“Hmm,” said Campbell. “Well, that would be a propaganda plus for the Republic if we can show these scientific celebrity types digging in and getting their hands dirty, literally, but it may turn out to be problematic in other ways. Things may fall out of their pockets while they’re digging, or things they find may disappear into the same pockets. We can’t very well promise these people transparency and full access, and then once they get up there tell them they can look but not touch, but we need to keep an eye on them. Make sure that any digging they do, they do it with our own people nearby and looking over their shoulders, as discreetly as possible. We have to assume that one of these characters is in touch with Scorpius, and we don’t want any seeding of the ground with phony evidence or any other kind of contamination.”
“We already have videocams in place all over the site,” said Jason. “The cameras record all the actual excavation, for that very reason, to verify that we’re not doing the same thing. Not that the outside world would believe our videos any more than they would believe our scientists, but every little bit helps.”
“You say they seem very knowledgeable about the dig,” said Campbell. “You looked over the Scorpius file. Is there anything in there that they would not have been able to get from our own published commentaries on the site, something that you guys would know and Scorpius would know, but which hasn’t been made publicly available? Something our ringer could only know about if he or she had seen the Scorpius files?”
“Mmm, maybe,” said Jason. “The list of artifacts is pretty long, and not all of it has been published, but the foreigners are going to be seeing everything we’ve got over the coming weeks as part of the project. The Ministry said full transparency, so full transparency it is. Let me cogitate on that, see if I can figure out something that might be a tell if any of them has seen the Scorpius material.”
“Any of them seem a little too enthusiastic?” asked Campbell.
“Bob, these guys are all for-real career scientists who are being presented with the chance of a lifetime to get in on the ground floor of a discovery that will re-write history,” Jason told him. “I could tell just by casual listening last night, they all have the monkey on their backs. Believe me, after ramrodding an institution of higher learning for thirty years, I know the type. One or two of them may be moonlighting for a foreign intelligence service, but I can tell you their primary interest is in Lost Creek, and what’s under it.”
“Mmmm. Okay, tell you what, I’ll meet you up there this afternoon,” said Campbell. “I want to observe these eggheads in their natural habitat. I’ll wear civilian clothes and I won’t bring Tom. BOSS makes outsiders twitchy, as well it should, and I don’t want them to feel that we have them under a microscope. Even if we do.”
Campbell was able to clear his desk of his normal work load by lunchtime—petty vandalism, car thefts, stolen lawn furniture, burglaries, a couple DUICFs (Drunk In Charge Of A Firearm), and one embezzlement case. There were a few stabbings and shootings that didn’t fall into the Republic’s parameters for consenting adults in such matters, and one homicide wherein the indicted man was claiming familial interference on the part of the deceased, and which required CID investigation and corroboration, or not as the case might turn out. The minuscule amount of crime requiring investigation, even in a huge Northwest Republic department like Montana, would have made any American cop laugh in derision and weep with envy. It was very easy for people to be law-abiding when there were so few laws.
He was up at Lost Creek in civvies by 3 p.m. Everyone except a small lab crew in the main shack was down at the site of the longhouse, watching Doctor Wingard and a crew of student excavators lifting earth from around the long gray stone rectangle in the ground with spades and trowels. They dumped the dirt into large wooden-framed sieves which were taken over to a canopy-covered area to be sifted and strained through screens into plastic tubs for any artifacts, before the dirt was removed to the truck and hauled away. Ally was there with her husband, Robert’s Guardsman son Bob Three, who waved to his father. They had decided to de-emphasize Bob Three’s relationship with Colonel Campbell as much as possible and not get too chummy in the presence of the foreign visitors. It might turn out to be a good idea to let them think Ally’s husband was just another grad student and not an actual cop himself, since it probably wasn’t good psychology for them to feel like they were surrounded by police on all sides. Ally herself climbed out of the slowly sinking depression in the ground as he approached. “Found anything yet?” Robert asked her.
“A bone sewing needle,” she told him. “Standard issue for cave gals. We’re still at Level Three, though. We’re not going to hit Level Two for another day and Level One until the day after that.”
“Our friends from Out There aren’t demanding that you go charging madly downward to get to the good stuff?”
“Oh, heavens, no!” she exclaimed. “They’re all true professionals. Some of them spend ten years on the same dig, off and on according to the season.” She sighed. “God, I envy them! To be able to excavate in Europe and the Middle East! Greek temples, Roman villas, medieval castles, whole villages wiped out by the Black Death that were never re-settled, battle sites like Cannae and Agincourt, seventeenth-century sewers, Georgian Dublin and Viking Limerick, Crusader fortresses in Palestine, Papal Avignon, monasteries, London pubs where Shakespeare got plastered and scribbled bawdy verses in iambic pentameter, Pictish burial tumuli, Saxon farmsteads. Aaaaargh! I’m green with envy!”
“Surely you must have some kind of excavation work here, in order to have an archaeology department at your university,” said Dr. Fred Haskins, who had come up beside them, along with his colleague Dr. Renfrew.
“We have a whole lot less history than you do,” replied Ally morosely. “Biggest project we’ve ever undertaken is to try to locate and excavate every camp Lewis and Clark ever made on our side of the line. We think we have, all the way down to Astoria and back.”
“You dinna do anything wiv’ Native Americans at all?” asked Renfrew. His Scots accent was light but noticeable.
“We call them Indians here,” said Ally. “Old ways, remember? Besides, Native Americans is not only insulting to the millions of white people who were born here, it’s inaccurate, if you consider a native American to be someone born in North America. Or South America, for that matter. I’m a native American, and so is Colonel Campbell. Doctor Wingard, as it happens, is not, although he lives here. It’s too imprecise a term, and science should always be precise.”
“Touché, Andy,” said Haskins with a chuckle.
“But to answer your question, Doctor Renfrew, sure we excavate Indian sites, and we have several museums devoted to the Indians who inhabited the Northwest, including the tribes down along the coast who made the totem poles such as the Tlingits. Some of whom were cannibals, by the way.”
“We don’t deny history, Doctor Renfrew,” said Campbell. “All we ask is that it be told truthfully.”
“We also do a lot of excavation of old pioneer sites and homesteads and nineteenth-century areas in our cities,” Ally went on. “We especially love to find old landfills. Many of them were dug up willy-nilly for their steel and plastic in the early days of the Republic, but last year we found one in north Seattle that had been filled in when a suburb was built over it in 1959. Do you know what a hula hoop is? A 45 rpm record? A Mouseketeer hat?”
“A what?” asked Renfrew in puzzlement.
“I know, that sounds a bit too recent to be really interesting,” said Ally. “But it’s all we’ve got. A lot of us take the attitude that we’re practicing for the day when things change and the rest of the world accepts us, and we can go to Europe and the east coast and work there.”
“I hope that happens, Mrs. Campbell,” said Haskins. He leaned over to her. “How are you on underwater excavation? I’m going to let you in on a little secret so far known only to a few in the archaeological community: some oil drillers in the harbor at Barfleur
think they may have found the remains of the White Ship!”
“Fantastic!” exclaimed Ally.
“The what ship?” asked Campbell.
“A ship that sank off the coast of Normandy in the year 1120 A.D., drowning William Adelin, the only legitimate son of King Henry the First and heir to the throne,” explained Ally. “The captain and the crew were drunk and they never made it out of the harbor, steered right into a rock. Through a long series of events I won’t get into, the sinking eventually caused a twenty-year civil war in England and put the first Plantagenet on the throne, Henry the Second. Okay, I know, all this sounds completely obscure and irrelevant to anything in the modern world, but it isn’t. That shipwreck nine hundred years ago was one of those identifiable single events with political and economic and social ramifications that made and changed a lot of history, and helped make our world what it is today, in a hundred different ways. If that ship hadn’t hit that rock we would be different people in a different time and place.”
“The Butterfly Effect?” asked Campbell.
“Yes, the wreck of the White Ship was a butterfly, and no one except a few obscure eggheads like us have ever even heard of it. Who’s doing the underwater excavation?” she asked Haskins.
“No one,” replied Haskins sadly. “Nor is anyone likely to. The wreck is under about ten feet of silt and mud, excavation would be quite expensive, and major universities in Europe have long since re-directed most archaeological funding to Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and South America, since to my never-ending astonishment, civilization apparently began there. All that can be found in places like Europe and Egypt and Mesopotamia are the unimportant, crude and violent ancestors of people whose descendants became cruel and violent conquerors and exploiters that were very beastly to the poor little Jewish people.”
“Ahh,” said Campbell. “Comes the dawn!”
“Ignore Freddy,” said the Scotsman. “He’s doin’ that deliberately tae see if I’ll grass on him when we get back home, which isn’t verra bright, because if ever I did he’d be buried in the King’s College quad wi’ a stake through his heart.”
“And will you grass on him?” asked Campbell politely.
“No,” said Renfrew with a tired smile. “I’m no’ yer man, Colonel. We’re no’ idiots, ye know. You and the other bloke are probably right, one o’ us is working for the spooks, but it isnae me, and I’ve no idea who.”
“Not that you’d admit it if you were,” said Campbell.
“No,” replied the Scot with a laugh. “Anyway, Freddy, I came to tell ye they just found a fish hook over there in one of the sieves.”
“That’s to be expected in this kind of Neolithic strata,” said Haskins.
“A hook made o’ copper?” asked Renfrew.
“Bollocks!” snapped Haskins. “That’s impossible! Not from that period! Oh, sorry, I must apologize, Mrs. Campbell. We were warned about our language before we came…”
“Not to worry,” said Ally. “I actually don’t know what that word means. But American Plains Indians didn’t work metal. Neither did Cro-Magnon or Neanderthal man.” But Haskins was already sprinting for the canopied sieving area as were several other visiting scholars. Renfrew followed him.
“Well, so much for our keeping a low profile,” said Robert Campbell with a sigh. “He’s right. They’re not stupid and they’ve picked up on why Tom and I are nosing around. I suppose they all know now that we suspect one of them is a spy.”
“I didn’t know!” said Ally in surprise. “Oh, holy—are you sure, Bob?”
“Absolutely, totally, one hundred percent sure? No,” admitted Campbell. “But there’s been a security problem with the site, Ally. That’s all I can tell you.”
Ally looked away. “This filthy politics, this vile spying, this insane hatred for white people who won’t bow down and kiss their noses! It killed my mother and now it’s coming here to mess up my work and my life again!”
“I’m sorry, honey,” said Campbell sadly. “One of the reasons Tom and I do what we do is to try and keep the poison away from your generation. As much of it as we can, anyway. But sometimes we fail. As you know.”
Allura look up at him. “You know I never blamed you,” she said softly.
“I’m glad to hear it, honey,” he said with a nod. There was nothing more to be said on that subject. “So let’s go see this fish hook everybody is all hot and bothered about.”
A tiny corroded green twist, about one and a half inches long, lay on a white sheet of paper on a table under the canopy while a dozen muttering scholars leaned over it, examined it under magnifying glasses, and watched while Dr. Arne Wingard picked it up and turned it with tweezers. Jason was talking to the two students, a young man and woman, who had sieved out the hook. “The cameras recorded the discovery, again for what it’s worth,” he told Bob. “This is big.”
“How big?” asked Robert.
“Big big! The only worked metal artifacts ever found in the Americas are items of crude jewelry, gold and silver, copper and jade from the Aztec and Maya and Inca cultures. Not even any bronze. There are signs that native copper was worked in Michigan and Wisconsin, in the western Great Lakes area, and some archaeologists think this copper was being mined as early as 6,000 years ago, but no one knows who the hell was mining the copper or what they did with it.”
“Why, it was the noble red man, of course!” suggested Campbell with a chuckle. “After all, they were the only ones here back then. Right?”
“Horse dung!” said Jason succinctly.
“Seriously? You mean to tell me that somebody was mining copper in the Great Lakes region six millennia ago, and nobody has ever even wondered who they were and what they were doing with the copper?” asked Campbell.
“Pretty much,” affirmed Jason. “By the time archaeological science was sufficiently advanced to understand what they were looking at, it had already become too politically dangerous in academic circles to show overmuch curiosity regarding anything that might punch holes in the official liberal, multicultural orthodoxy. For a century now, historians and scientists throughout the Western world have had to make like the noble lord in Macbeth, and say the less while they think the more. The consequences of scientific heresy in anything racially or politically sensitive can be devastating, sometimes even a matter of life and death.
“Look, there are all kinds of strange anomalies like that all across North America, not just those Solutrean spear points littering the landscape that clearly demonstrate contact with Europe thousands of years before Columbus first looked westward and wondered what was out there. Circles of standing stones in New England that near as dammit resemble mini-Stonehenges; funny writing on rock faces that looks like runes but isn’t like any runic script ever seen before; light-skinned tribes in various places around the continent who speak what appear to be broken dialects of Welsh and Gaelic; mounds throughout the Mississippi valley that pretty obviously were never built by Indians and are filled with hollow chambers, all empty; pictures on cave walls and drawn in petrified wood that are far too old to fit into any accepted prehistoric narrative, that show things nobody back then should have been seeing, like men in space suits and things in the sky.
“It’s not just in North America we get this kind of anomalous stuff, but down in South America too,” Jason went on. “What the hell was the true story behind those long-eared stone heads on Easter Island with red top-knots, the ones that Polynesian legend says were built by white-skinned, blue-eyed people who came on great magical rafts from the land beyond the rising sun? No one has yet figured out who built the ruined city at Tihuanaco, in Bolivia. In the 1940s a scientist who dated the ruins as being fifteen thousand years old was shouted down and silenced with the full force of the entire academic establishment. Since then anyone who has dared to point out that these huge stone walls and monoliths are completely different from Inca mud bricks just bought himself a ticket to teaching high school for the rest of his career. No one
has yet explained the Nazca lines in Peru, complex and geometrically perfect geoglyphs of animals laid down like a modern highway on a great plateau that can only been seen and recognized from the air. They weren’t even discovered for what they were until an American archaeologist looking for Inca sites flew over them in 1940. To this day, no one has the slightest clue as to who made them, or how, or why, or who the hell was supposed to see them. All over the world there are tantalizing hints of unknown civilizations pre-dating recorded history.”
“Are we talking about Atlantis?” asked Bob, arching his eyebrows.
“Who knows?” said Jason with a shrug. “Yeah, I know, the absolute quickest way for anybody in the scientific or academic community to be written off as a crank and a lunatic is to so much as even whisper the forbidden A-word. Don’t worry, I won’t do so around our foreign guests. I do have that much sense, at least. But Plato wasn’t the only ancient author who recorded folklore about lost continents and civilizations. And don’t even get me started on the Aztec Quetzalcoatl legend. But the one thing every legend and myth and fragment of evidence agrees on is that these ancient people, whatever else they were, were also white. White skin, red or golden hair along with blue or green eyes have always been associated with divine origin in the mythology of every culture. The far past is a gigantic Christmas package that liberal Political Correctness has nailed shut and sealed in shrink-wrap to make sure nobody ever opens it. Here today, we just punched a tiny hole in the shrink-wrap around our past.” Jason pointed to the tiny twisted green object on the paper.
“Those damned Jews and those damned self-hating white bastards who shill for them!” muttered Campbell. “God, the arrogance of it! If they can’t have mankind’s past for themselves, nobody can. The very idea of truth for its own sake seems to have vanished from their consciousness. Wonder what they’re so afraid we’ll find if we ever do open the package?”
“Way too many blue eyes for their taste, I suspect,” chuckled Jason.
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