Touchstone (Meridian Series) by John Schettler, Mark Prost Page A

what? Are you all right?”
           “I don’t know… something is very wrong…”
           “What are you talking about? What happened? You mean to say
you did get a report before I arrived?” He rushed to Nordhausen’s side,
eyes scanning the desk top as though he expected to see a variance report.
           Nordhausen sat with his face in his hands. He couldn’t look
at Dorland. “It was my fault, Paul. I… used the Arch…” he muttered, in a low
voice, almost inaudibly.
           “You what?”
           “I used the Arch!” He lifted his head from his hands, and
the look of despair was deep and clear. “I used the Arch and something
changed.”
           Paul stiffened. He held his clipboard to his chest, and
said, slowly: “Robert, what did you do?”
           “Nothing! I didn’t do anything! At least not anything I can
clue on. But I must have done something, because things are clearly wrong.”
Nordhausen gave him a pleading look. Suddenly the whole story came spilling out
in a gush of disjointed narrative, clothed in rationalizations and
justifications, causing Dorland to slowly sink into the other office chair
while Nordhausen went on.
           “So, you see, I didn’t do anything ! I was
just there, and—”
           “Didn’t do anything?” Paul gave him an incredulous look.
“You say you went out to the opera?”
           “But I just watched the show… then went across the street
to a club after and...”
           “And what?”
           Nordhausen hesitated, for the bit about his encounter with
Wilde and Gilbert was a source of great anxiety to him. He started to tell his
story and saw how Paul just put his hands over his ears with a flabbergasted
look on his face.
           “You didn’t do anything?” Paul just stared at him. “Robert,
you shouldn’t have been there in the first place!”
           “Yes, I know, I know…” Nordhausen covered his face in his
palms again, wanting to hide from his own foolishness. “But I just don’t see
the connection,” he muttered.
           “What connection?”
           “Between Wilde and the stone. How could an innocent session
in a bar cause damage to the Rosetta Stone? I can’t see it.”
           “What are you talking about?”
           ‘That’s the problem, Paul. It’s the stone. It’s broken, but
I can’t figure how. I went there to look at the carvings, and  I saw it… but it
was wrong! The Rosetta Stone. Our whole understanding of the
hieroglyphics was based upon that one object—but now it’s changed. What does it
mean? How could it have happened?”
           The recital had left Nordhausen drained, and he sat slumped
in his desk chair, waiting now for Dorland to say something.
           “I don’t know what to make of this, Robert. I have never
even heard of this thing—what did you call it? The Rosetta Stone? And what’s
all this about understanding the hieroglyphics? No one has ever translated ancient
Egyptian writing. Yes, there are pyramid freaks, and conspiracy theorists and
other cranks who claim to be able to read them, but they’ve remained a mystery
for thousands of years.”
           “No, no, no,” Nordhausen protested, waving his hand.
“That’s just what I mean! Someone did translate the hieroglyphics. I was
looking up the references only a moment ago. Champollion, a French scholar,
identified the phonetic connection in the glyphs centuries ago, but none of
that work is published now. Oh, God, what have I done?”
           Paul put his clip board down and folded his arms. “This is
too much for me to swallow at this point,” he said. “I’m still not sure what
you’re driving at. You just told me that this guy’s work was never published.
Do you realized how crazy that sounds? How could you know about something that
was never— “ Paul caught himself, and a squall of concern