The Real Thing
Danielle de Valera
Copyright Danielle de Valera 2015
The Real Thing
Cover and glyphs by C S McClellan
All rights reserved. No part may be reproduced in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
If you would like to do any of the above, please seek permission first by contacting the author at
[email protected] ISBN 978-0-9923311-6-0
Published in the United States by Old Tiger Books.
My sincere thanks to Barry Landy for allowing me to use one of his photos of Maralinga for the cover. Baz is a great lover of life, a believer in making the most of each day. His blogsite, Baz—The Landy (Out and About) at: the landy.com in which he records his travels, contains some wonderful shots of outback Australia. Thank you, Baz.
Table of Contents
Story start
Halfway
Last scene
About the author
More O’Neill, Star and Lawson stories
Other works by this author
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The Real Thing
Forget what you’ve seen on TV, Lawson thought, and all those glossy National Geographics. Central Australia was boring—just red soil, scrubby trees and dust. He couldn’t see what the fuss was all about. But he was weary of his life in Sydney, his suburban life with Angela-and-the-kids (though he loved them). He was glad to get away for a while. And then, of course, there was the money.
The Science Centre, so hi-tech for 1960, loomed in the fierce sunlight as Lawson crossed the tarmac from the plane to Reception, the bitumen soft under his feet. Already he was beginning to have misgivings. As far as the eye could see, the facility was enclosed by a high fence topped with barbed wire. Armed guards patrolled the fences. And all this security was for what? So the Brits could play with a few bombs.
Lawson took the crumpled telegram from his pocket, smoothed it out and read it again:
Come to Maralinga STOP Will make it worth your while STOP
Adrian Hall
Lawson hoped Hall would make it worth his while. Aging academics with expensive tastes needed all the lucre they could get. He took one last look and stepped inside into the welcome cool.
The Science Centre’s vestibule was deserted except for the guards on the doors. So much security, Lawson thought. As if anyone in their right minds was going to come out here unless you paid them. He dumped his bags, went over to the reception desk and leaned on the buzzer.
No one came.
The vestibule was full of armchairs and coffee tables—no sofas. Lawson sat down in a club chair near the fake waterfall, leaned his head on his arms and tried to breathe through his post-flight nausea. It had been a rough trip in a Fokker Friendship, air pockets all the way from Sydney.
Just as he was beginning to pass out, a young man in his mid-twenties came into the room through one of the internal doors. He was wearing a khaki uniform and boots. His hair had been dyed a beautiful shade of platinum. He had green eyes.
“Why didn’t you buzz?” this apparition demanded.
Lawson had a sudden memory of wanting to be able to become invisible at will. He’d been eight at the time, spending his pocket money on fake ink blots bought off the back pages of comic books—skeletons on strings, watches with luminous hands and dials (Read in the dark. A marvel!) fake dog turds ... If only he’d known: all you had to do was dye your hair grey. You didn’t have to do anything else. Grey hair would render you invisible.
Lawson bestirred himself, patted at that iron-grey hair—should he have dyed it? He was only forty. He pulled himself back from this dilemma to reply to the stranger.
“Thanks for the welcome. It’s touching.”
The young man’s eyes flashed. Lawson got the feeling they weren’t going to get on.
“You,” he said (Lawson didn’t like the way he said the you), “must be Charles Lawson.”
“Professor Charles Lawson,” he replied. His ID didn’t seem to impress the stranger.
Lawson studied the young man from under the brim of his Akubra hat, bought especially for the occasion. His days of chasing young men were gone. Besides, this one was too young—and far too beautiful.
And the longer I stay, Lawson thought, the better looking he’ll get. When do I go home?
“Adrian Hall?” he asked. “Is he in?”
The young man gave a frosty smile. “This way please,” was all he said.
They tramped down endless corridors like characters in Last Year at Marienbad, Lawson trailing behind with his bags while the young man strode lightly on ahead. At one stage he became lost, the boy was so far ahead, and a tall man with dark hair, horn-rimmed glasses and eyes like a horse that had been through a fire came along and tried to induce Lawson to view his fungus. He refused.
Then the young one came back and rescued him grudgingly, cutting short the pathetic, wild-eyed scientist, leaving Lawson unceremoniously outside Adrian Hall’s door.
Hall was just as Lawson remembered him from university days: big and blond, with a broken nose from a football brawl; Lawson liked him a lot. But Hall had hung up his boots long ago and married Nancy. Really married, Lawson thought, the full catastrophe. Pipe and slippers stuff.
After a lot of backslapping (“How long has it been?” “Don’t ask.”), Lawson sat down in a leather armchair and lit up a cigarette.
“Still smoking those things?” Hall asked. “They’ll kill you. The research is in. So far the tobacco companies are managing to keep it quiet.”
“The boy with the platinum hair,” Lawson said.”Who’s he?”
“Jamie? He’s my chief archaeologist. Best archaeologist I’ve had in a long time. Leave him alone.”
“What’s his name?”
“Shit, Charlie, you just got here. His name’s Stanborough. James Stanborough.” Hall had begun his routine with the pipe, a routine familiar to Lawson from their student days. “Did he meet your flight? I thought he was organising a staff meeting on Level 1.”
“And the Fungi Man?”
“Anson Blake? He’s all right. Quite harmless.”
Lawson gazed through the window at the Australian landscape. This was red dirt country. Small whirlwinds of dust drifted along the horizon. As he watched, an explosion way in the distance sent a miniature mushroom cloud into the air. It hung there, looking like a smaller version of what he’d seen in the newsreels, then the wind began to disperse it slowly southwards.
“That stuff,” Lawson said, “the fallout. What happens to the people downwind?”
Adrian Hall frowned. “Oh you mean the indigenous population. They were moved off at the beginning of the project and warned to stay away.”
“I saw some camped to the south of here when I flew in.”
“It’s not my department, Charlie, I’m just here for the dig. The Brits are responsible for the rest.” Hall waved a hand toward the slowly dispersing mushroom cloud. “You have to understand, resources are limited. My concern is this.” He opened the top drawer of his desk and handed Lawson a small object wrapped in waxed paper. “What do you make of it?”
Lawson unwrapped the coin and turned it over in his hands. It looked ancient, but he knew from experience that looks didn’t mean anything. He found himself thinking of James Stanborough’s hair and wondered at the connection.
“Is it one those medieval African coins?” Hall asked. “You know, like the ones found at Marchinbar Island back in 1944?”
“Marchinbar Island’s up the top of Australia, Adrian. We’re down at the bottom.”
Hall made a gesture of impatience. “Over time, it c
ould’ve found its way here.”
Lawson went over to the window and held the coin this way and that to the light. “Sorry. Nothing like.”
“Indigenous Australian?”
“They’re nomads, for Christ’s sake.”
“Space visitors?”
“You’re scraping the bottom of the barrel, Adrian. Where’d you find it?”
“About twenty-five ks north of here. Sector 5. But there’s very little to see, I’m afraid,” Hall added in the Now-There-Everything’ll-Be-All Right voice Lawson knew he saved for difficult situations.
“Okay, Adrian,” Lawson said. “What happened?” He placed the coin carefully on the desk and sat back down in the fine, old leather armchair. “You can give it to me straight, without the marshmallows.”
“We blew up the site.”
Lawson removed his spectacles and began polishing them to hide his displeasure.
“It was just another explosion site to the Brits.“ Hall puffed on the pipe. “Nothing atomic. They were experimenting with army clothing and various kinds of explosives. When they went in later to check the dummies, they found this,” he held up the coin, “buried among the rubble. Before you get too excited, though, there’s nothing there.”
“Metal detectors?”
“Don’t register anything. All we’ve got is this one coin. I faxed a copy to the best numismatist in the West. It’s no type he’s ever seen. I’m running out of experts fast, that’s why I sent for you. I need to know if this is genuine. I can’t keep the lid on this forever.”
Through the window Lawson could see the desert night coming down and, though it was warm in the room, he shivered. “No bones, no charcoal—nothing organic associated with it that I could use?” He was thinking of radiocarbon dating. It was reliable with correction curves, up to forty thousand years. But it worked only on carbon-based life forms—wood, plants, animals.
Hall shook his head. “Sorry. I’ve given you a whole laboratory on Level 3. Offhand though, your thoughts.”
Lawson ashed out his cigarette. “Are you sure no one from the Centre brought it here when they came?”
“You think it’s fake.”
Lawson could hear the disappointment in his old friend’s voice. “It’s just a thought.”
Hall shook his head. “I don’t see how anyone could’ve brought it in. Every item that comes into this place is screened.”
True, Lawson reflected. He’d been everything short of cavity searched before he boarded the plane in Sydney.
Somewhere a bell sounded. It seemed a long way away. Hall wrapped the coin back up in the waxed paper and returned it to the top drawer of the oak desk. “Dinner,” he said.
As they were leaving the room Lawson hesitated. “Don’t you think that coin should be kept in a safe or something?”
“Who from?” Hall asked, half-impatient, half-amused. “They’ve run intensive security checks on everyone here. Even you.” He glanced out the window at the gathering dusk. “And there are no spacemen here. Haven’t been for quite a while.”
If there ever were at all, Lawson thought.
The morning came up grey to match his mood. Lawson clad himself in the ubiquitous bush hat and khaki work issue and went down in the lift to the basement to meet his crew. He felt uneasy; he didn’t even know about what.
After he had been introduced to the dig crew, fifteen men in all, they fixed their hats, climbed into 4WDs and set off for the site, the last jeep trailing their equipment.
After an hour of jolting, an hour that seemed like an eternity to Lawson, they approached the site. It was just another version of desolation as far as Lawson was concerned.
He found Kingston, the foreman of the dig team, and said, “Unload the gear— and I want the fellow who found the coin to come with me.”
Kingston grinned broadly and pointed to James, who stepped forward and said coldly, “I’m the one who found it, Professor Nash.”
“Charles will do,” Lawson told him. “And okay, you come with me.”
They set off together across the rubble, leaving the team behind them unloading bags of tools and boxes of equipment and joking with one another. Their camaraderie made a heavy contrast to the studied indifference that passed between Lawson and Stanborough.
About fifty metres ahead of them, Lawson saw what appeared to be a well-organised dig. Lawson found himself hoping to find something wrong as he inspected the excavation, but everything was in order.
“What depth are you down to?” he asked Stanborough.
“Ten metres.”
Still they’d come up with nothing.
“Perhaps,” Lawson said, “we’re digging in the wrong place. Perhaps the coin was flung here by the force of the blast.”
“I didn’t dig where the coin was found,” James said shortly. “I dug at the centre point of the blast. Ground zero.”
Lawson regrouped. “Good, that’s good. Go tell Kingston I want him, please.”
Stanborough turned without a word and went off to relay Lawson’s instructions, still stylish, even in regulation khaki.
Lawson climbed up onto one of the mounds of rubble and surveyed the scene in every direction. Somewhere under this area might be proof that early Australian history was not what they’d thought—or was the whole thing an elaborate hoax? As for the boy, he thought to himself, watching Stanborough’s retreating form, forget it. This is not an Alan Ladd movie where they fight for two hours and fall into one another’s arms at the end.
For the best part of a week Lawson stayed back at the base, setting up his laboratory and planning his attack on the coin, while Stanborough and the team dug on. Every time he picked up the coin he felt uneasy, and that wasn’t good, for he had learned to trust his intuition. He was the best troubleshooter in the business when it came to attempts at numismatic fraud. There were many people, some of them in surprisingly high academic places, whose bids for fame had come unstuck because of the results from his laboratory.
During all his years in the business he’d never used an assistant and he always locked his laboratory doors. You might say he was cynical by nature.
Stanborough was on his mind, but the only time Lawson got to see him was in the evenings in the main dining hall. The boy (Lawson couldn’t help thinking of him as a boy) usually sat with Anson Blake at a small table in the corner. Blake was obviously besotted with him and, watching them sometimes, Lawson almost felt sorry for the fungi man—almost, but not quite. There was something about Blake he didn’t like.
Like the coin, he made Lawson feel uneasy.
Lawson was used to a certain amount of adulation, but Stanborough was unimpressed. This piqued Lawson’s interest. At the end of his first pass at the coin, he went down to the basement one morning and informed Stanborough that the two of them were going to crosscheck the metal detector readings on the entire site.
Stanborough was peeved. “Can’t you get somebody else to do it?”
“No,” Lawson lied.
For six days they hiked with detectors and notebooks and ignored one another while the sun blazed down and the team dug on good-humouredly, always hoping they might strike it lucky, become a part of scientific history.
Personally, Lawson doubted that. He doubted it very much.
When two people work together in the field, they get to know one another, even if they don’t talk a lot. Just as he’d hoped, Lawson got to know Stanborough, and the more he did, the more he realised that what he had first interpreted as cool was really a defence, a kind of structure James had erected to cover his fear. He found himself wondering if the young man had been ill-treated somehow in the past. There was a childlike quality to him sometimes that flashed out suddenly and made Lawson want to protect him.
Looking back on it later, Lawson realised he’d been thinking like a fool.
When he and Stanborough had finished the metal detector runs, they worked around the digging with the team. One particular day there was a feeling of som
ething in the air. Lawson hung close to the excavation. Sure enough, late in the afternoon, minutes before the crew was due to leave for base, there was a shout from Kingston, who had been sieving rubble on a ledge six metres below the surface.
Everyone crowded around and there it was: coin no. 2, identical in almost every respect to no. 1, definitely from a similar era.
The members of the team were jubilant. They stacked their gear in record time, piled into their trucks and raced one another back to base and the bar. Stanborough and Lawson remained behind to examine the new specimen under the portable electron microscope. After half an hour they climbed into their vehicle and headed for home.
Lawson drove over the parched red landscape with mixed feelings: two coins didn’t mean any more than one, unless they were genuine.
Ahead of them stood an ancient cliff, its base pitted with caves of varying sizes. They drove past it every day on their way to and from the dig. Just as they drew level with this cliff, their vehicle stopped and wouldn’t start again. They got out and worked it over. The engine had seized.
They were stranded.
Stanborough began unloading packs from the back of the vehicle. “Here,” he said, shoving the largest pack into Lawson’s arms, “we shoud get inside and get things organised before the cold sets in.”
“What’s this?” Lawson asked.
“It’s sleeping bags, and tinned food and lights, things like that. It’s standard regulation equipment on all vehicles.”
“Surely they’ll send someone out for us.”
Stanborough shrugged. “If we’re missed,” he said. “Come on. Night’s coming down, we’ve got to hurry.”
Already the visibility was fading. Lawson slung the pack over his back and trudged after Stanborough. It was possible, he thought, that they might not be missed: there were two bars and two dining halls in the Centre, and an unwritten code that no one ever bothered you in your room—they might ring, but if you didn’t answer, they’d leave you alone.