‘How the hell did you know I had bought it, and how did you get my email address?’
Any information on eBay had to be confidential. If it wasn’t, and the site had given — or, even worse, sold — his details to this individual, he would sue them. He trusted the site, though, and quickly dismissed the notion. But he still couldn’t work out how V. A. Bassianus could have got his address. He typed a short reply, asking those very questions, and ended by saying the meteorite was not for sale. He sent the email on its way and put it out of his mind for the time being.
A week later, when a heavy packet arrived at his apartment, the mystery was revived in his mind. Opening the packet, he found inside a battered wooden box with a label stuck to the lid. The label itself was ancient and almost worn away. Only strips remained on which Greg could discern faded brown writing in a crabbed hand. Some of the text was lost completely, along with the paper on which it had been written. What was left would take him a while to decipher. Intrigued, he opened the box. Inside lay the iron meteorite just as he remembered it from the photograph on eBay. The surface looked darker than in the picture, and smoother — as though someone had tried to polish it. Maybe Tallman, whoever he was, had thought he should do so before passing it on to his buyer. Greg could see the characteristic regmaglypts that covered the surface. They were popularly called ‘thumbprints’ because that was what they looked like — as though someone had pressed their thumb into the surface over and over again while the rock had been malleable. He could also see the marks he had at first thought had been painted on the surface. Looking closely at the rock, he could tell they were an integral part of the material. Curiously, they looked like Hebrew letters. He turned the rock over and over in his hand. It was heavy, and, if it conformed to the normal make-up of an iron meteorite, it held iron, nickel and perhaps some kamacite and taenite. He rolled his wheelchair along his workbench and put the rock on some electronic scales. He whistled quietly. It was almost 1,700 grams, so, taking its dimensions into account, it probably had a specific gravity of 8. Definitely within the range of an iron meteorite. He placed it on the bench and looked hard at it.
The email message from Bassianus came into his mind, and he wondered what was so special about this stone that the man was prepared to pay any price to get it. He picked the stone up again and nestled it in his lap while he motored back to his computer. Once there, he looked in his email service’s deleted file and called up the message again. He scanned the text, and the email address of the sender.
‘What the hell is the Sol Invictus Trust when it’s at home? And why were you so keen to get the stone in the first place, Mr V. A. Bassianus?’
He tried the obvious first route, typing the name of the trust into Google. He had plenty of hits, including an online gaming site, and information about an English neofolk band addicted to electronic experimentation. There was nothing about a trust. However, there was another entry on an historical site that caught his eye. It was about a Roman emperor called Heliogabalus who had been responsible for promoting a version of sun worship. He replaced Jupiter with the god of the cult called Elagabalus, and renamed him Deus Sol Invictus — God the Undefeated Sun. Greg’s inclination was to be sceptical about anything he couldn’t measure or define, so he didn’t believe in the supernatural. But he knew equally that it didn’t stop some cranks thinking they had powers greater than science could encompass. Someone probably wanted to revive this old cult seriously enough to spend big money on obtaining the meteorite. Then he spotted Emperor Heliogabalus’s birth name, Varius Avitus Bassianus. He clicked back on the email text on his computer screen.
‘Just who do you think you are, Mr V. A. Bassianus? A ghost, a reincarnation or a god?’
He recalled the old box the stone had been delivered in and reached out for it. The label that had been glued on the lid was tantalizing. The words were in English, but an old form of it, and broken up by the missing pieces of paper that had been shed like dry skin. He pored over it, and slowly he began to piece it together. He noted down what he could decipher, then interpolated some possible words into the text. What emerged was startling.
With this sky-st[one] comes a legend. It is [said] to be a force for great good, and a cure. But ev[il?] is drawn to it also. It has travelled through m[any h]ands [or maybe many lands], but its origin is thought to be Greenland […] where the evil began. HT, 16[??].
Could it be? Was the missing place name Brattahli?? Greg’s mind reeled. It was only a week since he had first had sight of Brattahli? on Google Earth. Before then, he was unaware of the ancient site. And maybe that was the rational answer — he was making an incorrect jump based on limited knowledge. How many places in Greenland started with those three letters? On Google, he did a place names search. It didn’t take long, and showed him that no modern town at least had a name beginning with the letters ‘Bra’. Nor were there any other ancient sites so entitled. It was not conclusive, but it was disturbing nevertheless. He lifted the stone from his lap and stared at it. It felt hot, and he could feel it pulsing in his grip. Hastily, he put it down on the workbench top. He tried to clear his head, rationalizing that he had just felt his own pulse. But the thought kept returning to him that this very stone could have been the meteorite that had impacted in the crater he had discovered last week. Or at least part of the original meteor, because the crater was larger than this small stone could have made. He began again searching Google Earth for smaller impact craters in the vicinity of the larger one. And on the same side of the fjord as the ancient settlement of Brattahli?.
It was the early hours of the morning before he took a break and rolled his wheelchair into the kitchen. He needed coffee to keep him awake. The last time he pulled an overnighter, he had been drinking red wine, and it didn’t help his powers of concentration. He made some of the real stuff in a cafetiere, balanced the hot jug between his insensitive thighs and rolled back to the computer. He depressed the plunger, poured the hot coffee into his mug and took a sip. The phone rang jarringly in the deep silence, and he almost spilled the mug into his lap. He wondered who was calling him in the depths of the night. Picking the cordless up, he heard the voice of June Piper, and she was excited. Before he could say anything about the meteorite, which sat, dark and mysterious, in front of him, she babbled out her news.
‘We’ve found something. It’s from your new impact crater site. Well, not exactly from that but around it. There are the fingers of some glaciers running down the valleys quite close, and Don sashayed down there on to the surface.’
Greg felt a pang of jealousy. Don Tremlett was the mountain goat who had replaced him after his accident. He did all the risky manoeuvres that had been Greg’s forte. He could just imagine him scrambling down on to the uneven and no doubt fissured surface of the glacier. As June pressed on, he idly moved his cursor hand on Google Earth, grasping the image and sliding it east, back over the fjord. One stretch of the satellite image had been taken in winter, and Greg could see a grey river snaking through ice just below where he had identified the crater. He followed it up and found the glacier terminus — a mass of shattered ice. Above it he could almost picture Don walking on the crumpled surface and finding a good point at which to bore down with his core sampler. June’s sharp tones alerted him to the fact that she didn’t know if he was still on the line.