Across A Billion Years

I’ll know soon. It’s morning, now. Pale, straggly light is coming over the horizon. I was the first one up in our dorm; but when I came outside I found Dr. Horkkk doing some kind of weird calisthenics, and Pilazinool sitting on the ground stripped down to a torso and one arm, polishing his other limbs, while 408b was meditating. Those aliens don’t sleep much.

An hour from now we’ll tackle the site. More news later.

THREE

August 23, 1 think, 2375

Higby V

We’ve been at it a week. No luck. I almost think we’ve been hoaxed.

The site is a hillside outcropping exposed by recent erosion, as I think I may have said already. The top forty meters of countryside here did not exist when the High Ones had their camp on Higby V; all of this gritty, sandy yellowish soil piled up hundreds of millions of years after their time, deposited by wind and flood in the long-ago days when this planet still had weather. Then after we got here and reintroduced weather, the topsoil started to erode, permitting the discovery last year of characteristic High Ones artifacts. Fine.

Then Dr. Schein and a couple of grad students from Marsport came here last year to do the preliminary survey. They went into action with neutrino magnetometers and sonar probes and density rods, and calculated that the zone of High Ones occupation constituted a large lenticular cone ru

I don’t understand what’s wrong.

What we have to do, basically, is very gently lift off the top of the hillside so we’ll have access to what was the surface of the ground a billion years ago. Then we gently work our way down, layer by layer, to the High Ones strata. Then we gently take everything out, one scrap at a time, recording relative positions in a dozen different ways. If we’re gentle enough we may learn something about the High Ones here. If we aren’t gentle, our names will go down in the black book of archaeology alongside the spinless sposhers who took that Martian temple apart to see what was underneath it, and couldn’t get it back together again. Or the zoobies who found the key to Plorvian hieroglyphics and dropped it overboard in a methane ocean. Or the feeby quonker who stepped on the Dsmaalian Urn. The first rule in archaeology is: Be careful with the evidence. It isn’t replaceable.

No, that’s the second rule. The first one is: Find your evidence.

We commenced by sca

There weren’t any other irrelevant deposits in the upper part of the hill. Luckily. The next stage was to lift most of the remaining overburden. ("Overburden” is one of those zooby archaeological terms of which you’re always cranking, Lorie. It means the burden of soil or gravel or rock or whatever that’s on top of what you want to excavate. I know it sounds dumb, but what the zog, it’s part of the professional jargon.)

To clear overburden quickest, you use a hydraulic lift. This is nothing more than a highly directional sort of hose-and-pump deal, which you snake into your hillside at just the right angle. Turn the water on and zit! The overburden is sliced off and sloshed away. Dr. Schein and Leroy Chang spent half a day computing velocities and lift angles; then we ran the pipes into the hill, hitched up the compressors, and in five minutes succeeded in cutting off the top twenty meters or so of the hill. In theory we now had a clear shot at our site.

In theory.

In practice, not the case. Our modern gadgets deceive us into thinking archaeology is easy, sometimes. But gadgets may err, and in many ways we are not too far removed from the i

Our trouble seems to be that Dr. Schein’s survey of last year was off by a bit, and that the degree of error is variable, which is to say he was wronger in some places than in others. This is forgivable: an underground survey is a tricky thing even when you have neutrino magnetometers and sonar probes and density rods. Still, it’s a pain. We know that a terrific cache of High Ones things is right in front of us. (At least, we think we know it.) But we haven’t found it yet.

Mirrik labors heroically to clear the remaining overburden. This has to be done manually, because we’re too close to the supposed upper strata of High Ones occupation to dare use anything as violent as the hydraulic lift. Kelly hovers just back of Mirrik’s huge left shoulder, taking core samplings now and then. The rest of us haul dirt, fidget, speculate, play chess, and crank a good deal.

The weather doesn’t help. At least our work is conducted under the weather shield, but that protects only the site and those actually examining it. In order to get from shack to site we have to cross a hundred meters of open ground, with one chance out of four that it will be raining, three chances out of four that a strong wind will be blowing, and five chances out of four that the air will be bone-chillingly cold. When it rains, it doesn’t drizzle. The wind unfailingly carries tons of sand and grit. And the cold is the sort of cold that doesn’t just bother you, it persecutes you. Some of us don’t mind it, like Pilazinool, although he’s having tremendous trouble with sand in his joints. Dr. Horkkk comes from a cold planet — you can even have cold planets around a blazing star like Rigel, if you’re far enough out — and he rather enjoys a brisk breeze. Mirrik doesn’t mind because his hide is so thick. The rest of us are a little unhappy.

The landscape is no source of cheer. Some trees and shrubs, chosen for their ability to hold down topsoil, not for their beauty. Low hills. Craters. Puddles.

Dad would be sniggering up his sleeve if he knew the dark thoughts I’ve thought all week. “Serve the slicy idiot right!” he’d say. “Let him marinate in his archaeology! Let him ossify in it!”

You were lucky, Lorie. You missed the really nasty family conferences dealing with my choice of a profession. Dad hates to stir a fuss when we’re visiting you. Even so, you got a good dose of the quarreling, but it wasn’t a snip of what went on at home.

I have to say I was awfully disappointed in Dad when he started all that cranking about my being an archaeologist.

“Get a real job!” he kept yelling. “Be an ultradrive pilot, if you want to see the galaxy! You know what kind of stash they make? The pension rights? They get sore thumbs from all the spending they do. Or interplanetary law, now, there’s a profession! Alien torts and malfeasances! Hypothecation of assets on nonverbal worlds! Infinite possibilities, Tom, infinite! Why, I knew a lawyer on Capella XII, he did nothing but color-change suits and metamorphoses, and he had a ten-year backlog with six clerks!”