Free Wayward Son by Tom Pollack

the suburban baths; the basilica , or courthouse; and the theater remained either partially or totally buried.
    “Don’t think it doesn’t have a lot to offer, though!” enthused Juan Carlos, listing for Amanda a litany of attractions: frescoes, mosaics, wall paintings, furniture, jewelry, everyday kitchen implements, and partially excavated buildings. The excavations at Herculaneum continued to offer a unique panorama of daily life as it was over nineteen hundred years ago.
    They concluded their tour with an inspection of the new site. Just one hundred yards outside the ancient town walls lay the Villa dei Papiri, still mostly covered by sixty-five to eighty-five feet of volcanic matter. After a seven-minute walk to the north, Juan Carlos pointed to a deep declivity where excavations had been in progress for the last three seasons. Near the bottom of the rough-hewn stairs used by the excavators, the recent earthquake had split a huge wall with a narrow crack. This fissure was sixteen to eighteen inches wide and, he explained, extended several hundred feet into the slope. Juan Carlos mentioned that it was here that the robot with the fiber-optic cable had been inserted.
    “Silvio will show you the pictures over lunch,” he told her. “You will probably find them helpful. But he thinks they pose as many questions as they answer.”
    They arrived back at the house at one forty-five, when it was already ninety degrees in the shade. After a brief washup, they joined Silvio and Renata, who were busy making preparations in the small dining room.
    Lunch was long and leisurely. Renata had prepared a delicious seafood stew as the main course. There were bowls of fresh vegetables and fruits and pine nuts, and flaky round loaves of bread. Glasses brimmed with Lacryma Christi, the local white wine.
    Between courses, Silvio gave Amanda a brief tutorial on the photographs the robot had taken. He explained that some distance inside the narrow crack, the way was completely blocked by a set of tall double doors that looked as if they were made of bronze. On each side of the doors were inscriptions. On the right, these seemed entirely textual, while on the left there were a number of images.
    What had been deciphered so far suggested that the right-hand door had been inscribed with a group of quotations or proverbs. How these related to the images on the left—if indeed there was a relationship—was difficult to say. Many of the images were partial, and some of them were doubtless hidden by volcanic dust or other debris.
    The robot, Silvio explained, was no longer operative. It had been disabled by one of the earthquake’s many aftershocks.
    “What kind of code might the inscriptions contain?” Amanda wanted to know.
    “My best guess,” replied Silvio, “is that it constitutes a key for the doors. We know that combination locks existed in Roman times.”
    “But could this one possibly still function after all these years?” she queried.
    “A lock was found in the Kerameikos in Athens,” he told her, “dating from the Roman era there. It wasn’t made of metal that can rust, but rather, it used a series of finely polished stone cylinders. Remarkably, it worked perfectly. And look here,” he handed Amanda one of the photographs of the doors, pointing to a partially hidden row of symbols. “It’s hard to be sure, but it looks to me as if at least some of these symbols are three-dimensional, extending outward slightly from the door’s surface. I believe these doors may have the same type of mechanism.”
    “So, you’re suggesting that the symbols can be pressed in some sequence to open the doors?”
    “Precisely. Let’s hope you can determine the sequence.”
    The group gave over the late afternoon to a refreshing siesta. When they reconvened for a cup of tea at six o’clock, Silvio suggested that they dine that evening at a local trattoria. Renata, who had spent most of her day in the kitchen, enthusiastically seconded