“this, mostly. You know all about the Voyager project, of course.”
Epstein nodded. “NASA’s most shining decade and a bit,” he said. “Who the hell wouldn’t know about it?”
“And you know about the gold record, of course.”
Epstein nodded again. “Mmm. Carl Sagan’s greatest hits. Made up a record of music and greetings from the people of Earth to the aliens of outer space. Threw in a needle and a cartridge along with instructions for use so they’d know how to play it if they found the probes. Very considerate, I suppose…”
“But that’s what I’m getting at,” Schermer hissed, surprising Epstein by his insistence. “It’s not considerate, it’s bloody arrogant. Here’s us, the human race, just dispatching probes into the universe and expecting the residents of deep space to just be able to understand us like that. Never mind if we can’t understand them as long as they speak our language or languages. Really, that’s not much better than a gang of English soccer hooligans going to a foreign country and demanding everyone speak English. And if they were going to be considerate, they might’ve thrown in the turntable to play the disc on instead of just including the needle…”
Epstein shrugged. “Be a waste of time. The aliens probably have compact disc by now.”
Schermer sighed deeply. Sometimes Robert just wasn’t worth talking to. “On another subject,” Epstein said, reaching into his jacket pocket, “How do you fancy coming to a little press party for the Lanzmann Tablets?”
He withdrew his hand from the pocket clutching two tickets. Schermer was agog. “How did you wrangle those?” he said, visibly amazed. “I thought the supply of those was being strictly limited…”
“Very strictly, very limited,” Epstein agreed. “Suffice to say that I have my sources. Want one?”
Schermer snapped the proffered ticket from Epstein’s fingers. “Foolish question, Robert,” he said, quickly stashing the ticket in his own jacket pocket. “What’s the deal? Where and when?”
“The Egyptian Room, next Wednesday, starting from eight o’clock. Those of us in the press, or at least pretending to be, naturally get photo opportunities that Joe Public doesn’t as well.”
Schermer smiled. “I like those odds. Nice work, Robert, reassuring to know that you have your ways and means.”
Epstein bowed slightly. “See? Everyone’s useful for something, including me.”
A staff member came by to pick up the empty glasses next to the two men. “Something else I’ve been thinking of,” Schermer said after a few moments more of concentrated eating, “Which was also inspired by thinking about Voyager, only a bit less cranky than that last outburst…”
“Mmm?”
“Well, we’ve been sending our crap into space now for about, what is it, forty-five years or something? Near enough? And they reckon it’ll still take the Voyager probes forty thousand years or more before they’ll even approach another star…”
“…by which time,” Epstein mumbled through another mouthful of food, “Humanity will most likely have wiped itself out. I rather doubt humanity is smart enough to stick around for another forty thousand years, by which time we won’t be around to know if any aliens have discovered it…”
“…and there won’t be enough power in the batteries to tell anyone who might be listening, yes, yes, I know all that, but that isn’t the point anyway. All I was going to say was, what if some alien race out there also sent probes out like we do? With a gold record or something similar?”
This did make Epstein think for a moment. “Hmm… I see what you’re getting at. Or at least maybe I do.” He took one last bite of food. “Would we know how to play it? Would we know how to read the instructions?”
“Or indeed,” Schermer said, finishing his own meal, “Would we even know what it was? I mean, think of it. Apart from sundry Pioneers and Voyagers, we’ve also got Galileo somewhere around Jupiter, Cassini on its way to Saturn, Magellan around Venus, and God only knows what others up on the Moon and Mars, not to mention whatever space junk’s circling the Earth. Suppose an alien was to pass through this system, and suppose it came across all those satellites and probes and things. What do you suppose it would make of them? Do you suppose it would necessarily know what they all were?”
“Mmm…” Epstein burped gently; damn matriciana did that to him. “And if it found Voyager, would it know what it was and would it know how to read the instructions?”
“And, indeed, would we know how to read their instructions if they included any?”
For some reason or other this train of thought seemed to be puzzling and troubling Epstein, so Schermer let it go. Topics of conversation soon moved to more normal and regular matters as the waiter came to collect the empty plates and glasses, and another couple of beers were had by the two as they sat talking. Finally time came to leave, and the two made arrangements to meet before the Egyptian Room show the following week. That was a show that neither was willing to miss.
— II —
The Lanzmann Tablets were perhaps one of the more obscure ancient mysteries. Even the circumstances of their discovery was barely known. Supposedly they’d been unearthed during the early 1800s, and had been purchased in 1830 for the private collection of one Wolfgang Ritter von Lanzmann, a minor Austrian noble. Other than this, not much was known of their provenance. The identity (or identities) of the discoverer(s) of the Tablets remained a complete mystery. The place of their discovery was only vaguely known at best—an unknown site in Egypt—and no one could ascribe a more exact date than some point during the second or third decades of the nineteenth century. Following their discovery and purchase, Lanzmann had kept the Tablets largely hidden from view, so knowledge of them had largely vanished from public view; Lanzmann’s now fragmentary and ruined archives were almost the only source of information on them, other than a few rare contemporary reports that said very little.
This was the case at least until a few years ago when the Tablets were rediscovered. One of Lanzmann’s descendants had disposed of the things in somewhat shadowy circumstances, donating them to a museum in Vienna in 1926, where they were forgotten about once again. In the late 1990s, however, they were brought into the public eye for the first time thanks to a book entitled Prehuman Relics and Remains by one William C. Henryson. It was in a freak in a subsection of the book industry which produced a number of strange items, the “new age” genre, dealing with artefacts and objects that were supposed to predate civilisation as it was commonly known in much the same way as people like Erich von Däniken and Graham Hancock did. Henryson’s speculations, however, were wilder than either of these, and the Lanzmann Tablets were one of his prize examples, with parallels being drawn between the curious inscriptions on them and the still undeciphered Easter Island script, hinting at a bizarre common origin millions of years ago.
As “new age” books sometimes do, Prehuman Relics and Remains turned into something of a hit, although Henryson himself remained as obscure and mysterious as some of his subject matter. Except that he was reportedly Scottish, not much was known; there were no known photos, no other publications by him, and when pressed his publishers averred that they knew as little as anyone else. Nonetheless the book served to make the Lanzmann Tablets known widely for the first time. In the four years since the book’s publication they had gone on a few international touring exhibitions, hence their presence now
at the Egyptian Room in Sydney, Australia.
The press preview for the exhibition was going splendidly. Epstein had scored his tickets to the preview from one of his university colleagues; the other man worked in the School of Archaeology just around the corner from him in the School of History, and had found that other commitments would prevent him from going. Epstein had therefore been the beneficiary of the other man’s bad fortune; and so both he and Schermer now sat with assorted journalists and photographers from various newspapers and magazines, listening to one Professor Ismail DeLucia deliver his spiel on the Tablets. DeLucia was a gruff-looking man in his mid-50s, of Middle Eastern appearance but of somewhat Germanic accent. He was custodian of the Tablets during their exhibition here, an extension of his role as curator of the museum in Vienna where the Tablets normally resided.
“Some of you,” he continued, having outlined the historical conditions of the Tablets as described above, “May be aware of Erich von Däniken’s 1968 book Chariots of the Gods?. In that book he makes passing reference to an iron pillar that stands in Delhi in India. This pillar seems impervious to the passing of time and the effects of weather, reportedly because it contains neither phosphorus nor sulphur and does not rust. We find a similar phenomenon with the Lanzmann Tablets, though still a different one.” At this cue, a projector at the back of the room came to life and a beam of light from it illuminated the Tablets, which were mounted in a case on the wall behind DeLucia. The two Tablets shone brightly, almost blindingly, under the light. DeLucia waved for the intensity of the beam to be turned down.
“You’ve observed, no doubt, that the Tablets are highly reflective and clean. Much like the pillar von Däniken refers to, they bear no signs of rust or decomposition. There appear to be a few traces of wear in some of the inscriptions, some discolouration, but that would appear to be the extent of it. However, that is basically also the extent of our knowledge. Despite scientific testing, we have been unable to determine precisely the chemical composition of the Tablets. They appear to be made of some sort of metal, although even this is somewhat uncertain, and if it is metal then it is of a very curious type indeed…”
DeLucia continued much in this vein for another three-quarters of an hour. It was an interesting and informative lecture—despite the lack of much information he’d had a surprising amount to say—and at the end the photographers in the audience were allowed up close to the Tablets to take the required number of photographs. This was what Epstein and Schermer (particularly the latter) had been waiting for. Both had brought cameras; one took colour shots, the other took black and white. Both of them stood looking at the Tablets for a moment after taking their photographs. It was a curious experience, being in the presence of these strange metal (perhaps) blocks from an unknown earlier age.
Both of the Tablets were square, with slightly rounded corners, about four feet on each side and approximately two and a quarter inches thick; both possessed the same bright gold colour with small patches of reddish discolouration. One was densely inscribed with small squarish designs of unknown type, containing forty-nine rows of forty-nine “characters” each—a statistic which had provoked some speculative comparison in the Henryson book with Dr John Dee’s angelic tablets which were laid out in a 49x49 grid, although the inscriptions on the second Lanzmann Tablet bore no resemblance to Dee’s. The first Tablet contained fewer of these inscriptions, being instead marked with a number of odd geometric designs, all small, some vaguely circular, others more trapezoidal than otherwise. There were a few brief lines of the small half-inch inscriptions found on the other Tablet but not nearly as many. The first tablet was diagonally bisected by a perfectly straight line etched into the smooth surface, about a millimetre wide and estimated to be about five millimetres deep.
Epstein took as many photos as he could to ensure that he got all of the inscriptions in as much close-up detail as possible, as Schermer had asked him to do. The latter had not taken so many photos, as he began to feel somewhat strange standing so close to the things. Slightly nauseous. “Right there?” Epstein asked him, seeing him take a few steps back.
Schermer nodded. “Yeah. Just felt a bit weird there.”
Epstein nodded and returned to photographing the Tablets. Schermer drifted around the room, feeling (and looking) slightly dazed. Over on the other side of the room DeLucia was now fielding questions from individuals. “…As to their age,” Epstein heard him say in response to one question. “Carbon-14 dating has not given us any indications. The material that the Tablets are composed of does not respond to that sort of testing…”
“What about William Henryson’s claims that the Lanzmann Tablets may date back tens of million years, before humanity?”
DeLucia did not seem to take kindly to this question. “Henryson is one of those thorns who occur in the side of science every so often, full of wild pseudo-scientific theories with their roots in obscure mythologies and incorrect logic and reasoning. I’m not inclined to take him seriously.”
“But if you’ve been unable to date the Tablets…”
“…Henryson’s dating has its roots in the same mistaken thinking as idiots like Alford and Sitchin are prone to. A twisted reading of some ancient Middle Eastern mythological text, combined with references in an old occultist textbook that are obscure and unlikely to say the least, and from this Henryson somehow derives a date of eighty million years ago for the manufacture of the Lanzmann Tablets. You tell me, young man. Does that sound likely to you?”
There was a moment of uncomfortable silence and the look on DeLucia’s face indicated that he was not interested in pursuing this topic. After a moment another reporter piped up. “Could you tell us what you think about Henryson’s views on the connections with the Easter Island script?”
DeLucia nodded, evidently weary of having to field another question about Henryson. “Again I’m sceptical,” he said. “There is a resemblance but I think it’s fairly superficial. Some of the Easter Island symbols have a correspondence which is interesting, but the symbols on the Lanzmann Tablets are more involved and complicated…”
It went on like this for a while. Schermer sat down in one of the seats at the back of the room, watching the others mill about. Time came to leave at last, whereupon Schermer and Epstein went out into the street and caught a bus up to their regular pub on Broadway. For some reason Schermer was feeling like a good stiff drink even more than usual.
— III —
There was one major difference between Epstein and Schermer when it came to matters of occultism. Basically Epstein didn’t take them seriously, whereas in large part Schermer did. He’d had a particular fascination with Henryson’s book since it was published, and for years before that he’d been fascinated by certain obscure myths of civilised races that had existed on earth for thousands, even millions of years before the advent of humanity. And Schermer had no trouble giving credence to this sort of thing; however extreme the claims, he could understand and even believe them.
Epstein had always been more sceptical by nature; he was imaginative and capable of taking an interest in these things, but it was a purely comparative interest. He took an interest in the conventional religions and the things they had to say as well, but gave them as little credence as he did the statements of the occultists that Schermer kept introducing him to—sometimes literally; Schermer frequented an occult bookshop up on the north shore called The Inmost Light and would occasionally take Epstein to meet some of the freaks who would also gather there. However, though he generally dismissed much occultism as tripe, he did derive a certain amount of imaginative stimulus from some of it. Disbelief did not mean he couldn’t take an interest.
So it had been with the Lanzmann Tablets exhibition. Epstein had gone out of mere curiosity, whereas Schermer had gone for perhaps deeper reasons; and their reactions to the sight of the Tablets and being in their presence had also been different. Epstein had been impressed by the sight of them, and by the idea Henryson had of them being up to eighty million years old, on an intellectual level; Schermer had somehow felt the age of the things, and, as he’d later described it, felt a sense of wrongness about them as well. There was something… well, wrong (he really couldn’t describe the feeling any other way) about such ancient artefacts still being in existence, and—what was undeniably the most perplexing thing about them—still being almost completely intact.
These were thoughts that Epstein turned over in his mind as he leafed through the Henryson book again. There was indeed something about the alleged antiquity of the Lanzmann Tablets that bothered him. After all, where did eighty million years in the past take you to? Back to the time of the dinosaurs, and long before humanity’s most remote evolutionary ancestors had appeared (he did not subscribe to the views of certain freaks who suggested that humanity, and Homo sapiens sapiens in particular, had been walking the Earth for anywhere up to two or even three hundred million years, rather more than the two hundred thousand-odd years commonly ascribed to H.s.s.). And yet no one could deny that the Tablets were artefacts; there was not a scientist in the world who would have denied that they had been manufactured. Who existed eighty million years ago, and with what technology, to make these things?
Of course, this was enough to make Henryson instantly suspect in the eyes of many. Eighty million years ago was getting too wacky, and the corroborating “evidence”—some strange and obscure myths about a bizarre race of beings who were the Earth’s dominant species for hundreds of millions of years, up to as recently as fifty million years ago, myths which belonged to an exceedingly rarefied occult tradition indeed—was too weird and unlikely for most readers. Others said that because scientific methods had been totally unable to even remotely guess the age of the Lanzmann Tablets, as Ismail DeLucia had said at the lecture, Henryson’s date of eighty million years was as likely as anyone else’s guess.
Epstein had come across these myths of the ancient Great Race of Yith (as the traditions called them) before, thanks to Schermer. The latter had given him a copy of a number of texts related to them, including one published in 1912 by a certain Reverend Arthur Brooke Winters-Hall. This brochure purported to present a translation of odd markings found on a number of objects excavated in England in the early 1900s; the fragmentary narrative inscribed on these objects, which were dubbed the Eltdown Shards, made reference to this Great Race, describing how they had fled the impending doom of their own world by sending their minds across space to Earth—indeed, some reports said that certain vast ruins out in the Western Australian desert had once been a city of theirs—to inhabit strange new bodies that were said to be somewhat conical with various protruding tentacles. Epstein had always thought that the very description of these conical things would seem to completely defy the accepted rules of evolution, though this description was common to all the texts on the Great Race (and, as Schermer would and did say, the mere fact that they were the accepted rules of evolution did not make them the right ones necessarily).
He left aside the Henryson book for a moment to have a look at another one of the texts which Schermer had photocopied for him. Ah, yes, there it was. The History of the Ritter von Lanzmann and his Descendants, a 60-page booklet that had been published in 1980, written by one Adrian Bronson. In his book Henryson had acknowledged this text as a major source of information; Schermer had somehow managed to procure the already rare Bronson text and copied it for Epstein.
All told, the descendants of Wolfgang Lanzmann were a pretty mediocre bunch. One branch of the family had gone to England in the 1880s and thereafter had little contact with the Austrian line. By that point the Austrian line was declining; they were numerous enough but of mediocre quality. And almost all of them came to have connections (albeit usually in minor positions) with various strands of fin-de-siècle occultism. Some dabbled in theosophy, some in anthroposophy (following Rudolf Steiner’s split from the former); others came to be associated with the O.T.O and Guido von List; and even less reputably, later members of the family would be linked with the Thule Gesellschaft and the Ahnenerbe. Even in England some of the family were members of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.
While the English branch, which later included Adrian Bronson himself, continued to flourish after a fashion, the First World War did much to decimate the Austrian line’s fortunes—during that time many of the historical records of old Wolfgang Lanzmann were destroyed in a fire, while others were lost while being transported to a more secure location—and the Second served to exterminate them altogether, except for Hugo Lanzmann, who was still said to be living somewhere in Vienna, over a hundred years old. It had been Hugo who disposed of the Tablets to the museum in 1926; he had fallen somewhat under the spell of Rudolf Steiner and Steiner’s own disciple, the mystic Walter Johannes Stein, and had perhaps been influenced by them to do so. At any rate, Hugo had simply gone to the museum one day, presented an attendant with the two Tablets, wrapped in a linen covering, declared that he was giving them the Tablets as he believed they were an evil influence, and left without further explanation. It had taken some detective work to determine that Hugo Lanzmann had been the donor. The Tablets were relegated to a corner of the museum where few visited, and where they exhibited no particular signs of evil influence.
Old Wolfgang, though, had been linked with far more interesting occult connections. Apart from sending their minds across space, the myths of the Great Race of Yith also had it that they could send their minds across time as well, and that by an exchange of minds and bodies with other beings were able to learn much about future and past times and places. According to some of the texts on the Great Race which Epstein had been given, there had always existed certain obscure cults who existed to help the minds of the Great Race as they voyaged through millions of years of time in search of suitable temporary bodies in another epoch, and for this help the Great Race would grant various pieces of knowledge. So it was that so many myths of the hidden prehuman history of the Earth had supposedly come down through the ages to humanity.
Adrian Bronson himself was generally sceptical of the whole idea of the Great Race of Yith, but did recount the legend that old Wolfgang had been a member of one of these cults for a number of years up to his death in 1838. This legend stated that this cult had indeed been successful in establishing contact with the Great Race, and that a number of papers from his archive (which Bronson now maintained) had held some of the information obtained thereby. All that survived of this transaction, however, was four pages of peculiar hieroglyphs, and those pages were in as poor a state of repair as some of the Dead Sea Scrolls; it had taken a great amount of negotiation to persuade Bronson to even allow them to be photographed for preservation.
Epstein put down the Bronson booklet and picked up the Henryson book again, flicking through to the photograph section in the middle of the book. Yes, there they were. Henryson had been allowed to reproduce the photographs of the ruinous pages of hieroglyphs, which were a mixture of strange curvilinear script and some of the square designs found on the Lanzmann Tablets. This had been one of his main pieces of “evidence” to demonstrate the age of the Tablets, claiming that the curvilinear designs were representative of the later period of the Great Race’s tenure on Earth, and that the manuscript seemed to be laid out as if it were a table for translating the symbols of one into the symbols of the other.
Bah, Epstein thought, suddenly realising that he was starting to get a little too interested in this stuff. He was reading it and poring through it almost like Schermer did, as if he believed it as much as the latter did as well. Eighty million year old hieroglyphs. Prehuman civilisations and things from other worlds. It all made even the Christian cosmology believable by comparison. He snorted at the book, laying it on the floor beside his desk alongside the photocopied Bronson booklet and assorted other things, and decided to try a sensible book instead. Something with science instead of superstitions that no one had ever heard of…
— IV —
“…Good afternoon, this is Robert Epstein speaking. I’m calling to ask if I can speak to Mr Anton Schermer.”
“One moment, please,” the rather bored female voice at the other end said. Epstein sighed. He never liked having to call Schermer at his office, largely because he had a strange fear of having to deal with his full-of-the-joys-of-life receptionist. But for once it was necessary. Schermer had been out of contact now for four days, refusing to respond to e-mails and similarly ignoring messages left on his telephone answering machine. Calling him at the office was a last resort, but after this length of time he had to do it…
“Robert?”
Ah, the reassuringly familiar voice of Anton Schermer at the other end of the line. “Anton, mate,” Epstein said, inexplicably and audibly relieved. “Where you been lately? Haven’t heard anything from you since Sunday.”
“Um… yeah.” Schermer sounded a bit distracted. “Been kind of, ah, busy. Got a project…”
“Oh OK. Business or pleasure?”
“Ah… pleasure.”
“Hmm. Right.” There was an
uncomfortable silence for a few seconds. “Um… I’m not catching you at a bad time or anything, am I? If I am, I’ll call later…”
“Um… no, no, no, not at all. Not at all. Hey, listen,” Schermer said, animation suddenly returning to his voice, “What say we meet tonight? You available?”
“Hmm, sure. The usual place and time?”
“Actually, no. We’ll make it my place. I have some interesting things to show you. Usual time, though. See you then…”
And that was pretty much the conversation. Epstein was slightly mystified, wondering what this project might be. Well, presumably he would discover that this evening.
So it was that Epstein found himself making his way out to Paddington that evening at the usual time of 8pm, taking a typically packed bus up Oxford St from the city—normally he would be taking the rather shorter journey back to his own place at Newtown; this little jaunt was taking him somewhat off his usual course—disembarking outside the RSL club, and making his way to the narrow back street where Schermer’s terrace house was. It had been dark for an hour (damn daylight savings time, he thought) and the street was not particularly well lit, and Epstein was always slightly nervous at having to come here during the evening. Not that anything ever happened, though; Epstein was just a bit paranoid about poorly lit narrow streets like this. You never knew what surprises might be waiting.
When he got there, Epstein discovered Schermer had left the door unlocked.. He lived pretty much alone in this place, except for those nights when his girlfriend stayed over. Schermer often referred to her, “the marvellous Diana”, though Epstein had only met her once in passing at the Inmost Light, and she only came to visit Schermer two or three times a week (it was still more action than Epstein saw, though). “The marvellous Diana” was nowhere around tonight, though, as he found when he entered the place and peered in the front sitting room. Schermer was seated (or rather slumped) in one of the chairs, facing the doorway, head bowed and not looking up.
“Well,” Epstein said, “If you don’t mind me saying so, this is all somewhat mysterious, Anton. You don’t have any contact with me for four days, not even to acknowledge the dirty e-mail joke I passed on to you, and now you promise to show me something
interesting. Damn well better be interesting—”
“They’re alien,” Schermer said, interrupting him without looking up yet.
Epstein frowned. “Alien? Who is? What are? What are you talking about?”
Schermer still did not look up. “The Lanzmann Tablets.”
Epstein said nothing but frowned, quite baffled, waiting for Schermer to continue. “Well?” he said after a few seconds, realising Schermer was not going to move on in a hurry.
Schermer looked up at last. “Well what?”
Epstein was horrified by Schermer’s appearance when he looked at him. Even though both of them were only at the age of thirty, there was something about Schermer that had never been young-looking somehow. He always looked older than he should’ve done. But now there was something about him that made him seem vastly older still.
“Well,” Epstein said, recovering what he could of his composure, “You said the Tablets were alien. What precisely did you… mean by that?”
Schermer smiled thinly and mirthlessly. “Just what I said,” he muttered quietly and lifelessly. “Oh God, just what I said. Henryson was almost right, Robert. Those things are unspeakably ancient. Even older than Henryson thought.”
Epstein cast his eye over the piles of books and papers that Schermer had strewn over the table and over a few of the other armchairs; fortunately one was clear so he sat down in it. Here was a substantial part of Schermer’s collection of odd books and things, he thought to himself, with more than a few things on show that he couldn’t remember seeing before. And all of Schermer’s black and white photos of the Lanzmann Tablets were spread out on top of everything on the table.
“But,” Schermer said, interrupting Epstein’s thoughts, “Everyone else was wrong. They laughed at the idea of there being people or beings on Earth eighty million years ago who could make these things. Except that they WEREN’T made on Earth. They’re alien, Robert, they’re not of this Earth, literally. It was the Great Race that found them, they fell from the sky and they found them…”
Epstein was becoming distinctly worried; Schermer was starting to rave. “You wouldn’t think, would you,” he said, “That the cult of the Great Race would still exist, would you, you wouldn’t think it, you wouldn’t think that they would exist here either, not here, not now, not in rational modern boring Australia in the last year of the twentieth century… twentieth century! Jesus, there’s a laugh. Good old tiny-minded humanity reckoning its dating from something that happened two thousand years ago, not even thinking that infinitely more cosmically important things could have happened two hundred thousand or two hundred thousand thousand years ago…
“No, you wouldn’t think something like that would still exist in this day and age, and not in this place either… but we do, Robert, even if you can’t bring yourself to imagine it. Doesn’t matter whether or not you believe in us, we’re still there, we still exist, we don’t need to be believed in to exist, we will always exist, just like we always have existed…”
“What do you mean, ‘we’?” Epstein asked in a small voice, feeling more than a little frightened as he watched his friend rise from the chair and stumble to his feet. Epstein rose to his own feet.
“Instructions for use, Robert…” Schermer muttered, swaying unsteadily. “That’s what they are. Henryson was right, that Lanzmann manuscript was a table for translation… that’s what I did… all I had to do was compare the symbols and it was easy… oh Jesus, Robert, how easy it was… instructions for use… just as arrogant as humanity…”
Epstein took a couple of steps backward as Schermer appeared to take a couple of steps forward. And then, having done that, his nerve just snapped altogether and he ran for his life, fearing not so much what Anton might do as what he might say. He shot off into the dark, ran down the dark narrow street, back to Oxford Street, and kept running down that, running almost as far as Taylor Square. Paranoia was evidently getting the better of him; Epstein was hardly a fit and athletic man and normally he would never run that far nor that fast; indeed, the only times he normally ran at all was on rare occasions when he got suitably drunk and the alcohol triumphed over his normal inhibitions, and he would sometimes go running then. Well, fear had triumphed tonight.
He finally stopped, desperately needing to breathe again, near the old courthouse. Schermer hadn’t followed him; he didn’t know why he’d thought Schermer would do so. As he panted, trying to normalise his breathing and get his bearings, he did know one thing: that Schermer had finally lost the plot altogether. Perhaps Hugo Lanzmann had been right, back in 1926 when he threw out the Tablets to that museum: they evidently were a bad influence…
— V —
Fire kills 1, damages 2 houses
A fire has claimed the life of one man and damaged two houses in Paddington.
Witnesses reported smoke and flames coming from the house belonging to Anton Schermer, 30, shortly after 11 last night. Mr Schermer was taken to hospital with third degree burns, but was pronounced dead on arrival at St Vincent’s Hospital.
Preliminary forensic reports suggest the fire was deliberately lit by Mr Schermer. Traces of several pages of burnt paper were found in the bottom-floor sitting room.
The occupants of the other house, which was only slightly damaged, were not at home at the time of the fire. |
This was the news awaiting Robert Epstein a few days after that bizarre encounter with Schermer. As he usually did after his day at the university was through, he caught the bus that went through Kensington and up through Newtown, disembarking near the top end of King St and purchasing his evening paper from Gould’s Books; sometimes he would also browse the vast collection of second-hand books in the huge building, and he would often talk to the owner’s two cats, which had a fondness for clambering over the magazine section at the front of the shop (he would often have to disturb one just to pick up his Telegraph), and once he was done he would make his way back down King St to his house in one of the small streets behind the main thoroughfare. There he would make himself some dinner and read the paper while eating it.
And that was the news that awaited him on this occasion. Understandably his appetite deserted him somewhat when he read that small article on page nine. In fact, for some time most of his faculties seemed to desert him, as he simply sat staring at the newspaper, unable to take his eyes off the report. Good God almighty, Anton had gone completely over the edge. Why hadn’t he expected something like this to happen? No, that was wrong. He’d fully expected something like this to happen. Why hadn’t he done something to stop it happening, that was the question—
He might’ve pursued this line of self-recriminatory thought had he not been jarred out of his absorption by a sharp knock at the door. Jesus wept, he thought, who the hell would that be? So off he went through to the front door, and opened it as far as the door chain would allow. Peering through the gap, he saw a young woman standing there, of medium build, long dark brown hair. It took him a moment to remember that this was “the marvellous Diana”. He unlatched the door chain and let her in.
“Well,” he said, ushering her through to the sitting room, “Must say this is, um, a surprise.”
She nodded slightly as she sat down in one of the seats. Epstein remained standing. “I take it you heard about what happened to Anton,” she said in a rather clipped English accent, pulling out a packet of cigarettes. “Mind if I light up?”
Epstein shrugged. “Go ahead. I’ll get you an ashtray.” He shuffled off through to the kitchen again, picked up two small round glass ashtrays and took them through to the sitting room, passing one to Diana in exchange for one of her cigarettes. “I just read it in the paper about 15 minutes ago,” he said, taking a long drag on the cigarette.
“He called me last night,” she said, in between puffs. “After he’d started the fire.”
“After?”
“He’d just started it. I could hear the flames over the phone. He said to go to you and apologise for what he was doing. Told me where to go.”
Epstein frowned at her. “And, eh, you didn’t try to, well, stop him or anything?”
“He was at Paddington, I was in Vaucluse. Nothing I could do except call the fire brigade. They dragged him out and he died in the ambulance.” She took another puff on the cigarette. “Nothing anyone could really do for him. Pity really.”
Epstein stubbed out some ash at the end of his into his ashtray. “If you don’t mind me saying so,” he said, fixing his gaze on her, “You seem to be taking this remarkably well. I was under the impression that you two were romantically linked.”
Diana nodded. “We were,” she said, casting an eye around the room and studying its minimal furniture. “Unfortunate that it had to happen like this, but he wasn’t really of the right material. There was some… flaw in him…”
“What are you talking about?”
She took a long drag and turned her gaze back to him. “He was so sure,” she said, “That he knew what he was doing, trying to translate the symbols on the Lanzmann Tablets using the Yithian manuscripts. But he really wasn’t up for that sort of knowledge. Such a pity. But then again, not many people are. Takes a certain strength to handle that sort of information…”
Epstein stood and started pacing around. “What information? What are you talking about, Yithian manuscripts…”
Diana coughed. “You’ve read Henryson, I know, he said you had. So you’ll know about the Lanzmann manuscript as well. The translation table.”
He nodded. “And he thought he could use that to translate the Tablets?”
“Mmm-hmm. That was why he wanted such detailed photographs of the Tablets. The pictures in the Henryson book weren’t clear enough. But he was still able to make out the Yithian script, so we gave him what help we could…”
“We? Who’s we here, Diana?” And then it suddenly seemed to click for him. “A Yithian cult?” Diana nodded. “Now hang on a minute. This is insane—”
“Why insane, Robert my love?” Diana was infuriatingly calm, which only served to aggravate him further.
“Because,” he snapped through gritted teeth and shaking hands, “The Great Race is a myth. They don’t exist and they never did. How can a sane person believe in them—”
“See,” she said, standing herself, “That’s where you’re wrong, my dear. There’s nothing necessarily insane about it. There’s hundreds of millions of Christians out there in this little world of ours, to take just one of the major belief groups, and they all believe in something mythical. Does that make them all insane? Not at all. They’re most of them pretty normal, you’d pass them in the street and usually you wouldn’t think to yourself, well there goes a raving lunatic, now would you? At least not if you come from the same background as them.” She took another drag on the cigarette. “Seems to be this popular perception, though, that someone who believes something different to you is nuts or something.” She smiled sardonically at Epstein, who looked at her with the greatest possible scepticism. “But you don’t have to be insane to believe something, Robert.”
“It obviously helps, though.”
“Tut, tut, dear, you’re falling into that old pattern of misguided generalisation. Let’s put it this way,” she said, pacing around the room just as he’d been doing. “Ordinary little Christian man experiences a ‘revelation’ of some sort. Something becomes ‘clear’ to him in his ordinary little Christian way. He knows what the ‘truth’ is. Won’t matter to him if no one else believes him or his flash of realisation. He’ll know what’s happened to him and as far as he’s concerned it’s real to him.” She stopped pacing, standing directly in front of Epstein where he stood. “I know what revelations I’ve had. And they’re real to me.” With that she returned to her seat.
“So,” Epstein prompted her after a few moments’ silence, “You said ‘we gave him help’.”
Diana nodded. “We did. We… found refuge for some of the minds of the Great Race. And they gave us certain… information. Anton was something of a later recruit. But he had a lot of promise. There were passages and pages that the Yithians had been unable to communicate in our language. Anton was able to decipher them and make sense of them.” She sighed. “Poor thing. He was so sensitive to some of the things that the Yithian manuscripts said. He often said to us that it seemed wrong that this knowledge should exist…”
Epstein took another drag of his own cigarette. “Wrong,” he murmured. “That was what he said to me about the Lanzmann Tablets. He had some sort of odd reaction to them and he said afterwards he said it was wrong that they should still be around.”
“Mmm… that sounds like him. He was soft-minded, really, it was almost blasphemous to him that we should know the things that we do. Such a sweet man. But he was determined to do it, and we wanted him to…”
“So,” Epstein hovered around the doorway to the kitchen, “Let’s recap here. You gave him these Yithian manuscripts. So, comparing the writing in those to the writing in the Lanzmann manuscript…”
“…And then comparing all of that to the inscriptions on the Lanzmann Tablets. Yes,” Diana said with a sigh. “That was how he did it. He needed the photographs to be so detailed so that he wouldn’t make any mistakes. It wasn’t as if he could’ve translated much of the Tablets, as the manuscript gave so few guides. But he seemed to have worked out enough to…”
“…Snap.”
Diana nodded. “They were instructions for use, he said. That was the only coherent thing he would say to me about them. I wonder what for.”
Epstein nodded. This was grimly familiar to him. “He said that to me too when I saw him.” He shuffled nervously, rather wishing that the woman would go. Even if he did not believe this Yithian nonsense, there was something faintly disturbing and discomforting in the way that she evidently did.
“Anyway,” she said, abruptly rising again, “I don’t suppose we shall know. He lit that fire with his notes, and with the photos of the Tablets that you and he took, and with our manuscripts that the Yithian minds passed on to us. He said it was wrong that this knowledge should exist and so he was going to rid the world of it.” She smiled mirthlessly. “So we, at least, are at something of a loss. Foolish of us to trust him with them, I suppose. But we weren’t expecting this outcome, of course.”
“No,” Epstein said faintly, “I suppose not.”
“But no doubt one day someone else will succeed and won’t be afraid to take responsibility for the discovery,” she went on, moving over to the doorway. She turned to look back at him for a moment. “It’s a pity, in a way. Anton always said to us what a strong rational mind you had. You would’ve worked well with us, I think. It takes someone with a rational mind to respond to the things that we know. The weaker minds just tend to lose the plot like poor Anton did. You would definitely have fit in nicely.”
“Except,” he said with a hint of a sneer, “It wouldn’t work because I wasn’t raised to believe in weird myths like the Great Race.”
Diana smiled sweetly at him, walked over to him and planted a kiss on his cheek. “Just remember what Shakespeare said, Horatio,” she said, “‘There are more things in heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy’. It’s a big universe out there and it doesn’t revolve around the Earth or the human beings on it in any way. You shouldn’t be so sure of things all the time, you don’t know what’s out there that might prove you wrong…”
And with that she strode out the front door again. Epstein was still standing in the doorway of the kitchen. He sighed. What an interesting night it had turned into. Not only was one of his very best friends dead, but he’d been in a cult revolving around beings who ruled the Earth millions of years ago when the dinosaurs still roamed about the place. And he’d wanted Epstein to make his photos of the Lanzmann Tablets as detailed and clear as possible because he thought that with the help of this cult he could read what was on them. God almighty, he thought, his head suddenly pounding, wonder what revelations there’ll be tomorrow. He went over to the small tower of compact discs standing next to his stereo, pulled out a disc of industrial music and stuck that in the player. Probably it would make his head pound even harder, but better it should be pounding from the music than the thoughts going round it…
— VI —
So it was that a week and a half later Epstein found himself back at the Egyptian Room, in the exhibition space where the Lanzmann Tablets were on display. It had only been designed as a short-term exhibit, and this was the last day that they would be on show before returning to Austria. An evil influence, Hugo Lanzmann had called them, not really knowing why he felt that way. Well, they had certainly been an evil influence on Anton Schermer. Them and those freaks from the Inmost Light. “The marvellous Diana” and her marvellous Yithian cult. Bah. Too insane to be possible. And yet Epstein had found himself having trouble not thinking about it these past ten days. It was a worry.
More particularly he’d been wondering about the things Schermer had said to him. What had he meant by them? Had he indeed meant anything, or at least anything coherent? Epstein sat on a bench in the middle of the room, looking at the Tablets from a distance. He was not bothered when one or two other people came into the room and took a closer look, obstructing his own view. He just wondered what Schermer had meant by them falling from the sky to be found by the Great Race. A meteorite of some sort? Didn’t seem likely somehow. Imagine, some bit of rock falls from the sky and these things pop out…
Except…
He suddenly started thinking about something else Schermer had said, long before any of this started, right back to the conversation they’d had when he’d told Schermer about getting those preview tickets. What if some alien race out there also sent probes out like we do? With a gold record or something similar? Would we know how to play it? Would we know how to read the instructions? A new thought came into Epstein’s head: would we even recognise that they were instructions…
A possibility started to form in Epstein’s mind. Suppose… just suppose… that once upon a time, probes were sent into space, sent out in the hope that one day in the far future some alien race might find them and be able to understand the information contained in them. Just like humanity had done with the Pioneer and Voyager probes. Except that it was millions of years ago, and it was some other civilisation out there in space which dispatched these probes, and the Great Race had been the alien race which found them.
Just suppose. Somehow, by cosmic good fortune, a probe had passed through this solar system and come under the influence of Earth’s gravity and at some point crashed onto the planet’s surface. The Great Race may have observed it falling and retrieved whatever they could. And just suppose. Just like the Voyager probes, a gold record with information about the probe’s point of origin, and records of what its inhabitants were like, and things like that. Except that it wasn’t a gold record, it was two gold tablets, each about four feet square and two inches thick, bearing small inscriptions and geometrical designs.
Fantastic. Too fantastic for words. Surely, he thought to himself, he was tripping out too much into fantasy here. And yet… maybe that explained what Schermer had meant when he said they were alien. And when he said they had fallen from the sky. Not a meteorite at all, but an interstellar probe constructed millions of years ago by an alien civilisation that had drifted aimlessly in space for unknown ages—hundreds, thousands, millions, even billions of years? Why not billions?—and crash-landing on Earth to be found by a civilisation that was just as alien.
And maybe this was also what he’d meant by that cryptic last comment of his. Just as arrogant as humanity. Maybe the builders of the probe had thought that whoever found the thing would know what it was and be able to read the instructions. They would just know how to make use of it. He understood now what Schermer had meant by arrogance that night. The arrogance of humanity sending its probes out and just assuming that alien races would know what they were. The arrogance of the alien races doing the exact same thing. Maybe the Great Race had understood what the gold tablets were. And maybe humanity hadn’t…
He stopped himself short. He was getting speculative. He was beginning to sound not unlike Schermer, in fact. And yet he couldn’t stop himself. Diana had succeeded in planting the seeds of doubt in his mind that night, that was for sure. She was convinced of the truth of what she was saying, however weird it seemed to him. But instructions for use? For using what? That was the question he’d been unable to find anything resembling an answer to. Maybe the tablet with the geometric designs had somehow been the instructions for reading the square inscriptions on the other tablet. But no, there were still some of those on that tablet as well. Somehow that didn’t seem right.
Whereupon another new thought hit him.
Just suppose again, that the square inscriptions on the second Tablet were also part of the instructions. Maybe, just maybe, the inscriptions on the Tablets were instructions for using the Tablets themselves. Hadn’t they put all that information in the grooves of the Voyager discs with instructions for using the record? Maybe, just maybe, that was what the makers of the Tablets had done. Encoded all their information somewhere within the Tablets themselves. And the inscriptions on the surface of the Tablets were just the instructions for how to get at this information. What might be in there? Suppose the Great Race had figured it out. Had they known what was in there? Had they ever passed this knowledge on to one of their little cults, had maybe Wolfgang Lanzmann himself known…
He stood abruptly, rising from the bench and going to stand over next to the Tablets, staring at them intently. For the first time he began to at least vaguely understand the feeling Schermer had got from them. That feeling of incredible age. Older than humanity. Maybe even older than the Earth. He was speculating again, of course. And yet somehow he felt strangely sure of himself. There was age in the Lanzmann Tablets, and there was information in them. If humanity ever learned, their assumptions about the history of the universe might be revised wholesale…
“Excuse me, sir… museum’s closing.”
Epstein was roused from his reverie by a museum guard. He looked at his watch and was somewhat shocked to find that it was half past five. Closing time, right enough. He must’ve stood there staring at the Tablets for hours. He shuffled out of the exhibition space, taking one final glance back at them—then turned around and left the Egyptian Room, and the Lanzmann Tablets were gone from his sight forever. He did not even have the photographs to look at now, having given them to Schermer, and the latter having destroyed them in his fire. He went out into the street, made his way idly down towards Circular Quay, from where he would get his bus back to Newtown. The sky was already growing dark as he looked up at the spaces between the tall buildings of the city centre, and already one or two stars were visible in the twilight.
Speculation. That was all it had been. Just a bizarre chain of fantasy such as Schermer might’ve carried out. He didn’t really believe any of it. Still, as Robert Epstein waited down by the bus stops at Circular Quay, for some reason he felt unsure of himself. As recently as ten or twelve days ago he would have instantly dismissed it. But now for some reason he could not dismiss it completely; the possibility that his speculations might be even approximately correct was a disturbing one. Perhaps Diana had been right. You shouldn’t be so sure of things all the time, you don’t know what’s out there that might prove you wrong…
The 422 bus that went through Newtown was approaching the stop. Epstein took one last look up at the sky before he boarded it with the other commuters there. Perhaps there were more things up there than just stars and empty space. It was a thought that frightened him.
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