In the Beginning: Mars Origin "I" Series Book I (17 page)

CHAPTER
THIRTY-SIX

I was standing outside of the museum when
Michael got there at noon. It was so cold, and the ice was crunchy under my
feet. When the clock had hit noon, I had grabbed my stuff and ran out to the
front of the museum. I hadn’t bothered to put on boots, and left out without
buttoning my coat or putting on my gloves and hat. My teeth were chattering as
I wrapped my scarf around my neck and mashed my hat down over my head. It was
so cold that I had to practically march in place to keep the blood flowing and
not get frostbite.

Michael drove up and I guess my shivering
was noticeable. He rolled down the window on the passenger side.

“You must really be hungry,” he said and
laughed.

“Yeah right, hungry for the information
you have. You drive.” I hopped in his car and reached over and turned the heat
on high.

The restaurant was one of five storefront
establishments of a big brown brick building on the corner of Euclid and Ford
Drive, just around the corner from my museum. It was wedged in between a store
and a bank. The interior was covered in dark wood, with dim lights. The
waitress walked us past the large wooden bar and up two steps to the back
dining room and seated us at a small rectangular table for four.

Michael had the ‘stuff’ in a manila
folder, which he laid on the table next to him. I stared at it until my line of
sight was interrupted by a menu shoved in front of my face. I grabbed it with
both hands and looked up at the waitress, “Thank you.”

“So how’s Mase?” Michael attempted small
talk.

“Mase who?” I looked up from where I was
perusing the one page laminated menu.

He laughed. I don’t know what he thought
was funny.

“Just give it to me, Michael.” I reached
my left hand across the table, palm stretched out flat. “Give me the folder.
Tell me what you found out and stop beating around the bush.”

He hit my hand, pushed it down and leaned
forward across the table. I leaned in too so I could get every word of what he
was about to say. I stared into his hazel eyes.

“I’ll give you the folder in a minute.
You’ll want to hear this first.” He was almost whispering.

“What?” I took to whispering, too.

The waitress came back for our order and
Michael sat up acting nonchalant. I hurried and ordered the first thing I saw.
I was too preoccupied with that manila folder to care what I ate. After the
waitress, left Michael leaned back in.

“There may have been life on Mars.”

“There is no such thing as Martians,” My
voice was grainy as I dragged out the words. I sat back in my chair, looked up
in the air, took a loud breath through my nose and slowly blinked my eyes. “Is
that what you had to tell me?”

“I didn’t say there were Martians. I said
there may have been life on Mars.”

“What are you saying, Michael?”

“Didn’t you hear about this meteorite that
they found in the Antarctic? As a matter-a-fact, they found it on your
birthday.”

“August 7?” I said. Then thought, that was
a dumb question, how many birth dates do I have.

“Yep.”

“So?” I was totally confused.

“They think it may show evidence of
primary life on Mars.”

“So?”

“Sooo, that’s the fourth planet from the
sun. Your document talks about the fourth planet, right?”

“Right.”

“And it said the planet was red -”

“Burnt red,” I corrected him.

“Same difference. And, Mars
is
the
‘red’ planet, right?”

I rested my elbows on the table and
covered my eyes and cheeks with my hands.

“There it is.” He drummed both hands on
the table.
Ba dump bum bum
. I spread my fingers open enough to look at
him. His sat there with a big grin spread across his entire face, his eyes
sparkling. He looked like the cat that swallowed the canary. He took a sip of
his water and sat back in his chair, crossing his arms and looking at me. He acted
as if he had solved the whole mystery.

I didn’t get it. “What?” I held my hands
up and hunched my shoulders. “I don’t understand.”

“Life came from Mars on a meteorite.” As
he spoke the waitress came and sat his food down. He uncrossed his arms and dipped
the roast beef sub he ordered into the au jus and took a huge bite. He looked
up at me. That grin was still recognizable as he chewed hard to reduce that big
lump of food in his cheek. He seemed very pleased with himself.

I sat back in my chair. I couldn’t say
anything the rest of lunch. That just couldn’t be what he wanted to tell me.

I picked at the turkey club I ordered. I
ate a couple of pieces of the bacon and pushed the plate away. I drank all the
water I had packed with lemons and motioned for the waitress to bring me more.
“Lots of ice, please.”

While I crunched on my ice, Michael
devoured the last of his sandwich, and started in on his fries. He drowned them
with ketchup, and ate them with his fingers, one by one. Ever since I could
remember, Michael separated his food and ate only one thing at a time. I’ve
told him repeatedly that everything he eats mixes together once it hits his
stomach. He told me he didn’t think the digestive system worked like that. He
believed that each food continued down through the intestines in the order it
was consumed.

 With reasoning like that I wondered why I
would even believe anything he said and why I would trust him to get me
reliable information.

I took the “stuff” that Michael gave me
back to work, locked myself in my office, sat at my desk and read it over and
over. And over. I sat for a long time, legs crossed, chin cradled in hand,
biting the side of my tongue and flipping back and forth through the pages of
the articles Michael had given me. I tried to think about it from Michael’s
perspective.

So there are discussions that life
originated on Mars and traveled here on meteorites.

That sounds ludicrous.

Okay, let me be a little less judgmental.
Life originated on Mars and came here on a meteorite as a single-celled
organism and . . . and what?
Evolved
into man? Now that
is
ridiculous. And it would be contrary to everything I believed in. Everything
I’d been taught and everything I teach to others.

Maybe that’s why those Bible scholars were
so upset. Maybe they found out that God didn’t create man. That in fact, there
was no God. That man crawled out of a cesspool as a one-cell organism and grew
and grew and grew and grew.

But how could the scholars at that time
have known about the meteorite? They just found out where the thing was from.
And whoever wrote the manuscript wouldn’t have known about the meteorite,
either. No one knew about the meteorite.

Why even try to figure this out?

Okay, c’mon Justin, think. I slapped my
forehead a few times with my fingers. I didn’t believe that man evolved from
anything. Definitely not. Yeah, sure animals developed as their environment and
needs changed, but man is pretty much how he looked when God put him here.

So, I decided to be scientific about this
thing (a new approach). I tried to relate what information Michael had given me
to the minuscule pieces of information that I gleaned from the manuscripts.

Mars is interesting enough
, I thought. All
the space probes that the countries are sending up had everybody looking
skyward. NASA had even scheduled plans to send more. Everywhere you look
they’re talking about Mars, even in the movies. Everywhere you look including
the manuscripts, at least by my summation.

The ‘fourth earth’ couldn’t be any other planet
but Mars. The Hebrew word used in the manuscript when referring to the fourth
earth was ‘a
dâmâh
’ which means ‘earth’ but its root means ‘redness.’
Michael’s right, that’s what we call Mars - the red planet.

But, that’s all he was right about. I
don’t care what his articles concluded.

I collected all the papers I had spread
all over my desk and hit the bottom edge of the pile on the desk a few times to
get them in order. I put them all back in the manila folder and picked up the
phone to call Mase.

No answer. I looked at my watch, it was
after three. I didn’t realize it’d gotten so late. I had been locked up in my
office for more than two hours. Mase must have already left to go and get Logan
from school.

I needed to talk to someone. I called
Greg. I called his office first but Anne said he had already left for the day.
I tried him at home. He answered on the first ring.

CHAPTER
THIRTY-EIGHT

“Why do you answer your phone on the first
ring?” I asked. “Who you expecting to call?”

“What do you want?” he asked. Probably
hadn’t forgiven me for hanging up the phone on him the other day.

“It’s about the manuscripts,” I said
trying to be nice because I needed him to talk to me.

“Oh, brother.” His voice went up an octave
and he made some clicking sound with his mouth.

“Greg, I don’t think this document is
about the Bible.”

“What is it about?”

“I’m not sure, but I think it’s about
space.”

“Tired of dirt?” Greg chided. “Hankering a
need to play around with the stars for a while?”

“See. That’s why I don’t tell you
anything.”

“Tell me what?” he said.

“I just told you. I don’t tell you
anything
.”

“Well you must want to tell me something
or else you wouldn’t have called. So tell me what you want.”

“Are you going to listen to me?”

“Yes, Justin, I am,” he said. “Now what’s
going on?”

“I just need some answers about Mars.”

He laughed. “Well you’ve called the wrong
person. I can’t tell you a thing about Mars. Why you want to know something
about Mars anyway?”

“I’m not sure, but I think these
manuscripts talk about Mars. It says the fourth planet from the sun. I already
told you that.”

“Yeah, but you never actually equated it
to Mars. How do you know it means this galaxy? Maybe it’s a whole different
galaxy. The fourth planet somewhere else.” He was always going to disagree with
me.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But they just
recently found a meteorite from Mars that was interesting.”

“Go and talk to an astronomer.”

“I don’t need an astronomer. I need to
study samples of the earth.”

“You mean of Mars.”

“Yeah, Mars’ earth.”

“What do you think you’ll find?” Then he
said, “Oh now you got me talking like I believe this mess. Next you’ll be
trying to get me to go to Mars with you. Well, I’m telling you right now I’m
not going.” He seemed to find amusement in his discourse. “I don’t care what
tactics you employ against me. I’m not going.”

“Greg, I thought you were finished making
fun of this.”

“I’m not making fun of
this
.”

“You making fun of
me
? I thought
you understood how important this is to me.”

“Look, I went with you on your little caper
to Jerusalem, didn’t I? And I’m talking to you every time you call me with this
stuff.”

“This is really serious to me.”

“And I’m serious,” he said. “So, get on
with it. Spill it.”

“Well,” I started speaking slowly, not
knowing exactly how to explain. “What would be good is to study samples of the
earth. No one, I’m guessing, has ever disturbed the surface in the last billion
years or so making it a finite record of the past. That is just what we would
need to get a more accurate picture of what happened. But if they get up there,
they’ll mess up the evidence.”

“If who gets where?”

“NASA. They sent a space probe to Mars. It
landed last July fourth, just around the time that I went to Jerusalem the
first time.”

“Really.” He said in a way that made me
know that he really didn’t care.

“Greg.”

“What?”

“Listen to me.”

“I am. Go ahead.”

“Pictures from up there show river beds.
That’s a good sign of life so a good place to find fossilization. You look
around the edge of river beds and it has all the signs of life. But if NASA’s
little probe disturbs intact sites it’ll mess everything up.”

“Justin, that little probe wouldn’t mess
anything up. They’re not digging up there, they’re just taking pictures. I am
positive that there haven’t been any recent excavations on Mars. And that small
little probe wouldn’t do much damage. And,” his voice was stern, “if they did
destroy the geological evidence, there is nothing for you to fret about because
there is no way that you could go there to study anything.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said.

“So, since no one has ever studied Mars’
surface you’re getting this idea about life being there because of the
riverbeds?”

“No, because of the meteorite.”

“Are you thinking that the guy writing in
the journal was writing about a meteorite?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why would he hide documents that talked
about a meteorite?”

“I don’t know what that man was thinking.
All I know is I’m not leaving no rock unturned in trying to figure out these
manuscripts.”

“Well, tell me about this meteorite.”

“Michael told me -”

“Michael?”

“Yes, Michael. I had him go and research
some things for me. I just asked him to help me out because he had mentioned
about NASA and Mars at the Christmas Eve dinner. Figured he might already know
a little about it.”

“Okay, go on. Explain this to me.”

“In 1984 a meteorite was found in
Antarctica and just this past year it was determined to be from Mars. It showed
evidence of fossil-like prints of single-celled organic organisms.”

“Well isn’t that proof right there?”

“Proof of what?”

“Of some kind of life on Mars.”

“No. There were no bones or DNA present in
the rock. And the meteorite was believed to be from igneous rock.”

“So?”

“So, no DNA, no life. But like I said that
was igneous rock. It’d be better to look in sedimentary rock. Or at the poles.
Remains would survive there. That’s what I meant before. It would be helpful if
I could study some of the earth’s samples.”

“Stop saying Earth when you mean Mars,” he
said. “And if life doesn’t survive in igneous rock how is it going to
survive
in ice.”

“When I say earth, I just mean dirt. And I
don’t mean life
survived
in the ice. I meant the remains will be
preserved
in the ice. You know.”

“No. I don’t know. But that’s okay, you
don’t have to explain it to me.”

“I’ll explain. What happens is during dust
storms the dirt blows over the ice, carrying evidence of life with it and then
it’s covered by ice, and this happens over and over. Then when you cut down
through the layers of ice, not only can you find signs of life, you can
approximate the age of the fossils. Then some things may have been kept intact
due to climate change - - you know they froze to death and the entire remains
were preserved.”

He took in a deep breath. “So, they say
that life may have originated on Mars and traveled here on a meteorite?”

“Yep. Maybe so.”

“So, I was thinking, you’re always digging
up stuff. What do you think? If you dug in the right place you might dig up a
Martian?”

I snarled at him.

“Why do you come to me with this sci-fi
stuff anyway, Justin? I know you’re not saying that you believe in evolution.”

I didn’t say a word. He knew he was
upsetting me again.

“Okay, so this isn’t far-fetched to you?
Man evolving from some kind of growth on a rock that landed here from outer
space? That is a fair assessment of what you’re saying, isn’t it?”

“I am not saying that. You know I don’t
believe in evolution. I’m just saying that the manuscripts, from what I can
read, say something about life on the fourth planet, and life on the third
planet. I don’t suppose that the author of the manuscripts would’ve known if
the meteorite was the way life originated on Earth or not, so maybe that’s not
what the manuscripts are talking about. I don’t know.”

“You know, Justin, you’re always coming to
me with these half-hatched ideas. First you say that Indians are the ‘one
people’ that populated the globe. Now you saying that life originated on Mars,
came down as a single-celled organism on a meteorite and evolved into – I don’t
know – the Neanderthal and then into Indians. I don’t know, Justin, maybe you
should try another hypothesis?”

I didn’t know either. I was getting
disgusted with the entire conversation. I changed the subject.

“Anyway, DNA testing has proven that man
did not, rather could not, have evolved from the Neanderthal.”

“Really?” he said. That seemed to pique
his interest.

“Yes. Really.”

“I never heard of that.”

“And?” I asked.

“Seems like that should have been a very
important discovery.”

“It was important. But what’s your point?”

“My point is that it proves that man
didn’t evolve from apes, or whatever, and that God created man.”

I sucked my tongue. “It doesn’t prove
that.”

“What are saying? Yes it does.”

“It just says that there are two different
species that came into being separately
from
one another instead of one
species that evolved
into
the other. From a scientific point of view it
still leaves the question open. Evolution of man from apes is still a
possibility. This just clarifies the line of evolution by proving it didn’t
happen Ape - Neanderthal -
Homo sapien
.”

“It seems that should be all the evidence
they need.”

“Greg, I have spent years in a profession
trying to convince the world that God exists and that He created us, and so
have many other people. We have excavated Biblical sites, found artifacts
mentioned in the Bible and found non-Christian documents that confirm Biblical
accounts of events and still we have people who don’t believe. So what does DNA
evidence mean? Nothing.”

“You know ever since you got involved in
this manuscript thing you’ve been weirder than usual.”

“Never mind, Greg. You are no help.” I
hung up the phone. This time I didn’t even say “Bye.” It seemed like lately I
was always hanging up on Greg.