Fossil

Chapter One Here Jumpers Suffer More From Wind Than Weight

The slope was long and steep, and the lights her husband had installed made it stand out sharply against the scattered illumination of Pitville and the much dimmer background hills of the Solid Ocean. Janice Cedar knew that she should have been frightened. In theory, height should scare anyone except, of course, a Crotonite; in practice, after a Common Year under Habranha’s gravity, she could lean over the edge of a hundred-meter ice ridge without a qualm. She just wasn’t being pulled hard enough downward to affect her emotions. Her husband and the few other Erthumoi on the little world had the same trouble.

It took a lot of the fun out of skiing. Even armor full of diving fluid, which made most amusements either less fun or practically impossible, merely increased her inertia enough to make the wind less challenging.

She was able to push off and start accelerating, if one could really call it that, down the ramp without feeling her heart speed up at all. What little thrill the sport could furnish on this world would come a little later.

Her husband Hugh and their supervisor Ged Harrar stood watching her and waiting for their turns; Janice had wished briefly, before pushing off, that she had the Naxian ability to read emotion. The Assistant Director was a Samian, probably no more objective than the average Erthumoi, and she felt quite mystified why someone with no real body of his own, by her standards, should be interested in an Erthumoi sport. His stated reason might be true, but it had left her unconvinced. Barrar had admitted that the Cedars presumably knew what they were doing when they slid around on narrow boards in search of “fun,” and that this might well be worth doing for morale, but that he couldn’t really feel the point. He insisted that Hugh’s status as the person in charge of safety required that this human amusement be studied in more detail. Someone in the administrative office, Hugh suspected, doubted that Erthumoi, or at least the particular Erthuma named Hugh Rock Cedar, really grasped the concept of risk at all. There were, he thought, reservations in high quarters about the wisdom of using him as Safety Director.

He hadn’t worried at first; like his wife, he was kept by the low gravity from feeling any real fear of falling, and didn’t consider skiing dangerous here. He assumed that Samians would be even less concerned, since most of their planets were high weight and their physiques certainly less prone to injury. The few members of the species on Habranha were mostly researchers, Diplomacy Guild representatives, or, nowadays, individuals from one or another of the Six Races who felt an interest in the hypothesis that the intelligent Habranhans might actually be a remnant of the Seventh Race, known so far only from archaeological data. None of the Samians were settlers; there was no room for settlers.

Hugh’s first sight of Barrar “dressed” for skiing had caused him some other doubts, though. Instead of the six-limbed horizontally arranged sensibly stable walker which he usually employed, the administrator had appeared on something vaguely resembling a headless human skeleton made of some highly resistant — Hugh hoped — black and apparently resilient composition. The reddish-brown limbless, eyeless, and generally featureless slab of leathery-looking meat which was the Samian himself rode inside the rib cage, the fine wires which connected it with the various effectors and sensors of the “body” just barely visible from two meters away. Ordinary skis were mounted on framework feet which had been designed to fit them.

Even Janice, not usually a worrier, had tactfully suggested on their way to the jump area that familiarizing himself with a new mechanical body and a new method of locomotion at the same time might not be a fair trial of either, but Barrar had assured her there would be no problem. New bodies were an everyday affair to him. He had, indeed, managed to ski with no obvious problems from the residence area along the snowy, and often icy, streets of Pitville and even to herringbone up the slope to the top of the jumping ramp. He had still been standing completely at ease when she started her run. Now, as she approached its lowest part, she had to focus all her attention on her own technique and forget the Samian. Her husband would have to provide any help his boss might need.

The jump ramp itself was of packed snow, some of it natural and some the pulverized ice excavated from the two shafts which gave Pitville its name. They were only about a hundred and fifty kilometers from sunlight, so the general temperature, while extremely variable like all of Habranha’s weather, was usually high enough to let a reasonably strong Erthuma make snowballs out of water ice powder by squeezing. The ramp was therefore fairly hard and even moderately slippery, though its skiing surface was constantly changing as the natural precipitation which tried to cover it competed with the equally variable winds which strove to sweep it clear.

The falloff at either side was stabilized by native vegetation, carefully selected for deep roots and lack of explosive quality. There were two basically different types of life on Habranha; one had a biochemistry enough like that of the Erthumoi to use ATP as its “battery.” The other and more common employed azide ion for the same general purposes, so that much of the world’s vegetation and some of its animal life was either explosive or electrically hazardous or both. The winged natives belonged to the first category, lending strength to the mounting belief among the Six Races that they had not actually evolved on Habranha.

At the lowest point of the run, where the curve flung skiers upward again, the surface was hardest to predict or even to analyze by sight. Hugh had had the area lighted as well as possible, but no lighting would let human eyes determine how well the deposit was packed at any given moment. This was where the sport grew interesting…

Janice kept her feet. She was traveling last enough now to guarantee serious damage to her armor if she hit anything solid, explosive or not, and she was crouched to give the wind as little handle as possible.

For a brief moment she felt almost normal weight as she reached the bottom arc and caromed upward. Then she was off the snow beyond the first lighted area, with a fifty-meter gulf below her, and orbiting more or less toward a second and larger hill which started two hundred meters away. The target area was also well lighted, but for these few seconds she herself must be nearly invisible to Hugh. She had no idea of how, or how well, the Samian could perceive her.

She was busy with her poles, which looked more like broad-bladed oars; a skier’s problem of staying upright either on or off the ground, in Habranha’s feeble gravity and dense air, was much worse than on any Erthumoi-normal world. Strong wrists meant quite as much as good ankles in this kind of “jumping.” She made a technically poor but not catastrophic landing on her right ski, which she had managed to keep aligned with her direction of flight, brought the other down, slowed aerodynamically for a few seconds with her poles held across her body, and finally felt sure enough of her traction to bring herself to a stop in normal ski fashion. “All right. Who’s next?”

She didn’t ask vocally. Her armor and body cavities were filled with diving fluid, since her job of-ten took her to the bottom of the Pits. Vocal cords evolved for gas don’t work in liquid, and her armor carried a code transmitter whose output, while far more sophisticated than the short-and-long combinations of the original Erthumoi telegraph, was still much slower and clumsier than ordinary speech. It was loud enough to be heard for several hundred meters if the wind were not too strong.

“I’m coming. Be ready to pick up the pieces!” This was vocal language, through Barrar’s speaker and the woman’s translator, though originating in a device fully is artificial as Janice’s coder. The Samian had no more voice than he had arms, legs, or eyes; how his species had come to evolve intelligence was a favorite challenge to science from the mystics who still rejected evolution as well as among the biologists themselves.

Husband and wife watched tensely as the plastic-skeleton poled itself to the head of the ramp and paused for a moment while its driver presumably made a final evaluation of his problems. Both Erthumoi had time to wonder whether his feelings were normal enough, by their standards, for their own to qualify as sympathy. Then Barrar thrust himself forward and downward.

The mechanical body’s acceleration was rather greater than the woman’s; the framework must have set up more turbulence in the dense air but certainly had less total drag than her armored figure. Steering in the swirling air currents with the oarlike poles could have been a straightforward matter of logic, hut for a living nervous system reason takes significantly longer than reflexes. Janice and her husband had the reflexes — had acquired them, in fact, under some five times Habranha’s gravity; Ged Barrar did not.

The ramp was five meters wide, which was ordinarily plenty even in fairly high winds. By the time he was fifty meters down its slope, however, the Samian’s overcorrected turns were bringing him almost to the edge, first on one side and then on the other. Janice could do nothing from the low end of the run; Hugh was tempted to launch himself after the swerving figure in spite of the obvious fact that there was no way he could catch it in time to keep the plastic framework out of the bushes. Fortunately, he didn’t have to.

“Relax, Hugh.” The voice was not recognizable through the translation system, but the tone was that used by the equipment to identify male native Habras. Simultaneously three figures resembling dragonflies with three pairs each of, to Erthumoi, unbelievably short wings swooped into the lighted area above the ramp, diving toward the skier. They were flying almost in line, twenty-five or thirty meters apart.

The first missed; reflexes able to deal easily with Habranha’s chaotic air turbulence were defeated by Barrar’s inadequate attempts to steer himself.

“Ged! Just go straight! They’ll pick you up!” Hugh keyed out before realizing how silly he was being. If the Samian had been able to go straight, there would have been no problem. It was too bad Janice had heard — but she’d never remind him unless he asked for it.

The next native had an additional second or two to allow for the extra variables, and neatly inserted four sets of handling appendages among the upper bars of Ged Barrar’s pseudobody. This was light, far lighter than an armored Erthuma, and, with no obvious effort, the Habra lifted it clear of the ramp and around to the right of its upcurved end. Seconds later he set his burden down beside Janice, swooped gracefully up and around, and landed in front of them with his fellows.

“I’m coming,” keyed Hugh. “I can’t guarantee just where I’ll land; you fellows should be ready for a quick lift.”

“We know, Boss,” came the translated reply. “We’ve seen you often enough. Come on down. We’re ready.”

Hugh came. By some combination of luck and personal skill he held a relatively straight course both on the slopes and in the air, and landed on both skis at once, fifty meters or so to one side of, and seventy short of, the waiting group. He slid to a halt beside them, spraying snow.

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to bury anyone. Many thanks for the help…” he hesitated briefly as he glanced at body patterns…”Ted. Did you just happen by, or were you on duty?” He added for Barrar’s information, “Ted’s one of my safety people.”

“Ob duty,” replied the Habra. “We always have one flyer — one of us or a Crotonite — here when someone’s using the jump. Today it seemed wise to have more.”

“Not the most tactful of remarks, if my presence is the reason you intimate,” interjected Barrar.

“The Crotonites keep telling us sad stories of what happens when crawlers try to imitate flyers. We recognize their tendency to make a good story better, especially at the expense of nonflyers, but we also know how long it takes to develop really good reflexes for flight or — is orbiting the appropriate word here? Children are children for a long time.” The Samian shifted slightly, and Hugh quieted him with a gesture; such a phrase, he knew, carried no belittling implication to the natives. “We hadn’t seen any of your people trying this before, Administrator, and felt that our responsibility involved safety more than tact.”

“Quite right,” keyed Hugh. “Thanks again.”

“Yes.” Barrar caught on quickly; he himself had a tact-demanding job. “I hadn’t realized what my efforts would do to the air as well as to my own motion. I should have been more prepared for feedback. Your help was very much in order, Ted. I must go back and try again immediately; I should have learned something from this set of mistakes. Will your people stand by again?”

“Of course. As long as you care to keep practicing.”

“I’ll have time for only one, or at most two, more tries before work calls. I believe the Cedars can stay longer, but they probably don’t need you so badly.”

“We cover while anyone is using the slope,” the native replied. “Even a minor fall can damage armor, and the temperature is low even away from the Pits.”

“You don’t seem to need protection from the cold,” Hugh keyed. “It’s a good thirty Kelvins lower here than at Pwanpwan. Far below water-freeze. I had the idea you were comfortable at two seventy or eighty.”

“That’s about right,” Ted agreed. The Samian was making his way back to the starting point of the jump, but none of the natives had bothered to follow him yet. “It’s not very obvious, but do we have protection. It seems to be — what do the Naxians call him? — the ‘Muscle’ who doesn’t need it. This is poor light even for us, so you’ll have to look closely to see ours.”

At the implied invitation, the Erthumoi approached the nearest of the Habras. Like the other two, he was wearing male ornaments, not very noticeable even in good light at more than a few meters; but over this, held a few millimeters away from the body plates by what looked like little wads of sponge a few centimeters apart, was an extremely thin, transparent film. The light of Fafnir, as Erthumoi called the small companion to Habranha’s own sun, was not bright enough to reveal color; the supporting pads looked dark gray and the body plates rather lighter, but both Erthumoi knew that the latter were patterned randomly in shades of red.

The covering did not seem to include the three stubby pairs of wings, more reminiscent of fins to Erthumoi, currently folded back against their owners’ bodies.

Hugh and Janice judged that the film was simply insulation. Even on Habranha, a flying creature of roughly human mass would need an active metabolism and should generate plenty of its own body heat. There was certainly no sign of an artificial heater that either could see, though admittedly the light was poor.

“I’m coming!” Barrar’s voice interrupted the examination. The Habras took to the air at once, without apology. The Samian, either sensibly or tactfully, waited until he saw them swoop through the lighted region shortly below the starting point before he pushed off once more. This time no help was needed until he was off the end of the jump; he did what to Hugh, at least, was a surprisingly good job of holding his direction down the slope. Experience did seem to have helped.

The third dimension was another matter, however. No one afterward tried to judge how much of the Samian’s subsequent contortions should be attributed to random Habranha wind and how much to Barrar’s own unskilled efforts at control. A being may know perfectly well what feedback is, and even such physical laws as Conservation of Angular Momentum, but reasoning takes time; flying and jumping take reflexes. He was upside down before reaching the peak of his trajectory. His poles waved frantically; one was knocked from his grip as it struck the wing of the first native to attempt a rescue pass.

He was out of the lighted region now, and neither of the Erthumoi could really see what was going on. They might have made some gasp or other anxiety-driven sound, but with no voices could only watch, worry, and feel the discomfort as diving liquid was driven slowly through their windpipes by the reflexes which would normally have made them cry out. Barrar, as far as they could tell, was equally silent; whatever panic reflexes he might have been indulging did not involve his artificial voice. The translators should have been crackling with orders or signals among the natives, Hugh thought briefly, but even the radio spectrum seemed to be silent. The reflexes of the flyers were all aimed at flying, not communicating.

A second Habra, barely missing the one whose wing had knocked Barrar’s pole away, secured a grip on the Samian’s skeletal leg — the skier was still upside down — and for the moment seemed to end the danger since the burden was so light. The limb, however, had not been designed with enough foresight, and proved unable under tension to support the weight of the rest of the structure even in Habranha’s gravity. It came away at what the Erthumoi considered the knee, and Barrar was falling again with less control than ever, while Ted found himself holding a left shin, foot, and ski. The translators started buzzing and crackling, but emitted no comprehensible words; several of the Habras were speaking at once. This lasted only a few seconds before silence, except for the endless variable fluting of the wind, returned.

Ted swung far to one side and tossed leg and ski clear, while one of his companions made another attempt to intercept the falling Samian. The task proved easier this time; Barrar had stopped trying to do anything for himself, and the aerodynamic problems were accordingly less complex. The native secured a grip on the skeleton’s shoulders while he himself was nearly inverted, and without apparent difficulty brought the rotation of the Habra-Samian system to a halt with the remaining leg and ski underneath. Half a minute later Barrar was lowered beside the Erthumoi, and Ted was asking rather diffidently whether there would have been serious damage if they had let him fall head downward.

The Samian seemed amused.

“This walker shouldn’t have been hurt. I certainly wouldn’t have been, since there isn’t any head on this machine.”

“But your own body is fairly close to the top. If that had collapsed at the impact, wouldn’t you have been injured or killed?”

“In theory, the frame should be able to protect me. I designed it to. Of course, I also designed these legs — it’s hard to say just what might have happened. I am most grateful to you that I did not learn — what is that cynical Erthumoi term? — ’the hard way.’ I suppose my dignity would have taken some damage, at least. It probably should anyway, but as long as no Crotonites are on hand I can stand that.”

The Habras seemed somewhat surprised.

“Why should it be any worse for Crotonites to see you? I’ve met some who react very badly to ridicule, even from their own kind and especially from what they call slugs or crawlers, but I don’t see why being laughed at hv a Crotonite is any worse than by anyone else.”

“It’s not completely sensible, I admit. I’m not an administrator by choice or taste, and maybe I’m too self-conscious. This is just a task until I can write something that will earn me scholarly status; in the meantime, I worry whenever I do something silly. Crotonites are very good at pointing out the silly doings of us crawlers.”

“What’s wrong with administration?” asked Hugh. “It’s not my regular field, but I’m in it myself at the moment — organizing plans and people so as to minimize personal risks and take care of injuries when they do occur.”

“But that’s a sideline with you. You’re basically an explorer and observer — a researcher. I can’t do that because I didn’t start in time to learn enough, but I can still get into analysis and theoretical work. This telling whom what to do and when is trivial. Administrators are…” the translator emitted the no-equivalent-symbol sound, leaving Hugh and his wife uncertain just what the speaker thought of administration, though the context had provided some clue.

“It involves everyone here and everything we’re doing,” Hugh pointed out firmly though not quite indignantly. “No one at Pitville, not even the Habras, is in a normal environment; everyone outdoors has to have some sort of protection, whether working or…”

“True. But Spreadsheet-Thinker and I find questions of competence much less confusing than ones of motivation, even among members of her species and mine; and it seems to be what people want to do rather than what they do best that we have to consider most deeply. Neither of us understands that. A nice scientific paper would be a relief, for me at least.”

“You have Naxians in your office.”

“Knowing that someone is happy or unhappy about some part of what’s going on doesn’t by itself tell us what part. You use Naxians on general safety watch, I know, and still need to get more details when they report trouble. If that weren’t true you’d use only Naxians.”

“If I could get that many — and didn’t need flyers, too. But you’re right, in a way. What’s your main trouble? Or would you rather not say?”

“Personalities. Spreadsheet-Thinker has earned her name, and can deal better with such complexities, but I’m more of a scholar — a scientist, even — at heart, if that figure of speech means what I think it does. It’s so nice to be able to deal with variables one at a time. That’s — I’ll admit it to you, friend, but would rather you didn’t tell any Crotonites — why I was trying this ‘ski’ activity just now. I must admit i was cheating. I have automatic controls in this body; our nervous impulses and reactions are far too slow for this sort of thing, even in this gravity. After the first failure I was able to reset my autodriver to Handle the situation on the slope, but I would have had to find an excuse for not making the second run if you and your friends had not been here, Ted.”

“What if you had made it to the jump-off point and they hadn’t been here?” asked Janice.

“I prefer not to think about that.”

“You realize now that engineering design, as well as administration, involves considering many factors it once, I hope,” Hugh keyed. He knew the remark was less than tactful, but could see no way of squaring silence on the subject with his safety officer’s conscience.

“I do indeed.”

The Erthumoi smiled at each other, a gesture made meaningful by the transparent face shields of their armor.

“I hope, when your chance comes, you don’t find scientific reality too much of a shock, too.” Janice keyed, with some relief; had she been speaking, tact would have driven her to some effort to keep the laughter out of her voice.

“But I’ll just need to center on something that needs to be proved, like this question of whether the Habras really originated on Habranha. Just concentrating on that one thing! I hope that’s not a question you feel strongly about personally, Ted; I wouldn’t want to make you uncomfortable. I’ve met people who consider origins a solved problem and for some reason resent the suggestion of alternative solutions.”

“I think you miss the main point of science,” Hugh cut in.

“But isn’t science trying to prove something?” asked Ted. Janice wondered if he were evading the administrator’s implied question; this didn’t occur to her husband. If it did to the Samian, he let the point lie.

“Ideally, no, though things are seldom ideal,” answered Barrar, rather to the Erthumoi’s surprise. “If you have a preference, something you really want to prove, there’s a tendency to notice and remember the data supporting that preference — I’ve worked with every one of the Six Races, and that’s true of all of us. If it doesn’t apply to your own kind, Ted, you have the potential of becoming the most objective scientists in the Galaxy.”

Not even the Erthumoi had the open-mindedness or the courtesy to add, “if you aren’t already,” to the Samian’s statement.

“What do you prefer?” asked another of the Habras.

“I’m lucky. Right now I simply want a nice, definite, unambiguous answer to the Pit project, so my administrative work here will count as successful.” Hugh wondered fleetingly if Barrar might not be happier in the long run if he kept his illusions and hopes by remaining an administrator, but said nothing as the Samian went on. “Even that has its risks; if no firm answer is possible from the data we find, I could catch myself giving extra weight to some items to make their meaning more definite than it should be. That’s why I’m trying to keep track of all the other work of this sort being done on Habranha.”

“Didn’t know there was any,” remarked Hugh.

“Oh, yes. I’ll summarize it for you if we both ever have time.

“Look, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be lecturing. You’ve asked, I’ve answered. The live problem is the Spreadsheet-Thinker’s and mine and our staff’s. I must get back to work. I — well…”

“One of us will carry you,” Ted hastily put in. “I assume you have other bodies at the quarters.”

“Yes, of course. This one was merely improvised to let me try out this Erthumoi amusement for official and, er, other reasons. I fear I have not yet learned all I should about it. I will repair the structure and try again. I think I can travel on the three remaining appendages, if one of you will have the kindness to bring the lost one back to the Residence. I will want to examine it to learn why it proved detective. Go on skiing, Hugh and Janice, and see if you can invent some reasonably risky game for the Habras, too. It does take the mind off one’s regular troubles, I find. You shouldn’t have to be working to protect Erthumoi skeletons, even artificial ones like this, all the time, Ted. How about something like Cephallonian netball — in the liquid air of the Pits?” Barrar began to hobble away, Erthumoi and Habras watching silently. Hugh thought he could see why no major tripodal life-form was known.

The Samian was almost out of sight when one of the natives spoke.

“There are some bad plants along his way. I’d better watch.”

“All right, Walt,” agreed Hugh. “He may want help in his job, but we still have ours. Jan, we have time for another couple of jumps. Ted and Jimbo, are both staying, or is one enough?”

“Both. One might have to go for additional help while the first patches armor. I don’t think it’s very likely; you’re both pretty good…”

“It’s likelier now. I never knew — we never knew you were on watch here. Now we’re more apt to get careless or take chances.”

“Shouldn’t we have told you? Or should we have told you at the beginning? We thought you might have resented it. The Crotonites said you would.”

‘Technically, you should have, since I’m your boss. Actually, I like your taking responsibility yourselves. I suppose that makes me a bad administrator, too. The only one really likely to be bothered is Spreadsheet-Thinker. She’d probably resent not knowing what’s going on at any level of the operation. Let’s stop talking for a while; my hand’s getting cramped. C’mon, Jan. You first.”

Actually, the jumps were delayed for a few minutes by a passing snow squall, and the couple was able to take only one more each. There was further talk with the Habras while they waited, Janice this time doing most of the code work. By common consent Barrar’s problems were avoided; most of the debate was about finding better plants to stabilize the partly artificial hill on which the ski jump had been built. None of the natives was a botanist, but all Habras Hugh and Janice had met so far were imaginative and widely informed. This, of course, could have been observational selection, considering the sort of work the Erthumoi were doing on the little world; both were too experienced to assume that all members of any species were alike enough to be predictable.

All examined the slopes and agreed that something with still longer and stronger roots would help if it could be found. The winds, while chaotic in detail even here on the dark side, had a general trend toward the sunward hemisphere near the ground. The snow hills behaved enough like sand dunes to travel slowly in the same general direction. Temperature was sometimes so low that even considerable pressure failed to weld water-ice crystals together, though sometimes the welding did occur and dunes graduated to the status of hills. The fact that a rink was very hard to keep free of drifts was only one reason why skiing was more practical than skating on Habranha’s Solid Ocean. Water is inherently a most peculiar substance; Janice and her husband had always known this after a fashion, but Habranha had really driven the fact home to them.

The natives mentioned that many plants could be identified by smell as well as appearance. The Erthumoi would have liked to check this, if their armor had not been full of diving fluid; a brief exposure to the local atmosphere was harmless, as they had long ago found. Its total surface pressure was nearly four times their normal, but it was relatively chemically safe. The oxygen partial pressure was only about a third of a bar, and the ammonia and hydrogen cyanide were significant only in Habranha’s warmer regions where the gases were less soluble in water. They were already living at local pressure, since flexible environment armor was fairly comfortable and actually resisting the pressure to be expected when the Pit project was farther along would be impractical. Their use of diving fluid had been a concession to this fact from the beginning.

“I guess we’ll go in now, Ted,” keyed Janice ash>er husband came to a halt beside her. “Were you on duty just because of us, or do you expect others on the slope?”

“If there are others, they’ll almost certainly be Erthumoi. One of us will be enough until someone dually arrives. It’s Jimbo’s turn to stay, and he’ll all us if we’re needed. Walt and I will take a swing over the Pits.”

“But you can’t do anything there. Those suits won’t do any good at liquid air temperatures, will hey?”

“No, but we can get a look — pardon the word, I’m talking about our electric field sense — at what’s happening. I do like to know when something’s been around.”

“Did that wing of three days ago bother you?” keyed Janice. “We have no idea how you feel about your dead, and have been rather afraid to ask. It’s a touchy subject with many people.”

“If the owner can be identified, we’ll want to take steps. How far down was it? Have you learned its age? What really puzzled most of us was how it got separated. The idea of losing a wing is-is hard to express in words, and all the ones I can think of are negative.”

“Couldn’t a really violent storm have done it?” asked Hugh.

“I’ve never experienced or imagined one that could, but I suppose that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. I admit I don’t like to think about that, either, though I’ve faced my share of storms. How about the age?”

“It was four hundred eighty-one meters below the surface. The ice hasn’t been kind enough to form definite layers, so we’ve had to use other methods of dating. The carbon 14 limit on this planet is about a hundred and sixty thousand Common Years — longer than on most worlds, because you have no magnetic field to speak of and Fafnir flares fairly often, so you have a higher C 14 percentage than usual — and all I can say is the wing is older than that.”

“In our years, that’s…”

Both Erthumoi engaged in hasty mental arithmetic. Hugh keyed first. “A little over two and half million minimum.”

“Then we needn’t worry about notifying relatives,” the Habra said with no obvious trace of humor. “But I’d have guessed that such an age would have brought the fossil deeper into the ice.”

“So would I,” admitted Janice, “but remember the ice is moving too, probably in as complex patterns as your atmosphere and ocean. Even under this gravity, five hundred kilometers’ water depth gives you something like ten thousand atmospheres, which is plenty for most of the water-ice phase changes even without complications from radioactive heating from underneath. Things happen in solids, too, just a lot slower; and at this point I wouldn’t dare swear it was all solid. That’s something I’d really like to know in detail. It’s the most promising way I can think of for actually dating whatever we find buried here. Nice, unambiguous, straightforward — which is the last thing they’ll be — time-and-distance glacial flow problems.”

“It must be fun to go into the Pits and find things yourself,” Ted remarked thoughtfully. “I wonder when we’ll manage to modify one of our regular diving suits. The pressure is no problem, of course. We have diving fluid, too. Temperature, though— we’re trying to learn more about your insulating materials. You and the other aliens who work here have been telling our chemists about the stuff you use. It should be good enough; as nearly as I can see, you need even more protection from cold than we do.”

“That’s no problem,” Janice keyed, “but you’ll have to redesign your armor to protect your wings, too. I hope you manage it soon. It will be good to have you down there; your electrical senses might be very helpful. Looking for microfossils by sending laser beams from one hole in the ice to another works all right, but you might be a lot faster.”

“But you find larger fossils, too. The wings I was asking about haven’t been the only remains.”

“No. The ice is full of plant roots. We can some-limes trace them for a dozen meters or more. It looks as though a particular plant anchors itself and grows, maybe for years, maybe for centuries, until something drastic kills it — maybe it gets buried by an advancing dune, or something like that. While it lives, it affects the landscape around it, holding snow in place instead of letting it blow away— forget about decent stratigraphy!”

“I don’t know that last word,” Ted admitted, “but at least some plants let go of their roots and allow themselves to be blown away when dunes threaten to cover them. I couldn’t tell you which kinds, off jaw.”

“We’ll have to find out from someone who does,” replied Janice. “Somehow I’m going to get a decent dating scale for this world. But I’m tired, Hugh.

Let’s go…”

They went, but not to their quarters to rest. A modulated horn blast which drowned out the roar of an approaching squall took care of that.