by Talbot, Luke
The engraved stone they had removed from the surface had been sitting on a flat sill, six inches wide and two inches deep that ran uninterrupted along all four edges of the hole. The passageway in between was five feet wide, enough for two people to walk down side by side without touching each other. She took a mental note to thank Ben once more for letting her go down alone.
After thirty-odd steps, she found herself on a small landing, five feet square, where the steps took a ninety-degree left turn, away from the cliff outside, and continued to descend.
The walls of the staircase were completely smooth. As far as she could see, there was not one hieroglyph, engraving or painting all the way down. From what she knew of Egyptian tombs and monuments, this was not entirely uncommon; there may well be more to see further down.
The bottom of the steps opened onto a large room, about three times as wide as the staircase and just as long. She shone her powerful torch around, the passage of the Professor betrayed by the recently disturbed dust that danced lazily in its beam. In the four corners of the room and twice at regular intervals on each side, straight undecorated columns connected the floor and ceiling. On closer inspection, Gail noticed that they had not been built, but rather carved out of the bedrock, and were connected to the wall behind. The entrance she had emerged from was in the middle of one of the walls, in between two columns.
There were no other openings.
As with the staircase that led to it, the walls of the room were unmarked and the twelve columns stood out as the only decorative features.
The engineers’ X-ray machine was on the floor opposite her, one flat end of the cylinder touching the wall between two columns, the other pointing towards the centre of the room. Sitting on the floor next to it was a laptop computer, open and unlocked. She walked over to it and looked at the screen.
At first, she was not sure what she was looking at, the monochrome display showing a series of dark and light shapes within a circular frame, but soon her mind adjusted to the input, in much the same way it usually did after several seconds staring at a three dimensional image. She twisted her head slightly, then looked at the wall the cylinder was propped against.
“No way,” she said to herself.
She knelt down in front of the laptop and studied the grey and black shapes more closely for several minutes, briefly looking back at the wall several times in disbelief before resuming her in-depth appreciation of what lay beyond the rock.
It was a sight that, as a student, she was all too familiar with.
The echo of footsteps and excited voices from the corridor behind her brought Gail back to reality; she turned round just in time to see three students, a young boy and two girls, enter the room. Behind them, she could make out the distinctive tones of Ben trying to explain something to her husband.
“Look!” she said, standing up and pointing to the laptop display. “Look at this! Isn’t it amazing?”
The three students gathered round and stood in silence as they struggled to interpret the picture. After a brief moment, one of them recognised an object with a shriek, and within seconds they were all pointing eagerly at various shapes and talking quickly in a mixture of English, for Gail was still with them, and Arabic, because they were too excited to be able to find all the words they needed to explain what they were looking at.
In this time, Ben and George had entered the room and now stood behind the small group of archaeologists.
“All those steps lead to this, a room with no doors?” George complained.
She grabbed him by the arm and pulled him towards the laptop. “This room isn’t it.” As she gestured towards the wall, he saw the look of excitement in her eyes and looked more closely at the display before him. “It’s just an antechamber,” she said.
George leant closer, the puzzled look on his face telling Gail that he was unable to interpret the monochrome feed. “What am I looking at?”
The Backscatter X-ray system being used by the engineers was an experimental piece of hardware, developed mainly for seeing through rubble after earthquakes. The traditional X-ray, as used on patients in hospitals, was able to ‘see through’ objects by detecting varying levels of resistance to the radiation passing through them, therefore giving a very obvious representation of the human skeleton for instance, where the density of the bone is significantly higher than that of soft tissue. In order to be able to measure resistance through an object, traditional X-rays require the use of a radioactive emitter and a photographic receiver, in between which the object to be examined is placed.
In contrast, the Backscatter X-ray, as the name suggests, exploits a different phenomenon in the field of radiation detection – that of the amount of subjected radiation returned from an object. At the end of the twentieth century, this new form of X-ray garnered some interest from the search and rescue community, but it was not until the twenty-first century that it was fully taken advantage of; indeed, an urge to improve airport security in the United States following a string of terrorist attacks forced the government to invest heavily in advanced security technologies. The Backscatter X-ray had many advantages over other detection methods, primarily in its speed. Whereas it would take nearly thirty seconds for a person to manually search a passenger, the new system was able to accurately scan and detect offensive items in less than a second.
The other benefit of the Backscatter X-ray over traditional X-ray was that as it measured radiation returning from a target object, the emitter and receiver could be contained within one box, giving it the same flexibility as radar and sonar. Rather than placing the object between the X-ray and a photographic plate, it was simply a matter of pointing the X-ray at the object you wanted to see through.
Unfortunately, public opposition to the X-ray eventually proved too strong and the technology was never successfully implemented. It was not that the amount of radiation passengers were subjected to was unacceptable; in fact the Backscatter technique produced far less radiation than traditional X-rays and was deemed to be harmless. Even the price of the technology was not prohibitive, as the end cost of a production passenger scanning unit was cheaper than running a traditional security checkpoint. In the end, the system was abandoned as it presented an infringement on passenger privacy. Because of the low levels of radiation employed by the system, it did not see through soft tissue to show bones; instead, it saw through clothes to show soft tissue. During its first years in live trials, it became obvious that the quality of the images produced by the system was so high that it was no different to asking people to pass through security completely naked, and with airport management unable to commit to the reliable safekeeping of all of the resulting indecent images, the Backscatter X-ray lost its high government funding, and it was relegated once more to the search and rescue community, where funding was low and public interest minimal.
The cylindrical system they were looking at now had therefore been specifically designed for search and rescue, and was more portable and significantly more powerful than its airport ancestors. The level of radiation it was outputting, whilst still significantly lower than that of a traditional X-ray, allowed it to see through solid objects and detect whatever lay beyond, within a distance of up to one hundred and fifty feet. The software installed on the laptop computer was developed not only to render the resulting images in monochrome, but also display relative distances and scale; the further objects were from the cylinder, the lighter their colour on the display. To help in measuring these variations, a scale was shown at the bottom of the screen, from black to very light grey, zero feet to one hundred and fifty. The view was very cluttered, as the user interface had not been particularly well designed, but as Gail and the group of students had shown, only a brief period of mental adjustment was needed to interpret the images.
“Hang on,” George said slowly, before Gail could help him. “I think I know what that is.”
“Yes?” she smiled.
Running horizontally across the
X-ray were two very dark lines, approximately ten inches apart. Behind these were a series of six lighter lines, and behind those, ten more, lighter still. The pattern repeated itself a dozen times until the colour of the last set of lines showed them to be at least one hundred and twenty feet from the room they were standing in. An appreciation of the diminishing perspective as objects approached the limit of the X-ray’s reach made it clear that each line was equally spaced vertically, and that the sets of lines were the same distance from one another. Also, although they were not visible for the first two sets of lines, from the third set onwards regular vertical lines seemed to intersect the horizontal ones.
“The machines scope spreads out in a cone, doesn’t it? So we can only see a couple of feet square for the closest objects, but when it reaches the furthest ones we’re seeing a lot more?” George asked.
Gail looked at the display again and did some mental arithmetic. “As far as I can tell, at its furthest its showing us an area over thirty feet wide; it’s like a very expensive fisheye lens on a very old Egyptian front door,” she said.
George looked more closely and started to focus on the detail. On top of almost every single horizontal line were dozens of thick, short lines and circles. The lines tended to be placed next to one another, both horizontally and vertically, whereas the circles, of varying diameters, were generally on top of one another forming triangles, like sets of bowling pins seen from above. As he understood the images more, it became evident that the Backscatter X-ray cylinder had not simply been placed against the wall randomly; the position had to have been chosen very carefully so as to show as much of the more distant objects as possible. If a series of the short, thick lines had been present on top of one of the horizontal lines in the foreground, they would have blacked everything else out.
“I see it!” Ben shouted, making the others all jump. “Books! And the things you put books on!”
“Shelves. Dozens and dozens of shelves,” George said under his breath.
“And hundreds and hundreds of books,” Gail added. “It’s not a tomb, it’s a library.”
George found Gail’s hand and held it tightly. “And there’s something else, too,” he said.
It was strange that when faced with such an overwhelming number of priceless written records, anything could have been more impressive. But as George pointed with his index finger at the screen, everything Gail had seen so far that day seemed to dissolve in her mind, to be replaced with an excitement she had not felt for many years. Suddenly, she was seven again, looking at the presents below the Christmas Tree, and only seeing the one huge, beautifully wrapped box towards the back.
In the bottom half of the screen in very faint grey, at least one hundred and thirty feet away from them and beyond the farthest set of shelves, was a rectangular object. It was very small on the screen, but despite the resolution Gail could just about work out that there was something else on top of it.
One of the students looked at the controls of the laptop, and cautiously moved the cursor on the display until it was over the object. Bringing up a menu in Arabic, he selected an option and the X-ray image disappeared. After a heart-stopping moment, the image reappeared, but this time, the rectangular object filled the screen.
“Oh, wow,” Gail managed to say. She’d practically stopped breathing.
Of all the hundreds of books inside the library, there was now only one that mattered. It was placed on a plinth, at an angle, like a Bible at the altar of a Church.
George leant over to his wife and kissed her on the cheek. “Merry Christmas, honey,” he said quietly. “Merry Christmas.”
Standing on the edge of the cliff outside, Professor Mamdouh al-Misri snapped his phone shut and placed it back in his trouser pocket.
He scanned the rocky terrain below him, from the Nile on his right to his original archaeological dig ahead of him to the south. Shaking his head slowly, he turned round and made his way back to the trench, where the Al Jazeera photographer was impatiently waiting to be escorted down the steps.
On the other side of the trench, the three engineers stood together, watching him carefully. At their feet stood the large black case that had been taken with him down the steps.
The Professor pulled his eyes away from them and jumped down into the trench, landing next to the photographer with a thud.
“OK, come and see what all the fuss is about,” he said in Arabic, ushering the photographer into the hole. He shot a nervous look over his shoulder at the engineers, whose steely gaze followed him as he descended once more.
Chapter 11
Captain Yves Montreaux had always dreamed of going to Mars. Born in California to a French-Canadian father and American mother, his first vivid memory was of an image beamed back from NASA’s Spirit mission, in 2004. He had been barely six years old at the time and his mother, a US Navy pilot, had shown him the picture on the Internet early one morning before school. Even now, forty-one years later, he still dreamt of being there, with the Spirit rover, as it edged its way carefully out of its landing craft and onto Martian soil for the first time.
He pulled himself over to the small circle of Plexiglas, his window onto the eternal sunshine of interplanetary space.
A month earlier, the view had been dominated by aluminium cranes, connectors and cylindrical pods in orbit around Earth; the precision-built chaos that was the International Space Station. After half a century of operation, most of the original modules were now lost in a maze of metal and foil, somewhere towards the centre of the station. It had taken all of those fifty years to get to its current state, and was still exceeding the expectations of its original designers, now mostly dead.
Looking out of the window now, Montreaux had a front row seat to the stars. There was no horizon, no up, no down; a confusing state of affairs at first, but it was not something that he had simply been thrown into from one day to the next. For the past eight weeks, as the spaceship had gradually accelerated beyond the pull of the Moon and into interplanetary space, he had watched as his home planet had grown smaller, until now he was able to hold his thumb up and completely block it out. Within another week it would be but a bright star, and it would be time to look the other way, towards Mars.
There was a knock on the plastic door-frame of his quarters.
“Come in,” he said without turning.
Despite the lack of actual doors to separate them, the ingrained protocol was hard to shake.
“Sir,” the female voice said. “We are in the Lounge.”
Montreaux smiled to himself as he held on to the handle on the wall and slowly pivoted round to see her. Her jet black hair was pulled into a tight ponytail, revealing her pretty, pale face. “Su Ning,” he said. “We have known each other for over a year, trained together for months, and lived in the same metal tube for over two months, haven’t we?” His voice was kind, soft.
She smiled. “And I still call you Sir,” she confirmed.
Montreaux’s Chinese was hopeless. A few basic commands and greetings were all he had managed to master since meeting Lieutenant Shi Su Ning the previous summer. For this reason it amazed and humbled him that she could not only speak perfect English, but do so with barely a hint of an accent. That she had also never lived outside of Beijing in her entire life only made the feat more incredible to him.
“I’ll join you shortly, I have to quickly finish this log entry first,” he explained.
She left, and the Captain returned to the window and gathered his thoughts. “Captain Daniil Marchenko, Russian cosmonaut, Second in Command of the Clarke, is twenty-nine years old today.” He paused and repeated the number to himself under his breath; it seemed impossibly young. “We are having a small celebration in the Lounge this evening.” He focused on the small brilliant disc that was Earth, its continents no longer distinguishable, and smiled. “Next log entry in one sol. Stop recording.” The last two words were said more loudly in a monotonous voice. He was rewarded with an audible confirm
ation from his computer.
The Clarke’s crew had been working to the Martian day, twenty-four hours and thirty-nine minutes, for over a year, and were by now completely adjusted to it. As soon as they had been accepted for the mission training, they had all been given new wristwatches, and their computers had been updated with new software to add the extra minutes into each day. The easy part of the transition had been to start referring to a day as a sol; the hardest part was to turn up to work nearly three quarters of an hour later every ‘morning’. Within two weeks they were working at night instead of during the day, and it was two months before Montreaux learnt to stop looking towards the Sun for guidance.
While on Earth this had been a chore, in space it was much easier due to the lack of natural daytime and night time. Space made it more natural to fall asleep during what their watches told them was the Martian night. The Clarke was designed to simulate the cycle of the Martian sol by providing ambient light at pre-programmed times, in perfect coordination with the planet itself based on the time zone of their projected landing site.
Looking at his watch now, Montreaux knew that there were barely two hours of sol-light left.
Chapter 12
As Montreaux entered the Lounge, he saw Captain Daniil Marchenko sitting next to Su Ning on the sofa. He had a huge grin on his face as he donned his birthday hat. His head was completely shaven, and the hat slipped down to rest on his brow, partially blocking his sight.
“Wait, Danny!” Su Ning laughed as she lifted the paper hat off and crimped the back to make it smaller. “That’s better!” she placed it back on his head, ensuring it fitted perfectly.
“Thank you Su Ning, I will bring you my suit to fix in the morning.” He laughed as he avoided Su Ning’s playful dig at his ribs before reaching for his drink. Placing the straw in his mouth he pressed down on the bag’s contents until it was empty.
