The Christ Clone Trilogy 01 - In His Imagery
By
James Beau Seigneur
The Shroud
September 28,1978 — Northern Italy
Barely more than misplaced starlight, the lights of Milan peeked dimly through
the window as the jet flew over northern Italy. Decker studied the outline of
this landlocked constellation as he considered the consequences of the job
ahead. Like Professor Goodman, Decker was certain the team's research would
prove that the Shroud was nothing more than a cheap medieval forgery. The
problem was, he knew there were a lot of people who would not appreciate having
their bubble of faith burst by the truth, including Elizabeth's mother, a devout
Catholic. So far his relationship with her had been pretty good. How would she
take all of this? I guess we 'II be spending Christmas with my mom for the next
few years, he mused.
Father Rinaldi, who had gone directly from the meeting in Connecticut to Turin,
had chartered a bus to take the team the 125 kilometers from Milan to Turin. By
the time the bus pulled into their hotel it was midnight and though it was only
7:00 p.m. in New York and 4:00 p.m. on America's west coast, everyone decided to
go to their rooms to try to get some sleep.
The next morning Decker, who was never very good at adjusting to different time
zones, got up before the sun. Because of the time difference going east, he
should have wanted to sleep in. But it made no difference — he was ready to get
up and logic was not involved. As the morning sky grew light, he looked out from
his hotel window down Turin's long, straight streets which intersected at nearly
perfect ninety degree angles. On either side of the streets were homes and small
stores occupying one and two story buildings, none of which appeared to be less
than two centuries old. Beyond the city, to the north, east, and west, the Alps
pierced the atmosphere and clouds on their way to the sky. Elizabeth would love
this, he thought.
Decker left the hotel for some early morning sightseeing. Despite the city's
proximity to the mountains he encountered very few hills on his walk. About a
quarter of a mile from the hotel he came to the Porta Palatina, an immense
gateway through which in 218 B.C. Hannibal, after a siege of only three days,
drove his soldiers and elephants into the Roman town of Augusta Taurinorum, or
ancient Turin. As he walked, the wonderful smells of morning began to drift from
the open windows of houses along his path. The sounds of children playing
followed, and then suddenly the timeless atmosphere of the city was crowded into
the present by the sound of a television in someone's kitchen. It was time to
head back to the hotel.
As he entered the hotel lobby, Decker heard the voices of team members. The
breakfast meeting had already begun and the conversation centered around a
problem with the equipment that the team had brought from the United States.
Without interrupting, Decker tried to piece together what was going on.
Apparently the equipment had been put in the name of Father Rinaldi with the
intention of avoiding exactly the sort of problems with customs that the team
was now experiencing. Unfortunately, though Rinaldi was an Italian citizen, he
had been in the U.S. too long and back in Turin too short a time to be eligible
to bring the equipment into the country without a sixty-day impoundment. Rinaldi
and Tom D'Muhala had already been sent to the customs office in Milan for some
face-to-face diplomacy and arm twisting.
After breakfast, several members of the team decided to walk the half mile from
the hotel to the royal palace of the House of Savoy, which for centuries had
been the residence of the kings of Italy. It was in a suite of rooms in the
palace that the team would be conducting its investigation of the Shroud. When
they reached the palace they were stunned to find tens of thousands of people
standing several abreast in lines that stretched for over a mile to the east and
west. The lines converged at the Cathedral of San Giovanni Battista, which is
adjacent to the palace. In the cathedral, in a sterling silver case sealed
within a larger case of bullet proof glass filled with inert gasses, the Shroud
is kept. Two or three times a century the Shroud is taken out and put on public
display, drawing pilgrims from all over the world. The crowd that day
represented only a small fraction of the three million people who over the past
several weeks had traveled from all over the world to see what they believed to
be the burial cloth of Christ.
The team was escorted through a courtyard into a restricted part of the palace.
At every corner were guards armed with small European-made machine guns. The
team paused as they entered, awestruck with the size and splendor of their
surroundings. There was gold everywhere: on chandeliers, on picture frames, on
vases, inlaid into carvings in the doors and other woodwork. Even the wallpaper
was gold-gilt. And everywhere were paintings and marble statuary. At the end of
a long, opulently decorated hall was the entrance to the princes' suite, where
the team would conduct their experiments. Beyond the ten-foot doors was a fifty
by fifty foot ballroom, the first of seven rooms which made up the suite. The
second room, which is where the Shroud would be placed for examination, was as
magnificent as the first. Crystal chandeliers hung from ceilings painted in
classical frescos of angels and swans and biblical scenes. Somewhere in the life
of ancient buildings which remain in use comes a point at which time and
progress can no longer be ignored. Whether it is the carriage house that becomes
a garage or a closet that is converted to a phone room, some aesthetics
ultimately yield to the demands of modern convenience. In the princes' suite the
evidence of compromise was a bathroom and electricity. The bathroom was a
strange arrangement with two toilets and five sinks. This would double as the
team's photographic darkroom. The only electricity was provided by a wire just
slightly thicker than a standard extension cord, which led to a single outlet
about an inch away from the baseboard. The team's equipment would require far
more power than that.
"We'll need to run electric cables up here from the basement," said RudyDichtl,
the team member with the most 'hands-on' electrical experience. "I'm going to
see if I can find a hardware store."
Decker told Dichtl that he had noticed a hardware store while walking that
morning. He wasn't entirely sure of the location, but thought he could find it
again. "Great," said Dichtl. "If they have what we need, I could use an extra
pair of hands lugging it back."
For the next two days there was little to do but sightsee. Despite Father
Rinaldi's best efforts, customs in Milan simply refused to release the team's
equipment. Decker took advantage of the time to get to know some of the other
team members. His intent was both to be friendly and to gather background
information for the series of articles he planned to write. Everyone spoke
freely of their thoughts about the Shroud and how each had become involved in
the expedition. Decker was confident that he'd be able to sell the story to the
wire services. An exclusive like this could really boost his career.
All of this, of course, assumed that the team got their equipment. Finally,
Decker decided they'd waited long enough. If Milan didn't release the equipment
soon, this expedition really was going to end up as a wild goose chase.
Wednesday morning, when Father Rinaldi came into the hotel lobby to report on
his progress, Decker was waiting for him. "Any luck, Father?" Decker asked.
"None," responded the priest.
"Well," Decker said, "I think I know how we can break this
logjam."
"Please, go on," Rinaldi encouraged.
"Now, this might not be the way you like to do things, but right now Turin is
crawling with reporters covering the Shroud exhibit. If you held a press
conference and announced that we can't do our research because a bunch of petty
bureaucrats won't let us have our equipment, you could cause quite a bit of
embarrassment for our friends in customs."
By now Eric Jumper and John Jackson had come into the hotel lobby where Decker
and Father Rinaldi were talking. "Anyway," Decker said, "if you embarrass these
guys a little I bet they'll come through with the equipment."
After talking it over, Rinaldi, Jackson, and Jumper saw the merit in Decker's
idea but modified it to be somewhat less confrontational. Rinaldi called the
Minister of Commerce in Rome and pointedly explained that if the problem was not
resolved and the equipment delivered immediately, the American scientists would
not be able to begin their work. If that happened, Rinaldi continued, he felt it
likely that the international press would be quite interested and would probably
hold the Minister of Commerce personally responsible for preventing the
scientific testing of the Shroud of Turin. Rinaldi was put on hold for about
five minutes; obviously the threat had some effect. When he returned to the
phone the minister agreed to have the equipment shipped to Turin.
When the truck carrying the equipment finally arrived at the palace it was
Friday afternoon — five days behind schedule. There were no forklifts available
to unload the truck so the team's own brute strength was required to bring the
eighty crates packed with some eight tons of equipment up the two long flights
of stairs to the princes' suite. As soon as everyone caught their breath, they
went to work opening crates and unpacking equipment. Soon the public viewing of
the Shroud would end and it would be brought to the test room for examination
late Sunday evening. There were seven days of preparation to be done in just
over two. For the next 56 hours the team worked nonstop.
Some of the tests required bright light while others required total darkness.
The first part would be easy but the latter required sealing off the eight by
ten foot windows with thick sheets of black plastic. Maze-like light baffles
made of more black plastic also had to be built for the doorways. The testing
table was set up in the Shroud room and the adjoining rooms were established as
staging areas for testing and calibrating equipment. The bathroom, the only
source of water, was converted into a darkroom for developing X-rays and other
photography. Equipment that malfunctioned had to be repaired on-site with
replacement parts the team had brought from the U.S. or by adapting locally
available equipment. Quite a few square pegs would be forced into round holes
over the next several days.
Finally, on Sunday night at about midnight, someone in the hall said, "Here it
comes."
Monsignor Cottino, the representative of Turin's Archbishop-Cardinal, entered
the Shroud testing room, followed by twelve men carrying a sheet of
three-quarter inch plywood, four feet wide and sixteen feet long. Draped over
the plywood was a piece of expensive red silk which covered and protected the
Shroud. The men were accompanied by seven Poor Claire nuns, the senior of which
began to slowly pull back the silk as the men lowered the plywood sheet to waist
level. The testing table, which could be rotated ninety degrees to the right or
left, sat parallel to the ground, awaiting the transfer of the Shroud.
Silence fell over the room as the silk was carefully pulled back, revealing a
sheet of off-white herringbone linen. Decker waited for a moment for this second
protective covering to be removed, then slowly it dawned on him that it was not
a covering at all. It was the Shroud itself. He squinted and stared at the
cloth, barely able to make out anything resembling an image of a crucified man.
One of the unusual features of the Shroud is that when it is seen up close, the
image seems to blend into the background. The same is true when you move several
yards back. The optimum range for viewing the image is about six feet, and
Decker was much closer than that. He had also expected the image to resemble the
photos of the Shroud. But most of the Shroud photos are actually negative images
which, because the Shroud is itself a type of photographic negative, result in a
much clearer image than can be seen with the naked eye.
Suddenly Decker felt drained. The anticlimax of seeing the Shroud, added to the
weight of sleepless hours, rushed over him like the chill of cold water. The
extent of his disappointment surprised him. Even though he believed the Shroud
to be a fraud, he discovered that from a strictly emotional point of view, he
really wanted to feel something — closer to God, awe, perhaps just a twinge of
the strangely religious excitement he used to feel when looking at a stained
glass window. Instead he had mistaken the Shroud for nothing more than a
protective drapery.
He moved back from the Shroud and to his amazement, the image became much more
distinct. For a moment he rocked back and forth, watching the strange phenomenon
of the Shroud's appearing and disappearing image. Decker's curiosity went wild.
Why, he wondered, would the artist who painted the image have painted it so that
it was so hard to see? How could he have painted it at all, Decker wondered,
unless he used a paintbrush six feet long so that he could see what he was
painting? Few, if any, of Decker's emotional drives were ever greater than his
curiosity. The lack of sleep no longer seemed to bother him — he wanted to
understand this puzzle.
Decker watched as Monsignor Cottino walked around the Shroud, stopping every
couple of feet to remove thumbtacks which held the Shroud to the plywood.
Thumbtacks! Rusty and old, their stains rushed out in all directions to bear
witness of their having been there. So much planning and effort had gone into
keeping even the tiniest foreign particles away from the Shroud, only to find
that the centuries, perhaps millennia, that preceded them had been far less
careful.
During the 120 hours allotted to the American team, three groups of scientists
worked simultaneously, one at either end of the Shroud and one in the middle.
The sound of camera shutters formed a constant background as nearly every action
was recorded in photographs and on audio tape. Despite the sleep they had
already lost, during the next five days few on the team would sleep more than
two or three hours per day. Those who were not involved in a particular project
stayed near to help those who were, or simply to watch.
Thirty-six hours into the procedures, as husband and wife team members Roger and
Marty Gilbert performed reflectance spectroscopy, something very unusual
happened. Starting at the feet and moving up the image, they began obtaining
spectra. As they moved from the foot to the ankle, suddenly the spectra changed
dramatically.
"How can the same image give different spectra?" Eric Jumper asked the Gilberts.
No one had an answer, so they continued. As they moved the equipment up the
legs, the reading remained constant. Everything was the same except the image of
the feet, and more specifically, the heels.
Jumper left the Shroud room and found team member Sam Pellicori, who was trying
to sleep on a cot in another room. "Sam! Wake up!" he said. "I need you and your
macroscope in the Shroud room right away!"
Pellicori and Jumper positioned the macroscope over the Shroud and lowered it
until it was just above the heel. Pellicori focused, changed lenses, focused
again, and looked, without saying a word, at the heel image on the Shroud. After
a long pause, he said dryly, "It's
dirt."
"Dirt?" asked Jumper. "Letmelook." Jumper looked through the macroscope and
refocused. "It is dirt," he said. "But why?"
Decker watched as Professor Goodman, too, examined the heel and reached the same
conclusion.
As the next shift of scientists came on everyone met for a review and
brainstorming session to determine the direction and priorities for the next set
of tests. "Okay," Juniper started. "Here's what we know. The body images are
straw yellow, not sepia, as all previous accounts indicated. The color is only
on the crowns of the microfibers of the threads and does not vary significantly
anywhere on the Shroud in either shade or depth. Where one fiber crosses another
the underlying fiber is unaffected by the color.
"The yellow microfibers show no sign of capillarity or blotting, which indicates
that no liquid was used to create the image, which rules out paint. Further
there is no adherence, meniscus effect, or matting between the threads, also
ruling out any type of liquid paint. In the areas of the apparent blood stains,
the fibers are clearly matted and there are signs of capillarity, as would be
the case with blood."
"What about the feet?" asked one of the scientists. For those who had just come
on duty, Jumper explained what had happened with the reflectance spectroscopy
test.
"Of course there's dirt," one of the female team members said after Jumper's
explanation. "What could be more natural than dirt on the bottom of the feet?"
"Yes," said Jumper, "but that assumes that this is indeed an authentic image of
a crucified man, somehow transferred to the cloth." Personally, Jumper did not
discount the possibility, but he knew that it was bad science to start from an
assumption.
Still, the obvious became harder and harder to deny, for not only was there dirt
on the heel, but the amount of dirt was so minute that it was not visible to the
naked eye. Why, they wondered, if the Shroud was a forgery, would the forger go
to the trouble to put on the image dirt which no one could see? No one had an
answer.
As the meeting broke up, Goodman, who continued to be the greatest skeptic,
remarked, "Well, if it is a forgery, it's a damned good one." Decker was struck
by the tremendous allowance that Goodman had made in that little word 'if.'
It had now been three and a half days since Decker had slept. Finally he
resolved to return to the hotel. Before retiring, though, he sat in the lobby
with team members Roger Harris, Susan Chon, and Joshua Rosen, unwinding with a
slowly stirred cup of coffee heavily laced with Irish cream liqueur. Decker
entertained little thought of interviewing anyone. Over the past three days, he
had begun to see himself much less as a reporter and much more as a member of
the team. Habitually, though, he continued making mental notes.
One of his companions, Dr. Joshua Rosen, was a nuclear physicist from Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory working on laser and particle beam research for
the Pentagon. Rosen was one of the four Jewish members of the team and Decker
could not resist the opportunity to ask him about his feelings on examining a
Christian relic.
Rosen smiled. "If I weren't so tired I'd lead you on a bit," he said. "But if
you really want an answer on that you'll have to ask one of the other Jewish
members of the team."
"You don't have an opinion?" Decker queried.
"I have an opinion, but I'm not qualified to answer your question." Rosen paused
and Decker's brow tightened in puzzlement.
"I'm Messianic," Rosen added in response. Decker didn't catch his meaning. "A
Christian Jew," Rosen explained.
"Oh," said Decker. "This isn't something that happened in the last few days, is
it?"
Rosen laughed.
Roger Harris, too tired to even talk, barely managed to force down a mouthful of
coffee as he began to laugh with Rosen. Decker's remark had not been that funny,
but the pained look on Roger's face set Susan Chon to laughing and soon the four
overtired, punch-drunk team members were laughing uncontrollably, with each
member's inability to control himself fueling the others' laughter.
On the other side of the dining room, a woman had been sitting since before
Decker and the others came in. On the table before her were the remnants of a
long-finished cup of tea and a half-eaten hard roll. She held a red hotel
napkin, pulling it in one direction and then the other. She had been watching
Decker and the other team members as they talked, building up her courage to go
over to their table. Their laughter made them seem somehow more approachable and
human, while its infectious nature seemed to brighten her own dark mood. She
rose from her seat and walked slowly but decisively toward them.
"You are Americans?" she asked when their laughter began to pass.
"Yes," Joshua Rosen responded.
"You're with the scientists examining the Shroud?"
On the woman's face Decker saw lines of worry; in her eyes, the evidence of
recently blotted tears.
'Yes," he answered. "We're working with the Shroud. Is there something we can we
do for you?"
"My son — he's four — is very ill. The doctors say he may not live more than a
few months. All that I ask is that you allow me to bring flowers to the Shroud
as a gift to Jesus."
No one at the table had gotten more than twelve hours sleep in the previous four
days and it seemed to Decker that the tears of laughter were joined by tears of
sympathy for the woman's plight and her modest request. All agreed to help but
Rosen was the first to offer a plan. It would be impossible for the woman to
bring flowers to the Shroud herself. However, Rosen told her that if she would
bring the flowers to the palace the next day around one o'clock, he would bring
them to the Shroud himself.
In his room, Decker fell quickly to sleep and felt totally rested when he awoke
fourteen hours later, at noon the next day. When he arrived at the palace an
hour later, Rosen was talking with the woman from the hotel. Decker noticed that
the cloud of depression which had covered her the night before had been replaced
by a peaceful look of hope. She smiled in recognition at Decker as she started
to leave.
Rosen started up the stairs with the vase of cut flowers but, spotting Decker,
turned and waited.
"Pretty neat, huh?" Rosen said.
"Pretty neat," Decker responded. But to himself he wondered what would happen to
the woman if her son died.