“Kind of like that old nursery rhyme or whatever it is,” said Bob.
“There was a man upon the stair,
A little man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today.
I wish that man would go away!”
“Yeah, well, looks like the little man who wasn’t there was a fisherman,” said Ally, coming up to them.
“It’s really a fishing hook?” Jason asked her.
“No question,” she said with a nod “There’s no eyelet, probably too complex to make with whatever tools they had that could work the copper, but there’s a T-bar at the top of the shank to allow for a line of sinew or gut to be attached, and a triangular barb on the point.”
“I know it has to be carbon-dated in the lab, but any preliminary guess as to age?” asked Jason.
“Late Level Two, so let’s say between five and six thousand years, give or take,” she speculated.
“And the oldest Official Version metalworking civilizations?” queried Jason.
“Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia seem to be tied,” Ally replied. “Metalworking supposedly began about five and a half thousand years ago, halfway around the world. The oldest recovered examples of primitive metal tools and weapons are about five thousand years old, copper and bronze and tin. Gold and jade jewelry, maybe a little older. The oldest non-petro human artifacts we have are pottery shards from the Ubaid period in ancient Sumeria, which was over seven thousand years ago, and the Sumerians were definitely a Semitic people, so the noseys may have us beat on that one, but no metal shows up until many thousands of years later. That dinky little hook may well turn out to be the oldest metal artifact worked by human hands ever discovered, and it most definitely should not have been discovered in Montana. Fortis and Wyrick are almost gibbering over it.”
“They’re coming to gibber at us now, in fact,” observed Campbell.
Alvin Fortis was pale and his khaki work shirt soaked through with sweat. Amanda Wyrick’s normally handsome face was pale, her lips compressed, almost hysterical-looking. “Chancellor Stockdale, do you understand the significance of this find?” Fortis asked in a tremulous voice.
“Yes, sir, I do,” said Jason. “I’m not an archaeologist or a historian myself, but since I’ve become involved in this project I’ve learned a lot.”
“Please, don’t take offense, but I have to ask—this is such an earth-shattering development—can you give me some kind of assurance that no one here in your country could possibly have any, uh, political motivations to, how can I put this, enhance this site?”
Jason shook his head. “No offense taken, Doctor Fortis. We understand that you don’t trust us or anything we do. That is how you have been conditioned to think from birth, where you come from. No, no one in the Northwest Republic is in any way seeding the site or tampering with any of the archaeological record here. I know you won’t believe this, Doctor Fortis, but we don’t lie to people. We don’t have to, because we’re right. Our nation and our way of life is based on truth, not deception. That is why we left your own empire, so that we could live like that.”
“Then you won’t have any objection if we monitor the carbon-dating process from the beginning?” asked Amana Wyrick.
“Not at all, ma’am,” replied Jason. “In fact, I wish you would. It’s why you’re here. Ma’am, please don’t think we don’t understand what we’re asking you to do. We are asking you to go back to where you came from and speak the truth about what you’ve seen here, and we understand that in your society that can be a deadly dangerous thing to do. It will require immense moral and personal courage, in some ways just as much courage as it took for a small handful of people from my generation to take up arms against the most powerful and overwhelming tyranny in human history. Can you do it?” he asked her bluntly.
“I have to be honest with you, Chancellor,” the woman said, looking him in the eye. “I don’t know. I always wondered if something like this happened, if I had the strength to commit professional hara-kiri for the sake of the truth. Up until now the question has always been academic, since Bella and I have stuck to nice politically safe Maya ruins and Khmer temples and West African slave trading forts where there really are European male villains who can be blamed and vilified without fudging history too much.”
“I thought the slaves were sold into bondage by their own chiefs?” said Campbell mildly. “Not to mention the slave trade being mostly financed by Jews, and the slaves transported mainly on Jewish-owned ships.”
“Shhh!” said Dr. Wyrick, holding her finger to her lips. “Chancellor Stockdale, if you can convince me that this find alone is real and you guys aren’t pulling some kind of racist hoax here, it will be hard for me to plunge the metaphorical sword into my vitals and disembowel myself. I don’t know if I can lose everything I’ve got for the sake of a little twisted piece of copper that may turn out to be nothing. But if we find other evidence in the coming weeks, especially once we crack that mound over there, and I am convinced it’s all on the up and up, then yes, I will be forced to speak the truth out loud. And I will admit to you, Mr. Stockdale, that prospect scares me shitless.”
* * *
The copper hook was deposited and sealed in a sample box, the paper seal signed and dated by Dr. Wingard, and most of the Eminent Persons accompanied it back up to Missoula in convoy for testing. Dr. Haskins, Dr. Fortis, Doctor Kellerman, Dr. Wyrick, and both Martineaus would follow the carbon-14 dating procedure with eagle eyes the next day in Dr. Ian Shardlake’s lab at UM. Bob gave Captain Tom Horakova a call from the site office up on the rise above the longhouse and let him know the artifact was on its way. “I made sure Bobby’s driving the University’s van with the package in it,” he told Horakova, referring to his son. “He’s got one of the grad students with him and none of the foreigners, so they won’t have any way to get at it during the trip. They’re following behind in their own cars.”
“Did any of them object, want to ride with the box?” asked Tom.
“No,” Campbell told him. “Shardlake knows it’s on its way. Tell Leigh Anne it goes right into the safe until Shardlake formally unseals it tomorrow morning to begin the testing, and every alarm and monitoring camera in the lab needs to be up and running. This is a big discovery, one that our arthropod friend and anybody working with him will want to discredit like hell. We want to make sure it’s still there in the morning.” Campbell was referring to Leigh Anne Tremblay, one of his new detectives, who had been assigned to security duty in the lab, although for the purposes of this assignment her name on her ID tag was Leigh Anne Summers. Guardswoman Tremblay had been selected because of her unique combination of linguistic talents. The daughter of French Canadian migrants, she had been born in Montreal, and she still spoke French with her family at home. She could therefore eavesdrop on the Martineaus.
The remainder of the group out at Lost Creek continued with the excavation of the longhouse site under Arne Wingard’s supervision, grid square by grid square, slowly troweling up the dirt and dropping it into the sieves for sifting. The depressed rectangle slowly deepened. Ally excused herself and went back to work. Bob and Jason joined a group of the foreign scholars who were watching from behind the yellow nylon that roped off the dig area, since they were forbidden by their own governments actually to help in the excavation in any way. So far none of them had yielded to the temptation to get into the pit and start sifting. “How can carbon dating work on metal?” Bob asked Letitia Haines. “I thought something had to be organic, like wood or bone, so as to have carbon atoms whose half-life could be determined.”
“Oh? Do they teach organic chemistry at your police academies?” asked the Haines woman with a smile.
“No, just something I picked up with a budding young archaeologist around the house a lot,” said Bob, nodding toward Allura.
“Copper is an element, and so radiocarbon dating won’t work on pure copper, of course, but completely pure metal of any kind very rarely occ
urs in nature or even artificially,” she told him. “Carbon is the basic building block of life, Colonel, and carbon atoms or isotopes can be found everywhere. Carbon atoms tend to bond with almost anything through exposure to the air, which contains carbon dioxide and other molecules plus all kinds of microscopic floating plant and animal particulates. Most metal implements contain a measurable carbon content from the smelting or manufacturing process. If that hook was worked from a raw copper nugget using a wooden tool there will be carbon from the wood. If it was cut or worked from a smelted lump or ingot, there will be carbon from the wood in the fire. Even the most expert craftsman can’t keep carbon out. It gets into everything. Carbon content of steel is one way of dating weapons and armor and whatnot. That green corrosion on the hook will contain carbon dioxide and minute traces of everything from pollen to pine needles to human perspiration and skin molecules from handling. We won’t be able to date the copper in the hook itself, per se, but we will be able to date the microscopic film of various particulates that adhere to the artifact’s surface. That is, presuming your laboratory is as good as ours at Cambridge.”
“Is it? I’ve no idea.”
“Apparently,” she said, nodding. “You have subatomic spectroscopic analysis equipment and procedures which actually seem a bit better than ours, if I may be so indiscreet as to mention it, and Doctor Shardlake’s qualifications from MIT would seem to be sterling.”
“I’m not the one you have to worry about being indiscreet around, Doctor Haines,” said Campbell.
“Yes, Andrew Renfrew was telling us about your little spy hunt,” said the Englishwoman with a smile.
Damnation! thought Campbell to himself. Aloud he said, “That was very gregarious of him. But you have to admit that we have reason to be concerned.”
“Do you?” Letitia asked archly.
“Yes, ma’am,” put in Jason Stockdale. “You mentioned just now that in order to determine the precise age of that bit of copper we found, you have to analyze and look at microscopic layers of gunk and goo that have been deposited down through the centuries?”
“Yes, that’s correct,” she agreed.
“I know enough to understand that even the slightest touch from an ungloved human hand might be enough to contaminate and corrupt the results, and make accurate or at least certifiably reliable dating impossible. So you can see why we’re a bit concerned about the possible motives of some of you, just as you may think we’re seeding the site and trying to put a hoax over on the world to prove our people were here first. In fact, I’m sure your own authorities back home made it clear to all of you that was what you’re supposed to think.”
“So we don’t trust you, and you don’t trust us? Is that it, Chancellor?” Haines asked him.
“Unfortunately, ma’am, the real world we live in is one of mutual mistrust,” said Jason with a somber nod. “I hope that will change someday. Whether you accept the fact or not, we really are brother and sister, racially speaking. One day I believe that bond will transcend all this other petty cr-rubbish,” he concluded.
“I’m English, Colonel. You can say crap around me, although where I come from it’s shite. So, any suspects as to which of us is the Scarlet Pimpernel?”
“Honestly, Doctor Haines?” replied Robert Campbell. “We have no idea, and of course it’s possible that none of you has any hidden agenda at all and we are simply being paranoid. I hope so. Unfortunately, paranoia is part of a detective’s job description.”
“Of course,” she said. “Politics really is a bore sometimes, don’t you think?”
Campbell and Jason Stockdale strolled away. “It seems that Scottie has queered our pitch, as the Brits say,” Campbell muttered.
“Think it might have been deliberate, him tipping them off like that?” asked Jason. “Putting them all on their guard?”
“Maybe,” said Campbell. “Or maybe it’s just as Renfrew said a while ago, and these are intelligent people who pay attention to what’s going on around them, and who are capable of sussing out the political implications of what they’re doing. But now that he has put them all on their guard, that’s going to make things more difficult. It’s especially going to make any of them who are wearing multiple hats twitchy about contacting Scorpius.”
“Isn’t that the Sutcliffe woman over there?” asked Jason, pointing over to the site’s generator and main receiver shack. A Northwest Power and Light truck was parked in front of it. Bella Sutcliffe was talking to a man in overalls standing by the truck. “Wonder why she’s interested in the site’s electric supply instead of the digging?”
“Let’s see if we can find out.” They walked over to the power truck. Bella Sutcliffe was looking over an NP&L maintenance manual the engineer had given her. She was dressed in jeans and a denim work shirt, her black hair in a pony tail. The technician was a stocky man in his mid-fifties, gray-headed, with horn-rimmed spectacles, which were unusual in the Republic since eye defects were usually routinely corrected through laser surgery in childhood. The name tag sewed onto on his coveralls read Dave.
“Aha, you caught me spying, Colonel!” she said, looking up and giggling. “Congratulations! Take me, I’m yours!”
“Thanks a lot, Renfrew!” muttered Campbell to Jason sotto voce. Aloud he said, “There’s nothing confidential about the Tesla power transmission system, ma’am. Your country has access to all the right technology, indeed they had it before the Northwest Republic even came into existence, and they can read that manual you’ve got there on NP&L’s website, so there’s no need to smuggle it back to Harvard in your underwear.”
“I have better things to put in my underwear than technical manuals, Colonel, believe me,” said Bella sunnily. “Yes, we know how Tesla power transmission works in America, broadcasting electricity through the air. The problem is we still have to rely on fossil fuel to generate the power before we broadcast it. It’s so much neater and cleaner than all those tangled-up power lines. We even have a few small Tesla-powered communities. I live in one in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and it’s really nice not to have all those unsightly poles and pylons and cables and transformers cluttering up the horizon and ruining the view.”
“I’ve heard,” said Jason. “The United States is now dotted with fortified compounds for your super-wealthy liberal and Jewish élites, each with its own Tesla grid, while the bulk of your population of all colors has to make do with a crumbling copper-wire electrical grid of underground and aboveground cables both, powered by diesel and coal-fired generating stations, the whole of which is anywhere from sixty to a hundred and twenty years old, and just barely works. The Canadians are a little better off, but not much. Is there any major city in the U.S. that doesn’t have rolling blackouts in high summer and deep winter because your system can’t function at peak demand any more?”
“Probably not,” admitted Bella. “Of course, if you guys would be so kind as to share the secret of cold fusion with us, it would certainly make life a lot more comfortable in the States.”
“Why would we want to make it comfortable for you, ma’am?” inquired Campbell with a wintry smile. “We’ve told the governments of the so-called democracies repeatedly that we are willing to let the rest of the world in on everything we’ve got—cold fusion, levitational transportation, cancer cures, Tesla power, even certain parts of our space technology—in exchange for a simple recognition of the fact that we exist, and we are going to continue to exist as a nation. But no, that’s too much to ask. Over thirty years after the Longview Treaty, one nation, Russia, now has a full embassy in the Republic. Four others have consular delegations—Ireland, Argentina, Chile, and Serbia. Everybody else still has their noses in the air pretending we’re just dog doo they will someday scrape off their shoe.”
“Since you will only allow predominantly white nations to recognize you, of which there are almost none remaining in the world, I can see why the list is a little limited,” said Bella. “What about China, India, the Southern African
Union, Korea and Japan? The problem with that is you’d have to let them send you ambassadors and allow at least a few privileged people with different skin colors live here in your precious lily-white paradise. What would you do? Build separate bathrooms and water fountains for a handful of diplomats?”
“Actually, it is rather a paradise, and we mean to keep it that way,” replied Jason, grinning. “Southern Africa is a Chinese puppet régime that actively persecutes its few remaining white people, so they can keep their gold and their diamonds and their chromium. We’ll get it elsewhere, or do without. The Russians speak here for the Chinese, in anything that requires any interaction with them, which isn’t much. We still haven’t forgotten the way they loaded up that beaner zoo to the south of us with a thousand combat helicopters in the months before the Seven Weeks. The Irish broker any necessary deals with the Japanese, and the Indian government is so riddled with corruption and intrigue that neither the Russkis or the Chinks will have anything to do with them, never mind us. Believe me, it takes a lot to convince the Chinese, of all people, that a nation is too fundamentally dishonest to do business with, but India has managed it.
“The Americans, the Canadians, the Brits and other Europeans, the Aussies and Kiwis, even the damned Icelanders, we’ve laid it all out for you. We want only one thing. Full recognition. Accept the verdict of history, send us diplomatic missions with personnel who comply with our Constitution and our laws, and you’ve got everything from Northwest cancer medicine to Northwest wheat, Northwest engineers and money to rebuild infrastructure like highways and power and clean water filtration, stuff that will benefit niggers and Mexicans and keep them quiet, and we won’t even care so long as it benefits a few white people as well. Yeah, we’re prepared to compromise that far. We’ll feed and cure a hundred picaninnies and bambinos just to feed and cure a single white child, even if it’s the child of raving liberals who hate us, because that’s what the Republic is about, securing the existence of our people and a future for white children. But nope, you guys ain’t having any.”
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