is a stony-iron meteorite, which as the name suggests is made up of a combination of rock and metal. They’re very rare – there are fewer than a hundred and fifty known examples, I believe.’
‘You said it’s probably a . . . a mesosiderite,’ said Penrose, almost stumbling over the word. ‘Can’t you be sure?’
‘Not without cutting one of the statues in two to make a microscope slide, and I doubt Dr Wilde – or the Egyptian government – would be happy about that! But the tests I could do seemed reasonably conclusive. Although,’ he added, ‘if there’s any way at all I could get a larger sample, I’d very much like to carry out further tests. The rock has some unusual properties.’
‘In what way?’ asked Nina.
‘The density, for one thing – either the iron content is much higher than I’d expect, or there are heavier metals in there as well. There are also traces of organic compounds.’
Eddie gave the statues a deeply suspicious look. ‘Wait, there was something alive inside the meteor? Like the Blob?’
Bellfriar laughed. ‘No, no. If a compound is “organic”, then chemically it just means it contains carbon. Meteorites might have carried the precursors of life to earth, though; there was a famous find in Australia, the Murchison meteorite, which contained amino acids. I don’t know if that was the case here – but I did notice something else.’ He turned to Macy. ‘Miss Sharif, can you skip forward to . . . I think slide seventeen?’
Macy tapped the keyboard. Slides flashed on the screen, stopping at an image of one of the statues’ surface taken through a microscope. At extreme magnification, the stone was a fractal microcosm of a rocky landscape, with what seemed almost like man-made features running through it: a fine grid-like pattern.
‘Looks like a developer’s laying the ground for a new subdivision,’ said Nina.
‘It does, doesn’t it?’ replied Bellfriar. ‘I wouldn’t want to live there, though – not a lot of space. The lines are only about fifty micrometres apart, less than the width of a human hair.’
‘What is it?’ Eddie asked.
‘Some kind of carbon matrix infused into the meteoric iron. Naturally formed, of course – it looks artificial, but on this scale so do a lot of processes. What’s interesting is that it’s greatly increased the hardness of the rock, as if the whole thing has been reinforced with carbon nanotubes. Normally, this kind of stone would be around a five or six on the Mohs scale – diamond tops the scale at ten, by the way,’ he added for the benefit of the non-scientists. ‘The statues are actually harder than the porcelain streak plate I initially tried to use to test them, so on the Mohs scale they’re at least a seven – stronger than quartz.’
His description had sparked another of Nina’s memories – this time from personal experience. ‘The rock,’ she began, her cautious, probing tone immediately catching Eddie’s attention, ‘does it have any other unusual properties? Like, say . . . high electrical conductivity?’
‘Actually, yes,’ said Bellfriar, surprised. ‘It’s down to the iron content, of course, but it was higher than I expected. How did you know?’
‘It just reminded me of something I’d seen before,’ she said, trying to sound casual. ‘But it’s not important. What else have you found out?’
Bellfriar returned to his presentation, but Nina was no longer listening, instead running through theories of her own. When he finished, twenty minutes later, she thanked him for his work, then waited for the United Nations officials to conclude their pleasantries, trying not to seem too eager for everyone to leave.
‘What is it?’ whispered Eddie.
‘I’ll tell you in private,’ she replied under her breath, before calling across the room. ‘Macy?’
Macy was shutting down the laptop. ‘Yeah?’
‘Can you take the statues to my office, please?’
‘Taking them back off me so quickly, Dr Wilde?’ said Bellfriar in jovial mock offence. ‘I hope you’re not disappointed that I didn’t pinpoint where they came from?’
‘No, not at all,’ Nina told him as the puzzled Macy closed the case containing the statues. ‘You’ve given me a lot to think about. Oh, Sebastian,’ she added as Penrose was about to leave, ‘can I have a quick word with you? We need to finalise the details of, uh . . . the Atlantis excavations.’
Penrose covered his momentary confusion – the IHA’s undersea archaeological work at the ruins of Atlantis was already under way – and nodded as he left. Macy, carrying the case, went out