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Jade grinned. “Now I remember why I liked having you around. Gentlemen, let’s go find our planet.”

They spread out in a picket line and began walking, continuing in a clockwise direction. They found the next sphere, a blue green orb similar to the Venus stone and just a little bigger, in the three o’clock position. Jade had just reached it when Professor pointed to something about thirty feet farther along. “Jade, is that what I think it is?”

She followed the beam of his headlamp and spied what looked like a heap of rags. “Depends. Do you think it’s a body?”

He nodded sagely.

“Let’s have a look.” Finding the mummified remains of one of the ancient inhabitants of the city, while not completely unexpected, was nevertheless a major coup. “Odd that they would just leave him lying out in the middle of…well, space. Do you think maybe he was the last priest left down here?”

“Sorry to disappoint you,” Professor said, kneeling down beside the desiccated corpse, “but it looks like this fellow is a more recent addition.”

Jade couldn’t believe her eyes. Although it was impossible to draw any conclusions about the ethnicity of the man from the dark leathery skin drawn pulled tight across his skull, his clothing was most certainly not of a style worn by the original people of Teotihuacan or anyone else who would have been alive when the Pyramid of the Sun was being built.

Professor reached into the folds of the man’s doublet and withdrew a leather bound book. He opened it and confirmed what Jade already suspected. “It’s in Spanish. This guy’s handwriting is almost illegible, but there’s a date: October 23, 1593.” He looked up. “Sorry to break it to you, but it looks like we’re not the first to discover this cavern.”

Jade quickly overcame her dismay. This wasn’t the first time she’d ‘discovered’ a looted site, and it certainly wouldn’t be the last. That was one of the endemic hazards of archaeology. “Well he didn’t come in the same way we did. There must be another entrance somewhere.”

“Jade!” Sanchez called out. He and Dorion were on hands and knees, shining their lights at the underside of the Earth stone. “You have to see this!”

“I guess it can wait,” she muttered. “Let’s go see what the kids are so excited about.”

Professor chuckled and tucked the book under one arm.

When she reached the blue sphere, she knelt down to see what had so arrested the attention of the two scientists. “Well, what have you got for me?”

Sanchez’s customary enthusiasm seemed amplified by an order of magnitude. “You won’t believe this, Jade. The sphere is moving!”

“Moving?” She looked at the sphere, but saw no evidence to support the claim.

“It’s barely perceptible, but watch.” He took a pen from his pocket and held its tip close to a dark spot on the sphere’s surface near what would have been its equator. Jade stared at it intently, and even though she couldn’t see any change in the position of the orb, after a minute or so, the point of the pen was no longer above the spot. “It’s rotating,” Sanchez said, excitedly. “And I’d be willing to bet that its rotational period is exactly twenty-four hours. Jade, this isn’t just a map of the solar system; it’s an orrery! A functioning model that simulates the rotation and orbits of the planets.”

“That can’t be right. Is there some kind of mechanism underneath this thing?” Jade dropped down to where Dorion was peering at the underside of the sphere.

“No mechanism,” Dorion replied. “In fact, I don’t think it’s actually making contact with the floor at all.”

She directed her light at the spot where the curve of the sphere met the floor. Dorion was right. The sphere appeared to be hovering a hair’s breadth above the floor.

Professor just shook his head. “So much for straightforward archaeology.”

FIVE

Brian Hodges listened intently as Jade’s voice issued from the speakers of his laptop. Beside him, Acosta was hanging on her every word.

“A Spaniard you say? Have you read the journal?”

“Not yet,” replied Jade’s voice over the radio relay. “We got a little distracted by something else. It seems the ancients built a working model of the solar system down here.”

“A working model?” echoed Acosta. “What does that mean?”

“Exactly what it sounds like. There’s an enormous golden sphere to represent the sun, and surrounding it are smaller spheres that represent the planets. We’ve found four of them so far; one for Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. We haven’t looked past Mars yet, but I’m betting we’ll find Jupiter and Saturn as well. But here’s the really weird part. The spheres are actually rotating and orbiting the sun just like the actual planets.”

Hodges felt a dry lump rise form in his throat. This was exactly the kind of thing he’d been worried about.

“We didn’t notice the movement in Mercury and Venus,” said Pete Chapman’s voice, “because they rotate so slowly. In fact, Mercury’s day is longer than its orbital year. But we’ve confirmed that the spheres for both Earth and Mars are rotating at a rate that corresponds exactly to the rotation of the actual planets.”

“This is amazing,” Acosta exclaimed.

“From what I can tell,” Chapman continued, “the present arrangement of these four spheres corresponds exactly to the position of the planets in the sky. I’m not sure what makes this thing tick, but it’s pretty uncanny.”

Acosta nodded vigorously, evidently forgetting that the people on the other end of the line couldn’t see him. “I need to see it for myself.” He turned to Hodges. “Can you help me get down? I’ve never done that sort of thing before.”

Hodges managed an eager smile to hide his growing sense of alarm. “Sure thing. The more the merrier.”

* * *

Jade leaned close to watch as Professor slipped the long blade of his knife into the gap between the bottom of what she was now calling the “Earth stone” and the floor of the cavern.

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

“No,” he admitted. “So maybe you should take a step back.”

She frowned but did not retreat. He edged the blade in slowly, as if probing a landmine, then with just as much caution, drew it back out.

“Well,” he said, “there’s no magnetic field. And the sphere is definitely not making contact with the ground. I’m stumped.”

Dorion cleared his throat. “I may have an idea about what’s at work here.”

Jade faced him. “We’re all ears.”

Dorion took a breath as if gathering his courage. “Are you familiar with dark matter?”

Professor stood. “It’s a theoretical substance thought to account for more than eighty percent of the total mass of the universe.”

Dorion nodded. “Dark matter particles have no electrical charge and are therefore completely undetectable.”

“If they exist at all,” countered Professor. He turned to Jade. “The dark matter hypothesis was formulated to account for the fact that the universe doesn’t seem to behave the way it should, mathematically speaking. But there’s a growing belief that maybe the problem lies with the math or with our fundamental understanding of the laws of physics.”

“Back up,” Jade said, turning to Dorion. “How would dark matter explain this?”

“Everything we can see and touch, or measure with our instruments, relies upon the interaction of positive and negatively charged particles. All matter — light matter, if you will — is made up protons and electrons, which create atoms. Of course, many atoms also contain neutrons, which have mass but no electrical charge, but are nevertheless bonded by atomic force and surrounded by an electron shell. We are able to see matter because light energy bounces off the electron shell of these atoms. And we are able to touch and interact with matter because the electron shells of the atoms in a given object and the electron shell in the atoms in our bodies oppose each other, as negatively charged particles will do.”