Artifact

by Gregory Benford

  Claire said, “I’ve been in the grottoes along the Amalfi coast. The light there was a lot brighter than this.”

  “It looked stronger before. Probably cloud cover moving in.”

  “Yes, that might be it.”

  More stalling. Well, the hell with it. “You be on the other end of that block and tackle, okay? Three jerks means I want to come up.”

  She nodded, half opened her mouth, but said nothing. He leaned over and kissed her. Her lips went rigid for a moment, then softened, then pressed warmly back.

  “Umm. I’ll be back for more.”

  He waved to George, who was peering through from the tomb, and swung over the side.

  The first fifteen feet were easy. He played out the rope and slowed himself with his feet, watching the glistening walls rise past him, still lit by the lamp. The rock exuded a salty, fetid odor.

  At the first turn he got a purchase on the wall and worked his way to the right. The shaft squeezed down, but not badly. He twisted and got through, though he could feel his heart accelerate as he brushed against the smooth, wet stone.

  Past the turn, the glow from the lamp above showed only streaks of yellow down the shaft. He had left the flashlight on in his vest pocket, and its diffuse radiance helped.

  Here two smashed boards were caught in a crevice, pieces from one of the crate’s corners. Deep gouges in the wall led his eyes downward. His vision had adjusted and he could make out below another neck, then a branching into several side vents. The shaft was leveling off somewhat, and a large stone formed a platform. On it were more boards and some packing material. Some boards were still fastened together by nails, others were thrown back into a side passage that dropped away to the left.

  He jerked once on the line and Claire fed out more footage. The rope above scraped on the turn in the neck. He watched it, but the dampness let the rope glide smoothly. It was a thick rope, he told himself, not likely to wear away quickly. He told himself again. Then he dropped toward the stone.

  “Ledge here!” he called, so Claire would not be alarmed when his weight went off the line. He sat down on the slimy, cold rock, not trusting the footing. The main chimney dropped away at a slant under the rock, which looked to be dripstone. He got out the flash and crawled over clammy slickness to the side passage. A harsh, almost acrid smell filled the hole that dropped away steeply. A few boards had been flung that way, but his guess was the crate had gone the more direct route, below. He clicked off the flash.

  Was that a blue glow down the side passage? He waited for the afterimage on his retinas to fade. Yes, that was real, no figment.

  But faint. Too faint, he was sure, to see from above.

  On the other hand, maybe this side passage was the way out. He clicked on the flash again. This side hole was not as slick and gray as the chimney. The rock was brownish, and rough edges blocked his view.

  A hint of warmth brushed his face. A breeze from this side passage? Hard to tell. What was that sour tang in the air, like something burning? The senses played tricks down here.

  He crawled back over the brow of the stone ledge. There were no loose rocks, consistent with the subterranean cistern theory. Everything had been swept clean by millennia of seepage, carving an underground streamway. Certainly this wasn’t man-made; he had seen no handiwork, or any artifacts that had fallen in.

  At the edge he studied the steep drop of the main shaft. A dozen feet below it twisted and angled left. He killed the flash and waited for the yellowish afterimage to go. “Still looking!” he called.

  “Okay!” Claire’s high, echoing cry came from a long way off.

  There, below—light. Definitely a pale ivory luminescence. Reflected off the damp walls.

  He listened for sounds of wave action. Nothing. Absolute, dead silence.

  But was this faint light stronger than the one he’d seen down the side channel? Even though there were apparently two ways down, they might not be negotiable.

  Best to choose the brightest. It was either closer, or bigger, or both.

  He grimaced. Comparing two fuzzy patches of blue, trying to decide. He squinted. Hard to tell. He coughed from the dampness.

  The hell with it. This one looked good enough, and he hadn’t liked the looks of that side way. Too many tight angles. Squeezing into there, when a comparatively wide shaft was open here—no, this one was best.

  “Stepping off!”

  He eased over the edge and hung. Like bait on the end of a line, he thought. Claire let off the ratchet on the rope—he could feel the jerk—and he coasted down.

  The turn was closer than he thought. He had to squirm through. Slime eased his way. It reeked, something like dead kelp.

  His foot caught on something. His breath rasped. He felt around for a way through and suddenly the full force of it came on him—wedged in between two slabs of pressing rock, turned at an impossible angle, chilled, hands aching as they clenched tight, in damp darkness with only a slender rope connecting him to the world of light and air—

  No, drop that. He had to keep moving.

  He squirmed farther down. His right foot found more obstruction, but the left slipped and dangled in space. He wormed over that way. There was room for maneuver, but the cloying near-total darkness made it seem as if the rock walls pressed in, their weight and mass blocking all escape.

  He found a way and slid down chilly rock. The rope brought him up short, then eased him down a gentle slope.

  He thought of Claire laboring above. Was she strong enough for this, even with the pulleys giving mechanical advantage?

  More gray stone buttresses glided by. Clammy, clinging air. It was like descending a shaft of a Gothic cathedral.

  A brightening below. He descended, peering. Light suffused the pit of the passage. The rock leveled off here and John cautiously lowered himself down to it. Thirty yards downslope, a dimly radiant azure pool filled the passage, beyond a pebble beach. Inky shapes of boulders lined the slope. Long gouges in the sand and splinters of wood marked the passage of the crate. He picked his way forward in the gloom, feet crunching on pebbles.

  Water, gently lapping. How deep? He could swim down a short way, assess the situation.

  “I’m OK!” he called through cupped hands.

  A ringing, indecipherable answer.

  He unhitched the rope. Arms ached and tingled, shoulders knotted painfully.

  He stepped into the pool. After the chilly stone it was warm, reassuring. He waded down the steep slope, panting to store up oxygen, and then dove.

  The gurgle of submersion seemed loud. He struggled downward toward flickering shafts of dull light. Lumpy stone masses moved past with unnerving slowness.

  He fought down the throat of rock, feeling a tightness in his chest that must mean he had little air left. Should he turn around? No, it looked so close, so easy—

  He swam frantically now, the burning coming up into his throat, the mad desire to open lungs and suck in. Something tan-colored below caught his eye. And suddenly the light was brighter, the rock mouth opened and he was out, free. Shimmering mirrors danced above. He opened his mouth, releasing bubbles, kicking upward. He broke the surface with a rough gasp.

  It was not yet full dawn. The eastern sky was turning from red to yellow as he watched. How long to get ashore, up the hill? He looked for a quick way onto the sharp rock cliff, and remembered the thing below.

  He dove, and yes, there it was—the crate. One side ripped clean off, edges smashed, but otherwise intact. The side he could see was the back. That meant the front, with the Linear A and the cone, was still protected by the packing.

  He gulped air and swam to the right, looking for a handhold.

  CHAPTER

  Seven

  The sudden rattling at the door startled her. She was standing beside the open hole, ready to respond to any call or yanking on the rope. But there had been no signal for at least ten minutes now.

  George whispered, “Damn! Here, help me back in there
.”

  “Those men?” Her throat tightened.

  “Must be,” George said.

  Claire plunged into the tomb and reached for George. More rattling, a clank.

  Creaking. She seized George’s arm. Dim sunlight. The door swung open.

  “Presto!”

  She gaped at John, framed in the doorway. “You—you—”

  “Damn…right,” he gasped. He staggered in and pulled the door closed.

  “What did you find, how did—”

  “It’s getting light fast out there. We’ve got to move.”

  “Well, I—” Flustered, she looked around, spotted her things, snatched them up.

  George had gotten himself erect, leaning on the scaffolding.

  “Let me hold onto your shoulder, I can limp,” he said.

  “Man, that was fast.”

  John nodded, out of wind. “I didn’t spot anybody in camp.”

  “You get your breath, I’ll pick up here,” Claire said, beginning to unfasten the rope arrangement they had made.

  “No time. Doesn’t matter anyway,” John puffed.

  “We can disguise—”

  “Come off it,” he said sharply. “The crate’s gone, lying in twenty feet of water. They’ll damn sure know we were here.”

  “I…I suppose you’re right.”

  “Let’s go,” John said, taking George’s weight on his shoulder. “Up and over, the way we came. Got to get out of sight fast. George, I’ll count so we keep the same pace.”

  The camp was bare when she glanced at it. As she scrambled up the hillside, clutching at clumps of brush and oleander, she felt sure there would be shouts behind, running footsteps, a rifle shot.

  She reached the top and plunged over, then looked back. The two men came lurching behind her, grunting, and still the camp slept below. Incredible, after all her dark thoughts, to be released from that tomb, carrying her notebooks, into a bright reddening dawn, with the Skorpio lying at anchor below. The world was impossibly sharp, precise.

  John and George stopped below the brow, panting. She grabbed John’s collar and kissed him, saying nothing. A look of surprise crossed his face, he grimaced, and then studied the hillside, estimating the best path back to their boat. “Come on.”

  They were rowing out to Skorpio before she remembered what he had said. “You—you saw the crate?” she gasped. George was braced in the stern and she had to grunt to keep up her side of the paddling.

  “Huh? Sure did. Looks pretty good, considering.” He scanned the hillside behind them.

  “That thing on the tail of Skorpio, what is it?”

  “What? Oh, some kind of hoist. Used for trawling and bringing in loaded nets.”

  “How much can it lift?”

  “I don’t—oh, oh no—I get what you’re thinking.”

  “We can’t just leave it down there.”

  “With the whole goddamn Greek army on our tails?”

  “If they look now, they’ll simply see a fishing boat at work.”

  “Forget it.”

  George said, “Hey, look, don’t you think we’ve had enough—”

  Claire wheezed between strokes, “Damn it, I’m not going…to let a unique artifact…get destroyed on the sea bottom.”

  John said slowly, “You may be right about the guards. I locked the door again, so there’s no obvious sign we were there. But I can’t operate that hoist, and we damn sure can’t do it without Mr. Ankaros knowing it.”

  “We’ll tell him we woke up early, went out boating, saw something underwater that we want to salvage.”

  John snorted. “Likely story.”

  “A lot more believable than the truth!”

  “And George’s leg?”

  “He slipped getting into the boat.”

  George groaned. “Oh no.”

  John looked sternly at the set of Claire’s mouth. He was tired, she saw, the energy of his triumphant return dissipated. Perhaps it was too much to ask of him, adding one more to a pile of debts she had built up.

  George’s leg was bad, but it would heal. A month or two and he would probably be all right. All things considered, they had come through pretty well. Luck helped. Dumb luck, sure, but who was choosey?

  They were silent as they worked toward Skorpio, panting.

  “I don’t believe this,” George drawled.

  But then an amused, resigned expression came into John’s face. He smiled. “I do,” he said.

  PART FOUR

  CHAPTER

  One

  John Bishop belted up his coat outside the Pratt Building, squinting into yellow sunlight glaring on thin snow. Cambridge did not deign to clear snow from its sidewalks, but an army of students had trampled it into slush already. A late afternoon chill promised a freeze tonight.

  He sniffed, nostrils flaring. Storm coming again, he decided, using the automatic system of weather prediction every Tech inhabitant learned. A sweet tang in the air meant the wind blew from a nearby candy factory to the south, promising warm breezes and fewer thick-bellied clouds. A stink from Lever Brothers in the northwest threatened dark days and another wedge of moisture from Canada.

  Exams were just finishing up. John had helped with the grading in the introductory mathematical physics courses, and felt a restless fatigue. Passing judgment on an endless stream of mechanics and calculus problems numbs the mind while demanding that it still remain alert for the slight error, sometimes a mere jot of notation, that signals where a harried student had gone astray. Professors everywhere deplored examinations as an archaic technique, a fossil that recalled little red schoolhouses and memorizing the capitals of all the states. Regular progress and daily diligence mattered more, they felt, not an hour spent compressing months of learning onto a few sheets of paper. Far better to stress homework, classroom participation and the professor’s judgment. Regrettably, the large size of classes, and the requirements of society itself for pseudo-objective standards kept the exam structure firmly in place.

  None of these sentiments kept the professorial from devising examinations which caused sleepless cram sessions, caffeine addiction and despair. Old exam problems congested the files of fraternities and dorms; there were dossiers on each professor’s predilections. This constituted a challenge to each instructor, to find problems which would furrow any student’s brow while still being defensible as straightforward, clear, illustrating a central topic thoroughly explored in class. The ultimate quest was for problems which could trick the unwary into a blunder at a predictable point, allowing the grader to check these crucial turns quickly, assign demerits for failure, and move on.

  John adjusted his scarf—still a foreign garment he continually misplaced—and watched the fatigued faces leaving the building. There was a certain satisfaction in having taken part in this ancient academic ritual, for the first time from the vantage point of a judge. Tonight the movie houses and gaming rooms would be jammed, he knew, in search of distraction. Surely several thousand dazed and tired young men and women were a sign of a job well done.

  Well, enough musing. He was late for his appointment. He merged with this stream of dull-eyed, scruffy students and headed away from the Charles River down Mass Ave. His office was in the Center for Materials Science and Engineering, tucked into a confused assembly of buildings named for the fortunes which begat them—Sloan, Guggenheim, Pierce, Bush, Eastman, names which honored science, school and self. He could have worked his way through these labyrinthine corridors lined with display cases of geological specimens, arcane instruments, interactive experiments, pictures of great scientists. He preferred walking outdoors past the time-honored red brick buildings and across Vassar Street, to the unimpressive gray concrete and sheet metal of newer laboratories. Here in a bay of Building 42 he had arranged to examine the artifact.

  The bare cold floors and unceremonious entranceway were virtually empty. The solid state stress-test facility had moved to roomier, updated facilities over on Albany. Materials Science
still held title to this bay, though, since in the university as in foreign affairs, territory once held is never surrendered without a struggle or a deal. John had wangled permission to use it, and the privilege of using experimental equipment which came available. Since few archeologists carried out year-round digs, the diagnostic gear was usually free in winter, and he had brought most of it here. He stood, hands in coat pockets, and watched as a powered pulley inched along its track in the ceiling, its rrrrrrrttt echoing from the naked walls. A moment passed before he realized that the men at the far end of the room were those he had seen this morning at the truck which brought the artifact from the docks, and therefore the object suspended below the track was the tarp-shrouded crate itself.

  It seemed smaller in this expanse. He had no doubt the thing didn’t weigh too much for the thick steel cables, but something bothered him. That was it—the angle. The crate was not hanging straight down. He held up a finger vertically and sighted on the cable. It made about a ten degree angle. He frowned and then shrugged. Probably something off center in the T-clasp at the apex, he thought, or a misalignment at the joint. Still, it seemed that the workmen should have gotten it right; this was a valuable piece.

  Claire had gotten the artifact repacked in Italy. A man pulled the tarp away. The pale wood seemed oddly fresh as it settled to the concrete floor, air freight stickers garish against the knotted pine. The men nodded toward him and began opening the crate with crowbars.

  “Where’s the mount?” Claire’s voice called to them from behind him. He turned, realizing that it hadn’t been him they had nodded to.

  “We’ll bring it over soon’s this’s done,” the foreman answered.

  She wore a navy blue business suit, the stylish dressed-for-success look, over a frilly pink blouse. Severe exterior, feminine peekaboo beneath. He liked it.