The Lost Scrolls. Alex Archer

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      IT WAS LATE AT NIGHT. Annja had spent the day down in the excavation itself, painstakingly helping to extract burned scrolls from the rubble of the burned cabinets. She was exhausted and felt sticky from sweat, although here in the main lab inside the old warehouse it was quite cool. Apparently the Supreme Council on Antiquities was willing to spring for air-conditioning. Or maybe the television network was springing for it—she was grateful to whomever.

      She noticed Jadzia lurking off to one side. The girl was fanning herself with a sheaf of fanfolded paper and trying to chat up a handsome young Egyptian technician working on a computer near her. Either he was shy or deliberately ignoring her. She caught Annja’s attention, glared and looked away.

      “Correct me if I’m wrong,” Annja said, propping her rump on a table. “Wasn’t the Minoan civilization destroyed by a great big volcanic eruption around 1500 B.C.?”

      “Yes,” Pilitowski said. “The catastrophic eruption of Thera. It is now estimated to have been at least ten times as powerful as Krakatau in 1883.”

      “Although geologists tend to date the eruption from about 1600 B.C.,” Aleksy Fabiszak, the team’s geology specialist, said. “That volume of ejecta would be the same magnitude as the terrible Tambora eruption of 1815, the most violent of recorded history.”

      “One point on the volcanic explosivity scale beneath supervolcano,” Maria said.

      “So it would have made a royal mess of much of the Aegean,” Annja said. “I mean, the way the catastrophe that destroyed Atlantis is supposed to have?”

      “Well, if what you’re getting at is that perhaps Atlantis and the Minoan culture of Crete were the same,” Pilitowski said, “a lot of people have come to suspect that.”

      Jadzia snapped her gum loudly. “ Somebody should tell her,” she said brassily, as if Annja were not in the room, “that we have found many references on the scrolls that make it impossible the writer was talking about the Minoans.”

      Burly, good-natured Dr. Pilitowski looked to the slight, dark Maria, who shrugged. Annja got the impression she wasn’t the only one who found the brilliant language expert a problem child.

      “From contextual evidence in what we have translated of these Atlantis scrolls,” Maria said, “it is clear they were written about half a century after Solon. That would make them a century older than Plato’s writing.”

      “So far we are not finding any reference to Solon at all,” Naser said. He was a plump, pallid man in his thirties with a neat beard, who spoke with a Lower East Side New York accent. “We suspect that somewhere along the line different end-of-the-world stories got mixed together.”

      “Hmm,” Annja said. She was still having trouble dealing with serious archaeologists taking Atlantis seriously. Although she had to admit none of them actually seemed to be vested in the truth of the scrolls, even if they did call them the Atlantis scrolls. But there was no mistaking the excitement that ran through the site whenever the gong went off to announce that they had images of more restored fragments.

      “One thing I’m puzzled by,” she said, “is that reading Plato, I didn’t really see any talk about advanced technology. Not like what people always talk about, with flying machines and artificial light and all that.”

      “That actually seems to have first appeared in a book called A Dweller on Two Planets, which came out late in the nineteenth century,” Pilitowski said. “Its author claimed to have received the information in dreams.”

      Annja raised an eyebrow.

      “Well, channeled it, actually.” He shrugged. “What can I say? He was from California.”

      “Somebody ought to tell her the new scrolls substantiate much of what Frederick Oliver wrote in that book,” Jadzia said hotly.

      Annja looked to Pilitowski, who shrugged. “I do not know that I would go so far as to say ‘substantiate,’” he said. “Nonetheless, we must admit we find certain correspondences.”

      “We began to wonder if some alternate account of Atlantis might have surfaced sporadically throughout history,” Naser said, “without impinging on academic scholarship. And that Oliver got hold of it somehow.”

      “With all respect,” Annja said, “that seems to be reaching a bit far.”

      “Not so far as believing in channeling,” Naser said.

      “True,” Annja said with a laugh.

      Annja looked sidelong at Jadzia. The young woman—she just acts like a girl, Annja thought—posed a conundrum. For one thing, Annja wasn’t used to evoking knee-jerk hostility in people she hadn’t met. It bothered her. She led an isolated enough existence that she felt threatened when somebody reacted to her with such СКАЧАТЬ