Artifact Read online

  Like now.

  Paul was sorry about the men, but that was hardly a reason for Frik to demand his immediate presence. “You brought me down here because of the missing diver?”

  “Not exactly. I need your help with these lazy bastards who are refusing to go on working.”

  “Why?”

  “You’rea damn Trini. You tell me. They were bringing up a core sample and found some strange fragments,” Frik said. “That seems to be what spooked the hell out of them. Blaine here thinks the men may believe they are fetishes—Obeah—and that if we mess with them the Obeahman will hurt us.”

  “What is it you think I can do?”

  “Get someone to dive down and see if he can find Abdul.” Frik pointed at four objects lying atop a pile of silt. “Then take those back to the lab and examine them.”

  Paul walked over to the objects and hunkered down to take a closer look. Though he was far more educated than his average countryman, he was born and bred a Trini. He knew the power of local superstitions. There was nothing he could do about the workers or about Abdul. As a scientist, a chemist, he dealt in atoms and molecules and exchanges of electrons—an unseen realm, but vastly predictable.

  Most of the time.

  But not this time.

  There was something different about the objects. He wouldn’t go so far as to say “wrong,” because that was a moral or ethical judgment, and in his world, morals or ethics didn’t apply to lumps of matter. But he had to admit, if lumps of matter could be “wrong,” these four were pretty damn close. In the eyes of many of the Trinidadians working for Frikkie, these trinkets would be a sure sign of wrongness. The Trinis—whose heritage embraced both Africa and India—were an innately superstitious group.

  He, on the other hand, was not. As far as he was concerned, what he sawwas…what he saw.

  To him, the pieces looked like the stones he’d seen embedded in Native American jewelry in the States…asymmetrical matchbox-size lumps of bicolored turquoise from the Kingman Mine in Arizona, or something very much like it.

  He picked one up. It didn’t feel like turquoise or any other kind of stone. More like a rather strange form of plastic. There was no specific design to the lumps, but they were definitely not naturally occurring shapes. These were fashioned objects, products of intelligence, though he could not guess what kind of intelligence could have made them.

  That, Paul decided, was what had spooked the workers. No one had ever seen shapes like these before, so they automatically shied away from them. As far as he was concerned, it was a typical islanders’ response to the new and different.

  He didn’t consider himself a typical islander, however, and while he couldn’t help Frik with his divers, he wanted very badly to take a closer look at these trinkets.

  3

  Where the hell is he? Paul wondered as he paced back and forth in front of Oilstar’s labs.

  Frik was late, but what else was new? The man got a charge out of keeping people on hold. He was probably having another cup of coffee and taking his own sweet time getting here just to be annoying. Even if he’d stopped in at his San Fernando corporate office building on the way from his house, he should have been here by now.

  If he was certain of nothing else, Paul was sure of one thing: once he had shown his discovery to Frik, the man would wish he hadn’t played games this particular morning.

  Not that a few minutes, even a few hours, could make a difference. It was just that Paul couldn’t wait to share his conclusions. Those “trinkets” Frik’s drillers had raised from beneath the ocean bed just might change the whole damn world.

  He gazed at the morning sky, a flawless pale blue, promising another perfect day. His lab was a squat one-story white stucco square which lay near the town of La Brea—a short way south of San Fernando on Trinidad’s west coast, with a good view of the Gulf of Paria. The sun had yet to crest the lush hills behind him, but it had reached the drilling platforms that studded the still water like ticks on a dog’s belly.

  Trinidad…Paul loved the big, bold island. It anchored the Lesser Antilles to the continental shelf of South America. Nestled into a large depression on the northeastern coast, it played footsie with Venezuela with the extended toe of its southern tip, Punta del Arenal. He was born here and, except for college and postgrad years when he was earning his Ph.D. from Harvard, had spent his life here, lost a wife and raised his daughter, Selene, here. He planned to die here—but not for some time yet, thank you.

  He inhaled the morning air. When the wind was wrong, you could smell Pitch Lake, but not today. This morning the air filtered from the northwest, clean, with a briny tang from its journey across the Gulf of Paria. Early morning was his favorite time of the day.

  Early? He rubbed his burning eyes. Early for Frik, maybe, he thought, but late for me.

  He’d been up all night, feverishly testing and retesting. The key to a true breakthrough in science was reproducibility of results. He had that now. Oh, Lord, he had that indeed. And he was dying to showsomeone .

  But not just anyone. He had to keep this under wraps until Frik saw it—then they could tell the world.

  To that end, Paul had given the staff the day off—with pay. Frik would squawk at that. If he wasn’t already a billionaire, he was knocking on the ten-figure door with champagne and flowers in hand. Yet how he pissed and moaned about the slightest overrun.

  Well, once he saw what Paul had, he wouldn’t bitch about an extra paid vacation day for the small, bright crew of Trinis who staffed the lab. He’d forget all about it, the way he’d forgotten about the cost of the mainframe and electronic testing equipment Paul had asked for after it became clear that the apparatus had increased the efficiency of Oilstar’s refineries more than a hundred percent.

  There…the rumble of a big engine down the slope. Seconds later, Frik’s Humvee hove into view. The roads around here could barely handle a couple of passing Nissans, and he imports a Hummer. Typical.

  Paul waved as Frik skidded to a halt and hopped out. His boss didn’t wave back.

  “This’d better be good, Paul,” he said. “I’ve got a sweet young dancer visiting from Mumbai sleeping it off in my bed. She knows tricks neither of us has ever dreamed of, and I’m looking forward to another demonstration when she wakes up.”

  “This’ll make you forget all about the angle of your dangle,” Paul said, turning and leading the way to the lab entrance.

  “I seriously doubt that.”

  Paul smiled. He was tempted to trap Frik into a big bet, but decided that wouldn’t be fair. His boss was short-tempered, high-handed, and vain, and brilliant, funny, and loyal as well. Paul alternately loved and loathed him. Right now, he loved him.

  Paul led Frik through what he thought of as his lab, though of course it wasn’t really his. The Oilstar insignia graced the glass entry doors, the stationery, and just about everything else. Since Frikwas Oilstar, he owned the lab. But Paul ran it, and he felt that made it his, too, in a way. The lab was a small cog in the giant Oilstar wheel, but an indispensable one. This was where the crude from Oilstar’s wells was analyzed before and after its journey through the refinery.

  “My patience is wearing thin, Trujold. Let’s get this over with.”

  “Your wish is my command.” Paul led his boss into a storeroom he’d converted for his personal experiments—the odds of his creating a new petroleum-based polymer with industrial applications were slim, but he could dream, couldn’t he?

  “What’s that smell?”

  Paul sniffed and turned on the lights. Damn, he thought. He knew the odor: ether. He’d been testing that and some other solvents on the trinkets. He spotted the open jar on his workbench. The all-nighter had made him careless.

  “I’ll get rid of it.”

  He recapped the jar and started the exhaust fan in the ceiling. As the fumes were pulled away, he turned on the two bench lamps and ignited both Bunsen burners. Then he pointed to the object sitting in the center of t
he cleared area on his workbench.

  “Thar she blows.”

  Frik stared at it. “What the hell is it?”

  “It’s those trinkets your men found in that core sample.”

  “I gave you four objects,” Frik said, staring at the assembly.

  When Paul had started analyzing the objects, the first thing he’d discovered was that they weren’t made of turquoise or mother-of-pearl or anything else he had ever seen. The second was that they were all part of a whole. “And there they are, all four of them,” he said. “They click together like pieces of a three-dimensional jigsaw. I’m talkingperfect fit.”

  Frik bent and stared at the unified object from different angles. “They look even weirder together than they did apart.”

  Paul couldn’t argue with that. The assembly looked like something from an abstract painting. That was what he found most disturbing: how could objects that fit together with such fine tolerances appear so lacking in functionality?

  “Looksweird?” Paul said, repressing a grin. “You don’t know weird until you see what itdoes . Watch this.”

  He took a long pair of plastic forceps and grasped the object at what he’d by now determined was its center of gravity. He lifted it and began tilting it this way and that, rotating it back and forth.

  Now we fricassee Frikkie’s mind.

  “Paul,” Frik said when nothing happened. “Have you lost it?”

  “Just be patient. It never seems to work the same way twice.”

  Paul kept his eyes on the main piece—at least he called it the main piece. It was the largest and had a vaguely figure-eight or Möebius strip configuration. Telltale piece was probably a better name. He watched its outer edge, waiting…waiting….

  He felt the now-familiar chill run over his skin. A heartbeat later the motor of the overhead exhaust fan rose in pitch and the room brightened.

  Got it!

  He moved the assembly again, and everything returned to normal.

  “What just happened?” Frik asked.

  “Watch that gooseneck lamp right in front of you.”

  Paul rotated the assembly back, felt the chill again, and then the bulb flared, sixty watts climbing to one hundred. All the lamps in the room seemed to have doubled their wattage. The overhead fan whined and jittered, sounding as if it were about to take off. He’d had to move his computer terminal out of the room because he was afraid the power surge would damage it.

  He heard Frik gasp. “What the hell?”

  “Check out the Bunsens,” Paul said, keeping his eye on the telltale piece.

  “They’re almost out.”

  Paul lowered the assembly, and the light dimmed, the Bunsen flames grew.

  Frik stared at it. “That’s doing it?”

  Paul nodded.

  “What is it? Some sort of rheostat?”

  “Can’t really call it that—I’ve never seen it dim the lights, only brighten them. I don’t have the equipment to measure how much faster the fan goes.”

  “But the Bunsens—”

  “The Bunsens burn sixty degrees cooler. And did you feel the air temperature drop? That was a full ten degrees. Your skin temperature drops as well. Only the device doesn’t change temperature. It appears to be impervious to cold and heat.”

  Frik looked shaken. He turned, found one of the stools, and eased himself onto it.

  “Christ, Paul…what is it?”

  Paul couldn’t maintain his scientist poker face any longer. He burst into a grin. “I don’t know, but isn’t it great?” He heard an edge of hysterical laughter creep into his voice. “Isn’t it fantastic?”

  “That it is, but—”

  “You think you’ve just seen weird?” Paul was pleased with himself for having saved the best for last. “Get behind me here and watch.”

  Frik stood and positioned himself as directed, his hand on Paul’s shoulder.

  “Keep your eye on the big figure-eight piece while I move this around.”

  He angled the assembly this way and that, slowly, methodically, until…the outer edge of the telltale piece began to blur.

  He felt Frik’s hand tighten on his shoulder. “What—?”

  “Wait.”

  Paul rotated it a little further and half of the outer loop appeared to dissolve. The chill…the flaring lights…He raised his free hand and passed his index finger through the empty space where the loop had been. Nothing there but air.

  “Christ, Paul!” Frik’s grip was painful now.

  Paul rotated it back and the loop became whole again. The lights dimmed.

  Frik released him and leaned back against the counter, staring at the assembly. His face was ashen under the tan.

  “D’you mind telling me what’s going on?”

  “I don’t know.” Paul’s excitement bubbled through him. He felt like a shaken champagne bottle, ready to uncork. “The edge of that piece doesn’t just disappear. It’s not an optical illusion—it’snot there . It goes away.”

  “Goes where?”

  “I don’t know. But it goes somewhereelse, and when it reaches that somewhere else, the room gets cold and anything using electricity within a dozen feet revs into overdrive.”

  “A dozen feet?”

  “Give or take a few inches. I spent half the night testing its range, and a dozen feet is about its limit. Do you have any idea what this means, Frik? This little artifact is going to rewrite the laws of physics. Not only does it promise free energy, I’m willing to bet it taps into another dimension!”

  “Free energy?” Frik said, still pale. “No such thing as free energy. No such thing as freeanything . As for other dimensions—”

  “All right, maybe not another dimension, but it goes somewhere, and another dimension is as good a hypothesis as any for now.”

  “A dozen feet is a pretty limited area.”

  “Doesn’t matter if it’s three feet, this is a whole new energy source, utterly revolutionary. And there’s one more thing you should know.”

  Frik looked at him bleakly. “I don’t know if I can handle another revelation right now. But go ahead.”

  Why isn’t he excited? Paul wondered. He should be dancing around. This is the find of the century—of the millennium!

  Paul held up the assembly. “I don’t think this is all of it. It looks like there’s a piece missing.” He pointed to a pair of sockets opposite the figure-eight piece. “Somewhere down in that area of ocean floor you sampled is a fifth piece that fits here.”

  “What do you think it will do?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe act as an amplifier that will extend its range. Maybe something even more mind-blowing.”

  Frik looked away and said nothing. Paul let the silence hang, waiting for his boss to announce the obvious next step: a search for the missing piece.

  “Question,” Frik said. “Where did that thing come from?”

  The question flustered Paul. “From the core sample that you—”

  “No. I mean, who made it? That thing was buried in underwater shale. In pieces. Who buried it there? When? And why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Good questions. Paul had been so taken with the artifact’s astounding properties, so focused on the impact it would have on the world scientific community when it was made public—he’d gone so far as to picture himself on a dais, the focal point of a thousand cameras, demonstrating the artifact—that he hadn’t asked the next question.

  “What about your Trini brothers’ belief that it’s Obeah?”

  Paul shook his head. “I don’t think this was made by some primitive shaman. I’m not even sure it was made on this planet.”

  “Then where? By whom? Don’t you think we ought to know?” Frik said, eyeing him intensely.

  “We can leave that up to others.” He waved away the concern like an errant mosquito. “When we go public with this, there’ll be experts from every discipline—”

  “Public?” Frik said, straightening away from t
he bench. “I don’t think so. Not till we know more.”

  “We’ve gone as far as we can with our limited resources. The next step is a university setting, a major research center—”

  “No,” Frik said, steel in his voice. “Not yet. Not until we’ve found the fifth piece.”

  4

  “This is not open to debate, Paul,” Frik said. “I want absolute secrecy. In fact, I don’t want that thing to leave this room. And I want this room locked at all times. Is that clear? This is too important a find to rush into the public eye, especially in an incomplete state. Who knows what that fifth piece will do? For all we know it could transform the artifact into some sort of devastating weapon. No…we’ve got to proceed cautiously and weigh every move. Do you see what I’m saying?”

  Paul nodded. He saw what Frik was saying.

  Exactly what he was saying.

  “Good.” Frik thrust out his hand. “Then can I have your word that you will keep everything you’ve discovered here secret until I decide the time is right to go public?”

  “Very well,” Paul said, shaking hands reluctantly. He didn’t see that he had any other option, but in his raging heart he held back from a true promise.

  He’s lying to me, so it’s only fair that I lie to him.

  “Good! After all, Paul, my men found it, so I feel responsible for it.”

  “Yes,” Paul said. “A terrible burden.”

  In his peripheral vision, reflected in the shiny surface of the stainless steel door of a storage cabinet, Paul glimpsed the angry set of his own jaw. He was reminded of how his daughter had looked the day she’d turned her Ph.D. in physics into a paper boat and floated it off the dock. She’d resembled her mother so much that day, with the latté-colored skin of her mixed French-Arawak ancestry. As he’d stood with her and watched the breeze take away the piece of paper that had given him such pride, she’d announced her intention to go to Caracas and join a small group of like-minded people dedicated to the preservation of the environment, by any means necessary.