Black Rain

“By using a scanning electron microscope and other highly precise instruments, we determined that the crystals had been purposefully grown, manufactured and designed with precise geometric lines and a series of tunnels hidden within the quartz lattice. In a sense, the tunnels were a pattern of fiber-optic channels operating on an almost molecular scale, smaller than the smallest of today’s nano-sized creations, and something we could not duplicate with today’s technology. It was honestly mind-boggling,” she added, “and because the pattern showed an intelligent, non-random design, we had to conclude that it had been created by human hands.”

She studied McCarter’s face, she could see that he was following.

“We even considered the possibility that it was a hoax,” she added, “but our investigation ruled it out. The photographs, the chain of custody, the measurements. All of it matched up. The crystals we had in our possession were the same crystals that Martin had found, photographed and brought back from the Amazon in 1926. Which begged the question: what was a primitive tribe of indigenous natives doing with such things in the middle of the Amazon, twenty years before the dawn of the nuclear age, fifty years before microelectronics and fiber optics?”

Now McCarter nodded. It seemed he could understand their curiosity.

“Without an answer, we turned our attention to the rest of Martin’s haul. We made a breakthrough when we studied the golden cradle.”

As she spoke, Danielle recalled McCarter’s sharp eyes studying the photograph of the cradle weeks before. She remembered thinking that he was instinctively looking for more.

“Do you recall the photo I showed you?” she asked.

He nodded.

“That photo covered one quarter of the underside. One panel out of four,” she said. “I have to tell you, from a normal viewing distance the artwork on the panels looks like nothing more than random decoration: dots and scratches and curving lines. But as you saw on the photo, the panel proved to be a distinct star chart. The other three panels, which I didn’t show you, were also star charts. By comparing them with astronomical data we were able to come up with possible explanations as to what location each panel represented.”

“How?” Susan asked.

“The same way sailors navigate at night,” she replied. “You can tell where you are on the globe by where the stars are above you, using their angles above the horizon and in relation to one another. In this case we had data from the planets and where each was positioned in its orbit. The data was like a time code—because each planet moves at a different rate, their positioning relative to one another gives you an approximate date. It is a little more complex than that,” she admitted, “but there are other objects on each panel that helped us narrow down not only location, but time frame.”

They were looking at her skeptically. She wanted them to understand. Now that she was explaining she wanted them to comprehend and to believe. That way they might understand the choices she’d made.

“At its simplest, it’s like this: you look up at the sky and see the sun directly above, you know it is sometime near high noon. If you can see the sun and the moon, and you know the day of the year, you can tell where you are in a longitude and latitude. The same thing with the stars at night. Now, if you look up and you also see Halley’s comet, you know that it is either 1910, 1986 or 2061 or any other year on the 76-year interval in which Halley’s comet returns.

“Add enough objects like that to your map, and include some information on orbital position of the planets, and you can pinpoint exactly when and where you are. That’s what we found on the panels of the cradle.

“In this case the first panel was the southern hemisphere sky chart I showed you, which gave us a winter solstice date, and a latitude of approximately two degrees south of the equator.”

“Right where we are now,” McCarter noted.

“Exactly,” she said. “Only we couldn’t get longitude off this panel, so we had to start searching.”

“What about the other panels?” he asked.

“They were more complex. But based on the positioning of the stars, planets and comets marked on them, we determined the second and third panels to be similar southern hemisphere views, but with two widely disparate dates. The first was August 3114 B.C.; the second dated to December 2012 A.D.”

“The start and end of the Mayan Long Count,” McCarter noted. “The Mayan calendar.”

Danielle nodded. “You know better than I how obsessed the Maya were with the concept of time.”

“With those two dates in particular,” McCarter said. She noticed that his voice had returned to its academic tone, his intellectual curiosity fully engaged.

“Still,” he said. “Many Mayan writings and works of art contain astronomical observations. In most cases depictions of extreme accuracy. It’s not too surprising that you would find something like that on a Mayan artifact. It doesn’t mean it traveled here from the future.”