The 39 Clues [Cahills vs. Vespers] 05 - Trust No One (22 page)

“This guy thought we were stealing his scooter,” Hamilton said. “We weren’t, but he kinda went crazy and was yelling, and neither of us speaks Italian —”

“— or Sicilian,” Jonah added. “Did you know they speak Sicilian here and it’s, like, a whole different thang from regular Italian?”

“It took us ages to explain everything and get it all sorted out, but anyway it turns out this guy —”

“— the same guy, the one with the scooter, and we forgot to say, it happened at the archaeological museum —”

“He’s an Archimedes expert!” Hamilton finished triumphantly.

“Wow,” Dan said. “I guess it turned out to be a good thing, you guys stealing his scooter.”

“We weren’t stealing it!” Jonah said in exasperation. “Anyway, that ‘Apology’ thing — the document you found in Mali? It fits right in. It turns out that the Romans were invading Syracuse, and the head dude, this guy named Marcellus, had given orders to find Archimedes and bring him in.”

“Because Marcellus knew that Archimedes was, like, this major mega-genius,” Hamilton said.

Jonah continued, “But what went down was, Archimedes was working on some big project at the time — he was building something, and he had parts and plans scattered all over the place, and when the soldier invaded his house, he was like, no way, I can’t come with you right now, I gotta finish what I’m doing here.

“And the soldier kept giving the order and Archimedes kept denyin’ him, and finally the soldier got pissed off and killed him!”

“When Marcellus heard that, he was really mad,” Hamilton said. “But some people think the soldier didn’t know who Archimedes was when he went to arrest him. Anyway, the soldier realized he’d messed up big-time, so that must be why he wrote the ‘Apology’ thing.”

“Right. And for, like, his whole life, Nico’s been trying to figure out what Archimedes was working on that day —”

“Wait,” Atticus said, “who’s Nico?”

“Oh, sorry — that’s the scooter guy. We explained everything to him and the police, and then he calmed down, and it turned out his English is pretty good. So we got to talking, and that’s how we found out he knows all about Archimedes, and we ended up going to a café with him.”

“What else did he tell you?” Jake asked.

“Okay, so Archimedes was working on some device when he got killed, right? But his drawings and the device itself up and disappeared. It was an invasion, and everything was all crazy, but Nico thinks that because everybody knew what a genius Archimedes was, whoever took the stuff wouldn’t have trashed it, they’d have kept it safe somehow. Nico thinks that Archimedes was working on something really important. He’s spent years looking for any trace of it, and he thinks there might be something in the Archimedes Palimpsest.”

“The Palimpsest?” Atticus said. “But they already know what’s in that. It’s mostly mathematical formulas, about spheres and —”

“Hold up,” Dan said. “What’s the Palimpsest?”

“Atticus, you explain it to them,” Jonah said. “And do you guys have another laptop there? The Palimpsest is online, you should get it up on another screen.”

It turned out that the Archimedes Palimpsest was every bit as amazing as the Voynich Manuscript.

“Palimpsests,” Atticus said. “I studied them with Mom.” He paused for a moment, and Dan was struck by how the brief silence instantly filled with Atticus’s yearning for his mom.

He knew what that felt like.

Jake reached out and touched his brother’s dreadlocks, then turned the caress into a gentle tug.

“Ow,” Atticus said absently, but now he was back with them. “Okay, in ancient times, manuscripts were written on vellum, which was made from animal hides, right? Vellum was expensive, so they found ways to reuse it. What they would do is, take an old manuscript and scrape off all the ink, and then they’d write new stuff on it.

“A palimpsest is an
original
manuscript — the one that got scraped off. Of course, in those days, nobody could read a palimpsest. I mean, that was the whole idea, to get rid of the old writing so you could reuse the vellum.”

“You mean, nowadays you
can
read them? How?” Dan asked. He almost added,
Does it say where the hostages are?
but he stopped himself. Stupid questions would just waste precious time. Time — how long had it been since the drop? Why hadn’t the Vespers made contact?
“The final piece”
— maybe the hostages were being released at that very moment. . . .

Yeah, right,
Dan thought bitterly.

“Technology,” Atticus answered his question. “If there was iron in the original ink, they can pick up traces of it by using X-rays. Plus there are color-enhancement techniques and all kinds of stuff they can try now. It’s not, like, crystal clear or anything. But they can read some of it and guess at the rest.”

“I’ve got it here,” Jake said. He put Atticus’s laptop next to Dan’s.

At digitalpalimpsest.org, there were hundreds of fascinating images. Atticus explained that the Archimedes Palimpsest was essentially a thirteenth-century Byzantine prayer book. Underneath it, scholars had found much older manuscripts, including several of Archimedes’ works.

“They’re from the tenth century,” Atticus said. “Archimedes died in 212
B.C.
None of the works he wrote — I mean, that he actually
wrote
,
with his own hand — have survived. The Palimpsest is the oldest known copy.”

“They’re a mess!” Dan exclaimed, looking at the images over Jake’s shoulder. “It’s hard to make out anything at all!”

The digital images showed the layers of ink. The top layer of writing was clear and strong, even after more than six hundred years. The oldest, bottom layer was extremely faint, sometimes barely discernible despite all the enhancements.

“Yeah, that’s why it’s taking Nico so long to do his research,” Jonah said from the other screen. “He’s examining those images, like, a quarter inch at a time.”

“The thing about Archimedes’ devices is, they were
way
ahead of his time,” Hamilton said. “There’s this thing called the Archimedes screw, for getting water out of the hold of a big boat, right? He invented it more than two thousand years ago and they’re STILL using it today!”

“Yeah, Nico kept saying that over and over,” Jonah said, “how incredible Archimedes was, almost like he could see into the future. There’s this device called the Antikythera —”

“Atticus told us about that,” Dan cut in. He was finding it all but impossible to control his impatience for some good hard info. “Is that what he was building?”

“No. I mean, Nico isn’t for sure about that. But there are a bunch of diagrams of circles, he thinks are gears. They’re really cool — they form these perfect triangles —”

“Gears?”

Amy spoke for the first time in the whole conversation.

“Jonah, did you say
gears
?” she asked.

Amy had been listening to every word. She knew that this conversation was an important one. But she was fighting hard against the desire to sink into the comfort of that safe place. The word
gears
was like a hand trying to haul her out of a bog.

The image on the folio . . .

“Yeah, dozens of them,” Jonah was saying. “Way more accurate and precise than anything else from the same period. But they’ve made reproductions of the Antikythera, and it’s so complete and, like, perfect, Nico is pretty sure it wasn’t what Archimedes was working on when he got offed.”

“So we still don’t know why the Vespers wanted the folio,” Dan said.

“We’re not done yet,” Hamilton said. “Just listen.”

“Well, because some of those circle drawings look a lot like the Antikythera gears,” Jonah said, “Nico thinks Archimedes was using them as a basis for another device. Go check out the section about war machines.”

“Huh?” Atticus was clearly flummoxed. “What are you talking about — there’s nothing about war machines in the Palimpsest.”

“It’s new,” Hamilton said. “I mean, not new — it’s as old as the other ones, but they only uncovered it a little while ago.”

“Yeah, with the technology, they’ve found more documents than they thought were there at first,” Jonah said.

Jake found the section titled “On Inventions for Battle.” He clicked through the images, zooming in occasionally whenever he saw a circular drawing.

Amy got up from her chair and went to look over his shoulder. She could smell him — a healthy boy smell. For some reason, it brought tears to her eyes that she had to blink away.

“Archimedes invented a bunch of cool weapons,” Jonah was saying. “Really fly catapults to fling stones at the invaders, and also giant cranes with grappling hooks to pick up ships in the harbor.”

“It was awesome,” Hamilton said. “So there’s Syracuse, this little city, being attacked by the super-powerful Roman army, right? And Archimedes’ weapons were so good that the Romans had to take it by siege instead, and it took almost three years!”

Suddenly, Dan sat up straighter and said, “Wait — look!” He pointed to the screen and yelled, “BINGO!”

The page contained both text and drawings. The drawings were of gears.

“Those look just like —” Jake started to say.

“They
are
just like!” Dan said, who was now standing up. “They’re
exactly the same
as the ones on Folio Seventy-four. But what does it mean?” He jiggled from one foot to the other, excitement and impatience and frustration flying off him like sparks.

Then Amy inhaled quickly.

“Zoom in there,” she said, her voice low and tense. Her hand shaking, she pointed to a drawing near the left margin that looked like little more than a doodle.

The line on the Voynich folio — the one that led to a five-pointed star.
The star appeared to indicate the location of something important.

But what?

Now Amy was staring at the doodle. Like everything Archimedean in the Palimpsest, it was faded, faint, chicken-scratchy, buried under the top layer of writing. About half an inch long, it was sort of a curved bar marked by notches. The details were almost impossible to make out — unless you knew what it was.

Amy knew. She’d have known it anywhere. She had seen it dozens, maybe hundreds of times a day, every day for years now.

It was a sketch of a small part of the Madrigal ring.

They were so close. Dan could feel it.
Not just in my gut, but in my liver and my spleen and my — my pancreas, too. If I knew where that was.

We HAVE to figure out what Archimedes wrote on that page!

Despite frantic searches on all available laptops and phones, the group could not locate any transcriptions of the Palimpsest text online.

“Why can’t we find it?” Dan yelled. He was tearing at his hair, something he had read about but never actually done before.

“It’s probably because there are some books that have the transcriptions,” Atticus said, “and they must be copyrighted or something.”

“Atticus, you know Latin,” Jake said urgently. “Can you read what’s on that page?”

“Oh, man,” Atticus said. “I doubt it. It’s so hard to make out — it’s gonna take me a while.”

Dan made a quick decision. “We’ll go to the coffee shop to give you some peace and quiet,” he said.