He had no idea how to restore them.
But the work still had to be done.
That was the advantage of formal training. Even though Shen Le had absolutely no idea how to restore these metal fragments, he could still follow the procedures and put them through the instruments:
They had already been scanned by CT and the optical diffractometer. The lines on the metal fragments-or rather, the lines that ought to have been there-
Had all been marked out one by one.
Shen Le leaned over his computer, utterly engrossed. His fingers gently traced the lines of the patterns, one after another:
"This part is recessed-this part too-this recessed line feels different from something flattened by pressure. Its curvature is very unusual..."
"Here. These tiny raised beads are almost invisible to the naked eye, but the CT scan can still pick them up... This is clearly a beaded pattern... I just don't know how they were put on..."
"This part sticks out-there's a shadow beneath the raised section. What's inside that shadow?"
Shen Le rotated the three-dimensional model generated from the CT scans, getting nowhere. After some thought, he opened the images from the other instruments to compare them:
"The optical diffraction results show that this fragment is mostly silver. That raised strip is gold-tiny little dots, packed so closely together..."
Mercury gilding? Gold plating? Gold inlay? Soldering?
Shen Le clicked on the image and rotated it one way, then another. On closer inspection, the gold on the silver sheet looked like tiny beads adhering to its surface.
Two more scans revealed no traces of mercury nearby. No mercury meant it was not mercury-gilded. There was a little copper, but Shen Le could not yet determine why...
"So what technique was used? Were these little beads soldered on one