While the main effort will focus on opening up the stairway to the pyramid’s second level, as the size of the research team more than doubles over the next weeks and months, a second excavation team will begin tunneling from the current cavern horizontally a distance of about 45 feet to one of the smaller pyramids that surround the main structure. This much smaller pyramid measures roughly 20 feet to a side and 9 to 10 feet high, and the plan is to excavate it completely, opening a cavern in the ice that will surround it.
“The large pyramid is our main focus, but uncovering the smaller one will be a relatively quick job that could provide additional clues about the larger structure,” Reynolds explained.
The expedition that began as a project of U. C. Berkeley with funding from oil giant Arcon will now be expanded to include more than a half dozen universities, each providing not only funding but additional personnel and equipment. The excavation effort, already impressive, will grow significantly.
Whoever or whatever built this city that now lies under the ice of Antarctica, they’re obviously now either long gone, long dead, or both. 65 million years ago, before this continent was covered with ice, beings possibly beyond human imagination built a city and then seemingly abandoned it. The pyramids they left behind will provide the clues to who they were.
Whatever researchers here uncover, one thing seems clear already. Based on the evidence obtained, these structures at the bottom of the world are not the work of man. And that means that an age-old question may already have been answered, which is: are humans the only intelligent life in the universe? The answer now appears to be no.
Times staff writer Shannon Carroll contributed to this report
Chapter 8
Translation
Florence Hummford took two images of the same section of writing, taken with lights set at opposing angles while the camera remained locked in position, and adjusted their gamma curves to create high contrast images. She then inverted the images, making the bright areas black and the black areas white. She then selected the dark areas of the first image and copied them onto the second image, creating a monochrome set of images of the symbols.
She then had the computer trace the edges, converting them into Bezier curves. In essence, she was creating a font, or type face, of the symbols. Once the computer “understood” the shapes, it could analyze the characters.
Having performed the procedure once, she set up a batch process to repeat it on all 47 remaining photo pairs, and while the computer ran through them, she rolled her chair over to the casting of a section of the wall that had been “lost” in shipment to Berkeley. The casting had been made with plaster colored to resemble the concrete of the so-called Town Hall, and she’d set it up at approximately the angle of the pyramid wall.
The uniformity of the characters was consistent enough that she was certain they were not carved by hand but created through some automated process. Where the same symbol appeared in multiple places, each one was identical to the others. She ran her fingers over the characters, and found herself thinking that there was a certain beauty to their design. There was also a vague familiarity to them that she couldn’t put her finger on.
At 48, Hummford had been studying languages since grade school. Short and trim, with long, dark hair she kept up in a bun, she was fluent in thirteen languages and could swear in more than sixty, though she demonstrated this ability only in the presence of close friends. After earning undergraduate degrees in linguistics and mathematics and a graduate degree in linguistics at Harvard, she went on to teach at Cornell University for seven years before her recruitment by the NSA. There, in Maryland, she met the defense analyst who became her husband. They’d been married for seventeen years and had never found time to have children. Like her husband, she loved her work.
Her Macintosh said, “Oh, Florence,” signaling that it had finished the batch run, and she rolled back over to her desk. She first ran a simple count, and found that there were 1,044 individual characters. She then had the program run a comparison to eliminate duplicate characters. The answer came back almost instantly: 81.
She then set up the program to search all available databases for matches, which would take a few minutes. As the computer silently went about its task, she considered what she knew so far.
A language with 81 characters indicated that the characters probably represented diphthongs, or sound combinations, assuming, of course, that the culture that created this alphabet used verbal communication, and that their written communication was its representation.
Written languages with a small number of characters usually were based on phonemes, where each character represents a sound. English and all other Western languages were examples.
Languages with a large number of symbols, such as Chinese, with thousands of characters, were based on pictographs, where each character represents a word. For instance, the symbol for house began as a picture of a house. In the early development of written language, pictographs were an easy and obvious choice, but as the complexity of a language expands, it becomes increasingly unwieldy. In the case of Chinese, for example, it’s relatively easy to learn a few characters, but very difficult to become truly proficient.
Ancient Sumerian cuneiform writing had started as pictography, but evolved to a series of around 150 characters, each representing a syllable derived from the words that the pictographs had represented. It gained flexibility in the process.
Assuming the 81 characters used in the writing on the main structure represented the entire alphabet — probably including some form of punctuation — the language they represented would be more similar to a cross between Western and Sumerian writing than to Chinese.
The characters appeared in columns of nine, with even spacing between them, and it was this vertical alignment that led her to suspect that the language was written from top to bottom — or bottom to top, for that matter. But the characters were also aligned horizontally, albeit with more space between columns than between rows, so it was not impossible that the writing was actually horizontal.
Hummford next checked the distribution of characters in the sample, looking for classic patterns present in nearly all known languages. For instance, the letter “e” is the most commonly-used letter in English, while “z” is the least used. In the case of the sample from Town Hall, the distribution was surprisingly even. The most-used character appeared 32 times, and the least-used appeared five times, but most fell into a range of from eight to fourteen times.
The biggest problem she faced in trying to understand this writing was that if the characters indeed represented diphthongs or syllables combined to form words, she had no way of knowing where one word ended and the next began. All Western languages use spaces between words to define word boundaries, and punctuation to define sentence structure. But a written language could also use punctuation to define words as well as sentence structure.
The problem with word definition via punctuation in this sample was that the most common character appeared only 32 times. With a total of 1,044 characters, that would imply an average word length of roughly 32 characters. The average word length in Western writing, by contrast, runs from about five to seven letters. While an average word length of 32 characters was possible, Hummford doubted that this was the case.
She printed out a complete set of all 81 characters on a single sheet of paper, and leaned back in her chair to study them. There was a beauty to the curved wedges that made up this alphabet, and she was again struck by a sense of vague familiarity. There were characters that resembled Roman, Hebrew, Greek and Cyrillic letters to a certain degree, but none were exact matches unless a highly stylized typeface was assumed.
She tried to think what the shapes reminded her of… Yin and yang symbols? The curved blade of a scimitar? She stared at the sheet for several minutes, free associating, and then it came to her. The curved strokes used in many of the characters looked like claws. Like the claws of a large bird, only perhaps n
ot quite as curved.
Tucking that thought into the back of her mind, she studied the various shapes, looking for any inherent clues as to meaning. One might assume that punctuation symbols would be shorter or smaller than letters, since they are most effective when least obtrusive. The period at the end of a sentence, for example, is not easily confused by the eye with a letter.
The characters in her printout, however, ranged from a single stroke to a maximum of the four strokes of what looked something like a mangled “E”. There was a single straight horizontal line that bulged in the middle and tapered to points at either end, and a vertical counterpart, but neither was high in the distribution of characters.
“Oh, Florence,” her computer called. She turned to the screen to read the results, which were pretty much as she had expected. The computer had scored 26 “hits,” with the highest tolerance for variance of 57% and a mean of 22%. The hits were spread over 13 different alphabets.
In other words: “Eeep! Not a match!”
She converted the alphabet she had derived into a Postscript font that could be distributed to her research team, and then called Gordon Winston.
After brief pleasantries she said, “Gordon, I’ve finished an initial analysis of the writing found on the main structure, and I don’t have anything positive to report. We have a lot of work ahead of us.”
“Can you give me the layman’s summary?” he asked.
She recapped her findings for him, finishing with the computer analysis. “With only a third of the characters even similar enough to anything we know of to measure, and even then with high degrees of variance, and considering that the matches were spread over 13 different alphabets, the bottom line is that this is entirely new.”
“Alien?”
“I can’t say that for certain. But if it existed on Earth — well, actually, it has, come to think of it — what I mean is that it bears little or no similarity to any human writing we know of, so alien origin has to be considered as a possibility.”
“So what’s next?”
“I’d like to send what I’ve got out to my research team, to let them get started. Especially Pons at CIA and Reif at Northwestern, if that’s OK with you.”
“It’s fine with me.” Gordon knew that both men had security clearances. “Keep me posted.”
“Don’t I always?” she responded, and they rang off.
Sliding the printout she’d been holding during the conversation onto the desk, she called her husband to say she’d be late, and then got up and went to fetch a mug of coffee. She expected that long hours would be the norm for her for a while to come.
Chapter 9
Espionage
Billy Joe Wilder took the stage of the Diamond Cathedral to the thunderous applause of his audience, his purple satin robe shining under the stage lights. Two cameras on booms flew over the audience as spotlights played across the crowd while two others focused on him, one tight and one full-figure. In the control room, Sheila Eakins watched as the director called out shots to the camera crew and cuts to the assistant director.
Wilder drank in the audience’s approval as they came to their feet in what to a lesser man might have been an embarrassing display of adoration. He held up his arms, motioning the crowd to sit down, which of course did no good. Bringing his arms down, he clasped his hands in front of him, putting on his “humble servant” face and nodding to the audience. The cameras soaked up his telegenic presence and bounced it off the Christian Cable Network satellite transponder, which in turn spewed it out across the United States. Other countries would have to settle for tape delay.
Finally, after several minutes, the crowd tired of applauding and began to quiet down as they took their seats. Wilder waited until the room was absolutely still before beginning his sermon.
“Dear friends. It’s my humble duty to bring to you today a message of the greatest importance, delivered to me directly from the sweet baby Jesus,” he began, with the name “Jesus” coming out as “Gee-yuh-zuz”. He spoke with a measured cadence, crafted through years of practice.
“Now I know you’ve all heard about the Devil’s work going on down in Antarctica, and you’ve heard the blasphemy being spread by the so-called scientists and the liberal media. And I’m here to bear witness to the fact that it’s lies that you’re hearin’.
“The Bible tells us that God Almighty created the Earth in six days, and that He did so about 6,000 years ago. But these charlatans in Antarctica would have us believe that this thing they’ve dug up, this monstrosity, is millions of years old.” The crowd stirred in its disapproval, with numerous shouts of “No!”
“They trot out their phony science, their so-called carbon dating, and they claim it proves how old things are. But if the good Lord wants something to look like it’s millions of years old, that’s well within his power. These foolish people place greater trust in their science than the do in the revealed word of God Almighty!
“But that’s not where their blasphemy ends, oh no it isn’t. Now they claim to have found writing,” he paused for effect, “in a heathen tongue! Not English! Not Greek nor Latin nor any other tongue known to God or man. They claim that whatever’s down there under the ice is the work of aliens from outer space! They want us to believe that little green men — heathens from some other planet — built a city underneath the ice of Antarctica!” Again the audience registered its anger.
“But the fact is, we know that that’s simply not possible. And how do we know that it’s not possible?” The audience, not having a clue, fell silent.
“It’s not possible because God,” (“Gaaaaaawwd”), “the Lord Almighty, our Heavenly Father, made man in his own image!” The close-up shot going out over CCN showed Wilder looking like he’d just eaten a canary. God, how he loved logic!
“Don’t you see, friends? There cannot be any little green men. Little green men would be an abomination, a perversion of God’s will!” This the audience could handle, and they responded with a chorus of “Amens”, with an occasional “That’s right!” thrown in.
In the control room, Sheila Eakins felt a tingle that quickly subsided when the director cut to a crowd shot that happened to pick up Mabel Wilder in the front row. The view cut back to Wilder, now hefting his Bible.
“Right here in Genesis, the Bible tells us ‘And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air,’ but nowhere does it say a thing about the Lord God having formed little green men!” The audience howled its approval.
“He created man from dust, and then he created woman from Adam’s rib, and along the way he brought all the animals before Adam to give them names, and nowhere do we read of little green men!”
Wilder waited until the crowd quieted down before he continued.
“My friends, whatever’s down there, buried under the ice in Antarctica, has to be one of two things, and I pray to the Lord almighty that it’s one and not the other. Whatever’s down there has to be either the work of the Lord, or…” he tossed in a meaningful pause, “the work of the Devil!” He let the crowd buzz for a few moments.
“Now as good Christians, we have a duty to make sure the truth is revealed in this matter. And as the Lord Almighty’s humble servant, I will not rest until this blasphemy has been refuted, and the truth of God has been revealed in all its glory! The Lord God, our Heavenly Father has asked me personally to go to Antarctica to uncover the truth behind this heinous discovery, and I dare not refuse.” The crowd erupted in amens and applause. Wilder ignored the disapproving look on his wife’s face and drank in the approbation. Now came the best part.
“Of course, mounting an expedition to Antarctica is an expensive proposition. So I must ask you today, as we pass the collection plates here in the Cathedral, please dig a little deeper than usual so that we may make sure that the word of God is heard in this time of crisis. And those of you watching at home, please do your part to help us spread God’s word.”
An 888 number appeared superimposed on screen, with credit card logos and an address where those without credit cards could send checks or cash.
As the collection plates were passed, Wilder launched into general comments and reiteration of what he’d already said, the better not to distract the audience while they were doing their most important job. Once the collection was nearly finished, and the folks at home had had time to call in their donations, he started one of his signature prayers, in which he instructed God on what needed to be done.
“Oh Lord our God, give us the strength and the wisdom to fight the forces of evil that rise up against us. Guide us in our efforts to spread Your word among the heathens. Smite the sinners, that they shall not prevail over the forces of righteousness.” He spoke slowly, so that God could get it all down.
This went on for several more minutes, and then he turned the proceedings over to his musical director, who fired up the choir for a rousing rendition of “Onward Christian Soldier,” while Wilder retreated to his office. When the choir finished, the network would switch to a tape of one of his intimate chats, recorded earlier.
As Wilder was taking off his robe, his office door opened and Sheila Eakins entered.
“Billy Joe, are you really going to Antarctica? Isn’t it awfully cold there?”
“Now darlin’, don’t you worry your pretty head about that. I’ll follow God’s plan as he reveals it to me. If he wants me to go to Antarctica, then that’s what I’ll do.”
Wilder had no intention of getting even close to Antarctica, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t planning to extend his reach to the continent. In fact, he was completely confident that any approach to the research team with such a request would be rebuffed. On the other hand, the expansion of the research effort to a consortium of universities may have opened up a golden opportunity. If he raised enough of a stink, there was a chance he could arrange for a “biblical scholar” from HMU to join the team, giving him someone on the inside.
Sapiosaurus | Out Of Time Page 7