The Far Arena (50 page)

Petrovitch and Sister Olav should be coming right away. It was trickier to play with people than with rock formations. He reminded himself he had not wanted this and felt very good that, once faced with this sort of thing, he could work it quite well. Not the least asset for this being his size and down-home Texas attitude, which could be so deceptive. Lew took another beer.

Dr Petrovitch and Sister Olav came into the office without knocking. Lew offered Semyon a beer, which was declined. Lew cleared papers off his own chair and, with a beer in each hand, sat down, resting his legs on his desk, creating heel marks on notes he would no longer need.

'What's going on?' demanded Petrovitch. Sister Olav blinked nervously.

'1 don't know. You tell me,' said McCardle. 'I'm not the expert. I look to you people to clarify things. I just had some questions.'

'You have cast a pall of doubt upon this project,' said Sister Olav.

'I was sharing my own doubts, Sister. Again, I'm not the expert.' 'I believe Eugeni,' said Sister Olav. 'I believe he is what he says he is. Religious, Dr McCard
le, does not mean naive. I have
run several tests myself, not the least of which was having him listen to an old tape recording of Vatican Radio.'

'What did he do? Translate all of it?' said Lew, who knew better.

'No, he barely understood a word here and there, which would be a sure sign that he did not study Latin, because then he would have undoubtedly come across the Vulgate used by the Church. No, I believe him.'

Dr Petrovitch had one question. Was Lew McCardle, PhD, now claiming the subject was not discovered eight point two metres in the ice? Is that what Dr McCardle was now claiming, because if he was, he should get his honest cards on the table.

'No, that's not what I'm claiming, Semyon. I just know that back home when someone comes up with something super ring-ding, it's better not have no hay between the ears,' said Lew.

'And by that you mean what?' asked Semyon.

'If you say you cured a head cold, nobody is going to care whether the patient fibs or not. But in something like this, they're going to, excuse the expression, Sister, look up his ass with microscopes, and when we say not only have we successfully managed a resurrecting process, if you will, but that the subject is nearly two thousand years old and, wait a second, ladies and gentlemen not only a gladiator, but the premier gladiator, I mean, we had better have our facts straight.'

'Eugeni is not a liar,' said Sister Olav.

'Neither am I,' said Petrovitch.

'Gee,' said Lew, shrugging his massive shoulders, 'I didn't mean to say that. I'm sorry if 1 gave that impression. Real sorry. I am just one of three. I have only one vote. I'll do what you say. But you know and I know there are serious questions here, which I wouldn't want to attempt to answer in the fanfare and glare of publicity.'

'What publicity? We are working in scientific isolation,' said Petrovitch.

'Not if you listen to the crazy talk around the university.'

'What sort of talk?' said Sister Olav.

'That we've got Julius Caesar or Marc Antony in that private room,' lied Lew. 'That we resurrected some great historical figure. I don't know who's been talking or saying what to some young nurses, but the word is out that Dr Petrovitch has produced a miracle.'

Dr Petrovich shook his head sadly. 'Just what I didn't want.'

'What I'm saying is, all of us are going to look pretty damned foolish academically until these questions I've raised have been answered. I'm not only talking about me, but your department Semyon, and maybe your church, Sister Olav. It's gonna look like, excuse the expression, some bullshit hustle, and by that I mean we're going to look like frauds. And maybe that won't be the worst part of it. There's going to be more international noise around us than the biggest circus. We can forget any honest scientific inquiry once Marc Antony here gets on that television station in this town and starts beaming his nonsense around. Your reports, Sister are all over this place. That's one effective little liar we've got.'

'He's a showman,' said Sister Olav. 'They staged bloody shows then.'

'That's neither here nor there,' said Petrovitch, obviously realizing that a showman and television were not exactly combined guarantees of scientific integrity.

'If your reports are correct, Sister Olav, and I believe they are, our little fellow in there was at one point giving Semyon, or trying to sell Semyon, a special lurid sex technique in which you lost weight, too. This is not a person who can be let loose upon the world just yet.'

'He is not a liar,' said Sister Olav, standing firm beside the chair, refusing to sit. 'He is not a liar.'

'We have no evidence but your supposition, Lew,' said Semyon, forgetting his politeness and sitting down despite Sister Olav's standing. 'Besides, I am offended by all the dramatics, camera cross-examination, and everything. You hardly take part and when you do, you try to cast doubt on this achievement.'

'Yes. I did. I did try to cast doubt. Because a lot smarter people will do it outside, when this becomes public, and it's becoming public. A lot smarter people with great backgrounds in Latin, who don't have some interest in protecting the patient.'

'What does that mean ?' asked Sister Olav. Petrovitch looked up at her with some wonder. His left eyebrow cocked. He was quiet.

'That means, I, a geologist, a North Springs, Texas, boy, provincial, if you will, have found out that not only didn't gladiators get trained in many weapons, but that a normal-sized little fellow could not possibly have been the foremost gladiator of his time. Impossible, even if he did have agents making sure of who and what he met in the arena. It's an economic impossibility, and even I can prove it. And I'm not a Latin scholar.'

Petrovitch had a new gold cigarette case. He removed a French Gauloise cigarette and lit it with his British Dunhill lighter.

'I don't know,' he said sombrely. 'You might be right.'

'Just a minute, Dr McCardle, I think you're herding us like some of your cattle on your ranch,' said Sister Olav.

'Never had a ranch, ma'am. Never had cows. Never even had a shootout. I earned a doctorate, not a notch on a gun.'

'Not all notches, Dr McCardle, are carved in gun handles.'

'I'm yours to command, ma'am.'

'I doubt that,' said Sister Olav. 'But was what you have put forth in your cross-examination of our charge-and it was a cross-examination, and Eugeni is our charge - reason for us to believe he is lying? I don't think this is so.'

'Neither do I,' said McCardle. He finished one beer and balanced the bottle behind a plastic case that was supposed to organize file folders. Petrovitch finally took a beer. Sister Olav declined an offer of one with a shake of her head.

'I think he believes what he is saying. That's not the point. The point is, and this is the crucial one, he could not possibly have been, what is it, the foremost gladiator of the empire at his time. Impossible.'

'He would be about the average size in ancient Rome, not small,' said Sister Olav.

McCardle agreed. She was correct except for the crucial economics of things. He pointed out the vast amount of wealth connected with the games. She agreed that was correct. With that sort of wealth, they were bound to get larger, faster men in the arena, McCardle said. Many were six feet tall in a civilization where five feet was average, if not a little bit tall. While there were no records of this, it was basic logic that a five-foot man was not going to regularly defeat what must have been an unending flow of six-footers.

Sister Olav pointed out there were no records of the numbers and sizes of arena people. McCardle shook his head. With the kind of economics that went into the games, there had to be a flow of incredibly fast and skilful giants, with longer reaches than Eugeni. ,

Sister Olav said she had read of fights where smaller men ruled their fisticuff divisions. Dr Petrovitch said Muhammad Ali had beaten bigger men.

'Have you ever stood next to Muhammad Ali ? I once did. He's like a building. He only looks small compared to some other giant he fights. The best boxer, pound for pound, was Sugar Ray Robinson, another American, and he literally would be killed if he stepped into a ring with any of the heavyweights. In America we have a game called basketball. The short, fast men are six feet five inches tall, six feet four, six feet three. That's short. And they're incredibly fast. In football, those speedy little quarter backs we see are brick buildings, and those linemen are giants and run faster than you can believe. And that's just American sports, and today with all the millions of dollars we put into our professional sports, we have yet to build an arena the size our Julius Caesar says he fought in.'

'The colosseum in Rome held only fifty thousand people,' said Dr Petrovitch.

'That's the small one, Semyon,' said McCardle. 'The big one was where the Vatican is now. It held one hundred and fifty thousand people, larger than many of the city-states at that time, built without gas engines, electricity, or any of the power tools we know today. And that guy ruled there for what, ten, twenty years? C'mon.'

'You seem to know quite a few things for someone who says he is not an expert, Dr McCardle,' said Sister Olav.

‘I
know our Nero was not foremost gladiator. And I don't want to be laughed out of the scientific world as some hustler when you people try to pass him off as that.'

Sister Olav said there were worse things to fear in the world than ridicule. McCardle chugged the second beer. He should have ordered Rocker City beer for Semyon. It was the cheap, local beer drunk in North Springs, but here it would be imported. He took another Schlitz from the icebox without getting up. Semyon liked imported beer, hence the Schlitz.

'An economic impossibility for that man to be what he says he is. And that's just one strong point in a whole peck of peculiar points. More than ridicule,' said Lew.

Semyon put out his cigarette with finality. Dark suspicion crossed his glum face. He was looking at Sister Olav, wondering why she defended the patient so fervently.

'I'd like to hear how a person can lie and not be a liar,' said Sister Olav.

'Let me take this risk,' said Lew, looking up to Sister Olav and then across to Semyon. 'I think this theory I have is true, as wild as it is. I think our subject has already told us what happened, but we didn't see it or want to see it, any more than he did. Now the human mind is a funny, funny thing, even without bringing in the shock of an entirely new age. And we don't know the effects on the brain, although there don't seem to be any, but, as Dr Petrovitch can verify, there had to be some brain damage somewhere.

'Giving that the body was found frozen, and given that it tells the truth, and given that it cannot have been what it says it was, and given that Latin is its first language, we can therefore assume it is indeed nineteen hundred years old, but not that it was what it says it was, even though it tells the truth. Now how could that be?' said McCardle, holding up his beer bottle, looking at the bottle-darkened foam, but his mind was not on the foam.

'I believe something happened in the ice, to its mind,' said McCardle.

'Nothing happened,' said Dr Petrovitch, 'otherwise he'd be dead. The slightest ongoing act would have caused the body to react to the poison if not to time. In which case you would have recovered the remnants of a corpse.'

'No, Semyon. I am not talking about an entire process, I am talking about some small area in the brain which might have crystallized. One crystal. A million cells among billions gone, unnoticed.! That area unpermeated with your glycerol substance. You, more than anyone, should know how unstable the substance is.'

'Quite true, Lew. What else?' said Semyon.

'So let's look at something else, also. Let's look at what it remembers and specifically does not remember. Very little have you been told about its slavery. Why?'

'I didn't want to press it with him. It was painful for him,' said Sister Olav.

'Correct. It was painful because that was its daily life that would never change. When it was dying, it changed its life. It invented someone it wanted to be, someone it knew and envied. I think we have recovered what was probably an arena slave. Look since it's all conjecture, let's even get riskier. I've got a feeling that who we have is the slave this patrician Publius couldn't get by to warn Domitian to leave the arena the day of that first riot.'

That is conjecture,' said Sister Olav.

'Let Dr McCardle continue. He seems to know a bit about psychology, too,' said Petrovitch. 'We can't fall in love with the patient.'

'Well, let's say Publius demanded he be punished, and there undoubtedly would have been some kind of imperial inquiry as to why Domitian didn't get word to leave the riot early. OK, so it comes down to this poor slave. Not to make a bigger fuss over the thing, because Rome was political dry wood, if you will, they just quietly shipped this poor guy north with the next legion leaving for the Danube borders. Nobody missed him or cared. There, they traded the guy to some German tribe. And in some way we don't know yet, but I think we will find out, the slave ate some poison and, being property of much less value than a good dog, he's left without a stich somewhere it's cold. The German Sea, maybe.'