we were no longer in mortal peril.
Everyone but Naomi, that is. She huddled against Lavon, and her eyes darted back and forth like a panicked animal.
I couldn’t help but laugh.
I reached down to help her up, but she didn’t budge. Instead, she squeezed Lavon even tighter and stared into his eyes with an imploring, questioning gaze.
“Where are we?” she asked.
Lavon smiled. “We’re back, in our country, as we promised.”
To no one’s surprise, she remained doubtful, although we had clearly gone
“How did we get here? Where are the soldiers?”
I didn’t wait for his answer. However Lavon chose to explain it, his response couldn’t be quick.
Instead, I slid through the open door and continued into the changing room. There, I rummaged through the kit I had left behind and found five bottles of water, a handful of MREs, and a dozen energy bars.
When I returned to the chamber, I could see that despite Naomi’s remaining uncertainty, Lavon had at least managed to reassure her that we had no intention of abandoning her to the Romans or to Herod’s goons. Sharon’s relaxed attitude also bolstered her confidence that nothing untoward would happen.
I passed around the MREs, and we attacked the food like ravenous wolves; likewise, we drained the water in seconds. Unlike the rest of our group, though, Naomi did not cast her bottle aside after finishing it. Instead, she slowly rotated it, puzzled by the odd transparent material.
Lavon tried to explain, but quickly discovered how much background information we take for granted.
And that wasn’t her only worry.
“This writing: these are Roman letters.”
Though she couldn’t read, she recognized the script, and her tone reflected a concern that perhaps we had not escaped trouble after all.
Lavon took the bottle and examined the label. “Hydro-max Pure Spring Water,” he deadpanned.
Seriously, it said that.
We all laughed, and between our amusement and the wildly varying typefaces on the bottle, Lavon managed to convince her that we had left our pursuers far behind.
To make things even more interesting for her, I reached into my bag and pulled out another surprise.
I handed her a flashlight, and Lavon directed her to press the large yellow on-switch.
She fumbled it in sudden alarm the first time, but after she saw us laugh, she picked it back up and switched it on and off, over and over again. As she did so, her expression shifted from a tentative apprehension to open delight.
“Light, without fire,” Lavon explained. “Did I not promise that if you helped us, you would see wonders beyond your imagination?”
She barely acknowledged his reply. Instead, she continued to flip the switch on and off and to dance the beam across the room. The effect was like watching a small child who had just unwrapped the hottest new toy.
This would be fun.
A few seconds later, Naomi focused the light on me, with a huge, playful smile on her face.
“Welcome to our world,” I said. “And to America, a magnificent country, where the food is fat free but the people are not.”
Lavon flashed his best smile as he translated, though he skipped the last part. Some things just couldn’t be explained.
I was certain she would adapt over time. I could only hope that she would have a more peaceful experience in our country than we had had in hers.
***
And that brought us back to our unfinished business.
Juliet had finally overcome the initial shock of seeing her husband, once again alive and well, and she glanced around the room to assess us more carefully.
Her head count came up two short.
“Where are Ray and Scott?” she asked.
“Dead,” I replied, without any real emotion in my voice. “It’s a long story.”
She gasped, although she couldn’t have been completely surprised at the news. When we failed to return after a brief interval, she had to have suspected that our endeavor had run into unexpected difficulties, if not outright disaster.
After a moment’s silence, her husband whispered something into her ear. Whatever he said was instantly reassuring; for she recovered her composure and gestured toward Naomi for the first time.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“She helped us,” said Lavon. “It will take some time to explain how.”
***
The Professor spent the next half hour outlining the basics of our excursion. Finally, though, the rest of us grew impatient. The moment of truth had arrived.
Juliet led us into the conference room, and after a brief pause for Naomi to grow comfortable with wall- mounted light switches and overhead projectors, we all settled into the chairs closest to the drop-down screen.
By that point, I wasn’t sure who was more nervous. Although Naomi might not have understood the intricacies of how we commanded light to appear on a whim, she also had no conception of the infinitely more transcendent mystery that Bryson’s device was about to reveal.
I, for one, felt a veritable swarm of butterflies emerge from their cocoons in my stomach as Juliet booted up the computer. From the others’ expressions, I could see that they did as well.
The screen displayed the familiar blue backdrop while the Professor hooked his camera to the machine. When he finished, he glanced around the room and we all took a deep breath.
“Here we go,” he said.
Then he pressed ‘play.’
As with his earlier venture, the screen first displayed only the date and time:
Bryson started to explain that the camera’s date couldn’t be set before the year 1950, but we had already gotten the idea: Sunday, April 15, of the year 29 AD, at two-thirty in the morning.
A few seconds later, we could begin to make out the tomb in the full moonlight. A Temple guardsman, dressed in full uniform with his right hand resting on the hilt of his sword, stood on each side of the entrance.
“That’s the tomb?” exclaimed Juliet.
We all mumbled our concurrence without taking our eyes off the screen. The guards weren’t moving around much, though it was obvious that neither man was asleep.
“Where did you get caught?” I asked Bryson.
“I tried to sneak up behind the location where I placed the camera,” he said, admitting for the first time what we had suspected: that his real goal had been to witness the event in person.
“But I had the bad luck to run into the spot where the relief crew was taking a break,” he continued.
Personally, I thought he had become disoriented in the twists and turns of the quarry’s many trails, but whatever had really transpired, it was no longer our primary concern.
We all kept our full attention focused on the image on the screen, though for nearly an hour, very little happened.
The guards appeared to chat back and forth — undoubtedly complaining, like soldiers everywhere, about why
But their voices were too low and the camera too far away for the microphone to pick up enough details for Naomi to translate.
