The Vivero Letter

by Desmond Bagley

  'So long?'

  'You can't hurry a thing like this. Besides, we won't excavate it all. We must leave something for the next generation -- they might have better methods and find things that we would miss. I don't intend uncovering more than half the city.'

  I looked at Fallon thoughtfully. This was a man of sixty who was quite willing to start something he knew he would never finish. Perhaps it was because he habitually thought in terms of centuries, of thousands of years, that he attained a cosmic viewpoint. He was very different from Halstead.

  He said a little sadly, 'The human lifespan is so short, and man's monuments outlast him generation after generation, more enduring than man himself. Shelley knew about that, and about man's vanity. "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"' He waved his hand at the city. 'But do we despair when we see this? I know that I don't. I regard it as the glory of short-lived men.' He held out his hands before him, gnarled and blue-veined and trembling a little. 'It's a great pity that this flesh should rot so soon.'

  His conversation was becoming too macabre for my taste, so I changed the subject. 'Have you identified the King's Palace yet?'

  He smiled. 'Still hoping for plated walls of gold?' He shook his head. 'Vivero was mixed up, as usual. The Mayas didn't have kings, in the sense that we know them, but there was an hereditary chief among them called Halach uinic whom I suppose Vivero called king. Then there was the nacom, the war chief, who was elected for three years. The priesthood was hereditary, too. I doubt if the Halach uinic would have a palace, but we have found what we think is one of the main administrative buildings.' He pointed to another mound. 'That's it.'

  It was certainly big, but disappointing. To me it was just another hill and it took a great deal of imagination to create a building in the mind's eye. Fallon said tolerantly, 'It isn't easy, I know. It takes a deal of experience to see it for what it is. But it's likely that Vivero was taken there for the judgement of the Halach uinic. He was also the chief priest but that was over Vivero's head -- he hadn't read Frazer's Golden Bough:

  Neither had I, so I was as wise as Vivero. Fallon said, The next step is to get rid of these tree boles.' He kicked gently at the one on which I was sitting.

  'What do you do? Blast them out?'

  He looked shocked. 'My God, no! We burn them, roots and all. Fortunately the rain forest trees are shallow-rooted -- you can see that much of the root system on this platform is above ground. When we've done that there is a system of tubes, in the. structure where the roots were, and we fill those with cement to bind the building together. We don't want it falling down at this late stage.'

  'Have you come across the thing Vivero was so excited about? The golden sign -- whatever it was?'

  He wagged his head doubtfully. 'No -- and we may never do so. I think that Vivero -- after twelve years as a captive -- may have been a little bit nuts. Religious mania, you know. He could have had a hallucination.'

  I said, 'Judging by today's standards any sixteenth-century Spaniard might be said to have had religious mania. To liquidate whole civilizations just because of a difference of opinion about God isn't a mark of sanity.'

  Fallon cocked an eye at me. 'So you think sanity is comparative? Perhaps you're right; perhaps our present wars will be looked on, in the future, as an indication of warped minds. Certainly the prospect of an atomic war isn't a particularly sane concept.'

  I thought of Vivero, unhappy and with his conscience tearing him to bits because he was too afraid to convert the heathen to Christianity. And yet he was quite prepared to counsel his sons in the best ways of killing the heathen, even though he admitted that the methods he advised weren't Christian. His attitude reminded me of Mr. Puckle, the inventor of the first machine-gun, which was designed to fire round bullets at Christians and square bullets at Turks.

  I said, 'Where did Vivero get the gold to make the mirrors? You said there was very little gold here.'

  'I didn't say that,' contradicted Fallon. I said it had been accumulated over the centuries. There was probably quite a bit of gold here in one way and another, and a goldsmith can steal quite a lot over a period of twelve years. Besides, the mirrors aren't pure gold, they're tumbago -- that's a mixture of gold, silver and copper, and quite a lot of copper, too. The Spaniards were always talking about the red gold of the Indies, and it was copper that gave it the colour.'

  He knocked his pipe out. 'I suppose I'd better get back to Rudetsky's map and plot out next week's work schedule.' He paused. 'By the way, Rudetsky tells me that he's seen a few chicleros in the forest. I've given instructions that everyone must stay in camp and not go wandering about. That includes you.'

  That brought me back to the twentieth century with a bang. I went back to camp and sent a message to Pat Harris via the radio at Camp One to inform him of this latest development. It was all I could do.

  V

  Fallon was a bit disappointed by my diving programme. 'Only two hours a day,' he said in disgust.

  So I had to put him through a crash course of biophysics as it relates to diving. The main problem, of course, is the nitrogen. We were diving at a depth of about a hundred feet, and the absolute pressure at the depth is four atmospheres -- about sixty pounds a square inch. This doesn't make any difference to breathing because the demand valve admits air to the lungs at the same pressure as the surrounding water, and so there is no danger of being crushed by the difference of pressure.

  The trouble comes with the fact that with every breath you're taking four times as much of everything. The body can cope quite handily with the increase of oxygen, but the extra nitrogen is handled by being dissolved in the blood and stored in the tissues. If the pressure is brought back to normal suddenly the nitrogen is released quickly in the form of bubbles in the bloodstream -- one's blood literally boils -- a quick way to the grave.

  And so one reduces the pressure slowly by coming to the surface very carefully and with many stops, all carefully calculated by Admiralty doctors, so that the stored nitrogen is released slowly and at a controlled safe rats.

  'All right,' said Fallon impatiently. 'I understand that. But if you spend two hours on the bottom, and about the same time coming up, that's only half a day's work. You should be able to do a dive in the morning and another in the afternoon.'

  'Not a chance,' I said. 'When you step out of the water, the body is still saturated with nitrogen at normal atmospheric pressure, and it takes at least six hours to be eliminated from the system. I'm sorry, but we can do only one dive a day.'

  And he had to be satisfied with that.

  The raft Rudetsky made proved a godsend. Instead of my original idea of hanging small air bottles at each decompression level, we dropped a pipe which plugged directly into the demand valve on the harness and was fed from big air bottles on the raft itself. And I explored the cave in the cenote wall at the seventy-foot level. It was quite large and shaped like an inverted sack and it occurred to me to fill it full of air and drive the water from it. A hose dropped from the air pump on the raft soon did the job, and it seemed odd to be able to take off the mask and breathe normally so deep below the surface. Of course, the air in the cave was at the same pressure as the water at that depth and so it would not help in decompression, but if either Katherine or myself got into trouble the cave could be a temporary shelter with an adequate air supply. I hung a light outside the entrance and put another inside.

  Fallon stopped complaining when he saw what we began to bring up. There was an enormous amount of silt to be cleared first, but we did that with a suction pump, and the first thing I found was a skull, which gave me a gruesome feeling.

  In the days that followed we sent up many objects -- masks in copper and gold. cups, tolls, many items of jewellery such as pendants, bracelets, rings both for finger and ear, necklace Heads, and ornamental buttons of gold and jade. There were also ceremonial hatchets of flint and obsidian, wooden spear-throwers which had been protected from deca
y by the heavy overlay of silt, and no less than eighteen plates like that shown to me by Fallon in Mexico City.

  The cream of the collection was a small statuette of gold. about six inches high, the figure of a young Mayan girl. Fallon carefully cleaned it, then stood it on his desk and regarded it with a puzzled air. 'The subject is Mayan,' he said. 'But the execution certainly isn't -- they didn't work in this style. But it's a Mayan girl, all right. Look at that profile.'

  Katherine picked it up. 'It's beautiful, isn't it?' She hesitated 'Could this be the statue Vivero made which so impressed the Mayan priests?'

  'Good God!' said Fallon in astonishment. 'It could be-but that would be a hell of a coincidence.'

  'Why should it be a coincidence?' I asked. I waved my hand at the wealth of treasure stacked on the shelves. 'All these things were sacrificial objects, weren't they? The Mayas gave to Chac their most valued possessions. I don't think it unlikely that Vivero's statue could be such a sacrifice.'

  Fallon examined it again. 'It has been cast,' he admitted. 'And that wasn't a Mayan technique. Maybe it is the work of Vivero, but it might not be the statue he wrote about. He probably made more of them.'

  'I'd like to think it is the first one,' said Katherine.

  I looked at the rows of gleaming objects on the shelves. 'How much is all this worth?' I asked Fallon. 'What will it bring on the open market?'

  'It won't be offered,' said Fallon grimly. 'The Mexican Government has something to say about that -- and so do I.'

  'But assuming it did appear on the open market -- or a black market. How much would this lot be worth?'

  Fallon pondered. 'Were it to be smuggled out of the country and put in the hands of a disreputable dealer -- a man such as Gerryson. for instance -- he could dispose of it, over a period of time, for, say, a million and a half dollars.'

  I caught my breath. We were not halfway through in the cenote and there was still much to be found. Every day we were finding more objects and the rate of discovery was consistently increasing as we delved deeper into the site. By Fallen's measurement the total value of the finds in the cenote could be as much as four million dollars -- maybe even five million.

  I said softly, 'No wonder Gatt is interested. And you were wondering why, for God's sake!'

  'I was thinking of finds in the ordinary course of excavation,' said Fallon. 'Objects of gold on the surface will have been dispersed long ago, and there'll be very little to be found And I was thinking of Gatt as being deceived by Vivero's poppycock in his letter. I certainly didn't expect the cenote to be so fruitful.' He drummed his fingers on the desk. 'I thought of Gatt as being interested in gold for the sake of gold -- an ordinary treasure hunter.' He flapped his hand at me shelves. 'The intrinsic value of the gold in that lot isn't more than fifteen to twenty thousand dollars.'

  'But we know Gatt isn't like that,' I said, 'What did Harris call him? An educated hood. He isn't the kind of stupid thief who'll be likely to melt the stuff down; he knows its antiquarian value, and he'll know how to get rid of it. Harris has already traced a link between Gatt and Gerryson, and you've just said that Gerryson can sell it unobtrusively. My advice is to get the stuff out of here and into the biggest bank vault you can find in Mexico City.'

  'You're right, of course,' said Fallon shortly. 'I'll arrange it. And we must let the Mexican authorities know the extent of our discoveries here.'

  VI

  The season was coming to an end. The rains would soon be breaking and work on the site would be impossible. I daresay it wouldn't have made any difference to my own work in the cenote -- you can't get wetter than wet -- but we could see that the site would inevitably become a churned-up sea of mud if any excavations were attempted in the wet season, so Fallon reluctantly decided to pack it in.

  This meant a mass evacuation back to Camp One. Rudetsky looked worriedly at all the equipment that had to be transported, but Fallon was oddly casual about it. 'Leave it here,' he said carelessly. 'We'll need it next season.'

  Rudetsky fumed about it to me. There won't be a goddamn thing left next season,' he said passionately. 'Those chiclero vultures will clean the lot out.'

  'I wouldn't worry,' I said. Fallon can afford to replace it.'

  But it offended Rudetsky's frugal soul and he went to great lengths to cocoon the generators and pumps against the weather in the hopes that perhaps the chicleros would not loot the camp. 'I'm wasting my time,' he said gloomily as he ordered the windows of the huts to be boarded up. 'But, goddamn it, I gotta go through the motions!'

  So we evacuated Uaxuanoc. The big helicopter came and went, taking with it the men who had uncovered the city. The four young archeologists went after taking their leave of Fallon. They were bubbling over with enthusiasm and promised fervently to return the following season when the real work of digging into the buildings was to begin. Fallon, the father figure, smiled upon them paternally and waved them goodbye, then went back to his work with a curiously grave expression on his face.

  He was not taking any part in the work of the evacuation and refused to make decisions about anything, so Rudetsky tended to come to me for answers. I did what I thought was right, and wondered what was the matter with Fallon. He had withdrawn into the hut where the finds were lined up on the shelves and spent his time painstakingly cleaning them and making copious notes. He refused to be disturbed and neither would he allow the precious objects to be parted from him. They'll go when I go,' he said. 'Carry on with the rest of it and leave me alone.'

  Finally the time came for us all to go. The camp was closed down but for three or four huts and all that was left would just make a nice load for the two helicopters. I was walking to Fallen's hut to announce the fact when Rudetsky came up at a dead run. 'Come to the radio shack,' he said breathlessly. There's something funny going on at Camp One.'

  I went with him and listened to the tale of woe. They'd had a fire and the big helicopter was burned up -- completely destroyed. 'Anyone hurt?' barked Rudetsky.

  According to the tinny voice issuing waveringly from the loudspeaker no one had been seriously injured; a couple of minor burns was all. But the helicopter was a write-off.

  Rudetsky snorted. 'How in hell did it happen?'

  The voice wavered into nothingness and came back again, hardly more strongly. ', . . don't know . . . just happened . . .'

  'It just happened,' said Rudetsky in disgust.

  I said, 'What's the matter with that transmitter? It doesn't seem to have any power.'

  'What's the matter with your transmitter?' said Rudetsky into the microphone. Turn up the juice.'

  'I receive you loud and clear,' said the voice weakly. 'Can't you hear me?'

  'You're damned right we can't,' said Rudetsky. 'Do something about it,'

  The transmission came up a little more strongly. 'We've got everyone out of here and back to Mexico City. There are only three of us left here -- but Mr. Harris says there's something wrong with the jet.'

  I felt a little prickling feeling at the nape of my neck, and leaned forward over Rudetsky's shoulder to say into the microphone, 'What's wrong with it?'

  '. . . doesn't know . . . grounded . . . wrong registration . . . can't come until . , .' The transmission was again becoming weaker and hardly made sense. Suddenly it cut off altogether and there was not even the hiss of a carrier wave. Rudetsky riddled with the receiver but could not raise Camp One again.

  He turned to me and said, 'They're off the air completely.'

  Try to raise Mexico City,' I said.

  He grimaced. 'I'll try, but I don't think there's a hope in hell. This little box don't have the power.'

  He twiddled his knobs and I thought about what had happened. The big transport helicopter was destroyed, the jet was grounded in Mexico City for some mysterious reason and Camp One had gone off the air. It added up to one thing -- isolation -- and I didn't like it one little bit. I looked speculatively across the clearing towards the hangar where Rider was 'polishing up his cho
pper as usual. At least we had the other helicopter.

  Rudetsky gave up at last. 'Nothing doing,' he said, and looked at his watch. That was Camp One's last transmission of the day. If they fix up their transmitter they'll be on the air again as usual at eight tomorrow morning. There's nothing we can do until then.'

  He didn't seem unduly worried, but he didn't know what I knew. He didn't know about Jack Gatt. I said, 'All right; we'll wait until then. I'll tell Fallon what's happened.'

  That proved to be harder than I anticipated. He was totally wrapped up in his work, brooding over a golden plate and trying to date it while he muttered a spate of Mayan numbers. I tried to tell him what had happened but he said irritably, 'It doesn't sound much to me. They'll be on the air tomorrow with a full explanation. Now go away and don't worry me about it.'

  So I went away and did a bit of brooding on my own. I thought of talking about it to Halstead but the memory of what Pat Harris had said stopped me; and I didn't say anything to Katherine because I didn't want to scare her, nor did I want her to pass anything on to her husband. At last I went to see Rider. 'Is your chopper ready for work?' I asked.