Robin Cook - Seizure

Daniel nodded. “Almost as much as I.”

Stephanie eyed her lover after his last comment in hopes that there would be some evidence of humor like a wry smile, but there wasn’t. She felt a twinge of irritation that Daniel had to be a little more, no matter what the issue. She took a sip of her wine to get her mind back to the subject at hand. “Anyway,” she continued, “I started reading the material at the bookstore, and I had trouble stopping. I mean, I can’t wait to get back to the book I bought. It was written by an Oxford scholar named Ian Wilson. Hopefully, tomorrow I’ll be getting more books, thanks to the Internet.”

Stephanie was interrupted by the arrival of their meal. She and Daniel impatiently watched as the waiter served them. Daniel held off speaking until the waiter had withdrawn. “Okay, you have piqued my curiosity. Let’s hear the basis of this surprising epiphany.”

“I started my reading with the comfortable knowledge the shroud had been carbon-dated by three independent labs to the thirteenth century, the same century in which it had suddenly appeared historically. Knowing the precision of carbon-dating technology, I did not expect my belief that it was a forgery to be challenged. But it was, and it was challenged almost immediately. The reason was simple. If the shroud had been made when the carbon dating suggested, the forger would have had to be shockingly ingenious several quanta above Leonardo da Vinci.”

“You’re going to have to explain,” Daniel said between mouthfuls. Stephanie had paused to start her own dinner.

“Let’s start with some subtle reasons the forger would have to have been superhuman for his time and then move on to more compelling ones. First off, the forger would have had to have knowledge of foreshortening in art, which had yet to be discovered. The image of the man on the shroud had his legs flexed and his head bent forward, probably in rigor mortis.”

“I’ll admit that’s not terribly compelling,” Daniel remarked.

“How about this one: The forger would have had to know the true method of crucifixion used by the Romans in ancient times. This was in contrast to all contemporary thirteenth-century depictions of the crucifixion, of which there were literally hundreds of thousands. In reality, the condemned individual’s wrists were nailed to the crossbeam, not his palms, which would not have been able to hold his weight. Also, the crown of thorns was not a ringlet, but rather like a skullcap.”

Daniel nodded a few times in thought.

“Try this one: The bloodstains block the image on the cloth, meaning this clever artist started with bloodstains and then did the image, which is backward from the way all artists would work. The image would be done first, or at least the outline. Then the details like blood would be added to be certain they would be in the correct locations.”

“That’s interesting, but I’d have to put that one in the category with the foreshortening.”

“Then let’s move on,” Stephanie said. “In 1979, when the shroud was subjected to five days of scientific scrutiny by teams of scientists from the U.S., Italy, and Switzerland, it was unequivocally determined that the shroud’s image was not painted. There were no brushstrokes, there was an infinite gradation of density, and the image was a surface phenomenon only with no imbibition, meaning no fluid of any kind was involved. The only explanation they came up with of the origin of the image was some kind of oxidative process of the surface of the linen fibers, as if they were exposed in the presence of oxygen to a sudden flash of intense light or other strong electromagnetic radiation. Obviously, this was vague and purely speculative.”

“All right,” Daniel said. “I must admit you are getting into the downright compelling arena.”

“There’s more,” Stephanie said. “Some of the U.S. scientists examining the shroud in 1979 were from NASA, and they subjected the shroud to analysis by the most sophisticated technologies available, including a piece of equipment known as a VP-8 Image Analyzer. This was an analog device that had been developed to convert specially recorded digital images of the surface of the moon and Mars into three-dimensional pictures. To everyone’s surprise, the image on the shroud contains this kind of information, meaning the density of the shroud’s image at any given location is directly proportional to the distance it was from the crucified individual it had covered. All in all, it would have had to have been one hell of a forger if he anticipated all this back in the thirteenth century.”

“My word!” Daniel voiced, as he shook his head in amazement.

“Let me add one other thing,” Stephanie said. “Biologists specializing in pollen have determined that the shroud contains pollen that only comes from Israel and Turkey, meaning the supposed forger would have had to be resourceful as well as clever.”

“How could the results of the carbon dating have been so wrong?”

“An interesting question,” Stephanie said, while taking another bite of her dinner. She chewed quickly. “No one knows for sure. There have been suggestions that ancient linen tends to support the continued growth of bacteria that leave behind a transparent, varnish-like biofilm that would distort the results. Apparently, there has been a similar problem with carbon-dating some linen on Egyptian mummies, whose antiquity is known rather precisely by other means.

“Another idea suggested by a Russian scientist is that the fire that scorched the shroud in the sixteenth century could have skewed the results, although it’s hard for me to understand how it could have skewed it more than a thousand years.”

“What about the historical aspect?” Daniel asked. “If the shroud is real, how come its history only goes back to the thirteenth century, when it appeared in France?”

“That’s another good question,” Stephanie said. “When I first started reading the shroud material, I gravitated to the scientific aspects, and I’ve just started with the historical. Ian Wilson has cleverly related the shroud to another known and highly revered Byzantine relic called the Edessa Cloth, which had been in Constantinople for over three hundred years. Interestingly enough, this cloth disappeared when the city was sacked by crusaders in 1204.”

“Is there any documentary evidence that the shroud and the Edessa Cloth are one and the same?”

“That’s right where I stopped reading,” Stephanie said. “But it seems likely there is such evidence. Wilson cites a French eyewitness to the Byzantine relic prior to its disappearance, who described it in his memoirs as a burial shroud with a mystical, full, double-body image of Jesus, which certainly sounds like the Shroud of Turin. If the two relics are the same, then history takes it back at least to the ninth century.”

“I can certainly understand why all this has captured your interest,” Daniel said. “It’s fascinating. And getting back to the science, if the image wasn’t painted, what are the current theories as to its origin?”

“That question is probably the single most intriguing. There really aren’t any theories.”

“Has the shroud been studied scientifically since the episode you mentioned in 1979?”

“A lot,” Stephanie said.

“And there are no current theories?”

“None that have stood up to further testing. Of course, there is still the vague idea of some kind of flash of strange radiation… ” Stephanie let her voice trail off as if to leave the idea hanging in the air.

“Wait a second!” Daniel said. “You’re not about to spring some divine or supernatural nonsense on me, are you?”

Stephanie spread her hands palms-up, shrugged, and smiled all at the same time.