Pauline Ashwell: Time's Revenge

The Time Traveler took his head out of his hands and looked puzzled.

“I asked why you look as though you’ve been through the shredder,” I said, inaccurately, “and you handed me this photograph. The statue looks perfectly OK to me. Did it get damaged, or—’’ I realised suddenly that it did not look in the least as though it had been buried for 2,500 years—“did you forget, and polish the patina off it, or what?”

“No, no.” It came out like another groan. He fumbled out another photograph and gave it to me. It showed the same figure, but with the smooth dark greenness that comes from long aging of bronze without interference. The throne was gone; Persephone sat on a boxy wooden chair, instead. If anything, she looked even more impressive than before.

“Well, then,” I said, puzzled, “what went wrong?”

He buried his face in his hands again; but after a few seconds he straightened up and tried, rather resentfully, to make sense.

“We took her off the throne because we buried her—it was a lot easier that way. She’d been fastened to it with rivets. When we dug her up the area around the rivet holes was somewhat corroded, in places the bronze actually flaked away. I invited my contact at the British Museum to come and see her—”

“Where?” I interrupted.

“Oh, I hired a bank vault to keep her in. I had to bring in a couple of spotlights for his inspection, of course. He was absolutely overcome when he saw her; spent a long time just sitting and staring. Then he asked if he could take samples from the damaged area, for scientific tests. Of course, I agreed.”

“Of course,” I said.

“The asking price was two and a half million-pounds, I mean. Of course, he had to discuss it with his colleagues, but he thought he knew a handful of millionaires who could be persuaded to put up the cash. He was supposed to get in touch with me three days ago.”

“Didn’t he?” I asked, after the pause seemed to have gone on long enough.

“No. I was puzzled. I tried to call him, but was told he’d gone out of the country. That seemed most unlikely; he would surely have let me know. In the end I broke into the Museum’s computer, to find out what had gone wrong.”

I was momentarily startled; then I remembered that breaking into a computer did not involve physical violence.

“Did you find out?” I said, when it seemed that nothing more would be forthcoming without a prod.

“Oh, yes. I found out.” He made a very small gesture that somehow conveyed infinite despair.

“Well, was something wrong with the—the thermoluminescence or something?” This method of dating baked clay objects, including the core of bronze statues, had featured largely in a couple of archaeological paperbacks I had read recently.

“No, not that. The estimated age was 2,350 years plus or minus 400—quite close enough. It was the bronze that was wrong.”

“What?”

“The proportions of copper and tin were within the usual limits for the period, but there was more than half a percent of other metals. Under X-ray fluorescence it showed traces of half a dozen metals—lithium, iridium, niobium, cobalt, samarium, nickel. They were all concentrated in one part of the flake. There was not enough of it for quantitative analysis, but the analysts guessed that the proportion of metal other than bronze in one spot was something like three percent. So he analysed the clay of the core and found traces of several of the metals in that, as well.”

I mulled this over and could make nothing of it.

“How bad is that? Couldn’t Theodoros just have got hold of some ore that happened to have these other metals in it as well as copper?”

“Cobalt, perhaps, and nickel. Not the rest. The only way you’d find that assemblage of elements together would be if they’d been put together, in an artifact of some sort. And nobody even knew that most of them existed, until the nineteenth century A.D.”

“Then how did they get into the bronze?” I said.

The Time Traveler wiped sweat from his brow with a hand that shook, noticeably.

“The only explanation that the analyst could suggest was that somebody had dropped an artifact containing them into the clay, while it was soft. And the only way that could happen was if the statue was a fake. A very recent fake. Samarium, for instance, was not used for anything whatever until the last half of the twentieth century, when it was incorporated in magnets.” He gave a heartrending sigh. “My contact was terribly disappointed, poor chap. And everybody at the museum is terribly worried, because if the statue is a fake it means that thermoluminescence measurements can’t be trusted any longer—I would have to have faked those, too.”

“Yes, but how—” I halted, struck by a memory. “The first time you came here—that thing you’d lost—with the initials—”

“The E.T.T.?”

“Yes. What was it made of?”

He heaved a sigh all the way up from his boots.

“You’re quite right, of course. It contains all those elements. When the statue was moved into the workshop the clay was still soft. Once, I remember, the whole thing tilted—the figure toppled forward. I was behind it, I put out my hand to hold the seat level—”

“The hand with the E.T.T. in it?” I said.

“I suppose so… If I had let go of it it would have rolled down—and then—”

The words that trembled on my lips were “She would have sat on it?” I suppressed them. Instead I said, “So what happens now?”

Visibly, he pulled himself together.

“First—tomorrow—as soon as the bank opens I go to the vault and scrape out more of the core, until I find the remains of the E.T.T. Then…” He relapsed into apathetic gloom.

I prodded gently. “What will the museum people do, I wonder?”

“Oh, lord… Dither around checking things for as long as they can. Then once they’re absolutely certain of their ground they’ll notify me they’re not interested, and warn every other major museum that I’ve started selling fakes as well as stolen goods. I’ll be finished, so far as they’re concerned.”

“And what about the statue?” I said. “Oh, I’ll take that across to America and take it around to a few of the big collectors. They don’t have access to the museum grapevine; they’ll do their own tests and be happy. I’ll make damned sure I’ve removed all the affected sections.”

“I suppose it means you won’t get your full price, though,” I said.

“No, why? I’ll probably get more than I would have done from the B.M., especially if I get an auction going between rival collectors. The museums are hard bargainers; they expect you to take part of the price in prestige… But, damn it, I hate to sell Persephone to someone who’ll keep her to himself, except when he wants to make somebody jealous.”

“What will you do with all the money?” I asked. It had suddenly occurred to me to wonder about the value of a bank balance to somebody domiciled in another universe.

“Oh, it will be used… We buy a great many things here—in this placetime, and others. Machines, instruments, all kinds of equipment. There aren’t enough of us to make all that we need, even if we wanted to spend our time that way—”

“What’s the equipment for?” I persisted.

“Oh, we have a good many projects,” said the Time Traveler vaguely. He caught my look, and was suddenly amused, for the first time that evening. “Don’t worry; they do not include taking over the Earth, now or at any future time… We do make use of certain placetimes in the past, though. There’s one island in the Late Jurassic… I think I might spend the rest of my life there, watching the sea…”