Across A Billion Years

SEVEN

September 10, 2375

Higby V

Jan and I almost didn’t make it into town to deliver the press release. Some dumb clump had forgotten to recharge the battery of the electric runabout we use for commuting between town and the site. We were still twelve kilometers from town when the engine gave a soft sighing sound and zapped out. I opened the hood and tried to show masculine competence, but there wasn’t a thing I could do, and we both knew it. Jan called to me, “The battery’s dead. Don’t waste time playing with the engine.”

“What do we do now? Walk the rest of the way?” “It’s starting to rain,” she said. “What a lovely surprise!”

“Let’s wait. Maybe somebody’ll come along.” We waited for half an hour, all alone together in the middle of emptiness. I took no advantage of my great opportunity to slip in a little biology. For one thing, the endless gray downpour that is this planet’s characteristic weather has definitely dismalized my passions. For another, even if I had happened to be in the mood, I wouldn’t have wanted to get involved in anything at the risk of failing to notice a passing car. Traffic isn’t so heavy on that road that stranded wayfarers can afford to let a lot of potential rescuers go by. Most important, though, was this strange and old-fashioned attitude that suddenly came over me: that it would be bad form to launch a possibly quite serious romance in a stalled runabout on a muddy road. Not that Higby V offers more luxurious surroundings anywhere, but I rebelled against the sordidness of it all. I can be quite perverse sometimes. I think you know that.

So instead of leaping lasciviously at each other, we sat chastely side by side and talked. It occurs to me now that Jan may not have shared my sudden puritanism, but it’s too late to do anything about that. Mostly what we talked about was how we happened to go in for archaeology. She asked me, and I said, “It’s because I hate to think that anything goes to waste. I mean, that anything that was ever important or valuable or precious to somebody is just buried and forgotten about. I want to salvage all those things and let them be important to somebody again … so they won’t feel neglected.”

And I told her the Lost Statuette Story.

Do you remember, Lorie? How could you have forgotten? We were six years old. Dad had been on a planet whose name I can’t recall, in the epsilon Eridani system, setting up one of his real-estate deals, and he brought back two little native statuettes as toys for us, one for you, one for me. They were images of pet animals of that planet, made out of some kind of porcelain extremely smooth and voluptuous to the touch, so that once you began fingering it, you didn’t want to stop. You kept your statuette next to your bed at the hospital, and I kept mine in my pocket except when I slept, and then it sat on the night table so I could reach out for it in the night. And I loved that little porcelain animal more than anything else I owned, and then one day Dad took me to watch them constructing a new building he was putting up in Alaska, and I was on this balcony, looking down into the foundation site, with the statuette in my hands, and I sneezed or something and it fell into the site. I started to scream, and told Dad to get it back for me, but the construction machines were too fast; they poured tons of concrete into that hole in the next five minutes. “Make them dig it up!” I said to Dad. “You own the building! You can make them! I want it back!” He laughed and said it would cost thousands of credits to look for my toy under the concrete, and did I want him to waste that much money? Besides, he said, a million years from now archaeologists would come there and explore the ruins of the building and find my toy, and put it in a museum. I didn’t know what an archaeologist was, and I didn’t want the statuette dug up a million years from now, I wanted it right that minute, and I threw such a howling tantrum that they had to take me away and give me something to calm me down. And when you heard what had happened, you said, “Well, if Tom doesn’t have his statue, I don’t want to have mine either,” and you told your nurse to give it away to some other little girl, and she did. Which was a typically subtle and sensitive Lorie-type thing to do, since I was madly jealous that you still had your toy and I had lost mine. I suppose an ordinary good-hearted sister would just have given her own toy to her brother, but you never did things the ordinary way, and what you did was just right, because I wouldn’t have been satisfied with a substitute for what I had lost, but your not having one either somehow took the sting out of the whole incident.

Later I found out what archaeologists were. And started going to museums to see the things they had dug up, including plenty of toys lost by other little boys five or ten or fifty thousand years ago. And it struck me: how sad it is that these things were lost and had no one to love them and care for them. And how fine it is that somebody takes the trouble to find them again, after all those years. Still later I thought: how sad it is that whole civilizations are lost, whole slabs of the past, kings and poets and artists, customs and religions and sculptures and kitchen utensils and tools, and how fine it is that somebody takes the trouble to find them again, after all those years. Then I made up my mind that I was going to be one of the finders. Which horrified Our Father, naturally, since he had already decided I was going to be a real-estate tycoon just like himself. “Archaeology? What kind of thing is this archaeology for someone like you? I’ve got an empire waiting for you, Tom!” I said I was more interested in empires that don’t exist any more. I couldn’t really tell him that at the bottom of everything was a toy animal from epsilon Eridani.

As I finished, Jan said, “When you dug up the globe the other day — that wonderful toy — was it anything like finding your lost statuette again?”

“Yes. Very much. I found a whole world again, Jan. That’s what this is all about.”

“Suppose your father had stopped the construction machinery and ordered his men to dig your toy out of the new concrete? Do you think you’d be on Higby V today?”

“I think I’d be a junior-grade real-estate tycoon today,” I said, and I believe it’s true.

Then I asked Jan why she had become an archaeologist. Her answer was a little disappointing. She didn’t dredge up any dark episodes out of her childhood. “Because it’s interesting,” she said. “That’s all. The idea of finding out what the past was like is very interesting to me.”

Well, of course, that isn’t any answer at all. We know that archaeologists find archaeology interesting; the real problem is why they do. I think the answer is that all of us are looking for some kind of lost toy. We are fighting that force in the universe that nudges everything toward chaos. I mean that we are at war with time; we are enemies of entropy; we seek to snatch back those things that have been taken from us by the years — the childhood toys, the friends and relatives who are gone, the events of the past — everything, we struggle to recapture everything, back to the beginning of creation, out of this need not to let anything slip away. Forgive the philosophizing. I don’t know if Jan or anybody else here would agree with me, and I don’t want to delve. Maybe some of them would say that for them it’s just a job, or a means toward prestige, or a way of passing time, who knows? I really do think that beneath those reasons there has to be something more complicated.

The trouble with a serious, intense discussion, I find, is that it ultimately becomes a little awkward to continue when the people doing the talking don’t know each other too well. In an earnest way we made a stab at talking about Dad’s hostility to my going into archaeology, and likesuch topics, but the atmosphere of earnestness started depressing us. I had to do something. Either make a pass at Jan, which somehow seemed less appropriate than ever after all this solemn palaver, or else get out and pretend I could do something about starting the engine. I got out.

Jan said, “Why try to look chivalrous? You know there’s absolutely nothing you can do to fix it. Unless you can rub your fingers together and spurt some wattage into the battery.”

I grinned sickly at her as I stood in the rain. “We might sit here all week,” I said.

“So? They’ll send out a rescue party. Come back inside.”

I did, and a minute later a military truck appeared. Three soldiers were in it; they stopped when they saw we were stalled, became very attentive indeed when they got a good look at Jan (girls of her contours are extremely rare on this miserable outpost of the Terran Empire), and lewdly suggested that she ride to town with them while I stayed behind to guard the runabout. They looked hurt when Jan vetoed the idea. I drew sour looks of undisguised envy from them; I guess they figured Jan and I had been making feverish love while awaiting help. Let them stew.

They gave us a ride to town, finally.

Sour looks were in style there, too. The first place we went was the communications office, and naturally the TP on duty was Marge Hotchkiss Herself, that radio-actively charming seductress. She slouched over to the counter and said, “Yeah? What now?”

“We have a press release to send out. For relay to the nearest Galactic News Service TP pickup.”

“Well, okay.” She consulted a ratebook. “Five hundred credits, thumb to the plate.”

I stared at the computer input on her desk. “I’m not authorized to make charges here.”

“You are a feeb, aren’t you? Why didn’t they send someone whose thumbprint is registered?”

“GNS will accept a collect call from us,” I explained. “It’s already been arranged.”

Hotchkiss grew more sullen. “How do I know?”

“But—”

“You want me to go to the trouble of setting up a hookup just to find out if they’ll take a collect from you. Only what if they say no? I’ve wasted a shot of TP energy. I’m no goddam machine, sonny. You want to make a call, you pay for it.”

And she sneered. Like something out of medieval melodrama. I’ve never been sneered at before. She was an expert sneerer, too. Must have had lots of practice.

Jan was standing to one side during this exchange, obviously sizzling, but unwilling to cut in. This was my show. I’d look pretty spinless if I couldn’t even get the local TP operator to accept a collect call. I wanted to do something virile and forceful, like throw Marge Hotchkiss through the wall. I began to rage and bluster. I told her that my sister was a TP supervisor and would have her fired, a lie for which I hope to be forgiven. I demanded to see her superior. I threatened to report her to the network coordinator. The louder I yelled, the more curdled the Hotchkiss expression became, and the more defiant she got. “You can take your collect call,” she said, “and—”

“Wait a moment,” Jan said sweetly, at last. “According to the section of the Public Utilities Act of 2322 that governs the operations of the TP network, it’s illegal for any representative of the communications net to refuse to accept a collect call. The TP operative is not permitted to exercise independent judgment as to whether such a call will be ultimately accepted, but must undertake to inquire of the party called as to whether the call will be received.”

Marge Hotchkiss looked sick.

“What are you, a company spy?” she snapped. “All right, I’ll see if GNS will accept the call.”

Hotchkiss slipped into the TP trance and reached out toward the nearest pickup point of the news service, which I guess was about twenty light-years away. (You’d know that better than I, Lorie.) After a moment she returned her attention to us and said, still sullen, “Let’s have that blenking message of yours.”

I handed it over. Hotchkiss scanned it and began to relay it to the GNS operator. I began to wonder whether she might just garble it out of general bitchiness, and, if so, what protection we had against such sabotage. Jan must have thought the same thing, because when Hotchkiss was finished, Jan said, “Thank you very much. We’d like a confirming playback, of course.”

Why didn’t I think of that?

Hotchkiss glared demonically, but — half afraid that Jan really was a company spy checking up on her efficiency — she dutifully requested a playback of the message from her TP counterpart out yonder, wrote it down as it came in, and handed it to us for comparison. It checked out with the original down to the last comma.

“Very good,” Jan said. “Thank you so much!”

Outside the TP office I asked her how she had known that stuff about the Public Utilities Act of 2322, and so forth. “Don’t tell me you’re a refugee from the TP network,” I said.

“Oh, no! I don’t have a TP molecule in me, Tom. But I once watched my father get into a similar mess with a network girl, and I remembered how he got out of it.”

“Clever.”

“Why are all these TP people so slicy, though? Especially the females. They seem to be doing you a tremendous favor just to put your calls through. I guess they must really have contempt for us poor zoobs who don’t have their powers, and are forced to use mere words to communicate.”

“They aren’t all slicy,” I said. “My sister isn’t. Lorie’s very patient with everybody. Lorie’s a saint, in fact.”

“If she is, she’s the first TP girl I’ve ever heard of who shows any civility. How come I never draw someone like that when I have to make a call?”

“Lorie doesn’t take calls from the public,” I said. “On account of she’s confined to her hospital room all the time. She’s strictly pickup and relay.”

“It figures. They’ve probably got all the decent human beings working relay, and all the slicy howlers manning the public offices. I’d like to meet your sister some day.”

“Maybe you will.”

“Does she look much like you?”

“Not really. She’s shorter and softer and rounder in some places. Also she doesn’t need to shave.”

“Dodo! I mean, aside from her being a girl!”

“They say we look a lot alike, especially for fraternal twins,” I said. “It’s hard for me to judge that. She’s quieter than I am, and has a different kind of sense of humor. I mean, she’s likely not to say anything for half an hour or so, just listening to the other people in her room, and then she’ll come out with something in a very soft voice, so that you have to strain your ears to hear it, and it’ll be something absolutely devastating, something that manages to be funny and true all at once. She can really fuse a person sometimes, with two or three well-chosen words.”

“You must miss her very much.”

“This is the longest I’ve ever gone without speaking with her. I’ve always tried to share all my experiences with her — whatever I do, wherever I go. But here — this far away—”

“You could call her.”

“Via Smiling Marge?” I shook my head. “I don’t want to contaminate Lorie’s mind by unnecessary contact with that species of microorganism. Besides, it takes mucho stash.”

“Isn’t your father rich?”

“My father is. I’m not. He keeps his thumb in his own pocket.”

“Oh.”

“I’m piling up message cubes for Lorie, telling her the whole story. When I get back to Earth I’ll let her play them back in sequence, two years of letters all at once.”

“So that’s who you’ve been writing to!”

“You’ve noticed?”

“Half the time lately when I’ve gone looking for you, you’ve been off by yourself talking into a message cube,” Jan said.

Interesting. That she would go looking for me.

For strategic purposes I said, “Of course, those cubes haven’t all been for Lorie. I mean, you understand, not that I have any ties back on Earth of a formal kind, but there are a couple of girls who I think are interested in my adventures in the outer galaxy, and—”

“Certainly,” Jan said. “It’s thoughtful of you to keep them in mind when you’re so far away.”

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 playboy-hood. 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.

Billion. Billion. 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.