Robert Silverberg - The Artifact Business

Darby remained unconvinced. He shook his head. “I can’t condone counterfeiting Terran artifacts. No—if you try it, I’ll expose you!”

A stunned silence fell over the room at the threat. Sturges glanced appealingly at me, and I moistened my lips. “You don’t seem to understand, George. Once we have this new plan working, it’ll spur genuine archaeology. Look—we dig up half a dozen phoney scarabs in the Nile Valley. People buy them—and we keep on digging, with the profits we make. Earth experiences a sudden interest; there’s a rebirth of archaeology. We dig up real scarabs.”

His eyes brightened, but 1 could see he was still unpersuaded. I added my clincher.

“Besides, George, someone will have to go to Earth to supervise this project.” 1 looked around the room. “We’ll have to pool our cash, won’t we, to get a man down there?”

I paused, caught Sturges’ silent approval. “I think,” I said sonorously, “that it is the unanimous decision of this assembly that we nominate our greatest expert on Terran antiquity to handle the job on Earth—Dr. George Darby.”

I didn’t think he would be able to resist that. I was right. Suddenly, Darby stopped objecting.

Six months later, an archaeologist working near Gizeh turned up a scarab of lovely design, finely-worked and inlaid with strange jewels.

In a paper published in an obscure journal to which most of us subscribe, he conjectured that this find represented an outcrop of a hitherto-unknown area of Egyptology. He also sold the scarab to a jewelry syndicate for a staggering sum, and used the proceeds to finance an extensive exploration of the entire Nile Valley, something that hadn’t been done since the decline of archaeology more than a century earlier.

Shortly afterwards, a student working in Greece came up with a remarkable Homeric shield. Glazed pottery reached the light in Syria, and Scythian metalwork was exhumed in the wilds of the Caucasus. What had been a science as dead as alchemy suddenly blossomed into new life; the people of Earth discovered that their own world contained riches as desirable as those on Voltus and Dariak and the other planets the Company had been mining for gewgaws, and that they were somewhat less costly in the bargain.

The Voltuscian workshops are now going full blast, and the only limitation on our volume is the difficulty of smuggling the things to Earth and planting them. We’re doing quite well financially, thank you. Darby, who’s handling the job brilliantly on Earth, sends us a fat check every month, which we divide equally among ourselves after paying the happy Voltuscians.

Occasionally I feel regret that it was Darby and not myself who won the coveted job of going to Earth, but I reconcile myself with the awareness that there was no other way to gain Darby’s sympathies. I’ve learned things about ends and means. Soon, we’ll all be rich enough to travel to Earth, if we want to.

But I’m not so sure I do want to go. There was a genuine Voltuscian antiquity, you know, and I’ve become as interested in that as I am in that of Greece and Rome. I see an opportunity to do some pure archaeology in a virgin field of research.

So perhaps I’ll stay here after all. I’m thinking of writing a book on Voltuscian artifacts—the real ones, I mean, all crude things of no commercial value whatever. And tomorrow I’m going to show Dolbak how to make Mexican pottery of the Chichimec period. It’s attractive stuff. I think there ought to be a good market for it.