The Last Christmas On Earth

EPISODE III-6

"I don't know, I feel him too far now. He is as stubborn as a mule, now he has made up his mind that he wants Harry to visit a specialist because of his behavior ... I also fear he has a crush on the Sheriff."

"Instead I tell you that he will stay good and calm, do not fear. I know him well, he is the classic type who does not dare to act like that and now he will think only of recovering the family tranquility."

"But if instead he would ..."

"We only need a few days and I told you that he will do nothing bad in these few days! I am more than certain, but if this is not the case ... desperate times require desperate measures!"

"I don't think it would be a smart move, think about how Harry could behave."

"I just told you, at this point, we can't afford to act too soft."

The press officer waited patiently for journalists to take a seat in the large hall. After letting them bask in their curiosity, he motioned his co-worker to dim the lights and finally started the press conference.

"Thursday, September 13, 1492: on this day, at the beginning of the night, the compass needles moved towards the North-West and in the morning they turned rather to the NorthEast ... Saturday, September 15: at the beginning of the night they saw a wonderful streak of fire coming from the sky, just a few miles far from the canals ... Monday 17 September: the pilots took stoke of the situation recognizing that the compasses didn't point toward the correct direction, the sailors were timorous and heartfelt and they didn't say a word. The Admiral noticed it and ordered the pilots to report at daybreak and, taking the path going north, they found that the needles were working well again."

The Under Water Explorations press officer deliberately took a break, so that those present could metabolize his introduction; he had studied it for a long time and believed that no one would know how to prepare a better one. Bryan was sitting at the table to his left and, due to fatigue and dim light, he was already beginning to sleep. Cain gave him a nudge on the elbow and his arm slid into the void, making him jump.

"It wasn't funny," Bryan informed him, looking at him grimly.

"You were falling asleep" the other one justified himself, his indigo-colored irises sent a lightning flash that pierced the darkness.

"Commander or not of the mission, it is better for you if you reserve these jokes for your friends, I have accumulated fourteen hours of jet lag and I haven't slept for three consecutive nights."

"Forgive me, I forgot that you are returning from one of your extravagant missions! This time, did you bring home a mobile phone dating back eight thousand years? No wait, let me guess it. I had read it somewhere ... oh yeah, you went to risk your own ass in the middle of the Jordan Valley, just to bring home a stupid wooden trunk ... Have you already decided how you will call it? I think Pinocchio could be fine, what do you think?" Bryan looked at him seriously without blinking.

"Be quiet, the speaker is about to start again," said Pedro Ayala, annoyed.

"You'd better stay quiet!" Cain said coldly.

"What a lovely company I chose to take a trip at twenty thousand feet deep," said the elderly marine biologist Neil Patterson.

The speaker cleared his throat, adjusted the microphone's flexible pole and started talking to journalists, eager to write what many had called the exploration of the century.

"These navigation accidents are taken from the Journal of Christopher Columbus. What more disinterested and reliable head we could have found to describe what awaits those who are brave enough to venture into that stretch of sea? Columbus wrote those notes in his own hand as he sailed to the Indies, unaware that soon he would land on American soil. In those days the three caravels were exactly in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle, which as you all know for sure has the northern summit in the current Bermuda Islands, the west one on the Island of Grand Bahama and the southern summit in Puerto Rico. We can hypothesize that it is perhaps since then, since those September days of over five hundred years ago, that that segment of the ocean has earned the name of "Devil's Triangle". At that time they were indeed much more superstitious than us, and it is equally true that they did not have the means we have today to explain apparently mysterious or illogical events ... but in that area, absurd facts practically continued until almost our days. Who doesn't know the story of the five Avengers that took off from Fort Lauderdale on December 5th, 1945 and never returned to the base? Here is an excerpt from the conversation between Lieutenant Charles Taylor and the Control Tower: "Talk to me tower. Emergency. We seem to be off course, we can't see the land ..." And again: "We can't define our position! We don't know where the west is ... Nothing works here ... Even the sea is not where it should be!".

And shortly afterward, to the general astonishment of the control tower workers, he added: "All my compasses are broken", and again: "I don't know where we are, no land is in sight". From minute to minute communications became more and more chaotic and contradictory, until after about an hour the silence fell. At the base they immediately understood that something was wrong, the devices had just passed the periodic revision and therefore there was not a single technical reason justifying the simultaneous failure of the instrumentation on board of all five aircraft. If at least one of the aircraft had worked properly, the others could have followed it by flying at sight, but apparently, they no longer had a single good instrument. From Fort Lauderdale, they alerted the Navy and immediately sent a reconnaissance device to that area, a large Martin Mariner. "Lieutenant Kane to Control Tower. Visibility is good, but above two thousand feet, there is a very strong wind. The instruments onboard seem to work properly, but there are no traces of the Avengers and not even wreckage at sea or anything that might suggest that they have crashed. We continue the research, out". Those were the last words pronounced by Commander Kane, in fact, Martin Mariner no longer contacted the Base because it also disappeared. At that point, the largest search operation in history began, probably to date no similar ones have ever been made. There were three hundred and seven airplanes, four destroyers, eighteen Coast Guard Ships, as well as an unknown number of planes and private boats. Almost a thousand square miles of sea were checked over and over again, bit by bit, in vain."

The speaker paused again and looked at the audience, proud of how he had managed to capture the attention of everyone present. He noticed, however, that some of the journalists in the front row were glowering at him; in fact, he had proved to be too verbose and rather than of old hackneyed stories they were hungry for important news. Moreover, they all were in a mad hurry, because as soon as the conference was over they had to run and write a draft. The press officer then said that perhaps it was better to shorten the introduction he had stuffed with historical facts to give instead greater importance to the enterprise that the agency for which he worked was carried out. He cleared his throat again, drank a glass of water, and resumed talking while a few black and white photographs were shown on the screen behind him.

"Well, I understand that you are all impatient and therefore I will try as far as possible to be brief. What I just mentioned is perhaps the most striking case, so much so that it has been taken up in more than one film, but over the centuries hundreds of inexplicable facts have occurred in that area. Particularly impressive are the missing ships and subsequently found occupied only by dogs and cats, with meals never consumed by their owner still ready in the dishes. As well as impressive are the communications recorded in the moments before the occurrence of those strange phenomena. This is what happened on a quiet morning in April 1922," he said, pressing a button that started a recorded tape.

"Come here quickly! It's terrible! We cannot escape," shouted the Commander of the Raifuku Maru, a missing cargo of the Bahamas, in a tone so terrified as to scare the audience.

"And then there is the famous case of that jetliner that, flying over the Triangle, had a dialogue with the control tower to ask for authorization to land and immediately after disappeared. When flight crews and passengers asked why they had been greeted by a rescue vehicle deployment on arrival, they were told that they were ten minutes late and had disappeared from the radar for the same amount of time. Passengers said the plane had been enveloped in a greenish fog, then they discovered all their clocks had been turned back by ten minutes."

"Cut it short!" someone shouted from the back of the room, snatching brief and intense applause to those present.

"But now it's really enough, I don't want to bore you anymore! To conclude, I just want to mention the sad case of Atlantis dating back to just two days ago. It is amazing how astronauts trained to deal with the most extreme situations can literally disappear under our eyes because of we don't know what. This event made us feel tremendously powerless. Experts or presumed such, in various fields of science, have attributed to these strange phenomena the most fanciful causes, sometimes trespassing in the absurd: some blame the UFOs, someone else blame mysterious fogs that envelop planes and ships, swallowing them, some of them blame methane gas bubbles, and others blame the unspecified greenish lights. Many fishermen in Puerto Rico swear they have seen underwater large circular submarines similar to flying saucers, and finally there are those who claim that the disappearances are due to Atlantean weapons still active or even to the existence of space-time portals. But we are Americans and we like to get right to the heart of things. Whatever lies beneath it we'll find out, and we'll do it thanks to that technological marvel," he declared fervently, and his collaborator finally pulled away the cloth to show the scale model of the submarine that would have ventured into one of the few places yet really unexplored on the planet.

"What you see is the Nautilus," he said emphatically, "and it is the top of the most modern technological research in the world. This device was made of a special metal alloy, practically indestructible and with great elastic characteristics; thanks to a series of concentric spherical walls and a hydraulic circuit, it will be able to face the monstrous pressures of the deepest depths. It is also equipped with electric propulsion generated by a reversible chemical reaction, so it has an unlimited energy source. And finally, all the equipment, from onboard computers to the bathroom drains, are the most modern technology we could conceive and are the result of the collaboration of scientists from all over the globe.

The Nautilus is also equipped with two minisubmarines for exploration and anything else a man, who is preparing to descend to the bottom of the ocean, may wish. In short, the Nautilus is pure science fiction! And here on my left there is the magnificent crew that will finally give us all the answers we are looking for: it is composed of Cain Parker, specialist in oceanography and commander of the expedition; the one by his side is Bryan West, the internationally renowned adventurer dubbed"The Chimeras Catcher" because of his ability to hunt down the most remote myths and find out that these are not myths but pure reality. Next to him, there are Pedro Ayala, marine archaeologist, and finally Neil Patterson, a marine biologist. Sitting at the table to my right, there is Rupert Lee, who as everyone knows was the coordinator of the last unfortunate Shuttle Atlantis mission, which we have just mentioned. This man has sworn in front of the televisions all over the world that if he had the opportunity to bring his boys back home he would spit blood for them, and since this is speaking American with "A" capital, we decided that we will be the ones to give this opportunity to him: our technical team spontaneously stepped aside to make way for him and his collaborators, who will direct surface operations from a top-secret location. For obvious reasons of space and time, it was not possible to host and cite all those who participated and who will take part in this extraordinary undertaking, but we thank them all. I concluded, we have ten minutes for the questions and then you can all go up on stage to admire and photograph the Nautilus up close. All this, however, not before having given the recognition these authentic heroes reserve, "said the press officer to conclude his very personal speech. Then a thunderous applause filled the room for a couple of minutes, after which the flashes of the photographers began.