Maltby looked at the lump of clay. He said mildly, “Such a potent magician must have put a curse on his tomb in case anybody should rob it. Don’t tell me he omitted that!”
Dick grinned again, and then said in sudden half-seriousness: “Speaking of curses, an odd thing happened in Alexandria while I was there. The very pretty daughter of one of the richest men in town vanished from her bed, with two maid-servants watching her. She vanished in a pool of quicksilver. They screamed like all hell, and all her father did was throw dust on his head and die of a broken heart. That one made the newspapers, but the old sheykhs of Alexandria weren’t surprised. They said it happens occasionally and has since time began. The funny thing is that the quicksilver business—”
He stopped and looked startled. Maltby said: “That King of Cyprus you mentioned?”
“Y-Yes,” said Dick blankly. “I never thought of the connection before. Odd, isn’t it?”
Maltby said deliberately, “I know a chap who is digging into criminology. He’s a queer duck. He has all the money in the world, but he’s working like a beaver to set himself up as a consulting criminologist. And he says that he can’t understand some records he’s found. It seems there are several records of things disappearing in pools of quicksilver right here in New York. It doesn’t make sense, and nobody’s ever believed it. I must tell him about the King of Cyprus.”
Dick blinked.
“That’s crazy! In the Middle East quicksilver is considered more or less magical—”
“Mirages on a motor-road look like quicksilver,” observed Maltby. “I’ve seen a film of gas, formed in an electrolyte, look like it too... Now I’m going to set up my apparatus for your hunk of clay.”
He got out his gadgets. He had devised this particular set-up to work out his corrosion-reversal process for buildings. It was laboratory-size only, but it would serve for the clay. There was a plastic box with electrodes at its sides. He packed the relic into the box, filling the unoccupied space with more clay. A high-frequency oscillator came into play.
“There’s no metal in this stuff to serve as a cathode,” he observed, “and it’s just as well. I’m setting up a standing wave in the middle of this clay mass. There’ll be a constant potential difference between the middle and the outer surface. When the clay’s moistened there’ll be a steady flow of plating-out current from every direction toward the center. Presently some particle of metal will establish itself. Maybe several. I may have a dozen centers of potential—they’ll establish themselves wherever the oxide is densest. Then we’ll see what happens. I think the result should be pretty good, but it’ll take time.”
“At the museum,” said Dick, “we figure on six months.”
“I estimate two weeks,” said Maltby, drily. “My current-flow depends on the ions present, not on power fed to it. I’m not feeding current in at all. It makes its own.”
He arranged a moistening solution so that the clay would gradually acquire an even moisture-content. He turned on the oscillator and brushed off his hands.
“Now we wait. Have another drink?”
“No-o,” said Dick. “Just what did you mean by that quicksilver business? It’s odd to hear a story like that in New York. I didn’t believe the one in Alexandria, though the local inhabitants did. And it’s absurd to link them with an ancient papyrus with the same yarn in it!”
“I didn’t mean a thing,” admitted Maltby. “You spoke of a girl vanishing, and quicksilver, and of a forgotten king vanishing, and quicksilver. So I remembered Sam Todd telling me about a safe that was opened only a month ago in a perfume factory, and the flasks of essential oils worth up to hundreds of dollars an ounce vanishing in as many tiny pools of quicksilver. It seemed odd, so I mentioned it. That’s all.”
“I’d like to talk to this Sam Todd,” said Dick. “I hate to be silly, but that’s too damned queer—”
Dick Blair went about his business, which was partly that of relaxation just now. He’d been through a grueling grind in Egypt, and probably had a few tropical germs in his system which it would be a good idea to get out. He gave a lecture or two, wrote a magazine article, and kept himself available for consultation if needed by the Museum staff. But mostly he rested.
He met Sam Todd and found him a kindred soul who was, at the moment, almost ready to achieve his great ambition—to become a consulting criminologist with something to offer his clients. His material on quicksilver-pool disappearances and thefts was fascinating. The list went back for over seventy-five years. The tales were so impossible that it was only rarely that they had ever reached print, and that made it the more remarkable that on at least a dozen occasions the same story was told by persons who could not have heard of the others. A famous stallion vanished and when a groom looked in his stall there were four little pools of quicksilver descending to the floor. The horse was gone. There were other quicksilver droplets scattered here and there about the straw bedding on the floor, but they vanished too. No quicksilver was found when the stall was searched afterward. The old Delmonico’s was robbed of priceless wines. The wine bottles disappeared in round and oblong pools of quicksilver, which afterwards vanished too. Only one person saw them. There was the disappearance of an obscure dancer—by no means talented—who had been said to be the prettiest girl on the New York stage that season. Her dresser, and a stage-hand called by the dresser’s shrieks, claimed that they saw quicksilver as the girl vanished. That quicksilver could not be found, either.
The only common factor in all the tales was the absence of a sequel. Not one of the vanished things, whether persons or goods, had ever been found again. No corpus delicti. No underworld boastings. Nothing.
All of this brought Dick’s curiosity to the point where it became almost an obsession. Then he met Nancy Holt. Sam Todd had employed her to do research for him; she would be part of his staff when he opened his office. He thought a great deal of her brains, but the only personal fact he had noted about her was that she used a strictly personal perfume, which she said was made from a recipe of her grandmother’s.
But Dick Blair saw her as the one girl on earth whom he could not possibly let anybody else marry. He fell hard the first time he saw her. By the third time he was sunk so completely that she knew it too. And then he had an occupation which was at once relaxing and absorbing. He got busy trying to make her fall in love with him.
Meanwhile, the electrolytic reconstruction of the object in the plastic box went on. After four days, X-rays showed half a dozen small bits of solid metal in the clay. In six they had joined, three of them to form the beginning of a round flat disk, and the others still separated at odd angles to it. In eight days they were all joined. There was an irregular disk some four inches in diameter. It had a rod projecting from one side, and there were two branches from the rod. In ten days the object was recognizable. It was a ceremonial mirror with a cruciform handle, a crux ansata, part of an Egyptian Pharoah’s royal regalia through all the years down to Alexander the Great. Its significance was that the Pharoah was monarch not only of this world, but of the Other World beyond.
The outlines of the one in the clay were still rough. It was still being re-formed by the current the standing-waves induced. Two days later the X-rays showed an odd, disk-shaped shadow that Maltby could not understand. On the fourteenth day he had still made no sense of it at all, but the X-rays indicated that all metal in the clay had been returned to its original shape. The object was as completely restored as Maltby’s apparatus could make it. He called Dick on the phone to come and uncover it, with the precautions an archaeologist would take.