The Scrolls of Velia

by John McWilliams

  I looked at the speedometer—Mary’s little Mustang really moved along. I eased off of the gas.

  • • •

  Just before dawn, we pulled into a McDonald’s and ordered breakfast.

  “Okay,” I said as we exited the drive-through. “Let’s get a room at that Motel 6.” I pointed across the street. “We can lay low, eat, and, Adella, maybe you can explain to us what’s so important about those skulls.” I looked at her in the rearview mirror. “Nothing personal, but I’m not too thrilled about letting you just head off to start digging up more corpses.”

  “I’m a little concerned about that too,” Mary said.

  A little late, I thought, but it was nice to hear that Mary realized we couldn’t just let her go.

  “Fair enough,” Adella said. “I suppose I owe you both an explanation.”

  After paying for the room, I pulled the car around the side of the building and parked. With Adella’s body bag of skulls draped over my shoulder, I unlocked our room’s door, the sun rising behind me.

  Mary and I ate at the small table, while Adella arranged the skulls in a circle on one of the beds and applied green adhesive dots to each of their foreheads.

  “Seven skulls out of a total of twenty-one assassinated scientists,” Adella said, sitting beside them on the Motel 6’s patchwork-of-Americana bedspread. “Probably isn’t how they expected their next meeting to go.” She handed Mary the photo of the New Eureka Group—the one we had seen in her go-bag.

  “All dead?” I asked, looking over Mary’s shoulder.

  “Every one of them. These guys”—Adella patted one of the skulls—”were the only ones I could get my hands on.”

  “Who killed them?” Mary asked.

  “The same people who’ll now be trying to kill us.”

  Mary looked at me, her mouth agape. In those big brown eyes, however, I could see excitement.

  “Hang on,” I said. “What do you mean, us?”

  “I just mean, since you helped me escape and recover these skulls, it’s quite possible they’re now after all of us.”

  “Who?”

  “Let me first explain why,” Adella said. “I promise I’ll get to the who.”

  Mary picked up one of the skulls. “How come you could only get these seven?”

  “Out of the twenty-one, these were the only ones that weren’t cremated or buried. And they had to be in the United States—I wasn’t sure I could get a skull through customs.”

  “If they weren’t cremated or buried…” Mary looked puzzled.

  “Mausoleums,” Adella explained. “For my purposes, cremation was a nonstarter, but so was digging up a six-foot-deep coffin. So I was left with mausoleum dwellers to prove my case.”

  “Your case being that these scientists were all murdered,” I said.

  “Yes. These green dots, you see,” Adella held up one of the skulls, “mark the position of a bone tumor caused by exposure to a radioactive source. The tumor isn’t the primary cause of death, but it is what ties the deaths together.”

  “But why would anyone want to kill these scientists in the first place?” Mary asked.

  “Because,” Adella said, “they were about to discover something that could make our present world seem like the Stone Age.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “They were about to discover”—Adella peered into the eye sockets of the skull—”that time and energy are the same thing.”

  Chapter 2

  “Okay,” I said, “so these Eureka Group scientists were about to discover something that could change the world—presumably for the better. Why kill them?”

  “Money. At least initially.” Adella played with the positions of the skulls.

  “But who would do that?” Mary asked.

  “Yeah, who?” I said.

  “I told you I would get to the who.”

  Mary and I stared at her.

  “All right, I guess it doesn’t matter. You want to know who? Look up Raven Entelechy on your phones.”

  “Raven Entelechy murdered these scientists?” Mary asked.

  “It says here they’re an insurance company.” I scanned their website. It had the same two ravens on it that the card in Adella’s go-bag had. “They’re headquartered in Naples, Italy, and have offices worldwide. It says they specialize in insuring large-scale energy projects—anything from offshore oil rigs to wind farms.”

  “And I bet some of that business is actually legitimate,” Adella said. “But they’re an insurance company only because that’s the perfect mechanism for extorting money out of every major player in the energy industry. Their real policy is simple: pay us and we won’t put you out of business.”

  “Because Raven Entelechy has the discovery that the New Eureka Group was about to make?” I asked.

  “That’s right. And that discovery, exposed, would make these companies obsolete. So you can see the motive for murder here: huge amounts of money being made, and this little group of scientists about to ruin it all.”

  “But how can these Raven Entelechy people live with themselves?” Mary asked. “Depriving the world of a great discovery and killing scientists just to keep it a secret?”

  “Because Raven Entelechy isn’t just a business,” Adella said, “it’s a cult. According to Dr. Edmund Eriksson, the founder of the New Eureka Group, the true governing body of Raven Entelechy isn’t the board of directors, but a secret cabal made up of its spiritual leaders. Raven Entelechy, the cult, teaches its followers that they’re actually doing the world a service by keeping the Eureka Symmetry Formula a secret. They believe humans aren’t ready for the kind of technological advancements this formula would provide. Actually, they believe the Eureka Formula is far more dangerous to human survival than even the atomic bomb.”

  “Is it?” Mary asked.

  “Of course not. Well, I suppose it could be. But we can already blow up the world ten times over, so considering the potential benefits…”

  “You know…” I set down my orange juice. “Maybe if you could start from the beginning just so we can get things straight. There’s apparently a new and an old Eureka Group, and then there’s this Raven Entelechy business-slash-cult. How did all this get started?”

  “All right, from the beginning…”

  Adella turned away from the skulls, and Mary angled her chair so she could rest her feet on the bureau. I propped mine on the nearest bed.

  “In 1933,” Adella began, “a rare book collector named Richard Gimbel sent letters to Albert Einstein and several other scientists, asking for their opinions about an obscure scientific work by Edgar Allen Poe.”

  “Edgar Allen Poe?” Mary asked. “The guy who wrote those creepy poems and stuff?”

  “One and the same,” Adella replied. “Apparently, besides creepy poems and stuff, Poe also dabbled in science and philosophy. The work in question was a scientific essay he wrote around 1848, called Eureka.”

  “So he was dead at this point,” Mary said.

  “By 1933, long dead,” Adella replied.

  “Wait, I’ve heard of Eureka,” I said. “It was Poe’s Theory of Everything. In it, he solved Olbers’ Paradox.”

  Mary looked at me quizzically.

  “At one time,” I explained, “people believed the universe was static, that it was infinitely old and neither expanding nor contracting. But if that was true, then all those infinite stars would make the sky perfectly bright—even at night. It’s called the Olbers’ Paradox, after the German astronomer, Heinrich Olbers. In Eureka, Poe proposed that the universe was not infinite at all, but actually young and still expanding—meaning that the light from those distant stars, no matter how many of them there are, couldn’t have had time to reach us yet.”

  “Poe essentially came up with the Big Bang Theory way back in the early 1800s,” Adella said.

  “Cool,” Mary said.

  “Anyway,” Adella went on, “although Einstein’s assessment of Poe’s work is uncle
ar, other scientists were simply awed by the man. Apparently, enough so that they created a Poe-inspired philosophy of science debate club something like the Vienna Circle, only in Berlin. They called it, appropriately enough, the Eureka Group.

  “You see, it wasn’t so much Poe’s Eureka essay that intrigued them, but the fact that he wrote it. At a time when science seemed the exclusive domain of elite scientists, here was this layman who had articulated unique ideas about the nature of our physical universe. They felt the same way about Einstein, in that they believed it wasn’t extraordinary intelligence that had afforded him his breakthroughs, but raw creativity and determination. This notion inspired them to start looking for other writings that might have been overlooked by history, which, in turn, led them to search for what they termed Common Foundational Principles. They came to believe that by looking at the evolution of scientific thought in its entirety, perhaps certain threads—ideas or problems repeatedly invoked—might reveal something hidden in plain sight about the nature of reality.

  “So they organized under the name the Eureka Group and began their journey through history. They started with Einstein’s writings on general relativity and quantum mechanics, then worked their way back through Maxwell, Boltzmann, Hume, Kant, Descartes, Spinoza, and on and on, all the way back to Plato, Zeno, and Parmenides. Then they examined Eastern philosophy: Confucianism, Taoism, Hinduism, and so on.

  “Where their research went from there, I don’t know. The Eureka notebook doesn’t address it, and Dr. Edmund Eriksson, the man who started the New Eureka Group—I’ll get to him in a bit—couldn’t tell me. But somehow they did it. They derived a physically workable paradigm and mathematical solution for a unified Theory of Everything.”

  “Who were they?” I asked. “I mean the original Eureka Group.”

  “I don’t know. I have my suspicions, but I couldn’t say for certain. I’d imagine that, since the Eureka Formula relies heavily on Einstein’s general theory of relativity, and Einstein was a Jew, keeping their identities a secret in Nazi Germany was probably a prudent thing to do.”

  “How do you know they were successful?” Mary asked.

  “The Eureka notebook details the foundational principles of their work.”

  “But didn’t it say the Eureka Formula was encrypted?” Mary said. “Did you un-encrypt it?”

  “I didn’t decrypt it, no. But from the material included in the notebook, it’s clear to me that they were successful.” Adella moved over to the foot of the bed and opened her go-bag. She retrieved the leather-bound Eureka notebook. “Interestingly,” she said, “encrypting the formula was, in a way, Poe’s idea. Edgar Allen Poe loved encryptions. He even had contests challenging people to come up with an encryption he couldn’t break. So when the Eureka Group sought to minimize the Nazi risk, I bet encryption came to mind quite readily.”

  “Why were they so sure the Nazis couldn’t break their code?” I asked.

  “They’re Nazis,” Mary said.

  “What does that have to do with—wait a minute.” I turned to Adella. “Why haven’t you or the New Eureka Group decrypted it?”

  “The New Eureka Group barely got started before they were disbanded,” Adella explained. “And before I was sent to Ellington State, where I had no access to the notebook, I was too busy gathering evidence regarding the group’s murders. So no one’s really taken a crack at it.”

  “Okay, so…” I thought a moment. “Well, let’s hear the rest of the story. The original Eureka Group discovered their Theory of Everything. They encrypted the formula. Then what happened?”

  “Then what happened is that, at the end of World War Two—this is after the Eureka Group members had already been, presumably, captured or killed—a Russian general named Ivan Gorinevsky discovered the Eureka Group’s research facility on the outskirts of Berlin. Believing the facility to be some kind of Nazi think tank for secret weaponry, he seized all materials and burned the place to the ground.

  “After returning to Russia, the general hired a scientist to analyze the documents. The scientist, of course, reported back that the documents were actually related to some kind of new model of physical reality, which could potentially provide unlimited energy to the world. He also reported that it would take decades to develop this energy source, and that, once in development, it would be almost impossible to keep secret.

  “But the general gets another idea: he’ll use this knowledge as a threat to extort money from current energy providers.”

  Mary interrupted. “What happened to that scientist? The one that helped the general?”

  “Who knows?” Adella said. “But you can bet he either got on board or he met with some unfortunate accident. Anyway, in 1954, Raven Entelechy S.p.A. was born: the perfect extortion machine.

  “I have no idea what happened over the next two decades—although, obviously, the company grew by leaps and bounds. From what I understand, General Gorinevsky never brought his family into the business, but two decades after his death, in 1977, his grandson, Viktor Gorinevsky, came across this, the Eureka notebook, in one of his grandfather’s storage boxes.” Adella patted the notebook’s cover.

  “Not knowing what to make of the notebook’s contents, Viktor contacted his college friend, Dr. Edmund Eriksson, and asked him to take a look at it. Eddie Eriksson was a brilliant theoretical physicist and immediately recognized the potential. And within a few months, he and Viktor formed a team of scientists they called the New Eureka Group. The group’s mandate was to fully evaluate the Eureka theory to see if it had any merit.

  “Unfortunately, they had no idea what they were getting themselves into. Agents of Raven Entelechy immediately began threatening Viktor, pressing him for the source of his information. Viktor told them it was just a handful of documents from his grandfather’s files—he even turned over several boxes as proof. Then, as a precaution, he gave the notebook to Eddie.

  “Two days later—right after that first, and only, New Eureka Group meeting in Zurich—Viktor was killed in a plane crash over the Alps. The following day, Raven agents accosted Eddie outside his hotel room in France. They told him to disband the New Eureka Group or suffer a similar fate. Of course, Eddie had no idea that the New Eureka Group had already been dosed with radiation.” Adella looked at the skulls on the bed. “Eddie disbanded the group. But then, in extreme secrecy, he contacted the one person he believed could help him understand the mathematics.”

  “You,” Mary said.

  “That’s right. But we barely got started before the former New Eureka Group members started dying. That, unfortunately, changed our focus.”

  “No one else noticed that all these scientists were starting to die?” I asked.

  “The New Eureka Group had met only that once—and that was informally on the final day of a European Physical Society Conference in Zurich. They were just a small number among thousands of other scientists in Zurich at that time; there really wasn’t much to tie them together. Also, when Eddie disbanded the group, he really wanted to make certain no one else ended up like Viktor, so he sent out a memo explaining that he had found fundamental flaws in the theory—even joking about this being another case of ‘cold fusion.’ That kind of talk scares the hell out of scientists. After that memo, I doubt anyone would even admit to having been there.

  “Anyway, by the time Eddie came out to visit me at Sandia National Laboratories, his concerns had changed. He brought with him the medical records of six of the New Eureka Group scientists—including their X-rays and MRIs. All had cancers of one type or another, each with its own set of particularities, but there was one thing they all had in common: a tumor right here on the frontal bone.” Adella lifted the green dot from the forehead of one of the skulls, revealing a patch of stalagmite-like roughness in the midst of what was otherwise perfectly smooth bone. She showed us similar growths on each of the other skulls.

  “Two months later, Eddie showed up with the X-rays of three more former members. All had t
he same frontal bone tumor—some only slight, but definitely present. And this time, he had a theory. He believed that on the day that Zurich photo was taken, someone placed a radioactive source in the chandelier above the table. He even contacted the Mövenpick Hotel, where this took place, and got the precise dimensions of the room and matched the cranial tumor growth density and the position of the tumor with the position of each of the members at the table. Of course, it’s likely that this was only the first in a series of doses given to these people. But there it was—a correlation.

  “You can see for yourselves. The skulls are labeled.” Adella showed us the name written on the base of one of the skulls: William H. Anderson. “Good ol’ Bill Anderson. He’s… let me see…” Adella scanned the photo in Mary’s hand. “There.”

  “You knew this guy?” Mary looked at the picture, then at the skull. “That’s him?”

  “It is. And yes, I knew all of these scientists, to some degree.” Adella set the skull down and picked up another. She handed it to me. “This is Eddie.”

  “This is Eddie Eriksson?” I asked. “Your Eddie?”

  She nodded.

  Mary yanked the skull out of my hands. “Hello, Eddie,” she said to the skull. “Hello, Mary,” she made it answer, rocking it side to side.

  “Mary,” I said, “isn’t it bad enough the poor guy ended up as evidence in his own murder investigation?”

  Adella chuckled. “I don’t think Eddie would have minded. He was kind of a clown.”

  Mary scrunched her nose at me.

  “So,” Adella said, “getting back to Eddie’s theory. If one were to place these skulls in roughly the positions they were in around that conference table—as I have done here—then take a beeline from each of the skulls to the center of the table, and go up five feet to where the chandelier was… the tumor intensity and position on the forehead correlates well with the exposure they would have received. Even the ferocity of the actual death, and the death order, closely match this configuration.”