The Stolen

by T. S. Learner

  ‘Forgiven.’

  Helen wrapped her arms round him. He didn’t turn but stayed with his back to her facing the goddess, who seemed in that minute to be almost mocking his reserve. ‘You know I can’t promise you anything. I’m broken, defensive, and possibly on the run.’ He stumbled over the words, frightened of losing her through his honesty.

  ‘I’ll take the gamble. I’ve always believed in the impossible,’ she murmured into his ear, ‘and I know I’m not alone.’

  ‘The impossible it is then.’ He turned and kissed her, desire flaring between their lips like a candle. They were interrupted by the local church bells ringing. ‘I should begin the testing. Time’s running out.’ Matthias moved away from her reluctantly.

  The small room was a mass of electrical cables, set against a wall of control panels and several large orange-painted vacuum chambers, all linked to TV monitors, linked to computers. Canisters of liquid nitrogen and other cooling agents sat on the floor connected to the testing chambers. One assistant’s work – a half-constructed electronic panel – lay on his desk, abandoned for the night. A Peanuts cartoon was taped up on a pinboard over the desk. Matthias switched on the lights and fluorescent strips spluttered into life, casting a cold white-blue light over everything.

  He carefully took the box they’d laid the statuette in and, after pushing aside some spare electrical cable, placed it onto a workbench. Helen scanned the room.

  ‘My God, I thought it would be more ordered than this; this is real anarchy.’

  ‘I’d like to think of it as creative chaos. But in reality I think it reflects the way each of us works – very much in our own tiny world that we are constructing right in front of us. Take Toshiro from Tokyo – that’s his desk over there – his speciality is type two superconductors, alloys mainly. Absolutely no social skills, but he’s brilliant. I have a policy to recruit the difficult lateral ones who might not flourish so well in a larger lab like the IBM one.’ He looked at the statue. ‘I’m looking for a continuous loop of the metal. I want to check how conductive the statuette is; all the indicators I’ve seen so far seem to suggest that it’s potentially very conductive.’

  ‘And you think that might be one of the reasons it has so much mythology attached to it?’

  ‘Possibly. It isn’t such a crazy theory. Certainly having strange magnetic effects on objects around it would have lent weight to the idea of a powerful statuette. Often there’s a scientific explanation behind so-called magic.’

  He turned the statuette upside down. On the base was another plate of the metal, of which a small corner had obviously broken off in the past and been forced back into place. Matthias eased it off; it was curiously heavy in his hand, the weight disproportionate to its size.

  ‘I’ll use this, so there will be no damage to the figure. It will provide all sorts of information – including potential carbon dating if we can find any organic material – so you will be able to place the goddess in her right era.’

  ‘That would be a huge bonus.’

  Matthias carefully placed the fragment into a vice, placing some paper beneath to catch the filings. The metal had a curious flint-like composition – it was almost fracturing under the blade of the file as if it were made of minute crystals. Matthias had seen nothing like it in his entire career. He lifted the paper up that now contained a small pile of filings.

  ‘What’s that for?’ Helen had been watching, fascinated, perched on the edge of the desk, observing how, as Matthias had described earlier, he really did fall into a self-contained bubble of concentration when working, like a vacuum that excluded everything else – including the presence of other people – around him.

  Bending the paper into a funnel, he poured the filings into a test tube.

  ‘For viewing later; they’re small enough to go under a microscope.’

  He held the fragment under the lamp light, illuminating the filed edge of the piece.

  ‘Helen, look at this.’

  She looked over his shoulder. The core of the metal was lighter in colour – a captivating blue-silver, glistening with the specks of a flint-like substance.

  ‘The surface must have oxidised; it was probably this colour originally.’ He had the exhilarating sensation that he was on the edge of a great mystery – like standing on a precipice of a canyon whose beauty and sheer scale was beyond human imagination. It was a dangerous feeling and one that had disappointed in the past – research has many impasses, he reminded himself, trying to control the sudden dryness in his mouth.

  ‘Maybe that’s why the Kalderash called it sky metal, because of the colour?’ Helen suggested, marvelling at the diamond-like luminosity of the piece.

  ‘Perhaps, but I have another hypothesis.’

  He took the fragment to the instrument he used to electrically charge materials. There he attached two wires to the two sides. Helen joined him at the machine.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Running an electrical charge through it to see whether it can hold any of it.’

  He turned the dial of the charger and they both leaned forward to watch. There was a slight crackle and a spark ran over the surface of the fragment. Helen clutched at Matthias’s arm, then laughed.

  ‘I don’t know why, but I feel like we’re committing some great sin against an ancient power or perhaps Nature itself,’ she said. ‘Maybe we should just let the goddess keep her secret.’

  ‘Helen, I promise the statuette won’t be harmed by any of this.’

  ‘No, but you might destroy all the mystery – reduce it to an interesting metallurgical discovery. Isn’t that what all scientists do, take the wonder away?’

  ‘No, quite the opposite. We find the wonder in the most mundane materials – we are able to illuminate some of the great unknowns. It’s what I dedicate my life to, moments like this. I just happen to believe that part of Nature is human evolution and science is part of that.’ The fragment emitting another crackle interrupted them. They both swung back to the workbench.

  ‘Is it charged?’ Helen asked.

  ‘We’ll find out in a minute. Next step is to place the fragment in a foam container, place a small magnet on top of it, then fill the container with liquid nitrogen to lower the temperature of the fragment to below thirty-nine kelvin, at which point hopefully —’

  ‘The Meissner effect kicks in and all the electrons —’

  ‘Conductance electrons —’ he corrected her, smiling, pleased that she had absorbed some of the explanation he’d given her the first night they’d really talked.

  ‘Line up and whizz around in order with absolutely no resistance,’ she completed his sentence, grinning back.

  ‘You remembered?’

  ‘I cheated. I read up on the subject.’

  Matthias walked over to a cooling unit: several foam containers were stacked beside it and he lifted one up and slid the fragment into it, then, after opening the unit, pulled out a shelf and placed the container with the fragment on top. He got a pair of tongs and picked up a magnet from a tray of them, all individually packed and marked with weight and size. Using the tongs he placed the magnet onto the surface of the fragment and reached for a canister of dry ice.

  ‘I’m curious to see whether there are any superconductive qualities. If there are, once I cool the metal down to thirty-nine kelvin with liquid nitrogen’ – he bent down to switch on the liquid nitrogen – ‘and a Meissner effect kicks in, all resistance will fall away. The current will flow unencumbered and the magnet will react to the metal by —’

  ‘Matthias! It’s reacting already.’ Helen was staring into the cabinet. ‘That can’t be normal.’

  He peered in; the magnet was floating over the fragment by a good ten centimetres.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ he murmured under his breath, not daring to believe the reality of what he was witnessing. ‘It’s just not possible.’ He glanced at the controls – they were at zero. The temperature in the cabinet was SRT – standard roo
m temperature. His stomach went into free-fall. ‘Helen, please confirm the magnet is hovering above the metal fragment.’ He struggled to keep the sheer excitement out of his voice.

  ‘It’s hovering,’ she confirmed, uncertain what this actually meant. ‘That’s good, isn’t it?’

  ‘Good? We may be witnessing history on a scale that’s unimaginable.’

  A Polaroid camera lay on a table nearby. He took a photograph of the experiment, making sure the reading on the temperature dial was in shot then waited as the single photograph printed slowly out of the camera. He waved it in the air to dry it then peeled off the cover. There it was, caught by the camera, hard evidence. Trying to control his shaking hand he scribbled the date and the temperature – eighteen degrees Celsius – on the back to verify the occasion. He looked at the floating magnet. Hovering above the fragment, it was now revolving slowly.

  ‘Astonishing,’ he whispered, as if a raised voice might break the spell and the experiment would come crashing down.

  ‘Matthias, what exactly are we witnessing?’ Helen, now caught up in his rapture, murmured.

  ‘History,’ he answered. Holding his breath, he opened the cabinet as slowly as he could, terrified that the magnet might fall with one clumsy jolt. But it stayed in mid-air, suspended like a cheap magician’s trick. Still not quite believing his eyes, Matthias put his hand into the cabinet to confirm the temperature; to his extreme joy it was exactly the same as in the room. It was then that he allowed himself a huge shout of delight.

  ‘What just happened?’ Helen exclaimed, astounded by his reaction. In response he picked her up and whirled her around, her frame surprisingly light in his arms.

  ‘The Holy Grail just happened, the fucking Holy Grail!’

  Dawn was just beginning to streak up into the sky as the caretaker stamped the snow from his boots, before unbolting the door of the church. Anxious to finish his cleaning duties quickly and get back to the warmth of his basement apartment, the old man grabbed the broom from behind the altar and headed to the crypt where he always began.

  It was pitch dark as he descended the narrow stone stairwell, his foot feeling for the edge of each step. At the bottom his fingers found the switch on the wall and in seconds the chamber was flooded with light. But before he’d even stepped onto the flagstones he knew something about the crypt had changed; he had lived his life in such spaces and was attuned to their individual silences. He had learned that a distinct vibration marks a room, and now, straining his hearing, he listened. The vibration here had been changed, had been violated. Without moving he glanced around for anything that indicated a disturbance. The tombs with their sleeping figures appeared intact. Nevertheless the caretaker remained wary as he started to sweep the floor; it was only when he reached the far corner and was resting for a moment beside the tall altar candles that he felt the greatest disquiet. He looked at the candles. The wicks, normally pristine, were blackened with soot and pools of wax had solidified around the base of each one as if they’d been burning for hours.

  It took him five minutes to reach the telephone in the small ticket office behind the entrance door, another ten to reach the man he’d been instructed to call if ever there was such an invasion – he was not happy to hear from him.

  Matthias glanced at his watch. Six. He’d sent Helen home despite her protests and he’d now gone without sleep for over twenty-four hours, his nerves pulled taut – his whole physique and psyche gripped by exhilaration. The statuette’s alloy was superconductive at room temperature. He was sure of it: he’d tested and retested, each time meticulously recording the result. He’d even tested the fragment at twenty-nine kelvin just to see whether, ironically, it retained superconductivity at very low temperatures. To his utter amazement it had the opposite reaction – superconductivity fell away at thirty-nine kelvin, the traditional point when all other material he’d ever worked with underwent the Meissner effect. It was as if the world had shifted on its axis and he was now living in some parallel universe: the father he thought he had was not his father, the laws of physics he’d studied were now completely usurped. It was both wildly liberating and wildly disturbing.

  A row of empty coffee cups and two empty cans of Coca-Cola, the debris of a sleepless night, watched like disapproving sentries. The whole process had taken over six hours and tremendous patience as he painstakingly prepared the samples despite trembling fingers. Initially he’d run the sample under a scanning electron microscope to examine the surface qualities of the material – it was a mineral he’d never seen before, neither in a compound nor in an ore. Dumbfounded, and fighting the sheer adrenalin of discovery, he’d prepared another sample for the next stage of research – to examine the atomic structure of the material under an X-ray diffractometer. This machine used X-rays to illuminate the atomic structure – whereas the electrons used in the microscope only illuminated the surface structure.

  It was the diffraction pattern of the atomic structure that he was now staring at on a square of photographic film, absolutely captivated. I feel like the first man on an unknown planet, he told himself, scarcely daring to breathe, the atomic landscape of the material stretching out in front of him like an exotic landscape that was both stunningly beautiful and utterly alien. A lattice of atoms composed of chains, some of them double – some of them even treble – it was the most delicate of structures, sounding out in his head as a tune – a filigree of descant notes reminiscent of Gluck’s ‘Dance of the Blessed Spirits’ he couldn’t help thinking. But one thing was obvious: he’d never seen anything like it anywhere – not in a compound, not in any known element.

  ‘Matthias?’ Jannick’s voice jolted him from his reverie. He immediately swung round in his chair, masking the image of the sample on the desk, his mind racing madly as he tried to compose himself. Jannick, still wrapped in his winter coat, his cheeks and nose nipped red with the cold outside, began pulling his coat off.

  ‘Mind telling me where you’ve been these last few days?’ the Dane asked, a note of suspicion in his voice. ‘I’ve hardly seen you and it’s been really challenging keeping everything running smoothly.’

  ‘I told you I had to go to Germany.’

  ‘So you said, but I thought you’d at least call. When did you get in this morning?’

  ‘Eight last night,’ Matthias lied.

  Jannick put his briefcase down onto his desk, wondering why Matthias was screening his microscope. ‘You look terrible. When was the last time you slept?’

  ‘Wednesday, I think,’ Matthias replied, half of his brain telling him to keep the discovery a secret until he absolutely had a proven case, while the other half argued that it was so unbelievable, so preposterous that he desperately needed another scientist’s verification he wasn’t going crazy. All he knew was that if he was correct, it would explain how the material was superconductive at room temperature.

  ‘Matthias, it’s Friday morning. Must be a hell of an experiment to work on all night; something I should know?’

  ‘I’m not sure. It’s all a little premature and I just want to make sure…’ His words stumbled over each other, the guilt of withholding information undermining his natural authority.

  ‘I’m your partner, for Christ’s sake. If you can’t trust me who can you trust? Besides, I might be able to help.’ Jannick’s gaze turned to the worktop, where the sample slides were glinting in the sunlight now streaming in from the window.

  ‘Are you studying some new compound?’

  ‘It’s a mineral I came across, don’t ask me how, and it’s like nothing I’ve ever seen before. I have a hypothesis as to what it might be.’

  ‘Would you like me to take a look for you?’

  ‘You are better at recognising these things than me,’ Matthias admitted a little ruefully as he stepped aside, exposing the image lying on the desk. The Dane peered down, then fished his glasses out from his breast pocket and moved closer to the image.

  ‘Looks like a silicate, yet it doesn
’t…’ Jannick sounded guarded. Matthias studied him: he didn’t want the young Danish physicist to know exactly what he’d stumbled upon, at least not yet.

  ‘Exactly where would you find a brand new silicate?’ Matthias ventured carefully.

  ‘Not easy. I thought all the possibilities had been discovered, at least on Earth that is…’ Now Jannick swung back to him. ‘You must have tested this for superconductivity?’

  Ignoring the question Matthias stared at him, a sudden epiphany shooting through him like a blast of light. Sky metal, holy metal, metal from heaven – wasn’t that what the Rom called it? Extra-terrestrial – it had to be.

  ‘Well, have you?’ Jannick insisted.

  Again, Matthias chose not to reply. Instead he elbowed Jannick out of the way and looked back down at the image. There was only one way this had reached the Earth.