Quest for the Ark

by Taggart Rehnn

  Haim greeted him over the intercom and let him in.

  “Talk about ‘the’ David,” Haim said, chuckling, as he shook his hand.

  “The…? Say what?” joked David.

  “I was just talking to a friend about you.”

  “Any gossip I should resent, or praise I should pretend not to deserve, or reason to think I’d better vamoose?” joked David.

  “Not really,” Haim replied, as they kept ambling to the room where Tony was sitting, looking at pictures of the symbol, dozens of them at least, taken at different times, and in various places, most seemingly in Europe.

  “David, meet Father Antonio Bello. Tony, meet Dr. David Leib.”

  “You are weird, Haim. You know that?” teased Tony.

  “No. I’m a good strategist. Now you both will dispense with the bullshit and can call each other on a first name basis. So, David, Tony has the mother of all meteorological anomalies to discuss. He’s also Venezuelan, and might be able to help get you to Catatumbo.”

  Tony looked at Haim halfway between awkwardly and pseudo-shocked.

  “Alright! I was running out of options to get there and do what I must,” said David, all smiles, raising his coffee cup to a toast.

  “I feel ambushed,” said Tony. “Why do you need help to go visit Catatumbo? Sure there are problems, lots of paperwork: being an American, they might assume your are a spy, you might end up imprisoned, kidnapped for ransom; or followed, ambushed, then kidnapped for ransom, or killed; but there are always ways. Borders in South America are like colanders, if you know where to look—or, at times, whose help to seek. Also, hard currency opens most doors in countries where people live in fear, desperation, and hunger.”

  “Ordinarily, I’d agree,” started David. “However, aside from my militancy in green movements—which makes me suspect in oil producing countries—and the political instability in Venezuela, the studies I want to carry out require we take delicate and very expensive equipment to the study site. If the chaos were less, I would get all required paperwork, pay up, and just ask for military escorts.

  As things are now, that’s the last thing I’d do there: the equipment would probably ‘confiscated’, and everyone in my expedition, kidnapped, ransomed and killed, no matter how much we pay. My wife says if I insist in going there, may be time for me to decide whether I’m married to my profession or to her, and divorce the winner.”

  “I see,” commented Tony. “So why must you go study it precisely now, when things are so crazy? Catatumbo is an aboriginal, Barí, word that means “house of thunder”. It has illuminated the skies of Zulia since before the arrival of the first Spanish colonists. In 1595, it helped the Spaniards catch Sir Francis Drake trying a surprise night attack on Maracaibo; and in 1823 it helped Admiral Padilla defeat the Spanish fleet during the Venezuelan War of Independence. It’s still there, and will be there after Maduro is gone, won’t it?”

  “That is precisely the problem, Father Bello. It might not,” replied David, looking genuinely concerned.

  “Tony, please.”

  “Tony,” David corrected himself.

  “What do you mean it might not? During a drought El Niño caused in 2010, the lightning took a long holiday; and many—except possibly some fishermen, who die fulminated—were worried it could be gone for good. But when the drought ended, Catatumbo was back zapping boats and ‘caimanes’, as much as ever,” said Tony.

  “Maybe things are not so simple,” explained David. “We have finally modeled Catatumbo—or, should I say, we thought we had finally modeled it—to a tee.

  Now, suddenly, for no apparent reason, our models have started to fail. Catatumbo should not be weakening now—but it is. Fisherman in Lake Maracaibo now will live long enough to die from Huntington disease and cancer by eating polluted fish, or burn when rusting rig pipes explode. This doesn’t help tourism in the area either, already depressed by political instability, an important cash supplement to the locals. But our biggest concern is: this might signal the beginning of a change in the atmosphere that could lead to human extinction in a few years.”

  “Say again…?” replied Tony and Haim at the same time, “What the few years?”

  “Ouf! OK, here’s the deal: There are a few places where intense atmospheric discharges are unusually frequent: Catatumbo, in Venezuela, and El Tarra, in Colombia, both near coca fields, by the way; Kabare, Kampene, Sake, Butembo and Boende, all in the Eastern Democratic Congo, where Ebola and civil war might be a problem; Daggar in Pakistan, not far from the place where Bin Laden was killed and where the Taliban might be a problem; and Nguti, in Cameroon, where if not the pirates, the Niger delta petroleum thieves or Boko Haram, might as well be a problem. There are secondary places also in Florida, where shootouts might be a problem; in the Parana basin, where drug smugglers might be a problem, and such; but the big ones are the first few I mentioned.

  All those sites and others, lesser ones, are involved in regenerating the secondary ozonosphere, i.e. the part of the troposphere richer in ozone. The primary source of Earth’s ozone is, however, in the stratosphere, where solar UV rays produce by transforming oxygen into it. Partly because of concentration reasons, partly due to temperature reasons, ozone in the stratosphere lasts longer than in the troposphere—and, since ozone is carcinogenic, by flying planes loaded with passengers in the troposphere, and only in the part of the stratosphere below 20km of altitude, we avoid a pandemic of lung cancer.

  But those discharges also do something else: aside from atmospheric viscosity and air pressure due to gravity, those discharges anchor the secondary ozonosphere to the ground; and the secondary ozonosphere acts like the brake plates inside a car wheel: they stop the atmosphere from rotating independently of the planetary surface.

  Now, these big anchors are unevenly distributed: Catatumbo and El Tarra in Northwestern South America; those in Congo and Cameroon, around central Africa; Daggar in Pakistan; and a few others in Malaysia in South-Central and Southern Asia.

  So, imagine a giant cruise ship with many anchors, unevenly distributed. Now, imagine the largest one of them, suddenly falls off. First, the ship might just wobble; but, if the current is intense enough, the chains of other anchors might break as well, and as each chain breaks up, the problem get progressively worse. Eventually, the ship would start to swing wildly, and all chains would break, letting the ship loose.

  Now, in the case of Earth, this cruise ship is anchored, but with the motors constantly on. Imagine what would happen then, if the biggest anchor of all were to break loose.

  The fastest non-tornadic wind ever confirmed in Barrow Island, Australia, during a cyclone in 1996, was 408 km/hour—and that was a gust. Now, a point on Earth’s Equator travels about forty thousand kilometers in 24 hours—that is near 1,670 km/hour (a thousand miles per hour, give or take). In New York, that would be a mere 660 miles per hour. If the atmosphere uncouples (gets ‘unglued’ from the surface, i.e. the anchors get cut off) those are the wind speeds we would experience on the surface of the Earth, because of Earth’s rotation, all the time. Earth climate of course would run completely crazy.

  In short, if Earth uncouples from the atmosphere, we’re fucked.”

  “Guess that be a flying fuck, indeed,” said Tony. “More fucked than your witches, Haim, huh?” Haim shook his head. David looked at both, annoyed by what seemed Tony’s lack of concern.

  “Now,” Tony continued, “I could pull some levers and get you there, relatively safe, and probably sound; and, most likely, avoiding any ‘confiscation’ of your instruments. I might even be able to provide you with a ‘protective detachment’ to prevent your kidnapping.

  Now, let’s say you go and measure whatever you want to measure. Does your model not work because it’s flawed, or incomplete—or do you secretly hope it has stopped working because human activity changed something there, let’s say pollution? What do we do if it’s some natural phenomenon we cannot control instead?”

  “The l
ast question first. It’s the easiest: in that case, we enjoy our last days like it’s Spring Break, and then die. As for the model being flawed: our models take into account air currents, humidity, methane in the basin, the possible contribution of uranium minerals, atmospheric pollution, methane plumes in the exploding permafrost, ozone depleters, and a few other things. If Lake Maracaibo’s pollution were the cause, then I would leave to politicians, once our country becomes part of the civilized world again, the task of convincing Venezuela to do something. In the meantime, I can only make all the noise I can, protest, inform, cajole, and hope countries that still act rationally and NGOs and such, find a way to do something on their own.

  However, for now, precisely because my colleagues and I are heavily involved with groups that try to keep Earth habitable, we have many powerful enemies in high places. To go public and say what is the cause of this anomaly, I would need an ironclad theory, backed by rock solid data. Otherwise, publishing all this would create an avalanche of fake news trying to discredit all our work, and do more harm than good in the end.

  If the best minds of science can’t make governments do what’s necessary—to keep Earth habitable—and logical—to make money by expanding the use of green energies, instead of sinking money to help amortize refineries for rotten dinosaur corpses—imagine what would happen to a group of geekish weirdos who starts screaming that, if lightning stops in all those exotic places, Earth’s going to experience Mary Poppins in 3D-HD, with super-octaphonic surround sound to boot.”

  “Fine, then,” replied Tony. “I might be willing to help you, your colleagues and your equipment get to Catatumbo, if you help me first with something else—something that might also test not just your science, but possibly also your faith.”

  “My…what…?” mumbled David, looking very confused, glancing back and forth in the general direction of Haim. Haim imperceptibly nodded and slightly rolled his eyes pointing towards David. Only then, Tony told David most of what he had already told Haim, while the latter went to the kitchen to fetch some fresh baked bagels and more coffee.

  When Haim came back, as he was putting the tray with bagels on the table, David and Tony were talking about constellations and ancient astronomers and even the Zodiac of Denderah and what not, looking at the image of the stickman praying on several pieces of paper.

  “Those pieces we use to collect anything their sticky surface traps by lightly grazing the symbol for analysis,” Tony was explaining, “after the entire thing had been filmed, precision photographed, and studied in as many ways as possible—and before more substantial samples are taken from the area around that symbol.”

  Unlike Haim’s now scattered documents, those sample papers were easy enough to position, scattered on the floor, with names of their places of origin. Looking at them on the floor at a certain angle, Haim stopped in mid step, letting a piece of bagel fall from his mouth into the coffee cup, splattering all over a nearby pile of by now stomped-on papers.

  “I know what your stickman is, Tony,” he then mumbled, teary eyed, his voice breaking. “This is no constellation—no constellation at all.”

  4—Holocaust Memories

  “So you know what it is…?” jumped David. “Really? How? You sure?”

  “Yes!” said Haim, almost choking on a misdirected crumb. “Against doctor’s orders, before Becky’s father died, we had been planning a trip he was determined to take while he still could. He had devoted countless hours to talk about the Shoah, the Holocaust, as seen through the eyes of a child forced to grow up too fast, surrounded by too much horror.

  We lost count of how many hours of interviews and such he left for posterity, as a witness. Then, one day, he said he had done what he could for the future, to keep alive the memory of the Shoah; time had come, he said, for him to say his final goodbye to the past. And, since his entire family had perished in ways that made impossible to give them proper burial, he at least wanted to go visit the places where each of them had met death.

  Ehud had a large family. So, to do that, we would have to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bełżec, Sobibor, Janowska, Majdanek and Jasenovac.

  I was concerned about Ehud’s heart being able to take all the exertion and emotional rollercoaster, but Becky couldn’t deny him that last goodbye to his family, a long goodbye he had held off for his entire adult life to serve others, including her brother and her.

  So, we meticulously studied maps and roads, and planned, and planned, trying to find the shortest possible routes, and places where he could rest, and locating relatives that wouldn’t insist in keeping him for months on end there, because we couldn’t take so much time off ourselves, and Becky wouldn’t let him out of her sight, and the kids have to go to school, and so on.

  And all that planning paid off, but it also forced us to look, many times over, at the location of each and every one of those concentration camps. I have somewhere around here,” Haim said, rummaging under a pile of boxes buried under a pile of documents, “some of those maps. Ehud was old, and also old school. He did not like screens and blinking lights and such. He demanded paper and printouts. Half of this room—don’t tell Becky I said that—is paperwork collected for Ehud’s trips, plus old photographs, replicas of things, and heirlooms that make up about one quarter of our little family ‘treasure’.

  So, here it is. Now Ehud needs it no more. I have a ruler somewhere here. Ah, there you are, bitch! And here’s a fiber-tip marker. Let me see your stickman. Yes! Yes! If Auschwitz is the ‘heart’ of this ‘guy’, Mauthausen-Gusen his ‘groin’, Jasenovac the ‘heel of his shoe’, Chelmno his ‘hump’, Warsaw his ‘neck’, Majdanek his ‘chin’, Bełżec and Janowska his ‘hands’, Treblinka and Sobibor the base of his ‘bonnet’, and Maly Trostenets the tip of it, and you connect the dots, you get your stickman. Bingo! We have liftoff!”

  “How can you joke about that?” said Tony.

  David shook his head and rolled his eyes. “We can’t win this one, can we? If we mourn—which we do, more privately than in public—gentiles say we’re drama queens. We had our families decimated, erased, plundered, raped, enslaved, vilified; our cultural legacy attacked, destroyed, or falsified, twisted; our elders, the few who survived, traumatized, vilified, and a times, forgotten. We were exterminated, caged like animals, starved, used as lab rats for sadistic, stupid, hideous, useless experiments. We somehow got a home, contentious, but our home, a home we believe was promised us; a home we hold dear for thousands of years. Those who arrived after us say it’s their home too. So to hold on to this home, our home, some of us would share, others just want to expel everyone else. And those who want to expel everyone else, call ‘the sharing ones’ among us, traitors. And those we try to help, not only don’t trust us: many hate us, and would kill us, all the same.

  So our home is now a battlefield, and sometimes we are called murderers. We’re not ‘saints’. We’re human. So, we try to cope, by laughing to the face of untold savagery and horror, and when we do, we’re shamed for being superficial and disrespectful. Welcome to our world!”

  “I didn’t mean to offend you...” whispered Tony, head lowered, looking at the stickman.

  “No matter. Just watch ‘Night Will Fall’, or ‘Schindler’s List’, on your spare time. ‘Inglorious Basterds’ would just tell you how ruthless the Allies were when required, a perfect way to hide reality. Spineless and slow, they in the end made Germany a burning pile of rubble, but never bothered bombing the gas chambers when they could. They, in a sense, would have restarted the cycle, if it had not been…”

  “I’m sorry. I know this has to be painful for you…” said Tony, almost slurring the words.

  “You have no idea,” answered Haim, resting a hand on David shoulder. “Maybe, since this seems related to witchcraft and the Shoah, it’d be useful to parse things a bit. Let’s see: Hitler wasn’t always anti-Semite. Maybe even one of his grandparents was Jewish— although, of course, neo-Nazis have made rivers of ink run “demonstratin
g” this could not be possible. In German, by the way, rarely Nazis are called Nazis. That’s an Anglo-Saxon construct. In German, the whole name, “Nazionalsozialismus”, is used almost always.

  Why? The victors write history, so that inconvenient truths can be buried.

  How did Hitler raise to power? Not but simply screaming like a hysterical bitch at beer houses in Munich surrounded by angry unemployed and slobs. That was part of it. Sure, those who accepted hatred could feed and clothe them and their families were there, to listen to his insane rants. You can still find their kind somewhere out there. Those dangerous psychos are the ones that overturn tombstones, deface monuments, and kill people, even today.”

  “There was this stupid idea put forward that the German people were some sort of S&M voyous who got enamored of brutality, orgasming as the watched cruelty,” said David. “The truth is some might have, but their number could hardly build a state designed to be a very efficient killing machine.”

  “In Berlin,” continued Haim, “nowadays there are quite a few S&M enthusiasts, as there are in New York, Helsinki or Tel Aviv; and then as now, the German people were not any more cruel or angelical than any other people when not brainwashed, stressed, or attacked, at some point of their history. Reality was more nuanced: World War I had left Germany in shambles. In the Republic of Weimar, while most of the country collapsed under unemployment and hyperinflation, the rich elites lived sans souci, carefree lives. At the time, seeing a fertile terrain there, the Bolsheviks, who had taken over Russia, went for a visit and started to proselytize. And the unemployed masses started liking their Bolshevik shtick.

  Hitler saw a country humiliated, led by an aging leader. Having delved into the occult, he then decided he was indeed some illuminated new leader, a sort of ‘messiah’ so to speak, chosen by destiny to rescue his Motherland.