Matt had finally been admitted to the inner sanctum, the holy of holies, after almost an hour touring the facility. The only part of the tour he had enjoyed was the artificial insemination of the elephant, and that had little to do with his own project. Still, it wasn't every day you saw a possible half-mammoth embryo implanted in an elephant.
The object that Christian had assured him was a broken time machine rested on a long lab table in a big room protected by a keypad-locked door. It had been set there on the table and someone with a sense of the dramatic had positioned a baby spot over it, as if it were a bit of sculpture in a museum.
Matt had been looking at it for half an hour now. He had moved all around it, he had repositioned the light several times, he had moved a bit closer and squinted at this or that detail, but he had not touched it. He hadn't been told not to touch it, the thing was his project, after all, and he would have to be allowed to do what he thought best or what was the point of hiring him in the first place? But he didn't want to rush things.
So he looked at it, and tried to think like a time machine.
FIRST there had been the frozen mammoth carcass, and that had been pretty interesting, too. Christian pulled the plastic back and showed him the frozen man, huddled up against the mammoth's flank. It was gruesome.
"Can you imagine?" Howard almost whispered it. "I wish I'd been there. Amazing enough to find the frozen man, with the mammoth! Did he shelter up against a mammoth that was already dead, or did he kill it? Or is it possible he domesticated it? But then... they see the briefcase. Frozen under ice that had to have formed ten to twenty thousand years ago."
"Or a few weeks ago," Matt said.
Christian nodded, reluctantly.
"It's a possibility I can't completely deny. Rostov knows what a hoax like that would do to his reputation, he'd have to find a new life's work, and I don't think he's ever cared about anything much except prehistoric creatures. He admitted to me that, when he saw the briefcase, his first impulse was to beat a confession out of his workers, but then he saw how scared they were. He's having horrible and wonderful thoughts right now; he knows this could destroy him if he's been swindled somehow."
"Or win him the Nobel Prize, if they had one in archaeology." "Exactly. It wasn't hard to persuade him to keep quiet about it. As for the rest of the crew"—he smiled with half his face—"some families in Nunavut are driving around in brand-new snowmobiles and Humvees."
"Or the government, so far." Christian held up crossed fingers. "My influence can only work so far in that direction. If some spook agency gets wind of this and wants it, 'in the national interest,' I don't know if I could hang on to it. I'd hire enough lawyers to gag a mammoth, of course, but this is so revolutionary..."
"You don't have to convince me. In fact, I wonder if you realize just how revolutionary it could be." Matt was wondering if anyone, anywhere, at any time, would ever grasp the revolutionary nature of this thing as well as he did. Like Howard had said, not many people were equipped to do the math.
"MAYBE we could use a specialist from a museum," Matt said, still contemplating the box. "Someone who knows how to approach the exploration of old artifacts. Things recovered from the bottom of the sea, things that will crumble if exposed to the air. Someone who knows how to remove a layer of unknown substance without damaging whatever layers may be beneath it. I don't know anything about that. I could use some advice."
"Ask Warburton to find out about that," Christian said. He was speaking to the small man with glasses who had been introduced to Matt as "Ralph, who will get you absolutely anything you need, and keep it all organized for you." Ralph reached for his cell phone and spoke quietly into it.
"I'll need a machinist, and a good computer man, naturally, one who knows where to find the right programs or write them if he has to. An engineer, a metallurgist. They'll tell you what they'll need." Matt turned away at last from the box. He shrugged.
"Howard, the truth is, you don't really need me at all for this stage of your project. I know very little about engineering, and rebuilding or duplicating this thing is a job for an engineer. A gadget man. All I can do is look over his shoulder. Then, when we maybe get an idea of what it's supposed to do, and some notion of how it's supposed to do it, maybe I can be useful uncovering the underlying theory behind the thing. But to make it, and to make it work..."
Christian thought he was seeing an attack of cold feet. He just wasn't used to dealing with a man like Matt Wright, who told the truth as he saw it most of the time, and always when it came to mathematics.
"I have confidence in you," he said. "We'll have all that you asked for in place by tomorrow morning. In the meantime, you probably want to get to your hotel suite and clean up. I imagine it's been a long day."
Matt looked down at his trout-fishing vest, realized it had been a long day, but he didn't feel tired at all. He knew there were some interesting times ahead, and he knew that could be a problem—did Christian know why Matt had been out in the middle of a lake fishing in the first place? To tackle this problem, he would have to have some insights on the order of those of Einstein when writing his theory of relativity, or Heisenberg with his uncertainty principle. He would need a new way of thinking.
IT was the following afternoon before Matt felt ready to get started.
Most of what would be needed for analysis was in place, from a complete forensic lab to a mass spectrometer to a fully equipped machine shop. Matt had his engineer, his metallurgist, his computer man, and, most important, his restoration specialist. This was Dr. Marian Carreaux, an intense, fiftyish woman stolen away from the Getty Museum. She was a suspicious woman. The device was being
kept in a sealed glove box in a helium atmosphere.
"Is this thing radioactive?" she asked.
It seemed a natural enough thing to ask. So they brought in a Geiger counter and several other
instruments. They reported only background radiation.
She cleaned it on the outside. There were scratches all over it, and on the top side three indentations that Marian said had been made by a metal object, not a stone tool. Near the handle, set
into the side, were two standard peanut lights, one red and one green.
It was the bottom that was interesting.
When the grime was cleared away they could see a deep puncture that had been sealed up with
tar. And someone had scrawled a message on the aluminum surface. Analysis revealed traces of flint in the grooves. Howard was summoned and they all looked at the writing on a television screen. It had been computer enhanced. HAD A GOOD LIFE NO REGRE There was another mark, about where the crossbar of a T would have been.
"No regrets?" Howard mused. He looked grim. "I have to say, I cannot imagine a man from our time going back to the Stone Age and having even a tolerable life, much less a good one. God, it must have been a brutal life."
"I agree. Looks like he died before he could finish the sentence."
"He wanted to send a message to someone, if he was ever found."
Matt shivered, thinking of the man from... somewhen? Writing out what had become his last testament as his fingers grew too numb to hold the flint arrowhead.
"I have no idea. What would you recommend?"
She had a lot of suggestions. By the time they were ready to open it, they were equipped to detect dozens of poisonous gases, and to collect any gas or liquid that might come out of the box. Nothing that might provide a clue as to function or origin would be allowed to get away.
Finally the moment came. Matt and Howard stood back and looked on as Marian reached into the glove box and prepared to open the time machine.
She secured it with padded clamps, then opened the first of two ordinary latches that held the top down. It squeaked as it came free, and a brownish fluid began to leak around the rubber seal.