‘Kulusuk. Would you believe the population here is about three hundred and they have an international airport? It’s not quite as big as Heathrow, mind.’
Greg twiddled his control and reversed the chair back towards his computer, still talking on the cordless phone. He moved the hand cursor on Google Earth and zoomed out to seven hundred kilometres. From there, he could see how far the two spots were apart. It didn’t seem a problem, especially with airstrips at both locations.
‘OK. If the search is not bearing fruit where you are, I suggest you skip down to Narsaq. It looks far more promising.’
‘Nothing bears fruit here, Greg. It’s ice, snow and more ice. But you have the big picture, so we’ll do as you suggest.’
He ignored her feeble joke and idly moved the hand-shaped cursor around the rim of his crater, caressing it. ‘It’s what I’m paid for.’
There was a moment’s silence from the other end of the line, and Greg thought he had lost the connection. Then he heard June’s voice again. ‘Oh, I nearly forgot the reason why I phoned you. There’s a meteorite for sale on eBay. Looks interesting. Its curious shape might appeal to you.’
‘Curious shape?’
‘Take a look.’
Annoyingly, she rang off before he could question her further, so he opened Google Chrome and went into eBay. He bought lots of items on the website, so his access was smooth and easy. He soon saw what June had meant about the meteorite on offer being a strange shape. From the picture, it looked like one of those stealth planes from the 1980s. Boomerang-shaped with a small tail, and smooth. Later stealth aircraft got all angular to prevent radar working on them. This was like an early prototype, all rounded and smooth. And to Greg it looked old. New meteorites had a fusion crust, making them dark and glossy. This was brownish, and the surface looked grainy. But when he zoomed in on the picture, he could just make out some markings on the surface, half hidden by its granular nature. He thought it might be a fake, but he was prepared to take the risk to get a good look at it. And to add it to his collection. The seller, a guy with the handle Tallman, claimed it was an iron meteorite, which made it quite rare. Less than six per cent of meteorites were iron. He looked at the auction bid and at the time left. It had already reached $2,000 with an hour left, so he put in a bid of $2,200. Within a few minutes someone bid $2,500. Greg added another $500, only to be topped again a few minutes later. He grinned, knowing the guy bidding against him was an amateur. With only an hour — less now — to go, he should have been holding off until the last minute. This was going to be Greg’s strategy before he pushed the bidding higher than it needed to go. He eased back in his wheelchair, rearranged his lifeless legs that had slipped awkwardly and poured himself a glass of Tall Horse. The South African Merlot washed down his throat with its characteristic smoothness as he relaxed and held his nerve. Leaving eBay open, he returned to Google Earth. He ran his electronic hand over the Greenland crater rim once more.
Fifty minutes later, he had won. The iron meteorite was his for a paltry $3,600. He quickly sorted out the payment and arranged delivery. It was very late, and he should have been going through the tedious ritual that got him into bed by now. But he couldn’t bear it, when he knew he had to do the whole thing in reverse in only a few hours’ time. Not for the first time since his accident, he carried on through the night searching for craters that might provide remains of extraterrestrial life. The one he had found was very promising, as the outline was hard and jagged. He really needed to find craters without an outline eroded by Ice Age glaciers and the millennia. A crater formed by a meteorite that had come down recently — in other words, no more than 100,000 years ago. Even better if it was one that had impacted within living memory. And in a cold place.
When he told people he worked for a research team who were looking for extraterrestrial life, he had to fend off the inevitable inane questions about ET, little grey men with big eyes and flying saucers. The research team, led by Dr June Piper, would be overjoyed if they found something as lowly as frozen bacteria. Which is why Greenland was a great place in which to hunt for impact craters. The only drawback was that most of it was covered with snow and ice. The possible crater north of Qassiarsuk was an excellent prospect, as it was on bare terrain but close to the ice sheet. He ploughed on through the night looking at all the smaller dots and hollows on Google Earth that might be part of the scatter from the original meteorite fall. He hardly noticed the creeping greyness that began to fill the room as dawn approached. Suddenly, his email service pinged, alerting him to an incoming email. He scrubbed his stubbly chin, and yawned, aware for the first time that he felt hugely exhausted. He opened his email box and clicked on the new item in the inbox. The message was so unexpected as to immediately wake him up. It was from someone signing himself V. A. Bassianus, who claimed to be a representative of the Sol Invictus Trust. He explained that he had been very interested in buying the iron meteorite and regretted losing out on the eBay auction. He invited Greg to name a price for selling it to the trust. Greg stared at the screen as though it might have the answers to a myriad questions that were buzzing in his brain. He gave in to a persistent habit, developed since his accident, of talking to himself.
‘How the hell did you know I had bought it, and how did you get my email address?’
Any information on eBay had to be confidential. If it wasn’t, and the site had given — or, even worse, sold — his details to this individual, he would sue them. He trusted the site, though, and quickly dismissed the notion. But he still couldn’t work out how V. A. Bassianus could have got his address. He typed a short reply, asking those very questions, and ended by saying the meteorite was not for sale. He sent the email on its way and put it out of his mind for the time being.
A week later, when a heavy packet arrived at his apartment, the mystery was revived in his mind. Opening the packet, he found inside a battered wooden box with a label stuck to the lid. The label itself was ancient and almost worn away. Only strips remained on which Greg could discern faded brown writing in a crabbed hand. Some of the text was lost completely, along with the paper on which it had been written. What was left would take him a while to decipher. Intrigued, he opened the box. Inside lay the iron meteorite just as he remembered it from the photograph on eBay. The surface looked darker than in the picture, and smoother — as though someone had tried to polish it. Maybe Tallman, whoever he was, had thought he should do so before passing it on to his buyer. Greg could see the characteristic regmaglypts that covered the surface. They were popularly called ‘thumbprints’ because that was what they looked like — as though someone had pressed their thumb into the surface over and over again while the rock had been malleable. He could also see the marks he had at first thought had been painted on the surface. Looking closely at the rock, he could tell they were an integral part of the material. Curiously, they looked like Hebrew letters. He turned the rock over and over in his hand. It was heavy, and, if it conformed to the normal make-up of an iron meteorite, it held iron, nickel and perhaps some kamacite and taenite. He rolled his wheelchair along his workbench and put the rock on some electronic scales. He whistled quietly. It was almost 1,700 grams, so, taking its dimensions into account, it probably had a specific gravity of 8. Definitely within the range of an iron meteorite. He placed it on the bench and looked hard at it.
The email message from Bassianus came into his mind, and he wondered what was so special about this stone that the man was prepared to pay any price to get it. He picked the stone up again and nestled it in his lap while he motored back to his computer. Once there, he looked in his email service’s deleted file and called up the message again. He scanned the text, and the email address of the sender.
‘What the hell is the Sol Invictus Trust when it’s at home? And why were you so keen to get the stone in the first place, Mr V. A. Bassianus?’
He tried the obvious first route, typing the name of the trust into Google. He had plenty of hits, including an online gaming site, and information about an English neofolk band addicted to electronic experimentation. There was nothing about a trust. However, there was another entry on an historical site that caught his eye. It was about a Roman emperor called Heliogabalus who had been responsible for promoting a version of sun worship. He replaced Jupiter with the god of the cult called Elagabalus, and renamed him Deus Sol Invictus — God the Undefeated Sun. Greg’s inclination was to be sceptical about anything he couldn’t measure or define, so he didn’t believe in the supernatural. But he knew equally that it didn’t stop some cranks thinking they had powers greater than science could encompass. Someone probably wanted to revive this old cult seriously enough to spend big money on obtaining the meteorite. Then he spotted Emperor Heliogabalus’s birth name, Varius Avitus Bassianus. He clicked back on the email text on his computer screen.
‘Just who do you think you are, Mr V. A. Bassianus? A ghost, a reincarnation or a god?’
He recalled the old box the stone had been delivered in and reached out for it. The label that had been glued on the lid was tantalizing. The words were in English, but an old form of it, and broken up by the missing pieces of
