Artifact

by Gregory Benford

  “Hey? What’d you do?” Fred called out.

  John heard Sprangle answer, “Nothing. I was checking calibrations—”

  Fred said, “Well, somethin’ cut the noise.”

  Sprangle said, “John, did you step on the cabling or something?”

  He stood up. “No, I don’t think—Wait a minute. I rotated the sample some.”

  “You did? Well, that should not matter. Fred, look at those AMP units.”

  “Okay. I think maybe—”

  “Abe, Fred, watch the scope a minute,” John said quickly. He gingerly pushed on the platform, bringing the cone revolving back to where it had been before.

  Fred called, “The noise is back.”

  “John, what’d you do?”

  “I rotated the artifact back the way it was before.”

  Sprangle came around to where John crouched. “See?” John nudged the pedestal a bit.

  “Noise is droppin’ off,” Fred declared.

  Sprangle muttered, “Getting a signal without…damn! The thing’s radioactive.”

  “I never thought to check for that,” John said.

  “Well, certainly—who would? Fred, there is a hot spot on that back face. Those are real x-rays we’re seeing, by God, from the sample itself.”

  They grouped around the barrel detector and swung the pedestal slowly back and forth. The inertia of the block required a steady, powerful push. John began to sweat. “There!” Fred called. “Maximum intensity.”

  “It points at that plug on the rear of the cube,” Sprangle said. “There must be some pitchblende in there.”

  John asked, “Pitch what?”

  “A black, lustrous mineral, an oxide. Contains uranium or radium. A common natural x-ray emitter.”

  “There’s some in that plug?”

  “Probably. They might’ve used it as a coloring agent.”

  The two men stood up, Sprangle grunting, face flushed. John noticed the man’s paunch, well concealed by a cardigan, had bulged more with even this minor exertion. The man wheezed, “I suppose Claire will find that fascinating, but it brings bad luck to us.”

  “Why?”

  “We’ll have to be sure that pitchblende doesn’t foul up our measurements. It’s putting out x-rays at a hundred, maybe a thousand counts per second more than our fluorescence will.”

  “Just revolve the pedestal. The block itself will shield your detector.”

  Sprangle brightened. “Of course. It’s solid rock, there’ll be plenty of shielding.” He called to Fred, “Watch the noise while we spin it. Give me the integrated counts.”

  The two men rotated the block slowly while Fred called out numbers. The count rate dropped by over three hundred as they reached ninety degrees, which was the center of the adjacent face. It stayed low until the front face came into view. Then the rate began to climb as they pushed farther.

  “Something wrong here,” Sprangle said. “The counts, they should keep dropping off.”

  “Here, swing it back some,” John said. “Careful, careful—there.” The x-ray detector was peering straight along the front edge of the artifact, level with the center, so that it looked directly at the amber cone. “How’s the count, Fred?”

  “Not much.”

  “So?” Sprangle asked.

  “There’s no pitchblende in the amber, then. The barrel’s pointing straight at it, and we don’t get much. Let’s swing around now and look directly down the axis of the cone.”

  They positioned the block. “Lotta counts,” Fred called. “As high as from the other side.”

  “Then the source, it is inside the cube,” Sprangle said, panting slightly. “We will have to analyze that. Very interesting. You know, Claire will be most surprised at this. Will she be in today?”

  John smiled grimly. “She’s preparing for an exam,” he said.

  The modest brick buildings of Boston University face Commonwealth Avenue, but the best offices are at the back, where the Charles River narrows into a slate-gray, unrippled avenue. On this cloudy winter day the untroubled waters looked to John very much like the asphalt-covered former cow paths Bostonians called streets, as he crossed over the Charles on the BU Bridge.

  He found the seminar room at the end of a slick terrazzo corridor and knocked. A portly man opened it, smiled warmly, and said, “You must be Dr. Bishop. I’m Donald Hampton, we spoke on the phone. I was just making some remarks to the committee.”

  John went through ritual introductions while Hampton seated him at the end of a long table. There were two other archeologists, professors Aiken and McCauley, but Hampton seemed to dominate matters. Hampton explained that Claire had already left at their request; he preferred to get John’s version of events before the committee, without her “possibly intimidating presence.” John listened to Hampton review the history of Claire’s site, both for the sake of the committee and for John, spending a lot of time on how the American School of Classical Studies had reached an agreement with the Greek authorities. Apparently the American School usually handled excavations under Greek direction, but the political situation in the last two years had forced any American expedition to accept a Greek co-director—Kontos. Hampton detailed his own attempts to smooth over this change by “going the extra mile with Dr. Kontos,” which apparently meant socializing considerably, letting Kontos pick personnel, and bestowing the usual academic perks.

  As Hampton shifted into the history of the main dig—unearthing the town, tracing the life patterns of the time, investigating the tomb—it became apparent that Claire had always rankled Kontos, though there was no documentation of this point. He was surprised to learn that the main thrust of the group was the town itself, and the tomb, once seen to be bare, had been delegated to Claire and George because it seemed less promising. Hampton said little of this directly, and John soon saw this was the style of the others as well: verbose, oblique, with much use of foreign terms thrown like pepper into a bland dish. He remembered Claire’s telling him that archeologists were more like humanists than scientists—steeped in history, aware of literary and mythological clues. The field retained the old style of publishing always in one’s native language, a habit the physical sciences had lost a century before. It meant an archeologist needed a command of French, English, German and one or two other regional languages such as Greek or Arabic merely to keep up.

  The seminar room fitted, too. It had dark wooden floors and polished brass lamps. The chairs were comfortable and stuffed, with heavy wooden arms, a style he had seldom seen outside antique shops. Incongruously, against one wall stood the latest model projector, the glossy screen itself a broad square above the cabinet. He wondered why it was there.

  “So you see, Dr. Bishop, we would like your view of the events leading up to your, er, dismissal from the site.” Hampton smiled engagingly, pulled out a worn pipe and began stuffing it. He wore a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows, a vest and a conservative tie. The other two were similarly dressed, a fact which would have been unremarkable in Boston, except that John’s experiences with scientists and mathematicians had led him to expect open collars and baggy sweaters. He coughed and began his story.

  It was a fiction, of course, in the strictest sense. He and Claire had constructed it over a lengthy series of martinis. Still, his yarn contained no outright fabrication, only omissions and simplifications. He described performing composition tests on several types of artifact, which he had indeed done, without mentioning that the others were warmups, tests of the equipment, and the cube was his true interest. This intersected, he knew, with Claire’s omission of the cube, meanwhile stressing the political differences, sexual harassment, and his fight with Kontos that last night.

  Hampton said, “So you contend that when he—er—burst in on you, um, at the tomb site, you…”

  “We were carrying out last-minute tests and doing some packing. We were sure he was going to throw us off the site the next morning and Claire—she’s a stickler for get
ting things in order, you know—she wanted to be sure—”

  “But surely you must have guessed that Dr. Kontos, in a state of agitation over the, er, insults you had—or he thought you had—hurled at his nation, his government, would react strongly to the slightest misstep on your part. Surely?”

  “I don’t think it made any difference,” John said mildly. “I figure he was layin’ for us.”

  “Seeking a pretext?” Dr. Aiken asked.

  “Damn right. He wanted us out because we were Americans, not because Claire had obstructed the dig.”

  Two furrows creased Hampton’s brow as he puffed meditatively on his pipe, filling the air with blue smoke. “Yet Claire had gone far afield—to you—for help, without using the in situ facilities available in Athens. That hardly seems, er, cooperative.”

  “She was back here anyway, reporting to you.”

  “Her trip was hardly necessary for merely that.” He glanced at his watch.

  “Well, she thought so. Kontos was comin’ on to her, you know.”

  Hampton waved his pipe, as if to dispel this last comment. He had not reacted well to John’s passing mention of Kontos’s amorous advances, in their brief telephone conversation, and John guessed that he was trying to soft-pedal the subject. That implied that Claire had probably overplayed her hand earlier in the afternoon, when she appeared here. John was trying to decide whether to press the matter when a buzzer on the viewscreen cabinet rasped harshly in the silent room.

  “Ah, that will be our other, er, witness.”

  Hampton rose and busied himself with the cabinet. He placed an omnidirectional microphone in the center of the desk and switched on lamps which illuminated the table. John noticed that a camera snout pointed at them from the cabinet. The buzzer rasped again before he could ask anything, and Hampton called out, “Can you hear me, Alexandros?”

  The screen filled with a good quality view of Kontos, smiling. He was wearing civilian clothes and from the way his eyes tracked John could tell he was surveying their seminar room. Kontos replied, “Hello! I am delighted to see you again, Donald. And Dr. Aiken, Dr. McCauley.” Nods of greeting. Then he saw John. “Aha. I hope, Dr. Bishop, you have been telling the truth.”

  John smiled coldly. “Of course. Not that it will do you much good.”

  Kontos chuckled. “I think you see, gentlemen, that this man, he is biased against me.”

  “Getting chopped in the face does that sometimes,” John said mildly.

  Kontos registered irritation. “I was provoked, as I told Donald,” he said, gazing at the committee members.

  Hampton raised a palm. “We really should avoid these needless clashes, gentlemen. They merely obfuscate the true issues. Let me pose questions to Dr. Kontos, questions designed to illuminate the facts”—he glared at John—“and avoid ad hominem arguments.”

  As Hampton took Kontos through obviously rehearsed testimony John’s assurance evaporated. Bringing in Kontos on vision-phone had been unsettling, and now Hampton was undermining Claire’s position with leading questions about how well the rest of the team liked her, her notorious impatience with those who disagreed with her, her fatigue at the end of a long, unusually hot summer—all designed to build a case for Kontos. This much he and Claire had expected. The tough areas lay ahead. When Kontos began talking about an “unauthorized excavation” he leaned forward intently.

  “And without my knowledge, or of anyone at the site, she and George Schmitt continued at this, removing portions of the wall. They consulted with no one about the possible structural dangers.”

  John said, “You were gone nearly all the time. And when you were on site, you were fretting about your political rallies and palace coups.”

  Hampton snapped, “Please hold your comments!”

  Kontos went on as if nothing had happened. “They found a few items, which I shall report to you later, Donald. Dr. Anderson attempted to conceal this by bringing Dr. Bishop. That much should be obvious to anyone.”

  John kept his face impassive, but he was worried. Kontos was taking a minimum-risk position, not playing up the artifact at all. Every step of Kontos’s argument was either factual or probable. From a committee like this the outcome was certain. The question was, how far would he go?

  “Luckily, I discovered this in time. I admit, there came the unfortunate incident with Dr. Bishop. I am a patriotic man, I do not take insults to my country. But that is beside the point. It does not prove that I persecuted Dr. Anderson in any way. All these are excuses brought up to hide the fact that she and Bishop hid from me a new find.”

  Here it comes, John thought.

  But Kontos’s severe expression relaxed. “For us this time, the luck was good. They did not destroy anything with their incompetence. The find is minor but interesting. A few pieces of simple jewelry, a bit of ivory.” He shrugged.

  John blinked. Why was he covering up?

  Hampton nodded. “I am happy to hear that. Still, it does not mitigate the principle here in the slightest.” Affirmative nods from the other two.

  “The find came, I believe, from an observation you yourself made in August,” Kontos went on, relaxed and chatty. “To me, to all the team, you spoke of the markings on the one block in the tomb wall. It was at evening meal, perhaps you remember?”

  Hampton puffed on his pipe and seemed to nod.

  “That was where the find occurred. They barely had uncovered what truly lies behind there, I tell you now. I myself went further.”

  Hampton interrupted, “I gather you found a very nice objet d’art?”

  “Yes.” A murmur of interest from the committee. John tried to figure out what path Kontos was following.

  Hampton said warmly, “These proceedings aside, I would certainly like to discuss the discovery when your results are prepared. What is it?”

  “A cube. Very odd, placed behind the wall. And strangely decorated.” Kontos shaped a cone in the air with his hands. “I will provide photographs and notes soon.”

  John realized suddenly that Kontos had not been back to the site yet. He did not know the artifact was gone. And when he got a chance, he planned to “discover” it and bring it to Athens, along with Claire’s photos and notes still in the crates.

  Only it wasn’t there, and neither were the notes. Kontos must have some of them, but not enough. Claire had rescued the bulk of them.

  “Fascinating.” Hampton beamed at the camera. “Why was it hidden, do you suppose?”

  “A death ornament, it is difficult to guess immediately. I know with your interests in the religious artifacts particularly, you will find much here, possible connections with your earlier work on the tombs. Maybe you come after Christmas? I can show you.”

  “Thank you, Alexandros, I would very much like that.”

  “Perhaps we can join together in the movement to return the rest of the Elgin marbles? I am introducing a new resolution this next spring. With US backing—”

  “I certainly understand,” Hampton said, “but we should conclude this business.”

  “Wait a minute,” John said, “I wanted to ask him—who gets credit for the discovery of the cube?”

  Hampton said, “Why Alexandros. You heard him state clearly that he opened the tomb wall and found it.”

  “I think Claire should share it.”

  Kontos said evenly, “You are an amateur in these matters. Your opinion is worth nothing.”

  “Well, I know how you bullied everyone at the site—”

  Hampton said, “Come now!”

  “—And I’m damn well going to tell it to anyone who’ll listen.”

  Kontos’s jaw muscles clenched. “You would be wise to shut up. Or I will deal with you. Personally.”

  “Dr. Bishop!” Hampton cried. “No more of this.”

  “Any time, Kontos.”

  “Stop! Say no more.” Hampton held up a hand to John, waving ineffectually. He turned to professors Aiken and McCauley. “Do you have any further question
s?”

  They didn’t. Kontos signed off and the room seemed suddenly tiny, no longer linked with the other side of the planet.

  John said, “I hope you realize Claire had to fight that man every inch for the results she got.”

  Hampton’s smile had little of its previous warmth. The man was an accomplished actor, John realized. No doubt he also thought he was acting from the highest moral principles.

  “Thank you, Dr. Bishop, for your time.”

  As he walked home down Commonwealth it started to snow.

  CHAPTER

  Three

  Claire came into the bay with an air John had noticed before. It was as if she owned the place and was strolling through, seeing what the tenants were up to. It was amusing and eye-catching as she approached, wearing a neatly tailored cinnamon jump suit beneath a black coat, with gray gloves and black boots, twirling a collapsed blue umbrella with a jaunty swing. The rain of last night had turned to half-hearted snow and she was prepared.

  She brightened when she spied him among the equipment. He saw she was carefully made up: eye shadow and liner, color in the cheeks, lipstick of a rakish near-purple. Her hair was pinned back in a towering, elaborate manner. Celebratory? He called, “Is champagne in order?”

  “Maybe with lunch. I’ve been in the lions’ den and am here to tell the tale.”

  “This morning? They move fast.”

  “They pontificated and fretted and stroked their beards and decided to put a letter in my file describing their ‘dissatisfaction with my handling of the situation,’ was the way they put it.” Her smile had something in it, halfway between mischief and outright larceny, that matched the dancing excitement in her eyes. She was light years away from the woman at the Ritz.

  “Not bad.”

  “I was afraid of a lot worse,” she said seriously.

  “That letter, it’ll hurt your tenure?”