Over nine years had passed. Miller was now sixty-five years old. He had the dubious duty of entertaining his three wild grandsons while his wife went shopping. The boys were eight, nine, and ten years old, respectively, and could drive any sane adult bonkers. Miller decided that he would take the boys to his office at the Institute and show them his rock collections. Surely they would be interested in rocks, minerals, and fossils.
Miller’s office was fairly typical of most geologists’ offices. There was a sign on his computer desk that said “A clean desk is the sign of a sick mind.” (His wife, of course, didn’t buy this argument; things were different under her rule at home.) The floor of Miller’s office was cluttered with boxes containing rock samples.
The three grandsons were not all that thrilled by Miller’s office. Miller tried to tell them about some of his rocks. In one box, there was a large hunk of a green rock called “serpentine.” Miller told his grandsons that this rock had formed nearly three miles beneath the floor of the oceans about two hundred million years ago, just about the time the dinosaurs were beginning to start their reign. This barely raised the interest of the three boys.
While Miller had his back turned, one boy, Alfred, opened up the lid of a dusty old stone box in the corner of Miller’s office. Inside the stone box, Alfred found a gold-colored metallic disk. He was fascinated by the green translucent stone in the middle of the disk and decided to give it a hard twist to the right. Suddenly, the whole office was enveloped by a pulsating, eerie green glow.
Miller turned around immediately when he saw the all-too-familiar green glow and said with a grimace, “My God, boy! What have you done? This could be serious!”
Miller jerked the disk out of Alfred’s hands and said in a somewhat shaky voice, “We still don’t understand the significance of this disk. Some other geologists and I found this thing in a cave in Eastern Mexico. It was pretty spooky. We found the skeleton of an Aztec warrior chief dressed in full battle regalia draped over the stone box containing disk.”
After the show that the disk had already put on and the talk about the Aztec chief, the three boys became transfixed by what Grandpa Miller had to say. Alfred, with a look of newfound admiration for his grandfather, said, “Gee, Grandpa—you’re like Indiana Jones!”
Miller said, “I’m not sure how serious this is. I’d better get you boys out of here as quickly as possible.”
Miller called his wife on his cell phone and told her about what had just happened. His wife told him not to get too angry with Alfred. Miller said he’d kept quite cool, considering the gravity of the situation. He told her he would return the three grandsons to her custody within the next fifteen minutes. He said, “I need to call Dr. Clark at the University of Pittsburgh about all of this.”
“Okay; I will meet you in the driveway along the west side of the Institute. See you shortly. I am sure everything will work out. You worry too much.”
“Maybe I do. I’ll see you in a bit.”
After saying good-bye to his three grandsons, Miller called Dolores Clark. Clark said in an apprehensive voice, “I think I’d better come down to Dallas and see what’s going on firsthand. The pictures you took of the inscriptions on the box and on the metallic disk are probably the key to the whole situation.
The inscriptions on the white limestone box are clearly an old form of the Mayan language. So far, nobody that I have contacted has been able to make a proper translation. One set of inscriptions on the metal disk is also Mayan. It seems to be an even older dialect. No one is familiar with this either, but they agree that this inscription is closely related to the one on the stone box. The second set of inscriptions on the metal box is definitely neither Mayan nor any other known language on Earth. Perhaps we can find somebody who is an expert on deciphering codes to run this strange inscription through a computer.”
Miller responded, “I’ll pick you up at the airport on Monday, if you’d like. E-mail me your flight arrival time. You can stay at our house. My wife and I would love to have you as our guest.”
“Thanks, Frank. I look forward to seeing you and meeting your wife. I am curious—is your friend the disk still putting out a green glow?”
“Yeah, the glow is still there. It occurs in a series of pulses, which may also represent some sort of code. I put the damn thing back in the stone box and it still glows. The green light even penetrates the sides of the box.”