seymoure

Virgil Vigil

“Very deep, very deep is the well of the past.
Should we not call it bottomless?”
-Thomas Mann

It was a short ride in my customized Thunderbird. Rayleen had to stay at the office, but made me promise to call as soon as we knew anything.

The lab was an annex of the University. The head of the Sciences department had allowed us to use the facility, since we had donated a $100,000 dollars, and we hired our own assistant and donated his work to the general staff.

Our science guy was named Gerald Ng. Rayleen met him when she was working towards her accounting hours and had nothing but good things to say about this brilliant young man. He was knowledgeable in biology, chemistry, botany and geology. He made me think of the character Doc Savage. Not physically, of course, but in the broad range of his study. Physically he was a stereotypical bookish researcher. His glasses could always be used to start fires quickly. His face was square and his hair was black and short. In the middle of the hippie movement that was reaching the Midwest, he stood out like a raisin in oatmeal. But there wasn’t one of us who didn’t hold him in the highest regard, both as a scientist and as a person. Did I mention that he wrote poetry? Bad limericks, actually.

When we got to the lab Gerald was busy with a new experiment for the biology lab. He was trying to create a hybrid form of tomato that would be resistant to insects and not have such a hard skin as to make them inedible.

He wasn’t having any success, so he was glad to see us.

“What do you need, guys?” he asked, pushing his glasses back with his thumb.

“We got this in the mail,” I told him. “And I just need to know what is noteworthy about this piece of wood.”

He looked at it and his face glowed. He took the box from me and said, “Hold on, don’t go anywhere.”

He ran over to a drawer and took out a magnifying glass. He pulled the glasses off his face, resting them on top of his head, and peered down at the wood.

He giggled gleefully and then ran over to his teletype machine and pulled off a piece of paper. He looked at a black and white picture that had been printed on it and then back at the contents of the box.

“I just got this from my cousin,” he handed the sheet of paper to me, “She works for the new Director of the NSA.”

He saw he was talking to posts, so he explained, “That’s the National Science Administration. They got one of these chucks too. They identified it as coming from a cypress tree grown in Asia Minor.”

We were still slow to his eye, so he added, “That’s Turkey. And it’s really, really, really old.”

He didn’t wait as long this time. “So old that this particular type of cypress is extinct in that part of the world.”

Hugo said, “Turkey? That’s Mount Ararat! It’s part of the Ark?”

“No,” Ng corrected, “the Ark was made of ‘gopher wood,’ which might have been the ancient way of saying Pine, but maybe not. But for sure not cypress.”

“You know the Bible?” Hugo was more awed by the small man than normal.

“Comparative Religion was one of my three minors, along with History and Philosophy. Did you know that in Siam (Thailand now, but this was back in the ‘Anna & the King of Siam’ time), they thought the world was carried on the back of a giant turtle?”

“You had three minors?” I was also rather awed.

“I had four majors (that was all they’d allow),” He announced proudly, “Chemistry, Math & Physics, Pre-Med and Earth Sciences. Now most of those have been split up into their own sectors, but that’s okay, I keep current.”

“How did you find time to do that?” Hugo asked.

“When you hit college at 12 you aren’t doing a lot of dating.” He sighed. “But, back to the Bible for a second.”

“I thought you said it wasn’t the Ark?” Hugo was confused.

“Right. Remember, though it landed on Mount Ararat it is doubtful that it was built in the same area,” he went on.

“That make sense,” Hugo accepted.

“But, gentlemen, a Noah and the Ark limerick . . .” We knew he had been setting us up, “There once was a man named Noah, Who brought on board snakes like the boa, His wife said ‘you old lout. . . couldn’t you have left out pests like the bat and the mosquito=ah?’”

“What else was in Turkey?” I prodded, not letting it hurt too long.

He looked at the wood in the box and then at the teletype. Then he looked up at us and said one word.

“Troy.”