Ark (30 page)

SANCTUARY

Jim and Gene entered the communications trailer, bathed in the glow of various blinking lights and imaging systems. Lieutenant Bush said the magnetic and thermal readings had him puzzled.

“I just wanted you all to see this,” Bush said to them. “It’s definitely coming from the ark.”

“Tell me what I’m looking at, lieutenant, if you would, and quickly,” insisted the General.

“A thermal pocket right above the...” Bush pointed to an optical image superimposed with a thermogram. He handed a pair of thick glasses to General Wilcox, a slender wire connecting them to the console. “Put them on, Sir, you’ll see what I mean.”

The moment the General slipped the glasses on he gasped in surprise. “I’m seeing a column of heat in three dimensions. Is that what you’re showing me?”

“Yes, Sir.”

“And those pulses are the magnetics?”

“No Sir. Well, I don’t know.”

“Then what are they?” The General was tapping his foot nervously.

“Acoustic, thermal, and electromagnetic waves.”

“Is this what we saw in the simulation, Gene?” The General looked at Henson. Gene was standing at the door of the trailer looking out the window.

Gene didn’t turn around. “Something like that,” he replied, still staring out the window.

Someone handed Jim the 3-D glasses when the General dropped them on the console. He put them on and looked at the flickering screen. A funnel shaped column of energy was rising from the sanctuary. From the center of the Holy of Holies came radiating pulses of energy, a rhythmic undulation of waves.

“Tell me what we’re seeing, Bush. Real simple,” said the General. He turned to Jim, still wearing the stereo glasses. “What do you make of it, Wilson?”

“I guess it’s working, General,” said Jim. He took off the glasses and handed them to the lieutenant. “Impressive. But what is it?”

The lieutenant and Gene took turns with the stereo imaging, then looked each other and shrugged.

“We’re seeing a resonance, Sir,” said Bush, “but I’m not finding any source for the signal.”

The General seemed to growl. “You mean it’s just coming from nowhere?”

Gene nodded. “He’s right. This is similar to but not like the simulation. I’ve run the sim for hours and know it up and down. What ever THAT is out there, it wasn’t in the simulation.”

The General was incredulous. “I’m not buying that for a minute. We have over ten million dollars worth of gizmos aimed at that thing and you’re saying we don’t know shit?”

Jim couldn’t listen to any more. He quietly opened the door to the trailer and went outside. He wasn’t dreaming. The same glowing cloud hung over the sanctuary, and a pulsating light could be seen deep inside the Tabernacle.

Marta and Aaron sat nearby on the steps of the generator trailer, watching the cloud that hung above the Tabernacle. Jim called to them. “Hi, Marta, Aaron. What do you think?”

They seemed to be unaware of anything but the phenomenon before them. Two days ago, in the grotto, they had dealt dispassionately with the same objects that they now watched in awe. Everything had changed. Aaron looked at Marta and smiled warmly, then his gaze returned to the hazy cloud above the tenting of the Tabernacle.

Gene, too, stepped outside the instrument shack.

The lightning came with him; sheets of it, spreading across the sky like layers of a luminous plant. It ripped upward from earth to sky like a fountain of electricity. Jim and Gene were knocked to the ground. The sound of the blast echoed off the distant mountains.

When Jim got up the glowing cloud was gone. All that remained of the electrical outburst was the pulsing glow inside the Tabernacle. It began to rain, lightly at first, then harder. Soon hailstones showered the area.

Jim and Gene ran back into the trailer and shut the door. Everyone except Bush was ignoring the machines, their faces pressed to the window.

The lieutenant looked gravely at Jim before turning back to his instruments.

“Are you recording this?” asked Jim.

“It’s automatic,” said the General. Then he looked at Jim as though Jim had tipped him off to something. “That’s right. Recording it. We’ll let the eggheads deal with this later. Right now this is a military operation. Time to regroup.”

The statement made Jim want to go back to his rock and sit down, but it was now wet and covered with melting hail. The hail hit the metal trailer’s roof like a barrage of machine guns. Then it stopped as suddenly as it had started.

Gene whispered in his ear. “When’s the last time you heard someone called an egghead?”

Jim was glad for a reason to smile. Truthfully he was on the edge of panic. All that held him together was the certainty that nearly everyone there felt the same way, but he also was acutely aware that he’d been swept into the whirlwind of history. Standing out there in the rain was a testimony to events described in one of the world’s oldest history books, and it had happened just at the moment when Jim lost his belief that the ark would do anything at all.

In spite of all the talk and the computer simulations, and even in spite of the voices, Jim had been beginning to suspect that all of it could easily be tossed off as schizophrenia or simple obsession. Now each time he blinked and reopened his eyes, reality slapped him in the face. Whatever it was that had powered the ancient ark had returned after four thousand years.

Jim blinked again. It was still there, throbbing with light. This was no dream.

John Wilcox had found some binoculars and had them trained on the opening in the curtains of the outer Tabernacle. His elbows wobbled on top of a computer screen, his wet khaki T-shirt dripping on the computer.

Bush noticed and yelled at John, “Hey, you’re dripping on the puter! Watch it!”

John moved, apologized and grinned. “Sorry,” he said. “I thought the curtains were closed. Who opened them? I can see all the way into the Tabernacle, where the veil covers the inner sanctum. Something is ... there’s a light.”

Jim took the field glasses without asking and steadied them on the opening to the sanctuary. Wilcox was right. A pulsing light, soft yellow with tints of red, purple and blue, emanated from the curtains about a meter or so above the floor. Clearly it wasn’t fire, for the curtains of the Holy of Holies were still lit by the oil lamps of the menorah. With two light sources it was hard to read what was really going on in the sanctuary.

He handed the glasses to Gene.

After a few minutes everyone had his turn. The General kept the glasses. “I wonder what the archbishop is doing right now,” he mused, staring out the window.

“Shitting his pa–” began the General’s son.

“Stow that shit, son,” snapped the General. “He may be a Johnny-on-the-spot, hey-look-me-over cleric, but he didn’t get to his rank by sitting around picking his nose. I don’t like him but I respect him.” He put down the glasses and John grabbed them back. “When the rain stops we’ll have to act,” continued the General. “We need everybody right and tight and on the same page.”

“Do you have a plan?” asked Jim.

“We’re still in Phase Two,” said Lieutenant Bush. “We survey. Take notes.”

The General stared grimly out at the rain splashing in sheets against the trailer window. “All of the above.”

#

The weather people reported that the front had been expected. It hit a bit sooner and harder than expected, but the Rockies are a young mountain range and they can spawn unpredictable weather. As darkness fell over the land the heavens cleared and cool dry air replaced the clouds. In the still air the dampness in the ground gave rise to fog.

The test site, located not too far from the mouth of an ancient river bed, was particularly prone to fog. Lieutenant Bush reminded them of that as they all stood outside the goat hair fencing of the outer courtyard peering at the eerie spectacle of the Tabernacle, throbbing with a strange spectral light in the midst of a ground fog. It reminded John of a movie effect.

“Where’s Steve Spielberg when you need him?” joked the lawyer.

“I think you mean George Lucas,” said Gene.

“You’re thinking of that adventure movie. The one about the ark?” said Marta. “Aaron says that ark was of Catholic design, not Jewish.”

At the General’s orders, the military camp behind them was lit with green floodlights, a color more difficult to see at night. The light made the scene look even weirder.

For once there was utter solidarity in the camp. Even the archbishop had taken off his finery and was wearing army fatigues and a cap. He said that he hadn’t brought too many official robes. And his regular clothes were back at Sandia. The military garb seemed to make him forget his status and watch in awe like everyone else.

In the shadows, at the fringes of the camp, the military watched with ready weapons. General’s orders.

General Wilcox was the first to step into the courtyard. When he got far enough in so he could address the group, he turned his back to the Tabernacle and looked the group over. His eyes fell on the archbishop. “Any suggestions?”

Frazetti took that as a challenge. He looked around nervously. “I am thinking that this may have become a church matter.”

“Meaning?”

“Well, I don’t know. I never expected this development. Even in the Old Testament we have King Saul’s lament.”

“And that is?” asked John Wilcox. He was looking through his powerful binoculars at the mouth of the tabernacle.

“That the ark had stopped speaking to them. It was still intact. It had spoken to them for generations. The great kings of Israel like David knew the ark personally. Around the time of King Saul it just stopped working. It ended up in Solomon’s Temple where it stayed quiet until its destruction.”

“It seems to be working fine to me, Sir,” observed Gene. “But what the church says it’s supposed to do is obviously not on track. Anyone hear any commandments coming from this thing?”

An argument ensued, but only for a moment. The General raised both hands and ordered everyone to be quiet.

“Perhaps I should give you all a little background at this juncture,” he said. “It might be of some help if I tell you that a feasibility study has been run several times on Thunderbolt’s working in a biblical fashion. Even Tesla believed in God.”

The entire group stared solemnly at the General. Jim noticed that the General’s thumb was twitching, but other than that he stood steel straight, like a pylon driven into the ground.

“Some of you know that years ago I was given charge over Thunderbolt. It was due to be cut from the L.O.P.’s. The project remains and has always been one of the United States’ questionable secrets. I was happy to retire, to see Thunderbolt unrealized, untested.

“Periodically, a group of us would check on that thing in Chicago. I’ve only seen it through the green glass plate, but it’s still there.” He stared past his audience, off into the darkness, distracted by his own memories. “I’ve never known how to deal with that. We look. We leave.”

Jim thought he’d heard everything, but every day more truth came out. He wondered why the General was bothering to discuss state secrets. Was it honesty percolating up from somewhere inside, or was it just another spoonful of truth to help the group expose more secrets?

The General looked back over his shoulder. “We could never get near the thing in Chicago. It shorted out all the robots, magnetized probes, and it fried a few poor souls in test suits.”

Jim decided to test the wind. “How many?” he asked.

General Wilcox froze. “What?”

“How many people has that thing in Chicago killed?”

“Thirteen.”

The General’s direct answer surprised Jim. “I’m afraid to ask, then, how they died.”

“Good. Then don’t.” The General’s face wrinkled with a hard smile. His facial muscles strained with tension. “My point, Jim, is that what’s going on here is brand new. Behind me could be the U.S. government’s newest weapon. It could also be the U.S. government’s biggest embarrassment. And that THING might cause the loss of fifteen million in Fort Knox gold. It’s here ... on loan. That’s a problem.”

“In a nutshell,” said the archbishop. “But what if we have the Lord in that place? Perhaps I represent some level of prejudice in this matter but I think that we have a spiritual problem. What has happened? The death of the rabbi. The cloud. That glow inside. Look at it. This is what Moses would have seen. Perhaps it is ordained that the ark will be renewed. This is not a question that we few can decide.”

“I think we have to go back in,” said Jim. “One of us, anyway, to see what we’re dealing with.”

“Somebody else, not me,” said Gene.

Aaron raised his hand. “You should do as the priest says,” he said bravely. “It’s in God’s hands.”

John glared at Aaron but made no remark. All he could see when he looked at his chauffeur was the man who’d hammered gold into an ark. Giving it a name, John might have called it ‘succumbing to hype’, or what Gene had called ‘religious fervor’. During the events of the day John had watched from the background. Now he was part of what they’d all nearly become: a rabble. Each of them felt fear growing inside them, like children who’d played with matches and set a barn on fire. Everyone on hand struggled to be the experts they were being paid to be.

The General put his hand up again. “We all know why we are here, people,” he said insistently. “There is no reason to panic or be afraid. What we need to do is think.”

“What did the simulations do?” asked Gene.

“What simulations?”

“The ones that you said ran like it worked in a biblical way. What was the result?”

“Nothing meaningful, if that’s what you mean,” said the General. “The programs ended. The computer guy said ‘call the chaplain.’ That was about it.”

“Maybe Aaron’s right,” said Jim, wondering why he felt justified to speak up. “Maybe we should call in the chaplain.”

“Who would that be?” asked the General in a patronizing tone.

“Archbishop Frazetti,” said Jim. “I guess he could put on the headpiece and the ephod. If it’s ... well, those gold things should protect him.”

“Ephod?” said Frazetti.

“The breastplate Rabbi Levi was wearing.”