Origin, page 21
Lynn leant down to the man who had been about to oversee their torture and death. ‘Is there a way out of here?’ she asked. ‘Can you get us out?’
‘And just why would I do that?’ Steinberg scoffed.
Adams looked at Lynn, and then back to Steinberg. ‘What exactly do you know about Jacobs’ plans?’
It took no more than a few minutes to outline what Jacobs had told them, and the effect on Steinberg was electric.
‘The bastard!’ he muttered. ‘How can he hope to get away with it?’
‘He already is getting away with it,’ Adams reminded him. ‘He’ll be halfway to Geneva by now.’ In a way, Adams was surprised by Steinberg’s reaction. After all, the man had made a living out of torturing innocent people. But global genocide was a different thing altogether, especially if you just found out that you were going to be one of the unfortunate victims.
Steinberg just sat there, shaking his head in disbelief. ‘I knew about the alien research of course but I had no idea we had opened up any sort of contact with them. I just can’t believe it, I—’
‘Doctor,’ Adams interjected forcefully, trying to get Steinberg’s attention back on track. ‘We need to get out of here, and to CERN. Can you help us?’
Eventually, Steinberg looked up and met Adams’ gaze. ‘There might be a way,’ he said earnestly.
Ten minutes later, Steinberg was out of the wheelchair, and they were walking with the doctor down another concrete corridor, the sound of their footsteps echoing in the concrete space.
‘Why is it so deserted down here?’ Lynn asked.
‘This floor is classified A1 Ultra,’ Steinberg told her. ‘Not that many people are authorized to be here, and a lot of those who are have recently been shipped off somewhere – I guess to CERN, from what you’ve just told me. There’s only a skeleton staff remaining here now.’
‘What goes on down here?’ Adams asked next.
‘What you would probably classify as “alien” research,’ Steinberg admitted. ‘It is here that we develop related projects directly connected with the technology discovered at the Roswell crash site. This entire floor is unknown to the majority of the people working here at Area 51. I don’t know many details myself, I just run the interrogations. We have our base here because this is the most secure level. The elevators normally stop on the floor above unless you have a special access key.’
Lynn nodded, and they walked on in silence for a few more moments, following Steinberg’s directions. He had a final destination in mind but was withholding it for fear of being executed if he revealed it too early, as his captors would then have no further need of him.
‘Careful here,’ Steinberg told them as they turned into another long, concrete corridor. ‘There’s a laboratory down here. Should be empty now but you never know.’
They were silent until they reached the laboratory door, but Lynn’s curiosity was piqued. ‘What do they do in there?’
Steinberg smiled at her. ‘That is where they keep the bodies,’ he whispered.
‘The bodies?’ Lynn asked for both of them. ‘Which bodies?’
‘The original pilot of the craft that crashed in nineteen forty-seven,’ he told them proudly. ‘Perfectly preserved, despite full autopsies having taken place several times over the years.’
‘And who else?’ Adams asked.
‘Oh, various other bodies of questionable origin that have been found over the years.’
‘Like the one my team found in Antarctica?’ Lynn asked, and Steinberg nodded his head. ‘You mean there have been others?’
Steinberg smiled. ‘Of course there have,’ he said as if to a small child. ‘Would you like to see?’
Adams knew it was not a wise move. Things were happening too quickly in Geneva, the machine at CERN too near becoming operational to waste time on what amounted to no more than scientific curiosity. And yet he knew that to Lynn it was more than that – the body her team had discovered in the ice had led to their execution, and she felt it was her duty to them to follow the discovery to the end of the line. She owed them that much.
And Adams himself had to admit that he was more than a little interested to take a look in the room himself. And anything that they learnt there could be useful when it came time to confront Jacobs and his men in Geneva.
But it was a risk. Who knew if it even contained what Steinberg said it did? Maybe the doctor had tricked them and led them straight to the main guard post. Adams couldn’t be sure if Steinberg had really believed the story about Jacobs, or if he had just pretended in order to lead them into a trap.
But Adams had examined Steinberg’s physical signs as he spoke – his pallor, his heart rate, his respiration, his perspiration – and, save for the expected display of nervousness that would naturally come from being escorted at gunpoint, it seemed that he was telling the truth, as far as Adams could tell. He had confidence in his ability to read such things, and so finally agreed for the small party to enter the room.
‘Now I don’t know if there will be anybody inside,’ Steinberg told them honestly. ‘So we need to be careful.’
Adams nodded, withdrawing his pistol as he moved into position to the side of the door. Steinberg leant forward, pressing his palm against a security panel, which then flashed on to his retina. The door unlocked, and swung open.
Adams nodded to Lynn, who entered the room one step behind Steinberg.
‘Andrew!’ Adams heard Steinberg say in a friendly tone. ‘I thought you’d have gone with the rest of them.’
‘Willie!’ Adams heard an older man exclaim. ‘What are you doing over here?’
In a flash, Adams rounded the door frame and entered the room, gun levelled at the scientist before him, no more than twenty paces away.
The look on the man’s face indicated that he wasn’t going to shout or move, as he was more or less rooted to the spot in shock.
Adams ran towards him, forced him to the floor and cuffed him with plasticuffs he had taken from the guards back in the interrogation area. At the same time, he scanned the rest of the room for more people but found none. What he did see was more than interesting, though, and as he hauled Andrew back to his feet, he continued his inspection of the laboratory.
But it was more of a morgue than a laboratory, he soon saw. The room was a large metallic cylinder, with dozens of mortuary drawers cut into the walls. At the head of the room, in pride of place, was a tank filled with fluid, a body suspended within.
Adams and Lynn both saw it at the same time and their jaws dropped.
Steinberg saw their expressions and smiled. ‘Mr Adams, Dr Edwards,’ he said formally, ‘please let me introduce you to Exhibit 1A, the pilot of the Roswell spacecraft.’
Lynn walked with Steinberg towards the tank, while Adams pushed the other man – whose name tag read ‘Professor A. Travers’ – alongside them.
They stopped at the perspex unit, eyes wide. Lynn was surprised to see that the body bore no resemblance at all to the one they had found in the ice, save for having the normal complement of arms and legs.
The 40,000-year-old body in the Antarctic could have been buried there only last week, such was its similarity to modern-day humans, but the dead body she was looking at now literally screamed ‘alien’.
The body was small, its limbs short and slim, its stomach slightly distended so that it looked not unlike a child suffering from famine. But the skull was large, much larger than a modern human’s, and the eyes were also oversized, set into deep pits below the enlarged cranium. The face itself was small like the body, the mouth even smaller, almost as though evolution was in the process of eradicating it altogether. But the circumference of the brain case must have been twice that of a man’s, indicating great intelligence.
Adams was struck by how similar the body appeared to popular images of such creatures – large head and eyes, small child-like body. The skin had a strange, grey pallor, as if the species had not seen the sun in millennia, which perhaps explained why ‘eye witness’ evidence had resulted in such beings being labelled ‘Greys’ by the UFO press.
‘Which planet does it come from?’ Lynn asked with unbridled excitement, turning first to Steinberg, and then to Travers. ‘Is it from the same place as the body we found?’
Steinberg and Travers exchanged looks, and then Travers turned to Lynn, nodding his head. ‘Of course it is,’ he said, slightly confused.
‘Why “of course”?’ she asked immediately.
‘Because both this body and the body you discovered in the Antarctic are from the same species – Homo sapiens.’
He saw the look of utter shock on her face, and decided to confirm his statement.
‘They are both human.’
19
‘HUMAN?’ ADAMS ASKED, breaking the silence that had hung in the air for several seconds. ‘How in the hell is that thing human?’
‘Oh, it’s human all right,’ Travers said. ‘It’s just undergone a very specific form of evolution for the past fourteen thousand years or so.’
Adams knew they were pressed for time but he felt the need to know more, and knew Lynn would too.
‘I think you’d better explain that,’ he said.
Travers thought for a second or two, then looked at the pistol in Adams’ hand still aimed at him, and nodded curtly. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Follow me.’
They followed the professor to one of the mortuary drawers, which he pulled open. Lynn gasped as she saw the body on the metal slab, the one Tommy Devane had stumbled upon in Antarctica.
‘I’ll try and make this as simple as I can,’ Travers said. He pointed at the body. ‘This body that you found was part of the group of Homo sapiens that inhabited the earth from as early as two hundred thousand years ago, a highly advanced people who were expert in science and mathematics.’
‘Two hundred thousand years ago?’ Lynn asked. ‘Highly advanced?’
Travers nodded his head again. ‘Yes, and don’t ask me how they evolved, as they don’t even know themselves. One moment the earth had other Homo species, including ergastor, heidelbergensis, rudolfensis, habilis, neanderthalensis, among others, and the next, we had Homo sapiens sapiens, fully formed not only physically but also mentally. We’ve known for some time that anatomically modern humans existed as long ago as two hundred thousand years. But we had no idea that mentally advanced human beings inhabited the earth so long ago. There seems to have been an entire era of high human advancement, stretching far into pre-history.’
‘So if we accept this,’ Lynn said, ‘then what happened to this ancient civilization?’
‘Destroyed,’ Travers said simply. ‘Or at least, almost destroyed. People, buildings, vehicles, entire cities, lost forever.’
‘But how?’ Adams asked.
Travers held up a hand. ‘Before we get into that, we need to look at how human society was before the destruction. This will help you understand what happened.’
Both Adams and Lynn, along with a seemingly fascinated Steinberg, looked at him expectantly, urging him to continue.
‘As technology moved on and humans became more and more advanced, the world was much the same as it is today – various nation states looking after their own citizens while vying for power with each other. War followed war, followed war, until democracy started to spread, and federal blocks of like-minded nations joined forces. After several false starts – remember that this process took thousands of years – a true world government emerged, bringing peace to the earth.
‘But what occurred then was that society started to split down the middle, the rich became richer and the poor became poorer, until there were essentially two tiers. The “upper” tier, if you will, were known as the “Anunnaki”, which translates as “those who from heaven came to earth”, while the lower, much larger tier, was known as the “Arkashians”, or the “Others”, and they essentially became slaves to the Anunnaki. The Arkashians spread to the far corners of the world, living mostly unsophisticated lives, while the Anunnaki created one supreme city-state, located off the coast of what is now the Atlantic Ocean.’
‘Atlantis?’ Adams asked with disbelief.
‘Yes, Mr Adams,’ Travers confirmed. ‘There was indeed such a place, and it was the single, most highly advanced centre of civilization ever seen on the planet, before or since.’
‘So if these events were recounted for future generations, then presumably there were survivors of whatever disaster befell them?’ Lynn asked.
Travers grunted. ‘There are always survivors,’ he said. ‘And in this case, there were two sets, which brings us nicely on to the next part of our story. Fourteen thousand years ago, the world saw the flood that has found its way into tales of every single civilization and religion ever since. But it really happened, and wiped out an estimated ninety-five per cent of the world’s life forms current at that time.’
Lynn gasped. ‘A meteor?’ She knew NASA had looked into various ways such a flood could occur and she had read the research. One of the most likely explanations was that if a large meteor hit the earth in an oceanic area, the impact would create a mega-tsunami that would completely change the face of the planet.
Travers shook his head. ‘No, although the effect was much the same. At the time, there was a huge rocky island, just off the African coast – a little like the Canaries, only much larger. It had a cliff on one side, five hundred metres high, essentially a waterside mountain, that eventually just collapsed. Possibly seismic activity was the cause, but a huge chunk of this cliff just basically sloughed off and crashed into the sea. We’re talking about millions of tons of rock slipping straight down towards the ocean floor, the resulting force of which created a tidal wave two miles high that sped across the Atlantic and completely destroyed the eastern seaboard of what is now the United States of America.’
‘And Atlantis,’ Adams added.
‘In a way,’ Travers offered non-commitally. ‘But it didn’t end there, as the incredible force of the impact threw up billions of tons of debris into the atmosphere, which then inflamed and landed all over the planet, causing vast devastation by forest fires, which in turn caused carbon dioxide gases to clog up the atmosphere, until there was a nuclear winter that helped stamp out much of what life remained.’
‘How do you know all this?’ Lynn asked.
‘I’m the foremost expert on the Anunnaki,’ Travers answered. ‘I’ve been working with them for years, I’m an expert on their history.’
‘Working with them?’ Steinberg asked suspiciously.
Travers smiled. ‘I’m in communication with them,’ he answered. ‘There is a device I use, one that enables me to link telepathically to the Anunnaki, and I’ve been piecing together their entire history – as it’s related by them, at any rate.’
Adams nodded his head, not surprised that there was more than one communications box. He was sure it would be a device identical to the one that Jacobs must have been using back at his house in Mason Neck.
A sudden thought entered his head. ‘Where is it?’ he asked. ‘The box?’ If it was in the room, could the Anunnaki be reading their thoughts right now?
‘Relax,’ Travers said calmly. ‘It’s in another room entirely. We have a research library dedicated to learning and preserving their history and culture, and it’s based there. We use it regularly, and they are only too happy to provide answers to our questions. A remarkable people, really,’ he said with considerable respect.
‘Going back to the flood,’ Lynn said to Travers, directing the conversation back to the matter at hand. ‘Who survived?’
‘The Anunnaki, of course,’ Travers informed her. ‘They were aware of the possibility of the mountain caving into the sea long before it happened, but despite their technical expertise they could find no way of averting the catastrophe. Instead, they put their resources into developing their city-state of Atlantis into a spacecraft.’
‘They what?’ Adams asked, surprised. ‘They made a city into a spaceship?’
‘They were already very advanced in terms of space travel,’ Travers explained. ‘They had explored every planet in the solar system, and were in the middle of developing technologies that would allow intergalactic travel. And think about Plato’s description of the city of Atlantis – the central island surrounded by concentric rings, joined by bridges. It’s a spacecraft, plain and simple. The central island was the actual craft, and the rings – spinning once the craft was airborne – helped to create artificial gravity for their long voyage. And then the whole thing simply lifted up and blasted away into space.’
Lynn considered the matter. ‘At least that explains why Atlantis was never found,’ she said. ‘Because it’s no longer on earth at all.’
Travers smiled. ‘Exactly right,’ he confirmed. ‘The Anunnaki escaped the devastating flood by venturing up into space in Atlantis itself.’
Adams looked at a digital clock embedded into the laboratory wall and turned to the others. ‘Talking about making an escape, I think it’s time we started moving.’
Steinberg looked up at the clock and nodded his head in agreement. ‘Yes, I think you’re right.’ He turned to Travers and gave him a brief rundown of what was going on, and Jacobs’ plan for the earth’s population. ‘I’m taking them down to the Roosevelt Exit,’ he explained. ‘You should come with us.’
Travers stared at the tank containing the Anunnaki’s body for several long moments before turning back. ‘Yes. Of course I’ll come. There are still some things I need to explain.’
Steinberg smiled and turned to Adams and Lynn. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘let’s go. We’re still about a mile away from the exit.’
Moments later they were once more walking the deserted corridors of Level 36, footsteps again echoing off the concrete as they passed cavernous storerooms and hi-tech laboratories.
‘So what happened after the flood?’ Adams asked, still curious about the story Travers had so far told them.
‘Well, most of the Arkashians were wiped out,’ Travers continued, seemingly glad to be back in the role of educator; Adams supposed it kept his mind off their precarious situation. ‘But small pockets survived around the world, and we are their direct descendants. The most successful survivors were those that converged in a narrow area of the Middle East, the conditions there allowing them to develop into the agrarian cultures of Sumer, Babylon and Egypt.’
