Greene listened intently.
“On its own, it wasn’t unusual, but I was curious. I climbed up about thirty feet and found an entrance to a cave.”
“Getting interesting now.”
“Well, as you can imagine it was dark.”
“Caves are.”
“And I realized I needed help and supplies.”
“What kind of supplies?”
“Lights, extension cords, a generator. I pulled the team together. We bought out a hardware store, hooked things up, and started to explore…” McCauley glanced over to Dr. Alpert for approval. So far, so good. “…fairly far in.”
“And…?”
“And we saw Native American petroglyphs. Not at all unusual for the Sioux and their immediate relatives. But the drawings didn’t document their tribal life. They depicted a specific route through the cave.”
“To where?” Greene logically asked.
Suddenly, McCauley wished he’d said less. “I don’t know, it’s hard to say.”
“Try.”
“Well, the cave drawings were like maps through corridors and halls. At the end was a wall or maybe a door.”
“Sounds religious. Doors often represent openings to other experiences; spiritual worlds beyond their dominion.”
“Well, it was more than that,” McCauley offered.
“Oh?”
“A specific wall, but very hard to describe.”
“Go on.” Greene leaned into the conversation.
“A wall. Definitely a wall. Smooth and metallic—”
“Interesting.”
“…That reflected no light. The blackest black imaginable. It literally absorbed all the light from our lamps.”
Greene picked up on the word lamps. “Lamps, not flashlights?”
“Right. The electrical was unreliable, so we switched to portable lamps. The most curious thing is the black itself. One of my students went online and found a company that developed a similar substance?”
“Similar, not this particular one?” Greene asked.
“Not the same. At least we don’t think so.” McCauley did not elaborate. “But its properties could also soak up all light.”
McCauley waited for a response. After a long pause he prompted Greene for one. “Well?”
“Cool.”
“Cool? That’s the best you’ve got?” he complained.
“I’m sorry. But it is cool. It’s also got me stymied. Tell me more.”
They did. McCauley and Alpert explained how they cut away more rock and felt around the polished surface.
“We took pictures, but of course, you can’t really see anything,” McCauley explained. He shared some of the photos. Greene saw what he meant. There was the rock, then nothing; as if he was peering into a black hole.
“And this,” he taped the black area, “was behind the rocks?”
“Yes, buried,” McCauley answered.
“What else?”
McCauley had told Alpert that he didn’t know whether he’d show Greene the pyramid design. Now he wondered if he should. He tipped his head to his backpack. Alpert read his doubt and spread her hands apart, indicating her own uncertainty.
“Okay, what’s going on doctors?”
“We’re deciding,” Alpert said.
“I suggest you get your act together otherwise I can’t help you. You probably think I’m some crackpot; but the truth is, I may be able to point you in the right direction. That’s assuming you want to go there. But unless you come clean… .”
“There is more,” McCauley interrupted. “After we chipped away at the rock,” he pointed to the photograph, “we found a section of the wall that had some indentations; dimples grouped, then separated. They formed a pattern.”
He reached into his backpack and handed Greene the page he’d shown Alpert on the plane.
“This. The numbers are mine, but they represent individual groups of indentations we felt.”
At first, Robert Greene only saw the pyramid shape. Then he focused on the order of things.
He recognized it that could have gone on far longer. But what was there was more than enough.
“You see it?” McCauley asked.
“Of course I do. It’s a prime pyramid.”
Thirty-one
“This was on the metal wall buried behind the rock?” Greene asked.
“Yes,” McCauley said. “Any thoughts?”
“I’d love to see it myself.”
“Other than that.”
“Well, I’m fascinated by a couple of things. First of all, the black composite.” Greene now admitted that he’d also read about vanta, which stood for vertically aligned carbon nanotube arrays. But as far as he knew, it was a substance so far only grown on sheets of aluminum foil, not manufactured into solid metal walls.
“I’d say you stumbled onto a secret facility.”
“But the petroglyphs?”
“Well, Dr. McCauley, that does argue against that notion, unless they were put there to throw someone.”
“If that’s the case, it worked!” Katrina noted.
“What else?” McCauley asked.
“Back to the prime pyramid. Now, I’m no mathematician, but it was a favorite subject of mine. I’ve got respect for numbers. And it’s been said that primes are virtually the atoms of arithmetic. The basic tool that we’re using to reach across the galaxies; a universal language for the entire universe. It’s the code that gives sense to the things we otherwise don’t understand. Besides, they fascinate the hell out of me.
“Take the pyramid itself. The magic is in each row, starting with the first. The number one— the first prime number. Like the other primes, it has no positive divisors other than one and itself. Same for 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, on and up to a number that hasn’t even been calculated yet.”
“But not all the numbers in the pyramid are primes,” Katrina said.
“That’s the beauty of the thing,” Greene continued. “But they work to make primes. Any two numbers next to each other on any row add up to a prime. Perfection itself. So perfect, it’s found in nature.”
“How so?” she wondered.
“Many. My favorite example are the cicadas.”
“The what?”
“Oh, right, you’re British. They’re bugs that are pretty much indigenous to North America, much less so in England. They have a life cycle where they emerge every thirteen years or seventeen years. In between, nada. Then, and only then, on that schedule, those noisy little buggers take over. Thirteen and seventeen are both indivisible and that very fact gives cicadas a leg up on their predators which might appear in six year cycles. They win mathematically.”
“Incredible.” McCauley was impressed.
“Incredible when you consider they cracked an evolutionary code that must go back millions of years. They evolved through primes. It became their key to survival.”
“So back to the prime pyramid. Who put it there?” McCauley said.
“I have no idea. But let me give you something else to think about.”
Quinn and Katrina were completely engaged.
Greene turned to his computer and typed in Arecibo. Dozens of references came up. Greene clicked on the radio telescope in Puerto Rico.
“Now I can really talk more authoritatively about this.” He began to explain, concluding with an astonishing experiment. “They’re sending messages to other galaxies from here. How are they doing it?” Greene asked rhetorically.
“Prime numbers?”
“Precisely, Dr. McCauley. Radioing primes that, if and when received, may be arranged in a vertical column to create a picture. Like the rudimentary computer images on those Nano Pets that were the rage with kids years ago.”
Greene clicked on the actual image of the Arecibo transmission. It depicted the atomic numbers of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and phosphorous, the basic constructs of life on Earth. It included DNA information, a block image of a human with the approximat
e height, a layout of our solar system and most importantly the position of Earth. “It’s the human race in prime numbers for all the universe to see. The announcement of here we are.”
“Here we are,” McCauley repeated.
“Yes,” Greene said. “Here we are. Now how about I share some pretty wacked stories with you?”
"About prime numbers?” Dr. Alpert asked.
“Put that question aside for now.”
“Okay.”
“You’ll find them on my website. Clearly, you don’t have to believe all of it or, for that matter, any of it. But too often we assume we know everything there is to know.”
“I don’t necessarily agree,” Katrina said. She smiled at McCauley. He understood.
“Well good, because it would be pretty small-minded if we did. Every day science invents new tools and then discovers old stuff that’s been around since the dawn of time. We just didn’t have the means to see it. Forwards and backwards. It doesn’t matter which direction we look. There’s always the unknown.”
Greene had their attention. “Let’s look at your work. You only explore what is, in fact, an infinitesimal part of the earth; a virtually microscopic section within the fifth of the planet that isn’t water. And simply because you find Barney and a few of his friends from year to year, does that mean you’ve struck the mother lode? Given the great ancient continental shift, can you even imagine what there is to discover in the world’s seas?”
It was a staggering thought. Greene was correct, in the field of paleontology, the ground beneath the oceans was quite literally untapped.
“And look up,” Greene continued. “Our ancestors viewed the stars forever; with dread and wonder, giving flight to dreams. But it wasn’t until Galileo set his telescope to true focal points and challenged prevailing dogma that we began to think the unthinkable or imagine the unimaginable. Galileo, doctors. And, Dr. McCauley, because I’ve heard podcasts of your radio interviews—yes, I found them—I know you recognize that on earth’s evolutionary clock, that was barely a fraction of a second ago.”
Thirty-two
April 30, 1633
Rome, Italy
Father Maculano was opining about something in his chambers. Or maybe he was building up to another holier than thou bluster. Either way, Galileo wasn’t listening. He was living his life in chapters he never wrote.
His childhood in Pisa. His itchy first-growth beard. His father’s insistence that he go to the university. His mother reading to him from the Bible. The ideas he wrote down on whatever was in reach: school notebooks, the back of used envelopes, condensation on early morning windows, even dirt.
The purest of pleasures for Galileo was expanding on a notion, proving a supposition or developing the means to explore it further.
He remembered his friends growing up, who tried to keep pace with him intellectually, and his colleagues who followed such safe, conservative paths. His thoughts went to his children and the hard lives they were leading, and on to his wife and the strain his controversial research had brought her.
Most of all, Galileo recalled his temporal victories over the church and his undeniable belief that time was the thing he least understood for reasons stated and unstated.
“And so it will be,” Maculano concluded.
The priest’s icy tone brought Galileo back into the conversation.
“And there are no words that will appeal to you, your eminence? I have been a good man. I’ve lived a pious life. My daughters are in a convent.”
“You bore them out of wedlock. Who would marry Galileo’s bastards? Their prayer remains their only salvation. It surely won’t be yours.”
“My son has been legitimized and is married.”
“Perhaps he shall somehow escape the sins of the father who committed his blasphemy to print.”
“They were observations. Postulates. I was paid in tribute for the work.”
“Yes, by Pope Paul V. Paul, who introduced you to Cardinal Francesco Mari del Monte. Another who showered you with accolades. What did he say, ‘If we were still living under the ancient Republic of Rome, I verily believe that there would be a column on the Capital erected in Galileo’s honor.’ You shall never hear such things again.”
Maculano walked to his desk and picked up a book. “You acted as if there were no boundaries to the privileges granted you,” he said. “Your words are swords that strike the heart of His Holiness.”
“This Pope,” Galileo argued, “Urban.”
“And as cardinal he favored you. He extolled your virtues. Didn’t he describe you as a great man, ‘whose fame shines in the heavens and…’ ”
Galileo helped him with the quote. “ ‘…goes on earth far and wide.’ Yes, he was a friend. As was Pope Paul V.”
“Pity that you didn’t hold your tongue. Urban simply suggested you take an approach that would have allowed you to privately hold your Copernican views without precisely claiming them as truth. A proposal as it were. It would have been easy, but the Galileo Galilei ego said no to a compromise on any terms. The Pope sought a reframing of your position. You fail to do so even in these private conversations.
“You denied Urban a solution that would have most of all benefited you.” Maculano’s eyes widened. His nostrils flared. “You betrayed an ally who has risen to greatness. And in greatness, he will see to it that you shrink and shrivel into a speck of cosmic dust that the finest glass in your telescope will not see. He will never forgive you, Galileo. Never.”
Galileo’s hands shook. His face was drawn. None of the fire and fight that had driven the scientist throughout his life was evident.
“You and your few supporters are defeated. What’s worse, you’ve been discredited. You’re guilty of vanity. You ran to Rome to win support, which for a time worked in your favor. Yet you had to ridicule opponents and make enemies of the most powerful people.”
“People who became the most powerful.”
“Your mistake,” the inquisitor demanded. “Your grave mistake. Your life, as you knew it, is over.”
Galileo stood. The full weight of the church was on him as he walked to a narrow window at the priest’s third floor chamber. He peered into the night sky. A crescent moon was rising. A moon he knew to circle the earth, and the earth to revolve around the sun. He feared he’d never put his eye on his telescope again or his mind to the other great discoveries that lay in waiting in the universe.
“Your writing, Galileo. Your own writing spells guilt. ‘Philosophy is written in that great book which ever lies before our eyes—I mean the universe.’ In that single sentence you demonstrated irreverence to God Almighty. You defamed the Book of the Lord in favor of your own publication. Never has the Church seen such impiety.”
“You are excellent at quoting only portions,” Galileo said, still looking outside. “There is more.”
“That further damns you!” the priest charged.
“I sought to propose the Pythagorean standpoint that truth can be found in mathematics and science, in numbers and the order of things,” Galileo weakly countered.
“There is only one order. God’s.”
“But the Jesuits themselves are modern-minded humanists, friends of science and discovery.”
“And where are they now that you are imprisoned?”
Galileo turned away from the moon, which also seemed to abandon him as it began to disappear behind the magnificent Basilica Dome.
“Will you permit me a modest argument, if only as an academic exercise?”
“You may babble to your heart’s content or to the point I become bored.”
“Your Eminence, can we accept that the fundamental scientific methodology I employed, if put forth by others, could have led to similar conclusions about the nature of the earth and the planets in relation to the sun?” This was Galileo’s test of Maculano’s intellect.
The priest considered the point. “Quite likely,” he admitted. “Another scientist performing corresponding res
earch might reach a comparable,” he returned to his role, “and equally heretical position.”
“If you were a scientist, might the same be true of you?” Galileo asked.
“Ah, you would make a fine judge yourself.”
“I believe that while you have the best interests of the Church, you harbor the curiosity of a man of science—with the mind of an inquirer more than an inquisitor.”
“Galileo Galilei!” Maculano shouted, “there is nothing in my activities that would suggest such things.”
“Yes there is,” Galileo said summoning all his strength. “You visited the Le Marche cave yourself! Tell me what you think you saw?”
Thirty-three
Robert Greene’s residence
Bakersfield, CA
Present day
“Oh, of course, I have my wild theories,” Greene continued. “That’s what they love to hear in interviews—my go-to talking points. Crowd pleasers. Beyond that, I have things I keep to myself. If and when I feel confident to go public, I do. I’m just another guy searching for some truths. But believe me, there are some things better left where you found them.”
“You make it seem like you have to wade through conspiracies to get to anything factual,” McCauley observed.
“Welcome to my world.”
“Thanks a lot,” McCauley added. “But I interrupted.”
“Yes, you did. So back to my stories, which overlap with earth science or fiction. Your choice. Science says that Earth’s oldest rocks are about 3.8 to 3.9 billion years old. Since Earth itself has to be older than its oldest rocks, we can likely place terra firma’s age at 4.6 billion. Yet there are those who claim, validated by their interpretation of the Bible, the earth is just ten thousand years old or less.”
“We know all about them,” McCauley replied. “The Young Earthers.”
“I avoid the label and I’m particularly bad in head-to-head debates with them, especially when I deep dive into ancient civilizations.”
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