Andy McDermott - The Hunt For Atlantis

“That’s all well and good,” Philby snapped, voice tight with frustration, “but am I the only person concerned that a literally priceless archaeological find has just been blown up? This is worse than the Taliban!”

“You didn’t even see the interior, Jonathan,” said Nina sadly. “It was incredible. A replica of the Temple of Poseidon, exactly as Plato described it. And there was even a map showing the location of Atlantis…”

She trailed off. The map. There was something about it…

“Unfortunately, your gun-toting friends are already on their way there,” said Philby. She ignored him, thinking hard about what she’d seen inside the temple.

“Nina? What is it?” Kari asked.

“The map… Atlantis was definitely in the Gulf of Cádiz,” Nina insisted. “Starkman’s guy was wrong , he had to be. The Atlanteans were able to navigate across whole oceans-there’s no way their map could have been off by hundreds of miles with the position of their home! There’s something we’ve missed, something about the Atlantean… system…” She looked back at the women counting bullets. It was the way they were counting that caught her attention, opening up an unexpected line of thought.

She moved to crouch by di Salvo. “Agnaldo? Can you hear me?”

His face was drenched in sweat, but he was still responsive despite the painkiller. “Yes, I can. What is it?”

“I need you to translate for me.”

“I’ll do my best… What do you want to say?”

“First I need to know if it’s okay for me to go to those women, look at what they’re writing.” Di Salvo haltingly asked the two surviving elders, and nodded to Nina after getting a reply. Hands raised, she carefully approached the women. They reacted with surprise and a little fear, but it didn’t take long for her to persuade one of them to let her examine their pale sheet of bark.

Her guess was correct: it was a tally. She held it up to the firelight, trying to get a better look at the smudgy symbols, then spotted a chemical glow stick among the equipment. She bent it, releasing a vivid blue light. The Indian women jumped away, before slowly returning, fascinated. Other members of the tribe moved to stand around her, entranced by the sight. Nina gave them a reassuring smile, then returned her attention to the numbers.

Kari joined her. “What is it?”

“Remember how I thought the Atlantean numerical system used base eight?” Nina began, running a fingertip down one of the columns, careful not to smear the charcoal markings. “But that didn’t work for the Challenge of Mind, right? And the statues of the Nereids in the temple-according to Plato, there should have been one hundred, but you counted seventy-three?”

Kari nodded. “Have you found out why?”

“I’m not sure…” Nina looked down at the bullets on the ground. There was a pile of empty magazines next to them. She held one up. “Eddie! How many bullets does one of these hold?”

“UMP? Thirty rounds.”

“So there’s over a hundred bullets here, good…” She picked up one of the bullets. “Okay, let’s see…”

Kneeling, she moved closer to the nearest Indian woman, giving her what she hoped was a friendly, non-threatening look. The woman reacted with suspicion, but didn’t back away as Nina picked up a piece of charcoal and a blank scrap of bark. On it, she made a small mark-the symbol for a single unit. Then she held up the bullet, pointing to the mark and raising her eyebrows questioningly. “One, yes? One?”

The woman stared at her oddly for a moment, before suddenly smiling, saying something. “She says yes,” di Salvo told her.

“Great! Okay…” Nina reached back and picked up a handful of bullets, dropping them next to her knees, then lined up two of them below the parchment before making a second mark next to the first. “Two?”

The woman nodded again. Nina added another six bullets to the line, then made more marks. Eight little ticks in a line…

Another nod. Nina smiled, then took a ninth bullet, placed it by the first row, then added another tick to the line. “Nine?”

The woman shook her head. Nina wiped away the nine marks, then instead drew an inverted V and pointed back at the bullets. “Nine?”

A second shake of the head, this time accompanied by a somewhat exasperated expression and what sounded like a mocking comment to the other Indians. A few of them chuckled, as did di Salvo. “What did she say?” Nina asked.

“That she can’t believe you don’t even know how to count,” he replied, amused even through his weariness.

The woman took the charcoal from her hand and added a single mark to the left of the symbol, then pointed at the nine bullets. “So that’s nine?” Nina said thoughtfully.

“What have you found?” asked Kari.

“Starkman’s guy thought the circumflex symbol on its own represented nine,” said Nina, mind racing. “But it doesn’t-I started to realize it when I saw how they count. They don’t use their fingers-they use the gaps between them. Watch.” She moved one of the bullets away from the others, then tapped a finger between the thumb and forefinger of her other hand. “One.” The Indian woman stared at her, not sure what she was doing. Nina put a second bullet by the first, and tapped the skin between her thumb and forefinger again, then that between her forefinger and middle finger. “One, two?”

The woman nodded, smiling again. She held up both her hands, quickly using the little finger of each to count off the gaps between the fingers of the other until she reached eight.

Nina realized the significance of the shape her hands formed, the tips of her little fingers touching after she stopped counting. “The circumflex-it represents eight ‘full’ gaps. So nine is represented by one circumflex plus one, which means that…” She pointed at the tally, where a single dot was followed by a pair of circumflexes. “That’s seventeen-one plus eight plus eight. But look, they don’t represent sixteen with two circumflexes, but with eight single units plus one circumflex. It’s like they’re filling up the gaps between their fingers, and each time they’re full, the next number is however many full hands of eight they have, plus one.”

“It’s not a linear progression,” Kari said, understanding.

“No wonder we couldn’t work out the puzzle in the temple-we were using the wrong system! It’s like a weird hybrid of notational and positional systems!”

“English, Doc,” groaned Chase.

“Okay, okay… In our system, you add a new column every time you multiply by ten, right? Tens, hundreds, thousands-it’s a regular progression. But in their system, which also seems to be the Atlantean system, the new symbols that we saw in the puzzle room aren’t introduced along the same regular progression-instead, they fill in the gaps…” she held up her open fingers, “so to speak. If they were using standard base eight, the next symbol, the circumflex, the little hat-”

“Yeah, I know what a circumflex is, Doc,” Chase said testily.

“Sorry. It would represent eight in a normal base eight system. But it doesn’t-it stands for eight, but doesn’t appear until you get to eight plus one. And the symbol after that, the leaning ‘L’-in base eight that would be sixty-four. But because this is a cumulative rather than linear progression, where you don’t advance until you’ve filled up each of the gaps between your fingers-”

“It comes in after eight groups of eight, plus eight,” Kari continued, excitedly pointing out the relevant group of symbols on the tally.

“Right! And the first time it’s used is at eight groups of eight, plus eight… and then plus one. Or-”