“What do you think was meant to happen here?” Tom asked.
“Nothing good, whatever it was. I suppose being a sacrifice, someone had to stand on that additional pillar, in order to trigger a weighted mechanism to open the final door so the other person could exit. The only problem being, he or she would die in the process.”
At the end of the room the door had been held open once more by a hydraulic strut. Sam continued through the tunnel, which gradually moved in an upwards direction, and toward the fourth room.
When he reached the end of the tunnel the head of Sam’s ADS machine left the buoyancy of water. Startled, Sam said, “Tom, you’re not going to believe this — it appears the fourth room is still dry.”
Chapter Sixty
Sam stepped out of the water and into a massive room. The hum of his ADS machine’s electric propulsion system was replaced by the hydraulic movements of his mechanical limbs. He scanned cavern they’d entered. There was no question about it — they were standing inside Poseidon’s temple.
In Plato’s Critias Dialogue, Poseidon’s Temple was described as a stadia’s length by half a stadia’s width. No one had ever worked out what an Atlantean Stadia represented as a measurement. Looking around, Sam was surprised to discover that although it was large, it wasn’t anywhere near as large as historians had guessed over the years.
The ancient cavern was nearly barren.
Inside the temple of Poseidon, the place was completely dry. It looked like one of those fake sets after Hollywood got to it in another movie about destruction of the world. Sam looked around and could imagine it to be Atlantis, as described by Plato, with the one exception — all the wealth had been stolen. The gold statue of Poseidon himself was missing, the walls were no longer covered in orichalcum — the precious alloy mined only in Atlantis. The roof, stripped of its ancient ivory and precious gemstones, was barren blocks of stone.
“This looks like Atlantis all right,” Sam said.
“Yeah, the only problem is we got here about a hundred years too late!” Tom replied. “Man, look at this place. Whoever got here first, either the Russians or our guys, certainly did a job on the place. Archeologists would have a seizure if they saw the destruction here.”
At the center a round ball glowed with a slightly bluish tinge. It was as tall as each of them, were they not wearing an ADS machine. Despite its obvious glow, Sam had nearly missed it during his first reconnaissance of the room, the shock at the wanton destruction of Atlantis — most likely for its precious metals and ivory — distorting his vision. But now, the spherical structure seemed obvious.
“I’ve seen that blue glow somewhere before,” Sam said.
Tom squinted. “So have I.”
“Where?”
“At the center of the Mayan Pyramid. The same place Billie found the map to Atlantis.”
“Of course! I remember the bluish glow now. And I remember her showing me the sphere, too. Only hers was only the size of a clenched fist. Billie said she’d taken it to a number of geologists who could only tell her that it appeared natural and similar to a diamond, only stronger, brighter, and it had the unique properties of transmitting sound and light better than any other material ever known.”
Sam walked up to the sphere and examined it. More than fifty strange markings could be seen on the outside of it. Only, they weren’t completely strange markings. He’d seen them before, too. But where, he couldn’t even imagine.
“Help me roll this ball will you?” Sam asked.
“Sure, anywhere you’re planning on taking it?” Tom replied.
“No, just off this light so I can see what’s under it.”
Together they attempted to move the sphere. Despite the massive lifting power of the ADS’s hydraulic arms, the sphere didn’t move.
“This stuff’s heavy,” Tom said.
“Let’s see if we can rotate it on its axis,” Sam said.
Carefully gripping the sphere with his metal hands, Sam prepared to rotate their strange discovery. This time, it moved easily, as though it had been floating on water or resting in a pile of tiny ball bearings.
“Any idea what the hell any of this means?” Sam asked.
“Not a clue. The sphere that Billie and I found in the Mayan pyramid, buried in the seabed, showed a number of unique locations. Maybe it will show us something. Billie knew about it, so there must be something she wants us to see.”
Sam moved it again. This time he noticed that the marking on the sphere, when it reached the blue glow at the base, turned to a glowing red. He turned the sphere again, and the same small marking remained bright red, as though it was glowing with fire.
Continuing the process, another four marks became engulfed in a flame red glow, while more than forty others which he’d tried remained unchanged.
“Okay Sam, I’m here to find Billie, but you’re the expert in ancient mythology — what the hell is this?”
“If I had a guess, I’d say that it’s some sort of ancient counting device, like a computer.”
“The Atlanteans had computers eleven thousand years ago?”
“Not quite, but I’d say this is a pretty complex abacus. The more I look at it, the more I can’t help but feel like I’m triggering a code to something, but what I don’t know.”
“You mean, the code to Atlantis?” Tom said.
“Yeah, something like that. Where did you get that idea from?”
“Because, when Billie called me a few weeks ago, she told me that she’d reached it, but now had to find the code to Atlantis, before it was too late!”
A cold shiver ran down Sam’s spine. A sixth sense that he was close to achieving something or destroying something. “Too late for what?”
Tom stopped him turning the sphere again. “I think I know what happened to the scientists who came here in 1908.”
“Well don’t leave me in suspense. What happened to them?”
“They activated that sphere.”
Chapter Sixty-One
Sam moved back from the sphere.
A total of eight markings glowed red. He looked at the device as he would a modern day computer, searching for a delete button or backspace. Surely whatever purpose the device had, the ancient people of Atlantis must have had a means of activating it or deactivating it.
“We need to find something else. There must be another device around here that will help me clear it. Come on, I cringe to think I’ve inadvertently triggered the next cycle of human life or lack thereof, on this planet.”
“Already on it,” Tom said while turning over bits of debris within the temple.
Thirty minutes later, Sam found something on the sphere itself. He was so focused on the sphere that it took a while to notice it was now projecting a small red light on the ceiling. “I’ve got something, Tom.”
Tom came back and stared at the glow above the sphere. “I’m sure that wasn’t there before.”
“No, so am I.”
“I’ve seen those markings inside the Mayan pyramid, too.” Tom paused for a moment and then said, “I think Billie said they were ancient Egyptian measurements of time.”
Sam looked at the projection again. “You’re right! They are images of time, but I’ll need my tablet to compute the exact time.”
Sam placed locked his machine in gear, as he would when parking a car, and then climbed down, inside his massive ADS machine. There was enough room there to eat, drink, and store basic necessities. In Sam’s case, that meant his high powered computer tablet and its several terabytes worth of information.
He quickly scrolled through his ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics page until he reached the section regarding the recording of time.