“Okay. And say, genius boy,” Bud put in before Tom signed off, “Mac tells me your new camera didn’t pan out so well. Won’t you be able to use it on any space carvings we find down here?”
“We’ll use it,” Tom assured him. “In fact, that’s exactly what I’ve been doing.”
He reported enthusiastically that after working half the night and resuming at dawn, he had succeeded in redesigning the scanner. Just before Bud’s radio call, he had tested the camera again.
“I tried it out on an old Mayan inscribed stone we found near here,” Tom went on. “The retroscope showed clearly what the original carving looked like. Turned out that it was four baktuns old.”
Bud’s brow puckered into a frown. “Four which?”
“Four baktuns.” Tom chuckled. “Dad sent down some books on Mayan culture, and I’ve been
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reading up on their calendar and system of numbers. A baktun is four hundred years. The actual date as it appears on the stone is 8.14.0.0.0 7 Ahau 3
Xul, which would be September first, a.d. 317, by our calendar.”
“Wow! Over sixteen hundred years old!” Bud gave a whistle. “That’s plenty ancient for me! But how do you know that date is accurate?”
“Because it checked out exactly with the reading on the time dial of my retroscope,” Tom explained. “Besides, the old Mayas just didn’t make mistakes when it came to dates. By means of astronomy they were able to figure out the length of a solar year right on the button. And they were wizards with numbers.”
Tom went on to explain how the Mayas had developed two kinds of numerical notations. One, using a system of bars and dots, was simpler and easier to figure out than Roman numerals. The other, using pictures of human heads to represent the numbers from one to thirteen and also zero, was much like our present-day Arabic numerals.