Chapter 5: The Urim, The Thummim, and the Breastplate of Aaron
(Friday evening)
PREV HOME NEXT"And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud, to lead them the way; and by night in a pillar of fire, to give them light that they might go by day and by night; the pillar of cloud by day, and the pillar of fire by night, departed not from before the people."
"And thou shalt make a breastplate of judgment, . . . And thou shalt set in it settings of stones, four rows of stones: a row of carnelian, topaz, and smaragd shall be the first row; and the second row a carbuncle, a sapphire, and an emerald; and the third row a jacinth, an agate, and an amethyst; and the fourth row a beryl, and an onyx, and a jasper; they shall be enclosed in gold in their settings. And the stones shall be according to the names of the children of Israel . . . . And Aaron shall bear the names of the children of Israel in the breastplate of judgment upon his heart, when he goeth in unto the holy place . . . . And thou shalt put in the breastplate of judgment the Urim and the Thummim. . . ."
"While I was thus in the act of calling upon God, I discovered a light appearing in my room, which continued to increase until the room was lighter than at noonday, when immediately a personage appeared at my bedside, standing in the air, for his feet did not touch the floor.
"He had on a loose robe of most exquisite whiteness . . . . Not only was his robe exceedingly white, but his whole person was glorious beyond description, and his countenance truly like lightning. The room was exceedingly light, but not so very bright as immediately around his person. . . .
"He said there was a book deposited, written upon gold plates, giving an account of the former inhabitants of this continent . . . .
"Also, that there were two stones in silver bows - and these stones, fastened to a breastplate, constituted what is called the Urim and Thummim - deposited with the plates, and the possession and use of these stones were what constituted Seers in ancient or former times, and that God had prepared them for the purpose of translating the book."
When Dan and I finally reached home, it was past 7:30. Ping met us at the door with a worried look on her face.
"Ah, you two OK? I'm so worry about you," she said. "A neighbor came over and told me there was a man shooting people on campus, and it's on all the TV news. It's even on CNN. Oh, very awful." Then she made us sit down and eat.
Although we were still shaken, Dan and I did manage to eat a light meal while silently watching the news reports as they came in. It turned out that under the intensive care of the doctors, Stephie's condition soon stabilized. There was no immediate danger of her death. But the bullet had lodged in her spine at the third cervical vertebra. The damage to her spinal cord was such that she probably would be paralyzed below the neck for life.
"My God," I muttered to Dan. "I hope our moving her didn't aggravate the damage to her spine."
The three murdered professors included Dr. Aaron Farbstein, George Panopoulos, and Yuri V. Kuchinsky.
Farbstein, a Nobel laureate for his pioneering work in laser optics communications technology, had been the Department Chairman and Shao's dissertation advisor. Panopoulos was a meteorologist working on supercomputer chaos theory models of weather patterns.
Kuchinsky was an astrophysicist who had worked on the design of the Mir space station at Baikonur. When the Soviet regime crumbled, he immediately defected and came to the U.S. With his pick of whatever institution he preferred, he chose U. of I. It seems he liked the NASA contract R&D work being done there on a new generation of guidance systems for geo-stationary satellites. He apparently also did consulting work for Rockwell International, based nearby in Cedar Rapids.
The murdered TA, a Kashmiri student named Lambir Singh, had been a brilliant protege of Farbstein's and was assisting him in his laser research.
Farbstein, Kuchinsky, and Singh were bachelors, but Panopoulos had a wife and three young children. The TV news reports made a lot of human-interest mileage about the Nobel laureate, the brilliant defector, and the bereaved family.My impression of Noah Rook was that he tended his bee farm during the day and played his high tech games at night. Accordingly I waited until almost 10:30 before placing my call to him.
"Hello."
"Hi, Noah? This is Derek Walker."
"Hey, you Iowans are developing a pretty violent lifestyle." He started right in.
"I don't know what's going on, but Dan and I got caught right in the middle of it."
I recounted our Jessup Hall experience, and then I made an opening to draw out Noah's thoughts: "The evidence seems to indicate that Shao was upset about the scholarship decision made by the Physics Department and was jealous of his competing classmate, Singh. The stress of having come all this way from the hopeless days of the Cultural Revolution only to lose this golden opportunity for recognition apparently was enough to snap his widget."
"Are you sure that's all there is to it?" Noah responded with an annoying question.
"No, of course not," I said peevishly. "I never met the guy before, and only saw him twice briefly today. Both times I got a feeling that he was pretty seriously wacky. Especially when he came down the stairs and waved a gun at me. But the current official theory does fit with my previous personal experience.
"Most of what I call the 'gap' students have a weird feel about them, like a woman who has been sexually abused in childhood by her father. She tries to bury her unhappy soul in denial, but it leaks out as silent anger and alienation in her aura. Unless she clears that gaping wound of betrayal somehow, it's usually impossible for her to develop a responsible long-term relationship with anyone. I don't know any gappers that ever went bonkers on a killing spree, but I have heard of retired KMT servicemen who flipped out, when I was in Taiwan."
I could sense that Noah was skillfully extracting information and opinions from me. But that was OK. He always traded fair and square. And I usually got more insights from what he had to say than he got from me. That was probably also part of the illusion created by a spook.
"Did it occur to you that there might be a classified aspect to this story?" Noah hinted enticingly.
"No it didn't," I said, surprised. "But, now that you mention it, I noticed that the professors were quite prestigious and seemed to be working on projects that could impact the space program. But Shao was a good physicist, after all. Is there more to it than that?"
"Yes, there is," he replied. "And I'll only tell you what you need to know. NASA and Rockwell work closely with the NSA and the military. One aspect of this cooperation is a program to set up a network of sophisticated non-equatorial surveillance satellites. Motorola's Iridium is an example, and there are more in the pipeline. Wait and see. Iridium will go 'bankrupt' leaving all the satellites up in the sky. But you can bet somebody will be using this 'ghost' network quietly. Nobody spends 5 billion for nothing. Aside from the usual spy stuff, there is a lot of highly classified hardware installed in these babies, both the delivery systems and the stations themselves. The key element in them is laser optics and microwave technology. Farbstein and Kuchinsky were working on various ways for all of the satellites to link up using coherent beams - shifting, shaping, and transmitting data like a giant optical neural net computer in space. For quite a while computers have been getting smaller and smaller. Now they're suddenly getting bigger and bigger. The whole planet is sitting inside one hell of a gigantic supercomputer called SkyMind, and nobody but a few insiders even know it yet.
"And, yes, you guessed it: We and the Russians have been working together quietly on this for a long time, despite the ups and downs of surface level politics. Panopoulos was involved in SkyMind, too, working on a real time responsive weather feedback system, called WeatherNet. The HAARP program feeds into it also. Sky Station is a High Altitude Long Endurance platform network of gigantic solar powered airships that will be placed over all major cities soon, nominally to provide cheap cell phone service, but also to carry out sophisticated surveillance operations for NSA and its global minions."
"Wow," I managed to gasp.
"Farbstein's contributions were critical to many aspects of the project. In fact, he was virtually the High Priest of the whole program, designing technology, directing development, and obtaining unlimited funds from invisible sources. He had particularly good contacts in the gold industry and was a mineral man - very good with all sorts of metals and gems. His most important inventions included the development of super high-speed macroscopic quantum optical switches that operate by laser light resonating in various kinds of crystals. Imagine error-free optical switches operating at light speed in outer space over distances ranging from nanometers to 2000 miles! Up there in the sky our planet is rapidly being enclosed in a network of quantum resonating precious stones like emerald, ruby, amethyst, even hybrid dark light projectors such as onyx. They are mounted on the SkyMind sats."
As Noah talked, lights started going off in my head.
"Wow," I commented, forgetting that I had already contributed that gem a moment ago. But this time something else was popping up in my mind's eye. "What you are saying reminds me eerily of a couple of things. The network of stones and lights reminds me of that magical breastplate described in the Bible. The head priest, Aaron, wore it when the Israelites were wandering in the desert under the leadership of Moses. Who knows what the real purpose of that was? Listen to this."
I picked up the Bible that I always kept for reference on my desk and read off the passage from the 28th chapter of Exodus describing the device.
Noah caught my drift. "Yep. That just might be an optical computer device for storing and transmitting data on the tribes. The SkyMind certainly can track all the 'tribes' on the planet. You know, according to the Mormons, Joseph Smith used the Urim and Thummim to translate the ancient plates that he found. Maybe they used a form of hieroglyphics like Blissymbols."
The word 'Blissymbols' triggered my linguistic genes.
"I don't know about the Mormons," I responded, grabbing my Ben-Yehuda Hebrew dictionary off the shelf. "But the Hebrew word Urim means 'lights,' and it often is taken in the sense of oracles. Thummim also traditionally refers to oracles. They look like plural nouns. Probably both words are glossed as 'oracles' on the basis of the Biblical story. But that's just a traditional guess. The root *TM really means 'complete' or 'perfect.' Another definition, however, means 'terminate' or 'destroy.' So who knows - TuMYM might mean 'Terminators.' It could be a weapon of complete destruction, a Doomsday machine. After all, look here. T-MUTaH means 'death.' Actually the 'T' is a prefix here to the base root *MT, the two letters *TM reversed. Huh, reminds me of our root word 'mort' as in 'mortal.' And TiMUR is a column of smoke, though that may be from MoR, you know. The oriental incense, myrrh, was one of the gifts brought by the wise men to Jesus. And what about this: here's a related derivation TaMaH that means 'amazing.' Boy, that's quite a pregnant semantic cluster."
"Yep. And there's also a term T-MURaH which means 'exchange,'" Rook reminded me, without consulting a dictionary. "It is used as a technical term in the Kabbalah to refer to various encryption techniques. Maybe we're also talking about code scramblers and translators here."
"Wow," I said a third time. Leave it to Noah to find a crypto angle. Well, he hopped, so I hopped too. "You know, that Professor's given name was Aaron. And Farbstein is a typical German Jewish surname. But it means 'colored stone.' I've noticed that people often subconsciously follow paths in life that act out their names.
"And speaking of Germans, a girlfriend of my daughter, Joy, recently brought over some devices her dad, who is an inventor, had developed. They call them 'Radiators.' They are made from the powerful little pen flashlights that doctors use. Various crystals and precious stones are mounted in them. If you shine certain stones on certain chakras or other parts of your body, the specially filtered light is supposed to clear the energy in that chakra or meridian channel. I think it is kind of far fetched, but I could detect noticeable effects when I 'radiated' my own chakras with the pens."
"That's a good analogy," cut in Noah. "Because, in addition to the laser network and the usual high resolution surveillance cameras and that sort of thing, the satellites also are GPS, and have beams that can track or guide any object on the earth, down to the size of your credit card or wrist watch. They are ideal for spying, navigation, and communications. And more. On vertical beams projected from SkyMind they can project holographic images that look like real people, machines, objects - optical mirages floating in the air right in front of you, like Joe Smith's angel, or Princess Leiah.
"And remember the smart weapons used by the stealth fighters in the Gulf War? A spotter plane aims a laser beam at the target. Then a smart bomb rides that beam using phase conjugation techniques. You saw some examples of that on CNN. That's the unclassified stuff. Well, the new smart weapons systems can also deliver a variety of classified ordnance with pinpoint accuracy to any destination on earth. It could be explosives, or it could be something else. Death ray lasers are just for starters. The old Cold War days of nuclear holocaust Mutually Assured Destruction MADness are over as far as the military is concerned. They find precision surgical strikes more practical.
"But back to that great showcase of modern warfare, Desert Storm. Our friendly helicopters hovered over the impregnable bunkers the Iraqis had dug around Kuwait. According to the CNN commentaries the 'copter crews said a few nice words over loudspeakers, and the enemy all came out with their hands behind their heads, surrendering to the friendly allies. Well, that's not exactly how it happened. How come the Iraqis didn't just shoot the helicopters down from snug in their bunkers? Also, those bunkers were dug in so deep under the desert that the soldiers wouldn't even hear loudspeakers. Actually the 'copters were using classified mind control electronics developed in Project Rainbow and the Montauk operation to screw up the time/space orientation and willpower of those poor bastards.
"This kind of thing puts a little terror in the terrorists. It also means they badly want to hack the technology, or at least neutralize it. Right now the only advanced weapons that they have access to are the messy nuclear, chemical and biological devices. We believe that Shao was a Chinese agent. When he failed to gain the inside track with Farbstein and his colleagues - because of security clearance problems - he was ordered by his bosses to take them out.
"He was not at all crazy. We know that much. The Chinese have lots of physicists to spare - even good ones. And they do not place any value on individual human life. Shao was a trained assassin, especially prepared for this event as his life mission. His every action and contingency was planned ahead by his superiors, and he executed his tasks with total deliberation. I'll bet his suicide was deliberate and planned in advance."
"What a mind bender," I commented in awe.
"And, you know what?" Noah continued. "I'll also bet they had spotter agents covertly observing his every move. If Shao didn't make the right moves, they would have terminated him remotely anyway. There are a lot of Chinese operatives in the U of I community. It's actually a bit awkward that you had to get involved with that event just as we asked you to do a job for us. Unfortunately, your presence must have drawn the spotter's attention to you. They'd already know you from your East Asian teaching credentials and reputation. But now they will be observing you with the extra suspicion that perhaps you came intentionally to the scene when Shao made his move because you were on covert assignment to interfere with their operation. And that coincidence might just lead them to the truth."
"Oh, shit," I blurted nervously. "You must be kidding. You mean I - maybe even my whole family is in danger?"
A wave of paranoia swept over me.
"That's right," Rook agreed soberly. "So from now on, no more cellular phone calls with me. In fact, don't use your home phone either. They probably have you monitored already, and may have even jacked into this conversation, come to think of it."
You just do your stuff for now. I'll contact you soon when I figure out a clear channel. Don't worry about it. OK, talk to you later. You have a good evening."
And he hung up.
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