The Link (58 page)

“Why?” asks Norman.

“Now,” orders Robert.

Norman tries to object but Robert won’t let him. Hurriedly, they climb to the surface, Robert pushing Norman and his brother to move as fast as they can.

They have barely reached the top of the shaft and crawled onto the ground when there is a rumbling sound below. The shaft has caved in at the bottom.

Norman has no remark to make. Like a man living in an incomprehensible world into which he has been involuntarily plunged, he only walks away from Robert and John, shaking his head and mumbling to himself.

Joseph comes up to Robert and takes him aside. “We’ve made a mistake,” he says.

Robert looks at him apprehensively.

“We forgot to ask for permission,” Joseph tells him.

Another strange experience for Robert as Joseph tells him that, since the beginning of the world, the Hopis have depended for their well-being on the Kachinas, spiritual “caretakers” who reside in the nearby mountains. This slope “belongs” to them.

Accordingly, permission must be asked in order for them to have the right to dig here.

Robert must help to do this.

Robert is past arguing about anything of this sort any longer. All he asks is that they do it away from Norman, John and the crew.

“They will not be witness to it,” Joseph says.

Robert watches him walk away; sighs. “What would Cathy say?” he wonders aloud.

That evening, Robert and Ann (Joseph has told him that she, too, has “the right” to do this) ostensibly go for a walk. Meeting Joseph they help him gather spruce boughs, then accompany him to the kiva—the underground chamber we saw early in the story.

They follow Joseph down the ladder, watch him light the spruce boughs, then join him, hesitantly at first, in a dancing chant to ask the Kachinas to let them dig unharmed. Joseph has warned them that they must do this “from their hearts” and not pretend humility or nothing will work.

It is a bizarre scene, the three figures dancing and chanting in the dim, smoky chamber. It seems as though vague, shapeless figures move about them just out of sight while Joseph says aloud, in his own tongue, then in English, “Oh, ancient people, now slumbering, guide our shovels to the truth and beauties in the old fields, that we may bear witness to your life and be your voice from the past.

“Show us too, when we are worthy, the hidden place and the beginning that we may understand.”

When the ceremony is ended, Joseph says he thinks it went all right, it should be easier now. He should have known the need for this when they were obstructed by the boulder. He believes that Ann’s vision was the Kachina’s way of reminding them. He regrets having risked their lives by not recognizing the reminder.

Before they leave, he pledges them to keep the location of the kiva a secret because it is a place of spiritual ceremony. They promise him, then Ann asks, “What’s the hidden place?”

“Not yet,” says Joseph.

“The beginning?” Robert asks.

“Of everything,” Joseph answers as he walks away.

Robert and Ann walk back toward the motor home, hand in hand. They both feel very solemn.

Until Ann murmurs, “I don’t think I’m going to tell Mom about this.”

This reduces both of them to helpless laughter.

More days passing. An endless succession of climbing and descending, digging, eating, resting, sleeping, aching. John shows signs of weakening. Joseph observes and tells Robert that this work may be too hard for his brother. Robert hates to say anything because John seems to feel such strong fulfillment being here in Arizona at the kind of dig he and his father had gone to in the past.

They dig down past the edge of an enormous boulder. If it was under the shaft, the dig would be ended.

“Thank you, Kachinas,” Ann says in a voice as casual as though she were saying, “Thank you, Paine-Webber.”

Robert grins and scratches a heart on the boulder surface, scribes the letters R and A inside it.

CAMERA HOLDS ON the heart.

More days passing. Norman and Robert becoming uneasy for different reasons.

Norman is beginning to suffer a reaction to his “honeymoon” period on the dig.

At twenty-six feet, they uncover another paleosol which correlates to a date not less than 100,000 years old. More artifacts are found. He cannot deny their existence but that existence contradicts even more past beliefs. Twenty-five thousand years was one thing. One hundred thousand is something else again.

Norman feels the pressure of a man whose world is cracking.

Robert is becoming uneasy because nothing seems to be happening at the dig except what he had always believed could only happen here—the discovery of ancient artifacts possibly pushing back the date of man’s existence in this area. He has felt strongly that he came here—even that he was brought here—for some important purpose. Now he is beginning to wonder if the entire thing is, after all, as Cathy seemed to indicate, a personal delusion on his part.

Accordingly, he starts becoming restless. Even Ann’s reassurances fail to help.

Norman’s harried report of what Joseph has told him provides the solution for Robert’s distress.

“I can’t stay here,” Norman starts the exchange.

Robert looks at him in surprise. “Why? What’s the matter?” he asks.

Norman hardly knows how to begin expressing his state of mind. “I am a—a—party-line archeologist, Robert,” he says. “It is difficult enough for me to accept that there were human beings living here even twenty thousand years ago.”

“I understand,” says Robert, nodding.

“You don’t,” says Norman. “I do not believe that people living here a
hundred
thousand years ago had domesticated dogs and horses, corn and rye!”

Robert looks perplexed. “I don’t understand now,” he says.

“Of course, you don’t understand!” Norman fumes. “What person in their right mind could understand?! Domesticated plants and animals? Pottery, leatherwork, artwork, a symbolic writing system?! God in heaven!”

“Norman, what are you talking about?”

“Your Indian friend,” says Norman darkly. “Joseph, your Hopi Prognosticator. He is now predicting—not predicting,
stating
—the imminent discovery of wall-carvings, paintings, wooden ankhs, cured leather, parchment scrolls with hieroglyphic writing. Is the man insane?”

Robert pats a quivering Norman on the shoulder and suggests that a good night’s sleep would do wonders.

“I just don’t know if I can stay here any longer,” Norman mumbles as he turns away.

Robert goes to see Joseph, who lives in a hut below the opposite side of the temple.

He asks the Indian, flat out, what it is they’re digging for.

Joseph has him sit across a table from him, pours him a cup of coffee.

“What would you like it to be?” he asks.

Robert is taken back by the question. Then he realizes what he hopes for: that this dig might turn out to be located on the energy matrix he now believes covers the earth.

He starts to explain what he means by this when, to his astonishment, Joseph says he knows what Robert is talking about.

“You do?” asks Robert blankly.

The Indian’s faint smile makes Robert feel apologetic. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I shouldn’t be so…”

Joseph’s simple gesture allays his embarrassment. “Why do you wish this site to be on the matrix?” he asks.

Robert has to admit he doesn’t know. It was simply the closest thing he could visualize to an “answer” he is looking for. He just doesn’t believe that ancient artifacts are going to give him that answer.

At the same time, he has no idea what the purpose of the matrix is other than to provide energy access points—or exchange around the globe.

What the energy is and what purpose it serves is totally unknown to him.

“You’ve been involved in ESP,” says Joseph.

“Yes,” says Robert.

“And ESP is—what?”

Robert hesitates. “An energy of some sort,” he says.

Joseph stands and crosses the small room, takes a book off a shelf and returns to the table. Sitting, he opens the book and finds what he is looking for.

“Bernard Grad wrote this,” he says.

“The man from McGill University?” asks Robert, surprised again. “The one who conducted the healing experiments with mice?”

“The same,” says Joseph.

He reads aloud: “The central focus is energy—life energy—what it is, where it is, where it moves, how it works.

“It shakes up one’s view of the universe that there is energy moving through everything. That it is all around us—in the air, in the ground.

“What is more, it is informational—the energy itself an information-bearer… self-regulating…. programmed.

“Whatever the requirement for this energy, it, somehow knows.”

Joseph looks up.

“It knows when it is used to search for water underground,” he says. “Knows when an animal uses it to find its way home over the distance of a continent. Knows when a psychic sees across a thousand miles or a thousand years. Knows when it is utilized to move objects – to seek out thoughts in others’ minds—to see things that the eyes cannot see, hear things the ears cannot hear.

“All religions and mythologies are based on this ‘Energy That Knows’. Some of these have lost most of it. Some retain a little. Some remain close.”

“And did the megalith builders create places where this energy could come through?” Robert asks.

“They recognized these places as synchronizing points,” Joseph says. “Points where the rhythms of the Earth could be harmonized with the rhythms of the universe.”

“For ESP?” asks Robert.

“The network of megalithic sites built along the matrix lines seasonally re-vitalized the Earth,” Joseph answers. “And its people.”

“But this spot isn’t on the matrix,” Robert says, knowing.

“This spot is something else,” says Joseph.

The dig goes on. Norman continues to be cranky but Robert regains his spirits.

His pleasure is diminished by the obvious decline of John’s health.

They are sitting in the motor home one afternoon, having lunch, Joseph, Norman and Ann in the shaft.

“How are you, John?” Robert has to ask.

John sighs. “A little tired, Bobby,” he says.