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.”
8
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.
9
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.”
Caleb smiled. “Yes, I’ll keep an eye on him there, too. And, you’ll be happy to know, we might be heading that way again very soon. Me, Phoebe…” then, in a whisper, “… the Morpheus Initiative.”
He stood, stretched and watched the scene behind him, where Alexander chased after a Frisbee. “I’m reforming the group. Recruiting psychics, screening them myself this time. Waxman had the right idea, just the wrong motives. It’ll be a good team, dedicated, professional. Going after the biggest stakes. Important relics, things that will benefit mankind.”
Hands on her hips, gasping for breath, Phoebe laughed, saw Caleb and waved. Alexander shouted and Caleb thought he heard the words “Old Rusty.”
“Dad,” Caleb scolded, “he got that from you. Loves that damn rust bucket. Every chance he gets he’s chucking stones at it, climbing through it, pretending to be Captain Nemo.”
Dropping his voice a notch, Caleb leaned in toward his parents’ stones. Carefully, keeping the words from the jealous wind, he whispered, “Alexander will be ready sooner than I thought.” Caleb looked through the trees, across the narrowest part of the bay, to their little white lighthouse glittering in the sun. “It’s waiting for him, down in our basement, beyond the root cellar door. Locked away behind what, I must say, are some ingenious puzzles of my own. Alexander will figure them out in time. But before that, I’ll teach him what he needs to know.”
Bowing his head, Caleb walked back to his sister and his son, back to the sunlight and the warmth. He
