Sunbird (27 page)

^{'It sounds like magic.'}

^{'It is,' I said, clicking away busily. The filter takes out everything but the infra-red rays, and the film is sensitive to it. It will reflect any temperature or texture differences in the subject and show them in differing colours.'}

^{There was an hour's work in the dark room before I could project the images onto our viewing screen. All colours were altered, becoming weird and hellish. The king's face was a virulent green and his beard purple. There were strange dapplings, speckles, and spots which we had never noticed before. These were irregularities in the surface, extraneous materials in the paint pigments, colonies of lichens and other imperfections. They glowed like outlandish jewels.}

^{I hardly noticed these. What held all my attention, and set my pulses pounding, was the grid of regular oblong shapes that underlaid the entire image. An irregular chequer-board effect; they showed in lines of pale blue.}

^{'We've got to get Louren here immediately,' I blurted.}

^{'What is it? I still don't understand. What does it mean?' Sally pleaded, and I turned to her with surprise. It was so clear to me that I had expected her to understand readily.}

^{'It means, Sal, that beyond our white king is an opening in the rock wall which has been closed off by a master mason with perfectly laid blocks of sandstone The white king has been painted over it.'}

^{Louren Sturvesant stood before the rock wall in the cavern and stared angrily at the white king. His hands were clasped behind his back. He was balanced on the balls of his feet, with his jaw thrust out aggressively. We stood around him in a semicircle, Ral, Sally, Leslie and I, and we watched his face anxiously.}

^{Suddenly Louren tore the cigar out of his own mouth and hurled it onto the paved floor. Savagely he ground the stub to powder, then he swung away and went to the edge of the emerald pool and stared down into its shadowy depths. We waited in silence.}

^{He came back, drawn to the painting like a moth to the candle.}

^{'That thing,' he said, 'is one of the world's great works of art. It's two thousand years old. It's irreplaceable. Invaluable.'}

^{'Yes,' I said.}

^{'It doesn't belong to us. It's part of our heritage. It belongs to our children, to generations not yet born.'}

^{'I know,' I said, but I knew more than that. I had watched Louren over the months as his feelings towards the portrait grew. It had developed some deep significance for him, which I could only guess at.}

^{'Now you want me to destroy it,' he said.}

^{We were all silent. Louren swung away and began pacing, back and forth, in front of the portrait. All our heads swung to watch him, like spectators at a tennis match. He stopped abruptly, in front of me.}

^{'You and your fancy bloody photographs,' he said, and began pacing again.}

^{'Couldn't we--' Leslie began timidly, but her voice faded out as Louren spun around and glared at her.}

^{'Yes?' he demanded.}

^{'Well, could you sort of go round behind it, I mean, well--' Her voice faded and then grew stronger again. 'Drill a passage in the wall off to one side, and then turn back behind the king?'}

^{For the first time in my life I felt like throwing my arms around her neck and kissing her.}

^{Louren flew up one of his mine captains with a crack team of five Mashona rock-breakers from the Little Sister gold mine near Welcome. They brought with them an air-compressor, pneumatic drills, jumper bars, and all the other paraphernalia of their trade. The mine captain was a big, ginger-haired man, with cheerful cornflower-blue eyes, and a freckled baby face. His name was Tinus van Vuuren, and he threw himself wholeheartedly into the project.}

^{'Reckon we will be able to cut her fairly easy. Doctor, This sandstone is like cheese, after the serpentine and quartz that I am used to.'}

^{'I want the smallest opening you can work in,' Sally told him sternly. 'I want as little damage as possible done to the paintings.'}

^{'Man,' Tinus turned to her earnestly. 'I'll cut you one no bigger than a mouse's--' he cut the word off, and substituted another, '--ear-hole.'}

^{Sally and I taped the outline of the mouth of the shaft on the wall of the cavern. We positioned it carefully to avoid the most beautiful and significant paintings. Though we took Tinus at his word and made the opening a mere two feet wide by four high - yet we would destroy part of a lovely group of giraffe, and a dainty little gazelle with big listening ears.}

^{We kept thirty feet away from the white king, to avoid undue vibrations from the drills which may have loosened flakes of stone or paint pigments. Tinus would go in for thirty feet, then turn his shaft at right angles to the face and cut in behind the king. Tinus was set to begin first thing the following morning, but that night we entertained him in the common room. The atmosphere was similar to that of a fighter squadron mess on the eve of a dangerous sortie. We were all voluble and tense, and all of us were drinking a little too much.}

^{To begin with, Tinus was very reserved, clearly overawed by the company of the legendary Louren Sturvesant, but the brandy loosened him up and he joined in the conversation.}

^{'What do you want the respirators for, Doc?' he asked. 'You expecting gas or a fire?'}

^{'Respirators?' Louren broke off a private conversation with Sally. 'Who ordered respirators?'}

^{'They specially told me six respirators.' Tinus looked dismayed at Louren's direct questioning. 'They told me that, sir.'}

^{'That's right, Lo.' I rescued the poor man. 'I asked for them.'}

^'Why?'

^{'Well, Lo. What we are all hoping to find is a passage, a--' I was about to say tomb, but I did not want to tempt the gods,'--cave of some sort.'}

^{He nodded. They were all watching me - and with a receptive audience I can seldom resist a touch of the theatrical.}

^{'That cave will have been sealed, airtight, for two thousand years or so, which means there could be a danger of--'}

^{'The Curse of the Pharaohs!' Sally interjected. 'Of course, do you remember what happened to the men who first entered Tutankhamen's tomb?' She drew a finger across her own throat and rolled her eyes horribly. She was onto her second Glen Grant.}

^{'Sally, you ought to know better,' I cut in severely. 'The Curse of the Pharaohs is of course a myth. But there is a danger of a peculiarly unpleasant lung disease.'}

^{'Well, I must say, I don't believe in curses and all that sort of bulldust,' Tinus laughed, a little too loudly. His inhibitions were way down around his ankles.}

^{'That makes two of us,' agreed Ral Davidson.}

^{'It's not a supernatural thing,' Leslie told them primly. 'It's a fungus disease.'}

^{I seemed to have lost control of the situation completely, so I raised my voice.}

^{'If you are all finished, I'll go on,' which got their attention back to me. 'The conditions would have been ideal for the development of
cryptococcus newomyces
, a fungoid saphrophitic growth whose airborne spores are the cause of a fatal disease.'}

^{'What does it do?' Tinus asked.}

^{'The spores are breathed into the lungs, and in the warm moist conditions they germinate almost immediately and develop into dense granulitic colonies.'}

^{'Sies!' said Tinus, which is an expression of the deepest disgust. 'You mean it starts growing on your lungs like that green stuff on mouldy bread?'}

^{'What are the consequences?' Louren asked}

^{I had it word perfect. 'Primarily they are extensive lesions of the lung tissue, with haemorrhage, high temperature and rapidly painful breathing, but then the fungoid colonies begin generating wastes which are readily absorbed into the blood and carried to the brain and central nervous system.'}

^{'My God!' Tinus was blanched and horrified, his blue eyes stared out of the white freckled face. 'Then what happens?'}

^{'Well, the wastes act as a virulent neurotoxin and induce hallucination. There is inflammation of the meninges, and severe brain malfunction, similar to the effects of lysergic acid or mescalin.'}

^{'Groovy!' said Ral, and Leslie kicked his shin.}

^{'You mean it drives you crazy?' Tinus demanded.}

^{'Clean out of your little skull,' Sally assured him.}

^{'Fatal?' asked Louren.}

^{'Seventy-five per cent, depending on individual immunity and the rate of antibody formation.'}

^{'In the event of survival, is there permanent damage?'}

^{'Scarring of the lungs similar to healed tuberculosis.'}

^{'Brain damage?'}

^{'No,' I shook my head.}

^{'Hell, man,' said Tinus carefully, setting his glass down. 'I don't know that I am so keen on this deal. Rock falls, methane gas, pressure bursts - those don't worry me. But this fungus thing,' he shuddered, 'it is creepy, man. Just plain bloody creepy.'}

^{'What precautions are you going to take, Ben?' Louren asked.}

^{'The first party in will be protected by respirators.' I explained. 'I will take air and dust samples for microscopic examination.'}

^{Louren nodded, and smiled at Tinus.}

^'Satisfied?'

^{'What will you do if you don't find it - but it's sort of lurking there? Like, ready to pounce, you know. Like in those science fiction books,' Tinus hedged.}

^{'If it's there, it will be thick. Every dust sample will be full of it. You can't miss it under the microscope. A black, three-ball structure like a pawnbroker's sign.'}

^{'Are you sure, Doc?'}

^{'I'm sure, Tinus.'}

^{He took a deep breath, hesitated a moment longer, then nodded, 'Okay, Doc. I'll trust you,' he said.}

^{The buffeting, fluttering roar of the rock drills chased my agonized brain into a corner of my skull and started kicking it to a jelly. The party had ended in the early hours.}

^{'How are you feeling, Doc?' Tinus van Vuuren came across to where I stood watching the work and shouted above the din. My nerves vibrated like guitar strings. Tinus looked as fresh and baby-faced as though his night cap had been hot milk and honey and he had slept twelve hours. I knew the type - Louren was one of them.}

^{'I feel bloody awful, thanks,' I shouted back.}

^{'There won't be anything to see here for a couple of days,' Tinus told me. 'Why don't you go lie down for a bit, Doc.'}

^{'I'll stick around,' I said, which seemed to be the general sentiment. Louren piloted the course of the Sturvesant empire from the radio shack, unable to tear himself away from the City of the Moon. Sally made a few desultory attempts at cataloguing and filing, but these never lasted more than an hour or two and then she was back at the cavern. Ral and Leslie made no pretence, and spent all day in the cavern, except for brief simultaneous absences which Louren and I guessed were exercise periods.}