Artifact Page 3

Chapter 2

  The helicopter carrying Paul Trujold moved quickly toward the Oilstar drilling platform where Frik's men had been testing drill sites in the Dragon's Mouth. The passage earned its name from the toothy spears of rock that pierced the surface of the water and connected the dots between Trinidad's Chaguara Peninsula and the coastal range of the Venezuelan mainland. Many a ship's hull had been chewed by those teeth when her captain didn't know the waters, or he was caught by a storm. Given that history, why would Frik think it surprising that some parts of the Dragon's Mouth were also believed by the locals to be haunted or cursed?

  "Sorry to pull you out of the lab," Frik shouted over the slowing thump of the blades as he reached up and helped Paul out of the chopper.

  Such courtesy, Paul thought. Must be something mighty important. "What's going on?"

  "I sent a couple of divers down. Only one of them came back, and he died kicking and screaming on the deck before he could tell us a thing. "

  "Sounds like a bad case of the bends. " Must have shot straight to the surface without a decompression stop. What could spook a diver enough to do that? Paul winced at the thought of nitrogen bubbles fizzing through his bloodstream, ending in an air embolism to the brain. "No sign of the other?"

  Frik shot him a look. "I told you. Only one came back. And the other's tank would have run out long ago. "

  Paul always felt an uncomfortable sense of obligation around Frikkie, to whom he owed a great deal of money, borrowed for his daughter's long years of schooling. The debt forced him to stick around, but it didn't change the fact that he neither liked nor trusted his boss. What's more, Frik always made Paul, younger by a decade, feel like the older of the two. Somehow the older man had maintained the toned body of a man twenty years younger. Piercing blue eyes and even white teeth gleaming from a perpetually tanned face, dark hair just beginning to gray at the temples. Paul was shorter, darker, heavier, and, in the looks department, somewhat further down the evolutionary tree. All the way back to Amphibia class, he thought. A newt - no, a frog. . . waiting in vain for the princess's kiss that would turn him into a Frik. Tough. Single-minded. An expert manipulator.

  Like now.

  Paul was sorry about the men, but that was hardly a reason for Frik to demand his immediate presence. "You brought me down here because of the missing diver?"

  "Not exactly. I need your help with these lazy bastards who are refusing to go on working. "

  "Why?"

  "You'rea damn Trini. You tell me. They were bringing up a core sample and found some strange fragments," Frik said. "That seems to be what spooked the hell out of them. Blaine here thinks the men may believe they are fetishes - Obeah - and that if we mess with them the Obeahman will hurt us. "

  "What is it you think I can do?"

  "Get someone to dive down and see if he can find Abdul. " Frik pointed at four objects lying atop a pile of silt. "Then take those back to the lab and examine them. "

  Paul walked over to the objects and hunkered down to take a closer look. Though he was far more educated than his average countryman, he was born and bred a Trini. He knew the power of local superstitions. There was nothing he could do about the workers or about Abdul. As a scientist, a chemist, he dealt in atoms and molecules and exchanges of electrons - an unseen realm, but vastly predictable.

  Most of the time.

  But not this time.

  There was something different about the objects. He wouldn't go so far as to say "wrong," because that was a moral or ethical judgment, and in his world, morals or ethics didn't apply to lumps of matter. But he had to admit, if lumps of matter could be "wrong," these four were pretty damn close. In the eyes of many of the Trinidadians working for Frikkie, these trinkets would be a sure sign of wrongness. The Trinis - whose heritage embraced both Africa and India - were an innately superstitious group.

  He, on the other hand, was not. As far as he was concerned, what he sawwas. . . what he saw.

  To him, the pieces looked like the stones he'd seen embedded in Native American jewelry in the States. . . asymmetrical matchbox-size lumps of bicolored turquoise from the Kingman Mine in Arizona, or something very much like it.

  He picked one up. It didn't feel like turquoise or any other kind of stone. More like a rather strange form of plastic. There was no specific design to the lumps, but they were definitely not naturally occurring shapes. These were fashioned objects, products of intelligence, though he could not guess what kind of intelligence could have made them.

  That, Paul decided, was what had spooked the workers. No one had ever seen shapes like these before, so they automatically shied away from them. As far as he was concerned, it was a typical islanders' response to the new and different.

  He didn't consider himself a typical islander, however, and while he couldn't help Frik with his divers, he wanted very badly to take a closer look at these trinkets.