Chapter_26
Discouraged, Alex walked out of the room with the shield and into his lab at the end of the hallway. Not usually one to leave in silence, he felt the stress of the situation rising. If he could not figure out the mystery behind this ancient relic, another catastrophic event of biblical proportion would befall the entire planet. It was already occurring now, and he could do nothing to prevent it from continuing.
When he walked into the lab, the entire room acted as if it were alive. Every electronic device and invention stored in it was quantumly connected to a small subatomic analyzer chip Alex had implanted subcutaneously below his left ear. He could feel every piece of equipment in the room and knew simultaneously the status of each one of them. With almost a thousand different devices in the lab and electronic parts too numerous to count, the entire area vibrated with energy.
After placing the shield on a large circular metal plate levitating above a table, Alex analyzed all the digital readouts being transferred into his consciousness from the subtatomic analyzer in the plate. He went over the numbers and calculations, attempting to make sense of what they could possibly mean. However, nothing new could be ascertained. Reconsidering the situation, he began to ponder if he were looking at the problem the wrong way.
Maybe the answer isn’t from the inside out but from the outside in?
Alex stared at the constellations on the shield.
Do these constellations represent a clue? Why was the V-shaped Hyades star cluster of Taurus so prominent on the Mukulian Hall in Nan Madol? Do the esoteric scenes engraved on the shield represent something grander?
A kind hand touched his shoulder, breaking his concentration.
Alex turned. “Samantha.”
“I saw your frustration back in the room,” she responded like a concerned older sister. “While Marissa was caring for Christine, I thought it best to slip out. Is there anything I can do to help?”
“Unless you can tell me something about this shield here, we are in a stalemate,” Alex said. He looked up at his oldest friend and let out a sigh. “Any update on the movement of the Earth’s tectonic plates? I know you’ve been closely monitoring them since we left.”
She placed her coffee mug down on a table. “Not good. It could be a matter of just a few days, hours, or even minutes before everything shifts again. The magma under the Earth’s crust is churning and flowing like I’ve never seen before. It’s like something’s stirring up the mix and causing it to act erratically.”
“Which is triggering the massive electromagnetic fluctuations across the globe,” Alex concluded.
“If we don’t do something soon,” Samantha admitted. “What we’ve seen so far will be just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.”
“Have you determined what’s causing the problem?” Alex asked.
“No,” she responded. “Not a clue.”
Alex pointed to the shield. “The answer’s here. It’s a mystery a few millennia old.”
Samantha smirked, subtly reminding Alex of his genetic heritage. “So are you.”
Finally, a smile, she thought, watching a small grin form on Alex’s face.
“Now, what can I do to help?” Samantha asked.
“Maybe it would help if I ran a few things by you.” Alex held up his right palm, and a cross sectional image of the shield appeared above it. “As you see, the shield is composed of five different layers of composite material that I have no means yet of fully analyzing. However, its centermost layer is entirely made of mercury. And when I subject the shield to a certain frequency of electromagnetic energy, it excites this mercury, causing it to levitate.”
“Sort of like the Roman god Mercury,” Samantha chimed in. “He was also called Hermes by the Greeks.”
“I never thought of that,” Alex said, impressed with Samantha’s analogy.
“Wasn’t he the winged god of flight?” she continued. “And didn’t he hold that thing-a- ma-jig in his hand? A winged pole with two serpents coiled around it.”
“You mean a caduceus?” Alex responded. “The symbol prominently posted around our entire Neurono-Tek research center and hospital? I believe one was even embroidered by your grandmother and is hanging in your former office.”
“That’s it.”
“Never heard of it,” Alex jested.
Samantha gave him a slight nudge on the arm. “I’m glad to see that your recent near-death experience hasn’t entirely ruined your sense of humor.”
“But seriously,” Alex commented, with a more austere look on his face, “could the caduceus represent the remnants of some lost knowledge from a pre-flood era? And maybe this lost scientific wisdom was passed on to the subsequent post-flood era through myth and legend.”
“Or maybe,” Samantha concluded, “both myth and legend were meant to hide this knowledge the entire time.”
“Good point,” Alex agreed. Looking at the caduceus now in hindsight, he said, “You can now understand where truth and myth merge.”
“The wings represented flight,” Samantha continued, “while the liquid metal mercury somehow made this flight possible.”
“Let me show you something interesting.” Alex held out his other hand and activated a holo-projector above them with his thoughts. Odd-looking vehicles in the shapes of a fish, submarines, beehives, and domes appeared in front of them. Some had propellers while others appeared to have fins.
“What are they supposed to represent?” Samantha asked
“The ancient Indian text known as the Samarangana Sutradhara sums it up best,” Alex said. “By means of the power latent in mercury which sets the driving whirlwind in motion, a man sitting inside may travel a great distance in the sky in the most marvelous manner.”
“Are you trying to say that these images represent ancient flying machines?” Samantha asked.
“They might,” Alex concluded. “These drawings were created from detailed descriptions found in Samarangana Sutradhara and other ancient Indian Sanskrit texts such as the Ramayana and Mababharata. Again, what was once considered myth may have, in fact been, the truth all along.”
“Just like the city of Ur or the Hittite Empire in the Old Testament,” Marissa chimed in from the doorway. “Until archeologists dug up evidence of their existence, people used to think they were old, fabricated stories.”
Christine and Terzin stood next to Marissa. Both listened intently to the conversation.
Marissa’s voice warmed Alex’s heart. He could not help but go over and give her a squeeze around the waist. “Spoken from a true Sunday school teacher.”
“I see your patient is feeling better,” Samantha noted, gesturing towards Christine, who had wrapped herself in a blue blanket.
“She said there’s something that she needs to tell us,” Marissa commented.
Christine pointed to the shield. With a weak and cracking voice, she said, “I’ve seen that before.”
She paused a brief second before continuing, “In Philadelphia.”