Energetic feet made a clatter of footsteps on the polished floor outside the lab and Jim was already looking up as Robert poked his head around the door. 'Going for a beer?' he asked.
Jim gave not a return glance to the diagram he was working on but hit 'save'.
The small office that Carl and Jim and Robert shared was called a lab and looked out over the service yard of a hotel which sometimes in the evening, as now, mixed the traffic noise in the Bloomsbury air beneath their window with a faint smell of fat. Jim had spent two years in the 'Stables' but last year had found a way of extricating himself to slightly more spacious accommodation on the fourth floor of the Pierce Building. When he had started his PhD studies, the official first day of term had brought the technical officer of the Department of Interdisciplinary Sciences at Saddler's College, London into the Radiocarbon Lab with a cheery smile and he had led Jim over to a group of his fellow PhDs and they had all followed the man down to a large temporary wooden building that had been erected the year before on some old waste ground behind the Pierce Building to house 'Psychology' while its new building programme caught up with a revised completion schedule. Now Psychology had gone. A long line of small cubicles, like stalls for Shetland ponies, or laboratory chimpanzees, subdivided a room the length of a very wide railway carriage. The technician had introduced everybody to their new office space. By that afternoon, the place had already been christened 'the Stables'.
But Jim and Carl and Robert had escaped. The Peirce building was an eight-story structure of glass and steel that contrasted strangely with a lower building nearby of grey, timber-impressed concrete which housed the labs for physics and chemistry and would not have looked out of place on the South Bank. The short walk from the Peirce Building to the Amble Inn was pleasant enough, past a long frontage of a brand new glass building and along a wide pavement beside a Georgian terrace, which housed the departments of Law and Asian Studies, and through a pleasant quadrangle to a plain glass door beside the Department of History. A flight of stairs led down to the bar. Jim had known it briefly when it was still the Johnson Hall bar, with a thousand cigarette burns on a threadbare carpet and a dirty table-football game in the centre of the room. Now it was quite plush.
The large space inside was nearly empty but this was usual for a Friday at about half-past five. By six-thirty it would begin to fill. In one corner was a small group from the rugby club, celebrating another defeat. But the bar was large and there was nobody sitting in the area where they usually gathered, around a comfortable sofa and chairs near to a pine bookcase and well away from the far table where drinking games seemed imminent. Robert remained at the bar as Kelvin took his jacket from him.'
'What are you having?'
'Lager, cheers Robert.' Robert turned to Jim.
'Bitter, thanks!'
'Angus?' Angus was looking at the row of books in the bookcase.
'Lager,' he called, without turning. Next to Angus, one of their friends was already having a vigorous argument with one of the undergraduates that they had all been demonstrating to that afternoon - demonstrating, that is, in the sense of offering individual help to students during one of Professor Ron Beck's exciting practical lessons.
'Science is wonderful and explains everything,' the undergraduate was insisting. Robert came over with the beers. 'For a lot of people,' he objected, 'science has taken all the magic out of the world.' Kelvin heard this and sensed the honour of the postgrads might be at stake.
'Wordsworth wrote a poem about a telescope didn't he?' he said. 'How people came all expectantly to look through it, but went away 'as though dissatisfied', everything looked so small and remote.'
'And it is the same now,' said Robert, warming to the theme. 'People 'oooh' and 'aahh' when they see a pretty picture of a distant galaxy from the space telescope, but hardly any of them understand that it is so far away that it might as well not be there. It might as well be a picture of something that doesn't exist. This is why interest in space exploration has taken a nosedive...'
'A nosedive!' exclaimed the undergraduate, incredulously.
'There is really nothing out there to explore!' insisted Robert, contrariously. The distances are too vast and make any planetary system but our own completely unreachable! And forget hyperspace! That was only invented by science fiction writers who didn't want to have to try to understand relativity, so they could turn the galaxy into a large Pacific Ocean with Captain James T Cook, sorry, Kirk, sailing around it. There is really nothing out there to explore! The moon is a bare rock. Venus is a close approximation to hell. All the other places would make the Antarctic at midwinter seem like a tropical paradise! And to reach even the nearest star would take a lifetime! The distances are just too enormous.'
'But the vast distances are tremendously exciting,' insisted the undergraduate, excitedly.
'What on earth are you looking for?' Kelvin asked Angus. 'Those books have been there for months, and they have all come from jumble sales.'
Angus sat down at last, very heavily on the sofa, which was comfortable but very low. 'I was looking for a copy of Homer,' he said, with an evil grin. 'I was waiting outside Ron's office this afternoon and heard him in there with Jim. It was as close to a barney as I have ever heard them get. It sounds as though Ron is not impressed with Jim's sudden passion for ancient Greek literature.' Angus laughed. 'He suggested that Jim have a look at the Iliad. I think he was taking the piss.'
'Have you written anything yet,' asked Kelvin.
'Two middle chapters in first draft,' Jim replied.
'You know that the Department will be putting pressure on you to finish on time,' said Angus.
'How do you know that?' Jim asked.
'Paula told me,' he replied. Angus was going out with the Head of Department's secretary. 'She said the Prof had given her a memo to e-mail across to Senate House and your name was on it. Something about the Department's completion average and that future funding rested on your timely submission.'
This was unwelcome news.
'I reckon the heat will be turned up soon,' he said, encouragingly.
Simon appeared at the bar. 'Read the notice,' he said, pulling a stool from beneath the table and sitting. 'A quarter to six, Friday afternoon and the postgrads are on the piss. Are you working later tonight Jim, or is this the start of a session.'
'The start of a seshette, maybe! If I choose to! Ron wanted to talk to me this afternoon.'
'I expect you are thanking God it's Friday,' said Simon. 'I have heard you have been avoiding Ron's office all week.
A few minutes later, Ariadne walked into the lounge and tossed a friendly comment to her friend Jane behind the bar. Jane was a third-year classics undergraduate as well and they spent a while talking about their finals that were looming.
'How was the conference, Simon?' asked Jim.
'Storming! There were some super slides of ancient rock formations in Greenland and Western Australia. And I got a lot of feedback from the team at Milan who are doing the same sort of work as I am. They seemed quite impressed with my seismic images of the reflective lower crust beneath Peru. And they showed me some mineralogical evidence that water played a part in deforming some rocks that were once a part of the lower crust. This supports my idea that water plays a key role in crustal movement. Not everyone believes it, though. Speaking of which, are you serious about this ancient history business?'
Jim explained that he was, and filled Simon in a little about the idea and its many problems.
'What about contradictory historical documents?' asked Simon, obviously grasping the idea. Jim explained the difficulties in rejecting the more plausible possibility of simple error in one of them.
'Contradictory memories?' suggested Simon. 'Like when Kelvin pays you back the five pounds he borrowed yesterday and forgets about the ten he borrowed from you last week.'
Oh, hello Kelvin.'
Ariadne appeared behind the chair where Jim was sitting and put her hands onto Jim's head. 'What do you know of the Iliad?' he asked, looking up at her. Ariadne looked down at him in surprise.
Not much. I did it for 'A' level but I haven't looked at it since!'
'I know nothing at all,' confessed Jim. 'Not even the story.'
'Ignorant scientist!' she whispered.
'Robert has an idea,' Jim continued, 'that the archaeological remains of Troy are four hundred years too old for Homer. I need to know if this is true. In fact, I need to know all about the archaeology, and about how it ties in with the story told by Homer. Is it even certain that the place that has been dug is actually Troy?'
'I don't know,' said Ariadne. 'You need to speak with Brigit. She knows all about the Trojan War. Her father is Colin Thruxton, you know, that man who did the TV series on ancient Greece. She will be in the 'Duke' later on, are you coming?'
'I can feel a sesh coming on,' said Robert.
·
On the way to the Duke of Bedford, Jim called in to the lab. Carl was there.
'Coming over to the 'Duke'?' he asked.
'Look at these,' said Carl, by way of reply. He handed Jim a sheaf of paper with 'Cavendish Laboratory' stamped at the top. They were a summary of an extensive investigation into relative Egyptian chronology by the same team that was working with Jim's Iraklion ash.
'Fifteen mummies have been dated so far, and they are all completely consistent with one another,' he said. 'To the very year, which I should imagine pleases you a great deal. They fudge over this when they compare these results with my volcanic ash.'
'Do they?' said Jim, and he chose a page at random. 'The thirty-six recorded years between the twenty-fifth year of the reign of the pharaoh Horemheb and the sixteenth year of the reign of Rameses II is...' he skipped down the page a bit, '..exactly thirty-six years!
'No absolute dates from them yet - but they still want to blame the Iraklion discrepancy on the technique?'
'But where does this leave me?' said Carl. 'I have a date for the volcanic destruction of the island of Thera in the southern Aegean Sea, and therefore the tsunami that engulphed the northern coast of Crete, that seems that it should be accurate to the nearest year and yet is over a hundred years out!'
'Is it possible that the village on that island in the southern Aegean where you took your samples from, buried under all that volcanic ash, could be a hundred years older than everybody thinks?' asked Jim.
'Impossible,' replied Carl. 'The frescoes on the walls point unequivocally to a time within the first subdivision of the Late Minoan Period. All the sea scenes and ladies with bare bosoms, colourful landscapes and green foliage, yellow butterflies and blue deer, monkeys gathering saffron. It is like finding a fresco'd wall with an original Picasso on it. Dates the plaster pretty well! And this style was widespread throughout Crete and the Aegean, so it is fairly well tied-in to all the Egyptian stuff found associated with it. The Egyptian stuff dates the frescoes beyond question.'
'And you have a date of 1631 BC for the volcanic eruption that led to the destruction of the Palace of Minos at Knossos?'
'1631 BC,' affirmed Carl. 'So this stunningly accurate date I have obtained from the charred timber of the buildings containing this artwork seems to be impossible. It places the reign of the Pharoah Rameses II in the fourteenth century BC, which nobody is prepared to believe. I am going to have to defend the way I have done my experiments like the devil, or people will think I have bungled them.
'And no, Jim, I can't take your idea seriously, and I don't think I am alone.'
'Coming then?'
'No, I don't think so.'
·
'The catalogue of all the cities that contributed to the expedition,' explained Brigit, 'is a puzzle. This part of the Iliad seems to be originally Mycenaean, in the sense that most of the places listed in it are, indeed, Mycenaean, as we know from excavation, and some did not survive into classical times, even as ruins; in fact, archaeology has unearthed some plausible candidates for some of Homer's towns which even the classical Greeks themselves knew nothing about. But on the clay tablets from Pylos, dating from the Myceneaen age and written in Greek, only a very few of these names appear, although a lot of other place names are mentioned. There seems to be very little agreement between these clay tablets and the lists of the Iliad. Does this help?'
'It is very interesting,' Jim encouraged.
'The archives of the Hittite empire, the 'Hatti', lost for over two thousand five hundred years in the Anatolian plateau of central Turkey, might refer to the Mycenaean kingdom and its involvement in the eastern Aegean. Nothing actually contradicts. A case can even be made for the description of diplomatic incidents requiring the mobilisation of Hittite forces into the region of which Troy was a part, and against intrusion that might have been from the west, at a time that is not impossible for Homer's Trojan war, about 1250 BC.'
'But if Homer seems tantalisingly accurate,' she continued, 'and yet to tell, in significant ways, a different story to that pieced together by archaeology, that is not really surprising, is it,' she asked, sipping her beer. 'in view of what I said before. Like Rambo and the Vietnam war. A fiction. But remarkably, the Hittite documents mention, in connection with this possible trouble with these possible Greeks in a possible Troy, a King called Alexandros, which was the other name given to Paris. Remarkable. But of course, in the Iliad, Paris never becomes king; his father Priam presides over the destruction of Troy.
·
The Testimony of the Minotaur
There is something very odd going on. It does not frighten me, I have to tell you. It intrigues me. But the tunnels did not enlarge and narrow and wind and twist as they had before. I put this down to forgetfulness brought on by fatigue and my fear grew that I might not be able to find my way back through the labyrinth to the Temple Mansion. Perhaps I became lost. I had not laid a thread to guide me back. But it was as though I was following a voice that was calling me, and at last I found my way into the Temple.
But it is not the same Temple. Its passages and halls twist and wind in the wrong way, and its ladies are so ugly that I have to knock my horns against the walls to prove to myself that I am not dreaming.