She read the paragraphs again, her eyes tearing, her head making little, involuntary no-no motions. He had it all wrong! The Divine Masters hadn’t been like that, couldn’t have been like that at all! He was misinterpreting the data; he had to be!
No matter. Pastor Blaine would know what to do. He always did. He never admitted it, but she was certain he was somehow inspired by the Masters themselves, as they orbited the Earth in their invisible mother ships, watching over their people below.
She completed her final copy and uploaded it to the pastor’s address. Then she checked through David’s files once more, this time—with a painful curiosity that burned like the picking of an old scab—looking for any more of those saved vid recordings or other files that might have been sent by that woman.
She was almost disappointed when she failed to find any more.
TEN
FRIDAY, 25 APRIL 2042
Institute for Exoarcheological
Studies
Chicago, Illinois
1610 hours CDT
There were no marching crowds today, for a change, no ancient-astronut mobs calling for revelation, no church groups denouncing him as inspired by Satan. Traffic flowed along Lake Shore Drive, building toward the afternoon rush, and, for once, Chicago was ignoring him.
It was still a little startling to David to stand at his office window, looking past Soldier’s Field and the Adler Planetarium causeway out to the cold, flat, gray horizon of Lake Michigan, and realize that he’d actually been out there, on the surface of the Moon. He was now one of that handful of men and women who’d stood on the surface of three separate planetary bodies. A most exclusive club indeed.
And the place to which he’d returned, the real world of work and politics and deadlines, seemed so…ordinary.
“David?” Teri called from his desk. “Is something wrong?”
Fixing a smile in place, he turned. “No. Not a thing. Just woolgathering.”
She smiled and stroked the copy, cast in resin, of one of the artifacts he’d brought back from Picard. “Howard agrees completely with your analysis of P-3, right down the list, word for word. Congratulations!”
“Good,” he replied absently. “Uh, very good. Sorry. I just wish I had a little more confidence in that thing.”
“That thing” was the Expert System Program running in the Institute’s local network, one of the new AIs that offered encyclopedic knowledge within its expert purview, combined with an almost human flexibility and reasoning power.
Almost human.
Privately, he’d named this one after Howard Vyse, the nineteenth-century adventurer and soldier of fortune who’d done so much damage to the science of archeology in his ham-fisted and outright criminal explorations of the three main pyramids at the Giza Complex, in Egypt. Vyse, it was now nearly certain, had perpetrated several incredible hoaxes in order to establish that the Great Pyramids had been built as tombs by three particular Fourth Dynasty pharaohs—Khufu, Khephren, and Menkaure—all three within a period of eighty years, from about 2550 to 2470 B.C. So much of the modern understanding of history and historical timetables had been built upon Vyse’s claims, so much professional literature published, so many reputations established and doctorates awarded and names secured, that even now, two centuries later, there were firmly entrenched adherents to the “traditional” views of Egyptology. Vyse might have been a charlatan, the conservatives insisted, but he was still right. His conclusions were valid even if his proofs were faked. To claim otherwise would unravel two centuries of carefully interwoven dates and meticulously constructed historical comprehension.
By calling the Institute’s archeological ESP Howard, David reminded himself not to take what it said as gospel.
“I still don’t understand why you’re so paranoid about expert systems,” Teri said with a laugh. “They give us access to more information than we could absorb in a decade or three of solid study, and without the human politics you’re always railing about.” She patted the desk’s open display screen fondly. “Howard wouldn’t lie to us! The way you talk, you’d think we had your friend Kettering locked up in here!”
David snorted. Craig Kettering was a professional rival—an enemy, really—who’d been on the expedition to Mars. They’d parted ways when Kettering had gone along with the UN plan to hush up the Cydonian findings. Now that they were back on Earth, the man was happily publishing with the data David had made available, acting as though nothing at all had happened between them.
“Actually,” he said, “I think my problem is that Howard isn’t political enough. He agrees with everything I say, and that’s scary.”