Excavation (19 page)

“It's the least I can do after all your help.” His own words were heavier than usual.

A sharp rap on the laboratory door interrupted the moment.

Henry's hands froze, then pulled back.

Joan shifted from her chair, her shoulders and neck still warm from his touch. She glanced at her watch. “It must be Dr. Kirkpatrick. He's right on time.”

 

Henry cursed the metallurgist's impeccable timing. He rubbed his palms together, trying to wipe away the memory of Joan's skin.
Get ahold of yourself, man. You're acting like a smitten teenager
.

He watched Joan walk away. One of her hands reached to touch her neck gently. Then she brushed her hair back into place, a midnight flow against her white smock. Mysteries or not, right now all he wished for was a few more moments alone with her.

Joan crossed to the door, opened it, and greeted the visitor. “Dale, thanks for coming over.”

Dale Kirkpatrick, the metallurgy expert from George Washington University, stood a good head taller than Henry, but he was waspishly thin with an elongated face that seldom smiled. He tried to do so now with disastrous results, like a coroner greeting the bereaved. “Anything for a colleague.”

Henry sensed the red-haired man had shared more with Joan than just a professional relationship. The pair's eyes met one another awkwardly, and the welcoming handshake
was a touch longer than custom dictated. Henry instantly disliked him. The man wore an expensive silk suit and shoes polished to a glowing sheen. His heels tapped loudly as he was invited into the room. In his left hand, he carried a large equipment case.

Henry cleared his throat.

Joan swung around. “Dale, let me introduce you to Professor Henry Conklin.”

Kirkpatrick held out his hand. “The archaeologist.” It was a statement not a question, but Henry scented a trace of dismissal in his voice.

They shook hands, briefly and curtly.

“I appreciate your help in this matter,” Henry said. “It's posed quite a mystery. We can't make heads or tails of this amalgam or whatever it is.”

“Yes…well, let me just take a look.” The man's attitude was again polite, but a touch haughty, as if his mere presence would bring light to darkness.

“It's over here,” Joan said, guiding him to the worktable.

Once presented with the enigma, Kirkpatrick cocked his head, studying the strange substance in silence. Joan began to speak, but the specialist held up a finger, quieting her. Henry had an irrational urge to break that finger. “It's not gold,” he finally declared.

“We sort of figured that out,” Henry said sourly.

The man glanced back at him, one eyebrow held high. “Undoubtedly, or I wouldn't have been called in, now would I?” He turned back to the beaker and reached for the glass rod still embedded in the material. He fiddled with it. “Semisolid at room temperature,” he mumbled. “Have you ascertained a true melting point for the substance?”

“Not yet.”

“Well, that's easy enough to do.” He told Joan what he would need. Soon they were gathered around a ceramic bowl warming over the low purple flame of a Bunsen burner. A sample of the metal filled the bottom half of the
bowl with a thermometer embedded in it.

The metallurgist spoke as the material slowly heated under the hazards hood. “If it's an amalgam of different elements, the constituent metals should separate out for us as it melts.”

“It's already melted,” Henry said with a nod toward the bowl.

Dale swung his attention back, frowning. “That's impossible. It's only been warming for a few seconds. Even gold doesn't melt at such a low temp.”

But Henry's observation proved true. Using tongs, Dale jostled the bowl. The substance now appeared as loose as cream, only golden in color. He looked up to Joan. “What's the temperature?”

Joan's face was bunched in consternation. “Ninety-eight degrees Fahrenheit.”

Henry's eyes widened. “Body temperature.”

Away from the heat source, the bowl quickly cooled and the metallic substance grew turgid as the trio pondered the result.

Henry spoke first. “I didn't see any breakdown into component metals like you said. Does that mean it's not an amalgam?”

“It's too soon to say.” But Dale's voice had lost its edge.

“What next?”

“A few more tests. I'd like to check its conductivity and its response to magnetism.”

In short order, they molded a sample of the soft metal into a cube and inserted two electrodes into it. Dale nodded, and Joan engaged the battery hookup. As soon as the current flowed, the cube melted into a sludge that ran across the worktable.

“Switch it off!”

Joan flipped the toggle. The material instantly solidified again. Dale touched the metal. “It's cool.”

“What just happened?” Henry asked.

Dale just shook his head. He had no answer. “Bring me
the magnets from my case.”

Henry and Joan positioned the two shielded magnets on either side of a second sample cube. Dale fastened a potentiometer on its side. “On my signal, raise the shields.” He leaned closer to the meter. “Now.”

Joan and Henry flicked open the lead dampers. Just as with the flow of electricity, the cube melted like ice in an oven, running across the table.

“Shield the magnets,” Dale ordered.

Once done, the substance instantly stopped flowing across the tabletop, freezing in place. Dale again fingered the solidified metal. He now wore a worried expression.

“Well?” Henry asked.

“You said the substance exploded out of the mummy's skull when exposed to the CT scanner.”

“Yes,” Joan said. “It blew across the entire room.”

“Then even the CT scanner's X rays affect the metal,” Dale mumbled to himself, tapping a pen on the table's edge. “Interesting…”

Henry packed away the magnets. “What are you thinking?”

Dale's eyes cleared and focused. He turned to them. “The substance must be capable of using any radiant energy with perfect efficiency—electric current, magnetic radiation, X rays. It absorbs these various energies to change state.” He nudged a trickle of the solidified metal. “I don't think there's even any heat given off as it changes form. It's an example of the perfect consumption of energy. Not even waste heat! I've…I've never seen anything like this. It's thermodynamically impossible.”

Henry studied the contents of the beaker. “Are you suggesting the scanner's X rays triggered the mummy's explosion?”

He nodded. “Bombarded by that amount of concentrated radiation, some of the material might have changed state—this time from liquid to gas. The sudden expansion could have caused the violent explosion, expelling the liquefied
metal. Once away from the radiation, it changed back to this semisolid state.”

“But what is it?” Joan asked.

He held up that irritating finger again. “Let me try one more thing.” Taking another sample cube of the soft metal, he squeezed it like a lump of clay. “Has it ever completely solidified?”

Joan shook her head. “No. I even tried freezing it, but it remained malleable.”

Dale swung on his seat. “Professor Conklin, could you pass me one of the magnets' insulating sleeves?”

Henry had been wrapping the last of the heavy magnets in a copper-impregnated cloth. He undid his work and passed the wrap to Dale.

“The sleeve blocks the magnet's effects…so I don't accidentally damage some expensive electronics in passing. It shields almost all forms of radiation.”

Henry began to get an inkling of the metal expert's plan.

Dale took the gold cube and wrapped it in the black cloth. Once it was totally shielded, he placed the shrouded cube back on the table. He then took a chisel and hammer from his case. Positioning the chisel's edge on the cube, he struck the tool a resounding blow with the mallet. A muffled clang was the only response. The cube resisted the chisel.

Quickly unwrapping the cube, Dale revealed the unblemished surface. He took the chisel again, and only using the force of his thumb, he drove it through the exposed cube. He explained these results. “All around us is low ambient radiation. It's always present—various local radio waves, electromagnetic pulses from the building's wiring, even solar radiation. This substance uses them all! That's why it remains semisolid. Even these trace energies weaken its solidity.”

“But I don't understand,” Joan said. “What type of metal or amalgam could do this?”

“Nothing that I've ever seen or heard about.” Dale suddenly stood up, carefully lifting the soft cube in steel tongs. He nodded toward the neighboring room, to the electron-microscope
suite. “But there's a way to investigate closer.”

Henry soon found himself trailing the other two into the next room. He carried both the beaker of the strange metal, now sealed with a rubber stopper and the mummy's Dominican crucifix. Already, Joan and Dale were bowed head-to-head as they prepared a shaving of the metal to use in the electron microscope.

Henry crossed to a small table off to the side, setting down the beaker and the cross. The large electron microscope occupied the rear of the room. Its towering optical column reached for the room's ceiling. A bank of three monitors was crowded before it.

Joan warmed up the unit, flipping switches and quickly checking baseline calibrations. Dale finished prepping the sample, locking it into place on the scanner's tray. He gave Joan a thumbs-up.

Henry, all but forgotten, scowled and sank to a stool by his table.

Across the small room, the optical column began to hum and click as its tungsten hairpin gun bombarded the sample with an electron beam. Dale hurried to Joan's side before the monitors. The pathologist jabbed at a keyboard, and the screens bloomed with a grey glow in the dim room. The words
STAND BY
could be seen even from where Henry sat.

“How long will this take?” Henry called over.

Joan glanced at him, her face a mixture of surprise and embarrassment. She must have finally realized how little she had acknowledged him. “Not long. The EM will need about ten minutes to compile and calculate an image.” Joan offered Henry a weak, apologetic smile, then turned away.

Henry swung away himself, turning his attention back to the crucifix. He tapped its brilliant surface with a finger. After testing the unknown substance, the friar's cross was clearly composed of the real thing. “Mere gold,” Henry muttered to himself. At least one mystery was solved, but that still left another enigma.

Grasping the crucifix, Henry flipped it over to study its
back side and the rows of small scratches. What was Francisco de Almagro trying to say? Henry ran a finger along the marks. Was this some last message? If so, what was so important? As Henry fingered the cross, he felt a twinge of misgiving, similar to the one the previous night when his attempt to communicate with the camp failed. He pushed aside such irrational worries. He was being paranoid. But for the hundredth time that day, his thoughts drifted to Sam and the other students. How were they faring with the buried pyramid? Had they perhaps already discovered the answers to these puzzles?

Henry palmed the crucifix between his two hands, resting his forehead on his fingertips. So many oddities surrounded the dig. Henry sensed there was a connection, some way to bring all these strands together: mummified priests, mysterious metals, sealed crypts. But what was the connection? Henry felt the crucifix's outline pressed into his palms. A cross of gold and a coded message. Could this be the answer?

He imagined the young friar, crouched over his cross, etching it with some sharp tool. Painstaking work while his death neared. In Henry's hands were perhaps the last words of this man. But what did he want to say? “What was so important?” Henry whispered.

The image of the cross crystallized in Henry's mind, turning slowly before his inner eye.

Joan suddenly gasped behind him, pulling him out of his reverie. He twisted around. She faced his direction, but her eyes were not fixed on Henry. He followed the path of her gaze to his right elbow.

The beaker rested on the tabletop where Henry had placed it. His breath caught when he saw its contents.

“Henry…?”

The beaker no longer contained a pool of the raw metal. Inside, leaning against the glass side, was a crude copy of the Dominican gold cross. Roughly cruciform in shape, the detail was blurred. The Christ figure was no more than a
blunt suggestion upon its surface.

Joan and Dale moved closer.

“Did you do that?” Dale asked.

Henry glanced at the man as if he were mad. He pointed to its sealed stopper. “Are you kidding?”

As they all watched, the cross seemed to lose some of its detail. The edges became less sharp, and the figure slid from the cross to pool at the bottom of the beaker. Still, the cross itself persisted in its general shape.

Henry tried to explain, “I was just thinking about it when—”

A sharp chime rang from nearby, loud in the small room.

They all turned to see the monitors waver, then blink into greyscale images.

“Maybe we're one step closer to an answer,” Dale announced tacitly. He stepped back toward the bank of monitors.

Henry and Joan followed. Their eyes met briefly. Henry could see the consternation and something that looked like fear in her eyes. Before he knew what he was doing, he reached out and gave her hand a quick reassuring squeeze. She acknowledged the gesture by moving a few inches closer to Henry's side.

With a final worried glance toward the cross in the jar, Henry joined the others at the monitors.

Dale stood bent over the keyboard, one finger tracing along the screen. Upon the monitor was an unearthly landscape, a rough terrain of oddly shaped peaks and valleys, as if someone had taken a black-and-white photo of the surface of Mars. “This is impossible,” Dale said. He pointed to a section of screen that magnified a corner of the landscape. “Look. The metal is actually an aggregation of tiny particles. See how they're latched and interlinked.”