” said Yaeger solemnly. “The admiral, Rudi Gunn, Al Giordino, and Dirk Pitt, they’re all men I’m proud to call my friends.”

“You’ve known them for a long time.”

“Close to fifteen years. We’ve had some wild times together and solved any number of ocean riddles.”

“While we’re waiting for Max to get back to us, why don’t we begin analyzing the wall symbols. Perhaps we can find a clue to their meaning.”

Yaeger nodded. “Sure thing.”

“Can you reproduce the holographic image of the chamber?”

“Wishing will make it so,” Yaeger said, as he typed a command at his keyboard and the image of the interior walls of the chamber materialized again.

“To decipher an unknown alphabetic writing, the first trick is to separate the consonants from the vowels. Since I see no indication that they represent ideas or objects, I’m assuming that the symbols are alphabetic and they record sounds of words.”

“What is the origin of the first alphabet?” asked Yaeger.

“Hard evidence is scarce, but most epigraphists believe it was invented in ancient Canaan and Phoenicia somewhere between 1700 and 1500 B.C., and is labeled as North Semitic. Leading scholars disagree, of course. But they do tend to agree that early Mediterranean cultures developed the awakenings of an alphabet from prehistoric geometric symbols. Much later, the Greeks adapted and refined the alphabet, so the letters we write today are related to theirs. Further developments came from the Etruscans, followed by the Romans, who borrowed heavily to form the written language of Latin and whose later classic characters eventually formed the twenty-six-letter alphabet you and I use today.”

“Where do we begin?”

“We’ll be starting from scratch,” said Pat, referring to her notes. “I’m unaware of any other ancient writing systems whose symbols match those inscribed in the chamber. There seems to be no influence either way, which is most unusual. The only remote similarity is to the Celtic Ogham alphabet, but there any resemblance ends.”

“I almost forgot.” Yaeger handed her a small batonlike shaft with a miniature camera at one end. “Max has already coded the symbols. If you want me to help you from my end with any calculations, just aim the camera at the symbol and its sequence in the inscriptions you wish to study, and I’ll work at developing a decipher program.”

“Sounds good,” said Pat, happy to be back in the harness again. “First, let’s list the different symbols and get a count on how many times each is represented. Then we can try working them into words.”

“Like
the
and
and.”

“Most of the ancient script did not include words we take for granted today. I also want to see if we can detect the vowels before tackling the consonants.”

They worked through the day without a break. At noon, Yaeger sent word down to the NUMA cafeteria to send up sandwiches and soft drinks. Pat was becoming increasingly frustrated. The symbols looked maddeningly simple to decipher, and yet by five o’clock she had had little or no success in untangling their definitions.

“Why is it the numbering system was so easy to break, but the alphabet so impossible?” she muttered irritably.

“Why don’t we knock off until tomorrow,” Yaeger suggested.

“I’m not tired.”

“Neither am I,” he concurred. “But we’ll have a fresh outlook. I don’t know about you, but my best solutions always come to me in the middle of the night. Besides, Max doesn’t require sleep. I’ll put her on the inscriptions during the night. By morning, she should have some ideas on the translation.”

“I have no sensible argument.”

“Before we knock off, I’ll call up Max and see if she’s made any progress with the stars.”

Yaeger’s fingers didn’t have to play over the keyboard. He simply pressed a transmit button and said, “Max, are you there?”

Her scowling face came over the monitor. “What took you and Dr. O’Connell so long to get back to me? I’ve been waiting for nearly two hours.”

“Sorry, Max,” said Yaeger, without a deep sense of regret. “We were busy.”

“You didn’t spend but a few hours on the project,” said Pat naively. “Did you strike out?”

“Strike out, hell,” Max snapped. “I can tell you exactly what you want to know.”

“Start with how you came to your conclusions,” Yaeger commanded.

“You didn’t think I was going to calculate movement of the stars myself, did you?”

“It
was
your project.”

“Why should I strain my chips when I can get another computer to do it?”

“Please, Max, tell us what you discovered.”

“Well, first of all, finding the coordinates of celestial objects in the sky takes a complicated geometric process. I won’t get into boring detail on how to determine the altitude, azimuth, right ascension, and declination. My problem was to determine the sites where the coordinates engraved in the rock of the chamber were measured. I managed to calculate the original sites where the observers took their sightings within a few miles; also the stars they used to measure deviations over many, many years. The three stars in the belt of the constellation of Orion, the hunter, all move. Sirius, the dog star, who sits near the heel of Orion, is fixed. With these numbers in hand, I tapped into the astrometry computer over at the National Science Center.”

“Shame on you, Max,” admonished Yaeger. “You could get me into big trouble raiding another computer network.”

“I think the computer over at NSC likes me. He promised to erase my inquiry.”

“I hope you can take him at his word,” grunted Yaeger. It was an act. Yaeger had tapped into outside computer networks for unauthorized data hundreds of times.

“Astrometry,” Max continued unperturbed, “in case you don’t know, is one of the oldest branches of astronomy, and deals with determining the movements of stars.” Max paused. “Follow me?”

“Go on,” Pat urged.

“The guy in the computer over at NSC isn’t up to my standards, of course, but since this was an elementary program for him, I sweet-talked him into working out the deviation between positions of Sirius and Orion when the chamber was built with their present coordinates in the sky.”

“You dated the chamber?” Pat murmured, holding her breath.

“I did.”

“Is the chamber a hoax?” Yaeger asked, as if afraid of the answer.

“Not unless those old hard-rock Colorado miners you’re worried about were first-class astronomers.”

“Please, Max,” Pat begged. “When was the chamber built and the inscriptions engraved on its walls?”

“You must remember, my time estimate is give or take a hundred years.”

“It’s older than a hundred years?”

“Would you believe,” Max said slowly, dragging out the suspense, “a figure of nine thousand.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying your chamber was chiseled out of the Colorado rock sometime around 7100 B.C.”

15

GIORDINO LIFTED THE BELL-BOEING 609 executive tilt-rotor aircraft straight up into a Persian blue sky outside Cape Town, South Africa, just after four in the morning. Taking off like a helicopter, its twin prop-rotor engines tilted at ninety degrees, the huge propellers beating the tropical air, the aircraft rose vertically, until the tilt-rotor was five hundred feet off the ground. Then Giordino shifted the controls of the mechanical linkage that enabled both prop rotors to swing horizontal and send the aircraft into level flight.

The 609 seated up to nine passengers, but for this trip she was empty except for a bundle of survival gear strapped to the floor. Giordino had chartered the plane in Cape Town because the nearest NUMA research ship was more than one thousand miles away from the Crozet Islands.

A helicopter could not have made the 2,400-mile round trip without refueling at least four times, and a normal multi-engine aircraft that could go the distance would have had no place to land once it reached the volcanic island. The Model 609 tilt-rotor could land any place a helicopter could and seemed the ideal craft for the job. Depending on the freakish whims of the winds, the flight should average four hours each way. The fuel would have to be monitored closely. Even with modified wing tanks, Giordino calculated that he would only have an extra hour and a half of flying time for the journey back to Cape Town. It wasn’t enough to ensure a mentally soothing flight, but Giordino was never one to play a safe game.

Thirty minutes later, as he reached 12,000 feet and banked southeast over the Indian Ocean, he set the throttles at the most fuel-efficient cruise setting, watching the airspeed indicator hover at slightly under three hundred miles per hour. Then he turned to the small man sitting in the copilot’s seat.

“If you have any regrets about joining this madcap venture, please be advised that it’s too late to change your mind.”

Rudi Gunn smiled. “I’ll be in enough hot water for sneaking off with you when the admiral finds out I’m not sitting behind my desk in Washington.”

“What excuse did you give for disappearing for six days?”

“I told my office to say I flew to the Baltic Sea to check on an underwater shipwreck project NUMA is surveying with Danish archaeologists.”

“Is there such a project?”

“You bet your life,” replied Gunn. “A fleet of Viking ships that a fisherman snagged.”

Giordino passed Gunn a pair of charts. “Here, you can navigate.”

“How big is St. Paul Island?”

“About two and a half square miles.”

Gunn peered at Giordino through his thick glasses. “I do pray,” he said placidly, “that we’re not following in the footsteps of Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan.”

 
THREE hours into the flight, they were in good shape fuel-wise after picking up a tailwind of five knots. The Indian Ocean slowly vanished as they entered overcast skies that came from the east, bringing rain squalls and turbulence. Giordino climbed to find smooth air and blue skies again, rising above white puffy clouds that rolled beneath them like a stormy sea.

Giordino had the uncanny ability to sleep for ten minutes, then pop awake to check his instruments and make any course alteration suggested by Gunn before dozing off again. He repeated the process more times than Gunn bothered to count, never varying the routine by more or less than a minute.

Actually, there was no fear of becoming lost and missing the island. The tilt-rotor carried the latest Global Positioning System (GPS) navigation equipment. With the GPS receiver measuring the distance to a string of satellites, the precise latitude, longitude, and altitude were calculated, and the data programmed into the aircraft computer so Gunn could determine course, speed, time, and distance to their destination.

Unlike Giordino, he was an insomniac. He was also what Giordino often called him—a worrywart. Gunn couldn’t have relaxed if he was lying under a palm tree on a Tahitian beach. He constantly read his watch and checked their position in between studying an aerial photo of the island.

When Giordino came awake and scanned the instrument panel, Gunn tapped him on the arm. “Don’t drift off again. You should begin your descent. I make the island forty miles dead ahead.”

Giordino rubbed water from a canteen on his face and eased the control column a slight inch forward. Slowly, the executive tilt-rotor began to descend, thrown about as it dropped through the turbulence from inside the clouds. With nothing to see, Giordino could have simply watched the altimeter needle swing counterclockwise, but he kept his eyes fixed on the white mist swirling past the windshield. Then, suddenly, at 5,000 feet they emerged from under the overcast and saw the ocean again for the first time in three hours.

“Nice work, Rudi,” Giordino praised him. “St. Paul looks to be about five miles ahead, less than two degrees off to starboard. You as good as hit her right on the nose.”

“Two degrees,” Gunn said. “I really must do better next time.”

With the turbulence behind them, the wingtips stopped fluttering. Giordino eased the throttles back, the roar of the engines falling to a muffled hum. The heavy rain had subsided, but rivulets of water still streaked across the windshield. Only now did he turn on the wipers, as he aimed the bow of the plane over the high cliffs that shielded the island from the relentless onslaught of the sea.