David Sakmyster - The Pharos Objective

“Here it is,” Lydia announced. “We will keep the recovered texts here and invite certain scholars to have access to a portion at a time. A scroll here and there. And carefully, and only after great analysis, we will dole out the information as appropriate.”

“Dole it out to whom?” Phoebe asked, leaning forward in her chair and looking around the room.

Lydia sighed. “To those who seek it. I expect we’ll differ on this, but you must realize that such knowledge, with the power it brings, cannot just be made available to everyone, at once.”

“Why not?” Phoebe asked, cutting Caleb off. She pointed to the servers. “You have everything you need. Scan all the texts, post them on the Internet, and let the world have at them!”

Lydia laughed, and Robert, who had gone down the stairs to sit at a table beside an empty alcove, snickered. “You can’t be serious. No, we will decide when to release certain information. We’ll catalog the sources based on their inflammatory potential, and release the knowledge in small doses gradually, but surely releasing it all.”

“Over how long?” Caleb wondered.

Lydia shrugged. “We’ll see how the early releases are received. Decades certainly, maybe centuries.”

Caleb shook his head. “So we’ll just have to trust your judgment?”

“ Our judgment. Caleb, you’re one of us now. Again.”

He nodded, looking around. It was so tempting to have access to this, to everything coming along. The ancient treasure reunited with its library.

A cell phone rang, and everyone looked at Robert. “Hold on,” he said, digging out his phone. Caleb was amazed it worked down here, but apparently they had set up additional receivers and transmitters for wireless connectivity to the outside.

“Yes?” he said, “we are. What do you mean? Look again.” He frowned, gave Caleb a curious stare, and then glanced at Lydia. He hung up, stood and moved in close to her. “It’s not there,” he whispered.

Lydia’s shoulders sagged. She turned to Caleb. “The tablet isn’t there.”

He stared back at her impassively. “I didn’t think it would be.”

“What?”

“Didn’t the legends claim it was moved before Alexandria fell to the Muslims? Moved back to Giza? I’m thinking it’s under the Sphinx now.”

“But your vision of Manetho…”

“Maybe I wasn’t asking the right questions,” he said. “I wanted to be shown how the wisdom left the Temple of Isis, not where it ultimately wound up.”

Lydia continued staring at him, then looked to Phoebe, considering whether they were lying. Finally, she said, “We’ll keep looking. It has to be there.”

Caleb shrugged. “There were a lot of alcoves, it could have been hidden. Or maybe there’s a secret wall or something.”

She nodded. “We’ll find it, wherever it is. But for now, we have enough to work with.” She came over to Caleb, hesitated, then put her arms around his neck.

“Can I see my son?” he asked.

“My nephew!” Phoebe chimed in.

“Of course,” Lydia said. “He’s waiting upstairs.”

Sodus Bay — Christmas Day

With a deep sigh, Caleb leaned all the way back in the chair, put his feet up on the edge of his mother’s bed, and turned to his side. He had been speaking to her for close to five hours, telling her everything, completing the story of their quest. Filling her in on the triumphant discovery.

Completely exhausted, he closed his eyes, just for a minute. Helen let out a sigh, and a soft murmur filled the darkened room. The lone candle had burned almost completely, the wick floating in a puddle of wax, and Caleb drifted toward sleep.

Then, he heard something. A rustling of the sheets, a creak in the floor. Wearily, with great effort, he opened his eyes. Someone stood over her bed.

The gaunt figure with the long, greasy hair and hunched shoulders. Green khakis. He bent over her. Words poured out from the darkness, whispers at once gentle and strange.

Caleb tried to rise, to lunge for him and drag him away. He’d plagued Caleb all his life, appearing, then disappearing. For so many years Caleb thought he was a manifestation of his own fears, or some subconscious guilt.

But to see him here, now… and to be unable to move!

Then the man did something that melted away Caleb’s fears. He took Helen’s dangling hand in his, and he gently caressed her skin. More whispers. His face right next to hers, he looked into her eyes. And then Caleb understood. Most times he’d seen this man, his mother had been around. And more than once, he knew she had sensed him too. But what visage, what presence would-?

“Dad…?”

The figure froze, as if he had been assuming Caleb was asleep. His head turned, ever so slightly — and the candle went out.

Another sigh, and the room suddenly chilled as the darkness dissipated. Finally finding his strength, Caleb fell out of the chair, turned and reached for the wall switch. The room sprang into light, and Caleb spun around, hoping to confront his father’s apparition at last, to touch him, to apologize for giving up on him, for everything. But there was no one there.

The pictures on the walls watched soberly, and all those faces seemed to turn away, to provide him with solitude, to allow this moment to be alone with his mother. Caleb stumbled toward the bed and took the outstretched hand and the fingers that were already uncoiling from their last grip. Her eyes were closed, her lips moist as if just kissed. Caleb knelt beside her and put his head on her chest, and listened a long, long time, while tears started to slide unimpeded down his face.

Sodus Bay — June.Two years later

“Hello, Mom.” Caleb sat beside her stone and arranged the gardenias in a pattern matching those by his father’s. He had petitioned the right people at the State Department, and with an agreement to forgive and forget, and a tidy sum for his loss, they released Philip’s body from its unmarked grave behind Fort Meade. George Waxman’s name had been stricken from all records related to Stargate and the CIA, and they disavowed all knowledge of his service.

“Just stopping by,” Caleb told his parents as he squinted up through the eaves of a great willow in Forest Hills Cemetery. Here in the shade, and so close to the bay, it was a good ten degrees cooler than near the entrance road. He looked back and saw Phoebe chasing Alexander around.

“I hope you can see this,” he said. “I still can’t believe it, but the new treatments worked. They repaired Phoebe’s neural connections and reconstructed the lower vertebrate, all according to the instructions from the Hippocrates Manuscript. We introduced that one quickly to the medical association, claiming that a boy playing in the caves outside of Cairo had discovered it sealed away in a jar.”

Using the small shovel, Caleb piled more dirt around the flowers and sprinkled water from his bottle over the earth. Then he cleared the emotional block from his voice. “So much more will be coming out in the next year, you’d be amazed. I’m moving the others along as fast as I can, and it’s working. The potential for hydrogen energy and innovations in robotics will astound the world. Amazing that the early thinkers considered these things only for sport. Imagine if necessity had weighed on their imaginations.”

He touched Helen’s stone, laying his palm flat against it. “Rest well, Mom. Phoebe’s doing great, and your grandson… well, I have him for the next four months, and that will have to be enough time for him to experience some down-to-earth cooking and good old American culture. He’s got a lot of games to play, TV to watch and books to read until I have to send him back to Lydia in Alexandria.”