Chapter Three
“Good morning!” The sheer power of the loudspeaker over their heads belied the flight attendant’s friendly greeting. “We will be landing in just about an hour, so we’ll be serving breakfast and distributing landing cards now. Please have them with you when you pass through Customs.”
Holl woke up like a shot at the first blast of sound. “They dole out sleep in grudging amounts, don’t they?” he asked grumpily, planting his cap on top of his disordered hair. Keith had been curled up like a grasshopper with his thin knees against his chest until the flight attendant’s voice shocked him awake. Both legs shot out and banged into the seat in front of him, earning a sleepy grunt from its occupant. “Sorry,” Keith murmured. He focused his reddened eyes on his friend and ran his hands through tousled hair.
“Good morning,” Holl said politely.
“I guess they don’t want us to get too comfortable.” Keith noticed the glare of the sun coming over his shoulder. “Sounds like we crashed straight into tomorrow. Oops, I must have nudged the shade open while I was asleep. Sorry.” He glanced down at the shimmering gray sea far below them, visible through thinning white clouds.
“Don’t bother,” Holl said, catching his hand. “I don’t mind any more. It doesn’t look real up this high. There, I see coastline, clear as I can see you. Which is it? Can we open up your maps?”
Breakfast was a basket containing a cold, sweet pastry, fruit cocktail, and a sealed cup of orange juice, and accompanied by a white document identified by the flight attendant as a landing card, which all non-United Kingdom residents needed to fill out. Holl tasted a single bite of the pastry and rejected it, as he read the card.
“Newsprint mixed with sugar, and topped with more,” he complained. The fruit was pronounced edible, but the orange juice proved to be as difficult to open as the peanuts. “They must have an endless supply of that plastic.”
“Don’t worry,” said Keith. “I have emergency rations in my bag. Cookies, candy bars, and sandwiches. Do you want peanut butter and jelly, or ham, tomato, and mustard?”
“I apologize, Keith Doyle, for all the bleating,” Holl admitted, shamefacedly accepting a sandwich. “Grousing about such trifles as food, when I’ve just flown three thousand miles and more. A wonder, and I’m not even properly grateful. Your pardon.”
“I promise, I would never have assumed you were scared out of your skull,” Keith replied, very solemnly, but his eyes twinkled. “If I didn’t know better, I would have put it down to that.”
Holl laughed. “That’s the truth of it. I don’t react well in crisis, do I?”
“Lack of experience. You’re much better on your home ground,” Keith reasoned. “Why not let yourself go, and take the adventure as it comes? The food wasn’t poisoned or anything, just not that good. I prefer home cooking myself.” Keith, who prided himself that he could eat anything, had finished both their pastries and a sandwich, and was rolling down the wrapper on a candy bar. “It’s a whole new experience for me, too, traveling to another country. At least this one speaks the same language I do.”
A flight attendant appeared beside them to take away their trays. “Well, how are we this morning?” she asked brightly. Her swept-back brown hair looked freshly coifed, and her makeup had been newly applied.
“Better,” Keith smiled up at her, wondering how she looked so good when he felt so lousy. Maybe their seats were more comfortable.
“Good! The captain would like your little brother to have his wings, for completing his first flight across the Atlantic.” The woman handed Holl a small card to which was pinned a pot-metal representation of pilot’s insignia. “Thank you for flying with us, young man. We hope you’ve enjoyed yourself.” Holl stared at the card and then up at the woman with disbelief in his eyes.
“Say thank you,” Keith urged him, with an elbow in the ribs.
“Thank you,” Holl gritted out. “I suppose I deserve a medal for living through this,” he said under his breath as the flight attendant walked away.
“Don’t hate it too much,” Keith cautioned him. “We have to do it all over again on the way home.”
Within the hour, the plane touched down, and the passengers debarked into Glasgow Airport. In the midst of the milling crowd, Keith and Holl followed the signs for Customs. The longest line in the Customs hall proved to be that for U.S. and Canadian citizens. “It’s tourist season,” Keith reasoned, glancing covertly at the loud, obscene, or torn tee shirts in which his countrymen were clad. He winced, and then wondered if he would be considered overdressed in his short-sleeved button-down shirt. It was close in the hall. The heat was not as much a problem as the humidity, which made breathing a task in the stagnant air, especially for travelers short of sleep. They shuffled back and forth in the serpentine queue, which was bounded by colored ropes and bronze posts. “I feel like I’m on Mulholland Drive in the middle of an L.A. summer.”
“No air conditioning,” Holl observed. “When it’s there, you complain of it. When you don’t have it, you miss it.”
“Passports?” said the man behind the narrow desk, with little to no inflection in his voice. Obediently, Keith and Holl handed over their dark blue booklets and white landing cards. “Business or playsure?” The final r rolled off his tongue in a rumbling burr.
His was the first real Scottish accent they had heard, and Keith’s ears perked up. “Uh, we’re here to join a university class,” he explained, hoping the man would say something else.
The deeply etched mouth lifted slightly in one corner, and the dark eyes twinkled. Keith saw that they were actually dark blue. “Taychnically, that’d be playsure, do you no’ agree; still it might be a bit o’ a job?” Keith absorbed the tones with avidity, and nodded. The man stamped their passports with a square and a line of print and waved them on to the baggage hall.
“Whew! Did you hear him? Great!”
“Fascinating,” Holl agreed. “He sounds like and not like Curran, the chief of my clan. Are we that close to Ireland?”
“We’re separated from it only by a narrow sea and a sense of direction. Remember King James the Sixth and all. Hey, come on. Our bags won’t be on the baggage carousel yet. I want to call home.”
There was a money-exchange inside the baggage hall which took Keith’s traveler’s checks and provided him with a receipt and a handful of very colorful paper money and coins of several sizes and shapes.
“Uh-oh, I hope the phone doesn’t just take … what is this?—” he wondered, examining a small silver coin with seven sides, “—twenty pences.”
Holl looked through the collection of cash with fascination. “They’re all different, and graduated in size by value, I see. Would you mind lending me a bit of that for the duration of the journey, Keith Doyle?”
“Sure—Whoa! Didn’t you bring any money with you?” Keith asked, aghast. He experienced a moment of panic, calculating his meager supply of liquid cash, and dividing by two. It wasn’t a comforting total. “Who the heck travels without spending money?”
“And how should I know, when I’ve never been ten miles from my home in my life?” Holl defended himself, and produced his wallet, which he thrust at Keith. “You should have warned me, Keith Doyle. All I’ve got with me is this.”
Keith counted the money in the leather folder and sighed with relief. “Holl, they’ll take hundred-dollar bills, I promise.”
“I don’t need the blue money?” Holl asked meekly.
“Nope. Those are traveler’s checks, which I bought at home for green money. The exchange rate’s a little lower for cash. I might even ask you for a loan later on. I don’t have anywhere near seven hundred bucks on me.”
Returning from the exchange desk with a fascinating handful of British money, Holl found Keith reading the instructions on long cards surrounding the pay telephone.
“Piece of cake,” the young man called, as the elf caught his eye. “It takes all the coins.” Keith fed in the change, punched in the International Access Code, 1, then his home phone number. “It’s ringing … Hi, Dad. Yeah, we’re here. The flight was fine. I’m on a pay phone, and it’s ticking off the money pretty fast. I’ll call again in two days. Give my love to Mom. Sure I’ll send postcards! Bye!” He punched a square blue button under the hook marked ‘Follow On Call,’ and dialed again. “Whew! The sign says that’s what you’re supposed to do to keep from losing your change. Dad says hi, and hopes you’re okay. Diane? Good morning!”
“Keith?” Diane muttered sleepily into the receiver. “Hi. I’m not up yet. Can you call later?”
“Whaddaya mean you’re not out of bed yet?” the cheerful voice demanded. “It must be four in the morning!”
O O O
Her eyes flew open. “Are you guys okay? How’s Scotland?” Diane asked anxiously. Unable to restrain a yawn, she covered the receiver with the other hand, and gaped at the clock. She peered out of her apartment window at a gray false-dawn, and groaned.
“Haven’t seen it yet. We’re still waiting for our suitcases. Say, can you let them know on the farm that Holl is okay?”
Diane clicked her tongue in exasperation. “Don’t you have their phone number? Call them yourself. They’d be thrilled to hear from you. Can I go back to sleep now?”
“Be my guest,” Keith said magnanimously. “Call you again later in the week?”
“Later in the week and the day. Bring me a souvenir. A pot of gold would be nice. Love you.”
O O O
“Yeah, love you, too,” Keith echoed fondly. He winked at Holl and pushed the blue button again and dialed another number. He waited for it to begin clicking through to the American exchange, then handed the surprised elf the receiver. “Here. Phone home.”
“They thought it was a young miracle, hearing my voice travel four thousand miles,” Holl told him later, impressed by the feat. “They’re all well, though Dola has the sore throat again.”
“Probably still. You’ve only been gone a couple of days,” Keith chided him lightly. “Not much usually happens in that short a time. Sorry I ran out of coins, there.”
Holl waved a dismissive hand. “Ah, they’ll never know the difference. Having never received a call of this distance, I don’t think they know how one should end.”
“Did you talk to everyone?” Keith grinned, picturing a crowd of fascinated elves around the phone.
“Nearly,” Holl returned the impish smile. “Those I missed this time will demand their turn when I call again.”
They followed the crowd past the baggage carousels to the two wide doorways marked Red Channel and Green Channel. As they had nothing to declare, Keith and Holl obediently joined the queue going through Green. At that time, it wasn’t moving at all. They stood yawning behind a family wheeling a huge number of bags, and waited for the way to clear.
“They must have just returned from going around the world,” Keith muttered behind his hand to Holl. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other.
Holl was becoming impatient. “Wait a moment.” He left his bag beside Keith and ran forward to the edge of the Green Channel. Surrounded by Customs men opening a host of matching luggage, a woman in a fur coat was gesticulating with an official in shirtsleeves. Her face was bright red. One by one, the Customs men set bottles of liquor on the metal tables. There seemed to be dozens in each bag.
He marched back to Keith, and explained what he had seen. “The whole channel is constricted by Customs Agents helping to move her bags aside. Come with me.”
Seizing Keith’s arm, he marched them around the queue and into the Red Channel.
“What are you doing?” Keith demanded in an undertone. “We can’t go that way. They’ll search us.”
“They won’t even look at us,” Holl promised. “I’m putting an aversion between us and them.”
It was true. The agents in the Red Channel seemed to look everywhere but at the two youths walking between them. They passed unnoticed by everyone, and abruptly found themselves amidst a huge, busy crowd in the waiting room of the airport. Everyone else seemed to know where they were going. A number of the people waiting for passengers had small white signs of cardboard in their hands. Keith peered at them all as he went by, looking for the Educatours representative.
“Now, where to?” Holl asked, feeling lost and helpless among all those Big Folk.
“I don’t know,” Keith answered, casting around.
A tall, thin, elderly lady with silver hair tied back in a knot scurried up to them. In one hand she held a clipboard; in the other, a cardboard sign which read “Educatours.” She peered at Keith through thick, round glasses which magnified eyes of flower blue. “Doyle? Are you Keith Doyle?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he answered politely, hoisting the strap off his shoulder and setting his bag down on his foot.
She thrust the sign among the papers on the clipboard, took Keith’s right hand and pumped it enthusiastically. “I’m Miss Anderson. How do you do? And is this Holland?”
“Holl,” the elf said, extending his hand to her. She gripped it, and Holl winced in astonishment.
“How do you do, Holl? I’m the Educatours director for this tour. Nice to have you with us. The weather’s not as fine as we could have hoped, but it may improve as the day progresses. I often find that it’s foul before noon and fair afterwards.” Keith was fascinated by the perfection of her diction.
“Perhaps it has the same trouble I do with getting out of bed in the morning,” Keith joked.
The blue eyes gleamed behind the glass circles. “Hm! It wouldn’t surprise me at all. If you tend to be a slug-a-bed, you’ll have to scotch your tendencies over the next six weeks. We get an early start every day. This way. Our motor coach is waiting in front of the terminal building. You look tired. Let me take that. I must meet one more flight, and then we may leave for Glasgow proper.” She hoisted Keith’s large bag over one shoulder without the least suggestion of effort and strode ahead. The electronic-eye doors parted before her.
“Boy, if that’s an example of the old ladies of Scotland, I don’t want to get in any fights with the wee lads,” Keith muttered under his breath to Holl as they scurried behind with their carry-ons.
“She’s likely an example of why they’re so polite,” Holl suggested. “All bones and wires. She must have ten times their energy.”
O O O
“Michaels here, sir. We caught sight of him on his way through Immigration: Danny O’Day.” The mustachioed man in the nondescript tweed suit spoke into a telephone at the front of the airport. He sent a suspicious glance around, watching out for illicit listeners, but no one seemed interested in a middle-aged man who looked like a retired mathematics professor lately returned from a fishing holiday. “Aye, it had to be him. Face like the very map of Ireland and a midget with him pretending to be a kid, on a plane from the States. Oh, yes, big bill-cap and all. Cool as you please. They came through the Red Channel, if you like. Yes, incredible. No, no one on the floor saw them. I got word from the operator minding the security cameras. The bloke got all excited when he watched those two trot unmolested through the channel, and made me a phone call. Left here with a tour group led by an old bag. Wondering what he’s smuggling in this time. Whatever it is would have to be light. They have no sizable luggage. The airline said there’s nothing in ’em but clothes and books. A lot of books.”
“No idea, Michaels,” said the Chief of Operations. “Might be disks or microfilms of classified information hidden away, like the last time, but it’s just as likely to be diamonds. We’re fortunate you spotted him. The gen was that he’d be entering from the U.S. either here or Manchester.”
“Shall I have him stopped?”
There was a pause on the other end of the telephone line. Michaels eyed a woman who was waiting impatiently for him to finish, and then turned his back on her. “No,” the Chief answered reluctantly. “They’ll laugh themselves sick at Scotland Yard at our expense if we stop him, and he’s here empty to make a pickup instead of a delivery. Keep an eye on him, will you? Report anything he does that looks suspicious.”
“I will, sir.” Michaels pushed the Follow-On Call button, and punched 100, requesting Directory Inquiries to tell him what it could about a company called Educatours.
Miss Anderson shepherded them into the waiting motor coach, painted a natty silver and blue with “Educatour” blazoned in white across the sides and front of the vehicle. “Keith Doyle and Holl Doyle,” she said formally, indicating the other passengers with a sweep of her hand, “meet your classmates for the next six weeks.”
The group assembled on the coach was a mixed one. A cluster of college-age male students huddled together at the back of the bus. They stared blankly through a haze of acrid cigarette smoke at Keith when he was introduced to them. Max, Martin, Charles, Edwin, Matthew, and Tom came from the same college at Edinburgh University. Alistair was one of Miss Anderson’s own pupils at Glasgow University. In spite of their casual insouciance, they were dressed in button-down shirts with identical ties. Keith was glad he hadn’t given in to the temptation of comfort and worn a tee shirt. Two middle-aged women, Mrs. Green and Mrs. Turner, whom Keith guessed to be teachers, sat together in the second seat behind and to the left of the driver. They gave him polite, shy smiles, but positively beamed at Holl. Miss Anderson dashed off and returned with a petite Indian girl dressed in a sari.
“There. With Narit’s arrival, we have our full complement.” Miss Anderson plumped herself into the seat in front of the pair of teachers. “Open the windows, extinguish cigarettes, thank you! It’s too nice a day not to take the air.”
Keith and Holl took a seat on the left side halfway back, between the Scottish students and the English teachers. Even though he had seen the driver seated on the right when he got on, Keith still did a double take when the bus pulled out to the right, with apparently no one driving it. They left the one-way system in front of the airport, and pulled onto the motorway.
“Now, now!” Miss Anderson clapped her hands at Keith. He had just settled back with his head on his rolled-up jacket. “No naps yet. We’ve too much to do!”
“I can hardly stay awake,” Keith pleaded.
“Nonsense!” cried Miss Anderson. “Today is your first day of class!” There was a chorus of groans from the back of the coach. “Now, pay attention, and I will begin. The area of the island of Great Britain known as the Highlands had a surprisingly rich Neolithic culture, which was during the period between 4400 and 2400 B.C. In the ensuing millennia, the population in many of these centers has declined. As a result, a number of the Stone Age and following Bronze Age sites have remained relatively undisturbed, because until air transport and surveillance became a reality, they were unknown. That feature which our ancestors have left for us in the greatest abundance is the tomb. It was the custom for most of these ancient peoples to bury substantial goods with the dead, and from these goods, we are able to deduce as much about the way they lived as we can from the remains of the people themselves.
“The first site we will explore is just southwest of here in the portion of the county of Strathclyde which was known as Renfrewshire, in which Bronze Age settlements were common. Alas, this area has been heavily settled through the ages since the beginning, so we are hard pressed to discover undisturbed sites near here. In this case, we’re immediately in front of the bulldozers. There will be construction on the site in ten months’ time unless something of significant cultural or historical importance is unearthed, so time is precious. The team does not expect such a find, so they are working quickly to document the site while they still can.”
“Do they hope that they’ll find something that will save the site?” Keith sat up, remembering Gillington Library on the Midwestern campus and how he had worked to prevent its demolition.
Miss Anderson shook her head. “Indeed, no, not really. In this case, we’re merely record takers, making notes of what was where, and when, for future historians. We can’t hope to preserve all the sites where our ancestors lived—we’d soon run out of places to live! Most of what we find will be reburied in situ. The second and third digs, both in the ancient province of Alban, now known as Inverness-shire and the Islands, are much better. Neither is immediately subject to development.”
She went on with her lecture. Keith strained to comprehend and remember what she was saying, but realized, hopelessly, that the words were bouncing off his jet-lagged ears. Holl had dozed off miles back. Maybe one of his fellow classmates could help fill him in later.
The coach turned in off the main street and passed by an arched stone gate. Keith glimpsed relief carvings on the archway and a square surrounding a grass sward, banked by solid walls of buildings inside of the same soot-darkened stone as the arch. He was awed by the antiquity of the University buildings, compared with those of Midwestern University. What they offered here was Education, with a capital E, tried but untroubled by the passing ages. He was enormously impressed, and couldn’t wait to explore.
“That is the MacLeod Building,” Miss Anderson pointed out. “We’ll have seminars in the Small Lecture Room once a week, where those of you taking this tour for credit will present weekly essays, which I’ll explain later. The University is not in session during the summer, so we’ve got the place pretty much to ourselves. You’ll all be staying in rooms in the Western Residence Hall just along this road for the next two weeks. Meals are in the refectory. Your names are on the doors of your dormitories.”
The party clambered out of the coach before a gray granite building with no windows on the ground floor. Checking Miss Anderson’s chart, Keith and Holl found they were sharing a suite with Martin and Matthew on the second floor, which, translated for them, meant that they had to climb two flights of stairs to get there. “We’re on the ground floor, now,” the teacher explained, as they pulled into the car park next to the gray stone building. “First is just above us.”
“Miss Anderson,” Keith began apologetically, “can I get a review sheet or something of the lecture you gave on the bus? I don’t think I absorbed very much of it.”
“Never mind, lad,” the teacher smiled brightly. “I was talking simply to keep you awake on the coach, though it won’t hurt if you retained some of it. We’ll be reviewing the same information tomorrow morning before we go out. Wear old clothes; we’ll be getting a bit mucky.”
Keith enkindled instant admiration for the wiry instructor. “Yes, ma’am!” He pulled a smart salute. Holl groaned.
With a smile, she shooed them away. “Get on with you before your room-mates bag the best beds!”
***