Claire was set on being there. The major opposition had come from John, who didn’t want her in the plan at all. But she would not be pushed aside by anyone. Once that was clear to John he changed to grudging neutrality. Then she had to deal with Carmody. His old-fashioned, solicitous concern was just another tired excuse to keep a woman out; she saw that immediately, and in the end it didn’t work. She was going. Not in the first ’copter, no, but once things were calmed down she would go into the tomb to save what was left. She owed that to her profession and to herself.
“Never thought it’d turn into this, did we?” George said eagerly. His hands trembled on the railing.
“Archeology, the field with a future.”
“Even though it’s about the past.”
“That’s what I’m puzzling over,” she said, watching men attach cables to the the crate that held the artifact. The cables led to a heavy hoist at the underbelly of the first helicopter.
“What the cube means?”
“Yes. Cubic artifact, cubic singularity. Can’t be coincidence.”
“They carved the rock to look like the thing inside, so?”
“Why? What relation did it have to whoever was buried in the tomb?”
“Maybe he discovered it.”
“Where?”
“Dug it up? From a quarry?”
“Ordinary quarrymen don’t rate fancy tombs.”
“Maybe it was a prize of war. Remember the ivory map.”
She blinked, surprised. She had not thought of that in weeks. The crude sketch on ivory, showing Crete and Santorini. Kontos must have found it by now, among the artifacts shipped to Athens.
“Of course. But they must have known the singularity was dangerous. Why—”
Then it struck her. “The chipping on the front of it, the face. Remember? Someone must have been trying to get the singularity out.”
“Who?”
“Grave robbers?”
“Doesn’t sound like something I’d try to steal.”
“Or…there was John’s idea. That if servants were ritually buried with the dead king, they might try to get out.”
“There’s very little evidence that any were buried, I thought.”
“Correct. But suppose it was so. They couldn’t dig their way out of the sand blocking the entrance; they knew that. So they would be desperate. Working in the dark. They had of course heard about whatever was in the cube, knew it gave off light.”
“So they tried to get at it?”
“Yes! It can bore through rock, can’t it?”
“Come on, Claire.”
“It all fits. The servants knew what was in the cube; everyone must have.”
“Maybe. They never got behind the first block, though. The mortar was intact.”
“Yes. Not enough time. Perhaps they thought they could liberate the singularity from the rock? Bring it to their aid?”
George studied the shadowy figures working under two banana-shaped dark masses. His eyes glittered with a look of alert anticipation as he said, “Look, we can work that out later.”
“There won’t be much of the tomb left then.”
“We’ll see. That’s what we’re for, right? Protect the archeological record.”
“And then get out,” John said from behind them.
Claire turned and saw he was fully covered by a black wet suit, standing a little awkwardly in incongruous blue Quon tennis shoes. A wordless, jittery excitement passed between them. The sight of the wet suit seemed to sober George, who said, “Wow, gettin’ to be about that time.”
“I’m due back in five minutes. When the ship slows, that’s when we go over.”
Claire searched John’s face for a reading and failed. He seemed remarkably steady, compared with George. His hands seized the railing firmly and he stretched his legs back, saying, “Got to stay loose.”
“You said it,” George added.
“You’re going in ’copter A, right?” John said, grunting as he stretched.
“Yeah,” George replied. “We scout the tomb.”
John nodded, tensing his arms behind his head, twisting, flexing his whole torso. Like warming up for a football game, she thought.
She knew exactly what he was thinking. He had gone behind her back and made a deal with Carmody. She rode in ’copter B—not A, which carried the singularity below it. George would go into the tomb first. John was doing as much to protect her as he could. They had had three separate, grade-A fights about what he called her “bull-headed mulishness,” an interesting contradictory image. But she had prevailed. She was going, allowing him without comment his minor and rather endearing deception.
“Y’know,” John said, “I was thinking of sending a cable back to Zaninetti.”
“Carmody has a total transmission blackout,” George said.
“It can go out after we’re done. Hell, even better that way. Then I can cancel it.”
“I’m not following,” Claire said.
John grinned. “There was a great mathematician named Hilbert, who telegraphed Berlin saying he had proved the outstanding unsolved problem in mathematics, a thing called Riemann’s conjecture. It has to do with the roots of a well known function. He sends this telegram to Berlin, see, where he’s going to give a speech. Everybody gets excited. So Hilbert shows up and talks, and says nothing about the problem. Somebody comes up to him after the speech and says, what about Riemann’s conjecture, what’s the solution? And Hilbert says he hasn’t got one. He was taking his first airplane trip to Berlin, and was pretty nervous, so he sent the telegram in case he got killed.”
George whooped. “That’s one way to get a place in the books.”
Claire smiled. “The famous lost Bishop proof of the Riemann conjecture, huh?”
“You got it,” John said mirthlessly. He lifted his hands to Claire, palms up, and shrugged.
Together they moved off, leaving George.
“Five minutes?” she asked quietly.
“Yep.”
“I still don’t see why it’s got to be so fast. There’ve only been a few days to think, to—”
“It’s this war. It provides a perfect distraction. And if anything goes wrong here, people will write it off as some Turkish scheme that went bad.”
“Carmody didn’t say that.”
“He didn’t have to. It’s obvious.”
“But you’ll admit if we had another week—”
“The genie might get out of its bottle over there,” he jerked a thumb toward the flight deck, “and we’d have a devil of a time getting it back in.”
She gave grudging agreement. “I still don’t see why so much sudden attention is paid to a mathematical curiosity.” News of an equally important discovery in archeology, she reflected, would have reached a figure like Carmody after a zippy decade or two.
“It’s much more than that. The math implies that such energetic, high-mass particles may be useful. Compact energy storage. A versatile radiation source. Hell, you could explore the whole damned interior of the Earth if you could control one.”
“How?”
“With two singularities, you could put one exactly on the other side of the Earth. Anchor one twin to something. Then their attraction will draw the second one through the center of the Earth. Time how long it takes, measure its rate of progress. That’d tell you something about densities, maybe the material composition. At a minimum, it’d let you sink really deep shafts, take samples.”
“Or make bombs.”
He nodded. “That too.”
“Which is why Carmody is keeping us isolated from the press.”
“Sure. That’ll work for a while. But even he knows that can’t last long. The science is too interesting. Maybe he could keep you and me quiet, but Zaninetti is too big a figure to shut up.”
“Comforting.”
“Yeah.”
Bow waves splashed below, a slight phosphorescent glow in the foam. The Watson rolled slowly, driving forward
at half its top speed. Claire leaned against him. “Two minutes,” she said. “What’ll we talk about?”
“Love and death.”
“Whose?”
“Ours.”
“Do I get to choose which one?”
He kissed her. “Do me a favor?”
“Sure, sailor. You want it right here on deck? I suppose it’s dark enough.”
“Don’t go in the helicopter.”
She looked at him and saw a face vulnerable, open, and she regretted being so flip with him. But it was too late, and they both knew it.
“I…you understand, I have an obligation.”
“I know. I don’t agree, but I know.”
“I…have to.”
“So much for death. Let’s stick to love.” He put his arms around her.
“Is that what this is?”
“Sure. Done in understated good taste, of course.” He kissed her.
“We take things slowly in Boston.”
He smiled down at her. “You’re just hiding behind that.”
She said slowly, reflecting, “That’s true.”
He kissed her again.
“Hey!” Arditti’s voice called from beyond the helicopters. “Bishop! Get your ass down here.”
CHAPTER
Three
The Watson had deployed a steel side stairway and hoist. At the bottom of it a platform skimmed along two feet above the low churning swell. Spray wetted the steps. John made his way down in the dark, using the handrail, his heart already thumping.
With minimum talk he finished suiting up. The last stage was wrestling on the big cylinder, 72 cubic feet of air compressed at 2250 p.s.i., the stem indicator reading full. A good hour’s worth. If everything went right he wouldn’t need even half of it.
Arditti handed him the demand valve. He screwed it on and checked it twice. Arditti nodded approval and drawled, “You see the situation report?”
“Carmody said there was nothing significant.”
Arditti hesitated a fraction of a second. “Yeah.”
John’s eyes narrowed, although expression was useless in the pervading gloom. “What’s on?”
“Got a report from a survey ship up the coast. Says there’re jeeps on the road down from Athens.”
“Moving which way?”
“South, looked like.”
“How far away?”
“Twenty miles. But the report’s an hour old by now.”
“They’re fighting a war. There must be plenty of troop movements.”
“That’s right.” Arditti shrugged it off. “Plenty.”
There were three of them in the Arditti team, plus John. They were only names to him, lean and rugged men who spent most of their waiting time in the rec room, playing cards and drinking coffee. They seemed utterly uninterested in anything except their mission.
A team member helped John get the straps over his shoulders adjusted. He sat on the platform looking at the water rush by, leaning back against the cylinder. They went through a check-down. Diving knife, depth meter, mask, flashlight, depth gauge, lead-lined belt. Arditti carried several flares as well, for lighting the cavern. Each team member carried a different component of the detection and comm gear. The heavy stuff would follow in the transport.
John was uncomfortably aware that these were professional divers, men who had dived to great depths, through murky waters, at night, everything. He was a weekend sports diver. His biggest thrill had been seeing a shark at fifty yards’ range down near Cozumel. The shark had ignored him completely, but he had been close enough to see the face clearly as it swam off with that strange fixed, fanatic expression. That still sent a cold fear through him when he recalled it.
“Two minutes,” Arditti called softly. Above, the Watson blotted out whatever dull light the sky let through. It looked as though the clouds were thinning; there was a diffuse silvery haze to the east which might be a sliver of moonlight trying to get through. Not good news.
Mask pushed down, John put the regulator in his mouth and cracked the valve. Air hissed and he drew a shallow, metallic breath. Fine.
The Watson gradually throttled down its engines, bringing a strumming pulse into the platform beneath him. Spray splashed him.
They would go over the sides of the platform on signal, so they didn’t disperse. John struggled over to the edge, the cylinder like a massive parasite on his back. Again he tested the air.
Arditti’s party went first. The Watson would slow when it drew alongside the tomb site, dropping the team on the port side, where no one ashore could see. The ship would pick up speed again, move several miles farther west, and make its turn. Coming back, it would drop the inflatable transport and a crew of three, also near the tomb site.
The transport would home in on a beacon that Arditti’s team had floated at the entrance of the underwater tunnel. The beacon was an infrared emitter, invisible to the unaided eye. When they reached the site the second team would deploy the equipment in the transport, two of them taking it down on air pressure assisted carriers.
John’s major job was finding the underwater entrance to the shaft. Arditti had argued that his team could locate it quickly enough, going by John’s vague description. Carmody doubted that. Arditti had then argued that they should send in a team in a fishing boat to mark the spot in daytime. Carmody thought that would compromise the mission, quite possibly alerting anyone guarding the site.
So John’s bird-dogging was necessary. Arditti was skeptical of his abilities, and had rehearsed him relentlessly in the Watson’s belowdecks pool. As long as John had to come, Arditti felt he might as well do a side job, too. They showed him how to deploy the floating antenna, and drilled him without mercy. It was a minor job, and kept John out of the underwater cavern while the others worked their way in. Once he had performed the few simple movements with the antenna, he would wait for the transport to arrive and help unload it.
As soon as the equipment was off the transport, though, he and one man would high-tail it for the Watson, which would be slowly returning along its previous track.
John looked at the already loaded transport, a low-slung, flat-bottomed thing with inflated cigar-shaped walls. It took up half the platform space. The second team was already sitting in it. One waved to him.
“On the count!” Arditti called.
John pulled the mask over his face. An hour’s air. He wondered what his oxygen consumption per minute was. Somehow he, a mathematician, had never calculated it.
Somebody called down from above, a clipped signal. Arditti counted back from five. John ground his teeth and breathed into the mouthpiece. He was an amateur, these were professionals. He worked with chalk and a blackboard, they—
He realized suddenly that the others were armed, compact submachine guns strapped to their sides. They hadn’t given him one.
“Zero!”
He felt a sudden jolt of very real fear. He froze, his legs unwilling to move.
Somebody pushed him from behind. He had just enough time to feel outraged before he hit the water.
He held the mask over his face with both hands, the way the instructors always said. A froth of bubbles enveloped him and he sank, blind and weightless, taking his first breath. In the utter blackness, gravity told him nothing about orientation. He turned, searching.
There, a ruddy light. Abruptly a shadow moved across it. Something flickering—
A figure was waving at him, gesturing. A finger pointing. Follow, yes.
He righted himself and moved toward the dim red beacon. He remembered to let his legs do the work, flexing the flippers.
Arditti’s hand light was a subdued red, to avoid detection from ashore. They were all waiting for him, masks regarding him impassively, a cluster of oily shadows. Arditti had somehow gotten himself oriented, and pointed shoreward. They moved off. John had to work to stay up. One man always stayed behind him. Not letting him drop out of sight, John realized.
His heart pounded u
nnaturally in his water-logged ears. He dragged on the demand valve. Short, shallow breaths, yes. That was the way. Take your time. Hold in the air and get all the oxygen out of it before you set it free.
When he breathed out, the bubbles cascaded upward and were lost in a shrouding mist. Around them, inky nothingness. Below, like a smoldering faint vision of ruby hell, weeds swayed lazily.
Arditti’s light was the central sun for this pocket universe. They followed it obediently. Tiny silvery fish hung in an orderly swarm, unbothered by the passing black giants.
He turned his head to watch the fish and ploughed into the man ahead of him, who had stopped. It was only a brushing contact, but it jarred him out of his reverie. Arditti gestured down and cast the reddish beam that way.
Greenish mud gave way to sandy, rolling bottom. They were nearing shore. John tried to remember signs, directions. The pervasive gloom distorted shapes and angles.
The team hovered, looking at him through their panes of glass. Okay, lead us to it. Do your thing.
John nodded and looked around. Was that hummock familiar? He couldn’t tell. It had been months, after all.
He stopped trying to figure out directions. Better to head shoreward and try to sort it out from the look of things there.
He pointed along a spur of rock and Arditti turned that way, the red beam casting infernal shadows. They all flippered across the ridge and over a sea of grass. A starfish flattened itself against a stone below. Arditti kept the beam level, letting most of the light diffuse into the gloom, rather than reflecting off the bottom. That reduced the illumination anyone could see from the hill above.
John scanned the dim terrain below. His ears deadened further as he descended for a closer look. Yet the swift hiss of air as he bit the demand valve was loud, reverberating in his head. He thrust thumb and forefinger against his mask, pinching his nose, and blew his ears clear. The burbling rush of bubbles sounded like fitfully exploding popcorn.
They passed over a hummocked region of seaweed and tumbled rocks. The beam brushed by dark cavities and revealed fat yellow fish, mouths puckered as if in alarm. The weed grew denser ahead and John wondered if he had seen anything like this area. Was he even headed toward shore? What if—
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