Area 51 by Robert Doherty Read Free Book Online Page A

prohibited. The waves emitted by the imager could safely invade the depths and tell him if there were more buried wonders. At least that was the theory. The practice, as his graduate assistant Mike Welcher was pointing out to him, was not living up to the anticipation.
    "It's like"--Welcher paused and scratched his head--"it's like we're being blocked by some other emission source. It's not particularly powerful, but it is there."
    "For example?" Nabinger asked, leaning back against the cool stone walls of the chamber. Despite all the time he'd spent inside the pyramid over the years, there was still a feeling of oppression in here, as if one could sense the immense weight of stone pressing down overhead.
    Nabinger was a tall, heavyset man, sporting a thick black beard and wire-rimmed glasses. He wore faded khaki, the uniform of the desert explorer. At thirty-six he was considered young in the field of archaeology and he had no major finds to stake his reputation upon. Part of his problem, he would readily acknowledge to his friends back in Brooklyn, was that he had no pet theory that he desired to pursue.
    He only had his pet method, searching for new writings and trying to decipher the volumes of hieroglyphics that still remained untranslated. He was willing to accept whatever they yielded, but so far his efforts had not turned up much.

    Schliemann might have been convinced that Troy actually existed and thus spent his life searching for it, but Nabinger had no such convictions. Nabinger's work on the pyramids was one of detailing what was there and searching for its explanation, an area that was perhaps one of the most heavily studied in the field of archaeology. He had hopes that perhaps he might find something with the MRI, something that others had missed, but he didn't have a clue as to what.
    Hopefully, it might be a new chamber with not only whatever was in it, but also new, unseen writings.
    Welcher was looking at the readouts. "If I didn't know better, I'd say we're getting interference from some sort of residual radiation."
    Nabinger had been afraid of this. "Radiation?" He glanced across the chamber at the group of Egyptian laborers who had helped haul the MRI down here. The head man, Kaji, was watching them carefully, his wrinkled face not betraying a thought. The last thing Nabinger needed was the laborers walking out on them because of the threat of radiation.
    "Yeah," Welcher said. "To prepare for this I worked with the MRI in the hospital and we saw readings like this once in a while. They came up when the reading was affected by X-rays. In fact, the technician told me they finally had to write up a schedule for the machines so they wouldn't be on at the same time, even though they were on different floors of the hospital and both heavily shielded."
    It was information not widely known, but Nabinger had read reports from earlier expeditions that had used cosmic ray bombardment to search for hidden chambers and passages in the Great Pyramid and their reports had been similar: there was some sort of residual radiation inside the pyramid that blocked such attempts.
    The information had not been widely disseminated because there was no explanation for it, and scientists didn't write journal articles about things they couldn't explain. Nabinger often wondered how many unexplained phenomena went unreported because those who discovered them didn't want to risk ridicule since there was no rational explanation for their findings.

    Nabinger had hoped to have better luck with the MRI because it worked on a different band-width from the cosmic-ray emitters. The exact nature of the radiation had never been detailed, so he had not been able to determine if the MRI would be blocked also.
    "Have you tried the entire spectrum on the machine?"
    he asked. They'd been down here for four hours already, Nabinger allowing Welcher to handle the machine, which was his specialty. Nabinger had spent the time painstakingly