by Larry Baxter
"Exactly," said Robert. "I finished the last view at the lab, took the photo with the digital camera, erased the plate, and went home directly. Nobody was in the lab or at home except me."
"Of course, there is another possibility which I must consider: that you are pulling a hoax on me."
Robert was startled. "No way. Sir."
"But you do not have to consider it, of course, just me," he went on. "And it will be easy for us to repeat your experiments with the virus and compare the images with the Maya glyphs. The photos of the glyphs are archived in the Library of Congress, so if you are trying a hoax we will know soon enough. You wouldn't have accomplices in the Library of Congress? I thought not. And you would have figured all of this out yourself, since you are quite intelligent, so I think that we will find that the photos are indeed archived as stated and that you are not trying to hoax me."
"I'm as confused as you are, Dr. Teppin."
"I am not confused. As Sherlock Holmes used to say, once the impossible is ruled out, the remaining answer, no matter how unlikely, must be fact. So we are left with the ancient Maya inventing the microscope twelve hundred years before you reinvented it, hmmm? Is there anything in the construction of your microscope that would have been impossible for a pre-iron-age culture? No fancy electronics, right?"
"No fancy electronics," agreed Robert. "It needs a smooth black dielectric plate."
"They used obsidian, a volcanic glass, for knives and decoration. It was also available in larger pieces, I think they made mirrors of it. Or was that the Aztecs?"
"Obsidian would work. It also needs a flat conducting plate. I use aluminum."
"They didn't have aluminum," said Teppin, "But I think they did have brass and some gold."
"Either would work. And even the Minoans knew about static electricity. I used a simple metal ball and a cloth for my high voltage supply. It works well in the winter with the low humidity, but it would not work at all in a humid jungle climate."
"Yes. So they could move out of the jungle to one of the drier microclimates. We certainly need to talk to an expert, maybe the researcher whose paper you found, but at least at first pass it seems as if they could have built the microscope."
"But the knowledge of how to build it, the theoretical background, what it would do when it was finished, how it would be used," said Robert. "How could they have been that advanced? We're talking about a primitive Indian culture, not a modern university."
"Indian, but not primitive. They did not need to watch television, they did not have far to commute to their jobs, and they did not have to spend Saturday at the shopping mall. They lived in a less complicated universe than we do, but perhaps because it was less complicated they understood it better than we understand ours. I traveled in Mexico and in what was then British Honduras, when I was younger—when I could still walk—and visited several of the Maya sites. Chichén Itzá, Tulum, Cobá. I was astonished at how advanced they were."
"I've never been there."
"In Chichén Itzá, there is a pyramid temple with a stairway on one side, and a feathered serpent head carved in stone at the bottom of the stairs. During just one sunrise every year, at the vernal equinox, the angle of the sun is just right to project an image of the stepped stair rail on the opposite rail, and as the sun rises the projection animates into a serpent of light undulating down the slope to the feathered serpent's head." Teppin moved both hands to illustrate. "It was obviously not built by accident, and it took some excellent mathematicians and architects and builders to make it come out right."
"Fascinating! Did you see it?"
"No, because the knowledge of the event had died and was only rediscovered in the 1970s, but I did see a video a few years ago. The place was mobbed with visitors at dawn to admire the show. There's also a small observatory, called Caracol if I remember correctly. You can take sight lines from the building's platforms and door jambs to plot the rising and setting location of the sun, the moon, and Venus."
"Not primitive," said Robert.
"Now, about the virus sample itself. Where did it come from? How did they know to look at it with the microscope? How did they precipitate it as a crystal? How far advanced were they in understanding the molecular basis of matter?"
"They wouldn't need to understand molecules. Really, all they would need to figure out is that they crystallized a sample of something and it would make a pattern, and if they wanted to find something else that would be chemically active with their sample they'd look for the mirror-image pattern. They could have had a science based on the charge image of molecules without knowing that they were molecules."
"Yes," said Teppin. "Of course. If your only tool is a hammer, et cetera. And with no transparent glass, they had no chance of building optical microscopes. They may have developed an understanding of chemistry based on their version of a charge microscope. And similarly they would not need to know anything about DNA to do genetic engineering."
"That's still a pretty big leap," said Robert. "There's no record of any of this, is there?"
"Perhaps the record is there, if we had the wit to see it. Part of their environment was the immense chemical factory of the tropical rain forest, and they understood the products of that factory much better than we do today. If they catalogued the charge image of biologically active substances from the rain forest, they could match them with virus or bacterial images. Instant cure. Plenty of test subjects, they had no particular respect for the sanctity of human life. And they had no Food and Drug Administration to slow down deployment."
"But this kind of effort should leave traces."
"The jungle is a hostile environment. The Spanish were quite hostile also, as I recall."
Robert digested this, then asked, "Do you think that the Maya had a cure for the virus?"
"Maybe. It does make sense that the virus could have hit the Maya in the ninth century, decimated the population and become the number one research project of the Maya scientists. And it could have been cured at the time and been lying dormant in the Yucatán jungle or the Uxmal excavation until some random native with the antibodies bred out of him, or one of the U.T. group, got bit by the wrong bug, or bird, or animal. There is a group culturing samples from the Uxmal site. That may clear up the mystery."
"So the virus could account for the civilization's collapse. The people that were left would have bailed out of the cities. What do we do next?" asked Robert, finishing off his cognac.
Teppin carefully poured him another half inch. "Precisely. What do we do next?" He thought for a moment. "I will set up an independent group to replicate your experiment. That should take a week. We also need a research team studying the uses of the charge pattern, trying to synthesize an antiviral with the charge pattern data."
"How will you fund it?"
"I will find a way, don't worry. I have some personal reserves if nothing more formal is available. Let me see, what else? Our attorneys will be interested in your notes for the patent applications. And we will need a few adventurous types tracking down the Maya link; if they did discover a rain forest solution, we need it in a hurry. I imagine you would be one of the charge pattern team."
And Katie, down in Houston. One hundred miles away didn't seem as safe anymore. On the other hand, if the ancient Maya had actually used a charge microscope for medical research, they could have easily left some clues that would point to a cure.
"I think I'd be more useful in the Yucatán," said Robert. "The job here is pretty cut and dried. I'll give my writeup and notebooks to an engineer to finish up."
"The Yucatán is incredibly hot. It has snakes. You will contract a particularly annoying form of diarrhea. And it is not called the Mosquito Coast for nothing."
"You know what Brighton in November is like? And I have the feeling that we might be able to find the old cure. It should be faster than developing the microscope." Another fork in the road, Robert mused. The obvious choice is to stay safely in Boston, finishing the i
ndustrial design, gearing up for production, discovering the correct process control variables for crystallization. A good job for methodical, patient technicians…lets me out. They'd probably make faster progress without me. Anyway, the chance of a quick fix for any new virus was poor, look at AIDS.
Robert made up his mind. "I'll go to Mexico. But I don't know the territory or the language, and I'll need some help with the Maya translation."
Teppin nodded. "I would think that the student who wrote the thesis you found would be a prime candidate. And, failing that, there is a department at Harvard that has done some good research on the Maya. I know her department manager. I will make a phone call. What was the name of the thesis author?" asked Teppin, punching buttons on his computer.
"Dr. Teresa Welles."
He nodded, looking at the monitor. "That simplifies things; she's a researcher at Harvard." He scribbled a phone number for Robert.
"Sounds good. What next?"
"Next, you and she can try to translate more of the glyphs from photographs. If that does not work, you travel to Mexico with Welles, if she can go. She should know the language. The languages. Do you speak Spanish?"
"Yo hablo Espanol," Robert answered, somewhat truthfully, with three years of study in the language.
"¡Bueno! And you will need a guide, somebody who knows the territory, too, but that should be easier from down there."
* * *
The next day Robert dialed the number at Harvard.
"This is Teresa."
"Dr. Welles?"
"Yes."
"I'm Dr. Robert Asher. I'm a researcher at B.U."
"What can I do for you, Dr. Robert Asher?"
"I'm working with Dr. Teppin on a project in virus research. We need some help with Mesoamerican languages and Maya archaeology. He recommended your department."
"I've heard of Dr. Teppin, of course. But that's an unusual connection. How can I help?"
Her voice was cool and confident, with an undertone of amusement. He momentarily considered trying to give her a summary on the telephone, then realized how confusing it would sound. "Well, it's sort of involved. We are organizing a trip to the Yucatán to track down some mysterious glyphs. Can you give me half an hour to go into the details?"
"Sure, can you come over this afternoon?"
"That'd be great. How about 3:00?"
* * *
At 2:45, Robert took the turn on Massachusetts Avenue at Out Of Town News and was stunned to see an empty parking place, a legal space, with a parking meter. He swung the Toyota quickly into the curb, stepped out and locked the car. Well, he locked the driver's side door; the passenger door lock didn't work. Next week for sure, stop at Goldie's for a new lock. Robert figured that any self-respecting Cambridge car thief would draw the line at sliding across a ripped Toyota seat and climbing over the shift lever.
He walked across the Quadrangle—a tree-lined grassy square surrounded with ivy-covered brick buildings—found the Harkness Laboratory, gave his name to the receptionist and said he had an appointment with Dr. Welles. He was ushered down a long corridor with a chipped dark green linoleum floor and two-tone green walls, through an oak framed door with frosted glass announcing Mesoamerican Studies, Dr. T. Welles, and into a small office.
"Dr. Welles. Hi, I'm Robert Asher."
She looked up from her computer screen. She had dark hair in moderate disarray and a nice smile and extra large glasses enlarging her eyes, and from what he could see her body was attractively arranged. Her skin was the color of antique pine. He looked again at the eyes, somewhere between purple and blue, deep, arresting.
"Hello, Robert Asher." Her voice was a smoky contralto with a surprising depth and power, a performer's voice, not an academic voice.
"Call me Robert."
"Then you may call me Teresa. Let me save this, just in case," she said, punching keys. "Sit down, please. You said you could use some help on the Maya. I'm probably not the ranking expert in town, or even the ranking expert at Harvard, but I could be the cheapest. What exactly do you need?"
"Do you speak Maya?"
"Maya, Yucatec, Spanish, all that stuff." She smiled and turned back to him. "My mom was Maya. I lived in Mexico until I was six years old. I got one name from her, one name from my dad the archaeologist."
"I do molecular biology," he said, "and I invented a new kind of microscope. Or maybe I just re-invented it, I'm not sure. It makes a picture of the charge patterns of the component molecules of a sample, a charge image instead of an optical image. It gives you a better picture of how the sample will interact with other chemicals. Dr. Teppin thought I should take a charge microscope picture of the Austin virus that's causing all the trouble in Texas."
"I've been following that one. Not nice."
"Not nice at all. I got a virus culture and ran it through the microscope. It made a pretty distinctive charge pattern picture. Here it is." He dropped a computer printout of the Austin virus image on her desk. "Then I discovered almost by accident that the same image was carved into a rock 1200 years ago in Mexico. You used a picture of the carving to illustrate your doctoral thesis. Here's that picture."
She compared the pictures. "Huh?" she asked. "Are you saying the ancient Maya built one of these microscopes? And looked at the same virus with it?"
"Exactly. If you do the math, there's no way this could happen by chance. Simply no way. But nobody can come up with any other explanation, so we think the Maya were much farther advanced in science and biology than anybody thought possible."
She spun her chair halfway around and stared at the wall for a minute, then swung back to face him. Her expression was of someone who had just bitten into a jalapeno pepper. "Naaaah," she said.
"Feel free to suggest an alternate explanation."
She thought for a minute, brow furrowing and then smoothing as if she had come to some conclusion. "Can't handle it. I hate to say impossible, but I'll make an exception in this case."
This wasn't going well. I need another approach. I need this woman to translate. Plus she is incredibly nice looking, and probably smarter than I am. Try again. "Definitely impossible," he said. "But there is also a chance that working out this puzzle will give us some clues to a treatment for the Austin virus. Those other symbols on the rock look to me as if they could be some kind of antiviral. Dr. Teppin said he thought that the glyphs were words, and that you could translate them."
"Well, yes, mostly. There are hundreds of glyphs that we have translated. They're not words but mostly syllables, or phonemes, speech sounds. Some are like Chinese characters, pictographs, representing an object. We can translate about ninety percent of them."
"Can you translate these particular glyphs?"
"No, sorry. I worked on them for a bit when I was doing the thesis, no luck. Then later I worked on them again for this." She gestured at a manuscript open on her desk, titled Similarities Between Maya Glyphs and Asian Religious Symbols, Dr. Teresa Welles.
"Perfect, that's the sort of analysis we'll need. Has that been published?"
"Not yet, but J. Historical Archeology has it in peer review. And Scientific American is looking at it, too, that's this week's exciting news."
"Congratulations."
"It's neat stuff. There are lots of common symbols you can find in early Mexican and Asian cultures, like this one of an eye in a hand, or this one, face of god with rivers for a nose. There's good evidence that there was commerce across the Pacific a few millennia BC."
"That's the kind of thing I'll be looking for in Uxmal."
She nodded and thought for a moment. "When you were looking for matches to your microscope pictures, did you find any other images?"
"No, none. But help me with this; the Maya civilization is all brand new to me. I didn't know that there was so much civilization in the Americas that early. Do you know Uxmal?"
"I grew up in Mexico, but I've only been back once. A bunch of us visited Uxmal and Chichén Itzá during my doctoral
studies. Here," she pointed to a large map on the wall. "This is a map of the Yucatán Peninsula in about the time the stones were inscribed. On the right, the Caribbean Sea. On the left, Mexico. To the south, what later became Belize, and to the southwest, what later became Guatemala. You can see, here, the concentration of Maya cities. The Maya population was about fourteen million at that time."
"How old are the cities? Our Indians didn't build cities."
"The North American Indians were mostly migratory, following the game, but here the forest provided crops year round. The population changed from nomadic hunter-gatherers in twenty thousand BC to farmers who lived in villages, and later built these beautiful cities."
"Why the change? And how can you be sure about the dates?" asked Robert.
"A woolly mammoth skeleton was found with a spear point in the ribs, and there were flint knives nearby. The date is about ten thousand BC from soil strata. Then the climate changed. Things got dry starting around seventy-five hundred BC, we can tell from soil cores. Then it looks as if—due to the dry climate—the big, easy-hunting animals died out and the poor Mexicans had to eat snakes and beetles and stuff. So they started doing some farming, and over the next few millennia they got pretty good at corn, and then squash and beans."
"How did we figure that out?"
"Discoveries of agricultural tools, and millstones for grinding corn to make tamales. Things got organized in Mexico a couple of millennia later than the progress of civilization in Europe and Asia."
"What was the timing in Europe and Asia?" asked Robert.
"In Egypt there was a frenzy of monument building, about twenty-five hundred BC; they took over the world championship of math and science and pyramids and then disappeared. The early Mexicans may have learned from them with the contact with Asian civilization across the Pacific back then. I'll give you a copy of my manuscript. Then from one thousand BC to AD nine hundred, the Mexicans created the most advanced civilization of that age, with great art, major advances in science, and dramatic city architecture. In the last stages of the Maya civilization, a dozen or so kings built themselves these incredible temples." She gestured to photographs on the rear wall showing several steep-sided pyramids.