Professor sighed, as if recognizing that his appeal to rational thinking had backfired. “Well, that’s the problem isn’t it? We don’t know where to look.”
Jade considered this. “There still might be something in the Dee manuscripts. Some clue that only the Shew Stone can reveal. We still have it, right?” She shot a hopeful look at Dorion who in turn looked at Ophelia. The latter, almost reluctantly, took the crystal globe from her clutch purse and placed it on the tabletop.
“If Dee really did have a vision of the Moon stone,” Jade said, “maybe he also saw where it would eventually end up. The only problem is finding the right manuscript.”
“I suppose we could do some research online,” Professor said. “That might help us narrow it down. Then, of course, there’s the obvious. We try to find out what happened to Alvaro. Didn’t Perez’s journal mention that he saw himself presenting the Moon stone to King Philip? For all we know, the thing is gathering dust in a Spanish museum.”
Ophelia clapped her hands together. “We can start looking right now!”
She rose from her chair, went to the nightstand and returned with an iPad. She held it out to Professor. “Will this work?”
Jade felt his eyes on her, as if silently asking: Are you sure you want me to do this?
She wasn’t sure at all, but what choice did she have? She was drawn to unsolved mysteries like a moth to a flame, unable to turn away despite the threat of getting burned.
Professor took the tablet from Ophelia and set it on the table facing up. “Okay, what should we start with?”
The next hour was excruciating. Jade, Dorion and Ophelia crowded together behind Professor, looking over his shoulder as he navigated a seemingly endless maze of Google results. “John Dee Manuscripts” directed them to Dee’s diary and several other works that had been laboriously transcribed into plain text and also recommended several books for purchase by a certain Gerald Roche.
“Scans of John Dee Manuscripts” was even less helpful.
“It may not matter,” Professor told them. “If the manuscript Perez saw was written using some kind of special ink that’s visible only when viewed through a polarized crystal, it wouldn’t show up in a scan.”
“So we would have to actually have the original parchment in hand,” said Jade. “Well, I know that Roche had a bunch. Those won’t do us much good.”
“You could break in and steal them.”
“Don’t tempt me. Where else can we find Dee originals?”
Professor typed in “Where can I find original John Dee manuscripts?”
“The Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology at Oxford,” Jade said, reading the first result that didn’t mention Roche. “Wouldn’t mind going there.”
“I’m not sure we’re going to find much more of use online. And if this is all we’ve got, then I don’t think we should get our hopes up.”
“Try searching for Alvaro.”
Professor dutifully typed in: “Alvaro Diego Menendez Castillo.”
“I’m glad you remembered that,” Jade said. “I didn’t.”
“That’s why you keep me around.” He scanned the results. “Nothing.”
He tried different variations, but there was not a single result that linked back to the sixteenth century.
“That’s not so unusual,” Professor said. “It could just mean that no one has digitized the historical account in which he appears.”
He tried other searches relating to Spanish history, ships that sailed from Mexico in 1593, ships that might have sunk along the way. Finally, he tried Gil Perez.
“Uh, Jade…”
She looked at the list. “No way.”
Jade had gotten used to results that had nothing at all to do with what had been entered into the search engine. Common names yielded personal websites and Facebook pages, and no shortage of advertisements for White Pages and other paid people-finding services. She was completely unprepared for what the search for Gil Perez returned.
“‘The mysterious teleporting man’?”
Professor clicked on the page and Jade began reading silently.
On October 24, 1593, a Spanish soldier named Gil Perez was standing guard at the Palacio Del Gobernador in the Philippines. Governor Gomez Perez Dasmarinas had just been assassinated by Chinese mutineers and the garrison was on high alert while they awaited the appointment of a new governor. A weary Gil Perez decided to lean against a wall and rest for a moment. When he opened his eyes, he was in a completely unfamiliar place. Unsure of what to do, he continued to do his guard duties until he was approached by soldiers who began asking who he was. When he attempted to explain that he was guarding the governor’s palace, he learned that he was no longer in the Philippines, but in Mexico City’s Plaza Mayor. He had been teleported over 9,000 nautical miles away in the blink of an eye.
Because he was in a strange uniform, and because news of the governor’s assassination would not reach Mexico for several months, Perez was assumed to be a deserter and imprisoned. When a ship from Manila arrived, they not only brought word of the assassination but also said that they knew Gil Perez, and said that he had been missing since the night of October 23.
The story showed up, more or less word for word, on more than a dozen different web sites. One page indicated that the story had first appeared in print about a century afterward. Another site offered a skeptical examination of the details and explained why the story was nothing more than an urban myth.
“This can’t be the same guy,” Professor said. “Even if the story is true…and I’m not saying it is…there wasn’t anything in that journal about being a palace guard in the Philippines.”
“But the date,” Jade persisted. “It’s exactly the same.” She reread the account again. “In the journal, Perez said something about seeing the life he might have lived as if looking through a window. And he talked about opening the window and stepping through. What if he succeeded?”
“We found his body. I’d call that a ‘fail.’”
Jade turned to Dorion. “Paul, is there a possibility that a dark matter field could transport people between alternate dimensions?”
Dorion seemed excited by the prospect. “When it comes to quantum mechanics, almost anything is possible. It may be that Perez — our Perez, the man we found under the pyramid — tried to bridge the universes, to open a door instead of just looking through the window. In so doing, he might have created instability in space-time, causing several universes to overlap.”
“Maybe that’s what he meant by the life he might have lived; he saw the outcome of a different choice in life — the choice to be a lowly palace guard — and tried to switch places with his double. There was a hiccup and one Perez wound up dead in Teo, and the other got teleported to Mexico City.”
“A hiccup?” said Professor. “Is that the scientific term for it? Can I point out a big flaw in this idea? The Perez in the story had no clue about any of this, and the sailors who arrived from Manila confirmed that Perez had gone missing. That means that the guy we found in the cavern might be the one from another universe.”
“So?”
“So, maybe the whole business with Alvaro taking the Moon stone happened in another reality.”
Jade shook her head. “If that was true, we would have found the Moon stone in the cavern. Maybe things got mashed up, but the Moon stone was taken, and that means it’s got to be in our universe…somewhere.”