Artifact

by Gregory Benford

  Sergio Zaninetti, a leading theoretical physicist, fully shared the assumption of intrinsic Harvard superiority, conveying it nonverbally, with Italian shrugs, lofting eyebrows, twists of his full lips, and eyes which bulged in bemused surprise.

  “You have abandoned your earlier work on manifolds?” Zaninetti asked incredulously.

  “I got interested in some problems in solid state physics, simultaneous integral equations—”

  “But your thesis, it was important!”

  “So’s this,” John said defensively.

  “You should have remained with the pure, the beautiful work,” Zaninetti pronounced, puffing energetically on Nazionale cigarettes, which he had shipped to him from Italy. He was a short, barrel-chested man with large tufts of blond hair escaping around his shirt collar. His thin, sallow face, described as “artistic” in a HighTech Magazine profile, never rested. When John replied that he wished to broaden his area of knowledge, Zaninetti wrenched his mouth around in dismay and barked, “A young man, he must concentrate. Nothing venture, nothing have!”

  He then lectured John for five minutes on the duty of mathematicians—the lovers of the pure, the ideal, the eternal—to use their best years in nonapplied pursuits. John shrugged and endured Zaninetti’s emphatic, accusing voice. It was true enough that mathematics, like music, was a young man’s game. The ability to play with abstracts and find new twists, to see deeply into entities which existed only in the mind—this eroded quickly, leaving a gathering inventory of skills, but less of the sparkling zest that once came effortlessly.

  John knew this, every mathematician did, but he also had a pestering curiosity about applied mathematics and, lately, physics itself. There came a time in every young scientist’s life when he knew with heavy certainty that he was not the next Einstein, that in fact he would probably not win the Nobel or even one of the lesser prizes, never discover a startling new truth or unveil a fundamental corner of the universe. With that depressing realization there came a compensating freedom. You knew that to follow your nose, to work on what most delighted your mind, would not deprive you of the great opportunity to stand the world on its ear. That was gone. Gone. John had passed that point years before, had gotten thoroughly and systematically drunk for a weekend, and now was becoming irritated at Zaninetti’s blandly arrogant lecture.

  Answering it would have simply led to more of the same. Instead, he deepened his Southern accent and made a few small jokes, relying on the long, rounded tones to ease the situation. It was a handy maneuver among these people, who inevitably assumed the possessor of such an accent was surely a little thick-headed. He slipped away to get a drink and encountered Claire. “Setting your social pitons higher?” she inquired sardonically.

  “You mean him? More of a molehill.”

  “I saw you talking to him, and decided it was best to keep my distance.” To his questioning look she replied, “That’s the famous Zaninetti the womanizer, isn’t he?”

  “To me he’s just your everyday brilliant theoretical physicist. I didn’t know his repute extended to BU and archeology.”

  “Oh, he’s a wonder. There was a Lampoon piece last year, a parody of final exams. One question was:

  “‘Nasty, brutish and short,’ Thomas Hobbes’s famous words, describe

  (a) The life of man in the state of nature;

  (b) Sergio Zaninetti;

  (c) Sex with Sergio Zaninetti.”

  John filed the story away for a letter to his parents, and felt a bit better. By this time what he called the Cocktail Party Instability had developed. He had noted that the noise in a room rose as the square of the number of people in it, as each new loud pair forced the others to try to talk over them. It saturated only as people were driven from the room. He anticipated this, shaking off Claire’s invitation to meet some archeologists, and stepping out onto a freezing balcony. It looked down on a street that might have come from the early nineteenth century but for the jam of parked cars.

  He liked this feeling of slipping effortlessly back into the past. There was nothing like it in Texas, and though Georgia had been one of the original thirteen states, there were few substantial buildings to show it. He felt the torrent of talk behind him as a force, pressing against the glass doors at his back. His mind turned again to the artifact—it was seldom far away now, hovering like a presence—and he let himself realize the suspicions that had been building in him. The thing was not going to fit into the history of Mycenae, ever, unless Abe’s measurements were dead wrong. The incident with the magnetic fields had underlined a central fact: they could assume nothing about the piece was commonplace. He would have to persuade Abe to check all sorts of physical properties.

  The door clicked open behind him. Claire said, “I thought I saw you duck out.”

  “Wanted to think.” He leaned on the railing. “You could drown in Mozart in there.”

  “I was talking to a field archeologist who’s visiting Harvard this year. He asked me about our artifact.”

  “Oh?”

  “He says he heard it from someone at Brown.”

  He straightened. “LeBailly is talking.”

  “Yes.” Her face was tight, nervous. Claire Number One.

  “How much time until Hampton gets wind of it?”

  “Very, very little.” She made a crooked smile.

  CHAPTER

  Seven

  The next morning was tense. They all braced for the coming storm and worked quickly, earnestly, to make as many measurements of the cube as possible. John had duties in his office, but promised to return in the afternoon.

  Claire puffed on a cigarette with her coffee, thinking of strategies for dealing with Hampton. How she handled the inevitable revelation would be crucial. The Old Boy Network still worked in archeology, and despite the steady progress women had made since the 1980s, the humanistic areas of the university pyramid were notoriously the slowest to change. She had never been skillful at handling the old style men. Professions would be egalitarian only when women like her—comparatively guileless, a bit crusty, unwilling (or, she admitted ruefully, unable) to use sexually tinged strategies for advancement—could pursue a career without becoming neurotic and defensive.

  Three years ago, at age twenty-five, she had gone through a protracted soul-searching and had more or less written off her chances at a conventional life. She certainly had no great desire for children, though there were still moments which could touch off a bout of tearful reflection, or even depression. A melancholy song on the radio, or a gushy letter on cream paper from a securely wedded old Radcliffe friend, could do it. Things weren’t fair, dammit….

  It particularly wasn’t fair that when she should be rehearsing confrontations with Hampton, she drifted off into fuzzy ruminations about her life. She gave up, stubbed out her cigarette, and went to help Abe.

  She had spoken to him earlier in the morning, revealing to him that she had brought the artifact out of Greece without the proper clearance, but he seemed unconcerned. To her surprise, he had brushed such formalities off as mere paperwork, and gone back to his ’scopes.

  Abe had thought of a new method to explore the cube’s interior. It involved an independent source of gamma-rays, which Abe could project through the plug. His hope was that some of the gammas would be absorbed by the dense parts of the core. The rest would pass through the less dense portions and exit from the amber cone. He could detect those and build up a projected picture of the interior.

  It worked. However, the image was mottled and blurred. It showed the same square they had seen before by looking at the emitted gammas. The central dot remained as well. This meant that the source was dense, which was no surprise. The question was, how dense? Abe handled this by turning up the gamma-ray energy. The stronger the rays, the better they could penetrate.

  Claire and Abe worked through the morning, with Claire simply following instructions amid the tangle of cables and humming apparatus. The square formation blurred as Abe
increased the gamma-ray energy.

  They sent out for food from the Italian bar at Albany and Cross Streets. Abe increased the energy again, then again, and finally to the extreme end of the device’s range. The central dot remained unchanged.

  “That’s a hell of a lot of energy we put through there,” Abe said, shaking his head. “But the center keeps absorbing it.”

  “Doesn’t that tell us how long it is?” Claire asked.

  “If we had a model geometry, most certainly,” Abe said. “See how the size of the dot never varies? A sharp profile. That means we’re looking at a rod, I’d guess, end on. From the flux of gammas I’m using…” He scribbled numbers on a pad.

  “Supposing it’s made of iron, say,” Claire put in. “That would account for John’s magnetic field.”

  “Iron…okay…” Abe shook his head, checked his numbers.

  Claire waited next to the screen where the dot swam, a blue cipher on a circle of green. The circle was the image of the cone of gamma-rays coming from beyond the cube, through the plug at the back. The cube rock, which absorbed the gamma emission totally, formed a blue enclosing field around the circle.

  She felt again the strangeness of this fusion, an ancient artifact probed by the latest technology. Such devices, far from the techniques still taught by the old style archeologists, were now the primary source of change in the field—more important, in fact, than any of the new theories of ancient immigration patterns or social organization. In Egypt a complex net of acoustic detectors had listened to the echoes of sonic waves and found tombs buried so deeply that even millennia of grave robbers had missed. In China a shredded manuscript had been restored in a weekend by computer analysis of the billions of possible combinations, a job which would once have been an entire five-year thesis.

  Abe shook his head again. “Something wrong. This says you’d need a rod of iron over two meters long in there. That’s…”

  “Impossible,” Claire finished for him. “The cube itself is smaller than that.”

  Abe sighed. “I’ll have to go over the whole rig. I’ve fouled the calibration somewhere.”

  “Could the center be a lot better at absorbing gammas than iron?”

  “I don’t see how. You’d need something truly dense.”

  “Like rock?”

  “You cannot make a rod of rock. It will snap.”

  “What’s better?”

  “Nothing plausible. This rod, or whatever it is, must be also a gamma-ray emitter. Remember? So strong an emitter that I could not see any detail in that little dot.”

  “And we’ve got to explain John’s magnetic fields, too.”

  “With this ‘rod’?” Abe laughed sourly. “The Mycenaeans, did they know how to make such a rod?”

  Claire shook her head. “I doubt it.”

  “Then we cannot make sense of this thing. We must go inside.”

  Claire clenched her teeth. “Not yet.”

  “This thing is—is impossible! We cannot understand—”

  John’s excited voice called, “Hey there!” He came trotting toward them from across the bay. “Abe! I just saw Hampton down in your office, asking—” He saw Claire. “Looks like you were right.”

  Claire bit her lip and felt the old sinking sensation, the descent into a cloud of wordless bleak anxiety.

  “I suppose you all understand,” Donald Hampton said gravely, “the seriousness of this.”

  He stood with hands judicially clasped behind his back, studying the artifact. His three-piece suit of blue wool was spattered by the rain storm that had settled on Boston like a sodden pall. His face was red from the chill outside and he puffed, the knot of his plaid tie bulging. There had been only a few minutes’ wait until he appeared, scowling distrustfully at the messy array of diagnostics.

  “This is an incredible breach of elementary professional standards. I can perhaps understand the motives of Dr. Bishop and Dr. Sprangle, but you, Claire, a trained archeologist—!”

  John said mildly, “You haven’t heard what led to this.”

  “I needn’t know every detail.” Hampton scowled at John. “Professor Kontos was right about you, that is all I need to know. And to think how you deceived our committee hearing, sitting there and lying—”

  “I never lied,” John said with sudden sharpness. “It’s not my fault if you don’t ask the right questions.”

  Hampton snorted. “So you hold that theft is permissible if undetected?”

  “We got it back from where Kontos had hidden it,” John said.

  “I am sure Professor Kontos had no intention of doing anything—”

  “He stuck it back in a hole, to keep it from being shipped with the rest of the gear, to Athens,” John said. “He was going to claim it as his own discovery.”

  “Fantastic,” Hampton said dismissively. “How could he? You and Claire had evidence, pictures.”

  “Only because Claire went back to get her notes and records. It was while we were there, in the tomb, that we saw what Kontos was trying.”

  “I simply do not believe such a wild, ad hoc story. If it was true, why did you not bring it up during our committee hearing?”

  Claire said, “You wouldn’t have bought it.”

  Hampton stared at Claire, then John, then Abe. “You should all be ashamed at such a deception. Your failure to argue your case merely underlines your duplicity. Abe, you in particular should know this undermines all that our joint program stands for.”

  “I did the research. I didn’t ask about the details of getting it here.”

  Hampton reddened further. “What you call details concerns the theft of Greek national treasure.”

  Abe said calmly, “From what I’ve heard, there were mitigating circumstances.”

  “I am afraid you understand nothing of the international standards of respect for a nation’s past, for its heritage—”

  “I am a scientist,” Abe said simply. “I have research to do, I do it. This is one fabulous artifact, Donald.”

  Hampton sniffed. Claire realized that since he had come into the bay he had not taken a close look at the cube. He saw it as a pawn in a larger game. His curiosity as an archeologist had atrophied. “I can see it is unusual,” Hampton declared. “A beautiful amber, yes. Fine artwork. But the exact nature of the piece is immaterial; we deal with principle.”

  Claire had deliberately said little since his appearance. Now she murmured, “I want a hearing to make my case.”

  Hampton chuckled sardonically, “Oh, a hearing you shall get. Rest assured, young lady, rest assured. Meanwhile—” He turned to Abe. “I want this artifact placed in the care of Boston University immediately. We shall prepare it for shipping back to Dr. Kontos.”

  Abe smiled thinly. “Not until I’m finished with it.”

  “You have no right—”

  “It’s a piece that demands close study. It was brought here by one of your own faculty.”

  “Illegally!”

  “My position is that your internal disputes have nothing to do with the MIT-BU cooperation on archeological physics. Nothing.”

  “I will get the—the police.”

  Abe’s white eyebrows arched. “Come now. They wish not to get into something like this.”

  “We shall see.”

  “No we won’t. Our administrations will have to battle it out. You know how much time that takes, Donald.”

  Abe put his hands in his pockets and beamed at Hampton. Claire had never seen the mild experimentalist in this persona, and she suddenly understood how he ran his department with such studied ease. He simply could not be cowed, particularly not by blustering.

  “You are being unreasonable.”

  “This artifact has properties that simply do not associate with what we know of Mycenae, Donald. I can show you gamma-ray and other data that cry out for explanation.”

  “You expect me to lend my expertise to this?”

  “We thought you might—”

  “
I cannot believe you are taking this attitude in defense of a woman who has lied, stolen—”

  “You callin’ her a liar?” John asked threateningly. He stepped closer to Hampton and squared himself. Claire’s eyes widened.

  Hampton stared in open disbelief at John. “You are threatening me?”

  John reached out and gave the knot of Hampton’s regimental tie a jab with his index finger. “You bet.”

  “This is incredible.”

  Abe stepped forward. “I think you’d better leave, Donald. This will be settled by the administration.”

  Hampton looked mystified. “But you are in the wrong. You have taken a precious—”

  “Just go, Donald.”

  Hampton’s face clouded. “You are mistaken if you believe you can simply hide behind your university. Your activities cannot withstand scrutiny. This is an international matter.”

  “Go, Donald.”

  “All right, I will. But as soon as I reach my office I shall call the proper authorities in Athens. I have not been able to reach Dr. Kontos recently, but I know he will be horrified. And he will have other, more drastic means, I assure you.”

  Hampton glared at each of them in turn, as if memorizing their features, and then turned and stalked off.

  Claire sat down. Beneath her blue jump suit she was perspiring heavily, yet her brow felt cool. She tried to think.

  “It’s over,” John said quietly in her ear. He bent over and kissed her cheek. “C’mon, don’t go into Claire Number One on me.”

  She managed a broken smile. “I—to have it finally happen, I’ve thought about it so much….”

  “I know.”

  “He was exactly how I imagined, and he’s going to call Kontos….”

  “Forget him. Abe handled it just right.”