Chapter Five

It’s been two days now since I joined Project Methuselah. Jalena was right about one thing: The disk code was broken yesterday and now all the disks, plates, and pages have been translated. What’s left is interpreting those translations. Disk interpreting is going particularly fast since most of the disk contents were self-explaining animations. The primary researchers are almost finished and even the secondaries, the cultural specialists, are finished with the obvious. Project Methusala is a rich find all right, but it’s like eating a big candy bar: It’s quickly digested.

My bag, on the other hand, remains a bag, and there’s no dead hand leading me straight to its meaning. The bag itself is in sorry shape. The fiber is from an ancestor of the cotton plant. The fiber survives but in a brittle form. Unlike the rest of the tomb, the contents of the bag were not selected for durability. Some of the contents were oily and others were corrosives. All the containers have leaked their contents and those contents have stained and disintegrated big chunks of the bag and contents. Some of the remains are crumbly metal oxides that are barely stuck together. Others are masses of plastic that can’t be pulled apart. Fortunately those discovering hunters didn’t explore behind panels so the bag was carefully removed and the contents retain their spatial orientation. The bag and its contents have been scanned up and down the electromagnetic spectrum, sonically, and with neutrons and neutrinos. The analyzing programs have done an age regression and I review the itemization of the reconstructed contents.

Readers who enjoy puzzles should read the following very carefully. Readers who don’t should skip on to Chapter Six.

 Item 314 itself is a cotton cloth bag with a painted insignia on the outside, about the size of a laundry bag. Item 314 contains the following:

• One large green cotton cloth woven very thickly and with a soft rough texture. This cloth takes up about half the bag’s volume. It has irregular edges, possibly torn from a larger piece, with no insignia.
• One medium-size knitted white composite cloth: Natural cotton and synthetic polyester. This cloth has a fine weave, soft texture, and highly irregular edges, again as if torn from a larger piece, and two apparently purposeless seams.
• One cylindrical metal container, about the size of a man’s open hand from finger to wrist, painted green with large and small inscriptions. The metal is coated sheet steel and the top of the container is plastic with a finger-operable valve system. This container leaked an oily substance and the inscriptions in the paint covering the top half of the container were smeared unrecoverably. The con­tents may have been stored under pressure.
• One blue composite plastic cylindrical container, also about the size of an open hand, with large and small inscriptions. It has a permanently attached finger-operable plastic cap. The contents have not migrated from the container but are now a solid dried mass of organics and minerals.
• A small piece of paper with inscriptions
• One clear plastic bag. It too is about the size of an open hand. The inscribed paper may have been attached to its outside. It is filled with:
  • Many small pieces of plain white cloth-like plastic rectangles.
  • A few pieces of thin woven cotton squares slightly larger than the plastic pieces.
  • A few paper rods with fluffy cotton fibers glued to both ends.
• One black polypropylene rectangular case, a bit shorter than a man’s forearm and a third as wide, about two fingers high, with brass latch and a gold and black insignia on the outside. The case was warped by some of the contents leaking out of containers inside it but the reconstruction makes it regular. Contents of the black case:
  • One cylindrical brown glass bottle with yellow metal cap and yellow paper wrapped around the outside. Large and small inscriptions cover the paper. The cap has large inscriptions. The contents were an oil-based slightly corrosive substance.
  • One ellipsoid sheet metal can with plastic cap. Metal is painted brown with a wide white band in the center. Large and small inscriptions cover the con­tainer on all sides. The contents were oil-based and not corrosive.
  • Three pieces of similar, but not the same, design. Each consists of stiff twisted steel wire entrapping stiff phosphor bronze slivers. One has short length and short slivers; another, long length and short slivers; a third, short length and long slivers. All are threaded on one end.
  • Two stiff nylon cylinders with elaborate precision shapes, each threaded on one end. One is solid; one has a long slit near the end opposite the threads. The threads are the same as those on the steel-wire pieces.
  • One steel cylinder covered with mammal fur, perhaps rabbit family, also with threads on one end.
  • One elaborately shaped piece of sheet steel covered with black paint, about the width and length of the container, perhaps a spacer to keep pieces in place inside it.
  • One long piece of aluminum rod with a large ovoid black plastic piece on one end and internal threads on the other. Threads match those on the steel/bronze, elaborate nylon, and animal fur pieces.
• Two black and green plastic cups, about the size of teacups, hard but lined with a softer plastic and with thick soft lips. Each is attached at its base to a semicircular band of metal. The metal piece has sliders for pushing the cups to the end of the band or pulling them up higher. One icon on each cup, no inscriptions.
• One white polystyrene plastic bag, about the size of a grocery bag. No inscriptions, no contents.
• One palm-sized roll of wood paper–based tape as wide as two fingers, coated on one side with a mixture of organic substances. There are inscriptions on the inside of the roll.
• One rod of tightly wrapped paper, about as thick and as long as a finger. The core is a black waxy material and the outside is painted black with gold inscriptions. There is a cotton thread deliberately embed­ded in the outer layers of the paper wrapping.
• An elaborately shaped steel container about as long as a finger and two fingers wide. It and its contents were badly corroded—worse than anything else in the bag. The container has, in fact, completely disintegrated and it is only by reconstructing the locations of the oxides within the bag that we can make any guess as to its shape. It did not hold liquid or gas. It is roughly rectangular shaped and contains within it:
  • A spring.
  • Six precisely packed cylindrical cans about the size of a finger joint made of lead, copper, and alumi­num with traces of iron, nickel, and mercury. Their contents were a mixture of highly corrosive organics and oxidative salts that have oxidized the alumi­num and steel parts.
• One harness system of flexible black nylon fiber shaped into two figure-eight loops by a black plastic piece. Each loop would fit around an upper thigh. They are attached to a roughly triangular piece of thick nylon fabric folded over to make an open semi-container. A fist would be a tight fit in it.
• One white cloth with one small inscription wrapped around:
  • The heaviest object in the bag, an elaborate assembly of thick parts composed mostly of steel but also some stiff plastic, with a few small inscriptions at various points. The whole thing is very roughly the size and shape of a bent hand. The harness’s semi-container could be designed to hold this piece.

That’s it, the entire contents of bag #314. I have no clue what any of it is for.

Puzzlers can check their answers in the Appendix after this story.