Declare

picked out a couple of irregular gray metal balls, which proved to be lead when he spilled them from his palm onto the desktop and they thudded and didn’t bounce. “These were cast from the mold they took on Ararat in November.”
    One of the balls wobbled across and clinked against Hale’s coffee cup. He slowly reached out and picked it up between his thumb and forefinger. It was egg-shaped, and though it was heavy it forcibly reminded him of the black glass pellets he had found at Wabar and had later thrown down in the bomb shelter below Ararat.
    Peering more closely at the thing, he noticed that it was incised with two fine equator lines at right angles, one around the middle and one around the ends.
    “Three-dimensional crosses,” said Hartsik, “or wheels buggered out of usefulness by being folded into three dimensions, if you like, completed —on an oval, which is a sphere with two internal hubpoints, two foci . Mathematical severance of the geometric core. It’s the experience and expression of end-of-message , for djinn, and it will impose shut-down if it’s delivered spinning clockwise fast enough to match their own rotation, so that it becomes an integrated part of them. They can’t help but take it in—they’re hypnotized by right angles and ovals, like the shape of an ankh. Morbid of them, really.”
    “If—my team—had been able to blow up the stone—”
    “It would have been useless. For one thing, the open bubbles on the stone wouldn’t have created reciprocal balls , just… bumps , even if they struck impressionable mud. These leaden balls have been finished, trimmed. Djinn cast this shape when they die, they become hundreds of these balls, of all sizes, made out of whatever’s at hand; it’s as if they crystallize terminally into this configuration. The concave impressions in the Shihab stone are just the molten stone’s plastic response to the death-shape. You know what the djinn tend to be made of, from moment to moment—wind, dust, snow, sand, agitated water, swarms of bugs, hysterical mobs. All that stuff is already thoughts in fluid motion. You need to intrude a new memory—a seed-crystal, the physical experience of death.” He opened another drawer and hiked out a half-full bottle of Laphroaig Scotch. “Your exploded stone would have done no good—but a plain chicken’s egg, with the crossed-parallel lines scratched into the shell, might have worked, if you’d thrown it up in the air so that it was spinning.” He waved the bottle. “Purify your coffee?”
    Hale was dizzy with the vodka he had bolted half an hour ago, and he shook his head.
    “I’m to bring— those ,” he said, waving at the lead balls, “up the gorge, this time? Will we be going all the way up to the Ark itself?” He was still depressed at the thought that the djinn were occupying Noah’s vessel.
    “Well, it’s not the Ark , it seems,” Hartsik said, clunking the bottle down on the desk; “not Noah’s ship.”
    “It’s not?” Hale was surprised at the extent to which this news cheered him. “You’re sure?”
    “We’ve been busy on all this since you’ve been in storage. The situation has been clarified by study of overflight photos and a couple of furtive expeditions. In ’43 the Americans were flying provisions from the U.S. air base in Tunisia to the Soviet base in Brivan, and Ararat was right in the flight path, and we’ve got hold of films the pilots took; and then the Geodetic Institute of Turkey did an aerial survey in ’59, and our Turkish station was able to get prints of the relevant area. The American National Security Agency even consented to what appeared to be a most-secret request from the Foreign Office, and sent along some recent photos taken by their Ryan ‘Firebee’ drone. Of course, even with the Foreign Office the NSA is circumspect—a photo of Ararat isn’t intrinsically secret, but the mere fact of an overflight photo-survey of that area, the Russian– Turkish–Iranian border, is; and they often employ less-than-their-best photographic equipment on such flights because anybody can deduce the specifications of the camera that was used, by examining the photographs—resolution and instantaneous-field-of-view and so on. Still, altogether we’ve been able to establish that a formation in the Anatolian Akyayla range, some twenty miles southeast of Ararat, is probably the real, Biblical Ark. It wasn’t visible in the wartime photos—we believe it