For on close inspection, the Backscatter X-ray showed the Stickman book, and right next to it, with barely a gap between, was a second identically-sized tome. The photo from inside the Library, however, showed only one, lonesome book.
Not only had there been a cover-up, but it had happened right in front of her eyes.
Chapter 39
Gail subconsciously adjusted her backrest and fastened her seatbelt. She raised her hand and asked the nearby steward for a glass of water. Pulling her tablet computer from her bag, she hit the ‘On’ switch and waited for the welcome screen before using a stylus to enter her access signature.
A sudden burst of computer graphics brought her to her desktop, where all of her useful applications were waiting to be used. It was the same workspace as at her desk, and on the video wall at home, with all the applications and data synchronising in real time with a farm of University servers, probably deep inside a hill somewhere Gail had never even been. The tablet was never truly ‘off’ unless its battery was drained, and was constantly performing quick-syncs whenever it had access to WiFi.
The benefits to her and fieldworkers everywhere were enormous. What she saw on her tablet was identical to what she saw on her desktop machine in her office. No matter where she was, she could see the same files, applications and settings, saving her valuable time. In the field, it meant that she could input data and start analysing it on site, and collaborating with colleagues hundreds of miles away, before continuing at her leisure either at home, in the office, or as she was doing at that very moment, on the plane to Cairo. And if ever she lost her tablet, logging on to any new device as herself would synchronise everything once more
She tapped the screen to access her emails and scrolled down the list until she came to a recent one from George.
There was no text, just a picture of a cartoon rabbit looking sheepish. She smiled and checked the time of the maiclass="underline" half past three in the afternoon. He must have sent it from his phone, as there was no way he could be home yet after having dropped her off at the airport. She saved the picture to her personal files and closed the message.
George didn’t pretend to know much about Egyptology, but he wasn’t an idiot either. He had known enough to understand that the news from Mars could be both good and bad. Knowing that he would always be with her and supporting her touched her deeply.
When he had learnt about the call from Mamdouh, he had been genuinely shocked. Gail and George had spent numerous holidays in Egypt over the past ten years, and had grown very close to the Professor. That he had never mentioned the missing book, even during one of his after-dinner ramblings, was surprising to say the least, as a great deal of their conversations had tended to centre on Amarna and the Library.
Gail had had time to think about things more now, and on reflection thought that she understood the situation better. In fact, as she deleted a selection of junk emails, she could even accept why the Professor would have hidden the book.
If it had shown any kind of link with Mars, then an unqualified archaeologist discovering it in the desert with no prior study of the area would seem too good to be true: the scientific community would never have believed that the book was genuine. Removing it ensured that the Library as a whole would be accepted without question.
But it did not all fit, she thought as she fired off a quick reply to a student, wondering if the lecture notes from that morning’s interrupted lecture would be available on her website. ‘Yes ’ was all she had written. Not everything made sense to her. For starters, removing one book on the spur of the moment couldn’t ensure that no similar evidence was present elsewhere in the Library. No one would have been able to check the thousands of books before she entered. And if you’re going to remove a book, then why not the one with the Amarna Stickman engraved on its cover? And why, when all the other books related to politics, economics and demographics, was her book so different, its content almost biblical in comparison? Surely, from what had been seen so far in the Library, her book was unique; but not enough to be removed?
Most confusing of all, though, was the fact that Mamdouh couldn’t have removed a book from the Library himself. Gail was the first to enter after the engineers, and the book had been sitting on the plinth undisturbed.
How had he made the swap?
She closed the email program and sipped her water. Her emotions had given way to curiosity, and concerns over the future of her career had been replaced by a number of questions she was eager to put to her friend in Cairo. Unfortunately, since their brief phone conversation, he’d not answered any of her calls or emails. Maybe he’s fending off questions left, right and centre, too, she thought.
She brought another application to the front of the desktop. A simple window, not unlike a word-processor, filled her screen. She dragged George’s sheepish rabbit picture over and dropped it in, then tapped a button on the application toolbar. A simple dialogue popped up asking her to enter her keyword.
She smiled to herself and typed bunny. A progress bar briefly worked its way along the bottom of the picture, and then a message emerged:
Good Luck Bunny, always with you. Love George xxx
The application she was using had been written by George as a Christmas present for her several years earlier. At first, she had believed it to be a simple viewer for all of her scanned pages of books from the Library. She had thanked him, but had secretly been a little disappointed that the fruit of his labours – three months of programming in the evenings after work – had produced a simple program she could have obtained for free from the Internet.
George had said nothing more of it.
The Christmas holidays had been over for nearly a month before Gail actually used the program he had made. She had uploaded her scanned images, and had been idly flipping through them when she noticed the strange icon along the toolbar. She had clicked it, only to be faced with an error: Please select glyph(s) for translation. Her heart had literally left her chest.
George had not simply made a viewer for her Egyptian texts, he had made a tool that helped her translate them. She grinned to herself as she remembered how she had thanked him that evening for his Christmas present.
Closing the message and the picture, she dragged another file into the application and a series of tiny rectangles filled the screen, as if someone had ripped the pages from a book and laid them out in rows on a grey background. She tapped the first page and zoomed in to the wooden cover of the book from the Library plinth, the Stickman book as it had become known. The engraved Stickman looked so real she felt she could touch it. Memories of the dry atmosphere of the Library came flooding back to her, memories of the smell of old leather and wood.
The application let you select a hieroglyph or group of hieroglyphs, such as a cartouche, and add custom text, which would serve as the translation. The application would then run through all of the text and suggest the same translation for any matching symbols. It used a simple bitmap comparison algorithm with some additional routines for cleaning up background noise, so it couldn’t do anything too sophisticated. A common problem was that Egyptian hieroglyphs should be read in the direction in which the characters were facing. This meant that the bitmap analysis would correctly match two sets of glyphs reading from left to right, but would fail to recognise that a third set, reading from top to bottom, was also a match. It was a minor gripe, which George had promised to look into at some point in the future.
Once the analysis was complete, tooltips would appear all over the text. An overview pane would also give a summary of all the available translations in any given selection. By selecting multiple tooltips, it was possible to add further contextual translations too, giving a second or even third meaning to common groups when used in conjunction with each other. Over time, the more she used it the more complete the dictionary became, and while Gail’s own grasp of ancient Egyptian had improved to the extent of near-fluency over the past ten years, George’s application had evolved such a sophisticated dictionary that it became the envy of her peers. One of her outstanding actions in the Faculty was to wrestle the source code from her husband and hand it over to the Department of Computer Science, so that they could enhance its functionality and distribute it more widely. But before he would let her do that, he had to remove his ‘love-letter’ system, which was what allowed them to hide words in pictures, only to be revealed when a keyword was input.