Excavation

“But what is it?” Joan asked.

He held up that irritating finger again. “Let me try one more thing.” Taking another sample cube of the soft metal, he squeezed it like a lump of clay. “Has it ever completely solidified?”

Joan shook her head. “No. I even tried freezing it, but it remained malleable.”

Dale swung on his seat. “Professor Conklin, could you pass me one of the magnets’ insulating sleeves?”

Henry had been wrapping the last of the heavy magnets in a copper-impregnated cloth. He undid his work and passed the wrap to Dale.

“The sleeve blocks the magnet’s effects… so I don’t accidentally damage some expensive electronics in passing. It shields almost all forms of radiation.”

Henry began to get an inkling of the metal expert’s plan.

Dale took the gold cube and wrapped it in the black cloth. Once it was totally shielded, he placed the shrouded cube back on the table. He then took a chisel and hammer from his case. Positioning the chisel’s edge on the cube, he struck the tool a resounding blow with the mallet. A muffled clang was the only response. The cube resisted the chisel.

Quickly unwrapping the cube, Dale revealed the unblemished surface. He took the chisel again, and only using the force of his thumb, he drove it through the exposed cube. He explained these results. “All around us is low ambient radiation. It’s always present—various local radio waves, electromagnetic pulses from the building’s wiring, even solar radiation. This substance uses them all! That’s why it remains semisolid. Even these trace energies weaken its solidity.”

“But I don’t understand,” Joan said. “What type of metal or amalgam could do this?”

“Nothing that I’ve ever seen or heard about.” Dale suddenly stood up, carefully lifting the soft cube in steel tongs. He nodded toward the neighboring room, to the electron-microscope suite. “But there’s a way to investigate closer.”

Henry soon found himself trailing the other two into the next room. He carried both the beaker of the strange metal, now sealed with a rubber stopper and the mummy’s Dominican crucifix. Already, Joan and Dale were bowed head-to-head as they prepared a shaving of the metal to use in the electron microscope.

Henry crossed to a small table off to the side, setting down the beaker and the cross. The large electron microscope occupied the rear of the room. Its towering optical column reached for the room’s ceiling. A bank of three monitors was crowded before it.

Joan warmed up the unit, flipping switches and quickly checking baseline calibrations. Dale finished prepping the sample, locking it into place on the scanner’s tray. He gave Joan a thumbs-up.

Henry, all but forgotten, scowled and sank to a stool by his table.

Across the small room, the optical column began to hum and click as its tungsten hairpin gun bombarded the sample with an electron beam. Dale hurried to Joan’s side before the monitors. The pathologist jabbed at a keyboard, and the screens bloomed with a grey glow in the dim room. The words STAND BY could be seen even from where Henry sat.

“How long will this take?” Henry called over.

Joan glanced at him, her face a mixture of surprise and embarrassment. She must have finally realized how little she had acknowledged him. “Not long. The EM will need about ten minutes to compile and calculate an image.” Joan offered Henry a weak, apologetic smile, then turned away.

Henry swung away himself, turning his attention back to the crucifix. He tapped its brilliant surface with a finger. After testing the unknown substance, the friar’s cross was clearly composed of the real thing. “Mere gold,” Henry muttered to himself. At least one mystery was solved, but that still left another enigma.

Grasping the crucifix, Henry flipped it over to study its back side and the rows of small scratches. What was Francisco de Almagro trying to say? Henry ran a finger along the marks. Was this some last message? If so, what was so important? As Henry fingered the cross, he felt a twinge of misgiving, similar to the one the previous night when his attempt to communicate with the camp failed. He pushed aside such irrational worries. He was being paranoid. But for the hundredth time that day, his thoughts drifted to Sam and the other students. How were they faring with the buried pyramid? Had they perhaps already discovered the answers to these puzzles?

Henry palmed the crucifix between his two hands, resting his forehead on his fingertips. So many oddities surrounded the dig. Henry sensed there was a connection, some way to bring all these strands together: mummified priests, mysterious metals, sealed crypts. But what was the connection? Henry felt the crucifix’s outline pressed into his palms. A cross of gold and a coded message. Could this be the answer?

He imagined the young friar, crouched over his cross, etching it with some sharp tool. Painstaking work while his death neared. In Henry’s hands were perhaps the last words of this man. But what did he want to say? “What was so important?” Henry whispered.

The image of the cross crystallized in Henry’s mind, turning slowly before his inner eye.

Joan suddenly gasped behind him, pulling him out of his reverie. He twisted around. She faced his direction, but her eyes were not fixed on Henry. He followed the path of her gaze to his right elbow.

The beaker rested on the tabletop where Henry had placed it. His breath caught when he saw its contents.

“Henry…?”

The beaker no longer contained a pool of the raw metal. Inside, leaning against the glass side, was a crude copy of the Dominican gold cross. Roughly cruciform in shape, the detail was blurred. The Christ figure was no more than a blunt suggestion upon its surface.

Joan and Dale moved closer.

“Did you do that?” Dale asked.

Henry glanced at the man as if he were mad. He pointed to its sealed stopper. “Are you kidding?”

As they all watched, the cross seemed to lose some of its detail. The edges became less sharp, and the figure slid from the cross to pool at the bottom of the beaker. Still, the cross itself persisted in its general shape.

Henry tried to explain, “I was just thinking about it when—”

A sharp chime rang from nearby, loud in the small room.

They all turned to see the monitors waver, then blink into greyscale images.

“Maybe we’re one step closer to an answer,” Dale announced tacitly. He stepped back toward the bank of monitors.

Henry and Joan followed. Their eyes met briefly. Henry could see the consternation and something that looked like fear in her eyes. Before he knew what he was doing, he reached out and gave her hand a quick reassuring squeeze. She acknowledged the gesture by moving a few inches closer to Henry’s side.