crashed down upon him.
2
Conrad Yeats Scaled the side of the plateau under the blazing Peruvian sun and looked across the plains of Nazca. The empty, endless desert spread out hundreds of feet below him. He could pick out the gigantic figures of the Condor, Monkey, and Spider etched on the baked expanse that resembled the surface of Mars. The famous Nazca Lines, miles long and thousands of years old, were so enormous that they could be seen only from the air. So could the tiny dust cloud swirling in the distance along the Pan-American Highway. It settled near the van he had parked off to the side. Conrad pulled out his binoculars and focused below. Two military jeeps pulled up to the van and eight armed Peruvian soldiers jumped out to inspect it.
Damn, he thought, how did they know where to find me?
The woman on the opposite line adjusted her backpack and said in a flat French accent, “Trouble, Conrad?”
Conrad glanced at her cynical blue eyes framed by a twenty-four-year-old baby-smooth face. Mercedes, the daughter of a French TV mogul, was his producer on Ancient Riddles of the Universe and helped him scout locations.
“Not yet.” He put the binoculars away. “And it’s Doctor Yeats to you.”
She pouted. Her ponytail swung out the back of her Diamondbacks baseball cap like an irritated thorough- bred’s tail flicking flies. “Doctor Conrad Yeats, world’s greatest expert on megalithic architecture,” she intoned like the B-actor announcer for their show. “Discarded by academia for his brilliant but unorthodox theories about the origins of human civilization.” She paused. “Adored by women the world over.”
“Just the lunatics,” he told her.
Conrad eyed the last ledge beneath the plateau summit. He was stripped to the waist. Strong and muscular, his body had been toughened and tanned from tackling the hills of the world’s geographical and political hot spots. His dark hair was too long, and he had it tied back with a strip of leather. His lean thirty-nine-year-old frame and chiseled features made him look tired and hungry, and he was. Tired of life’s journey, hungry for answers.
It was his quest for the origins of human civilization-the “Mother Culture” which had birthed the world’s most ancient societies-that drove him to the earth’s remote corners. His obsession, a nun once told him, was really his quest for the biological parents who had vanished after his birth. Perhaps, he thought, but at least the ancient Nazcans left him more clues.
Conrad grabbed the ledge overhead and gracefully pulled himself onto the summit of the flat plateau. He reached down, took hold of Mercedes’s dusty hand and pulled her up to the ledge. She fell on top of him, deliberately, and he sprawled on his back. Her playful eyes lingered on his for a moment before she looked over his shoulder and gasped.
The summit was sheered off and leveled with laser-like precision. It was like a giant runway in the sky over the Nazcan desert, and it afforded breathless views of some of the more famous carvings.
Conrad stood up and brushed off the dust while Mercedes relished the view. He hoped she was taking it all in, because her next vista would be from behind bars unless he figured out some way to elude the Peruvians below.
“You have to admit it, Conrad,” she said. “This summit could have been a runway.”
Conrad smiled. She was trying to get a rise out of him. Since the carvings could only be seen from the air, some of his wacky archaeologist rivals had suggested that the ancient Nazcans had machines that could fly, and that the particular mount on which he and Mercedes stood was once a landing strip for alien spaceships. He wouldn’t mind one showing up about now to take him away from Mercedes and the Peruvians. But he needed her. The show was all he had left to fund his research, and she was his only line of credit.
Conrad said, “I suppose it’s not enough for me to suggest that aliens who could travel across the stars probably didn’t need airstrips?”
“No.”
Conrad sighed. It was hard enough for him to contend with the sands of time, foreign governments, and goof-ball theories in his quest for the origins of human civilization without ancient astronauts eroding what little respect he had left in the academic community.
At one time Conrad was a groundbreaking, postmodern archaeologist. His deconstructionist philosophy was that ancient ruins weren’t nearly so important as the information they conveyed about their builders. Such a stand ran against the self-righteous trend toward “preservation” in archaeology, which in Conrad’s mind was code for “tourism” and the dollars it brought. He became a maverick in the press, a source of bitter jealousy among his peers, and a thorn in the side of Near East and South American countries who laid claims to the world’s greatest archaeological treasures.
Then one day he unearthed dozens of Israelite dwellings from the thirteenth century B.C. near Luxor in Egypt that offered the first physical proof for the biblical account of the Exodus. But the official position of the Egyptian government was that their ancient forefathers never used Hebrew slaves to build the pyramids. Moreover, only the Egyptian government had the right to announce discoveries to the media. Conrad didn’t discuss his find with them before talking to the press, thus violating a contract that every archaeologist working in Egypt had to sign before starting a dig. The head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities called him “a stupid, lazy jerk” and banned him forever from Egypt.
Suddenly, the tables had turned, and Conrad the iconoclast had become Conrad the preservationist, demanding international protection for his “slave city.” By the time Egypt allowed camera crews to the site, however, the crumbling foundations of the Israelite dwellings had been bulldozed into oblivion to make way for a military installation. There was nothing left to preserve, only a story nobody believed and a reputation in tatters.
Now he was worse off than ever. Stripped of his stature. Strapped for cash. In the arms of Mercedes and her crazy reality TV show that peddled entertainment, not archaeology, to the masses. He couldn’t go back to Egypt, and soon the same would be said of Peru and Bolivia and a growing number of other countries. Only the hard discovery of humanity’s Mother Culture could rescue him from ancient astronauts and this purgatory of cheap documentaries and even cheaper flings.
Concern clouded Mercedes’s face. “We could blow a whole day just getting a crew up here for your stand- up,” she said, brooding for a moment before her face suddenly brightened. “Much better to stick with an aerial from the Cessna and a voice-over.”
Conrad said, “That kind of defeats the purpose, Mercedes.”
She shot him a quizzical glance. “What are you talking about?”
“I see it’s time we perform a sacred ritual,” he told her, taking her hand. “One that will unleash a revelation.”
Conrad dropped to his knees, pulling her down next to him. Mercedes’s eyes sparkled in expectation. “Do as I do, and behold a great mystery.”
Mercedes leaned next to him.
“Dig your fingers into the dirt.”
They slowly dug their fingers through the hot, black volcanic pebbles into the cool and moist yellow clay beneath.
“This in your script?” she asked. “It’s good.”
“Just rub the clay between your fingers.”
She did, and then lifted a small clump to her nostrils and smelled it, as if to experience some cosmic epiphany.
“There you go,” he told her.
A look of confusion crossed her face. “That’s it?”
