The foreman scrambled out of the trench, brushed away a couple of volunteers, and called, "Dr. Henderson! Here's the skull, just as the scanners indicated!"
James Henderson quickly returned the stone axe he'd been inspecting to its box and started across the field. So it was there, unlikely as it seemed; not electronic backscatter but human bone. And yet recumbent stone circles always contained cremated burials, a few flakes of carbon at the most; this one, Castle Fay, had seemed no different from Sunhoney or Berrybrae or Balquhain.
So he had the skull now. His lips moved, "...that but this blow Might be the be-all and the end-all here, But here, upon this bank and shoal of time, We'd jump the life to come."
"I beg your pardon?" A figure appeared at his side, a young woman clutching a tiny recorder. Lisa what's-her-name, Morrow or Morgan, the reporter from World.
"MacBeth," he replied, embarrassed. "Lived right over there, at Cawdor. Just an apt quotation."
"Regarding that experiment with the skull?"
Henderson sighed. He was used to this by now, trying to excavate and preserve and record and interpret--and make it all seem like headlines in the afternoon tabloids. No, that wasn't fair. The editors of World, reasonably, wanted their readers to get something interesting for the investment in the expedition.
"Yes. An attempt to jump to another life."
She nodded, scrambling up the hill at his heels.
Expedition, he thought. It sounded like a trek up the Nile rather than a pleasant drive across northeast Scotland. And there would be no treasure of Tut-Ankh-Amon at its end, no spectacular discovery to assure future financing. This was only a small neolithic site. Henderson remembered with exasperation the student volunteer who, thinking that "pottery" was his mother's delftware tea service, was caught throwing away some very nice corded beaker fragments.
"This experiment now," the young woman persisted, slightly out of breath. The stubble of the harvested field crunched and splintered under their feet. Her recorder whirred.
"Later," he said. A chance, that, telling her about his theory. At best he could be accused of sensationalism, at worst farce. But it might be the answer to an archaeologist's lifelong dream, better than any store of gold; it was worth the chance. Perhaps this was a major expedition after all.
)
