Old Earth Read online

  Old Earth

  Gary Grossman

  Copyright

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008

  New York, NY 10016

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © 2015 by Gary Grossman

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For more information, email [email protected]

  First Diversion Books edition March 2015

  ISBN: 978-1-62681-633-6

  Also by Gary Grossman

  Executive Actions

  Executive Treason

  Executive Command

  Superman: Serial to Cereal

  Saturday Morning TV

  For Vin Di Bona

  You have inspired me my entire professional life and defined the meaning of true friendship.

  But this is not just a gift you’ve given me.

  You’re the author of a never-ending story of caring—for your family, for your friends, for your community, for your personal and professional causes, and for your industry.

  Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

  “Whereof what’s past is prologue…”

  The Tempest, Act 2, Scene 1

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  Principal Contemporary Characters

  LONDON

  Martin Gruber, Voyages magazine publisher

  Colin Kavanaugh, Voyages magazine editor

  Felicia Dunbar, Voyages magazine assistant

  Marvin, man in the park

  Simon Volker, researcher

  Leon, Brown’s Hotel waiter

  Dr. Renee Kritz, Oxford University professor

  NEW HAVEN, CT

  Dr. Quinn McCauley, Yale University paleontologist

  Pete DeMeo, Yale University graduate teaching assistant

  SOUTH DAKOTA

  Dr. Katrina Alpert, University of Cambridge professor

  Anna Chohany, Harvard University graduate student

  Rich Tamburro, University of Michigan graduate student

  Adam Lobel, Penn State University graduate student

  Leslie Cohen, Penn State University graduate student

  Al Jaffe, University of California, Berkeley graduate student

  Tom Trent, Northwestern University graduate student

  Carlos Rodriguez, University of Madrid graduate student

  Jim Kaplan, director, Makoshika State Park

  Franklin, Winston, and Horst, three experts

  CALIFORNIA

  Robert Greene, researcher

  Dr. Marli Bellamy, museum director

  ITALY

  Father Jareth Eccleston, priest

  Lucia Solera, tourist

  Beppe Poppito, Vatican archivist

  FRANCE

  Claude Bovard, spelunker

  Prologue

  Late July 1601

  The countryside

  Le Marche, Italy

  If he had turned right, not left, his life would have been different and history would have told another story. But he was left-handed and without thinking, at a fork in an underground cave system, the thirty-seven year old professor veered to his dominant side.

  Most of his contemporaries regarded caves with utter dread, seeing them as entrances to hell. Not the mathematician, the professor from the University of Pisa. He had heard that the Le Marche region, located in northeast Italy, might provide the perfect laboratory environment to develop his hypothesis that heat has a discrete nature.

  To validate his theories, he needed extremes: the summer heat that baked the Appennini Mountains versus the cooler confines of the caves that were said to lie in the hills.

  The townspeople and priests who lived in the area believed that the rumored caverns near the town of Genga were portals to hell. The professor would get no help from them. So he invited two noblemen friends from Pisa to accompany him.

  Luigi Pino, Roberto Santori, and the professor traveled together reaching Genga on one of the hottest days of an already sweltering summer. For five days they trudged through the hills; exhausting work in heat that couldn’t be quantified yet. But that’s why the professor, as much a scientist as he was a mathematician, was there.

  On the sixth day his friends gave up the quest in favor of eating, and especially drinking, Le Marche’s famed Verdicchio—the luscious floral regional wine renowned for centuries. The professor, now alone, hiked through the beautiful hills and valleys blanketed with white asphodel, cyclamen and orchids.

  Three days later, the professor found hints of an opening to the caverns—a slight stream of cool air that escaped from behind a boulder. It certainly didn’t feel like it was coming from hell.

  He carefully removed a thin glass tube from his satchel and placed it on the ground. It measured the length from his wrist to his elbow and had a bulbous top no wider than the circumference of a small hen’s egg. At various intervals, he’d drawn hash marks, though they didn’t actually stand for any definitive measurement. Not yet.

  Next, he methodically took out a small glass cruet, a cork with a hole bored through the center, and a Verdicchio bottle left over from his first dinner in Le Marche now filled with water. He poured the liquid three fingers high into the cruet and inserted the cork at the top.

  Time for the first test. While slowly counting to sixty, he warmed the tube by rolling it between the palms of his hands. He gently pushed the end through the cork and down into the cruet.

  Water slowly began to rise up the neck. This was not surprising. He had done this much before. Beyond the boulder is where he would truly test his hypothesis.

  He chronicled his experiment in a journal, including a sketch of the apparatus and the high point of the water.

  After carefully wrapping and returning everything to his satchel, with his bare hands he began to dig at the spot where the cooler air flowed to the outside. Dry dirt fell away around the larger obstruction. After thirty exhausting minutes, he’d cleared an opening around the boulder and was able to crawl forward.

  Now he lit a bronze olive oil lamp designed for him by a friend from Firenze—artist and engineer, Bernardo Buontalenti.

  The lamp housed a well that would provide fuel for many hours. Its forward-facing high lip shielded the flame from any breeze.

  The professor strapped his satchel to his feet and crawled past the big rock. He pushed the lamp forward, looking above and ahead, hoping that the opening he had created would widen. It did.

  He wriggled some fifteen body lengths forward and was relieved when he could rise up on all fours. Soon he was able to crouch.

  The air was getting cooler, even damp. He decided to take another reading, repeating the process, warming the tube, turning it over and inserting it through the cork and into the cruet. This time he noted that the liquid only rose to roughly three-quarters its previous height.

  The scientist was pleased. His apparatus affirmed his theory. The warmer it was, the higher the water would rise. The reverse was true with the cold. He was able to gauge temperature.

  Now to venture farther.

  Twenty paces beyond he could walk upright. Another thirty paces, and feeling colder himself, he repeated the experiment. The water rose to only half the height of the first reading. Satisfied, he was ready to return to daylight and warmth, however he was also intrigued by the remarkable rock formations in the cave. He felt compelled to continue. The professor walked for two more minutes. That’s
when he reached the fork.

  He automatically took the left spur. Well into this new tunnel, he heard the echo of his footsteps. The walls had widened well beyond arm’s length. He lit a second oil lamp. His eyes slowly adjusted to the additional light.

  “My God!” he exclaimed. This wasn’t the gate to hell. He felt as if he’d just been allowed to gaze upon heaven itself.

  How could such beauty exist? he thought. What words could describe it? Yet for all the marvels before him, he pressed onward through a grotto so vast that Italy’s most magnificent cathedrals might fit within. There were fanciful crystalline hanging rock formations in brilliant shades of green, blue, yellow and orange that resembled icicles kissing their own reflections rising from the cavern floor.

  He stopped to document his impressions as best he could, describing the glorious world he had entered. The professor wrote about a dark blue lake, undisturbed by rocks that cut through the surface, and a whimsical landscape that seemed shaped by the Almighty himself

  He no longer felt the cold. What lay ahead? With no worry that his lamps would immediately run out, he continued for what seemed an eternity. In some respects it was. For deep in the cavern he saw another passageway that opened into a space more amazing than the last.

  Though he couldn’t have realized it, this was a defining moment in time. His scientific curiosity now controlled his feet. He inched forward, raising the lamp in his left hand high overhead.

  He was a brilliant man, but suddenly he felt small, insignificant. He’d come to the cave to test his heat doctrine suppositions. Now, he struggled for the meaning of things far greater.

  This day changed the course of his research. The experience led him to raise infinite questions about how and why things occurred, not only underground, but high above.

  The professor from Pisa returned with readings from his thermoscope which many would credit him for inventing. But there was much more at work in his mind and his mind’s eye; secrets that set the course for what would become a challenging and contentious life for Galileo Galilei.

  PART ONE

  One

  London, England

  Present day

  Early spring

  “Secretum,” the old man declared.

  Martin Gruber lived a life of secrecy, following the path of his predecessor and those in the same position generations and centuries before. Now, after four decades, it was close to the time to pass the secrets on and relinquish the tremendous responsibility.

  “Secretum,” he stated again.

  Colin Kavanaugh listened as he knew he should. This lecture, like all of Gruber’s, was conveyed with deliberate intent behind closed doors in the headquarters of Voyages, the most well-respected travel magazine in the world. Gruber didn’t pause for comment or debate. It was always a diatribe, covering old ground and revealing new ideas. Every word had meaning, even those unsaid between the ellipses.

  “Trust no one. Know everything. Have eyes and ears around the world. Put nothing in writing—ever. But read into everything. Follow the leads, yet never leave tracks. Don’t allow anyone into your world, but enter everyone else’s.”

  The octogenarian publisher was close to believing that Kavanaugh would make a worthy heir apparent. He was a trusted disciple, though egocentric. Perhaps, Gruber thought, that’s what the times demanded.

  “Be guided by the undying belief that secretum is what you must live by. Secrecy. Faithfully, unquestioningly, and with true devotion of purpose. Your life and your life’s work will be shrouded in secrecy.”

  “Yes, sir, I understand.” Kavanaugh relished the day he’d succeed the old man.

  “But enough of my pontificating,” Gruber said, changing both the subject and mood. “How about lunch?”

  “I was hoping you’d ask.”

  “Good. Today, I have an exquisite mousse foie gràs paired with a 2010 Côte de Brouilly Gamay.”

  “From our May issue,” Kavanaugh remarked.

  “Yes indeed. Wonderful article and the winery was most appreciative. They sent us a case. I’ve been anxious to try it with you.”

  Gruber pressed a button on his phone. “Ms. Dunbar, we’re ready. You may send in our delights.”

  “Certainly, Mr. Gruber.”

  The voice was obedient and respectful. Kavanaugh had never heard anything but proper business etiquette from Gruber’s secretary. Felicia Dunbar was efficient, but not someone he could ultimately live with after he transitioned into the job. Of course, he kept that to himself.

  Such was the world that would soon be Colin Kavanaugh’s. Aristocratic, formal, civilized. He was eager to publicly helm Voyages, reinventing the print and online magazine for younger travel demos. More than that, he believed he was ready to take on the additional burden. The private job. The one that demanded age-old secretum.

  • • •

  Martin Gruber grew up in England, raised to honor civility, duty, and religion. He would be buried in his freshly pressed Brooks Brothers three-piece suit, his Oxford shirt crisply starched, and his hand-made Stefano Bemer shoes polished to a mirror-like finish. All his earthly needs would be put in order. What he didn’t arrange ahead of time, Felicia Dunbar would complete.

  The doctors told him he had two to three months. Gruber took out his pocket watch, wound it in the company of the younger editor of Voyages, believing that his physicians didn’t know a damned thing.

  His thin gray hair and moustache were accented by large black glasses. Although he’d lost a few inches off his former five feet ten inch self, he never added them to his thirty-two inch waist. On the outside Martin Gruber did everything possible to appear fit. Inside, the cancer was progressing. So, if it were a matter of only months, Gruber was going to listen to his cravings because the doctors had nothing interesting to tell him.

  “I shall finally indulge in all temptations and excesses we’ve recommended for our readers, my boy.”

  Kavanaugh was hardly a boy. Moreover, at forty-four, he was fully nine years older than Gruber was when he assumed the mantle as publisher and all that went with it.

  Colin Kavanaugh, like Martin Gruber, had studied at King’s College in London, and through a religion and philosophy professor, was encouraged to take a special off-campus curriculum taught by teachers from the Pontifical Scots College in Rome. The lessons were not in the catalogue or even sanctioned by the college. Rather, they were quietly offered on an invitation-only basis at a retreat in Bracciano, a small town thirty kilometers northwest of Rome.

  The school itself was founded December 5, 1600 by Pope Clement VIII, principally to provide religious education to young Scotsmen, who could not receive a Catholic education because of the laws against Catholics at home. Other than the two times it was shut down—when the French invaded Rome in 1798 and during World War II—it has remained a well-respected institution, renowned for sending priests to Scotland.

  However, the special, private program, which carried no course credit or affiliation, provided open-air education in a very closed environment. Secretum. It offered a way to screen for potential candidates who could answer a most important calling.

  Colin Kavanaugh went to the head of the class. He was diligent, determined, and above all else, someone who exhibited true courage of his convictions. It brought him to the attention of people he’d never met.

  Now twenty-two years later, he sat with his boss and mentor, enduring what he hoped would be one of the last of Gruber’s harangues and sharing one of the last of his boring meals.

  Kavanaugh was six feet tall, bald, trim, and more in tune with today than Gruber’s fascination with antiquity. Of course, that would change, too. As publisher, he would have to adjust his habits somewhat, review the worthiness of his friends, and take his obligations to heart. Colin Kavanaugh was still learning what was important and what wasn’t, what was worthy of further review and what was destined for the shredder. There was so much to figure out. But he was hungry to take over. Kavanaugh was deter
mined to further contemporize and upgrade the publication and leave Condé Nast Traveler, National Geographic Traveler and Food and Wine irrelevant in the marketplace. He had the guts and intellect to do it. He loved traveling, spoke four languages, and summered in Rome, wrapping himself in the traditions and rituals.

  Indeed, the Catholic Church exerted a strong influence over Kavanaugh. Early on, his mother had hoped he would become a priest. His father knew otherwise. Colin was devout on Sundays, but he did love his Saturday nights. His annual visits to Rome brought him rewards of both.

  However, now Colin Kavanaugh was thinking less of his ongoing affairs and more about the powerful job he would inherit. His mind went back eighteen months to when Martin Gruber told him his plan.

  “So, what do you think, my boy?” Gruber had asked across the desk.

  “Like I’ve been hand-picked by God for the best job.”

  He could still hear Gruber’s laugh. It was a hearty, big laugh. Then it abruptly stopped. With chilling authority came a declaration that Colin Kavanaugh only recently understood.

  “Oh, not by God. And it’s far from the best job. But make no mistake, you should consider it the most important job in the world.”

  Two

  Spring 1755

  Altay Mountains

  Southern Siberia, Russia

  Close to Russia’s border with Mongolia, China, and Kazakhstan, a rock face rises thirty meters above the Anuy River. This by itself is not unusual. But when the light hits the base correctly, an opening to a cave becomes visible. Today, it is known as Denisova. It contains more history than has ever been reported.

  The name is owed to a hermit who lived there in the eighteenth century. Dionisij, or the more anglicized Denis, was something of a character. He rarely came out of the shadows, but those who saw him would never forget. He had long, scraggly hair and a filthy, knotted beard. The river provided his food supply, his bath and his toilet, though he fished more than he bathed.