Artifact

by Gregory Benford

  “Lord, they took forty forevers to get here,” Claire said to him, never taking her eyes off the laboring men. “Crawled through every back alley from Logan.”

  “Do they know how to handle it?” He watched the men stripping away the packing material. One dropped a crowbar and it rang jarringly.

  “It’s pretty rugged, you know—it survived that horrible fall. Except for occasionally moving it around, we’ll be doing delicate work here. I’ll handle that.”

  “Alone?”

  She smiled enigmatically. “As near to it as I can get.”

  “You called Watkins in China?”

  “Yes. Watkins grumped a while and then gave me carte blanche to use the equipment, so long as it doesn’t leave the sacred ground of MIT.”

  “And Sprangle? He’s department head, he could keep you from using the expensive gear if he thought you might mess it up.”

  “He passed the buck to Watkins.”

  “Bravo. How’d you do it?”

  The enigmatic smile again. She knew she could be charming when she wanted, he could tell that, but the curiously guarded way she used this ability puzzled him. Other women would squander it, he had seen that often enough. Claire kept a cool exterior, perhaps realizing that the melting of such a facade was more interesting to men than mere continual warmth.

  “I did have to make one concession,” she admitted.

  “To Sprangle?”

  “Yes. It seems he is an archeology buff. He wants to be kept up on my results. I think he sees it as an opportunity to push his group’s capability.”

  “Maybe drum up a little more support from his dean?”

  “I think you read the tea leaves correctly.” Her eyes had never left the uncrating. Now she stepped closer.

  “Anything wrong?”

  Heavy padding had fallen away, revealing the golden cone. “I don’t…no, nothing. The cone, it…reminds me of something.”

  “Of what? Some tests?”

  “No, something I’ve seen….” She shrugged. “It’ll come back later.”

  They circled the laboring men. The artifact stood bare now. It had been a great surprise to him how little the fall down the shaft and plunge into the sea had done. The crate had been demolished, of course, the back half stripped away entirely. They had a sweaty, aggravating time of it, getting the thing aboard. He had dived repeatedly, attaching three cables to the sides of the remaining crate, not truly sure the rig would hold together. It did, though, and they secured it on deck. Claire went over the exposed stone carefully and found miraculously little damage: a few scrapes and gouges at unimportant points, and the accumulated hard mud at the rear scraped off.

  John asked, “What’re you going to look into first?”

  “Better resolution of the metal content. Materials analysis. X-ray that cone, too.”

  “What about that ivory piece?”

  “The rectangle?” She sighed. “Kontos has it. I packed it separately.”

  “Too bad.”

  “I have plenty of photos.”

  The men finished and stepped back to admire their work. “Okay, Miz Anderson?” Claire nodded and thanked them.

  The artifact seemed small here, its deep black drinking up the light. At the back, where the hard soil had been, John saw a small hole. It was filled with some tan-colored matter. He bent closer. “What’s that?”

  Claire looked puzzled. She crouched, reached out gingerly and touched the hole. “It was still covered with a tough clay or something when the Italians packed it up. That must have worn away in transit. This…ummm.”

  “What is it?”

  She leaned closer. “A plug of some kind, I think. George and I were careful not to remove the soil on the back, afraid we might damage something underneath. Odd, isn’t it—a little hole, no more than a centimeter across, filled with some hard material.” She tapped it with a fingernail.

  “What do the Mycenaean experts at BU think about this?”

  Claire stood abruptly, glancing at the men who were putting away their tools. “Let’s celebrate,” she said vigorously. “Ever been to the Ritz?”

  “Nope. Is there one in Boston?”

  She made a face of mock shock. “Some things are eternal. The Ritz-Carlton will be here when all we know has vanished into dust.”

  Her Alfa Romeo buzzed angrily across the Charles River and plunged without hesitation into the sluggish stream of early evening traffic. She took it down Boylston Street, avoiding delays by the simple maneuver of changing two lanes at a time where possible. Horns blared in their wake. They passed the Prudential Center’s blank majesty at a good clip, slowing only when she caught sight of a policeman on an incongruous bay horse. They idled beside the public library.

  “Did Hampton give you a hard time when—”

  “I hate that new wing of the library. Did you know an elderly woman went into one of the side corridors in there, thinking it led to the restrooms, and got caught? She didn’t have the strength to push the door open, that’s how badly engineered it is.”

  “How long was she in there?”

  “They figure two weeks.”

  “You mean—”

  “Right. She died. Of dehydration, the coroner said.”

  The fountain in Copley Square flung joyous crystalline tribute into the sharp air, ignored by the earnest gloomy mumble of traffic. Two huge golden lions guarded the entrance to the Copley Plaza Hotel. Claire peered hopefully at parked cars, visibly willing them to turn on their headlights in announcement of an opening space. The brown stone spires of Trinity Church were moist, reflecting the swarm of headlights, and the side of the Hancock Tower gave watery echo to this image a block away.

  She finally sought refuge in the underground lot beneath the Commons. Getting out, John said, “There’s a ticket on your windshield.”

  “Oh.” She pulled at it. It stayed attached to the wiper by a string. “Look at that,” she said with mild admiration. “They have a little loop on it, so it doesn’t blow away when you start up. Good idea.” As they left the lot she carefully placed the ticket in a public trash bucket, and laughed at the look he gave her.

  It had begun to rain and the Commons was emptying. Droplets drifted, threatening to turn into ice, making big luminous globes hang in the air around the street lights. Traffic was hushed, as if a long distance away. The same traffic policeman came clip-clopping toward them, his well-muscled bay alert. The man’s yellow slicker reflected the roiling lights of the city, but the two of them seemed to John like an island of stability among it all.

  “Late at night,” Claire murmured, “when there’s no one out, you can imagine Emerson and Thoreau walking through here in their top hats, arguing poetry.”

  They crossed Arlington Street and up the steps into the Ritz. Strangely, it didn’t look ritzy to John. The public rooms and bar were Yankee with a touch of the China trade, mixing lacquered desks and rose carpeting with lithographs of old Newbury Street. No filigree or flourish, no chrome or cut glass. The fireplace roared with crisp yellow life, and they got seats nearby on a camelback sofa. While they waited for their Tanquery martinis she pointed out the antique wing chairs and cranberry carpeting, describing how the hotel employed one staffer full time to touch up the gold paint on the furniture. “And now that you’re convinced this is an awful citadel of privilege, I’ll remind you that the labor leader, Cesar Chavez, stayed here when he came to town to stir up proletarian passions.”

  He smiled wanly. She had an airy, girlish joy when she showed him things Bostonian, and the serious professional woman dropped away. They had seen a good deal of each other in the few days since returning, and he had detected a shift in her moods here on her home turf. As yet he could not quite sort the signals she was giving him. At moments she would abruptly tighten up, become much more the proper Boston lady, and then, moments later, she would be open again. Maybe it was the continuing worries she had?

  “Do you suppose Colonel Professor Kontos will stay he
re, then? Proletarian though he is?”

  She sighed. “Ah, you’re getting used to my dodges, are you?”

  “Not that they aren’t likable.”

  She recrossed her legs, frowning. He admired the sensible shoes, which did nothing to reduce the agreeable swell of calf beneath nylon. He waited her out, speculating on the odds that she did not wear those awful panty hose, but instead went in for the real thing, complete with garter belt. Probability about point one percent, he guessed. As usual. Odd, how some male fantasy objects persisted long after their practical use vanished. Even in Boston—

  “I might as well come straight out with it. I didn’t tell Hampton about the artifact.”

  Despite his surprise he only raised his eyebrows. He was beginning to get the knack of underplaying, in response to her.

  “He had me up on the carpet yesterday, and again this morning.”

  “No kiss on the cheek for the heroine’s return?” He signaled the waiter for another round of martinis. The waiter indicated that they were already being made. He realized Claire was undoubtedly a regular here. The fire snapped energetically and he turned to present a larger cross section for its radiation. Even the Ritz had drafts.

  “Kontos sent a long letter detailing my crimes.”

  “And Hampton buys it.”

  “Of course!” She snorted. “Why wouldn’t he?”

  “Hampton gave you the Dutch uncle talk about being polite to the host country representatives and so forth. Then you argued.”

  “Something like that.” Drinks arrived and she took a healthy pull.

  “So you elected to minimize damage by skipping over the matter of the missing artifact.”

  “Right. Those customs forms, they’ll be addressed to the department at BU. But they’ll come to me first, because I wrote my name over the address. So Hampton won’t know right away that we flew anything back with us.”

  “He still thinks we went docilely along? That we didn’t slip off to Crete and all the rest?”

  “I saw the Kontos letter. It deals only with events up until we left Athens. Or were supposed to.”

  “But he knows we were down in the islands.”

  “All he saw on Santorini was a dragnet in operation. He knows we didn’t leave on that flight, and we were on Santorini, but he doesn’t know what we did after that.”

  “The artifact—he’ll miss it.”

  “But he can’t claim we took it. He hid it, remember. If it’s not at the Museum in Athens, how is he going to account for our having it?” He eyed her. There was something here, something she hadn’t mentioned. She was fidgeting.

  “Eventually he’ll find a way to nail us. So? You’ll have the artifact to study for a while, tucked away at MIT.”

  She shook her head, gazing into the fire, distant and distracted. He watched the yellow light flicker across the planes of her face, never fully banishing the shadows from it.

  “You don’t understand this field. What I did, it—it was crazy. I stole a priceless artifact!”

  “You were mighty provoked.”

  “That’s no excuse! I simply got so—so wound up that I forgot entirely about my professional standards, about ethics, about respect for the past.”

  “What about respect for other people? Kontos wasn’t showing a lot of that.”

  Her expression had been shifting, ranging between chagrin and agitated puzzlement at her own actions. Now it subsided into an abstracted sadness. She still stared into the popping fire, eyes a distant dusky blue. “No, I understand what you’re saying—I felt those things, certainly. That’s why I acted as I did. But now sanity has returned and I see no way out.”

  “Out of what?”

  “Eventually facing the music.”

  “What’ll happen?”

  “I’ll be finished in Grecian archeology. Probably in the whole field.”

  “No chance of tenure?”

  “Of course not.”

  “You’ll have other avenues.”

  “Today I’m a chicken. Tomorrow I’ll be feathers.”

  “It doesn’t have to be right away, does it?”

  “Not necessarily. I do want to study the artifact some more, do some library work on it, try to find connections to other digs.”

  “Fine. We’ll hang onto it. Unless Sprangle runs into Hampton and spills the story over a lunch or something, you’ll be safe.”

  Her gaze slid away from him. “Well…”

  “Come on.” He leaned forward into the pressing glow of the fire, gesturing, trying to cheer her up. He liked her buoyancy and spark; it hurt him to see her down like this. “Sic transit gloria mundi-wise, you’re not doing all that damn badly.”

  She smiled grimly. “Hampton’s holding a review panel about this. He’s raising the issue of my continuing on at BU as an assistant professor.”

  Deflated, he sat back. “Oh.” So it was worse than he’d thought.

  “And he wants to call you as a witness. He got your name from Kontos.”

  Silence for a moment, broken only by the snapping of the fire. John finished his drink and wished for more. “Well, I’ll follow the story up to the Athens airport. Then I’ll say we flew to Italy.”

  “Well…”

  “Okay, look—it’s not ethical to lie. But maybe we’ll find a way to answer and still not give anything away.”

  “Ummm.”

  “What about George?”

  “The pressure’s on me, not him. Anyway, he’s scooted for Columbia. He was supposed to go there for a year of detailed artifact work, starting January. When we got back, he saw this storm brewing and left early.”

  “Brave fellow.”

  “Look, it’s not his fight. He wasn’t responsible for the dig. I was.”

  He leaned toward her again, trying to lift her spirits. “With enough practice, what the hell—we can get around ’em.”

  Her mood did not change. “I wonder.”

  “Sure we can. We’ll just have to think over our approach, is all.”

  “Think fast.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The review panel is tomorrow.”

  He sat back, puffing out his cheeks. “Oh.”

  CHAPTER

  Two

  When John came into Building 42 the next morning he found a team of technicians working around the artifact. Their leader was Abe Sprangle, a ruddy, balding man whom John knew fairly well from the metallurgy group. He had brought a dextrous expertise and good-natured executive skills to the department, when MIT recruited him from Denmark a decade earlier. Sprangle had already lifted the artifact onto a working pedestal. It could be rotated slowly, bringing to bear the snouts of several detectors arrayed around it.

  John said, “Already started?”

  Sprangle beamed happily. “I wanted to get some preliminary data. It’s a very exciting object, do you think?”

  “Sho’ nuff.” John could not resist occasionally throwing in a conspicuous Southernism. He vaguely sensed that this was a way of distancing himself from the pervasive, smug certainties of Northern culture, of which Boston still considered itself the apex. “I had one devil of a time with it. There’s a good chance all my measurements were wrong—I’m no pro. So beware. That’s an x-ray sampler, isn’t it?” John pointed at a large set of portable cabinets linked together, all leading to a barrel projection.

  “Yes, but there is something wrong with it. We have had it set up an hour now, to make x-ray fluorescence measurements. But there comes noise in the thing, some glitch.”

  “You’re trying to get a reading from that little hole I bored? I thought it was too small.”

  “Not for really good equipment, I think. Mind, I’m just an interested amateur at archeology, but I do know my diagnostics. Couldn’t prove it today, though. See that big reading Fred’s getting there?”

  He pointed at a needle which showed a steady x-ray count, occasionally jumping up or down a bit. A lanky technician looked up ruefully from a tan
gle of cables at the base of the device. “A glitch, fer sure,” Fred declared.

  John tried to look knowledgeable. He stooped to see where the barrel of the detector was pointing. The artifact was facing away from them, and the barrel focused on the rear of it, near the center. “What are you trying to find?” he asked.

  “We discover what metals are in the rock. That boring you made, we can use that for depth studies.”

  “And this noise?”

  “Just some electronics screwup. Fred’ll find it.”

  Fred shook his head. “Nothing in the connections, anything like that.” He sighed. “This was up and running fine before, when we first plugged it in. Maybe something in the power source…” He opened a cabinet and began studying its myriad connectors.

  John said, “The idea is, you put the barrel right up against the rock and give it a burst of x-rays. Then you turn off the x-rays and look to see if the metal atoms in the rock emit radiation of their own—right?”

  “Yes, yes,” Sprangle muttered, distracted. “But we have not turned on the source yet. So there is no fluorescence to detect. Yet our meter, it hops around.”

  “Well, good luck.” He wanted to get a better look at the front, but the apparatus left little room. He wormed in next to the artifact’s pedestal, hemmed in by equipment, slightly uncomfortable in the presence of so much machinery whose function he did not understand.

  It was all fairly straightforward stuff, he knew, easily understandable once someone carefully explained it. He did know a fair amount of physics, had minored in it at Rice. But to him physics at its best was an ideal world of clean solutions, strings of deduction, mathematical chains. Like most mathematicians he was a Platonist, a believer that the world was an imperfect expression of an underlying crystalline order, a mathematical plan—though if challenged, he would have automatically rejected any such label, knowing it was considered rather simplistic. His instincts, though, were another matter.

  He bent and inspected the artifact. In the bright lighting its every detail seemed more significant, a swarm of clues. The spotlights in the tomb had cast shadows over one face while illuminating another, and now, seeing it fresh, the stark incongruity of the amber cone was more striking. He placed a hand on the rotating platform and pushed, meeting heavy resistance, turning the block slightly to have a better look.