TEC: Chapter 4: Back…Again…with Bob
So Chapter 4 is Murphy getting his pastor, Bob Wagoner, up to date on what happened in the last book.
Hey, anyone wanna guess what Chapter 4 of The Secret on Ararat was about?
Yup, Murphy has lunch with Bob at the same diner, where they eat the same food served by the same “waddling” waitress.
Then a weird thing happens: See, in Ararat, they establish that it’s been six months since the events in Babylon Rising. And now, in Europa, we’re told that it’s been a year and a half since Laura’s death in Babylon.
Which means that the events in Ararat took a year, or Murphy has waited months to tell his friend and pastor about finding Noah’s ark.
So apparently Murphy makes quite a habit of ditching people he allegedly cares about for months at a time.
Murphy relates the basics of the events on Ararat, and Bob is “absolutely spellbound by the tragic story,” and that’s before Murphy hits the punchline that they actually found the ark. If anything, Bob seems relatively uninterested in the greatest archeological find in human history, one that proves that their god is indeed a dickhead who drowned millions. So uninterested that after talking about the ark for 36 seconds (yes, I times myself reading the dialogue because I am a nerd), he changes the subject to Murphy’s love life.
Murphy talks about how attracted he is to Isis for less than 30 seconds (timed myself again), then he changes the subject to the plates (that were bronze in Ararat but have now inexplicably changed to brass) that fell into the sea in Ararat.
Bob, of all people, comes up with the pretty good plan to get a mini-sub and follow the route of the ship they took until they find the plates. But Murphy ditches Bob (why, I don’t know) without so much as a thank you for the idea.
Damn, I’ve missed you, Murphy.
Posted on January 26, 2016, in The Europa Conspiracy. Bookmark the permalink. 11 Comments.
RubyTea
Heathen Critique 
Wait, are the Seven about to get outsmarted by a ‘pastor’ who spends all of his time at the golf course and whose only concern in life seems to be patting Murphy on the back whenever he so much as farts?
You know, maybe Satan shouldn’t even bother if his best and brightest can’t even come up with a better idea than that with a several month head start.
Who says the Seven (They stop at nothing!) haven’t done so already?
I mean, Murphy doesn’t even want the plates found because they might cause evil green energy to outcompete godly oil and coal tycoons
I picture Bob Phillips, somewhere near the end of writing this, saying “Oh, man, I’ve been using the chapter-by-chapter outline for book 2 again. Oh well, nobody will notice”.
There’s a big failure of vision here. If the events of Ararat had been made public, Murphy wouldn’t need to tell Bob about them; they’d be huge news, changing lots of ideas about the history of the world. Never mind the missing bronze plates, they found the actual Ark and presumably took a whole bunch of photos of it.
But no, Christianity is still a nearly-forgotten minority religion, just the way it is in the real world. Ahem.
I don’t think the moron squad took any pictures before Talon avalached it. Of course, that doesn’t mean Murph couldn’t have found the place with a few flybys. A fresh avalanche can’t be that hard to spot if you at roughly which part of one particular mountain it was.
Guess the photos and any evidence was in the chopper with Token Turk and Dick (I’d say The Dick but then there were actually quite a few dicks here starting with Murphy) None of the evidence got left behind back at camp 2 where Isis was left alone to pack up tents and also face near death from snowstorm, Isis a linguistic genius was neither allowed to jot down that fragment of proto-Hebrew she saw nor could she at least guess at recalling it later.
Oh & three words Global Positioning System.
Can we really believe an archaeological team with choppers and nerds and all in it would leave out a basic or more likely advanced GPS to precisely fix the location of the flippin’ Ark? Oh well, guess that got blown up with the chopper and Murphy and Isis didn’t get to see or recall those key figures either. Or y”know have a ground team (say marines, say even just Verne note the position from the Ark site when they discovered it.
Also satellite imagery which can be used now to produce some amazing VR depictions of flying right over features on other planets etc .. could surely be used to do a VR flight over Ararat and spot the spot and .. oh why am I even bothering. Murphy sure isn’t.
Yeah, Murphy swears that Talon destroyed all the photos, which just seems…unlikely to me. I mean, ALL of them? Nobody took any pictures of Noah’s ark except Larry the Photo Guy, and Talon got ALL of them? Sure.
It amazes me to no end that you and the people in Heathen-Critique-ville remember enough about this BS to point out plot holes like that. After like 1-2 years I couldn’t even remember Talon (THE BEST TERRORIST HITMAN).
Unless you had to go back and relive it just now when writing this one, in which case you have my condolences. ^^;
I can’t remember the last time we saw the waitress; might the “waddling” be a roundabout way of saying she is several months pregnant? Previous experience implies it’s just calling her fat, but it might be LaHaye actually managing to give an NPC some implied character.
I did some googling, and… brass plates would corrode away in salt water. Bronze plates wouldn’t. So the difference is going to be significant if they’re ever recovered.
They really weren’t editing these books very carefully, were they? Not that I can blame them; who wants to be pouring over this series over and over to catch continuity errors? Well, RubyTea does but to laugh at them, not fix them.
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