“This is the last record of a prior version of humankind,” McCauley solemnly said. “As the forces acted on the earth, it also changed what was breathable. The air was on its way to becoming ours. They couldn’t evolve quickly enough. It ended up being a false start, with their archives surviving beyond them.”
“I don’t know a lot about the constellations, but wouldn’t the Big Dipper have appeared completely differently back then?” DeMeo asked.
McCauley again subconsciously sensed the answer. “Yes. It was still forming in their time out of a cluster of scattered stars. But the beings projected that movement into the future for when they believed — or hoped — intelligent life would return. Our time. Us.”
“It’s the greatest discovery of all time.” Katrina gasped.
“It is,” McCauley agreed. “Like Greene said, when the continents formed, conditions gave life an opportunity to exist. Intelligent life emerged. And we’ve looked back some three hundred million years or more to see it.”
“What should we do?” DeMeo asked.
The decision was being made for them. The images began to fade from brilliant colors to shades of gray. The sharp focus dissolved into the soft blurs. The sound returned to ocean waves and then nothing. Soon the only light was the North Star. Then that faded and the chamber began to darken.
“We have to leave,” McCauley urged. “The old man was right.”
Katrina Alpert understood. They all really did.
“The world isn’t ready. Religions, governments, people,” McCauley proffered. “Not ready. Initially other scientists will feel excited, as we are. But how can civilization possibly reframe guiding belief systems, rewrite histories already in stone, or replace principles and laws that hold society together. Here’s proof that there’s so little we know or can possibly understand. Our fields of science are just that. Vast open fields. We plow through facts. We plant seeds of interest in students’ minds. We cultivate their thinking process. And we hope our study will bear fruit. And yet, sometimes we harvest an apple we just shouldn’t bite.”
“And who’s to say it won’t happen again,” Katrina said. “What kind of record will we leave behind?”
“I hope it’s not one filled with failure,” McCauley offered. Failure? he thought. Not today.
“I understand why the old man asked us about Cardinal Francesco Barberini,” he said. “Why he let us live.”
He took Katrina’s hands in his. “Remember, what Eccleston told us? Barberini was on the Inquisition panel. He headed it. All that responsibility. All that knowledge and yet he abstained when it came time to convict Galileo of heresy even though he knew about these secrets. And so they allowed Galileo to live. The old man did the same for us.”
“Why?” Katrina asked Quinn.
“A dying man’s gift. He might have seen in us, what we see in each other — stewardship.”
“And now?” she continued.
“Now?” McCauley replied. “We have our duty.”
They retreated from the cave, climbed down the ladder and silently walked one hundred yards more. Jaffe attached wires they had strung from inside the cave to a generator. The former corporal had had real experience with such things in Afghanistan before going to graduate school.
There was one more thing to do.
“You want the honors, Dr. McCauley?”
It had been his discovery. Now it was his path.
“Yes.”
The Yale professor placed his right hand on a detonator cobbled together from electronic supplies bought at the local hardware store. He shook his head. “Too much responsibility,” he quietly offered. “It’s better this way.”
McCauley took a deep breath and pressed the button. The explosion rumbled across the valley floor. Tons of earth, representing millions of years of history billowed up, then slowly drifted down making a new layer of strata at Makoshika State Park.
What the Cessna had not done, the team of paleontologists accomplished. They covered up history of Old Earth.
Past is Prologue
By the order of Inquisition, Galileo was placed under house arrest at his villa in Arcetri, near Florence, Italy. For the rest of his life, his writing and his movements were restricted by the Pope and the Vatican courts.
By 1638, he wasn’t even able to gaze at the stars any more. He went completely blind. The result of looking at the sun through his telescope. Some in the Church called it God’s punishment.
Galileo died in 1642.
It wasn’t until 1992, 359 years after he was wrongly convicted, that the Roman Catholic Church formally admitted its mistake in condemning Galileo’s assertion about the earth’s relationship to the sun. Pope John Paul II expressed regret and issued a declaration acknowledging errors made by the tribunal.
In 2008, the head of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences announced that the Church would honor the work of Galileo by erecting a statue within the walls of the Vatican. A month later, the plans were suspended.
Pete DeMeo was vacationing with Lucia Solera. She’d managed to seduce him in every shape and manner, including finding out about the discovery in Montana and what they had done to keep it a secret. Of course she passed along what she learned in a detailed report. That was her job. Falling in love wouldn’t change anything.
The news was hardly reported. Two research spelunkers escaped with minor injuries after a catastrophic collapse within a two mile section of Western Kentucky’s remarkable Mammoth Caves. They’d been mapping the one thousand mile cave system for National Geographic. Some six hundred miles had remained unexplored. Now it appeared a good section would be inaccessible forever because of the massive internal rock slide, perhaps triggered by unstable earth.
The Associated Press gave it two paragraphs. USA Today, the fifth page. The cable news channels didn’t cover it at all. But in London, Simon Volker, Martin Gruber’s successor, considered it business as usual.
McCauley’s phone rang. “Jesus, who the hell…?”
He picked up his cellphone from the nightstand and answered in a whisper, hoping not to wake Katrina. “Hello.”
“Hey there, Dr. McCauley, it’s Robert Greene.”
“Oh man, do you have any idea what time it is?”
“Sorry. I never do. Anyway. I finally got great info for you. Don’t ask how I tracked it down, but the book you were asking about led to a….”
“Stop! Bury it!” McCauley said. “Trust me. Bury it now and forget you ever saw it.”
“You’re serious?” Greene asked.
“Beyond serious.”
“But you’ve got my juices going.”
“Turn them off. Not this.”
“Okay, if you say so. Consider it buried, deleted, erased, and expunged from the record.”
“Thank you,” Quinn said. “Now may I please go back to sleep?”
“Wait! I have to tell you about something else I’m onto. Ever hear of mokele-mbembe?”
“Sure. It's rumored to be a living dinosaur stalking somewhere in west central Africa. About as real as the Loch Ness Monster.”
“Maybe you'll think differently after I tell you what I have. Up for an exploration, Dr. McCauley?”
Acknowledgments
I have so many people to thank for their help and support through the research, writing, editorial, and marketing stages of Old Earth. I’ll start with Bruce Coons, my oldest friend and retired Army Officer with a distinguished 40 year military career. Once again, he gave me true guidance on technical detail. Special thanks also go to Brian Aubrey for his attention to earthly issues. Where I bent geological history for the sake of suspending disbelief, he helped me maintain a sense of reality and, dare I say, grounding.