Black Wings Of Cthulhu: Volume Two Part 19

The UAZ-452 lurched and shuddered to a stop as the driver killed the engine. Amundson pushed himself halfway out of his seat and saw through the windows on the opposite side of the minibus that they were not far from a cl.u.s.ter of khaki field tents, beside which were parked several trucks.

"Are we there yet?" he demanded of the driver.

The Mongolian grinned and jabbered in his own language. He threw open the side door and gestured for the lanky engineer to get out. Hot desert air rolled into the air-conditioned interior. Amundson unfolded himself with difficulty. After sitting for so long on the uncomfortable seat, stiffness had found its way into his very bones.

From the open door of the largest tent, a group of Westerners and a single Mongolian emerged. The leader, a white-haired man with a pot belly and a bearded face, extended his hand. He was a head shorter than Amundson and had to look up to meet the engineer's gray eyes.

"You must be Amundson from MIT," he said in a resonant voice. "I'm Joseph Laski, and I rule in h.e.l.l." He let out a booming laugh at his own joke.

Amundson accepted the calloused hand and shook it, surprised by its strength. There was soil under the fingernails.

"This is my wife, Anna, my a.s.sistant James Sikes, Professor Tsakhia Ganzorig from the National Museum of Mongolia at Ulaanbaatar, and the head of the American student team, Luther White."

"From Pittsburgh," the athletic young black man said with a grin. "You'll meet the rest of the students at dinner."

"Supper," Anna Laski corrected with a slight smile. "We dine late."

"No point in wasting the light," her husband explained.

"Pleased to meet you," Sikes said. "I can 'ardly wait to get a look at that machine of yours."

He was a small man with narrow shoulders and a bald patch at the crown of his head.

"You're English," Amundson said with surprise.

"c.o.c.kney by birth, but I've been with the Smithsonian for near on twenty years."

The Smithsonian had put up the bulk of the money to finance the Kel-tepu dig, which was named after a local geological feature. Satellite photographs had revealed the faint outline of buried ruins on the track of an ancient silk road. They were invisible from the ground, but had looked promising enough for the Smithsonian to gather a team of archaeologists. The students were all unpaid volunteers, of course-they always were. They worked for the experience of being part of an important expedition, and for the improvement of their resumes. From what Amundson had read about the find at Kel-tepu, they had all hit the jackpot.

A loud bang from the open rear of the minibus drew his attention. He made an apologetic face to Laski and stalked around the vehicle.

"Be careful with that!" he said in irritation.

The two Mongolians were hunched over the imager, using a kind of wrench to release the buckles on the tight straps that held it to its pallet. Another strap let go and hit the side of the minibus.

Ganzorig came around the edge of the door and spoke to his countrymen in a quiet voice. The grins fell from their faces, and they nodded seriously.

"I'm sure they'll be careful," he told Amundson. "I have explained how valuable this equipment is to the expedition."

"Thank you," the engineer said. "If it gets knocked out of calibration, it will take me a week to put it right again."

Laski approached. The others had gone back into the tent.

"Let me show you around the site," he said, putting his hand on Amundson's shoulder.

He allowed the archaeologist to lead him behind the tents, where some distance away from the camp the ground had been excavated in a series of trenches and holes. From a distance it resembled a gopher village.

"You'd never know this is a river valley, would you?" Laski said companionably. "It looks flat. Even so, satellite photographs and topographic measurements show that an ancient river once ran through here, very close to where we are digging. It dried up fifty or sixty thousand years ago."

They stopped in front of a wall of canvas erected in a rectangle some ten yards wide and forty yards long.

"We keep our prize behind this barrier to exclude windblown dust and desert animals. You'd be surprised how many creatures live in the desert. Some say there are even wolves."

Drawing aside a flap in the wall at the near end of the enclosure, he gestured for Amundson to enter and followed close behind him. The engineer stopped and stared in amazement.

"It's quite a sight, isn't it?" Laski said with a dry chuckle. "I always like to watch the reaction the first time someone sees it."

The ground had been excavated just inside the barrier on all sides, so that only a perimeter strip a few feet wide remained of the original desert surface. The rest of the enclosure was an elongated hole, but it was not empty. Within it lay a black stone statue. It reminded Amundson of the statues of Easter Island, but was not quite like anything he had ever seen. The lines of its primitive form exhaled brute strength. It was humanoid but not quite human in its proportions. The ma.s.sive erect phallus that lay flat along its lower belly was certainly not human. It seemed vaguely aquatic in some indefinable way-perhaps it was the thickness of the neck or the webbing between the impossibly long fingers.

The covering of soil had preserved the sharp edges of the stone carving, with a single exception. The face of the statue was no more than a featureless mask. No trace of a nose, lips, or eye sockets remained, if indeed they had ever existed.

"Have you identified the stone?" the engineer asked.

"Some kind of basalt," Laski told him. "We're not yet sure exactly what it is, to be honest. It has resisted identification."

"You mean it's not local," Amundson said as he began to slowly walk around the hole.

"Not local, no."

"So the statue wasn't carved in situ."

"Good heavens, no. The stone of the desert is too fractured to carve out a figure of this size. You're thinking it's like the rec.u.mbent statues on Easter Island."

"The thought had crossed my mind," Amundson murmured. He bent over to study the surface of the head.

"No, impossible. This statue was transported here from far away-how far, we can't even guess, but there is no stone like this for hundreds of miles. And it was upright-we've found its pedestal buried at its base. At some point it was toppled off its support into a hole and covered with dirt."

The burial of ancient stone carvings and ancient religious sites was not unknown. Amundson remembered reading about such a site.

"You mean like Gobekli Tepe?"

Gobekli Tepe was a twelve-thousand-year-old archaeological site in Turkey consisting of carven stone monoliths and other structures that at some point in its long history had been completely buried, but was in every other way intact.

"Yes," Laski said, pleased at the reference. "Something like that."

The engineer crouched and leaned over the edge of the hole as far as he could reach. He was just able to touch the edge of the smooth face of the giant.

"You're certain it wasn't buried face down."

"Quite certain," Laski said firmly. "The position of the arms and hands, to say nothing of the phallus, clearly shows that it is lying on its back facing the heavens. Even so, we excavated beneath the head. There is no face on the other side."

"I think I see the chisel marks," Amundson murmured, stroking the black stone lightly with his fingertips.

"You can see them better in early morning. The low angle of the sun accentuates them."

The archaeologist waited in silence while Amundson studied the enigmatic, featureless mask. The engineer straightened his knees and turned. Lights of excitement danced in his pale grey eyes.

"It will work, I'm sure of it."

Laski clapped him on the shoulder.

"Excellent! We'll get started tomorrow."

DINNER-NO, SUPPER, HE CORRECTED HIMSELF-WAS better than he expected. Sikes did the cooking ch.o.r.es, and he did them purely from choice, Anna Laski explained to Amundson. The little c.o.c.kney had an innate talent for cooking. It was usual on an archaeological dig to eat the local cuisine, but at Kel-tepu it was the local diggers who sampled what was to them exotic dining-roast beef, pudding, dumplings, fish-and-chips, meat pies, stews, bangers-and-mash.

"The first night of the dig, the local man a.s.signed by Gani to do the cooking made khorkhog and khuushuur-goat meat and deep-fried dumplings," Anna told him. "I didn't think it tasted that bad, really, but Sikes was beside himself. He practically begged Joe to make him camp cook."

The conversation around the long dining table in the main tent was lively and free of the tensions that so often plagued academic gatherings. In part this was due to Professor Laski's dominating personality-his enthusiasm and good spirits were infectious. In part it was also due to his gracious wife who acted as hostess at the table. But mainly it was the general atmosphere of success that pervaded the entire team. Those partic.i.p.ating in the dig knew they were making history, and at the same time insuring the future prosperity of their academic careers. This left them with little to complain about.

Two conversations were taking place at the same time across the table, one in English among the Americans, and the other in Mongolian among the local diggers. Gani, as Anna Laski called Tsakhia Ganzorig, acted as translator at those infrequent intervals when a member of one group had something to say to a member of the other.

Amundson noticed several of the Mongolians toying with small carved stone disks about the size of a silver dollar. When the opportunity arose, he turned to the young woman seated on his right, a blonde graduate student from the University of Southern California named Luce Henders.

"Could you tell me, what are those objects?" he murmured.

She followed his eyes, fork poised before her lips, and smiled.

"You mean our good luck charms? That's what Professor Laski calls them. We've been finding them all over the place, inside the graves."

"Graves?"

Luce chewed and nodded at the same time.

"This whole site is really one huge graveyard. There are graves all around the colossus-that's what we call the statue. Hundreds, maybe thousands of them. The bones are gone, but when we dig we find stone ossuaries that must have held them, with those carved disks inside."

"What happened to the bones?"

"Time happened. Thousands of years ago this was a wet river valley. Bones don't last under those conditions unless they petrify."

"Is the stone of the tokens the same as the stone of the colossus?"

"We're pretty sure it is," she answered. "It's not local stone."

"I wonder if I might have one," Amundson said apologetically. "I can use it to adjust my projector before I set it into place."

"I don't see why not; we've got dozens. Everyone's got one. Give me a minute."

She stood and left the tent. Amundson continued his meal. In a few minutes she resumed her seat and with a smile pressed something cold and hard into his hand. He studied it.

The black stone was surprisingly heavy and not quite circular, he noticed, but ovoid, some two inches across on its longest dimension and half an inch thick. Its edges were rounded like those of a beach stone. Into one face a simple geometric figure had been deeply carved. It was a kind of spiral with four arms. Amundson realized that it was a primitive form of sun wheel or swastika.

"Thank you," he told Luce Henders. "This will be very useful."

One of the grads, a red-haired Irishman from Boston College named Jimmy Dolan, noticed the black stone and pointed at it across the table with his fork.

"I see you've joined the cult of Oko-boko," he said. Several other students laughed, including Luce.

"When we first started finding these stones, we noticed that they were going missing," she explained to the engineer. "Professor Laski was upset because he thought we had a thief in the camp. He and Gani started to question everybody, and it turned out that the Mongolian diggers were taking them for good luck charms. This valley is supposed to be real bad luck or something, according to local superst.i.tion, and the Mongolians believed that the stones would protect them from the evil whatever-it-is. They got upset when the Professor tried to take the stones back, so he realized he'd better let them keep them or he'd have a mutiny on his hands and we would never get any work done. Anyway, Gani made all the local diggers promise to give the stones back when the dig is finished. You'll have to give yours back, too."

Amundson dropped the black stone into the vest pocket of his shirt and laid his hand across it.

"I do solemnly swear to return it," he said.

Luce laughed, her blue eyes sparkling with something a little brighter than the table wine. Things are looking up, Amundson thought to himself, things are definitely looking up.

THE ENGINEERING PROBLEM WAS SIMPLE. THE IMAGER had to be positioned directly above the face of the colossus, and no more than three feet away. Since the statue could not be moved, it was necessary to build a superstructure above it to support the machine.

When Amundson mentioned the problem to Sikes, the little Englishman said he had just what was needed, and came back with two aluminum ladders. The ladders easily spanned the sides of the trench in which the colossus lay. It was necessary to support them from below with diagonal bracing so that they would bear the weight of Baby Huey without buckling, but this was not difficult.

Within an hour the framework was ready and the squat yellow machine in position beside the hole. Amundson had already spent the previous evening setting its sensors for the density of the black stone, which appeared identical in every respect to the stone of the statue. It was surprisingly easy to skid the imager along the ladders, and only a bit more taxing to get it positioned precisely above the face using the built-in camera as a guide.

Laski had been right, Amundson thought as he looked at the camera image of the blank face on his monitor. The statue was oriented with its head in the west, and the beams of the morning sun slanting along its body highlighted the marks of the chisels that had been used to cut away its features. He wondered idly what strange compulsion had caused a primitive people to cast down the statue and mutilate it. Perhaps they were some warring tribe and thought they were defeating the G.o.d of their enemies. He shrugged. He was an engineer, not an archaeologist. There was no need to bother his mind with such questions, which were probably unanswerable.

Amundson found himself less nervous than he expected, considering that his future career at MIT was riding on the performance of the imager. He smiled to himself. Not all of last night had been spent on work. The latter part of the evening he had devoted to the relaxing task of exploring Luce Henders. She was interested in him only because he was the first unfamiliar male to walk into the camp in months-that much was obvious-but it had not diminished his pleasure.

Why make life complicated when it could be simple? That was his personal motto. It had served him well enough through the first half of his life, and he saw no reason why it should not serve equally well through the second half.

This morning, Luce was away from the camp with Laski and his wife, Gani, and most of the others, excavating an artificial pa.s.sage that had been found amid the graves. The discovery had been made by chance, while digging exploratory holes. When first found, the pa.s.sage had been completely choked with rubble and its entrance covered with dirt. Laski was removing the rubble slowly so as not to miss any objects that might lie in it. He had the students screening the dirt and gravel as it was taken out of the pa.s.sage by the diggers.

Amundson noticed Luther White across the trench. When he looked at the black grad student, White turned his head away. He had worn the same sullen expression all morning and had failed to respond when Amundson greeted him at breakfast. Apparently it was impossible to keep anything secret in so small a camp. He wondered if Luce had even tried to conceal her late-night visit to his tent? Or had she taken some perverse pleasure in relating the details to Luther?

After a few minutes dithering around, White found his way around the hole and approached Amundson. All the cheerfulness of the previous day had vanished.

"Stay away from Luce," he said in a low voice.

"What?" The engineer smiled disarmingly. "What did you say?"

"You heard me," White snarled. "I'm not going to tell you again. Luce is mine, not yours."

He backed away before Amundson could think of a response. Sikes, working nearby on the wires that connected the imager to the data processing unit, gave no sign that he had heard the exchange, although he must have heard every word.

"I'm ready to switch on," Amundson told the Englishman in a neutral tone.

Sikes nodded. He started the generator with its pull cord. It fired on the second pull and ran smoothly. With his laptop computer across his knees, Amundson put Baby Huey through its paces. The scanner hummed and stopped at the end of each pa.s.s, moving slowly back and forth like a farmer ploughing a field. Its beam was invisible, but a red laser cast a spot on the stone below it to act as a guide.

Sikes approached behind him and peered over his shoulder.

"You mind telling me 'ow this works?" he asked.

Amundson didn't mind. He had the time. The scan of the machine was largely automatic, once its parameters were programmed in.

"You know how it's possible to recover a serial number on a gun, when the number has been completely filed off?"

Sikes nodded. "They use acid. The metal is 'arder under the place where the numbers are stamped in, so the acid eats the surrounding metal quicker, and the 'arder numbers show up in what they call bas-relief."

Amundson nodded.

"It's the same with stone. When stone is carved using a chisel, the repeated impact of the blade aligns the molecules in the stone. The harder the impact, the greater the alignment; or the more frequent the impact, the greater the alignment-same thing, it's the total impact on the stone that determines the degree of stress."