There was warning in Rhonda’s tone, but Liesl was so caught up in the grief and anxiety of a thousand other problems and in her excitement about the blue Quran that she didn’t think to listen for it.
“Let’s go sit,” Liesl said. “Shall we?”
“Sure. Good idea.” She allowed Liesl to lead her to the small reading room, the one used for reading. “Not as grand as the other one, is it?” She stood, waiting for instruction. Holding on tight to that report. Liesl pulled two chairs up to a table for them.
“I had put the work with the Peshawar totally out of my head,” Liesl said. “Had just about forgotten it. Isn’t that awful?”
Rhonda nodded. She placed her stack of papers on the reading table. Smoothed the smooth pages.
“It’s not good news, Liesl,” Rhonda said. She turned over the first page as if the papers themselves would speak the words for her.
“It never is,” Liesl said with a laugh. “But tell me all the same.” She leaned forward and whispered, “It’s not the oldest zero, is it?”
“It’s not,” Rhonda said. “But I don’t think you understand the seriousness of this.”
“Tell me. Will we have to remove this particular claim from the library’s Wikipedia page?”
“I’m going to try my best to explain.”
“Please do,” Liesl said. “I imagine I’ll have to explain to the marketing department why they need to update the library’s brochures.”
Liesl leaned back in her chair. Crossed her legs at the ankles. Rhonda remained upright, hands folded on the report.
“Liesl. My high-school calculus textbook used the zero before the manuscript we tested did.”
The stone that Liesl had been carrying around in her stomach since September was back. She let her head roll backward so she was looking at the ceiling. There was a light bulb out.
“It’s a fake?” she asked.
“Yes,” Rhonda said. “Now I know mathematics, and I know libraries, but I’m not a physicist. But I’ll try to explain what the physicists found.” She slid the report across the table.
“There’s always been some variation in the estimates,” Liesl said. “It could be eleventh century.” Her response was perfectly rational. Her behavior, perfectly rational, but she could feel her pulse beating in her throat, and her muscles and bones and tendons were begging her to get out of that chair, out of the library, and run as fast as she could from this stack of problems.
“Yes,” Rhonda said. “That’s what we thought at first. So the lab redid the testing when the first result was so confusing.”
“And?” said Liesl.
“Again, I’m not a physicist. But there’s something called the bomb peak.”
“Sounds ominous.”
“In the 1950s and 1960s, the frequent testing of nuclear weapons caused large variations in radiocarbon concentration.”
“So the ‘bomb’ is a nuclear bomb?”
Liesl was looking through the pages of the report. There were charts and graphs and lists of numbers she didn’t know the significance of.
“It roughly doubled the radiocarbon concentration in the atmosphere.” Rhonda reached over and closed the report. “It allows physicists to tell with a great deal of accuracy when something was created in the second half of the twentieth century or later.”
“It’s been in the university’s collection for over a hundred years,” Liesl said.
“No.”
“No?”
“Not the manuscript we sampled.”
Liesl covered her mouth with her hands.
“So you’re not saying we acquired a forgery a hundred years ago,” Liesl said.
“Liesl. You know I can’t speculate.”
“Right. But you can confirm that even if we acquired a forgery a hundred years ago, this isn’t it?”
“Yes. I suppose I can confirm that.”
Liesl stood up and then Rhonda did.
“How long?” Liesl said. “How long do I have until the lab submits the results for publication and this goes public?”
Rhonda picked up the loose pages of the report. She knew exactly what Liesl was asking of her. Her answer confirmed that yes, she knew.
“They’ll wait,” Rhonda said. “No one at the lab will report anything until you have told us we can do so.”
Liesl led Rhonda back to the elevator. They said a quiet goodbye. Liesl walked back through to the larger reading room. It had been cleaned from the night before; there was no trace of the drinking or the mourning that had taken place under the eyes of the books. Liesl stretched out, resting her feet on a table and looking up to the shining books and the one burned-out light bulb, hoping the answer of what to do would suddenly come to her.