seymoure

Beware of Greeks

“The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance –
it is the illusion of knowledge.”
-Daniel J. Boorstin

“Gerald, are you telling me that this has to do with the Trojan War? Like Achilles, Ulysses and Helen?” I asked.

“I don’t say anything,” he told me. “I’m a scientist. I’ll tell you what the evidence is, but I don’t draw conclusions. That’s what they pay you for, isn’t it?”

“Smart ass,” I grumbled in a voice meant to be heard. It was and brought a smirk to his face.

“Helen of Troy?’ Hugo was not keeping up as well as he had hoped. “Like from the movies?”

“Like from “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey,” Ng said. “Homer’s epics of the 11^th century B.C.”

“I thought it was the 12^th?” I ventured.

“We’re really in a nebulous timeline here,” the bespectacled man stated. “We don’t even know when exactly Homer lived. But the war was supposed to have been at least a couple of hundred years before he told the tale. We think he lived between 700 and 900 B.C., so take the stab you want from there.”

He pushed his glasses back up on his nose and continued, “We know that he was blind, and that people paid him to come in and sing his epic poems to them. Usually for days at a time.”

I turned to my comrade. “He was like the limited TV series of his time.”

He tried to look like he understood, but he didn’t.

“Maybe I can dig up a copy of the ‘Classics Illustrated’ versions,” I suggested.

“Hey, you don’t have to make fun of me,” Hugo seemed seriously hurt. “I read more than comic books.”

“Hey,” our scientist friend said, “I read a lot of books because I read the comic first. ‘Moby Dick,’ ‘Last of the Mohicans,’ and a bunch of others. I never would have read the books if I hadn’t known that they were worth it beforehand.”

My large buddy seemed less wounded.

“Well, we’ve got someone out there that wants us to know he had got this piece of wood,” I changed the subject. “Why he has it and what it is from may be what he wants us to figure out. Or, maybe something else. I guess we need to look deeper, at least until he gets back in touch with us.”

“I’ll see if anybody in the scientific community has any more conclusions,” Gerald said, “starting with my cousin and her contacts at the NSA. Maybe they have more for us.”

“Thanks,” I told him and took the box back. Hugo and I walked out to the car.

On my seat was a large model. It was about a foot tall and 18 inches long. It was made out of unvarnished wood.

It was a model of a horse.

Hugo and I looked at each other without saying a word.

Step two.