In the Beginning: Mars Origin I Series Book I

by Abby L. Vandiver

  “So, Justin,” Mase broke the silence. “Don’t you think that makes this kind of suspect? Like it’s all made up? All of life’s mysteries answered and wrapped up neatly with a bow. This one small notebook tells this huge secret? C’mon. Who were the people that wrote it? No one’s ever heard of this before.”

  “I don’t care about that,” I said. “This is true. There’ve been many peoples and civilizations that we didn’t know existed. Some we are just finding out about. Like the Essenes. No one knew much about them until we found the Dead Sea Scrolls.”

  “Yeah, but they didn’t come from Mars.”

  Ooh, he was making me so mad.

  “Oh, so you really believe all of this, don’t you?” He all of a sudden seemed surprised.

  “Yes, I do. Can’t you tell? Do you think I would have been so adamant over something I didn’t believe?”

  “How? How could you believe this?”

  “I’ve never had a problem believing in the other artifacts that I dug up.”

  “You didn’t dig this up.”

  “It was found with the Dead Sea Scrolls, and everyone in the entire world believes that they are authentic. Plus, as you say, it has all the answers ‘neatly tied up with a bow.’” These manuscripts explain the extinction of dinosaurs, the origin of the Neanderthal man, the ability to build pyramids and how there are similarities in language, and architecture of peoples that supposedly had no contact with each other. So many other ancient mysteries that scientists have pondered over for centuries are answered. So many pieces of history just weren’t explainable. Besides, how would someone two thousand years ago know about space travel and nuclear war and all the other modern things that these manuscripts talk about?”

  “Justin, you’ve said yourself, that there have been many authors who wrote about flying machines and space travel long before we actually did it.”

  “I never said that. You said that.”

  “Yes, you did, Justin. And, people for hundreds of years, heck, thousands of years have dreamt and wrote about space travel.”

  “And?” There was an edge of disgust in my voice. I hope he sensed it.

  “Now. Look. We can’t have this discussion if you’re going to act like a brat.”

  I opened my mouth twice to speak, and finally just let out a very loud, very long sigh and rolled my eyes, again.

  Mase squinted his eyes and shook his head. “You know you are going to be met with a lot of opposition on this, so you better get used to it. Be a professional.”

  “What a mean thing to say, Mase. I am a professional. And I know people will have a hard time believing this, but I really didn’t expect the opposition to come from you.”

  Mase laughed. “I don’t know why. You come to me and tell me that Man originated on a planet that does not have any life and as far as we know, never had life. Then you tell me that it not only did have life, but that life beamed down to this planet, started all over again, creating their own Book of Genesis. And you expect not to get any opposition? You couldn’t really be serious.”

  Maybe I was being a brat.

  “I never said they beamed down,” I said, half mumbling.

  He smirked. “Okay, maybe that was my own rendition. Can’t help but to think about Captain Kirk and the starship, Enterprise.”

  “Yeah, well big difference, Mase. This is all true.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  “Speaking of race,” I said. We’d been talking about the human race, but I wanted to swing the conversation back around. “Another interesting fact I discovered was they decided to populate their ‘new’ earth with only one race of people. They tried to repopulate the Earth with Indians.”

  “Indians.” He sounded skeptical. “Yeah, I remember when you first figured that part out. And, I did read that part, but – I don’t remember seeing the word Indian in there.”

  “Well, I had to figure out that he meant Indians. I’m sure they didn’t call them that.”

  His expression showed his disbelief in yet another fact of the manuscript. I opened my mouth to explain but he held up his hands to stop me.

  “We’ll come back to that one. Tell me what happened that they came here.”

  “You just read it.”

  He gave me a look.

  “Okay, at first they came here to fool around with the planet. To play God, as it were. Then they moved here because they had some kind of nuclear holocaust. It destroyed their planet and most of the people.”

  “How did it happen? Did the manuscript say that or is that something else you figured out?’

  “The manuscript.”

  He looked at me suspiciously. “So, what? Did they blow each other up? How? What? Why? Why would they blow each other up?”

  “I don’t know why. I don’t even know if they did blow each other up or not. The manuscript doesn’t give the reason. They do talk about global conflict and destruction, but I don’t know if war caused the holocaust. The author never uses any word with the English equivalent of ‘war.’ He uses words like “accident’ and ‘chance.’ So it could have been a war, a chance attack, I don’t know. Or an accident, perhaps, like Chernobyl. I don’t know which one. But I do know that there was some sort of nuclear catastrophe and the surface of the planet was destroyed and a lot of lives lost. And the manuscripts describe a one world government, making the declaration of war on one nation, other than the possibility of a rebellious faction, not likely. So who knows what happened. I don’t know.

  Mase was staring at me in doubt again.

  “You know,” he said, after a moment’s thought, “for you to have all this figured out and be so convinced that it’s true, you sure do say ‘I don’t know’ a lot.”

  I started to say something snarky, but he spoke up first.

  “So, after the nuclear calamity they came to Earth and started man here, right?”

  “They didn’t start man here. It’s not like they came down here and ‘impregnated a Neanderthal’ as Greg puts it. They just continued life here. It was migrate, mutate or die.”

  “Migrate, mutate or die.”

  He repeated it, “Migrate, mutate or die.” And then seemed to mull the thought over for a long moment. “So for thousands of years,” Mase said, “people are arguing whether God put man on Earth, or if man evolved from a single-cell organism. Now, here come these manuscripts with this extraordinary revelation.” Mase seemed overwhelmed. He was staring out into space like he was really trying to figure this thing out and all of a sudden this concerned look came over his face and he looked at me. He didn’t say anything right away.

  Finally, he spoke, “So, maybe the second coming of Christ has already happened.”

  “What?” I couldn’t believe he said that.

  “In the Book of Revelation it talks about the world being destroyed by fire, the air killing folks the same as it would in a nuclear attack. It talks about a new heaven, a new earth, the old one being ‘passed away.’ And you could easily equate the rapture to them leaving the planet on spaceships. Maybe God has already redeemed man and now we have just messed up all over again.”

  “What a horrible thought.” I felt a lump in my throat and a knot in my stomach. Mase’s observations actually scared me.

  “So, Mase, that would mean that there’s no hope for us,” I said hesitantly. “No hope for a better existence. No hope of a heaven to give us eternal life and replace this pitiful existence that we have.”

  He nodded, “That’s what it would mean.” He said it so matter-of-factly. “I’m going to get a drink of water, something to eat or something.” He spoke abruptly. “I gotta take a break. Take a minute to digest all of this. This is too much for me. You want something out of the kitchen?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. I’ll be right back.”

  How could he want something to eat? His last comment had left such a bad taste in my mouth and a sick feeling in my stomach that there’s no way I could even think about eating anything.
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  I remembered thinking after Dr. Margulies died that maybe there isn’t any God. That maybe Dr. Margulies was just lying down there in the ground, cold, hard, with no soul uniquely his own to live on. That he’s just there waiting until some futuristic archaeologist dug him up and tried to figure out what he ate, what kind of living he had, and then base a whole civilization’s culture and beliefs on it. I leaned back in my chair and felt tears roll down my face. How could Mase make such a statement and then just get up and leave?

  I could hear him in the kitchen. Cabinet doors closing, the refrigerator door opening and shutting, him raffling around in the silverware drawer. What was he doing? I shouldn’t have told him about all of this because he had me upset again. Right when I was starting to calm down. This thing was hard enough for me without me having to defend it to him and listen to his obscure interpretations. I heard another cabinet door shut. Oh, he makes me sick. He is as bad as Greg.

  I took a deep breath and closed my eyes. Okay, so I wasn’t really mad at Mase. I just don’t want to ever think that there isn’t any hope. I opened up my eyes and stared out blankly.

  “God,” I whispered softly, “Are you there? Please be there.” I sat with tears running down my face.

  Instead of God, I got Mase. He came back from the kitchen with a pound bag of potato chips, four sandwiches each wrapped in its own paper towel, a half-gallon of orange juice and two glasses of ice. I looked at him as he juggled to place the stuff down on the desk. I shook my head.

  “That’s why we can’t keep any paper towels in this house. Did you need to use all of those?”

  “Yes, figured it might be a long night.” He smiled at me and unwrapped one of the sandwiches. “Here.” He handed me one of the paper towels, “You can use them to wipe your tears and blow your nose. I see that you’ve been crying again. Now what’s wrong?”

  I guess he had forgotten what he said.

  “Nothing. I’m okay.”

  “Oh, I thought maybe you found something else in that little notebook of yours.”

  I chuckled. “No. I didn’t.”

  “Good. So, now, tell me about the dinosaurs.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  “Dinosaurs? Okay, dinosaurs.” I lowered my eyes and thought for a moment. Mase took a big bite out of his sandwich.

  “Per the manuscripts, they created the dinosaurs.”

  “They made them? That’s kind of hard to believe.”

  “No harder, I would think, than believing they evolved from the same single-celled organism that every other animal came from too.” He nodded, reluctantly it seemed. “Then when they grew tired of them they killed them off.”

  “How?”

  “You know that dinosaurs became extinct about sixty-five million years ago, right?” He nodded. “And many scientist believe that their extinction was all at once. That some catastrophe befell the Earth and wiped them all out at the same time. Most popular theory being a meteorite hit.”

  “A meteorite came down and hit them, killing them all? That doesn’t make sense.”

  “No, Mase. Listen.” I chuckled. “The meteorite didn’t hit them. It hit the Earth. One meteorite hitting them couldn’t have killed them all because they lived all over the planet.”

  “Well, who knows what might happen in this sci-fi yarn you’re weaving.”

  “It’s not a yarn.”

  “Keep going. No wait. If it hit the Earth then why did only the dinosaurs become extinct?”

  “You gonna let me tell the story?”

  “Yeah. Sorry. Go ahead.” He opened up the second paper towel and pushed his mouth down over more than a fourth of the sandwich.

  “Did you bring one of those sandwiches for me?”

  He reached out his hand offering one that was still wrapped. “You want one?” Pushing the food over into his cheek and muffling his words.

  I shook my head. He seemed to be enjoying them and I definitely had been feeding him lately.

  “So,” I continued, “there is overwhelming evidence that a meteorite, about six miles wide and traveling thousands of miles an hour, slammed into the Gulf of Mexico.”

  “That’s in your manuscripts?”

  “Listen, this is real life. This is what some scientists think.”

  “Oh, okay.”

  “When the meteorite hit,” I raised my hand and slammed it against the arm of the chair, “huge amounts of dust and earth were thrown up into the atmosphere.” I waved my arms. “It would have blanketed the Earth, blocking out the sun. No sun, no plant growth, no food for any animal that fed off of them.”

  “So they starved to death?” He asked before gulping down the last of the orange juice in his glass. I reached over while I was talking and poured a glass of juice for me. Figured I better grab some before he emptied the entire gallon.

  “That’s what could have happened, or it could have done something else . . .”

  “What?”

  “Wait.”

  “Okay.”

  According to the manuscripts, the inhabitants of Mars got rid of the dinosaurs. And, not by a meteorite. They’d let them roam around for millions of years and then it came time for them to go. So they killed them off. All at once - - with a virus.

  “So, no meteorite? Our scientists were wrong?”

  “No.”

  “You just said they killed the dinosaurs with a virus.”

  “Yeah, that’s how the dinosaurs met their demise. But, and here’s how the manuscripts help put pieces of the puzzle of ancient mysteries together, in the place where the meteorite supposedly hit -”

  “The Gulf of Mexico.”

  “Right. The Gulf of Mexico. There was found a lot of iridium. Iridium is not really found on Earth, but it is present on Mars.”

  “So, the stuff found around the meteorite is the same stuff found on Mars?”

  “Yes. And, the manuscript said they fashioned the meteorite from elements they had there and then hurled it at the Earth.”

  He looked at me out the side of his eyes. “The manuscript said ‘iridium?’”

  “No, Mase,” I said. “You think you’re going to catch me, don’t you? Of course it didn’t say iridium. We named it that.”

  “So, the Martians -”

  “Not Martians.”

  “Okay, so our ancestors hurled a huge rock at us. Not to kill the dinosaurs, but to do what?

  “To change the climate.” I took a sip of my juice.

  “How does that answer ancient mysteries?”

  “We have always wondered how we had things like sudden global ice coverage.”

  “Ice age.”

  “Right. Like how did the Earth freeze so quickly that a woolly mammoth could be frozen whole while it was still eating a flower?”

  “Did that really happen?”

  “Yeah.”

  “On Earth?”

  “Yes.”

  “Nobody down here can figure out why?” I shook my head. “And the manuscripts say the Martians – I mean our ancestors did it?”

  “Yep. So take for instance Greenland and Siberia.”

  “What about them?”

  “They’re polar opposites.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “If you started in Greenland and dug straight across through the Earth you would end up in Siberia.”

  “Okay.”

  “That also means they are the same distance from the North Pole. Yet, Greenland is like eighty percent covered in ice. Siberia has no ice. It’s cold and has lots of snow, but no ice. So why if they’re the same distance from the pole don’t they have the same topography?”

  “The Martians?”

  I chuckled. “Yeah, the Martians.” They did all kinds of experiments on people, on the land. They just had their way with this planet.”

  “Sounds unethical.”

  “Really? Because it’s what we do now. We do climate change experiments; we do human experiments like infect people with deadly diseases, chemicals
, and radiation and do surgical procedures on them. At least our ancestors on Mars did it on another planet.”

  “Okay, tell me about the cavemen. That was an experiment, right?” Mase brushed the crumbs from his sandwich into one of the napkins, folded it up so they wouldn’t fall out on the floor.

  “Not caveman, the Neanderthal.”

  “Right. You want any more of this juice?”

  “No, Mase, you drink it.”

  “Okay, now go ahead.” He poured some juice and put his feet up on the ottoman.

  “So, you’ve seen that chart that has the monkey evolving into man? He nodded. “Well, recently, DNA has proven that man couldn’t have evolved from the Neanderthal. They were two separate species. They don’t fit into that chart.”

  “We couldn’t have evolved from monkeys?”

  “No. We couldn’t have evolved from the Neanderthal. Evolution from monkeys is still possible because we share common DNA.”

  “You don’t believe that do you? That we evolved from monkeys?”

  “No, Greg. I don’t.”

  Mase laughed. “You silly. Don’t call me ‘Greg.’ Bet you couldn’t have sat and talked to him this long without pulling your hair out.”

  I chuckled. He was right about that.

  “Anyway, Mase, the manuscript said they created the Neanderthal – and before you say it, they didn’t write that word either.” Mase chuckled. “They said that they, acting as God, made their own man and put him on the third planet – ‘We placed our crude imitation of man on the third planet. We watched and observed. We were never to get it quite right though, the creatures did not develop as we hoped. They were incapable of speech, or a brain that could support or comprehend the knowledge we possessed. Truly our first attempts were more animal-like than human, but, in our eyes we had triumphed.’”

  “Is that what the manuscript said?”

  “Yep.”

  “Verbatim?”

  “Verbatim.”

  “You probably could recite the whole translation to me from memory, couldn’t you?”

  “Sure could.” I smiled.