“Oh, I am, Dr. McCauley. Read the small print. It’s just below the photo. A disclaimer with the warning, even pictures lie.”
“Very cool,” McCauley said.
Katrina kicked him.
“What’s that for?”
“I thought you wanted me to be your reality check.”
“Ah, good cop, bad cop?” Greene said picking up on the exchange.
“Simply trying to keep skepticism in tow,” she added.
“Well, if it’s any consolation,” Greene continued, “that’s what I’m all about. Information is king. That’s what I request from the government. That’s what I deliver online. No speculation. Documents, records, transcripts. All facts, or at the very least, what isn’t blacked out on the way for public consumption. Once in hand, I give it the contextual wrapping. Then, I plug it into appropriate webisodes, video links, podcasts I’ve appeared on, and my Internet radio show. Impressive, huh?”
McCauley had to agree. “Before I talked with you I thought it was primarily going to be paranormal stuff. But hell, when I looked at your site, you’ve got more on Iraq, Vietnam, and Voting Rights issues than UFOs and ghosts.”
“Thank you, Dr. McCauley. I take that as high praise. You’re not quite accurate on the balance, but I’ll accept the compliment. Now to your questions. I need a little more than what you gave me on the phone. Bullet points will do for a start. Actually, depending upon whether the government is involved, less is even best. Okay?”
“Okay.”
McCauley looked for a place where they could settle. Greene removed two storage boxes from a couch opposite his desk. He stacked them higher atop others. “Sit, sit. What can you tell me?”
“In general terms, we’re camped at one of Montana’s richest dinosaur locations. But after nearly halfway through our time, our work wasn’t leading to anything out of the ordinary. Not that it necessarily ever does. But I don’t want my students to get too bored, especially early on. So I checked out a valley with a deeper geological footprint by a few million years. Before moving everyone down, I spotted something up a cliff.”
Greene listened intently.
“On its own, it wasn’t unusual, but I was curious. I climbed up about thirty feet and found an entrance to a cave.”
“Getting interesting now.”
“Well, as you can imagine it was dark.”
“Caves are.”
“And I realized I needed help and supplies.”
“What kind of supplies?”
“Lights, extension cords, a generator. I pulled the team together. We bought out a hardware store, hooked things up, and started to explore…” McCauley glanced over to Dr. Alpert for approval. So far, so good. “…fairly far in.”
“And…?”
“And we saw Native American petroglyphs. Not at all unusual for the Sioux and their immediate relatives. But the drawings didn’t document their tribal life. They depicted a specific route through the cave.”
“To where?” Greene logically asked.
Suddenly, McCauley wished he’d said less. “I don’t know, it’s hard to say.”
“Try.”
“Well, the cave drawings were like maps through corridors and halls. At the end was a wall or maybe a door.”
“Sounds religious. Doors often represent openings to other experiences; spiritual worlds beyond their dominion.”
“Well, it was more than that,” McCauley offered.
“Oh?”
“A specific wall, but very hard to describe.”
“Go on.” Greene leaned into the conversation.
“A wall. Definitely a wall. Smooth and metallic—”
“Interesting.”
“…That reflected no light. The blackest black imaginable. It literally absorbed all the light from our lamps.”
Greene picked up on the word lamps. “Lamps, not flashlights?”
“Right. The electrical was unreliable, so we switched to portable lamps. The most curious thing is the black itself. One of my students went online and found a company that developed a similar substance?”
“Similar, not this particular one?” Greene asked.
“Not the same. At least we don’t think so.” McCauley did not elaborate. “But its properties could also soak up all light.”
McCauley waited for a response. After a long pause he prompted Greene for one. “Well?”
“Cool.”
“Cool? That’s the best you’ve got?” he complained.
“I’m sorry. But it is cool. It’s also got me stymied. Tell me more.”
They did. McCauley and Alpert explained how they cut away more rock and felt around the polished surface.
“We took pictures, but of course, you can’t really see anything,” McCauley explained. He shared some of the photos. Greene saw what he meant. There was the rock, then nothing; as if he was peering into a black hole.
“And this,” he taped the black area, “was behind the rocks?”
“Yes, buried,” McCauley answered.
“What else?”
McCauley had told Alpert that he didn’t know whether he’d show Greene the pyramid design. Now he wondered if he should. He tipped his head to his backpack. Alpert read his doubt and spread her hands apart, indicating her own uncertainty.
“Okay, what’s going on doctors?”
“We’re deciding,” Alpert said.
“I suggest you get your act together otherwise I can’t help you. You probably think I’m some crackpot; but the truth is, I may be able to point you in the right direction. That’s assuming you want to go there. But unless you come clean….”
“There is more,” McCauley interrupted. “After we chipped away at the rock,” he pointed to the photograph, “we found a section of the wall that had some indentations; dimples grouped, then separated. They formed a pattern.”
He reached into his backpack and handed Greene the page he’d shown Alpert on the plane.
“This. The numbers are mine, but they represent individual groups of indentations we felt.”
At first, Robert Greene only saw the pyramid shape. Then he focused on the order of things.
He recognized it that could have gone on far longer. But what was there was more than enough.
“You see it?” McCauley asked.
“Of course I do. It’s a prime pyramid.”
Thirty-one
“This was on the metal wall buried behind the rock?” Greene asked.
“Yes,” McCauley said. “Any thoughts?”
“I’d love to see it myself.”
“Other than that.”
“Well, I’m fascinated by a couple of things. First of all, the black composite.” Greene now admitted that he’d also read about vanta, which stood for vertically aligned carbon nanotube arrays. But as far as he knew, it was a substance so far only grown on sheets of aluminum foil, not manufactured into solid metal walls.
“I’d say you stumbled onto a secret facility.”
“But the petroglyphs?”
“Well, Dr. McCauley, that does argue against that notion, unless they were put there to throw someone.”
“If that’s the case, it worked!” Katrina noted.
“What else?” McCauley asked.
“Back to the prime pyramid. Now, I’m no mathematician, but it was a favorite subject of mine. I’ve got respect for numbers. And it’s been said that primes are virtually the atoms of arithmetic. The basic tool that we’re using to reach across the galaxies; a universal language for the entire universe. It’s the code that gives sense to the things we otherwise don’t understand. Besides, they fascinate the hell out of me.
“Take the pyramid itself. The magic is in each row, starting with the first. The number one— the first prime number. Like the other primes, it has no positive divisors other than one and itself. Same for 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, on and up to a number that hasn’t even been calculated yet.”