Across a Billion Years (13 page)

Mirrik, who as I think I told you is a big one on religion, became greatly excited when he found out Ben-Dov was an Israeli. “Tell me about the ethical constructs of Judaism,” the huge Dinamonian bellowed eagerly. “I myself am Paradoxian, but I have studied many of the creeds of Earth, and never before have I encountered an actual Jew. The teachings of Moses concerning—”

“I’m sorry,” said Nachman Ben-Dov mildly. “I’m not Jewish.”

“But Israel—am I wrong, is this not the Jewish nation of Earth?”

“There are many Jews in Israel,” said Ben-Dov. “I am, however, of the Authentic Buddhist faith. Perhaps you know of my father, the leader of the Israeli Buddhist community: Mordecai Ben-Dov?”

Mirrik hadn’t; but he already knew a good deal about Authentic Buddhism, and his tusks drooped in disappointment as his opportunity to find out the inside data on the Laws of Moses faded. That’s the trouble with the spread of global communications: tribal structures break down. You get Authentic Buddhists in Israel, and Mormons in Tibet, and Revised Methodist Baptists in the Congo, and such. I must admit that Ben-Dov’s Buddhism startled me, though.

Jewish or not, he was a fine TP operator. He and Marge between them waded beautifully through the data sheets. At the end of his week of rest, Ron Santangelo returned to the job, now on a work-sharing basis with the other two, and the skull-to-skull transmission of our first photo was completed. Back from Luna City came an acknowledgment; they had decoded the transmission and were going to work on trying to locate the zone of space shown.

I tried to do something a little shady about this time.

I called Ben-Dov aside after he had finished his stint for the day and said, “In your data-boosting, have you had occasion to link minds with an Earthside relay girl named Lorie Rice?”

“No,” he said. “We haven’t relayed anything through Earth.”

“Do you know her? She’s my sister.”

He thought a bit. “I don’t think so. You know, space is very large, and there are so many members of the communications net—”

“Well, you
could
relay something through her, couldn’t you? By way of giving the other relay people a rest. And maybe if you did, you could slip in an extra thought or two, just to tell her that Tom says hello, that he’s doing fine and misses her a lot—”

The way Nachman Ben-Dov looked at me, you’d think I’d just suggested that Israel give Egypt, Syria, and Iraq back to the Arabs.

“Wholly impossible. The basic rule of the TP service:
no free riders.
Such a thing would violate my oath. It might also get me into serious trouble. There are supervisory monitors, you know.”

I dropped the scheme fast. I can’t crank about Ben-Dov’s refusal; he was right and I was wrong. But it would have been nice to send a word to you. I try to pretend that these letters really are reaching you, but I know they aren’t, because I’m looking at the whole stack of message cubes that I’ve dictated so far. You haven’t heard from me or about me since June, and I wish I could afford to let you know what I’ve been doing.

Anyway, our TPs finished sending the data of the first photograph last Tuesday. They started in at once on transmitting the stellar close-up. They’re still busy with that one.

We have, in the meantime, gone on excavating the site, but our finds are drearily ordinary. By normal, that is, pre-globe, standards, we’d have been delighted with the wealth of High Ones artifacts we’ve taken from the hill. But now all of us right up to the three top men are inflamed by the wild urge to make spectacular discoveries, instantly, instead of going through the potsherd-and-crumb tactics of standard archaeology. It’s bad science, we know, but we’re palpitating to buzz away to the robot in the vault, leaving the rest of this once-promising site to lesser drudges.

And as of yesterday we find that we’re absolutely committed to making spectacular discoveries. Because yesterday was the last day of the month, and the TP network rendered its bill.

Nobody had said much about the
cost
of all this frenzied overtime. The big thing was to relay the data; sordid matters of stash could be discussed some other time. Well, some other time has arrived. I don’t even know how big the bill actually was. But you can compute it for yourself: we’ve kept a whole TP staff sitting skull-to-skull on an Earth relay for eight transmission hours a day over something like fifteen days.

The chilly fact is that we’ve spent our whole second year’s budget on two weeks of TP communications.

As the finances of archaeological expeditions go, this one has an awfully big thumb. I don’t know the details, but we have grants from half a dozen universities, a couple of private foundations, and the governments of six worlds. The purpose of all this stash was to pay our transportation to and from Higby V, to provide (modest) salaries for expedition personnel, to cover our field expenses, and to underwrite the cost of publishing our results. The funds thus set aside were supposed to last us for two years in the field. Nothing was budgeted in for extraordinary TP bills.

We are in trouble now.

Late last night Dr. Schein came over to me and said, “Tom, are you sure you don’t have latent TP?”

“Positive, sir.”

“With a twin sister who’s a communicator?”

“I’ve been tested up and down,” I said. “There isn’t an atom of TP ability in me. My sister’s got the family monopoly.”

“Too bad. If we had a TP of our own, and didn’t have to pay the ruinous official rates—” He walked away, shaking his head. Half an hour later Dr. Horkkk also approached me and quizzed me about possible TP abilities. Try, he begged me. Try to make contact with a TP. I felt like telling him to try to fly. Trying isn’t enough sometimes.

Besides, did they really think that a freelance TP would be able to bypass the utility laws and use the communications net without charge?

As of this morning, this is the position: we
have
to find that asteroid, because we simply don’t have enough funds to work our full two years on Higby V. Having crashed our stash, we now must come through with phenomenal results in relatively little time. One bit of encouraging news did arrive last night from Luna City. They’ve run the computer simulation and have indeed located the piece of sky our photo shows. They’ve identified Rigel, Procyon, Aldebaran, Arcturus, and a number of other familiar stars.

This is not colossally useful to us. The photo shows a cube of space with a volume of thousands of light-years, and finding a single white dwarf (possibly burned out) and a single asteroid in all of that is an impossible task. But what Luna City has told us is that the robot-and-vault sequence took place in our galaxy, which is some comfort. If the closeup photo enables them to pinpoint the actual solar system involved, we can take it from there. We
have
to.

October 14, 2375

Higby V

W
E LEAVE HERE NEXT
week for a star called GGC 1145591. That’s where our asteroid is. With some luck, that’s where our High Ones robot is too.

GGC 1145591 doesn’t have a name, just a catalog number. It’s seventy-two light-years from Earth, and the star closest to it whose name you’re likely to know is Aldebaran, which isn’t really close at all. However, a billion years ago Aldebaran and GGC 1145591 were stellar neighbors, which is one of the ways Luna City was able to trace our star. It amazes me that the astronomers are able to figure out the positions of stars a billion years ago, when the only data they have to work with are the observations recorded over the last four or five hundred years. But they’re quite confident that they have found the right star. It’s as if they took a film of the present-day sky and ran it backward until it corresponded to the billion-year-old picture left us by the High Ones.

Luna City tells us that our globe sequence was filmed precisely 941,285,008 years ago. If you ask me, it takes a kind of cosmic slice to make dogmatic statements of that kind. But that’s what their computer told them, and I guess it must be so. It gives us one more confirmation of our own dating of High Ones culture.

GGC 1145591 is not visible from Earth. Or from anywhere else. It was a white dwarf 941,285,008 years ago, but by now it’s pretty well burned out and has become a black dwarf. No heat radiation to speak of, and therefore no luminosity; as stars go, it’s invisible. It was discovered about forty years back by a scout ship of the Dark Star Survey Mission. Except for that bit of luck, no one could have traced it for us, since it can’t be located by optical or radio or X-ray telescopy.

We ran our TP bill a little higher by notifying Galaxy Central of our plans. Dr. Schein felt honor bound to let it be known that he was giving up work at Higby V. Zit! What commotion! I drove Dr. Schein to town so he could place the call. I wasn’t with him while he was giving the message to Nachman Ben-Dov for relay to Galaxy Central, but when he came out of the TP office his face was dark and tense.

“They blew up,” he told me. “The TP says they were practically spouting gamma rays. How dare we pull out of Higby V? What kind of archaeologists are we? What sort of madness is this asteroid chase of ours?” Dr. Schein looked as angry as I’ve ever seen him. “The phrase Galaxy Central used was dereliction of duty. I think they also called us unprofessional. They can’t comprehend why we don’t want to dig our full two years here.”

“You tell them about the TP charges?” I asked.

“I didn’t get to that part,” Dr. Schein sighed.

He fell into glowering silence as we began our drive back to camp. Halfway there I said, “What are we going to do now?”

“We’ll go to GGC 1145591 and find that asteroid vault.”

“Despite Galaxy Central?”

“Despite Galaxy Central,” Dr. Schein said. “There’s no turning back for us now.”

He sounded grim.

Over the next couple of days Dr. Schein, Dr. Horkkk, and Pilazinool were locked in almost constant conferences, and Dr. Schein made several more trips to town to talk things over via TP with Galaxy Central. Almost no information on any of this filtered down to us underlings. Sometimes Dr. Schein let a few words slip to his chauffeur, sometimes not. Meanwhile we went on digging, dating, playing the globe, and otherwise carrying on business as usual. This was the mixture of fact and rumor that we put together:

• Pilazinool is overwhelmingly in favor of going to 1145591 no matter what the consequences.

• Dr. Horkkk has had second thoughts about his professional reputation and now would like to remain on Higby V for the duration of our grants.

• Dr. Schein is wavering between the two positions, but generally feels that we have already compromised ourselves beyond repair and might as well go through with the voyage.

Also:

• That all our grants are being cancelled and we are being ordered back to Galaxy Central for a roasting. (This has been denied by Dr. Schein.)

• That Galaxy Central insists that we go on digging here, but is sending a separate expedition to 1145591. (This is still circulating, unverified.)

• That we have been cut off from our financial support, but Dr. Schein is trying to raise private funds for an immediate expedition to 1145591. (Confirmed by Dr. Horkkk and denied by Dr. Schein on the same day. Who’s lying?)

The only thing we know for sure, and we aren’t very sure of it, is what I said at the beginning of this letter: we leave here next week for 1145591. An official order has been posted in the lab to that effect. We’re supposed to stop excavations tomorrow, begin backfilling the site, and pack.

All is confusion.

A day later, and confusion has been replaced by catastrophe. At least for yours truly.

All three bosses went into town after breakfast and spent the whole morning in TP communication with Galaxy Central. The rest of us started, in a halfhearted and uncertain way, the shutting down of operations. Most of us expected to be told later in the day that we weren’t going anywhere and better open up the excavation again, so we didn’t put much effort into the shutdown.

A little past noon our leaders returned. For the first time since the beginning of the crisis they looked reasonably calm. Dr. Schein was actually smiling. As they got out of the runabout, Dr. Horkkk said, “Everything is settled. We have Galaxy Central’s permission, and we are departing on schedule for GGC 1145591.”

That was all. They disappeared into the lab. A little while later they summoned Saul Shahmoon and Leroy Chang to a conference. Secrecy prevailed.

At dinnertime this notice was posted in our quarters:

MEMBERS OF THE EXPEDITION:

Agreement has been reached with Galaxy Central for suspension of operations on Higby V and for immediate transfer of activities to the solar system of the black dwarf star GGC 1145591. An ultraspace cruiser making a regular run will pick us up here on October 21. The following members of the expedition will depart for GGC 1145591 at that time:

Dr. Schein

Pilazinool

408b

Professor Chang

Kelly Watchman

Mirrik

Jan Mortenson

Steen Steen

The following members of the expedition will remain on Higby V until October 27, at which time a second ultraspace cruiser will pick them up and convey them to Galaxy Central, where they are to deliver the globe and other artifacts, and report on our findings thus far:,

Dr. Horkkk

Professor Shahmoon

Tom Rice

It is hoped that these individuals will be able to rejoin the expedition at a later date.

I read the notice six times, and still didn’t believe it. How could they do this to me? Ship me back to Galaxy Central? Cut me out of the expedition at its most exciting point?

Is it fair? I’m the one who found the globe. I’m the one who thought up the way we could have the location of the asteroid traced. And now—packed off to Galaxy Central while the others go on into the unknown—

While
Jan
goes—

I staggered across to the other dorm and found her. “Have you seen the notice?” I asked, though I could tell without asking that she had.

She nodded. “Isn’t it awful?”