The Hunt For Atlantis

twenty, Bronze Age Europeans used base eight…” She snapped her head around to look at the symbols again. “Base eight! That’s it, it must be!”

“Why would anyone use eight?” Chase asked. In response, Kari held up her hands, fingers splayed-but with her thumbs tucked against her palms. “Oh, I get it-they used their thumbs to count on their fingers, but didn’t actually count the thumbs?”

“That’s the theory,” said Nina, searching through the inscriptions. “So instead of going one, ten, one hundred, the numbers actually go one, eight, sixty-four…” She rushed back to the door. “So the first column is single units, the second multiples of eight, then sixty-four, five hundred and twelve, four thousand and ninety-six and…”

“Thirty-two thousand, seven hundred and sixty-eight,” Kari finished.

“Right. So the number would be, let’s see… three single units, plus five units of eight, forty, plus sixty-four times seven…”

Chase made a pained noise. “I’ll let you two work all that out.”

Kari came up with the answer first. “Fifty thousand, six hundred and sixty-seven.”

“Okay,” said Nina. “You do the second number, I’ll do the third.” Another burst of mental arithmetic produced the answers: 36,695 and 14,452. “All right! So the first minus the second minus the third is…”

They both thought hard about it, Chase watching intently-only to see both their faces fall at almost the same moment. “What? What’s the answer?”

“It’s minus four hundred and eighty,” Nina told him despondently. “It can’t be base eight.”

“What about base nine?” asked Kari. “If decimal gives too large a result, and octal too small…”

“The answer would still be in the thousands. Shit!” Nina gave Chase a questioning look.

“Twenty-four minutes.”

“Damn it! We’re running out of time!” She angrily kicked the door. “What the hell are we missing?”

Chase crouched and rummaged through the lead balls, hoping there would be some hidden clue in the trough. There wasn’t. “What if we just take a best guess and put that many balls in the pan? There’s a chance we might get lucky.”

Nina touched her pendant. “That would need the biggest piece of luck in the world.”

“It’s all we’ve got. We can’t just give up-even if we go back through all the other challenges, the Indians’ll kill us as soon as we get outside. And Hugo and Agnaldo and the Prof.”

“If we get it wrong, we’ll be killed anyway,” Kari reminded him, pointing at the spikes suspended overhead.

“Maybe there’s some way we can pull the lever from outside the room…”

But Nina was no longer listening. Something else Chase had said was now foremost in her mind.

Back through all the other challenges…

That was what had been troubling her, gnawing at her mind. And now that she knew what it was…

“There’s another way through!” she burst out. “There has to be! The tribespeople maintain the temple, and the traps-they must, they need to be reset. And repaired.” She indicated the stone door. “But there’s no way the temple’s builders would have forced the very people who were supposed to be protecting it to go through the challenges every time they needed to go inside-one little mistake, and they’re dead! So there has to be some way for them to get through safely without running the gauntlet every time.”

“A back door?” asked Chase.

“Yes, like a service access, or even just some way to open the exit of each challenge without actually having to complete it.” Nina turned the light back to the chamber walls. “Maybe there’s a switch, or a loose block, some way to open the door.”

They hurriedly searched the walls of the chamber, fingertips brushing over the cold stone to feel for anything out of place. After a minute, Chase raised his voice. “Here!”

Nina and Kari joined him in one corner of the room. At floor level, right where the two walls met, was a small vertical slot. It wasn’t much of an opening-but compared to the precise joins of the other blocks, it was clearly a deliberate feature rather than poor workmanship. “What’s inside?” Kari asked.

“No idea-it’s too small to get my hand into. Nina, you’ve got nice dainty little fingers-have a root around.”

“And I’d like them to stay nice,” Nina complained, but she knelt by the slot anyway. “Oh God. I just hope there’s not some finger-chopping thing or a scorpion inside…”

She warily slipped her fingers between the blocks. A little more… more…

Her fingertip touched something. She flinched, afraid it was a hair-trigger that would drop the spikes onto them. But the trio remained unimpaled.

For now.

“What is it?” asked Kari.

“There’s something metal in here.”

“A switch?”

“I don’t know… hold on.” Nina tried to slide her fingers around the obstruction. “It could be.”

Chase leaned closer. “Can you pull it?”

“Let me,” said Kari. “Nina, you should wait in the passageway. Just in case something goes wrong.”

“If it doesn’t work, then we’re going to be dead soon anyway,” Nina said. “You two get out of the chamber. Go on!” she added, before either of them could object. She took several deep breaths as they backed through the entrance to the chamber. “Okay. Here goes…”

She wrapped her fingers around the metal, paused for a moment to wonder what the hell she was doing, and pulled it.

Clink.

The hanging framework of spikes remained still.

Another, louder clink of metal came from the stone door. Nina exhaled loudly. “I think it worked…”

“Get out of the room,” Chase ordered, waving Kari to stay back as he walked to the door. Nina gratefully obeyed. He braced himself, then pushed. The door swung open, heavy stone rasping over the floor. Another dark passage lay beyond.

“You did it!” Kari cried.

“Nice work,” said Chase. “But we really need to shift-we’ve only got twenty-one minutes left.”

“We’d better get a move on then.” Nina patted Chase’s arm as she passed him. “And you were right about the lateral thinking.”

“We make a pretty good team, don’t we?” he said. “You’ve got the brains, I’ve got the brawn, and Kari’s got…”

“The beauty?” suggested Nina. Kari smiled.

“I was going to say agility, but yours works too.” He took the light from Nina. “Okay. So we beat the three challenges. Now what?”

“Now we put the artifact back where it belongs, then get the hell out of here,” Nina said, advancing down the passage.

Castille glanced nervously to the west. The sun had long since dropped behind the high canopy of trees, but pinpoints of bright light still made it through the dense foliage.

It was very close to the horizon, though. And the sky overhead was rapidly turning a deeper blue as dusk crept in…

He looked back at the temple entrance. The square of darkness was devoid of any movement, as it had been from the moment the glow of Chase’s flashlight had disappeared about forty minutes earlier.

“Hurry up, Edward,” he said to himself.

“Wh-what if they’re dead?” Philby asked, sweat covering his panicked face. The three prisoners were on their knees outside the elders’ hut, several hunters encircling them.