Strange, but not enough to excite me. The picture in my right hand did that. It was an enlargement of the statue’s ornate belt. The buckle looked like the front of a modern hand calculator, with miniature numerals, function keys, and display screen. Next to it, attached to the belt but ready to be detached from it, was a bulbous weapon with sights, trigger, and a flared barrel. It was not a revolver, but it looked a lot like a power laser.
First things first. “Do you have the statue?” I asked, before anyone else could speak.
He assumed his seat in the circle. “If I did, I would not be here.” He was sitting as immobile as a statue himself. “And if I thought I could obtain it alone, none of you would be here. Let me tell you a story. It concerns my earlier trip into the Takla Makan, and how I came to make it.”
The lamp caught the keen profile and the dreamer’s brow. The moon was rising. Far away to the northeast, the first desert dunes were a smoky blur on the horizon.
“I thought I knew it all,” he said. “And then, three years ago, I was called in to help the executor of an estate in Dresden. Dull stuff, I thought, but an old friend called in a favor. You may ask, as I did, why me? It turned out that the old lady who died was a relative of Sir Aurel Stein, and she mentioned my name in her will.” Paddy Elphinstone started, and Sebastian caught the movement. “That’s right, Paddy, there’s only one of him.” He turned to the rest of us. “Aurel Stein was the greatest Oriental explorer of his time. And this was his stamping-ground”—he gestured around us—“for forty years, in the early part of this century. He covered China, Mongolia, and Xinjiang—Sinkiang, the maps called it in his day—like nobody else in the world. He lived in India and he died in Kabul, but he left relatives in Germany. It was more than a pleasure to look at that house in Dresden. It was an honor.
“Before I’d been in that place for an hour, I knew something unusual had been thrown my way. But it was a couple more days before I realized how exciting it was.” He tapped the photographs on his knee. “Stein drew the statue, and described its dimensions. The pen-and-ink drawing was in the old lady’s collection. Sir Aurel told in his journal exactly where he had found it, in a dry valley surrounded by dunes. He gave the location—or to be more accurate, he described how to reach the spot from Urumqi and the Turpan Depression. He knew it was an oddity and he couldn’t identify its maker, but it was far too heavy to carry. Sixty years ago, that statue’s belt didn’t send its own message. Electronic calculators and power lasers didn’t exist. So he left it there. He was content with the drawing, and he didn’t set any great value on that. It could take an inconspicuous place in his works, and end up in the possession of an old German lady, dying in her late eighties in a Dresden rowhouse.”
It was hard to be specific, but there was something different about Gerald Sebastian. I felt an openness, an eagerness in him since we had entered China, something that was quite different from his usual public persona. Evaluating his performance now, I decided that he was a little too obsessive to appeal to his own backers. He and Will Reynolds were brothers under the skin.
“I went there,” he said. “Three hundred miles south of Urumqi, just as Sir Aurel Stein said, to the middle of the worst part of the desert. Of course, I didn’t expect to find the statue. Chances were, if it were ever there, it was long gone. I knew that, so I went inadequately prepared and I didn’t think through what I would do if I found it. But I had a look. Sam will understand that, even if the rest of you don’t.” He nodded his head at me, eyes unreadable in the lamplight “Well, the valley was there, half filled with drifting sand. And I didn’t have equipment with me. I spent one week digging—scrabbling, that’s a better word—then I was running short of water.” He slipped the photographs back into their envelope and stood up abruptly. “The statue was there. I found it on my last day. There was a gold tablet and a ruby ring, attached to the belt, and I took those. Then I photographed it, and I covered it with sand. It will be there still. We’re going to lift it out this time and put it on the truck. And when we get it, we’ll take it back for radioactive dating. My guess is that it is more than seven thousand years old.”
He walked away, outside the circle of lamplight, over behind the two balloon-wheeled trucks. After a few seconds Jackie Sands followed him. Paddy was off in an alcoholic world of his own, eyes closed and mouth open. I looked at Will Reynolds, sitting hunched forward and tugging at his finger joints.
“Give me a hand to get Paddy to his tent, would you? It’s getting cold, and I don’t think he’ll manage it on his own.”
Will nodded and moved to the other side of Paddy. “I’ve seen it, you know,” he said, as we lifted one to each arm.
I paused. “The statue?”
“Naw.” He gave a snuffling laugh. “How the hell would I see the statue? The valley. It shows on the radar images, clear as day. And there’s structure underneath it—buildings, a whole town, buried deep in the sand. I saw ’em, before I’d ever met Gerald Sebastian.”
“He contacted you?”
“No. I wrote to him. You see, after I interpreted the images and realized what I might be seeing, I asked the applications office at Headquarters for field trip funding, to collect some ground truth. And they bounced it—as though it was some dumb boondoggle to get me a trip to China!” Between us, we stuffed Paddy Elphinstone into his tent and zipped the flap. If he wanted to undress that was his own affair. “That made me so mad,” said Will, “I thought, damn you bureaucrats. If you don’t want this, there’s others who might. I’d seen one of Sebastian’s travel programs about China, and I wrote to him. The hell with NASA! We’ll find that city without ’em.”
Will turned and lurched off towards his own tent. He had the height of a basketball player and none of the coordination.
Well, I thought, that’s another piece of the elephant accounted for. So far as Will Reynolds was concerned, this illegal journey to China’s western desert was just a field trip, a way to gather the data that justified his own interpretation of satellite images. I wondered, had Gerald Sebastian talked of Sir Aurel Stein’s legacy in Dresden, and the follow-up trip to the Takla Makan desert before Will Reynolds had shown him those radar images? My skeptical soul assured me that he had not.
And yet I couldn’t quite accept my own logic. While Sebastian had been speaking about Aurel Stein, a disquieting thought had been creeping up on me. From the day I was recruited by him, I had been sure that he and I had the same motives. Sure, he was smoother than I was, but inside we were the same. Now I wasn’t sure. He was so terribly convincing, so filled with burning curiosity. Either his interest in exploration was powerful and genuine—or he was better at the bait-and-catch funding game than anyone in history. Was it somehow possible that both were true?
I lit a black Poona cheroot and stood there in the lamplit circle, noticing the temperature dropping fast around me. In this area, it would be well below freezing before dawn, and then back up to a hundred degrees by the next afternoon. I zipped up my jacket and started to put away the cooking equipment. With Paddy gone for the night, the number of hired help on the party was down to one.
The evening was not yet over. Before I had time to finish tidying up, Jackie Sands reappeared from the direction of the trucks. She was wearing a fluffy wool sweater, as dark, tangled and luxuriant as her hair. She made no attempt to help—I wondered if she had ever in her whole life cleared up after dinner—but sat down on one of the camp stools.
“Destroying your lungs,” she said.
“Do you tell that to your hubby, too?”
There was a flash of teeth, but I couldn’t see her facial expression. “It’s not worth telling things to Henry. He stopped accepting inputs years ago on everything except stocks and bonds.”
“Does he smoke?”
“Not any more. Doctor’s orders.”
“So he does accept other inputs.”
This time a chuc
kle accompanied the gleam of teeth. “I suppose he does. But not from me.”
I flicked the cigar stub away and watched its orange-red spark cartwheel across the dusty surface. “That’s one nice thing about deserts. No fire hazard.” I sat down on a camp stool opposite her. “What can I do for you, Mrs. Hoffman?”
“Miss Sands. I don’t use my husband’s name. Do you have to be so direct?”
“It’s nearly ten-thirty.”
“That’s not late.”
“Not for Manhattan. But social functions end early in the Takla Makan. I have to be up at five. And it’s getting cold.”
“It is.” She snuggled deeper into her sweater. “I thought this was supposed to be a hot desert. All right, straight to business. I know why Gerald Sebastian organized this expedition. He did it for fame and fortune, equal parts. I know why Will Reynolds came along; he wants to protect his scientific reputation. And I understand Paddy. He’s a born explorer, along for the sheer love of it, and if he doesn’t drink himself to death he’ll be world famous before he’s forty. But what about you, Sam? You sit and listen to everybody else, and you hardly say a word. What’s your motive for being here?”
“Why do you want to know? And if it comes to that, what’s your motive?”
“Mm. You show me yours and I’ll show you mine, eh?” She stared straight into the lamp and pursed her lips. “You know, being on an expedition like this is a bit like being on a small cruise ship. After a few days, you start to tell near-strangers things you wouldn’t admit to your family.”
“I don’t have a family.”
“No?” Her eyebrows arched. “All right, then, I’ll do it. I’ll play your game. A swap. Who first?”
“You.”
“You’re a hard man, Sam-I-am. Lordie. Where should I begin? Do you know what SETI is?”
“Settee? like a couch?”
“No. SETI, like S-E-T-I—the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Heard of it?”
“No. I’m still looking for signs of intelligence on Earth. What is it, some sort of game?”
“Not to me. Just think what it will mean if we ever find evidence that there are other intelligent beings in the universe. It will change everything we do. Change the basic way we think, maybe stop us all blowing ourselves up. I believe the work is enormously important, and for nearly five years I’ve been giving money to promote SETI research.”
“Henry’s money?”
She sat up a little straighten “My allowance. But most of the research work is highly technical, with radio receivers and electronics and signal analysis. I can’t even understand how my money is spent.”
“Which makes it sound like a classic rip-off.”
“It does sound like that, I admit. But it’s not.”
Her voice was totally earnest. Unfortunately, that’s one prime qualification to be a total sucker. “You think it’s not,” I said.
“Put it that way if you want to. I’ve never regretted giving the money. But then I heard about this expedition, and it really made me think. Sebastian says he has found Atlantis, with a technological civilization as advanced as ours. But I say, it’s just as likely he found evidence of visitors to the earth, ones who came long ago.”
“And just happened to look exactly like humans? That’s too implausible.”
“Not if they were truly advanced. Beings like that would be able to look just as they wanted to look. Anyway, Sam, you’re on the wrong side of the argument. Suppose there’s only a one in a thousand chance that what we are looking for is evidence of aliens. I’m still better off spending my money coming here, to do something myself, rather than being a little bit of something I don’t even understand. Don’t you agree?”
“Oddly enough, I do. It’s one of the golden rules; stay close to the place your money is spent.”
“But you don’t accept the idea of visitors to this planet?”
“I don’t reject it. I just say it’s improbable.”
“Right. But it’s possible.” She sounded short of breath. “And that’s what I think, too. So that’s me, and that’s why I’m here, and the only reason I’m here. Now how about you?”
I didn’t want to talk, but now I seemed committed to it. I lit another cigar and blew smoke toward the half-moon. “I’m going to be a big disappointment to you,” I said, with my face averted. “You’re on an expedition with a world-famous traveler and television celebrity, a NASA scientist, and a born explorer. I’m the bad apple in the barrel. You see, I’m a treasure hunter. I came with Gerald Sebastian for one simple reason: there’s a chance—an outside chance, but a hell of a lot better than the odds that you’ll find your extraterrestrials—that I’m going to walk away from this holding a whole basket of money. That’s why I’m here.”
“I don’t believe you!”
I shrugged. “I knew you wouldn’t. I didn’t think you’d like it, and you don’t. But it’s true.”
“You may have convinced yourself that it’s true, but it isn’t.” She sounded outraged. “My God, if all you wanted was money, there are a hundred easier ways to get it. Play the Stock Market, work in a casino, go into the insurance business. You don’t have to come to the ends of the earth to make money. I don’t think you know your own motivation, or you want to hide it from me.”
I threw away my second cigar—this one much less than half-smoked. “Miss Sands, how long have you been married?”
“Why, four years, I suppose. Five years in August. Not that I see why—”
“Do you love Henry Hoffman?”
“What! I—of course I do. I do. And it’s no damned business of yours.”
“But you left him for months to come on this expedition.”
“I told you why!”
“Right. Do you enjoy sleeping with him? Never mind, ignore that, and let’s assume you do. You’re quite right, it is no business of mine. All I’m trying to say is that people do a lot of different things to make money, and it’s no one else’s concern why they do it. And sometimes the obvious assumptions about why people do things are right, and sometimes they are quite wrong. So why won’t you believe me, when I tell you that I’m here for the simplest possible reason, to make my fortune?”
But she was on her feet, swiveling around and heading fast for the dark bulk of the trucks. “Damn you,” she said as she walked away. “My marriage is fine, and anyway it’s none of your bloody business. Keep your big nose out of it.”
She was gone, leaving me still with the clearing-up to take care of. Before I did that I picked up the lamp and went off to look for the cigar I had thrown away. The way things were going, before the end of this expedition I might be craving a half-smoked cigar.
I slept poorly and woke at dawn. When I emerged from my tent Paddy already had the stove going and water heated for coffee. Apparently he was one of those unfortunates who never suffer a hangover, which made his long-term prospects for full alcoholism all too good. One good hangover will keep me sober for months. He nodded at me cheerfully while he shaved. “Sleep well?”
“Lousy. I thought I could hear noises outside the tent—like people talking. I guess I was dreaming.”
“No. You were listening to them.” Paddy pointed his razor at the sand dunes to the north. “It’s called mingsha—singing sand. It will get worse when we move deeper into the Takla Makan.”
“I’m not talking about sand dunes, Paddy. I’m talking about people. Conversations, whistling, calling to animals. I even heard somebody playing the flute.”
“That’s right.” He was intolerably perky for the early morning. “Hold on a minute.” He put his razor down on the little folding table that held his coffee, towel, soap, and a cheese sandwich, and ran off to dive into his tent. A second later he reappeared with a paperback book in his hand.
“We’re not the first people to visit this place, not by
a long shot. It was a big obstacle for two thousand years on the Great Silk Road, and all the travelers skirted it either north or south. Marco Polo came by the Takla Makan seven hundred years ago, when he was traveling around on Kubla Khan’s business. He called it the Desert of Lop. Here’s what he says about the desert.”
While I poured sweetened black coffee for myself, Paddy found his place in the book and began to read aloud. “ ‘In this tract neither beasts nor birds are met with, because there is no kind of food for them. It is asserted as a well-known fact that this desert is the abode of many evil spirits, which lure travelers to their destruction with extraordinary illusions…they unexpectedly hear themselves called by their own names, and in a tone of voice to which they are accustomed. Supposing the call to proceed from their companions, they are led away from the direct road and left to perish. At night, they seem to hear the march of a large cavalcade.’ And here’s another choice bit. ‘The spirits of the desert are said at times to fill the air with the sounds of all kinds of musical instruments’—there’s your flute, Sam—‘and also of drums and the clash of arms.’ And it wasn’t only Marco Polo. A Chinese monk, Fa Xian, passed this way in the fifth century, and he wrote that there were ‘evil spirits and hot winds that kill every man who encounters them, and as far as the eye can see no road is visible, only the skeletons of those who have perished serve to mark the way.’ ”
Paddy closed his book and grinned happily. “Good stuff, eh? And nothing has changed. At least we know what we’re in for over the next few weeks.” He went to put the book back in his tent.
The dust-red sun was well above the horizon now, and the other three team members emerged from their tents within a couple of minutes of each other. Between cooking breakfast and striking camp, Paddy and I had no more chance for talk.
Gerald filmed our activities and the scenery around us, then disappeared into the second truck. But Jackie Sands gave me an extra nice smile and even helped collect the breakfast plates. Whatever had annoyed her so last night was apparently all forgotten or forgiven.
Dancing With Myself Page 27