“I don’t believe Abe’s element abundance measurements,” Claire said one evening as they finished coffee in a Hungarian restaurant, the Cafe Budapest. Claire had offered to take him at her expense to the ornate, somewhat stuffy basement spots on Copley Square, arguing that he needed to broaden his gastronomic education. He had murmured not a single objection to her paying. To do so would have invited a lecture on how she made more than he did; BU assistant profs earned marginally better than MIT postdocs. And aside from that, he had never felt that a man had to carry all the social load. He was a man fitted for the new century.
They had both been in the bay when Abe finished a full week of labor on the deep boring. The Brown specialist, LeBailly, had been inordinately interested in the cube. He had reluctantly and somewhat prissily packed away his tools, which looked to John like a jeweler’s, plainly wishing he could do more.
Abe had made separate chemical and physical analyses of the elements present in the rock, using samples from the full three centimeter depth, to avoid surface contaminants. The inner sample showed a hundred times the heavy element abundance than the surface rock had.
“That’s highly unlikely,” Claire concluded forcefully.
“Abe had two specialists check him,” John said.
“But how could it be? This is limestone, laid down in an ocean long ago. How can there be that much difference in the composition of the heavy elements in just three centimeters? That’s hardly more than an inch!”
“An unusual specimen.”
“I talked to geologists at BU. They’ve never heard of anything remotely like it.”
John swirled his coffee, watching it rotate like a black coin in his cup. He said tentatively, “There’s one way you could explain it….”
“How? The cube is intact rock, we know that. No one of that era could have hollowed it out entirely and inserted other rock inside.”
“Suppose the heavy elements come from bombardment by the central source?”
Her eyes widened satisfyingly. John sat back and watched; he enjoyed upsetting that Bostonian reserve. He had never seen any good reason to give up his suggestion of weeks before, that the central source of gamma and x-rays might have been ferociously stronger only a few thousand years ago. Certainly the idea was unlikely, on the face of it—but then, everything else about the artifact was unlikely, too. And it did explain why the amber cone had such an anomalous abundance of elements. At one time in the distant past a great deal of radiation had poured out of the center, irradiating the cone, the plug at the back, and all the rock.
“I…I’ll admit it would explain the analysis of the samples from the boring….” She concentrated prettily, unconsciously, and he admired the play of emotions across her face. A lip turned down in dismay and disbelief. A nostril flared. An eyebrow arched with a partial, provisional acceptance. “And the cone abundances, too.” She had seen the connection quickly. “But it would mean such a burst of radiation.”
“That it would.”
She sipped her coffee with a lopsided grin. “This is beginning to sound like that Shroud of Turin business.”
To his puzzled look she responded, “A piece of cloth that was supposed to have the image of Christ seared into it somehow. It was a big issue, back in the eighties. The religious types believed it provided substantial evidence for the miracle of Christ’s rising. The problem was, to explain how the image got into the cloth, you needed another miracle.”
“Occam’s Razor wins again.”
“Yes. Much better to look for a less complicated explanation. But in our case, what other explanation is there?”
“Archeology seems like a detective story with only physical evidence, and not even a clear idea of what the crime was.”
She nodded pensively. “You know what Abe wants, don’t you?”
“I can guess.”
“But to bore through that plug in the back…that’s destroying potentially vital material.”
“That stuff is just rock. You saw the analysis.”
“I still don’t like it. I…never had to make decisions about this kind of question before.” A somewhat plaintive note came into her voice. “I shouldn’t have the artifact in the first place, and now, to carve it up…”
“You took the thing in order to study it. Now it’s turned out to be a real riddle, not just another totem or whatever. No time to back off now, ma’am.”
“I…somehow, back here, what we did in Greece seems, well, crazy.”
He said softly, “Your feeling that way is only natural. Boston is your anchor, m’dear. You’re a very traditional woman.”
“Yes,” she countered, “right down to my stockings.”
His lip curved with the merest suggestion of a leer. “Point conceded, and gladly so.”
He became solemn, and signaled for more of the thick coffee. “But there are two Claires—the one who is steeped in Bostonian rigor and correctness, who’s sitting here now. Second, the secret Claire. The one I knew in Greece, who was free of her relatives and college and friends and the weight of history around here.” He gestured expansively, taking in the beamed ceiling, nineteenth century woods and stuffed furniture of the restaurant. “She was willing to stand up to Kontos, elude the police, snatch the artifact. But now, back in the old setting, the doubts come crowding in. Her profession, her chairman, her dear old aging grandparents—they’ll all be aghast if they find out.” He paused and said gently, “Isn’t that it?”
She blinked, and he was astonished to see small, crystalline tears. “Y—yes. Something like that. I ne—never thought of myself…as two…” She stopped, and gave him a broken smile.
“If I’m wrong…”
“No, you’re not.”
“I’ve known you only a short—”
“I can see, I do look that way from the outside, and…”
“I didn’t mean to…pry.”
“No, no, you’re not, I want you to.” She opened her palms to him, as if in mute explanation.
“That Claire Number Two, I’d like to see more of her.” He grinned.
An expression of genuine regret crossed her face. “I would, too.”
“I reckon you’ve been dividing your life that way. I can see the difference, when you walk into the lab. The Bostonian girl gets swept away and here’s this crisp, bright woman who won’t take crap from anybody.”
She smiled wanly and reached across the starched white tablecloth to grasp his hand tightly. “I…no one ever cared enough to see the two sides.”
“You’re a master of disguise.” He pressed her two hands together between his. She liked holding hands more than any woman he had ever known. He could not decide whether it was a romantic symbol for her, or something deeper. Not that the answer mattered very much.
“Jekyll and Hyde,” she said ruefully, her mouth still uncertain, fragile. He thought of what she probably faced at the hands of Hampton and the others. Now that he understood better how the profession of archeology worked, he realized how much she had taken on. His throat tightened. He squeezed her hands.
CHAPTER
Six
“Come on, get up.”
“Uh,” he groaned. “Have some respect for the dead.”
“Give them a little ride, they want to loaf in the hay.”
“Little ride? I distinctly remember your clock reading 2 A.M. You were on top at the time, as I recall, ma’am.”
“A concession to your condition. You didn’t have to drink all the rest of that Chablis.”
“That’s what it was? I thought it tasted better than the Boston water.”
“Come on, I’ll make oatmeal.”
“Is that supposed to be tempting?”
She yanked the sheets back, exposing him to the chill. “Ah! All right, I give up, where are my clothes?”
“You are a primitive. Shower first.”
“Sho’ nuff, I remember readin’ that in the tour guide to Boston. Don’t shower and the natives will know
right off you’re a monster.”
She smiled. “We already have a Jekyll and Hyde, remember.”
“Great hip swivel, that Hyde.”
The towel hit him on the chin. “Cleanse thyself, defiler.”
When she came back with tomato juice he was sitting, nude and showered, looking over a copy of Vogue. A cat stropped itself on his ankles. “Clothes are customary before dining,” she said with mock primness.
“I was looking for something in my size.” He waved the magazine. “Studying to become a transvestite.”
“My mother gave me a subscription when I was fifteen.”
“Gee, my mother gave me a governess.”
She grimaced. “The johns always want to tell you about their first time.”
“Mornin’, Miz Hyde.” He kissed her. “You dress an order of magnitude better than this.” He tossed the Vogue aside.
As he sipped the juice she brought him a yellow terrycloth robe. “Fits all sexes,” she said, slipping it over his shoulders and rubbing his neck.
“Interesting, isn’t it,” he said between yawns, “how women’s magazines are filled with pictures of women, and men’s magazines…”
“Yes, more pictures of women. Vast gulf between the sexes. Metaphysics of our oppression.” She smiled. “Maybe you should do a thesis on it.”
“Too bad there aren’t any Playboys left over from Mycenae. We could—what’re they always asking for in the humanities?—compare and contrast. Probably worth a grant from the National Endowment for Exhausted Ideas.”
She blinked and he instantly regretted saying it. It summoned up all the conflicts the night had banished; her face clouded and the luminous eyes turned inward. But then with a visible effort she brightened, leaned forward and kissed him fervently. “How’d you like to earn that oatmeal?”
The array of electronics and sensors around the artifact was deeper, more tangled. John had never fully gotten used to the fact that a working scientist was seldom neat. To his mathematician’s sensibility, messy surroundings somehow undercut the necessary orderly scheme of framing an idea, thinking of a way to check it, and carrying out a clear test. Yet, undeniably, physicists brought serene order from such chaos.
Abe Sprangle sat at the center of the tangle, muttering over a new arrangement as John approached.
“What’s this?”
“Your tax dollar at work,” Abe said sourly.
“Looks to be new gamma-ray detectors,” John said, glad that he could by now identify some things.
“They are. I thought maybe something was wrong with the old ones.”
“Why?”
“I’m getting more counts from that plug in the back.”
“And were the old detectors—”
“No, that’s the trouble!” Abe said angrily. “There really are more gammas now.”
“You’re…?”
“Sure? Yes, there’s no way I could be wrong on this one.” John said diplomatically, “If the gamma flux is increasing…”
“Can’t be. Any natural source decays, that’s obvious.”
“Maybe something was in the way? I mean, partly blocked the gammas before? We’ve rotated the cube—couldn’t that have knocked a rock out of the way inside there, or somethin’?”
Abe looked dejected, his ruddy face pinched so that it became jowly. “I suppose. How to check that, eh? If it were dislodged, perhaps we can reverse the movement.”
“You watch the readout. I’ll turn the cube.”
Squatting, putting his shoulder and full weight into the cube, he could move it smoothly. As he touched it a slight, odd sensation came into his hands, an effect he remembered noticing back in the tomb. There he had attributed it to the spooky surroundings, but here the feeling was more obvious, a faint tugging at his fingers as he moved them to get a grip on the rough stone. Grunting, he spun the cube back and forth, stopping whenever the plug faced the sensors. After half an hour of this Abe shook his head. “Still the same, I fear.”
“How’s the reading from the cone?”
“As before. It has never shown the increase, as does the plug.”
John stopped, puffing. “Maybe the plug itself is getting thinner? That would let more gammas through.”
“Thinning how?”
“Dunno.”
“Maybe is not a theory, you know, it is merely maybe.”
John ignored his patronizing tone. “It feels a little funny when you turn it.”
“It is heavy,” Abe said dismissively and went back to his electronics. A technician worked nearby at a counter strewn with equipment, which gave a 60-cycle hum. The antiquated heaters in the bay could barely take the edge off a chill as unforgiving as the Puritan God. He could hear irritated honking outside on Vassar Street. Something nagged at him and he didn’t want to let it go.
“Did you ever measure for ferromagnetism?”
Abe looked up. “No. In limestone, there is none.”
“How about from whatever’s inside?”
“Unlikely. The source is small.”
“How would I do it?”
Abe sighed with exasperation. “Ask in Metallurgical Stores. I think they have some such device. It is for field work.”
Like every seemingly minor task, this took much longer than it should. General Stores had a file card on it but the kit was not in its bin. Odd-shaped devices were crammed into any available space, another symptom of a great university which had long ago exceeded its physical bounds. John got a technician to help him rummage among nearby bins, and after an hour found the small, flat case, not much larger than a good manicure set. Figuring out how it worked consumed another half hour, and it was nearly noon before they got a reading on the counter-mounted needle. By checking the reading some distance away from the artifact, he got the right value for the Earth’s magnetic field, half a Gauss. The needle wavered significantly as he neared the cube.
“Nearly two Gauss,” he proclaimed.
“What?” Abe had not noticed his return.
“The cube has a big magnetic field.”
“That I do not believe.”
“Five will get you ten.”
Abe ignored the challenge and repeated each step of the measurement. “Perhaps something wrong with the battery,” he muttered, and did it again. The result would not go away.
Abe was silent for most of the next two hours, while they mapped the strength and direction of the magnetic field. John said nothing. At length Abe remarked casually, “I believe it is a quadrupolar field.”
“What? Not a dipole?” A magnetic source in the cube would have given a pattern similar to the Earth’s. The field lines would leave one pole and loop around to the other. A quadrupole or four-poled field was a complex set of loops, as though there was a pole at each point of the compass.
“The pattern is unmistakable,” Abe said almost sadly.
“If there were two magnetic sources inside, pointed different ways—”
“Yes, that surely could do it. Still, it is strange.”
“Maybe there are lodes of iron, separated.”
Abe was silent, staring at the sketch he had made of the field pattern. “One more…strange feature. I do not like it.”
“It just means we’ve got something important.”
“But I do not understand. Why would the Mycenaeans make such a thing? How could they? It must be elaborate inside.”
“Well, they did.”
Abe shook his head, still disturbed.
Claire was equally upset. She quizzed him intensely about it that afternoon, talked to Abe in his office, and would not let up on the subject even as she drove to a reception that evening in Cambridge. To John their objections were puzzling. They were vexed as each measurement made the artifact more unusual, whereas his interest quickened. Their reaction seemed to come from an archeologists’ attitude that the aim of their field was weaving a seamless web. A rogue object with uncertain ties to the conventional picture of Mycenaean society would d
o little to cement our view of that time. It could be the work of a crank, or an isolated genius, or of course from someplace else entirely. It seemed to John that such objects should be expected, but the others regarded this as simple bad luck.
The reception was at a large brick home tucked down a shadowed lane near Harvard. Mozart soaked into the crowd from speakers that ringed each room. One of the local radio stations was having an Orgy Week, devoting a day apiece to a single musician or group—Wagner, Beatles, Beethoven, Dylan—thus insuring, it seemed to him, that a diligent listener would be terminally saturated.
In his distracted mood, expecting a Harvard party to yield stimulating, original conversation was roughly like hoping that the telephone directory would read like a novel. Claire drifted off into other circles, leaving him; and John somehow got caught in a clique of literary theorists. Feigning polite interest was harder for him than any other social duty except remembering names, so under cover of freshening his drink he found some mathematicians and physicists. He knew several of them and fell into a discussion of one of his side pursuits, the quantum theory of gravity. There was always with the Harvard faculty a slightly lofty attitude, a feeling that MIT was, in the words of a guide published at the turn of the century, “that trade school down the river.” In retaliation, MIT scientists regarded Harvard as a quaint liberal arts school trying to play catch-up ball. While it was a long time since an eighteenth century Harvard professor insisted on his contractual right to graze a cow on the Cambridge common, keeping the cow in his living room during bad weather, Harvard still imagined itself more creative, eccentric, and donnish than the grim gray drudges of MIT. They coveted stylish oddness. Sidney Coleman, a famous particle physicist, had such a skewed personal schedule that when he was asked to teach a 10 A.M. class, legend had it that Coleman replied, “Sorry, I can’t stay up that late.”
Artifact Page 20