The body was perhaps four feet tall. The legs and pelvis had been separated from the torso and whatever meat or flesh it once carried had long ago succumbed to decay. The skull was shaped like a man’s but deformed and bulbous. A pair of great empty holes that must have once contained eyes sat in the upper half of the face, with bony ridges above and a forehead that sloped radically backward.
Instead of a rib cage, the body had two broad plates that curved out from its backbone, wrapping the body and fusing together in the front, completely covering the chest cavity. Somewhat like the exoskeleton of the animal outside, with thousands of pinprick holes in the bone.
McCarter touched the fragile skull, running his finger across its smooth surface. It reminded him of a horseshoe crab he’d found washed up on the beach when he was a child.
“It was almost completely buried,” Susan told them. “I cleared most of this away. It helped me pass the time.”
“What is this?” McCarter asked.
Susan shook her head.
Danielle didn’t seem to hear. She was staring, eyes and mouth wide open. “My God,” she whispered. “I never expected … I don’t believe it. I just don’t believe it.”
CHAPTER 36
Danielle Laidlaw gazed at the malformed body lying among the rubble. She had an idea of what it might be, though it was a conclusion she still found hard to accept.
McCarter seemed to sense her feelings. “This means something to you,” he said. “Something more than it means to the rest of us.”
Words flashed into her mind—deceptions. She could tell them it was just what it appeared to be, a deformed skeleton that had been entombed in the temple for a thousand years or more, a birth defect gone horribly to the extreme. But she guessed it was more than that. And she was sick of lying.
She looked back at the skull, studying the smooth curve of the forehead. She noticed a thin line embedded within the bone, a strand of golden fiber, not much thicker than a spider’s thread. Similar strands led from each eye socket back across the top of the skull, a third strand from where the ear would have been. The bone had grown over them in places, like a tree might engulf a wire tied around it.
She was certain now, as certain as she could be, and when McCarter noticed the metallic strand and looked toward her, she knew the time for the truth had arrived.
“It does mean something more to me,” she said, finally answering McCarter.
He was staring at her, his jaw clenched. “It’s been pretty damn obvious since Kaufman and his people showed up that we were here for more than Mayan artifacts,” he said. “So is this what we came here for? Is this what everyone is so willing to kill for?”
“Take it easy, Doc,” Hawker said calmly.
“No,” Danielle said, waving him off. “It’s all right.”
She put a hand to her forehead. She felt sick.
Across from her McCarter took a deep breath. “I would like an explanation,” he said.
She nodded and spoke plainly. “I needed your help to find this place,” she said, “because we—the NRI—believed we could find a power source here, a device or piece of machinery that would be capable of creating energy through the process of cold fusion.”
McCarter’s face softened, but more, she thought, from surprise than anything else. He asked almost the exact same question Hawker had asked an hour before. “Why would you possibly expect to find something like that here?”
“Because that person,” she pointed toward the body, “whoever he or she was, brought it here.”
McCarter looked back toward the body, blinking and shaking his head as if his mind were in a fog. “I don’t mean to be deliberately thick,” he said, finally. “We’re all exhausted and not thinking clearly, but I honestly have no idea what you’re trying to tell us.”
Danielle took a deep breath. “I’m saying that if the NRI’s theory is correct, the body you’re looking at, which has been entombed here for a couple thousand years or so, was born in a different time frame, somewhere in our distant future.”
They stared at her, searching her face for the slightest hint that this was a lie, just another cover story or even some cruel joke. She offered nothing to suggest that, and McCarter turned back to the body. She could see his eyes focused on the gold filaments, probably wondering, as she was, just exactly what they were.
“You’re serious?” Susan asked.
Danielle nodded.
“Can you explain this to us?” McCarter asked, less aggressively but still clearly upset.
“I’ll try,” she said. “It’ll probably be easier to understand if I start at the beginning, two years ago, when an assistant curator at the Museum of Natural History brought the Martin’s crystals to our attention. He’d seen something in them, something he couldn’t identify, a strange haze that formed in the stone when viewed under polarized light. He insisted that the crystals were unimportant in general, hadn’t been out of the back room in as long as he could remember, but he was curious, and he was a friend of Arnold Moore, my old partner.
“So we had some people look at them and what we discovered was hard to fathom. The crystals themselves were basically quartz but they were doped with a complex substance, glowing with low-level radiation and harboring a residue of gaseous tritium in certain places.”
She looked around at the faces. “I don’t know how much any of you know about tritium, but it’s a gas that can only form in a nuclear reaction of one type or another. This suggested that the crystals had been used or exposed to a low-level nuclear reaction, one that our people could only reconcile as a form of cold fusion.”
“How did you know that it wasn’t some type of natural occurrence?” McCarter asked.
Danielle remembered asking the same question herself. “At first, we considered that a likely possibility,” she said, “though it would have required a type of phenomenon never seen before. But as we studied the crystals more closely, it became obvious that they were the result of something even harder to explain: a human factor.
“By using a scanning electron microscope and other highly precise instruments, we determined that the crystals had been purposefully grown, manufactured and designed with precise geometric lines and a series of tunnels hidden within the quartz lattice. In a sense, the tunnels were a pattern of fiber-optic channels operating on an almost molecular scale, smaller than the smallest of today’s nano-sized creations, and something we could not duplicate with today’s technology. It was honestly mind-boggling,” she added, “and because the pattern showed an intelligent, non-random design, we had to conclude that it had been created by human hands.”
She studied McCarter’s face, she could see that he was following.
“We even considered the possibility that it was a hoax,” she added, “but our investigation ruled it out. The photographs, the chain of custody, the measurements. All of it matched up. The crystals we had in our possession were the same crystals that Martin had found, photographed and brought back from the Amazon in 1926. Which begged the question: what was a primitive tribe of indigenous natives doing with such things in the middle of the Amazon, twenty years before the dawn of the nuclear age, fifty years before microelectronics and fiber optics?”
Now McCarter nodded. It seemed he could understand their curiosity.
“Without an answer, we turned our attention to the rest of Martin’s haul. We made a breakthrough when we studied the golden cradle.”
As she spoke, Danielle recalled McCarter’s sharp eyes studying the photograph of the cradle weeks before. She remembered thinking that he was instinctively looking for more.
“Do you recall the photo I showed you?” she asked.
He nodded.
“That photo covered one quarter of the underside. One panel out of four,” she said. “I have to tell you, from a normal viewing distance the artwork on the panels looks like nothing more than random decoration: dots and scratches and curving lines. But as you saw on the photo, the panel proved to be a distinct star chart. The other three panels, which I didn’t show you, were also star charts. By comparing them with astronomical data we were able to come up with possible explanations as to what location each panel represented.”