'Masterfully carved,' said Sandecker, admiring the intricate features of the face on the lid.
'A most distinctive design,' observed Straight. 'The serene expression, the soft look of the eyes definitely have an Asian quality about them. Almost a direct association with statuary art from the Cahola dynasty of southern India.
'Now that you mention it,' said Yaeger, 'the face does have a remarkable resemblance to most sculptures of Buddha.'
'How is it possible for two unrelated cultures to carve similar likenesses from the same type of stone?' asked Sandecker.
'Pre-Columbian contact by a transpacific crossing?' speculated Pitt.
Straight shook his head. 'Until someone discovers an ancient artifact in this hemisphere that is absolutely proven to have come from either Asia or Europe, all similarities have to be classed as sheer coincidence. No more.'
'Likewise, no early Mayan or Andean art has ever shown up in excavations of ancient cities around the Mediterranean or the Far East,' said Gunn.
Straight lightly ran his fingertips over the green jade. 'Still, this face presents an enigma. Unlike the Maya and the ancient Chinese, the Inca did not prize jade. They preferred gold to adorn their kings and gods, living or dead, believing it represented the sun that gave fertility to the soil and warmth to all life.'
'Let's open it and get to that thing inside,' ordered Sandecker.
Straight nodded at Pitt. 'I'll let you do the honors.'
Without a word, Pitt inserted a thin metal shaft under the lid of the box and carefully pried it open.
There it was. The quipu, lying as it had in the cedar lined box for centuries. They stared curiously at it for almost a minute, wondering if its riddle could be solved.
Straight zipped open a small leather pouch. Neatly arrayed inside was a set of tools, several different-sized tweezers, small calipers, and a row of what looked like the picks that dentists use for cleaning teeth. He pulled on a pair of soft white gloves and selected a pair of tweezers and one of the picks. Then he reached in the box and began probing the quipu, delicately testing the strands to see if they could be separated without breaking.
As if he were a surgeon lecturing to a group of interns over a cadaver, he began explaining the examination process. 'Not as brittle nor as fragile as I expected. The quipu is made from different metals, mostly copper, some silver, one or two gold. Looks like they were hand formed into wire and then wound into tiny coil-like cables, some thicker than others, with varied numbers of strands and colors. The cables still retain a measure of tensile strength and a surprising degree of resilience. There appear to be a total of thirty-one cables of various lengths, each with a series of incredibly small knots spaced at irregular intervals. Most of the cables are individually tinted, but a few are identical in color. The longer cables are linked to subordinates that act as modifying clauses, similar to the diagram of a sentence in an English class. This is definitely a sophisticated message that cries out to be unraveled.'
'Amen,' muttered Giordino.
Straight paused and turned to the admiral. 'With your permission, sir, I will remove the quipu from its resting place.'
'What you're saying is that I'm responsible in the event you break the damn thing,' Sandecker scowled.
'Well, sir. . .'
'Go ahead, man, get with it. I can't stand around here all day staring at some smelly old relic.'
'Nothing like the aroma of rotting mulch to put one on edge,' said Pitt drolly.
Sandecker fixed him with a sour stare. 'We can dispense with the humor.'
'The sooner we unsnarl this thing,' said Yaeger anxiously, 'the sooner I can create a decoding program.'
Straight flexed his gloved fingers like a piano player about to assault Franz Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody Number Two. Then he took a deep breath and slowly reached into the box. He slipped a curved probe very carefully under several cables of the quipu and gently raised them a fraction of a centimeter. 'Score one for our side,' he sighed thankfully. 'After lying in the box for centuries, the coils have not fused together or stuck to the wood. They pull free quite effortlessly.'
'They appear to have survived the ravages of time extremely well,' observed Pitt.
After examining the quipu from every angle, Straight then slipped two large tweezers under it from opposite sides. He hesitated as if bolstering his confidence, then began raising the guipu from its resting place. No one spoke, all held their breath until Straight laid the multicolored cables on a sheet of glass. Setting aside the tweezers in favor of the dental picks, he meticulously unfolded the cables one by one until they were all spread flat like a fan.
'There it is, gentlemen,' he sighed with relief. 'Now we have to soak the strands in a very mild cleaning solution to remove stains and corrosion. This process will then be followed by a chemical preservation procedure in our lab.'
'How long before you can return it to Yaeger for study?' asked Sandecker.
Straight shrugged. 'Six months, maybe a year.'
'You've got two hours,' said Sandecker without batting an eye.
'Impossible. The metal coils lasted as long as they did because they were sealed in a box that was almost airtight. Now that they're fully exposed to air they'll quickly begin to disintegrate.'
'Certainly not the ones spun from gold,' said Pitt.
'No, gold is practically indestructible, but we don't know the exact mineral content of the other tinted coils. The copper, for instance, may have an alloy that crumbles from oxidation. Without careful preservation techniques they might decay, causing the colors to fade to the point of becoming unreadable.'
'Determining the color key is vital to deciphering the quipu, ' Gunn added.
The mood in the room had suddenly turned sour. Only Yaeger seemed immune. He wore a canny smile on his face as he gazed at Straight.
'Give me thirty minutes for my scanning equipment to measure the distances between the knots and fully record the configuration, and you can keep the thing in your lab until you're old and gray.'
'That's all the time you'll need?' Sandecker asked incredulously.
'My computers can generate three-dimensional digital images, enhanced to reveal the strands as vividly as they were when created four hundred years ago.'
'Ah, but it soothes the savage beast,' Giordino waxed poetically, 'to live in a modern world.'
Yaeger's scan of the Drake quipu took closer to an hour and a half, but when he was finished the graphics made it look better than when it was brand new. Four hours later he made his first breakthrough in deciphering its message. 'Incredible how something so simple can be so complex,' he said, gazing at the vividly colored simulation of the cables that fanned out across a large monitor.
'Sort of like an abacus,' said Giordino, straddling a chair in Yaeger's computer sanctuary and leaning over the backrest. Only he and Pitt had remained with Yaeger. Straight had returned to his lab with the quipu while Sandecker and Gunn went off to a Senate committee hearing on a new underwater mining project.
'Far more complicated.' Pitt was leaning over Yaeger's shoulder, studying the image on the monitor. 'The abacus is basically a mathematical device. The quipu, on the other hand, is a much more subtle instrument. Each color, coil thickness, placement and type of knot, and the tufted ends, all have significance. Fortunately, the Inca numerical system used a base of ten just like ours.'
'Go to the head of the class.' Yaeger nodded. 'This one, besides numerically recording quantities and distances, also recorded a historical event. I'm still groping around in the dark, but, for example. . .' He paused to type in a series of instructions on his keyboard. Three of the quipu's coils appeared to detach themselves from the main collar and were enlarged across the screen. 'My analysis proves pretty conclusively that the brown, blue, and yellow coils indicate the passage of time over distance. The numerous smaller orange knots that are evenly spaced on all three coils symbolize the sun or the length of a day.'
'What brought you to that conclusion?'
'The key was the occasional interspacing of large white knots.'
'Between the orange ones?'
'Right. The computer and I discovered that they coincide perfectly with phases of the moon. As soon as I
