"Yes, it was recorded in the map of the heavens on the ceiling of the Colorado chamber," explained Max. "I haven't deciphered the entire narrative yet, but it seems that not one, but two comets swept in from the far outer solar system and caused worldwide calamity."

"Are you sure they weren't asteroids? I'm no astronomer, but I've never heard of comets...o...b..ting in parallel."

"The celestial map showed two objects with long tails traveling side by side that collide with the earth."

Yaeger lowered his hand and petted the dog as he spoke. "Two comets striking at the same time. Depending on their size, they must have caused a huge convulsion."

"Sorry, Hiram," said Max, "I didn't mean to mislead you. Only one of the comets. .h.i.t the earth. The other circled past the sun and disappeared into deep s.p.a.ce."

"Did the star map indicate where the comet fell?"

Max nodded her head. "The depiction of the impact site indicated Canada, probably somewhere in the Hudson Bay area."

"I'm proud of you, Max." Yeager had lifted the ba.s.set hound onto his lap, where it promptly fell asleep. "You'd make a cla.s.sic detective."

"Solving an ordinary people crime would be mere child's play for me," Max said loftily.

"All right, we have a comet crashing to the earth in a Canadian province about 7000 B.C. that caused worldwide destruction."

"Only the first act. The meat of the story comes later, with the description of the people and their civilization that existed before the cataclysm and the aftermath. Most all were annihilated. The pitiful few who survived, too weakened to rebuild their empire, saw it as their divine mission to wander the world, educate the primitive stone-age inhabitants of the era who endured in remote areas, and build monuments warning of the next cataclysm."

"Why did they expect another threat from s.p.a.ce?"

"From what I can gather, they foresaw the return of the second comet that would finish the job of complete destruction."

Yaeger was nearly speechless. "What you're suggesting, Max, is that there really was a civilization called Atlantis?"

"I didn't say that," Max stated irritably. "I haven't determined what these ancient people called themselves. I do know that they only vaguely resembled the tale pa.s.sed down from Plato, the famed Greek philosopher. His record of a conversation that took place two hundred years before his time, between his ancestor, the great Greek statesman Solon, and an Egyptian priest, is the first written account of a land called Atlantis."

"Everyone knows the legend," said Yaeger, his thoughts spinning into s.p.a.ce. "The priest told of an island continent larger than Australia that rose in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean west of the Pillars of Hercules, or the Strait of Gibraltar, as we know it today. Several thousand years ago, it was destroyed and sank beneath the sea after a great upheaval, and vanished. A riddle that has puzzled believers, and is scoffed at by historians to this day. Personally, I tend to agree with historians that Atlantis is nothing more than an early saga of science fiction."

"Perhaps it was not a total fabrication after all."

Yaeger stared at Max, his eyebrows pinched. "There is absolutely no geological basis for a lost continent to have disappeared in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean nine thousand years ago. It never existed. Certainly not between North Africa and the Caribbean. It's now generally accepted that the legend is linked to a catastrophic earthquake and flood caused by a volcanic eruption that took place on the island of Thera, or Santorini as it is known today, and wiped out the great Minoan civilization on Crete."

"So you think Plato's portrait of Atlantis, in his works Critias and Timaeus, is an invention."

"Not portrait, Max," Yaeger lectured the computer. "He told the story in dialogue, a popular genre in ancient Greece. The story is not related in the third person by the author, but presented to the reader by two or more narrators, one who questions the other. And, yes, I believe Plato invented Atlantis, knowing with glee that future generations would swallow the con, write a thousand books on the subject, and debate it endlessly."

"You're a hard man, Yaeger," said Max. "I a.s.sume you don't believe in the predictions of Edgar Cayce, the famous psychic."

Yaeger shook his head slowly. "Cayce claimed he saw Atlantis fall and rise in the Caribbean. If an advanced civilization had ever existed in that region, the hundreds of islands would have produced clues. But to date not so much as a potsherd of an ancient culture has been found."

"And the great stone blocks that form an undersea road off Bimini?"

"A geological formation that can be found in several other parts of the seas."

"And the stone columns that were found on the seafloor off Jamaica?"

"It was proven they were barrels of dry concrete that solidified in water after the ship carrying them as cargo sank and the wooden staves eroded away. Face facts, Max. Atlantis is a myth."

"You're an old p.o.o.p, Hiram. You know that?"

"Just telling it like it is," said Yaeger testily. "I prefer not to believe in an ancient advanced civilization that some dreamers believe had rocket ships and garbage disposals."

"Ah," Max said sharply, "there lies the rub. Atlantis was not one vast city populated by Leonardo da Vincis and Thomas Edisons and surrounded by ca.n.a.ls on an island continent, as Plato described it. According to what I'm finding, the ancient people were a league of small seafaring nations who navigated and mapped the entire world four thousand years before the Egyptians raised the pyramids. They conquered the seas. They knew how to use currents, and developed a vast knowledge of astronomy and mathematics that made them master navigators. They developed a chain of coastal city-ports and built a trading empire by mining and transporting mineral ore they transformed into metals, unlike other people of the same millennium who lived at higher elevations, led a nomadic existence, and survived the disaster. The seafarers had the bad luck to be destroyed by the giant tidal waves and were lost without a trace. Whatever remains of their port cities now lies deep underwater and buried beneath a hundred feet of silt."

"You deciphered and collected all that data since yesterday?" asked Yaeger in undisguised astonishment.

"The gra.s.s," Max pontificated, "does not grow under my feet, nor, I might add, do I sit around and wait for my terminal innards to rust."

"Max, you're a virtuoso."

"It's nothing really. After all, it was you who built me."

"You've given me so much to contemplate, I can't digest it all."

"Go home, Hiram. Take your wife and daughters to a movie. Get a good night's sleep while I sizzle my chips. Then, when you sit down in the morning, I'll really have information that will curl your ponytail."

25

AFTER PAT HAD PHOTO-RECORDED the inscriptions and the strange global maps inside the burial chamber, she and Giordino were airlifted to Cape Town, where they met with Rudi Gunn in the hospital soon after his operation. Causing a scene bordering on an uproar, Gunn ignored the orders of the hospital staff and enlisted Giordino to smuggle him on an airplane out of South Africa. Giordino gladly complied, and with Pat's able a.s.sistance sneaked the tough little NUMA director past the doctors and nurses through the utility bas.e.m.e.nt of the hospital and into a limousine, before speeding to the city airport, where a NUMA executive jet was waiting to fly them all back to Washington.

Pitt remained behind with Dr. Hatfield and the Navy SEAL team. Together, they carefully packed the artifacts and directed their airlift by helicopter to a NUMA deep-ocean research ship that had been detoured to St. Paul Island. Hatfield hovered over the mummies, delicately wrapping them in blankets from the ship and carefully arranging them in wooden crates for the journey to his lab at Stanford University for in-depth study.

After the last mummy had been loaded onto the NUMA helicopter, Hatfield accompanied them and the artifacts on the short flight to the ship. Pitt turned and shook hands with Lieutenant Jacobs. "Thank you for your help, Lieutenant, and please thank your men for me. We'd have never done it without you."

"We don't often get an a.s.signment chaperoning old mummies," Jacobs said, smiling. "I'm almost sorry the terrorists didn't try and s.n.a.t.c.h them from us."

"I don't think they were terrorists, in the strict sense of the word."

"A murderer is a murderer by any other name."

"Are you headed back to the States?"

Jacobs nodded. "We've been ordered to escort the bodies of the attackers, so ably dispatched by your friends, to Walter Reed Hospital in D.C. for examination and possible identification."

"Good luck to you," said Pitt.

Jacobs threw a brief salute. "Maybe we'll meet again somewhere."

"If there is a next time, I hope it's on a beach in Tahiti."

Pitt stood in the never-ending drizzle and watched as a Marine Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft hung in the air above the ground, and the Marines climbed on board. He was still standing there when the plane disappeared into a low cloud. He was now the only man on the island.