Black Rain

“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.”

She understood his skepticism. There was something unbalancing about the idea, which created an almost automatic prejudice against it.

“Of course,” she said. “By themselves, simple star charts don’t prove the theory any more than having a calendar for next year proves that you’ve been there already, but we found objects on those panels that could not be seen with the naked eye, not even with a powerful optical telescope. I’m talking about comets in the cold depths of space at the apogee of thousand-year orbits, neutron stars that emit no light, just radio waves and X-rays. The Maya could not have seen these things, Galileo couldn’t see these things. Some of them can only be studied with massive radio telescopes like the dish in Arecibo. Something the native tribes and the Maya obviously did not have.

“One example that made me believe was on the third panel. It displayed the remnants of an exploded star, a supernova in its correct position and magnitude, the light from which did not reach earth until 1959. Don’t forget the cradle had been recovered in the 1920s, and presumably created long before that. If it had been a simple description of where some astronomer of that era had calculated the star would be, then this supernova object would be depicted like all the other stars, but it wasn’t. The icon clearly depicted a star that had exploded. In other words, the design wasn’t based on what someone could predict; it was based on what someone knew as history.”

“And the fourth panel?” Hawker asked.

“A northern hemisphere view,” she said. “The year 3197. We don’t know the significance but one guess is obvious: the time frame from which the expedition was launched.”

The room fell silent, the group awed by the moment. If they were anything like her, their minds were fighting a back-and-forth battle between what the facts told them and what they found believable. It had taken her a long time to accept the possibility. Even as Stuart Gibbs had sent them here, they came with the knowledge that they would most likely find nothing. In fact, a chart of probabilities had been worked out, one that operated something like the Richter scale, with each additional level a full order of magnitude less likely to occur than the one below it. A level 1 result was finding nothing at all, level 2 would be the recovery of relics unrelated to the Martin’s crystals. Levels 3 and 4 described their chances of finding true Mayan artifacts. Level 5 would have meant additional recovery of items like the Martin’s crystals; level 6 would mean they’d found enough additional material to begin reverse engineering a coldfusion device. And level 7, considered to have a likelihood of one chance in ten million, was that they would find the remains of a human who had made the journey back in time.

“I know it sounds crazy,” she said, “but most physicists believe that some form of time displacement is possible. They disagree on how and on how much and whether it would be something that a human could physically survive.”

She looked at the deformed body, wondering if the journey had caused the damage or if that mutated shape was truly what humankind was destined for. “We came to believe that it had been done at least once. We assumed it would be some type of unma

She looked at their faces, McCarter’s in particular. “We decided that at least it was something worth searching for, operating under the theory that it had crashed, or appeared among the natives, who tore it apart, using the incredible things they found as ritual objects.”

“And the cradle and its depictions?” McCarter asked.

“I realize it’s a sort of anthropomorphism to assume others are acting as you would, but every probe we’ve sent into deep space carries a disk of gold, with various information, including greetings and music and a visual description of where earth lies in the solar system. Our guess about the cradle was that these natives found a similar object on whatever had been sent back here—perhaps even something the people who sent it could look for in the ruins of the past to prove that their experiment had worked—and they copied it meticulously.”

“Manhattan Project,” Hawker said.

She nodded. There was nothing more to say. Either they believed or they didn’t. She would let them consider the facts, while she looked for more proof.

She turned and her flashlight picked through the piles of crumbled rock before settling on the far wall. She stepped toward it and the Geiger counter began rattling again. “Are there any other passageways down here?”

“None that I’ve found,” Susan said.

Danielle looked around. She saw nothing to refute that. She took off her backpack and slid out a notebook computer that held the data from Kaufman’s ultrasounds and electro-magnetic ground analysis. She brought up a three-dimensional representation of the cave.