Kaspar's Box

"Couldn't do much about the names, but my grandfather was quite the explorer in his time. His hobby was going into unknown areas and mapping and charting them. He was certain that, somewhere out here, there just had to be some creatures, some civilization, if not contemporaneous to us at least one or more that had been here long ago, and he was going to find it. He wasn't crazy. That was his chosen field, and he did it in style. Made some really major discoveries in that super luxury yacht of his. Then he got this data that convinced him that he could locate the legendary and missing Three Kings. Something in that old fool of a priest's truncated survey caught my grandfather's eye and he was convinced that there might well be traces of ancient alien civilizations there. He went off, and he found them. The pictures prove that, as does some of the survey information that survived. You know the rest, though. The yacht came back but not any human or AI device that could tell us anything about it. Worse, no trace of how to find those three worlds or what my grandfather discovered. But inside-inside that perfectly good, working luxury spacecraft were the pictures, the strange little artifacts like nothing ever seen before and, of course, what came to be horribly misnamed as the Magi stones. I think you're aware of them and their peculiar, shall we say, properties?"

Maslovic nodded. It was all finally falling into place. "And because it was your family's property, when all was analyzed and said and done much of it came back to the Macouris. Your father put the artifacts in traveling shows and gave many of the stones out to rich and influential people as the ultimate status symbols. And he let some get sold at auction by the finest art houses, didn't he?"

"You're smarter than you should be," Georgi Macouri told him, in the closest thing to a compliment he could muster. "I'm impressed. We didn't need the money, of course, but the legend that went with them, that was the important thing. That silly El Dorado stuff. My father was convinced that somewhere, someone had my grandfather's papers, his research and calculations, that would give away the location of the Three Kings. What better way to find it, when the best detectives in the known universe couldn't, but to make it a contest, a quest for the Holy Grail, the magical place of dreams. And good legends really help sell status symbols, you know, and they grow in the retelling. We never did get the pictures back, and a lot of the data recordings, but we got copies of the interesting stuff. There was still a semblance of interstellar government then; it hadn't begun to break down. I assume that just as this ship and its crew are all leftover relics of that past time, somewhere out here there's still a bunch of folks who think they're the intelligence service of some big, monolithic government who are still classifying everything Top Secret and pretending that the Silence never happened. It doesn't matter."

"Odd that after all that, and such a clever plan, nobody ever found the stuff, though," the sergeant commented. "You'd think something would leak after all this time."

"Oh, it has. Your pitiful pretense at being part of some vast navy has blinded you to subsequent history in many areas. I think there's been a slow but steady progression of people and ships out there as the location turned up. I've traced many. The trouble is, just like my grandfather, nobody who goes comes back. Or, if they do, they come back very, very dead."

Maslovic sat up very straight. "You do know where the Three Kings are, then, don't you?"

Georgi Macouri gave his Cheshire Cat smile. "Who? Me?"

"But you haven't ever gone out looking. Your father's great dream, and his clever plan uncovered the coordinates, yet you never used them. Why not?"

"You assume too much not in evidence," the little man responded. "Why, just a few years ago a group of brave men and women got the address from a third party and went off to mine the riches and return. They haven't yet. Nothing. Not even a trace of their ship, either, although its wreckage, perhaps in tiny pieces, may be all over a half a light-year-wide region out there."

"But you never made the try."

Macouri shrugged. "Sergeant, I inherited everything. The money, the power, the influence, the excellent wine cellars, you name it. I even enjoy the thrill of risk. I bathe in it sometimes. But if it's not to be even odds, then the odds must be on my side. I seem to lack the recklessness."

"So you just have manipulated and sent others over and over, and to no avail."