Across a Billion Years (11 page)

Her tone was absolutely neutral. I detected no tinge of the jealousy that I was clumsily trying to arouse, and instantly I regretted the whole stupid adolescent ploy. Either Jan couldn’t care less about my supposed Earth-side amours (which of course I had invented on the spot, since the only letters I’m writing are to you) or else, even worse, she had seen through the maneuver and wasn’t awed by my pretensions to galactic playboyhood. I wished she’d tell me about some lad far away who made
her
aorta palpitate, just by way of hurling back the challenge, but she didn’t even do that. Her cool brown Brolagonian eyes offered me no information whatever. I was dealing with a girl with a ten-generation heritage of professional diplomacy. The only secrets she gives away are those she wants to give away.

We picked up a new battery for the runabout and ran a couple of other errands in town. Then Jan inveigled an off-duty soldier to drive us out to the place where we had abandoned the runabout. Her technique was neat: she had me lurk in the background until the ride was arranged; then I stepped forward, and there wasn’t a thing her victim could do about it except look disgruntled. By way of consolation Jan sat snuggled up close to him in the front seat on the way out. I hope that gruntled him a little.

This is a very capable girl. In many ways.

For the past several days we’ve been getting a new sequence out of the globe. It must be an important one, because it recurs every few hours, and on occasion it has simultaneously been projected on two of the 60-degree segments into which the circular viewing field is usually divided. No other scene has so far appeared in duplicate that way.

It looks like a teaser sequence for a space-opera video show. This is how it goes:

First we see a wide-angle view of a galaxy, perhaps ours, with constellations strewn across a dark background. Camera pans back and forth to give us a dizzying view at least a thousand parsecs wide. Then we zoom forward for a close-up of one patch of sky. Supply the music yourself: a high screechy crescendo.
Suspense!
Now we see about ten stars: a binary, a red giant, a white dwarf, a couple of main-sequence yellow stars, two Class O and B blazers, the whole family straight out of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram.

We head toward the white dwarf, and now it is very clear that the camera is mounted in the nose of a star-ship on which we are the passengers. The music adds something low and ominous and throbbing, at about thirty cycles.
Mystery!
The white dwarf has five planets. It looks like we’re making for the fourth planet, which moves in an orbit pretty far away from number three. But no: there is a course correction and we turn our snout toward a region between the orbits of planets three and four.

Suddenly an asteroid emerges from nowhere and swims past our point of view from left to right. The music gives a sharp stab to underline the unexpectedness of it.
The unknown
! We realize that an asteroid belt lies between the third and fourth planets; the void is littered with all sorts of cosmic debris, just as it is between Mars and Jupiter. Remnants of a shattered planet, maybe. We are in orbit around a large, knobby asteroid whose jagged mountains gleam a dull pink in the faint light from the distant dwarf sun. We’re landing, now, on a broad pockmarked plain.

Shift of viewpoint. Camera is no longer in nose of ship; now it’s a couple of hundred meters away, looking
at
ship. Which is standing upright on its tail like any modern vessel, but otherwise is a thoroughly alien job. No visible sign of propulsion devices. No attempt at streamlining. The ship is squat, copper-colored, unattractive. Along its flanks are inscriptions in large High Ones hieroglyphics similar to those on the inscription nodes, except that here the lettering doesn’t shift around at random.

Hatches open high up on the ship. Cables emerge and dangle. High Ones descend to the ground.

They are wearing masks of some sort; obviously the atmosphere on this asteroid doesn’t agree with them, assuming there’s an atmosphere at all, which doesn’t look likely. They move about in their strange gliding way, now and then fluttering their arms in graceful signals to one another. About a dozen of them come from the ship. Then a hatch much lower on the ship’s side rolls open and a ramp juts forth. Down the ramp come six massive robots. They are built to the same four-arm-two-leg-domed-head design as the High Ones themselves, but there is no mistaking their artificial nature. Instead of eyes, they have a single glowing vision panel running entirely around the upper part of the head. Their arms have various mechanical attachments specialized for digging, grasping, etcetera. (408b has suggested that these six are simply High Ones surgically transformed into machines, as Shilamakka are today. But Pilazinool, who after all
is
a Shilamakka, doesn’t think so. It’s anybody’s guess. I think they’re robots.)

The High Ones contingent leads the robots, single file, across the plain to a low hill. A signal is given and abruptly the robot in front points an arm at the hill, and flame sprouts, and the rock begins to melt and run off in puddles. The robot keeps this laser attachment, or whatever it is, running until a goodly-sized cave has been carved in the hillside. Then the other robots move in, clearing away the debris, trimming things up. When they finish (five minutes later, in the globe’s version) there is a neat six-sided room within the hill. The camera tracks right inside to show the robots at work, gently melting the rock walls with gadgets mounted on their leftmost arms, to put a nice glaze over the surface. Then they install a heavy metal door on a colossal hinge. They carry an assortment of machinery into the room and arrange it along the back walls. Finally one of the robots sits down in the middle of the floor, and the door swings shut. They seal it; with the robot inside. Everybody returns to the ship. They get in, the robots going up the ramp, the High Ones hauled up on the cables.

The ship blasts off. End of sequence.

Why did the High Ones leave the robot marooned in the cave on that dismal asteroid? As punishment? That seems like a lot of trouble and bother. To watch for enemies? Why?

And why does the scene show up so often when we use the globe? That in itself shows that there was some special significance in building the rock vault and leaving the robot in it. But what?

Meanwhile we keep digging and have settled into a daily routine. Since my discovery of the globe nothing of special interest has come to light. Mirrik and Kelly are tireless, though. They chip away at the site, we clear it, Saul processes thousands of artifacts. On the basis of hieroglyphic styles, potassium-argon tests, and other evidence, he has now dated our site to 925,000,000 years ago, with a probable error of 50,000,000 years in either direction. That’s a pretty big margin for error. I still like to think of the place as having been occupied a round billion years ago. There’s something boomy and majestic about the word “billion.” I say it with a good explosion on the
b.
I feel sorry for the poor archaeologist chaps who can claim only a pitiful few thousand years of antiquity for
their
sites.

B
illion.
B
illion. One thousand million and seven years ago, the High Ones brought forth upon this planet—

I still wish I knew what that rock-vault scene was all about.

Your brother has distinguished himself again, this time by a brainstorm. When I got the idea, it sounded absolutely chimpo to me, but I worked up the courage to try it on Jan, who was thrilled and insisted I tell everybody about it at that evening’s discussion session. Which I did, although as I heard the sound of my own voice uttering the first few words of my wild notion, I began to feel like a tightrope performer with defective antigravs, bravely striding out over nothing at all and about to take a plunge.

There was no turning back, though.

Everybody stared intently at me as I said, “Let’s assume, just for the sake of argument, that the High Ones left that robot sealed in the vault and never came back for it. On an airless and waterless asteroid, a metal object such as a robot, built with High Ones technology, might very well last a billion years without eroding away or suffering other harm. This globe here is our proof that that’s possible. Therefore it’s at least theoretically conceivable that the robot is still sitting behind that thick door, as good as new.”

People began to frown, to nod, to fidget. I felt myself tumbling into an abyss. Such nonsense I was spouting! In front of Dr. Schein, Dr. Horkkk, all these experienced archaeologists!

Helpless, I went on.

“The question is, can we find the asteroid where the vault is located? I think we can. We have certain clues. The opening shot of the sequence gives us a broad pan shot of at least a thousand parsecs of space. The constellations shown, naturally, are a billion years old and don’t have that configuration any more, nor do we have any idea which sector of space was being photographed. Even so, I think any good observatory could provide us with computer simulations of various regions of our galaxy as they looked a billion years ago. Perhaps we could get a hundred such simulations, spaced two or three million years apart, to cover possible errors in our dating of the globe.

“This may locate the part of the galaxy shown in that opening shot. Next we zero in on our close-up: that little group of stars, the red giant, the binary, the yellow stars, the blue-white ones. Of course, a billion years is a long time even in stellar evolution. I imagine that those hot O-type stars cooled a long time ago, that the red giant may be a white dwarf by now, and that the white dwarf may have burned out altogether. It’s also possible that these stars may have had very different velocities and are no longer anywhere near one another in space. Nevertheless, it’s not all that tricky for an astronomical computer to find some of the key members of that group, track them backward on their paths, and come up with a simulation of where they were a billion years ago. With a certain amount of luck we’ll find the white dwarf still associated with some members of the group. An expedition can go there and hunt for the asteroid, and then it can’t be too much of a problem to find … the vault … the robot …”

I ran out of juice. My idea sounded so absurd to me that I couldn’t go on. I sank limply into my seat and waited for the derisive hooting to begin.

“Brilliant!” Dr. Horkkk cried. Dr. Horkkk, no less.

“A superb scheme, Tom, superb!” said Dr. Schein.

“Tremendous!” “Wild!” “Beautiful!” and other choice adjectives came from the others.

Mirrik snorted and bellowed in enthusiasm.

Jan beamed at me with pride.

Pilazinool stirred in his seat, twiddled with the fastenings of his left leg as though about to unscrew it, then changed his mind and waved a hand for attention. He spoke very slowly, telling us how impressed he was with my idea. In his judgment it was possible to locate the vault, and he thought there was even an excellent chance that it still would contain the robot.

“I recommend that we make contact with an observatory computer at once and learn if the location of the vault is indeed discoverable. If it is, I am of the opinion that we should discontinue work here and seek it out,” Pilazinool said. “Aside from the globe, we have found nothing here that has not been found at all other High Ones sites. We are engaged in a routine and conventional dig. But I see the globe as the first link in a chain of evidence that may reach across the entire galaxy. The vault, perhaps, is the second link. Shall we remain here, drudging away at our little tasks, or shall we reach forth for knowledge elsewhere?”

Instantly we were split into factions again. The conservative people—Saul, Mirrik, Kelly—were in favor of staying here and exhausting the present site before doing anything else. The romantics—Jan, Leroy, Steen, and me—spoke for Pilazinool’s point that we were better off chasing an exciting will-o-the-wisp across the galaxy than digging up another ten thousand inscription nodes here. 408b leaned to our viewpoint, not out of any romantic hunger for adventure but only because it wanted a close look at a High Ones robot. Dr. Schein seemed split between what he saw as our obligation to work the promising Higby V site down to the bottom, and our chance of finding something colossal on that asteroid. Dr. Horkkk, who had earlier advocated quitting here so we could concentrate on studying the globe, seemed now eager to keep on here out of pure contrariness, but I sensed that he too was at least partly fascinated by the possibility of tracing the asteroid vault.

We didn’t try to reach a decision. Why draw conclusions until we know if we can find the asteroid? Tomorrow we’ll call one of the big observatories and see.

But after the meeting broke up, we fissioned into several groups and went right on discussing. Jan and I were talking with Pilazinool, and the Shilamakka was not minded to sponge his syllables. In that smooth lathe-turned mechanical voice of his, Pilazinool said quietly, confidently, “We will find the asteroid, Tom. And the robot will still be there. And it will lead us to other and more astonishing things.”

A Shilamakka doesn’t use the future tense in quite that way unless he’s delivering The Word. If Pilazinool is right, we won’t be on Higby V much longer.

And Pilazinool specializes in being right.

October 1, 2375

Higby V

A
VERY BUSY FEW
weeks. We have all been working double and triple overtime, which is why I’ve made no entry in these memoirs for you, Lorie. Let’s see if I can bring you up to date in one sizzling blaze of verbiage.

The important thing is that we are now committed, kneecaps, collarbones, and medulla, to my totally chimpo project for finding that asteroid vault.

It happened in easy stages, the way cataclysmic events often do. When you sink into quicksand, you don’t get sucked—sploosh!—to the bottom of the swamp in one quick glunk. No, you’re drawn in slowly thinking at first that the quicksand is just ordinary muck, that you can always pull out of it if you want to, that it’s a cinch to get free in case you decide you didn’t really want to cross that particular swamp. Suddenly the stuff is up around your shins and you get a little worried, and you move faster, thinking it’ll do you some good, but it only mires you in deeper, but you remain cool and confident, and gradually, when you’re hip deep and gently sinking, you begin to admit that your struggles are making things worse and that you’re in the sticky for keepses.