I heard about the Stargate years before I passed through it. It is super secret, super secure, but that does not mean there are not whispers. There always are. No matter how secret something is, there are whispers, unsubstantiated rumors, little hints here and there. I am good at putting together little hints. But I did not believe the reality of it. I thought it was a theoretical possibility, even maybe a project of the American military. I did not know there was a real, working Ancient device.
Ironically, I found that it was true not in any normal way, but through something that had no bearing at all. I had finished my doctorate at Cambridge in ‘97, but I did not immediately have a brilliant job waiting for me. I applied for many things, but none of the things came through by the end of the summer, and I must have work. I was offered a two month job in Paris, working for an old professor of mine who was engaged by the Louvre to take stock of some of the many things they had put away relating to the history of science. It was two months, and it was basically a glorified clerical job, but it was a paycheck and it was Paris, so I said why not?
The Louvre may be the world’s greatest museum but its basements are crap. It is as though they just hauled everything down there for a century, then jumbled it up in the Second World War, and then let it sit for fifty years. My old professor was working on a touring exhibition about the history of science, so my task was to go through hundreds of documents and woodcuts and engravings and minor pieces and documents donated to the Louvre and pull out things that seemed to apply. There were unsigned sketches of Montgolfier balloon ascensions and engravings of fanciful ice age animals based on the bones of wooly rhinos found along the Danube. There were Hamiltonian observations of Mount Vesuvius and Leonardo’s flying machines. It was intriguing. It was interesting. I did not feel I was wasting my time at all, unearthing all the starts false and true that we have made.
And then I found it.
The sketch was by Vivant Denon, who had been the official artist of Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition. It was titled in his flowing hand—“A rendering of the Strange Device discovered in the Temples of Philae.” It looked like a control panel, a round pedestal of some kind of metal with broad keys on it, each key inscribed with an unfamiliar symbol. In Denon’s time, of course, hieroglyphics had not yet been deciphered, so he had no way of knowing these symbols were nothing Egyptian. But I knew it.
A later cataloguer, but not very late from the coppered ink, had added “An Altar of Some Type?”
But it was not an altar. Denon had been right. It was a device. He did not have the concept of a keyboard, but I did. This was a keyboard in an unfamiliar system with unfamiliar symbols, like nothing I had ever seen before. It was a round keyboard, symbol keys and a blank in the middle. These were pushbuttons. It did something.
I dropped everything. I went seeking Denon’s papers, his letters, his work. If he sketched it, he might have written about it as well. What I found was both brief and tantalizing.
“…a device that was perhaps an object of study in the Renowned Museum, though it is far older in origin than the Ptolemaic materials it was discovered with. I am perplexed as to the metallurgy involved, as diamond cannot scratch the surface, and even hot iron does not seem to mar it…”
I am out of my field, I thought. This is not my study. But I was bored. I did not know people in Paris. I considered it an intellectual challenge. I tried to find more. Only there was little to find. A few tantalizing tidbits. Perhaps the device itself had once been stored in the Louvre, but if so it had been removed in 1941 with so many other treasures, removed to Berlin by the Nazis. If it had ever been here, a cautionary if. After the war no one knew anything of it. Perhaps it had been taken to the museum in Berlin. If so, like Schliemann’s Trojan gold, it had been in turn a prize for Stalin.
Or perhaps it had never been in Paris at all. Perhaps it had been too heavy for Denon to recover with the limited resources of the expedition at the time, and had remained in Upper Egypt. Perhaps it was there still, on the island of Philae, or drowned beneath the spreading waters of Lake Nasser.
And then I was offered a job, a good one. I took it, I left Paris. But the mystery did not go away. Perhaps it was that my new job was boring, teaching first year students things older professors did not want to bother with. Perhaps it was that I had no research project of my own, but as winter turned into spring again I found myself looking at the photocopies I had made of the Denon sketch. Was I the only one who had found this odd? Was I the only one who had looked at this sketch in a century? Was I the only one who found this puzzle intriguing?
I found at last a précis of a paper that mentioned Denon and the mysterious device, a wild paper given at a historical conference in 1990 about aliens building the pyramids and ancient spacecraft in Egypt. It mentioned the line in Denon’s diaries, but not the sketch. Had the author not known of the sketch? It might have made a tenuous line of reasoning more palatable. But perhaps he did not know, this Dr. Daniel Jackson.
It was difficult to find anything about him, but at last I got an address for his current employer, somewhere in the western United States. I wrote to him asking him if he knew of the sketch, if he had considered the possibility that the device had been taken first to Berlin and then Moscow? I am a Doctor of Engineering, I said. I am not a historian like yourself. But I have found this interesting, and I wondered…
A month later and I had forgotten. Then my telephone rang. It is Dr. Daniel Jackson, he said. I am in Paris by chance and I wondered if you might come by train and meet me. I would like to look at the Denon sketch with you, would like to meet you.
And I thought, why ever not? It is a spring weekend in Paris, and it is not so far on the train. If this Dr. Jackson is a nut, I will have dinner with him and then shove off. And if not, perhaps we will share this mystery. It will be enjoyable.
You can guess what it was, can you not, my friend?
Dr. Jackson bent over the sketch and let out a long, fervent breath. “It’s the missing DHD from the Giza gate,” he whispered. “They must have taken it away to make it harder for anyone to ever use it again, and it became a Ptolemaic donation at Philae. But the Ptolemaic scholars didn’t know what to do with it, and they never found the Stargate.” He caressed the old paper as though it were a lover’s face. “The Germans must have found it in Upper Egypt in 1906.”
“I think you had best explain what you just said to me,” I said quietly.
Dr. Jackson looked at me, and his eyes were bright. “Dr. Zelenka, can you keep a secret?”
Most of the Marines had gone to sleep. Cadman and two men were keeping watch, patrolling in long circles around the grounded jumper, the beams of their flashlights sweeping the night. Lorne was sleeping. He’d been up all night the night before.
Of course, so had Rodney, but you didn’t see him sleeping. Oh no. Rodney was running a final diagnostic on the jumper’s main power. It would be a very bad thing if his repairs blew out as soon as they put any strain on them. And they were likely to put a strain on them. The way things usually went, there would certainly be a strain.