“What in the world are you talking about?“ said Robert.
“Of what do I speak? Of a great day… but yet, more of a little thing that works the miracle. A’athreh ib dafra.”
“Look here, you have been very gracious, but we simply must be on our way.”
“Forgive me,” Khalid held up a hand. “A’athreh ib dafra. It is a saying among Arabs. It means: with a stumble and a kick. Such is the way of it. Small things, a stumble and a kick, but the harvest is great. Still, I am sorry for you, I will weep for you—you must believe me. Tonight I will pray to Allah that he will take you in the palm of his hand, and preserve your lives. Yes, you must go now. No one will be the wiser. Take that trail and you will find a barn behind this farm. There you may rest until the time of recovery. And may Allah go with you through all the days that remain.”
What was he talking about? Nordhausen kept running Khalid’s words over and over in his mind. He seemed possessed, like a man enraptured, but buoyant, alive, exhilarated by the discovery that so baffled the professor now. The lines of the script still burned in his recollection. What did they mean?
He looked at Maeve, hoping to find support for his confused state of mind in her unshakable logic. If anyone would know what to make of this, it would be Maeve. She was watching Khalid go now, hastening away, back toward the site of the discovery. Already the word had begun to spread that something extraordinary had been unearthed at the base of the wall. The French soldiers could be heard shouting in the distance, and Nordhausen, with the history in mind, knew that they would be dragging the Rosetta Stone to the tent of General Menou, where the slab would be carefully cleaned and examined before being transported, by river barge, to Cairo.
He remembered how Maeve first wagered that, if the stone were intact, the trip from Rosetta to Cairo would have been the ideal time for someone to inflict the damage. But that whole line of argument was meaningless now. The original Rosetta Stone inscribed the same message in each of three different languages. This stone held only one language—it was completely covered by the ancient hieroglyphics… no Demotic… No Greek… It was completely useless as a key to translating the glyphs… completely useless…
His attention was shaken when Maeve suddenly swayed, as though overcome by the heat, and fell. Robert stooped to help but, as he did so, an unaccountable chill shook his frame. He knew at once why he was becoming so light headed. Maeve looked at him, her features frozen with an expression of panic. He reached for her hand as the haze of a blue frost materialized about them, transforming into the shimmer of a multi-colored aurora. There was a sensation of falling, and he felt Maeve’s hand tighten. The retraction scheme was kicking in! Kelly and Paul were pulling them back through the Arch at Lawrence Berkeley Labs. But why now? They still had a hours to wait—unless something had moved his friends to retrieve them at once, with an untimely urgency that added yet another chill to the moment at hand.
21
“I just don’t see how this could be possible,” said Paul. “The haze in trying to alter the stone prior to its discovery would be intense. How would they know where to look for the damn thing?”
It was four o’clock on a gray September afternoon in Berkeley, and the growl of the generator turbines had finally subsided as the system reduced power. Paul was still keeping the Arch active on standby, with the generators running at 70% until the retraction was complete. Then he would take them down to 50%, just enough to maintain the electromagnetic field the Arch would create—enough to sustain the thin, protective boundaries of the Nexus Point it welled in the flow of Time.
The four primary team members were assembled in the lab. Nordhausen had taken off his wig and was still scratching the back of his head. Maeve had recovered from the retraction shift, a bit nauseous and disoriented, but feeling better by the minute. Kelly had a pot of hot coffee at the ready, and he was stirring a bit of cream into Maeve’s cup, hovering over her where she sat by the history console looking pale and tired.
After the elation of their safe return, and hugs all around, Robert was quick to break the news. He began talking about the discovery of the stone, trying to describe the new artifact that had been unearthed as best he could. He soon found words inadequate to the task and dragged Paul over to the Touchstone RAM bank where he retrieved an image of the stone from the data files and printed it out. Then he began to draw, carefully sketching from the his memory of the new find.
He presented Paul the drawing. “There,” he said, “Except all the Demotic and Greek in the image was covered with ancient hieroglyphics!” The two men hunched over the drawing, as if the answer to the dilemma might be found in the picture.
“You’re certain it looked like this?”
“Absolutely! Maeve will vouch for that.”
“How could this be?” Paul was still trying to see a clear line of reasoning to explain the change. “They would have to go back to the time the stone was originally made and then convince the makers to alter it by leaving out the Demotic and Greek script. Do you realize how difficult that intervention would be?”
“Yes,” said Nordhausen. “It was an established convention to display these proclamations in all three languages. The discovery of similar stones at Bubastis confirmed that in 2004. Perhaps they replaced the stone with another,” he suggested. “They knew exactly where to find it. Suppose they simply went back on some lonesome night and dug the original stone up.”
“You say it was twice the size of the original? That would mean they had to bring in an artifact weighing fifteen hundred kilos! I don’t think so. And what would they do with the original? You can’t transport an object of that size easily in the physical world, let alone through Time.”
”Why not? I went back and retrieved Lawrence’s manuscript of the Seven Pillars.” Robert caught himself too late. Paul looked at him, a dumbfounded expression on his face.
Maeve was suddenly making a remarkable recovery from the stupor of her Time shift. “You did what?” She was up off her chair, parasol still in hand, and advancing on the professor with bad intent. “When did this happen?”
Nordhausen looked from Paul to Maeve as she advanced, edging behind Paul’s chair to seek protection. “Alright… alright now. If you must know everything, I did it on that mission last July. You know, when I went to visit Reading Station. I wasn’t just sightseeing as I told you.”
“Damn you, Robert!” Maeve took a quick swipe at him with her parasol, scoring a glancing blow on his shoulder. He ducked behind Paul, flustered and embarrassed.