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"Why did they expect another threat from space?"
"From what I can gather, they foresaw the return of the second comet that would finish the job of complete destruction."
Yaeger was nearly speechless. "What you're suggesting, Max, is that there really was a civilization called Atlantis?"
"I didn't say that," Max stated irritably. "I haven't determined what these ancient people called themselves. I do know that they only vaguely resembled the tale passed down from Plato, the famed Greek philosopher. His record of a conversation that took place two hundred years before his time, between his ancestor, the great Greek statesman Solon, and an Egyptian priest, is the first written account of a land called Atlantis."
"Everyone knows the legend," said Yaeger, his thoughts spinning into space. "The priest told of an island continent larger than Australia that rose in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean west of the Pillars of Hercules, or the Strait of Gibraltar, as we know it today. Several thousand years ago, it was destroyed and sank beneath the sea after a great upheaval, and vanished. A riddle that has puzzled believers, and is scoffed at by historians to this day. Personally, I tend to agree with historians that Atlantis is nothing more than an early saga of science fiction."
"Perhaps it was not a total fabrication after all."
Yaeger stared at Max, his eyebrows pinched. "There is absolutely no geological basis for a lost continent to have disappeared in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean nine thousand years ago. It never existed. Certainly not between North Africa and the Caribbean. It's now generally accepted that the legend is linked to a catastrophic earthquake and flood caused by a volcanic eruption that took place on the island of Thera, or Santorini as it is known today, and wiped out the great Minoan civilization on Crete."
"So you think Plato's portrait of Atlantis, in his works Critias and Timaeus, is an invention."
"Not portrait, Max," Yaeger lectured the computer. "He told the story in dialogue, a popular genre in ancient Greece. The story is not related in the third person by the author, but presented to the reader by two or more narrators, one who questions the other. And, yes, I believe Plato invented Atlantis, knowing with glee that future generations would swallow the con, write a thousand books on the subject, and debate it endlessly."
"You're a hard man, Yaeger," said Max. "I assume you don't believe in the predictions of Edgar Cayce, the famous psychic."
Yaeger shook his head slowly. "Cayce claimed he saw Atlantis fall and rise in the Caribbean. If an advanced civilization had ever existed in that region, the hundreds of islands would have produced clues.
But to date not so much as a potsherd of an ancient culture has been found."
"And the great stone blocks that form an undersea road off Bimini?"
"A geological formation that can be found in several other parts of the seas."
"And the stone columns that were found on the seafloor off Jamaica?"
"It was proven they were barrels of dry concrete that solidified in water after the ship carrying them as cargo sank and the wooden staves eroded away. Face facts, Max. Atlantis is a myth."
"You're an old poop, Hiram. You know that?"
"Just telling it like it is," said Yaeger testily. "I prefer not to believe in an ancient advanced civilization that some dreamers believe had rocket sh
ips and garbage disposals."
"Ah," Max said sharply, "there lies the rub. Atlantis was not one vast city populated by Leonardo da Vincis and Thomas Edisons and surrounded by canals on an island continent, as Plato described it.
According to what I'm finding, the ancient people were a league of small seafaring nations who navigated and mapped the entire world four thousand years before the Egyptians raised the pyramids. They conquered the seas. They knew how to use currents, and developed a vast knowledge of astronomy and mathematics that made them master navigators. They developed a chain of coastal city-ports and built a trading empire by mining and transporting mineral ore they transformed into metals, unlike other people of the same millennium who lived at higher elevations, led a nomadic existence, and survived the disaster.
The seafarers had the bad luck to be destroyed by the giant tidal waves and were lost without a trace.
Whatever remains of their port cities now lies deep underwater and buried beneath a hundred feet of silt."
"You deciphered and collected all that data since yesterday?" asked Yaeger in undisguised astonishment.
"The grass," Max pontificated "does not grow under my feet, nor, I might add, do I sit around and wait for my terminal innards to rust."
"Max, you're a virtuoso."
"It's nothing really. After all, it was you who built me."
"You've given me so much to contemplate, I can't digest it all."
"Go home, Hiram. Take your wife and daughters to a movie. Get a good night's sleep while I sizzle my chips. Then, when you sit down in the morning, I'll really have information that will curl your ponytail."
