Across A Billion Years

ELEVEN

December 12, 2375

Planet III of GGC 1145591

We are very much on our own here. And things are extremely strange. I never imagined, when I picked a sedate profession like archaeology, that it would bring me to anything like this.

We are in a solar system that knows no daylight. We seem bewitched, transformed into gnomes, condemned to scuttle through dark tunnels lit only by a faint purplish glow breaking through from somewhere far above. But there are no tunnels. We are at the surface of the world. This is the condition of life here: unending darkness.

Even on Pluto the sun brings a sort of light, but not here. The sun of this solar system is a dead star, or rather one that is so close to death that we can sense the intensity of its final struggles. Our mood is subdued. We say little to one another. The petty conflicts that sometimes used to break out among us no longer break out. This place casts a mysterious spell. I feel as if I’m caught inside a cage of dreams.

The ultradrive crew that brought us here lost no time in clearing out. The cruiser landed on the third planet of the system, which has no name. (We are trying to think of one.) The crewmen unloaded our gear. Then they took off, fast.

Our rented planetship was waiting for us. It’s a little undersized, but it’ll do: carrying capacity of twenty-five, passengers and crew. For purposes of calculations the eleven of us count as twenty, thanks to Mirrik’s extra tonnage. The ship has a two-man crew. The captain is straight out of bad movies, a veteran-of-the-spaceways type with seamed space-tanned skin and faded blue eyes; he chews some mildly narcotic weed from a Deneb world and goes around spitting everywhere. The weed gives him the smell of a cloying perfume, which is a little at odds with his tough-guy image. His name is Nick Ludwig and he says he’s been piloting rental ships for thirty years. He’s ferried a lot of chartered cruises of millionaires around, but never archaeologists. The co-pilot is an android named Webber Fileclerk, with the usual glamor-plus appearance. An odd team.

The planetship is both our transport and our housing, for we have no facilities for blowing bubbleshacks. Whenever we go outside, we have to run through a complete airlock cycle, which is a sposhing pain, and we have to put on breathing-suits. There’s no atmosphere on this world. More accurately, there is one, but it’s frozen solid. The temperature here runs maybe five degrees above absolute, and everything freezes, hydrogen, oxygen, the whole periodic table. Our suits are insulated, of course, but it would be a quick death if a joint sprang.

Once upon a time this may have been a fairly decent Earthtype world. It’s a little more massive than Earth, and the gravity is maybe 1.25, which is to say enough to slow you down but not anything really uncomfortable. The atmosphere that lies around here in icy heaps was evidently our friendly oxygen-nitrogen mix. A terraforming crew could probably turn this place into a zingo resort planet simply by juicing up the thermonuclear reactions of the local sun until things thawed out.

The local sun…

We are obsessed by that sun. I dream about it, and I’m not the only one who does. When we leave the ship, we lose track of our purpose and stare at it for long minutes.

We wear telescopic glasses for a good view. There isn’t much to see with the naked eye. We’re only 110 million kilometers away from it, a lot closer than Earth is to its sun, but this star is small. And dark. Its visible disk is about one tenth that of the sun seen from Earth. We have to hunt around in the sky to find it, feebly flickering against the backdrop of space.

GGC 1145591 probably has a million years of life left in it, but as stars go it’s on its deathbed. A star takes a long time to die. As it burns up the hydrogen that is its fuel, it begins to contract, raising its density and turning the potential energy of gravitation into thermal energy. That’s what happened here, so many billions of years ago that it zaps the mind to think about it. Long before even the High Ones evolved, this star collapsed in on itself and became a white dwarf, with a density of tons per cubic inch. And burned on and on, gradually cooling, growing dark.

Now, as a black dwarf, it appears through the telescope like a vast lava field. There’s the gleam of molten metal, or so it seems, with islands of ash and slag drifting on it. The mean surface temperature of the star is about 980 degrees, so nobody’s likely to land on it even now. The ash masses radiate at about 300 degrees, and it’s much hotter inside, where the compressed nuclei still generate considerable kick. Even a dark star produces heat, but less and less of it all the time. A million years from now this black dwarf will be dead, just a big ball of ash drifting through space, cold, burned out. The last flicker of light will be gone from this solar system and the victory of night will be complete.

We do not plan to stay here any longer than we have to. As soon as we trace the asteroid on which the High Ones installed the rock vault, we’ll head for it.

This planet orbits the edge of the asteroid belt. There are thousands of asteroids beyond here, and may take weeks to find the right one. We begin with a very small scrap of information: the globe sequence showing a spaceship of the High Ones landing on a broad plain. From this it has been possible to calculate the curvature of the asteroid’s surface; given that, we can compute its approximate diameter. Luna City Observatory helped us with some of this. There’s a big margin for error, since we’re just guessing at the asteroid’s density, but at least we can eliminate 90 percent of the asteroids in the belt because they lie outside our parameters of size.

Now we’re making use of our planetship’s scanning facilities. Captain Ludwig has his equipment set up to track the whole asteroid belt; as each asteroid within the right size range comes within reach, he has the ship’s computer run an orbit for it. So far he’s found a dozen asteroids that seem to fit the specs. We’ll scan for another week; then we’ll begin to check the asteroids out, one by one. Let’s hope we don’t find too many more.

I think I’m starting to understand the troubles I’ve been having with Jan.

Every three hours somebody has to go outside the ship to set off a flare a thousand meters away. This has something to do with the measurements Nick Ludwig is making — something about triangulation — and I don’t pretend to understand it. We take turns doing it, and Dr. Schein insists that we do it in twos just to be safe. This morning, when flare time came around, Dr. Schein said, “Tom, you and Jan suit up and take the flare, yes?”

It was all right with me, and I started toward the rack where the breathing-suits were kept. But as soon as Dr. Schein had walked away, Jan gave me a poisonous look and whispered, “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather go outside with Kelly?”

“Kelly’s got other work to do this morning,” I said, not getting the point at all.

That was this morning. Jan suited up after all, and accompanied me outside in icy silence, and we lit the flare and came back in. But now I’m finally seeing the picture.

Jan didn’t start cooling on me until after the night when she walked into the cruiser’s library and found me talking with Kelly. I think Jan believes I’ve been fissioning around with her, that I’m having an affair with her.

I swear I haven’t given a cough in Kelly’s direction, not once. Kelly and I have become good friends, but purely platonic. There can’t be anything real between us — and Jan knows it. Kelly just isn’t the sort of one-in-a-million android who’d go in for biologizing. Or is Jan jealous simply of the time I spend with Kelly? Sometimes I envy androids. This business of humanity having two different sexes makes for all kinds of headaches.

We now have located seventeen asteroids that are possible sites for the High Ones vault. Captain Ludwig thinks that he’s just about checked out the entire belt, but for the sake of caution he wants to keep scanning for three more days, that is, through December 20. Then we’ll set out to inspect them.

Our chances of actually finding a billion-year-old vault on an uncertainly located asteroid suddenly seem fantastically slim to me. The others probably feel the same way. But we don’t voice our doubts. We try not even to think about them. At least, I try. I start not to understand how we ever committed ourselves to such a chimpo scheme. Walking away from the juiciest High Ones site ever found, defying Galaxy Central, running up huge outlays of stash to romp around from star to star — ! Archaeologists are supposed to be stable people, patient drudges who stick to their proper work year after year. What are we doing here? How could we have let this happen? Why did we imagine we’d find anything?

Dark thoughts on a dark world of a dark star.

Dr. Schein must be thinking similar things. Certainly this quest is out of character for him. The strain shows in his face. We’re a little worried about him. He lost his temper at Steen Steen yesterday and really cranked the Calamorian over, just because Steen accidentally turned on a data mixer, fed two streams of info into the computer, and sposhed a couple of hours’ work. Dr. Schein got so angry we all were shocked, especially when he said right to Steen’s face, “You wouldn’t have been here at all if I had had my way! You were forced on me in the name of racial tolerance!”

Steen kept his/her temper pretty well. His/her tentacles did a little twining movement, and his/her side-mantles rippled in an ominous way. I expected a militant denunciation of Dr. Schein’s bigotry to come tumbling out. But Steen had been discussing Christianity with Mirrik earlier in the day, and I guess he/she was in a Jesus mood, because what Steen said was, “I forgive you, Dr. Schein. You know not what you say.”

A silly interlude all around. But it was disturbing to see our good and kind and rational Dr. Schein screeching that way. He must be worried. I am.

As you know I’m famous for my subtle approach. So after I had had a few days to think about Jan’s remark about me and Kelly, I worked out a subtle way to take the matter up with her.

We went out to light flares again. The rotation schedule called for 408b to accompany me, but I arranged things with Pilazinool, and Jan was substituted. As we emerged from the airlock and stepped out onto the icy plateau I said, “What did you mean by that remark about me and Kelly?” Subtle.

Jan’s helmet hid her expression. The voice that came over my breathing-suit radio was carefully neutral. “What remark?”

“Last week. When you asked if I’d rather come out here with Kelly.”

“I understand you prefer her company to mine.”

“That’s not so! Jan, I swear to you—”

“Hand me the flare.”

“Zog, Jan, you’re absolutely imagining things! Kelly is an android, for zog’s sake! How can you imagine that there’s even the slightest—”

“Will you push the ignition plunger or should I?”

I lit the flare. “Give me an answer, Jan. What makes you think that I and Kelly — that Kelly and I—”

“I really don’t care to discuss it.”

She walked away, turned her back on me, and peered up at the dark star in an elaborate display of fascination with astronomy.

“Jan?”

“I’m examining solar phenomena.”

“You’re ignoring me.”

“And you’re boring me.”

“Jan, I’m trying to tell you that you’ve got absolutely no right to be jealous. I’m the one who ought to be jealous. Watching you lock yourself up in Saul Shahmoon’s cabin for hours at a time. If you’re in love with Saul, say so, and I’ll zap out. But if you’ve been doing all this just as some way of paying me back for my imaginary affair with Kelly, then—”

“I don’t wish to discuss any of this,” she said.

Females can be pretty wearying — yourself excepted, of course, Lorie. What I particularly loathe is when they begin coming on with secondhand dramatics, handing out a replay of the big love scene from the last tridim they saw. Jan wasn’t speaking out her feelings to me; she was playing a part. The Cold, Aloof Heroine.

Fight fire with fire. Old Earthside proverb. I could play a part too: Dashing, Impulsive Hero. Rush up to stubborn girl, whirl her into your arms, burn away her irrational stubborn frostiness with a passionate embrace. I did. And, of course, smacked the front of my helmet against the front of hers.

We stared at each other across the ten-centimeter gap that the helmets imposed. She looked surprised, and then amused. She wiggled her head from side to side. I wiggled mine. Old Eskimo custom of affection: rubbing noses. She stepped back, scooped up ice, smeared it over the front of my helmet. I made a snowball and tossed it at her. She caught it and tossed it back.

For about ten minutes we capered around on the ice. In our big, rigid breathing-suits we were none too graceful; it was like a pas de deux for Dinamonians. Finally we sprawled out together, exhausted, laughing wildly.

“Chimpo,” she said.

“Zooby quonker!”

“Feeb!”

“You too. To the tenth power.”

“What was between you and Kelly?”

“Talk. Just talk. Nobody else was around that night, and Leroy Chang was pursuing her, and she wanted protection. She’s quite an interesting vidj. But she does nothing at all for me that way.”

“Swear?”

“Swear. Now, about you and Saul—”

“Oh, that’s old stuff,” Jan said. “Absolutely prehistoric.”

“Sure. That’s why you’ve been practically living with him for the past two weeks.”

“I’ve learned a great deal about philately,” Jan said primly.

“Of course,” I said. “He can’t find anything better to do with a beautiful girl in a locked cabin than show her his set of Marsport imperforates.”

“That’s right. That’s exactly how it is.”

“I bet.”

“I mean it, Tom! Saul has never touched me. He’s terrified of girls. I gave him all sorts of opportunities, hints… nothing. Strictly from zero.”

“Then why’d you chase him so furiously?” I asked. “As a challenge?”

“At first it was because he seemed interesting. An older man, you know, dark, handsome, romantic-looking. That was before I paid any attention to you. I guess it was a sort of crush I had on him.”

“But he wasn’t crushing back.”

“Whenever I started getting the least bit biological he’d hide behind a stamp album.”

“Poor Saul,” I said,

“Finally I saw that it was hopeless. And then I started going with you.”

“Except you went back to Saul after we left Higby V.”

“That was only to make you jealous,” Jan said. “To get even with you for fissioning around with Kelly.”

“But I wasn’t—”

“It didn’t look that way.”

“Evil’s in the eye of the beholder. Old—”

“—Paradoxian proverb. I know,” she said. “Well, you could have explained a lot earlier that there was nothing going on between you and Kelly, and saved me two weeks of stamp albums.”

“But I didn’t know that that was what you had against me. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“And look like a jealous little minx?”

“But—”

“But—”

“If you had only said—”

“If you had only said—”

“Gabbling blenker!”

“Spinless feeb!”

“!”

“!!”

We broke up in laughter. I threw some more snow at her. She threw some more at me. We raced toward the ship. The hatch of the airlock closed behind us and we got our helmets off fast.…

Why do women have to be like that, Lorie?

Why can’t they come right out and say what’s bothering them? If Jan hadn’t imagined all sorts of dire stuff going on between Kelly and me, and hadn’t staged this deal with Saul to get even with me for my imaginary sins, we wouldn’t have wasted all this time and given each other two dreary weeks.

Sometimes I think the Calamorians have the right idea. Putting both sexes in one body with a single brain eliminates these messy communications problems. If Steen Steen ever gets into a lovers’ spat with him/herself, he/she has nobody to blame for the mix-up but him/herself. I mean — oh, blot it. You know.

December 20

We have twenty-one asteroids on our list now. We blast off after lunch to begin searching them for the robot vault.

Merry Christmas

In the Asteroid Belt

Once you’ve seen one asteroid belt, you’ve seen them all. The one we’re in doesn’t differ much from that of our home system: thousands of planet-fragments moving in a maze of orbits. Most of them are irregular chunks of rock a few kilometers in diameter, or less. (We saw one of those that looked exactly like a broken-off mountaintop. Perhaps it was.) But the ones we’re exploring for the vault are much larger than that, good-sized little worlds with diameters of 100 to 180 kilometers. Gravitational stresses operating on an asteroid of such a size wear down any projecting corners and force the asteroid to assume the normal spherical shape of a heavenly body.

We’ve toured eight of our twenty-one asteroids so far. No luck.

We use a two-stage scouting technique. First we put our ship in orbit around the asteroid we’re checking; as we swing around it, we bounce a sonar probe off it to locate large cavities close to the surface. Our instruments are sensitive enough so that a cave the size of the High Ones vault would show up. If anything registers, two of us then go down in landing pods for a closer look.

Most of these asteroids, being pieces of a shattered world, are solid throughout — no underground cavities of the proper size or position. (The High Ones built their vault in the side of a hill, remember. Since there’s no erosion on a planet or asteroid that lacks an atmosphere, and no internal volcanic action on a place this small, that hill ought still to look the way it did a billion years ago.)

We’ve made three landing-pod drops so far, a false alarm each time. The very first asteroid we checked seemed to have a cave in just the right position, which we thought was too good to be true. It was. Pilazinool and Kelly made the drop, and when Kelly cored into the hillside she found that there wasn’t any cave, just a big salt deposit within the hill; we had misinterpreted our sonar data. Three asteroids later, Saul and Steen made the drop, but discovered that the cave was a natural one. And on the seventh asteroid Leroy Chang and Dr. Schein went down, only to find that we had misread our probe again; what we thought was a hole in the ground turned out to be a huge pool of mercury, no less.

That wasn’t a bad misreading. Captain Ludwig immediately hopped into a pod and went down to inspect.

“You’ve got a million credits’ worth of quicksilver out there,” he reported. “Never saw the stuff frozen solid before, but there it is. You be smart, slap a mining claim on it fast.”

We didn’t know much about mining claims, but Ludwig did, and we gleefully let him show us the procedure. Stash is stash, after all. We radioed our claim to the nearest galactic message depot, 2.8 light-years away, setting forth the coordinates of this asteroid and filing notice of discovery of the mine. It will, naturally, take close to three years for our message to reach the depot and be recorded, but at least we have established incontrovertible proof of our filing the claim on December 22, 2375. Meanwhile, as soon as we leave here and come to a planet that has a TP communications office, we’ll notify Galaxy Central by TP of the discovery, and make the claim official. It may be six months or even more before we have a chance to do that; but in the unlikely event that somebody else comes here between now and then, finds the mine, and hustles off instantly to file a claim by TP, we’ll merely have to wait until our radio message comes floating into the depot three years from now to demonstrate our prior discovery. There’s no way to fake that kind of claim: it takes 2.8 years for a radio message to travel 2.8 light-years, and once our claim is in, no one can possibly jump it.

We’re cutting Ludwig in for 10 percent of the profits, and his sidekick Webber Fileclerk for 5 percent. That’ll make them both a lot richer than they ever would have become as charter pilots. The rest of the stash goes to us, not as individuals but as an expedition; it’ll be used to pay off the monstrous deficit we’ve run up. Galaxy Central can no longer accuse us of fraud, embezzlement, exceeding of budget, or other dire things.

We’d still like to find that High Ones vault, though.

December 27

Two days more have gone by. We’ve checked three additional asteroids, and we’ve found another possible site for the vault. Jan and I are going to make the drop in about half an hour.

Nick Ludwig is programming the entry orbits for the landing pods. Webber Fileclerk is fueling them. The rest of us are sitting around nervously, wondering — for the fourth time — if this is it. Another ten minutes and Jan and I will be getting into our breathing-suits. Twenty minutes and we climb into the landing pods. Thirty minutes and down we go. I’ve got that sense of an overture playing again — the curtain about to rise —

By zog, we found it!

No, that’s no way to tell it, not with wild whoops and jubilations. Let me be more matter-of-fact, more mature. Let me tell it calmly, step by step, from the moment we got into our landing pods.

Landing pods —

A landing pod is essentially a miniature spaceship, designed for work in a low-gravity region, such as an asteroid belt. It’s a cigar-shaped tube about five meters long and two meters wide at its widest point; thus it can hold only one passenger, who must remain standing throughout the voyage. Mirrik is disqualified from using the pods because of his bulk; Dr. Horkkk is too short, unable to reach some of the controls, and 408b is the wrong shape, being wider than it is tall, to fit inside. That leaves eight of us able to go down to explore the asteroids in pods; and it’s just the luck of the draw that Jan and I were the fourth team to go.

We use landing pods instead of going down with the whole ship because it saves fuel. A landing pod has practically no mass, and these asteroids have practically no gravitational pull, and so it takes only the slightest kick to reach escape velocity. Why bother maneuvering a bulky ship into a landing orbit when a couple of explorers in pods can whisk down, look around, and whisk up again? Especially when we’re not sure we’ll find what we’re looking for.

Jan and I climbed into our breathing-suits and clumped ponderously down the corridor to the pod room. The pods were ready in the ejection chutes, lying down with their upper halves unhinged and pulled back. I got into my pod, Jan into hers, and Pilazinool and Steen swung the lids down on us. Miscellaneous clanking sounds told me that the pods were being sealed. A couple of thousand years ticked by. I used up some of the time by studying the control panel mounted just in front of my face. The round green knob would open the pod. The square red knob next to it would close it. The triangular black knob would bolt it. The long yellow lever to my right was a manual blast starter. The long white lever to my left was a steering rod.

They say that running a landing pod on manual is no harder than driving a car on manual. Maybe so. But the last time I drove a car on manual was when I qualified for my license, and I didn’t care much for the sensation; it spins me to think of whole nations of drivers, a couple of centuries ago, at loose on the road and supposed to drive their cars themselves, instead of letting the traffic-control computers do the job. And as I got into the landing pod I wasn’t too eager to have to pilot it back from the asteroid myself, either. Of course, I didn’t expect to have to. Ludwig runs the pods by remote from the ship. But if the telemetry line failed, somehow —

Anyway, they shot us down the chute and into space.

Jan’s pod went first. I followed her out of the ejector tube twenty seconds later. As I cleared the ship I felt a faint vibration near my shoulder blades: the ship computer was firing my nitrogen jets to insert the pod into the entry orbit Ludwig had programmed. I went hurtling feet-first toward the asteroid.

By leaning forward in the pod and peering down my nose and through my pod’s viewscreen, I caught a glimpse of the silvery tube that contained Jan, zipping along below me. Her velocity and mine were identical, so that we seemed held together by a chain; but the asteroid appeared to be coming up at us at a fantastic speed. Something’s wrong, I told myself. We’re traveling too fast. We’re going to smash into that asteroid like a couple of meteors. We’ll split the asteroid in half.

Right on schedule, my tail-jets started firing. The pod decelerated and floated neatly down to its planned impact point on the asteroid.

Landing was a gentle bump. Instantly the four landing-jacks sprang forth to anchor the pod. I waited about ten seconds to be certain the pod was stable; then I twisted hard on the round green knob. The pod popped open.

I stood in the middle of a grim, terrible landscape. No breeze had ever blown here; no drop of rain had ever fallen; no living thing, not even a microbe, had called this place home. To my left, the plain on which I had landed curved away swiftly to the foreshortened horizon; to my right and straight ahead there ran a range of hills that looked like shrunken mountains, sawtoothed and jagged. The surface of the land was bare: no plants, no soil, no ice, only raw rock, pockmarked by the meteor collisions of billions of years. I remember the first time I visited Luna, Lorie; I was twelve years old and had never imagined that any place could look so desolate. But Luna is a lovely garden, compared with this asteroid.

As I glanced around, I felt suddenly sure: this is the place! In my mind I played for the millionth time the sequence of the globe, saw the plain on which the ship of the High Ones had come down, saw the low hills, the craters, everything. Everything matched. The only thing missing was the pink glow on the flanks of the hills, the pale light of the white-dwarf sun. That sun, much closer to death now, gave forth only a trickle of purple illumination; it didn’t help me much, nor did the cold glitter of the stars. I switched on my helmet lamp.

Jan’s pod had come down about a thousand meters away, much closer to the hills. She was out of it and waiting for me. I waved; she waved back; and I started toward her. My first quick bound covered twenty meters.

Nick Ludwig’s voice said in my suit speakers, “Remember the grav!”

So he was monitoring me. I looked up and saluted. But I walked more carefully. With gravity so low on this asteroid, a really good leap might be enough to send me a few thousand meters out into space. In a stately way I caught up with Jan, and we touched helmets by way of greeting.

Then we went together toward the hills.

She was carrying the portable sonar; I had the neutrino magnetometer. We halted in a cup-shaped depression in the plain, close to the hills, and set up our equipment. Turning on the sonar, we swung it slowly in an arc across the horizon, bouncing sound waves off the hills until the scope told us of the hollow place we were looking for. We carefully recorded the position.

We moved closer to the hollow place. I’ll spare you all the thundering heartbeats and tense exchanges of knowing glances; let’s just say that Jan and I were edgy and excited as we switched the neutrino magnetometer on and began to scan the face of the hill. As I brought the scanning beam over the area of hollowness, the needle shot way up into the blue end of the spectrum. Metal!

“This is it,” I radioed calmly up to the ship. “We’ve got the vault right here!”

“How do you know?” Dr. Schein asked.

“I’m getting two different densities for this patch of the hill,” I said. “They must have camouflaged the vault door with laminated rock. I pick up about a one-meter thickness of rock, with a huge slab of metal just behind it.”

“And what’s behind the door?”

“Just a minute,” I said, adjusting the field of the scanner. Now the neutrino beam penetrated more deeply into the vault. The needle stayed on the blue; and as I moved the beam, the printout supplied me with a picture, in shadow-images, of the contents of the vault. It showed me the rear walls — dark, full of alien machinery — and the side walls, following the six-sided pattern of the globe sequence; and it revealed a dark, massive metal object sitting in the middle of the floor.

The robot.

“My flesh began to crawl with amazement,” it always says in the old horror stories. Until that moment I was never able to understand how flesh could crawl, but now I knew, for my flesh was crawling in all directions. I had seen a billion-year-old film show me the construction of this vault; and I had seen the robot of the High Ones take up its position on the floor, a billion years ago, when trilobites and jellyfish ruled Earth; and here I stood, pumping a neutrino beam into that vault and seeing the robot still occupying the same place, and I tell you, Lorie, I was awed right out of my snuff.

I described the scanner readings to those in the ship. My suit radio dimly brought me sounds of shouts and celebrations from up there.

“Don’t go anywhere,” Dr. Schein said. “We’re coming down!”

The ship shortly broke out of its parking orbit and went into an entry approach. Ludwig made a picture landing. The ship floated nicely down and settled smoothly in the nearby plain. Then the hatches opened and people came pouring out, and we held another festival of foolishness, dancing madly around the neutrino magnetometer.

Now all we have to do is get the vault open. That’s all.

December -30

We’re still trying, as I dictate this three days later.

Removing the laminated slabs of stone covering the door was easy. Kelly cored through until she touched metal, and Mirrik tusked the debris away. It took the two of them almost six hours to lay bare the entire door, which is about seven meters high, four meters wide, and, according to our scans, a meter thick. The High Ones didn’t bother with a keyhole; and in any case we don’t have the key.

We don’t dare blast the door, not with all that High Ones machinery inside. And we aren’t carrying a laser powerful enough to slice through a one-meter thickness of metal. We do have a power winch aboard the ship, and we tried it this morning; we fastened magnetic grapples to the door, ran cables to the winch, and pulled, but the door didn’t budge and there was real danger that our cables would snap under the strain.

408b spent some time studying the hinge this afternoon. He thinks our best bet is to attack the door from that side: pull out the pin of the hinge, somehow, and swing the door open. But the hinge is about five meters long and the pin alone looks like it weighs a couple of tons. Furthermore, that thing hasn’t budged in a billion years, and even on an asteroid without atmosphere or water there’s bound to have been some degeneration of the metal, maybe even complete bonding of pin to hinge. In that case we’re in trouble. We’ll see in the morning.

December 31

A strange, grim, and busy day.

Unless we’ve lost track entirely, which is quite possible, this is the last day of 2375. But a New Year’s Eve celebration seems irrelevant tonight, after the day’s hectic events.

We went to work on the hinge first thing in the morning. Before making any attempt to remove it, we did a complete survey of it, with a tridim scan, measurements, holograms, the works, just as though it were a house beam or something that had to be destroyed in the course of an excavation. Not that the science of paleotechnology had much to learn from it, for it wasn’t a particularly alien kind of hinge; there is evidently only one efficient way to design a hinge for a door, and the High Ones had hit on the same scheme used on Earth and everywhere else, so that the main point of interest about this hinge was how uninteresting it was.

After this we got the most potent laser in the ship and started cutting. It took a couple of hours to slice the hinge the long way. At last we peeled it open and slipped the pin. Next we got the magnetic grapples out, cabled them to the power winch, and started tugging.

The cables went taut, and we cleared back, not wanting to be close at hand if they snapped. But the cables held. So did the door. Captain Ludwig threw the throttle of the winch wide open, so that it was pulling with its full fifty-ton force, but the tug-of-war remained a standoff. “What happens,” Steen Steen asked, “if the winch pulls the ship toward the door, instead of the door toward the ship?” And it was a sharp point, because the pull the winch was now exerting was nearly enough to handle the ship’s own mass and send it toppling forward.

The door yielded first.

It opened on the hinge side by about a centimeter. Ludwig changed a setting on the winch. The door slid reluctantly forward another centimeter. Another. Another.

What scared Ludwig — and the rest of us — was what might happen if the door suddenly gave up altogether and came flying out of its socket. The winch, to take up the tension, might very well haul the door toward the ship so fast there’d be a collision, and the ship would be demolished. Ludwig hovered over the controls of that winch like a virtuoso playing a chromosonic organ in a galactic music competition.

Slowly he peeled the door open.

We realized now that a bolt ran from the door deep into the rock of the hillside. That bolt was bending as the winch pulled on the door from the hinge side. Suddenly the bolt slipped from the rock; instantly Ludwig fed slack to the cable and choked down the winch, and the vast door toppled out of its frame, tipped up on one side, and fell forward, opening the way into the vault.

408b was the first to reach the open vault. It scrambled up onto the fallen door and stood there a moment, peering in and waving its tentacles about in excitement. This was the climactic moment of 408b’s career: the specialist in paleotechnology was staring into a room packed with High Ones machinery in perfect preservation. Just as Jan and I reached the door, 408b rushed ecstatically forward into the vault.

A blinding bolt of yellow light burst from the top of the open doorway. For an instant the entire opening was ablaze. Jan and I stumbled backward, covering our eyes; and when we took our hands away the brightness was gone. And so was 408b. Nothing remained of it but two charred tentacles just within the doorway.

I’ve never seen death — permanent death — before. I once saw a construction accident, and a couple of pedestrian fatalities, but each time, a freezer truck arrived within minutes, and the victim was hustled off to a resurrection lab for repairs. You don’t think of something like that as death, merely an interruption. But 408b was gone. Beyond hope of resurrection; scattered atoms can’t be brought together and given new life. All its skills, its fund of knowledge, its hope of future attainments… gone.

In a civilization where most deaths are so temporary, a real death is a terrifying, shattering thing to behold. The rest of us gathered in a dazed little group in front of the vault. Jan began to cry; I put my arms around her, then found I felt like crying too, but I didn’t. Mirrik prayed, Pilazinool removed and replaced his right arm about twenty times in two minutes, Dr. Schein cursed quietly, Steen Steen had a fit of the shakes, and Leroy Chang turned away, sitting on the edge of the door in a limp heap. Dr. Horkkk was the only one who seemed in full control of himself. “Away from the opening!” he shouted, and as we backed away he picked up a pebble and tossed it in. The lightning flared again.

We weren’t going to be able to get into the vault. That was quite clear.

The death of 408b left us too stunned to proceed immediately. We retreated to the ship, where at Dr. Schein’s request Mirrik conducted a memorial service for the paleotechnologist. Not even Mirrik had any idea what sort of religion they have on Bellatrix XIV, so he delivered a Paradoxian service, short and somehow moving. I won’t try to reproduce it here; I can only recall one piece of it, the most characteristically Paradoxian of all: “Thou endest our time to teach us that time is without an end. Thou shortenest our days so that our days may be made long. Thou makest us mortal so that eternity will be ours. Forgive us, O Father, as we forgive Thee. Amen.”

An hour later we cautiously returned to the vault.

Naturally our mood was dark and bleak; yet we doubted that 408b would have wanted us to go into prolonged mourning on its account when there was important work to do. We had rigged floodlights on the plain to work by during the cutting of the hinge; now we moved them closer, so they would illuminate the interior of the vault. Keeping a wary distance from the entrance, we looked in, and I shivered a little with the chilly shock of recognition as I saw before me precisely the scene depicted in the globe sequence.

A six-walled chamber. Alien, mysterious instruments mounted in back, screens and levers and nodes and panels. Seated in the center of everything, ponderous as a tribal idol, the giant robot whom the High Ones left to guard this cave ten million centuries ago.

Time had not been able to erode the mechanisms within this cave. The blaze of light that ended the life of 408b was ample proof of that.

Nor had time harmed the robot. Incredibly, it still functioned; the combination of High Ones engineering skill and a protective environment of vacuum had given it the ability to withstand all decay. As our lights flashed across its domed head, we saw its vision panel changing hues in response — the robot equivalent of blinking, I guess. Otherwise it gave no sign of awareness. We confronted it, standing in a row outside the vault and not daring to go near, for many minutes.

What now? We were stymied.

Then I remembered the globe and our plans for using it as a means of communication. I reminded Dr. Schein of this, and he sent me back to the ship to get it.

The globe was mounted on rollers now. I pushed it within twenty meters of the vault entrance.

“Switch it on,” Dr. Schein ordered.

My hand found the stud. The sphere of greenish light took form around me, widening until its perimeter reached across the threshold of the vault. Images of the High Ones began to swim in the air. Their airy cities, their rooms, their highways, even the sequence of the construction of this very vault, came into view. The robot’s vision panel flickered madly; its glow raced through the visible spectrum, descending from high purple to deep red, and tumbling into the infrared, where I saw nothing but felt the sudden hot glow emanating from the vault.

The robot stirred.

Slowly, awkwardly, like an Egyptian mummy awakening from a sleep of millennia, the seated robot rose, pitching forward into a kind of squatting posture, then unfolding its pillar-like legs. We watched, frozen, terrified, fascinated, as the huge thing came to its full height of at least three and a half meters. It stood erect for perhaps a minute, testing its four arms, extending them as if stretching. It contemplated the scenes that were coming from the globe.

Then it began solemnly to stride out of the vault toward us.

Everyone about me panicked and began to run. I held my ground, more out of bewilderment than courage. And so I stood alone as the robot emerged from the vault and drew near me, a gleaming metal colossus nearly twice my own height.

Two of its arms reached down. Webbed metal fingers slid from recesses in the fist-like swellings at the end of each arm. Gently the fingers engulfed the globe. The robot took it and raised it high above its head, as though about to hurl it down at me with terrible force.

I turned and raced toward the ship, not bothering at all to compensate for the gravity, simply leaping and bounding along. Eager hands reached for me and pulled me in.

I looked back. The robot had not budged. Like a titan holding a world in its grip, it still held the globe aloft. Motionless, lost in a billion-year-old dream, it stared up at it.

Two hours have passed now, since I came into the ship. In that time the robot has remained quite still; and we have huddled within the ship, baffled, frightened, yet deeply curious. Dr. Horkkk, Dr. Schein, and Pilazinool are once more conferring, up front in the ship’s control cabin. I have no idea what happens next. We’ve fulfilled our gaudiest dreams; we’ve come straight to the asteroid where the High Ones built their vault, have found the vault, have found the robot still in working order. It’s all like the kind of dreams that addicts buy in sniffer palaces. But now reality has broken in on the dream. The robot waits for us out there. One of us already is dead. Do we dare meet the challenge? Or, having made the archaeological discovery of the epoch, will we go slinking away in quonking terror? I don’t know.

And the robot still waits, as it’s waited for a billion years.