The Martian Pendant

by Patrick Taylor

  There wasn’t much talk after that, aside from Dan’s concern over Bobby’s return.

  “No need to worry, love. Once he’s asleep for the night, the only thing that will awaken him is either the sound of breakfast being prepared or his stomach rumbling. My understanding is that they will feed him breakfast over there before he comes home.”

  In his embrace, she put his hand to her breast, and held it there. Then standing up, she began to undress slowly in front of him, as he watched as if hypnotized. Taking his hand, she led him up to her bedroom, and closed the door.

  “Now, Danny boy, it’s your turn,” she whispered in that husky voice again, “shall we start with the shirt or the trousers?”

  Sleep was mostly forgotten as they made love that night. They did slumber periodically in each other’s arms, awakening as if in a dream to one another’s caresses. Each time there followed a renewal of passion, born of longing for each other. Ultimately it was the sound of breakfast being prepared downstairs that awakened her.

  “Oh my God,” she cried in alarm. “Look at the time!”

  Dan turned over sleepily and buried his face between her breasts. “Who cares? I don’t have to report in until this afternoon.”

  “Well, for starters, I care! Danny, my adolescent son has come home, and is in the kitchen, and any moment now he’ll come in with a breakfast tray, and find us like this!”

  Giving her a parting kiss, he grabbed his clothes and disappeared into the bathroom. Soon, he could be heard singing in the shower. She had just put on her robe and was sitting at her dressing table brushing her hair when Bobby knocked, then came in with a tray of breakfast for two.

  “Hi, mum, I hope you two are hungry. I have orange juice, bacon, eggs, toast and coffee.”

  “Oh, Bobby, that’s so thoughtful.” Then, guiltily, she added, “Did you know all along that Dan would stay the night? You must understand, people of our age who are in love do sleep together.”

  “Understand? Of course I do. And that love works with me. Although I was encouraged to call Dan ‘Uncle,’ I’ve always hoped he would be more that that for me some day. I never knew my real father, and maybe now I can call him dad.”

  Dan, overhearing, stepped from the bathroom in shirt and trousers. Broadly smiling, he said, “Lad, along with your mother, there’s no one I’d rather have as family.”

  Arson

  Celestre smiled, his glowing eyes reflecting the flames that lit the night sky of Dar-es-Salaam. The conflagration had by then entirely engulfed the old Archives Building, a relic of the German Empire. Directing his Indian thugs, he had set out to destroy all the files containing anything pertaining to the Martian discovery, as directed by Rome. But his men, hired from the large disaffected Indian immigrant population of the port city, became carried away. Instead of extracting the sought-after documents and burning them later in the narrow alley in back, they began burning them inside. Started by the liberal splashing of gasoline onto the heap of papers, the fire quickly spread with the flow of burning fuel across the marble floor. They were lucky to escape with only minor burns, as the furnishings and paneled walls of the old building caught fire.

  The fire brigade was woefully late, and the Sicilian priest lingered a few more minutes, fascinated by the conflagration. The inferno created sexual arousal in him, something he had struggled with in the past. Before, arousal had always come from looking at young women and girls, not fire. He kept that new realization for the future. With the sirens of approaching fire engines, he turned and melted into the shadows. When he radioed in his report that night, the return message only contained orders to return to Vatican City.

  He envisioned some type of reward for his services. A parish of his own in a nice mountain town in Sicily, or even on the Italian mainland, would suit him. Maybe he could be assigned a young woman as housekeeper, instead of the usual older matron.

  When he reached Rome, expecting a reward, he received instead a rebuke. It seems it was permissible to destroy records, but not burn down the entire building holding them. Both were sins, but it was a question of magnitude. Venial versus mortal. At the time, his explanation was that it seemed the most expeditious way to finish his task. The fire did destroy everything regarding the Martian findings, but also burned every record pertaining to Catholicism in all of British East Africa, including the ownership records of the Church’s extensive properties.

  Vatican Security was impressed by Celestre’s ruthlessness, despite his heavy-handed use of fire. There was one further task to accomplish, and while no trace of Martian technology remained, persuasive evidence of the aliens’ human form was still being circulated in the form of Diana’s preliminary paper. Certain officials in the Vatican had reason to believe that despite the seizure by the FBI of her attaché case containing undisclosed Martian information, she still had enough additional material to more firmly establish that the human race originated not on earth, as the Scriptures decreed, but on Mars. And it was known that she was working on a doctoral dissertation, a certain sign of more data being available to her.

  The gnome-like priest was given a chance to redeem himself. He had to find and destroy the Martian mandible, and by that means, remove the key piece of evidence supporting her theory that Homo sapiens had its origin on the red planet. Without that connection, the publication of Diana’s dissertation, it was thought, would be a total failure, because it would reveal nothing not already known.

  Isotopes

  Diana realized that to establish the age of the Martian discovery, a new method of isotope dating would have to be found. Using the lab in her spare time, she studied the periodic table, and researched the nuclear physics literature for the answer. She knew there must be a naturally occurring radioactive isotope with a half-life long enough to date something to around a million years.

  After some effort, she uncovered two isotopes that might be useful for her project. Argon-40 had a useful half-life, and decayed from potassium-40, a common element not only in organic substances such as vegetation and animal tissue, but also in some soils and volcanic rock. Argon is a gas, escaping into the atmosphere unless sealed into igneous rock under certain conditions. Obviously, that was one possibility, especially since much of the broken strata surrounding the spaceship was of that origin, due to its proximity to the volcano, with many lava flows over the millennia. No unbroken igneous rock had been uncovered in the layers surrounding the ship while she was at the dig, and no report of it being exposed by further excavation had come to her attention. This had led to her temporarily putting the argon--potassium method on hold.

  She recalled her previous inquiries into iron-60, which decayed with a half-life of between one-and-a-half to two million years, depending on the calculations used.

  Fe-60 had never been found on earth, its presence elsewhere in the universe detected only by astrophysicists using x-ray spectrometry. They postulated that the energy released by its decay to cobalt-60 had melted space dust and other rock to form the asteroids orbiting out beyond Mars. Calculations pointed to the isotope as having disappeared on earth several million years ago at the latest. Diana knew that if Fe-60 could be found in her Martian fossils, her problem with proving the origin of the mandible would be solved, for that very reason. It was a long shot, but she had a feeling that it was a winner. Armed with the idea, she approached the grad students in astrophysics at Caltech. She was met with skepticism at first, but her persistent and earnest approach finally won them over enough to run tests on the mandibular drillings she had kept from confiscation.

  As expected, there was no residual radiation detected by mere scintiscanning of the dust of the fossil, but when the x-ray spectrography results were analyzed, iron, exactly duplicating the theoretical characteristics of Fe-60, was detected. The Department head, when told of the findings, was amazed, and envisioned fame at being the first to have detected its existence on earth. Diana had told them that the specimen was from Africa, but not that it had been found i
n the spaceship. Needless to say, they were all disappointed when they were informed of the source of the sample. Iron-60 had indeed been found, but it wasn’t from our planet. Obviously, no one in that Department was a paleoanthropologist.

  Diana now had her proof. The presence of the isotope in the mandible firmly established the spaceship crew as being extraterrestrials. But that was only the first step, and she was puzzled. Even with virtually identical anatomy, could the presence of Fe-60 alone be used to further confirm the connection between the space aliens and modern humans? She thought so, and decided that further evidence was unnecessary.

  To complete her dissertation, she lacked only her original photographic slides, which had been locked away with the other material by the Federal government as top secret. She needed to make new slides, which necessitated flying to Chicago to again photograph the fossil mandible, in juxtaposition with specimens of modern man. Those photos, combined with her Fe-60 data, would establish beyond a doubt that, along with modern humans, Martians were Homo sapiens, and since they had arrived on earth a million or more years ago, as shown by the isotopic findings, they, and not the various primitive hominids found in Africa, were our ancestors.

  Diana left Bobby in his grandparents’ care in Hollywood, and flew to Chicago. Again she was met by Max at Midway Airport, and they sped to the Department at the U. of C. The sun had set, requiring bright lights in his office for her to use her Hasselblad camera.

  About the time she had left L.A., Celestre and two other men disguised as priests and furnished with forged passports, had landed in New York on an Alitalia flight from Rome. Their plane to Chicago was delayed, and coincidentally landed just after Diana’s. They hired a cab, the driver directed to take them to the University. With maps furnished them in Rome, they found the Anthropology Department without difficulty, despite the gathering darkness.

  “Hi, beautiful,” Max said, when he opened the safe and produced the jawbone. “It’s great to see you.”

  “Max, stop that. We don’t have time for such silliness. I have a feeling we must quickly take those juxtaposed photos ASAP, and get out of here with my camera and the fossil mandible.”

  Hurriedly, she took pictures, as she had for her preliminary paper, and put the camera in her shoulder bag, telling him to pick up the Martian fossil. Just then, they heard the door to the outer office open. She cursed herself for not having locked it behind them.

  “Max, quick, we have to hide. They’re after the mandible, and they’re probably armed. When they can’t find their prize, with any luck they’ll leave.”

  He found a convenient storage closet, and they were able to hide behind a stack of large boxes. The light had burned out, probably saving their lives. In his haste, however, he had left the specimen on the table.

  Directing the search, Celestre, loudly speaking in Italian, said, “The safe is open, and empty. But look, isn’t that our jawbone on that worktable there? This is too easy!”

  Directing the other two to set a fire using a container of lab alcohol, he exclaimed, “Let’s get out of here. Our next stop is the Library of the Chicago Anthropology Society, where many copies of her paper are kept.”

  As soon as he heard the door slam, Max came out from behind the boxes, and reached out to open the door of the little room.

  “No, Max, don’t! Not before checking. Is the door hot?”

  “Ow,” he cried as he touched it. “Looks like we’ll have to use that window!”

  She had already begun to pile the boxes up in order to reach the opening. “We’re on the second floor, so it may be rather too high to jump.”

  Climbing up to the window, she tried to open it, to no avail. Max tried also, but it wouldn’t budge. “Here,” she said, “use this piece of wood! It’s heavy enough to break the glass, at least.”

  Max did break the pane, giving them fresh air and saying, “I’ll knock all the glass out of the frame, so we can climb through without gashing ourselves.” Then, looking out the window to the sidewalk below, he saw a bent form looking on, apparently enraptured by the flames beginning to flare from the office windows.

  “Good Christ!” he shouted to Diana, “it’s that gnome of a priest from the African dig.”

  “Celestre! Although my Italian is rudimentary, I thought I recognized that voice. But I had no idea he was an arsonist too.”

  Seeing Max in the window simultaneously with the sounds of approaching firefighters, the priest loped across the street and disappeared into the gloom under the overhanging elms, joining his waiting men. A ladder was placed at the window after Diana hailed a fireman, and they soon found themselves among the gathering spectators, Diana holding her shoulder bag tightly.

  The international reach of the Mafia proved Celestre’s undoing. Manzone, newly stationed by his Sicilian Family in Chicago, was able to gain the ear of the local Consiglieri, Don Gasparri. Because of the priest’s turncoat activities, a trap was arranged outside the Library and very soon, three bodies were floating in the Chicago River.

  The authorities attributed the triple murder to some form of gang violence, and it wasn’t until Max and Diana came forward that the identity of Celestre and the organization he represented became known. No trace of the fossil mandible was found.

  While local Catholic officials had no knowledge of the reason for the trio entering the U.S., it was an easy step for the investigators to find, through customs records, that the Vatican had arranged their entry, supposedly for a religious meeting in Chicago. It was obvious from their burglary and arson at Max’s office that the Martian fossil had been their objective. The fact that they had been killed outside the archaeological library confirmed that their aim was to remove any remaining traces there of the Martian discoveries.

  The next day, after the background on the dead Sicilian surfaced, the newspapers played up his connection not only with Rome, but also with the Mafia, a combination few understood.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The Dissertation

  Despite being totally in love with Dan, Diana decided that their wedding would have to wait until she finished her dissertation. He objected vigorously. “By your own admission, in the beginning your Martian thing blinded you to our love. Isn’t our future together the most important thing now?”

  “Danny, I agree. Our love is certainly more important than any of that. I need you now more than ever. But I can’t just drop my professional goals, everything I’ve worked for the last couple of years, just to certify our union with a wedding. And you don’t know my mother in London. She’s been dreaming for years about my marriage. It will take months of planning the arrangements. Finishing my dissertation will be child’s play compared to that.”

  When she smiled up at him and snuggled closely, his impatience immediately dissolved. Unbuttoning his shirt collar and kissing him on the neck, she said in that husky voice, “Danny, won’t this sort of thing help our love survive my dissertation?”

  “There’s no doubt about that, if you keep your kisses coming.” Then, with an ironic chuckle, drawing her even closer, he whispered, “But what worries me are your mother’s plans. Can our love survive those?”

  * * *

  It took Diana only two weeks to put her research together to the point of beginning to write the dissertation. Much of the work was derived from her previous presentation, using the photographic slides of the ship and the comparative anatomy. Her research on iron-60 and argon-40 was entirely new. Anticipating that its absence on earth didn’t necessarily mean it wasn’t present a million years ago, she obtained fossil remains of that era and earlier, all specimens proving negative for the isotope. If the Fe-60 studies were not enough, the advanced technology of the space vehicle in which the remains had been found was proof of their being aliens.

  The work impressed everyone, and Max, her chair and main sponsor, was overjoyed that such a work would be credited to his Department. Diana had secured the sponsorship of an old professor, and also the head of the Oriental I
nstitute to be her committee members. When they met, her work was unanimously approved. Max, as usual, wanted a share of authorship in the work, but of course, was voted down. As they pointed out, his name would be cited in the bibliography, and acknowledged by Diana in the credits, but it was her dissertation, after all, and not anyone else’s. Her original plans were to give the paper again in Chicago, but the committee decided it was too important not to present nationally, or even internationally.

  In December, while awaiting word from the National Anthropological Society, her father, Sir Robert Howard, a member of the Royal Society in London, was able to arrange for the presentation of her paper at the yearly meeting of that prestigious body. She hadn’t been home for over a year, and the reunion at Gatwick Airport, after a rather turbulent flight over the Atlantic, was one of happy affection. “Father, mother,” Diana said smilingly as her parents joyously hugged Bobby. “You remember meeting Daniel Stuart here. I’ve written you about him, and extolled his virtues over the telephone, and here he is again in person.”

  Her father, grayer and thinner than when they had parted months before, was the first to seize Dan’s hand. “May we call you Danny now? Diana is always extolling Danny this, and Danny that. It is indeed a pleasure to see you again, son.”

  Lady Howard, still slim, and with her silver hair stylishly short, hugged Dan warmly. “We Americans just can’t settle for a handshake, however warm, right?"

  “Oh, come now, Sylvia,” Sir Robert said, “The handshake is all-important among American men. Am I correct, Danny?”

  “Yes, sir, especially where it comes to the historic enmity between the Stuarts and the Tudor Earls, like you Howards. Our extending an empty right hand is a flag of truce, eliminating any weapon that might be concealed there.”

  Bobby laughed at that. “Well, that wouldn’t remove a threat from a lefty, would it?”