“Senator, in the lower left on the screen, there is an icon called ‘Engage.’ Push it now.” It was the only way to override the countdown, a security mechanism left over from SATP’s earliest missions.
“Engage,” he heard her repeat.
The pod began to shake violently. A moment later, Keegan’s hands began to glow with golden effervescence. He watched as his fingernails started to disappear and float upward.
CHAPTER 65
Amy’s whirlwind of emotions continued, now centered on fear that she might have permanent damage to her eyes from whatever phenomenon they’d just witnessed. She’d been straining to peer into one of the portholes that were scattered throughout the side of the structure when the light had hit them. Tremendously unfortunate timing, and something she knew she wouldn’t do again, no matter how safe she felt looking around. So much had happened in the last – what could it have been? An hour? Since they’d arrived. So many things that defied logic and a reality that most of them on the trip had believed not to be true. She’d been trying to envision the scientific discourse that would follow this mission if they ever made it back, and how science would bend over backwards to find explanations for everything they were seeing. Which seemed to be more and more of a challenge with each step they took.
She’d read Landon’s paper, but it had been early in his interview process and had been for the specific purpose of reviewing Landon as one of two dozen candidates still in the running at the time. So, she didn’t remember it in detail. But she sure did wish she had a copy of it with her now.
She was just starting to make out silhouettes when one of them spoke. “Chester, did you upload Landon’s paper into the VitaCom?” It was Robert. He was thinking along the same lines as she was.
Chester’s distinguished laugh came next. “Isn’t it something that we have a century’s worth of research on this, and that’s what you want for reference?”
“My paper is moot,” Landon said. “Don’t worry about it. My paper sought to offer scientific explanations for the mythology of the various Creation stories. We don’t need explanation right now. We need to know what’s going to happen.”
“But we know what’s going to happen,” Robert said.
“Well, yes,” Landon said. “But we don’t know when. I-”
“Stop,” Claire said, catching everyone’s attention. “Just stop. You are all asking the wrong questions.”
“How so?” Reilly asked.
Her eyesight strengthening, Amy watched Claire demonstratively and painfully continue. “I can’t believe I’m saying this,” the once non-believer said, “but the woman said that the tree that we need to find is in the building, didn’t she? We need to go in there and I don’t care if we have to shove an apple down her throat and sew fig leaves around her, we need her to get on with it, so we can get home.” There was tremendous uncomfortable silence for a moment, then she spoke again, less animated this time. “That’s what we need to do.”
“You think she went in there?” Robert asked. “Maybe that light was God calling her to come?”
Claire looked around. “Where else could she have gone?”
“I’m not going in there,” Davies said. “Almost burned my damn eyeballs out.”
“Well, someone’s got to go in there,” Reilly said.
“Landon,” Robert said, turning the conversation back to him, “why would God meet with them in there? What’s wrong with the rest of the Garden? Reading that chapter in Genesis, I guess I always envisioned that they were walking through the trees, by some babbling brook.”
Landon was shaking his head. “We should’ve had the foresight to bring a theologian with us on this mission,” he said. “That was a mistake.”
“We didn’t have time,” Robert said. “If you had to guess...”
“So, we’re guessing now,” Claire said, throwing her hands up in frustration.
“If I had to guess?” He was thoughtful for a moment. “If I had to guess, I would say it was because Adam and Eve aren’t the only people around – but they are, however, the only ones created in God’s image and allowed to live in the Garden. Maybe?”
“Well, that’s the crux of the debate, now, isn’t it?” Davies asked, now literally turning and walking away from them.
“We’re really way out there now,” Amy said. “How could there be other people?”
Landon turned to her. “Well, we talked about it in our little game at the party. After the Fall of Man, Cain kills his brother Abel and then out-of-nowhere he finds a wife. That wife isn’t mentioned in the Bible before that, but she’s there-”
Davies had turned back toward the conversation now. “The wife is not mentioned in the Bible, but she is talked about in the pseudepigrapha,” he said. “Book of Jubilees, if I’m remembering correctly. Which says he married a sister.”
Landon had been on a roll, but he stopped for a moment, then laughed. “I don’t want to get into a debate about the validity of Ethiopian Orthodox canon,” he said, obviously knowing more about their current situation than he was letting on, “but you’re right. I also won’t deny its existence.” He waved his hand around his head. “It’s starting to come back to me. But Biblically speaking, the only logical – and I’m not saying that logic is always right because who knows what anything means right now – the only logical reason is that somewhere along the line God created more people. And perhaps they lived outside of the Garden. But for some reason they can’t be in His presence?”
Amy wished he hadn’t ended with a question, second-guessing himself. They needed someone to instill some confidence right now. Though she did appreciate the brief heavy-hitting theological debate, and wondered why Chester had never attended an after-mission party. Probably because Keegan oversaw the guest list.
“Why not?” Robert asked.
“Well, God and Adam and Eve had a special relationship,” Landon said. “One that allowed them to be in God’s presence – presumably due to the absence of sin. Now since we know the story as Eve eating the forbidden fruit as being the first sin, maybe there’s another reason no one else can see God. Maybe it’s because they weren’t Adam – they weren’t created in God’s image.” He shook his head. “I’m making this up as I go along…”
Everyone stood silently, waiting to hear if he had anything else to add, which he didn’t. Amy was having trouble processing what he was saying. Not because it didn’t make sense, but because the trauma they were currently experiencing left no room for any new ideas, at this point. “Unless there’s a theory that moves us closer to getting home,” she said, “maybe we should hypothesize when we’re all done with this. I don’t think my brain can handle it.”
“There’s only one solution then,” Robert said.
“Like I’m saying,” Claire said with assertive sarcasm. “Let’s go find that tree.”
CHAPTER 66
Claire wasn’t sure if there was any validity to her soliloquy, but she was growing impatient with everyone’s bickering. Reilly’s dishonesty, Robert’s finding himself again, Amy’s panic, Davies’s walking around like a kid at the carnival for the first time, and all of them turning to the new kid because he wrote some silly paper years earlier. She couldn’t have scripted a more asinine way for her teammates to be behaving.
And maybe it was because she was upset Keegan wasn’t here – and the added letdown of being led to believe that he was, only to find out again that he wasn’t. Right now, shutting SATP down and going back to Montreal to get a job at the university sounded like a pretty great way for her to spend the rest of her career.
She did have one thing lingering in her mind, though, and as they crept through a wide, dimly lit, non-descript corridor reaching into the structure, hopefully toward the courtyard that the woman had mentioned, she sidled up to Landon, close enough to say something privately to him. “Landon, you mentioned that God can’t have sin in his presence,” she said. “What happens if he does?”
Landon s
ighed. “What? Are you a believer now?”
She shook her head. “No,” she said, “but I do subscribe to your school of thought where we play it safe.”
“Well, unfortunately, I don’t know,” he said. “I just know that theologically speaking, it can’t happen. And, with the assumption that mankind is inherently born into sin, it’s best if we avoid the encounter if we can.”
“My thoughts exactly.”
They walked a few steps in silence before Landon spoke again. “I’m no Biblical scholar,” he said, “but I do remember that in the Old Testament no one was allowed to go into certain parts of the Temple… Moses hid his face from God at the burning bush. There’s a story in Kings or Chronicles – one of the history books – where the Ark of the Covenant was riding on a cart and the cart fell and a guy reached out to keep it from falling and was immediately struck down. It’s been a long time since I read the Bible.”
“You’re not Christian, are you?”
He shook his head. “No, I’m Hindu, as you might suspect. But I enjoy the historical aspects of mythology, so I’ve tried to read whatever I can. As a hobby.”
“Are you surprised that out of all of the Creation stories out there, including your own religion’s, we’re standing here today in the Bible’s telling of it?”
Landon grunted. “Am I surprised? Not really.” More silence for a moment. “Well, let me rephrase that. I am surprised, but not for the reasons you might suspect. It’s the timing. The fact that there’s a Garden of Eden, even with its supernatural implications, doesn’t shock me, even though it probably should. Maybe when I get back home and sleep on it, it will. But that we could time travel to a point in time when it is a reality is mind-blowing. It makes me think that if we picked a million, billion, or trillion years into the past, we would’ve ended up in the same exact place and time.”
“Well, no,” Claire said, correcting him. “We know the earth is several billion years old.”
“Do we? Or is there another explanation?”
“But you just said a moment ago… Outside the Garden could be-”
“Hey – we’ve got something here,” Robert called from about thirty paces in front of them. They hustled to catch up. “I think we’ve found the right place.”
The corridor opened to an enormous atrium brightly lit with natural sunlight streaming in from high above them. If the rest of the Garden outside the structure was beautiful, this was truly paradise on Earth. Surrounded by tapered inside walls, greenery filled the room, and the scent of what Claire could only describe as unadulterated freshness saturated the air. The vibrant colors of fruit were even more plentiful than outside, and they all stood silently in awe, staring.
Most importantly, rising above the other foliage in their view, in the exact center of the atrium, was an enormous tree, with gold leaves shimmering in the sunlight.
“I think we’ve found our tree,” Claire said, transfixed on what had to be the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen with her eyes. “I can see why it was tempting.”
“Unbelievable,” Robert said, next to her. “It’s beyond comprehension.”
“There are two trees, remember,” Landon said. “We don’t know which one we’re looking at.”
“You’re interested in the Tree?” a voice came from behind them. In unison, they all turned to face whomever had snuck up on them.
Davies, who’d said he wasn’t coming in, had obviously changed his mind, and was just arriving to the party. Though, he was shaking his head. “That wasn’t me,” he said.
No one else was in view, though, so Claire looked up.
Clinging to the wall twenty feet above their heads was easily the most beguiling creature she’d ever laid eyes upon – she had to imagine one of God’s finest creations.
And somehow, the serpent seemed to be smiling at them.
CHAPTER 67
Keegan opened his eyes. He was lying on the floor.
He felt pain in his right leg. In his hurried plan, he hadn’t positioned himself properly or taken any other precautions he would’ve taken with more time. He only hoped that Senator O’Neill had punched in the numbers accurately, or his entire gambit would be for naught.
Getting his bearings, he stood and looked around the room. Immediately, he confirmed she’d gotten at least the geographic coordinates right, as he was now in the highly-secure cloak room at SATP – exactly where he needed to be. He glanced at his VitaCom and waited for it to adjust to the geopositioning data. After a moment, the time changed before his eyes. He’d done it. He’d successfully traveled back in time about two hours and with pinpoint accuracy into a specific room in the building. They’d never attempted such precise calculations before – usually they landed in the middle of an open field or somewhere equally unobtrusive. Despite his need for haste, he pumped his fist in the air for his own benefit to celebrate the accomplishment, only to then breathe easy about doing something he probably shouldn’t have tried in the first place.
He knew he was no longer under the gun, because anything he did now should alter what was happening when he left. He hoped. He didn’t seem to know as much as Dipin did, and wished he’d had the chance to talk to him before any of this. Clearly there was something much more sinister than they’d envisioned afoot, but Keegan had no way of knowing how deep it went or who was involved. His team, himself included, was currently upstairs getting ready for the mission, but while he could operate for a bit with no one knowing he was there, he couldn’t stick around forever.
He picked up his own cloak from the ground next to his feet and made his way across the room to the array of cloaks lined up for the mission, where he and Amy had been working not too long before. The cloaks were currently set to return seconds after Keegan had left. He knew that the Attorney General and his agents would be waiting for them to arrive, and arrest them upon their return. It wasn’t just Robert anymore. It was the whole team.
He wasn’t going to let that happen.
Taking a moment, he stopped and panned across the cloaks. What was Dipin’s move here? Where would he have programmed the cloaks to send them when he suggested doing so? If they couldn’t come back at the time they were supposed to because they’d be arrested or worse, then what was a better option? Further into the future made sense, unless the AG was successful in shutting down the machine, at which point they’d be trying to return to a device that wasn’t in operation. He could reprogram and bring them back sooner, but then either they’d risk multiple versions of themselves or, if they tried just a few minutes sooner, there might not be enough charge to get them back safely.
But there was a reason that Dipin was saying it wasn’t good for them to arrive at their scheduled time and, knowing Dipin and his strong feelings on time travel safety, he wouldn’t suggest playing around with the process without good reason to do so. He thought about what might be happening on their mission – or, what would have happened 10,000 years before. Even if they were separated and attempted to return from multiple places, since all the cloaks were pre-programmed, everyone would return together. It was a security measure in the program, learned from lessons early on.
That was assuming, of course, that everyone’s motives were on the up-and-up, which Keegan wasn’t sure was the case. For example, he couldn’t blame Robert for looking out for himself, and he knew Amy was salivating over the opportunity to go back to China and tell them she had a line on the bringing the program home with her. Claire, he thought he understood and, as the only person at the end who was opposed to the mission, he figured she was safe. As for Davies, since they’d pulled him from his windowless room on the spur of the moment, he guessed that his interests were purely academic.
Which left Landon, the new guy, and Reilly, one of whom was terrified of going on the mission, and the other forcing that person to go. It was difficult for Keegan to get a read on Landon since his arrival because of the chaos that had ensued. But it was difficult to imagine that a person who had not been
a part of a planning process that had literally gone on for ten years could show up and mastermind a plot within 48 hours. Landon was not a part of whatever was going on. At least, if he was, he didn’t know it.
As Keegan went through this thought process, he was unfolding each of the cloaks to expose their hardware. He was stuck on Reilly – the only member of the team of whose motivations he couldn’t be certain. Reilly had seemed generally peeved that Keegan hadn’t made the trip, which, now that he had a moment, had caused him to think more deeply about his boss’s actions, and his intentions. He’d been ambivalent about the prospect of an Eden mission since the first time Keegan had pitched him the idea several years before, but his enthusiasm had picked up recently. His newfound ambition could have been, of course, the imminent threat to SATP and his life’s work, but something about it didn’t feel right to Keegan. His change in demeanor. His insistence on Landon’s participation. His tantrum in the pod. And since Keegan couldn’t explore what was going on the way a consummate researcher like himself would generally like to, he was going to have to ad lib.
He activated the biometrics that allowed him access to the programming device, which he thought may alert someone to his presence. Having been the last person in the room he knew he could cover it, though he was now on the clock. He engaged his VitaCom again and hastily calculated the coordinates to send his teammates 25 minutes into the future beyond the time they were supposed to return, and then systematically uploaded the new numbers into each cloak.
When he got to his own cloak, he paused, not having considered the gravity of what he was doing. While no one would double check the coordinates of the cloaks that had just been programmed, he needed to make sure that not only was his cloak sending him to the right place – because the cloak he held in his hand right then would be the one he would use as soon as he was finished here – but that whenever he returned, he’d have the flexibility to accomplish… something. After a moment of thought, he left his cloak, the one he ultimately would not take on the Eden mission with him (because he didn’t go) to return at the original time. Because it was, in effect, the same one he’d just brought with him (of which there were now two). He left Reilly’s as programmed, as well.
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