(Saturday evening)

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"And Noah begot three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth."

• Genesis 6:10

"And the Lord said unto Noah: 'Come thou and all thy house into the ark; for thee have I seen righteous before Me in this generation. Of every clean beast thou shalt take to the ark seven and seven, each with his mate; and of the beasts that are not clean too, each with his mate . . . to keep seed alive upon the face of all the earth. For yet seven days, and I will cause it to rain upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and every living substance that I have made will I blot out from off the face of the earth.'"

• Genesis 7:1-2

"And Noah was six hundred years old when the flood of waters was upon the earth."

• Genesis 7:6

We finished our simple repast, with a good deal less chatting, and then some of us adjourned to the common room area with mugs of tea in our hands, while others went off to their rooms to rest and prepare for the evening's challenge. Noah, Joe, Ensel, the NYU student, Geleg, Maria and I formed the tea-drinking group. Geleg was silent, unobtrusively observing the others without joining in the conversation. I felt his eyes probing me as the newcomer to the group. After a week of training together, the participants must feel a lot of camaraderie among themselves, I thought self-consciously. I certainly introduced a new and unexpected element for those who did not know me.

Maria began to talk about her work for the Natural Law Party and the kinds of issues they included in their platform. She was bright-eyed and perky and spoke from the heart. It was hard to disagree with someone as lively and pleasant as that. As she spoke I got the feeling that the term 'Natural Law' was an indoctrinated slogan for 'our agenda of what we know is right.' Although she did not come out and say as much, the bottom line hidden agenda of the NLP was for everybody to practice the Maharishi's Transcendental Meditation, and then everything in the world would be OK.

"She's such a sweet person," I thought, "and meditation surely is not going to hurt anyone. So why come on with this political jargon and hidden agenda?"

Then she began to tell us about Dr. Fagan, a professor of biology at the Maharishi University of Management in Iowa. Dr. Fagan had been funded with a large government grant to pursue research into DNA structures. Then one day he closed down his project and sent the money back. From that day forward he became an outspoken critic of the policies and procedures of genetic engineering. As Maria talked she pulled out a sheaf of papers on the subject with a list of various genetically engineered agricultural products that were currently or soon to be commercially marketed. The list included milk products, corn, cotton, soybeans, tomatoes, and several other basic crops. Major drug and chemical corporations such as Monsanto, Dupont, Asgrow, and Ecogen were splicing sequences of DNA from bacteria, viruses and other organisms into agricultural products, mostly to improve weed and pest control, or to enhance freshness and increase yield. The NLP and an affiliated group of women calling themselves Mothers for Natural Law were voicing concerns about lack of labeling. They felt outrage at being used as unwilling guinea pigs for poorly tested products, and they worried about the uncontrolled spread of hybrids with unknown side effects into 'wild populations.' Their literature included lists of foods 'whose consumption must be avoided.'

"Yeah," muttered Ensel, a muscular black with Jamaican braids. "An' pretty soon they be developin' hybrid humans, maybe not just to resist certain diseases. Maybe also with certain looks, you know, man, a certain kind of skin or hair color."

"Then we can all have designer genes," commented Noah with a laugh. "You know, an extra arm here, a few scales there. Maybe even gills for scuba divers."

"Mmm Hmm," said the NYU student who had a pale complexion and a short black beard. "If they can splice animal genes into plants, why not humans into all kinds of things. You know, humans have consciousness, but their bodies are totally an expression of their genes. Maybe one human gene into a tomato is just a bit of information and doesn't do much. If you add more genes, when do you get to the point where the tomato is a self-aware human, or vice-versa? I don't know. "

It seemed to me that Maria and her cohorts were exaggerating the dangers. However, she did convey an alarming picture that just as hundreds of species are being lost in extinction due to ecological damage, a great flood of new and untested and perhaps even monstrous and 'unnatural' organisms was being developed and released into the environment. Her vision embraced the definite possibility of losing genetic stability on the planet and reducing it to a barren lifeless rock.

Behind this grim specter I detected my old friend Fear lurking. The feeling was similar to the uneasiness I felt about the impending event in the woods with Kang and Yamada. One fear was for the survival of the race and the whole planetary biosphere. The other was for my own personal unscathed survival of the evening. Probably that was more of a concern for social survival than for physical survival. Still my intuition told me that the challenges of genetic engineering, however great, were not outside of Natural Law. To me, everything is natural. Even manmade objects are natural since man is also a part of Nature. So the word 'Natural' lost all meaning to me other than as a political slogan for what someone either preferred or abhorred. 'Law' sounded like a demand for submission to someone else's preference. It seemed to me that 'Natural' referred to pleasant and desired things, whereas 'Unnatural' referred to unpleasant, undesired, or feared things.

Were Monsanto and the government deliberately in a conspiracy to generate fear in the population by flooding the market with unlabelled products that had been tampered with in mysterious ways that the tamperproof Tylenol packagers had not even dreamed of? Or was it really the Natural Law Party that was fanning irrational and groundless fears for the sake of political grandstanding?

I glanced at Noah, and noted that he was unperturbed by the whole thing, and found it kind of amusing. After all, he was used to dealing with the horror of International Terrorism. A flood of genetic monsters would not phase him in the least. Likely as not he knew things that I didn't, and had a bigger picture to go by. Well, if I had a need to know, he'd tell me. Or I could probe him a bit.

The image brought to mind the Biblical story of Noah, and I wondered if the Ark with samples of every species aboard wasn't maybe a genetic library to protect against an ecological disaster rather than simply a boat in a flood of water. Many times in earth's geological history 90% or more of the life forms on the planet had been wiped out for one reason or another, the most well known case being the supposed comet that ended the age of the dinosaurs. All life came from water. The ocean is like a vast undefined body of protoplasm. A flood could be in the form of some breakdown of genetic barriers due to viruses, alien intervention or scientific tinkering. In the face of such a breakdown, why not have a means of preserving the existing DNA codes in a library, and then reconstitute them as needed if ever they are lost? The problems of Jurassic Park, while challenging, are not insurmountable. But the shift of viewpoint from individual identity to entire gene pools with no fixed species boundaries was pretty radical for most people.

It was time to begin the Night Fight. I changed in the men's room, grabbed my bamboo sword, and tagged along with the group out to the open spot at the edge of the lake, around a spit where you could not see any lights from the lodge. That was to be our starting point. The weather had changed and clouded up. There was no moon and the stars were no longer visible. It was dark. Norm and Tom carried flashlights to lead the way. But when everyone had gathered at the starting point, they doused the lights so we could all shift into night vision.

The Night Fight was a samurai version of running the gauntlet, except that it was done at night when you had even less a chance to see your adversary. You ran through a forest in which the masters were hidden. Along the way to your target destination, the lurking swordsmen would attack you from ambush with various weapons and techniques that had been covered in the course. You had to defend yourself and then race on - all in the dark. Somewhere between the lake's edge and the gazebo we would each encounter four challenges. It was like a real life video game.

Kang, Norm, and Brad dressed in black ibos and wearing Ninja masks had already disappeared into the forest. Tom instructed us to form a line and then set off one at a time up the hill. It should take ten or fifteen minutes to reach the top, depending on what happened. We were to wait a minute or so and then the first person would set out. Another would take off at each interval of thirty seconds to one minute, according to personal intuition. Finishing with the instructions, Tom also melted into the darkness and was gone.

I had placed myself in the middle of the line so that I could get a feel for how the game went. But I did not want to appear laggard. In front of me were Ed, Geleg, the Ashramite Calvin, Ensel, Noah, and Maria. Then came Jim, Chuck, the other Ashramite Ayub, Joe, Itoh, Gracie, and NYU at the rear.

Once our eyes adapted to night vision, we could make out each other in the group and the general outline of trees ahead, all in black and gray. But details were blurred. Visibility was no more than six or eight feet at best. Ed, one of the Seals, crouched, gripping his sword in the air in attack stance, ready to go first. Suddenly he let out a piercing '"Kyaaah" and set out running. There was a path through the reeds, but it turned, so he was quickly out of sight. It seemed that as soon as he entered the woods, he encountered his first attacker. "Heya!" "Crack, crack." The weapons clashed, and then he was dashing on up the hill. Again, "Whack, smack," and so on towards the top.

In the meantime Geleg suddenly and silently bolted into the forest. By the time Calvin started out, there were three people at various points on the obstacle course. The event became more complex with cracks and whacks and shouts here and there as confrontations occurred, punctuated by tense periods of silence as students ran through the dark forest with only 'uphill' as their guide.

Ensel took off, his braids flapping about. A minute later Noah lumbered into the shadows, and then Maria gave a shriek and ran, waving her bamboo wildly. I was next. I felt tense, but in spite of the chaos up on the hill, everything seemed to be going well. I trusted that I knew how to handle the sword, at least the basic strokes, parries, and blocks. I decided to start from a defensive stance, holding the sword low and to the rear. Then, keeping my center of balance as low as possible, I took off through the reeds and began to scramble up the wooded incline. I put out of my mind the sounds of what was happening further ahead on the slope and focussed my awareness on not crashing into trees and watching out for the first ambush.

I didn't see him hidden, but as soon as Tom moved from behind a tree, I reacted and was ready to meet him. He was swinging a five-foot wooden staff down on me. I brought my bamboo up and parried it and then swung around and stroked down at him. He brought the staff up between two hands, blocked the blow and deflected it to the side, then swung his stick around his head with a swish and disappeared again into the darkness. That's number one, I thought, and immediately dashed on ahead up the hill, trusting that he would not pursue me, but prepare instead for the next contestant.

I came to an area with lots of large boulders and outcroppings. As I sorted my way through, I heard a faint whirring sound, and Stormin' Norman's dark form raised up on a boulder launching a bola at my sword. It wrapped around and he was about to disarm me, but instead of flinching back, I closed in on him with a shout. The line slacked. I quickly bent my wrist back and jerked the sword free. Then I slashed upward to the right at the form on the rock. He leaped back and was gone in the shadows.

That's two. No time to waste. I raced on . . . and almost ran right into the glowering barrel chest of Brad Yamada, sword upraised in attack position. I jumped back in defensive posture and we glared at each other. He blocked the way. We sidled back and forth like samurai crabs, staring each other down. He was waiting for me to make the first move! If I didn't, he blocked the way, and I failed. If I did, his response would be swift and deadly. So I stared, and then struck - with a feint - which he deftly parried - whack! Then I swung again with a blow of commitment. He blocked it - crack! And at that moment I pushed. He shifted to the side, and I bolted past him.

On I went. One more to go. I reached a grove where the trees grew thickly. I suddenly realized that it would be hard to swing my bamboo with the trees so close together. But I had no time to figure out what to do about it. Two feet jarred into my shoulders from behind, throwing me forward. Like a monkey Kang had swung down from a tree limb over head. I rolled forward in the leaves somersaulting over my right shoulder, sword in hand, and came up into a crouching stance. Kang was bare handed, but he had stepped on my bamboo and was kicking toward my shoulder with his other foot. I let go of my sword, rolled away from him, got to my feet, and ran.

On to the gazebo at the top, and I'm home free, I thought. Just then - wham! A bolt of bamboo lightning crashed down onto my shoulder from behind, dropping me to my knees. I rolled to dodge the next blow that I sensed was coming - but from whom? What was going on? Whack! Whoever he was, he caught me in the ribs, and pain shot through my body, as I felt them crack. In desperation I groped in the dirt and leaves. My hand found a small fist-sized rock and flung it at my adversary. By chance it barely clipped him on the side of the head. He was wearing night goggles, and the glancing blow knocked them enough out of position that he had to pause and use two hands to adjust them. I took advantage of the moment to scramble through the brush and on up the last twenty yards to the gazebo.

My chest was filled with burning pain. As I came up to the steps, I turned to see if the assailant was pursuing, but he had thought better of revealing himself to the group in the gazebo and disappeared into the forest.

"Hey, what's the matter, Derek? You look hurt," said Noah.

"Oh, Ow," I agreed, and then I leaned over and whispered, "There's some extra guy out there who caught me off guard and nearly did me in."

Noah and Maria eased me down on the gazebo floor, and I sat there back against the railing and nursed my aches until the rest of the troupe completed their runs, which took about another 30 minutes. Noah sat quietly by my side. The others milled around, shrugging their shoulders at the questions from the arriving students who noticed something wrong with me. Then the instructors joined us - first Kang, then Brad, followed by Norm and Tom.

"What happened to you, Derek?" asked Kang. "I didn't kick you that hard, did I?" He knelt over me and began to gently scan and probe the extent of my injuries.

"I don't know," I replied.

Brad signaled the others to back off and bent over my other side. Kang motioned for me to speak softly, so I continued sotto voce. "I thought there were only supposed to be four encounters out there, but someone else was there too. At first I thought it was you coming after me, Kang. But when I saw he wore night goggles, I knew it was an imposter, or an extra surprise test."

"There were only supposed to be four of us," muttered Brad. "That's very strange. It couldn't have been any of the students because they were all here in the gazebo or still running the course behind you. And, of course, all four of us were busy challenging the students."

Kang spoke up louder. "Well, you took a couple of good whacks. That's what you get for not coming to practice with us all week. At least your collarbone is OK, but I think you cracked a couple of your ribs. When we get back to the lodge, I'll tape you up and give you some herbal poultices. That will do it, but you'll still have some bruise marks, though. And it will hurt a bit for a few days, too. That's all - don't worry," said Kang."Did everybody else make it here OK?" said Brad, standing up and addressing the whole group. When he had assured himself that was true, he continued, "Let's get back to the Lodge and rest. We'll go over your experiences in the morning at our final meeting. Everyone did well. Congratulations. Derek got a couple of bruises, but he's all right, so don't worry about it."

With flashlights on we walked back down the slope and around the cove to the Lodge. Several people offered a helping hand, but I had no difficulty walking on my own. It was just that my shoulder and ribs hurt, and it was hard to breathe, so I walked slowly. When we reached the Lodge, Kang brought out a bottle of fragrant Chinese ointment that he smeared over the injured area. Then he taped it securely.Noah had specially booked a cabin for himself without roommates, so he invited me to join him for the night. This would give us a chance to discuss the whole situation from our special viewpoint of the project privately. Then tomorrow, after the course disbanded, I would find out what I could from Kang and Yamada.

In the cabin I disrobed, sponged off, and then gingerly lay down on the bed in my underwear. "What's going on?" I asked Noah. "I'm sure there was somebody else out there that bushwhacked me. It wasn't Kang, though he could have creamed me if he really wanted to. This guy had night vision goggles on. He wanted to hurt me, but not kill me. Otherwise he could have used a gun or a real blade and easily finished me off."

Noah paused thoughtfully a moment and then replied, "What happened tonight was deliberate. I think someone is letting you know that they know who you are and where you are very precisely. And I think that what they did tonight was meant to serve as a warning. You're right. For some reason they didn't want to kill you this time, but they probably want to frighten you away from your investigations. You were lucky your martial arts training and survival skills are pretty good or you might have come off a lot worse than you did. I told you you'd have to be careful once you got involved in this project. It's not a nice game, and these guys play rough. Tomorrow we'll see what the Masters think about the whole thing. They're very in tune, and they'll surely have some useful information to share."

"Great," I said, and groaned myself into a more comfortable position, noting that now I was getting some direct experience of physical pain. It was distressful, and I wanted it to end. But it was not the same as the fear I felt of an unknown foe, or the anticipation of pain, loss, or other suffering. Physical pain was a tangible, real experience - a known. Who had caused my pain was still an unknown, something that I would explore further tomorrow. Oddly, the fear almost served to strengthen my resolve to get some answers.

So I updated Noah on all that had happened to me since our last phone conversation, including the start of Hebrew lessons, and the ideas about Hebrew and the Semitic alphabet that I had come up with during the flight and the drive.

"You know," said Noah, "The Hebrews were named after the patriarch Eber who was a great grandson of Shem, the patriarch of the Semitic peoples. And Shem was one of the three sons of Noah, my namesake. Noah in Hebrew means 'rest.' Maybe the Biblical Noah represents a quality of deep silence or a place in which all of creation may rest. His three sons were Ham, Shem, and Japheth."

"Here you go." He continued, pulling a small copy of the scriptures out of his travel bag and opening it to Genesis, Chapter 10 (Now there's a good Christian Scientist, I thought to myself.) "According to Genesis the Hamitic people included Egyptians, Africans (the Copts,) and Canaanites from whom came the Phoenicians, as well as the Sumerians and many of the great ancient city states of Mesopotamia, such as Akkad, Nippur (Nimrod,) Uruk, Nineveh, and Babylon. Shem fathered the Elamites, the early settlers of what's now Iran, the Assyrians, Hebrews, Arameans, and a bunch of others. Japheth seems to have fathered the Greeks (Gomer,) the Magyars or Mongols (Magog,) the Indo-Europeans (Ashkenaz,) the Midians (Madai,) the South-East Asians (Javan,) the Turks (Togarmah,) and the Chinese (Kittim.) Some of these identifications are obvious, and some I'm guessing at, and there are lots I haven't figured out. Remember . . . Noah's three sons and their nameless wives are supposed to have repopulated the world after the flood.

"On the other hand, if we just look at the meanings of the names of Noah's sons, we get that Ham means 'heat,' Shem means 'name,' and Japheth means 'beauty.' What if that's what really 'populates' our world."

"OK," I agreed, pulling out a pen and some scrap paper. "Let's pretend that these ancient patriarchs weren't meant to be taken as people, but rather as principles or aspects of reality. According to the ideas I'm getting on the letters, #haM might be a crystal grid, #heth, melting into a liquid, Mem." I wrote the formula #h <--> M : #haM (heat.) "That's certainly what heat does in chemistry, or should I say #haM-history.

"SheM sounds like wave forms. Shin is a wavy glyph, of sound or light or matter waves, - related to fire - ASh in Hebrew. And Mem is a liquid. It has a similar wavy glyph to Shin, but with a tail or a handle on it. Maybe it's a mapping of the unbounded wave structures of experiences with bounded wave samples - letters and words. That's language, or should I say SheM-antics, the science of naming." I wrote another formula. S <--> M : SheM-antics.

I continued. "JaPheTh would be the beauty of physical forms, the science of aesthetics. Yod means light, and Peh is a curl or a mouth, like light glancing off a girl's beautiful curls or face. The Tau indicates a visible mark or signature.

"Maybe these are three different views of reality: physical forms, chemical structures, and symbolic names," I concluded my speculation.

"The Semitic languages come from Shem," said Noah. "And Shem means Name. As I recall, it also refers to stuff like nouns, categories, and even one's reputation. Used as a verb it means 'to value' or 'to estimate.' It has to do with location. Pronounced Sham it means 'there.' Or the ideas of 'put,' 'lay,' 'set,' 'establish.' For me the most interesting use of it is as a term for God. The Hebrews had a taboo against saying the holy name of God, so they called Him 'The Name,' or HaSheM. That comes from Exodus (3:15) where Moses asks God what he should say when the Israelites want to know the name of the god he represents. God says, 'I AM THAT I AM.' Then He tells Moses, 'Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel: Jehovah, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, hath sent me unto you: this is My name forever, and this is My memorial unto all generations.' Right there he gives his name as the Tetragrammaton YHVH and says, 'That's My Name.' So the Jewish tradition just refers to Him indirectly as 'The Name.'"

"Interesting," I responded. "That could be something more than just a taboo. Maybe God is all about Language and the Science of Naming. After all, didn't God make Adam in his image and then give him the job of naming everything?

"Also, the name SheM is just two letters," I went on. "A majority of the Hebrew roots are made from three consonants. I wonder what other roots there are from SheM plus another letter?" I reached for my Ben-Yehuda dictionary.

"I remember the prayer, 'ShMOa Israel . . . . ' "Harken O Israel.' So adding the letter O, the eye, gives meanings like 'to hearken, pay attention,' . . . . Here's SMA, 'if' or 'perhaps.' Sounds like speculation, probabilities. SMY means 'heaven.' That's how Genesis starts off. 'In the beginning God created the Heavens (SheMaYiM) and the Earth.' SMN means 'oil,' 'grease,' 'cream,' 'fat,' and the number eight. Hmm. That sounds pretty organic and even orgasmic. Do you think that's where 'semen' comes from? What is the number 8 doing there? Here's one: SMH meaning 'waste,' or 'destruction.' Is there a martial application to SheM-ology?"

"Like the way Joe's brother Kenny knocks out people, or those old Taoist whistlers messing with the weather?" suggested Noah.

"Here is SMM, 'terror,' 'horror.' That sounds like doomsday stuff. Is semantics involved with terrorism?" I continued, running my finger down the page. "But there's more. SM#h means 'to rejoice, be happy.' Hey, you know the Russian word for laughter is smekh. SM@ means 'to release, let drop or fall.' I wonder what that's about? And here's SMR, 'to guard, watch over.' Wasn't that the ancient Semitic name for Sumer, the cradle of civilization? The Sumerians called their country Ki-en-gi, 'Land of the Guardians of Grain.' . . . . Oh, here's another one, SMS, 'the sun,' 'the sun god, ShaMaSh.' That's pretty heavy. The sun is the source of life on the planet. That's quite a list. I wonder what the common thread is that runs through these SM- roots."

"You know, you forgot one more shem," added Noah. "The eccentric scholar Zecharia Sitchin, whose books you would do well to read by the way, mentions that a shem is also a kind of stone marker with a rounded top that may be inscribed with the name of a king, his symbols, or a text commemorating his achievements. The Moabite stone of Mesha that you mentioned is a shem, I suppose. The funny thing is that Sitchin thinks the shems are not just stone markers, but symbolic representations of space ships belonging to alien space beings. The kings just imitated those shapes in stone to get prestige of association with the extraterrestrial 'gods.'"

"You mean we may be dealing with aliens?" I asked looking up into wild peals of laughter.

"Maybe not quite the way Mr. Sitchin thinks. But anyway, you have a good evening," he replied cryptically and, flicking off the light switch, wormed into his sleeping bag, and went to sleep, leaving me to feel my aches and puzzles.

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