Chindi

“Airlock,” suggested Hutch. There was a second door a few meters away.

Identical patterns of ironwork extended out of the walls on either side. Handrails of some sort. Except there were several of them, and they seemed decorative. But nobody decorates airlocks.

Another odd thing: There were no benches.

Hutch went back to work and cut out a larger section. When she’d finished, George led the way into the airlock.

They repeated the procedure on the i

There was more ironwork. Some was bolted to the floor, some attached to the walls. It reminded her of the monkey bars one occasionally finds in schoolyards and parks.

The walls and overhead were gray and water-stained. They appeared to be constructed of a fibrous plastic. The floor was stone, and had apparently been cut out of the surrounding rock.

Two walls were dedicated to operational stations, containing units that looked like computers. Everything was under a thick layer of dust. When she wiped it away she saw keyboards and the now-familiar spidery characters. There were numerous dials, push buttons, gauges, screens. Even a headset. A small headset, but it seemed unlikely it could be anything else. And there were other devices whose purposes she could not guess. Whatever the occupants might have looked like, she decided, they were smaller than humans. Despite the high tables.

But they possessed fingers. And ears.

Pete had found a radio. Here was a speaker and there a cha

Hutch tried to imagine the room when it had been filled with activity. What sort of creatures had been there? How had they sounded when they gave landing instructions over the circuit? Sets of monkey bars stood in front of each station.

She saw what was probably a radar unit. The screen was broken, and, of course, she couldn’t read the language. But she thought she could make out the power switch, the sca

There had been no benches in the airlock; there were no chairs here.

“Monkeys?” suggested Tor.

“Serpents,” said Alyx, flashing her light into the room’s dark corners. She sounded a bit u

Hutch opened a private cha

“Loud and clear, Hutch.”

“Nothing stirring up there?”

“Negative. Everything is quiet.”

Hutch had clipped an imager to her vest and was relaying everything up to the ship to provide a visual record. To her left, Herman scooped up something from one of the computer positions and slipped it inside his vest.

She switched to a private cha

He turned in her direction. “Who cares?” he asked, using the same cha

“Herman,” she said quietly, “I’d be grateful if you put it back. This stuff is priceless.”

He made a pained face. “Hutch,” he said, “what’s the difference?”

She held his eyes.

He sighed, hesitated, and returned it.

“It sets the wrong precedent,” she said. And then, to ease the tension, “What was it?”

He directed his lamp toward the object. It was a ceramic figurine. A flower.

It looked like a lily.

Together they examined it, commented on its workmanship, which was at best pedestrian. But that of course was irrelevant.

Opposite the airlock, a passageway opened into the interior. Pete entered it and disappeared.

The man was either foolish or fearless. Assuming there was a difference. She went after him and brought him back. “It’s dangerous to wander off,” she said.

“I wasn’t wandering. I wanted to get a look at what was back there.”

It was like herding a group of schoolchildren.

SHE HAD WATCHED archeologists at work in similar sites before, and she was reluctant to allow her group of tourists to blunder about. The problem with amateurs, she’d once heard Richard Wald say, is that they don’t know they’re amateurs. So even if they don’t resort to outright theft, they move things around. They break things. They muddy the water, and they make it that much more difficult for those who follow to piece together what was really going on at the site.

She knew eventually she’d be criticized for letting George and his team wander loose there. You of all people, Hutchins…She could hear it now.

“Try not to handle this stuff too much,” she cautioned. “Look, but don’t touch.”

“Beautiful women,” said Nick, “have been telling me that my whole life.”

“I don’t wonder,” said Alyx.

In the banter, Hutch detected a sense of pride. They’d come extraordinarily far. They’d persisted in a line of inquiry that others had dismissed. And now they’d actually found something. Not the living, intelligent aliens they’d hoped for. But nonetheless they’d unearthed a major discovery. And they deserved at least the privilege of getting a close look, of feeling what it’s like to be first into a site that was once a center of ET activity.

Hutch took scrapings from shelves and walls and instruments, packing it all into sample bags, which she carefully labeled according to subject and location.

There were two other chambers in the dome, and both contained variations of the ironwork. In addition, one of the spaces provided plumbing. A basin and a faucet.

“Washroom,” said Herman.

Alyx looked puzzled. “Where’s the toilet?”

“Maybe they don’t produce waste,” said Nick.

Pete laughed. “Nonsense,” he said. “All living systems produce waste.”

“I don’t think plants do,” said George.

Tor thought about it for a moment. “Oxygen,” he said.

George shook his head. “You know what I mean.”

“I believe,” said Nick, glancing across the room, “that’s the answer to Alyx’s question.” He was looking at a jar-shaped metal receptacle lying on the floor. It had apparently broken free of its housing, which was mounted on the wall at about eye level. They inspected the housing and found a duct behind it.

“That seems like an odd way to do it,” said Alyx. “You’d have to get halfway up the wall.”

“I guess,” said Hutch, “it settles the question of whether they were bipeds.”

They laughed, and Tor commented he was begi

BEYOND THE WASHROOM, they faced a choice between tu

Nobody argued, and George led them off to the right. Their footsteps had a whispery quality in the thin air. They passed closed doors and emerged eventually into a large single chamber.

Dim light leaked through the overhead. That would be the glow from Safe Harbor. They filed out onto a concrete apron that circled a section of bare earth.

“Greenhouse,” said Pete. A few stalks protruded out of the frozen ground.

They moved on into another dome and saw cages.

The chamber was crowded with them, divided into a range of sizes, none bigger than one would need to contain a beagle. They were stacked on shelves and mounted on tables and sometimes built into the walls. There were maybe a hundred of them.

“Bones over here,” said Alyx, in a small voice. She was looking down at one of the enclosures.

They were gray, desiccated, not very big, and there were still scraps of what might once have been flesh hanging on them. Hutch got detailed pictures.

George found more. His expression suggested he was being subjected to improprieties and bad taste.