The Link (54 page)

“The ruins of ancient sites appear to contain fragmentary clues that their architects possessed some kind of knowledge we no longer have.”

CUT TO Robert’s father sitting on his cot in a tent in Arizona, writing in his journal, his expression grave.

“These words, at one time, would have been a virtual abomination to me,” says his voice. “Now, as much as I desire to, I am unable to refute them.”

CUT TO Egypt, The Great Pyramid.

“The Great Pyramid,” his father’s voice continues, “seems to be a landmark on which the geography of the ancient world was constructed.”

SHOTS OF the pyramid parallel what he says.

“The foundations were apparently oriented to true North. Its builders seemingly knew the circumference of the Earth and the length of the year. They knew, among other things, it seems, the specific density of the earth, the acceleration of gravity and the length of the earth’s orbit around the Sun.”

CUT TO Northwest Europe and the megalith remains.

“The megalith builders of Northwest Europe apparently knew the same things hundreds and, in certain cases, thousands of years before textbooks listed them.

“Along a fifteen hundred mile front of Europe’s Atlantic seaboard, these ancient and mysterious monuments, stones, mounds and burial chambers exist to remind us of this fact.”

CUT TO aerial shot of Stonehenge.

“Another of these strange locations is Stonehenge,” says his voice. “The builders of which were, without the aid of writing, astronomers and mathematicians of high ability.”

CLOSE SHOT ON Stonehenge.

“Like the stone circles in Cornwall, on Dartmoor, at Station Drew and in Scotland, these enormous configurations were aligned not only toward the Sun but on many of the stars as well.

“In Great Britain, 600 sites have been discovered to be designed geometrically and aligned astronomically to an astonishing degree of perfection.”

CUT TO Peru, the plain of Nazca.

“Distinctions related in spite of distance and difference in shape and size are the desert patterns of Nazca in Peru,” says his voice.

“In 1972, it was discovered that the straightness of these lines could not be measured even with modern air-surveying techniques.”

CUT TO Francis Allright writing in his journal intently.

“Why were these sites of early man placed so carefully? Why were the sites apparently connected and developed with such uncanny geometric precision?

“What impelled these ancient people to such a gigantic physical and intellectual effort?

“Did it have a practical purpose?

“And did I catch a glimpse of that purpose last night?”

CUT TO the previous day, the dig progressing, the workers a combination of students and local residents both white and Indian.

A discovery is made and Francis Allright hurries to the spot with his foreman, a Hopi in his sixties.

The finds are exciting.

A clay face with prominently sloping eyes. A smaller pink soap-stone head, strange in appearance, almost Egyptian. An ornament made of shell.

And something else which the foreman pockets before Allright notices. The expression on the Indian’s face as he does so is overwhelmed.

That night the old man comes to Allright’s tent. He wants to show Allright something.

Allright follows the man to his tent. There the Indian prepares some odd-looking tea for them to drink. To be polite, Allright drinks it.

As they do, the old man says, “You have a son.”

“Two,” says Allright.

“One will come here,” says the Indian.

Allright looks surprised. “That I doubt,” he says.

“He will,” says the old man. “He will come to complete what you have started.”

“What have I started?” asks Allright. By now, the tea has begun to affect him; he has not noticed it occurring but his mind is beginning to cloud.

The old man tells him to put out his hand.

Allright does.

The Indian puts the crystal cone in his palm. “This was with the other things we found this afternoon,” he says. “I had to look at it before I gave it to you. I had to be sure.”

“Of what?” asks Allright.

“That it is what I hoped,” the old man says. “The link.”

“Link to what?” asks Allright. He is groggy now.

“Watch my hands,” the old man says.

In the dim interior of the tent—the Hopi turns the lantern almost off—Allright sees the old man light a pipe and begin to smoke.

He watches the curling smoke thicken.

Then curl downward toward the old man’s hands which he holds apart.

Thicken even more, then form a ball of smoke between his palms.

Allright blinks, his glazed eyes narrowing.

The ball has become a globe. It has become the earth turning slowly in space.

He peers closer, his expression confused.

The earth looks vaguely crystalline. Across its surface is a formation of lines.

Dodecahedrons overlaid with equilateral triangles.

Allright stares at the sight.

The old man blows out smoke which turns into a thin, glistening stream which turns down suddenly, piercing the earth at a point in the Pacific Ocean and creating a glare which blinds Allright.

He opens his eyes. It is morning. He is lying on the floor of the empty tent.

The crystal still in his hand.

He goes outside and looks around.

“The old man was gone,” says his voice. “I have not seen him since.”

He starts walking back to the site of the dig, his tent.

“What did he show me last night? Was it only an induced hallucination?

“I wish I could believe that. I wish with all my heart and mind I could believe that. It offends me that I can’t.

“What I do believe—without the least bit of evidence—is that there is something very strange on this site.

“Something which, if the old man’s words are to be believed, I myself will never see.”

CUT TO Robert cutting the twine off a package wrapped in thick paper.

The strange clay face with the sloping eyes.

The small pinkstone head.

The ornament made of shell.

As he turns the ornament, Robert gasps, his breath taken by what he sees.

“Without the least bit of evidence, father?” he says.

On the back of the ornament is a design.

A four-bladed scythe, a circle in its center, each blade with a spearlike projection on its cutting edge, inside the circle a hieratic letter symbol, a step-like configuration on each blade, the one on the upper blade connected to the letter symbol.

He is so struck by the sight that when the telephone rings, he jolts sharply and Bartoo is thrown to the floor ignominiously.

Laughing, comforting the whimpering puppy, Robert picks up the receiver.

“Where’s my driver?” Cathy asks, calling from the train station.

She tries to share his excitement but is unable to do so.

What he speaks of represents a world of such myth-like conjecture to her that she must reject it.

Pre-literate ancient civilizations creating geometric structures on the earth for some vast, unknown purpose? No, thank you.

“But the matrix on the earth!” says Robert. “I dreamed of it in Russia! Then, later, Adamenko told us about it! I drew that symbol at ESPA more than a month ago! Today I see it on an ornament found in Arizona years ago! Months ago, I see an image in my mind of energy coming down to the earth! I read in my father’s journal today that he saw something just like that in the Indian’s tent! Are you telling me it’s all coincidental?”

“Robert, can’t you see?” she argues. “The knowledge about that matrix was in Adamenko’s mind when we met him! The symbol in full detail was in your father’s mind years ago!”

“You’re telling me it’s all a prime example of telepathy?!” he cries.

“Can you say it definitely isn’t?” she challenges.

He stares at her, baffled.

“No,” she says. “You can’t.” She looks at him embitteredly. “You can’t. Yet, on the basis of this so-called ‘evidence’, you’re going to Arizona. Well, I find that questionable! Naïve and questionable!”

She draws in deep breath, holds it, then releases it.

“I believe you’re wrong,” he tells her quietly. “I have to go to Arizona. That’s where the answer lies. It’s not naïve. It isn’t questionable. It’s true.”

July 26
^th
, Robert picks up John at JFK. He has talked his brother into going to Arizona with him on the dig.

John has been drinking before the flight as well as during it. Why didn’t the old bastard ask me first? He says truculently when Robert tells him what the Indian told his father.

“If he said one of us was coming,” John says. “Why did Pop choose you? I’m the one who went with him on digs.”

“John, what’s the difference now?” Robert asks. “We’re going together, that’s all that matters.”

“Yeah,” John grumbles. He lets it go. “So how’s your girlfriend?” he asks.

“She was my intended,” Robert answers.

“Isn’t she any more?” asks John.

Robert tells him that Cathy is living in Manhattan now. She says it’s because working late hours at ESPA makes it difficult to commute. Actually, he feels it’s because of Arizona.

“She feels that I’m betraying her, I think,” Robert says.

“Are you?” counters John.

“No,” says Robert. “She knows I love her. She knows I want her to go to Arizona with me. She knows I accept her views, her work at ESPA. She knows that Arizona isn’t going to last forever, that when I get back, if her divorce is final, I want to marry her.”

“And is her divorce still in the works?” John asks.

Robert looks glum. “That’s the question,” he says. “She isn’t really telling me.”

Later, at the house, he shows John the items he took from their old house and they start to talk about their past.

Finally, Robert tells him about their Mother’s suicide.

John is taken back but, oddly enough, not that surprised. He never did feel right about the “fall down the staircase” story he’d been told.

Things add up now, he says. Her marriage to a man whose strength of character she so admired. A strength that ultimately proved to be her undoing.

“He never understood her,” John says. “Never even came close. To him, she was an innocent, a virginal beauty. That she had anything at all going on in her head probably never occurred to him.

“When he finally came to terms with what she believed—up ‘til then, I think he relegated it to Sunday morning church activities, he had no idea how totally it permeated her life—he… well, he never did come to terms with her beliefs. He couldn’t. He attacked them instead.

“She tried to live with his criticism, his mental abuse. She never showed anger. Never resisted him. He was too strong, too authoritative. So she turned it in on herself, hid in her room and prayed.” His voice goes bitter. “And got cancer.”

He remembers now—Robert doesn’t—the occasional smell of bourbon on her breath. Obviously, she drank it to numb the pain. He remembers—Robert doesn’t—her asking Robert, when he was three, to put his hands on her stomach “to stop the tummy ache.”

John sighs. “Poor woman,” he says.

Robert looks at his brother, sensing something. “What’s wrong?” he asks.