“Is that a fact?” I said. “I’m interested in that stuff myself.”
You gotta remember how it was back in those days. Exploration of space was brand spanking new. It had begun with the Dykstra Drive, the faster-than-light drive that made space exploration possible. You used the Dykstra only between the stars, out in deep space. When you got in close, you used the ion engines for maneuvering. That’s where you burned up the fuel. And fuel cost money.
So the search was on. For intelligent life. Yes, that was the big one. But that was on a level above the one I was operating on. Or wanted to be operating on. I wanted to make some money in artifacts. It was a big market Especially in the first ten years or so of the rush to space, when everybody was crazy to own some piece of shit from an alien planet. Put it up on the mantel. “See that doohickey? It came from Arcturus V. I’ve got papers to prove it.” Humans are crazy about conversation pieces. The fad ran down after a while, but there was still plenty of demand. By the time I got into the racket, collectors had become a whole lot more discriminating. The stuff you brought in had to be of artistic merit, as they phrased it. How do you judge artistic merit? I don’t. That’s why I had Gomez along. If Gomez, with his credentials, said it was good, dealers were apt to believe him.
I was qualified. I’d pushed ships for NASA for a couple of years, until a difference of opinion with my superior put me out of work. I was looking for a way to get back in. Gomez was a couple of years younger than me, but he had similar ideas.
Gomez was young, wanted to travel, and he was more than willing to sell his services cheap for the privilege of going out into deep space. An appraiser is important on a scavenging expedition. You need someone who has an idea of the current market, has some idea what dealers will pay for “genuine alien artifacts.” You also need a guy to prepare and sign the provenance, the statement that gives whatever is known about the origin of the article. Although he was young, Gomez’s reputation in the field was excellent. If Gomez swore it was real alien goods, dealers would know they weren’t buying something faked in a factory in Calcutta or Jersey City.
That was the scavenging aspect. Of course, the main push was to find the folks who had left that stuff. But those guys just didn’t seem to be around anymore. What happened to the vanished civilizations of the galaxy? That was a question that interested a lot of people. You know how much interest there is on Earth in vanished peoples. You don’t, Julie? Take my word for it. Folks find it romantic.
Although the first buying spree was over, alien artifacts was still a pretty good racket. Even though there were a lot of people out there working it, the ruins scattered around the galaxy were a long way from being picked over. Just too many planets, too many ruins. And too few spaceships.
So Gomez and I talked about this stuff, there in the hazy cigarette smoke and beer smell, among Indians and tourists and farmers. After a while Gomez said, “You know, Dalton, we could make a good team. You’re a spaceship jockey, and I’ve got the art-appraisal skills we’d need.”
“I agree,” I told him. “But we lack just one thing. A ship. And some backers.”
Investing in spaceships to go scavengering in was a popular speculation in those days. You’d be surprised how many people were able to get their hands on a spaceship. For a while, every country in the world felt it needed at least one spaceship for national prestige. There was a time when there were more working ships than qualified men to ran them. I had the know-how, and I had the right attitude. I mean, I was no pure-science freak. I liked to make a profit.
“I could maybe help us find something,” Gomez said. “I know some people, did some art appraising for them last year. They were pleased with the results. I heard them talking about going into deep-space exploration.”
“Sounds like a natural to me,” I said. “Fifty-fifty between us, OK? Where do we see these guys?”
“Let me make a phone call,” Gomez said.
He went away, came back in a few minutes.
“I talked with Mr. Rahman in Houston. He’s interested. We’ve got a meeting with him day after tomorrow.”
“Rahman? What kind of name is that? Arab?”
“He’s Indonesian.”
Rahman had a suite at the Star of Texas. He was in town doing an oil deal with some Texas wildcatters. He was a little skinny guy, colored a medium brown, a shade darker than Gomez. Little mustache. He didn’t wear no native clothes. Italian silk suit, must have cost thousands. He was a Moslem, but there was no silly stuff about not drinking alcohol. He poured us some Jim Beam Reserve and had one himself.
We talked, casual stuff for a while, and I got the definite impression that this Rahman and his people had a lot of money they didn’t really know what to do with. A little birdie told me it might have been drug money. Not that I thought Rahman was a dealer. But he was an advance man for an Indonesian investment group, and their cash flow seemed a little heavy to be accounted for entirely from oil. But what do I know? Just an impression, and his willingness to do business with Gomez and me, a couple of unknowns.
First he went over my credentials. They were pretty good if I do say so myself. I’d worked ships for NASA for a couple of years until I got into a dispute with my superior and found myself out of a job. After that I’d gotten work for a private company pushing a supply ship between Earth and the L-5 colony. That went fine until L-5 went bust and I was out of work again. I had the papers and newspaper clippings to document everything.
“Your credentials look good to me, Mr. Dalton,” Rahman said. “I already know Mr. Gomez’s work. We’d be willing to make an arrangement with you. Salary plus ten percent of the profits on whatever you find, to be split between you and Mr. Gomez. What do you think?”
“I’d like it a lot better if you could make that ten percent for each of us. It’s not a deal-breaker, but it would be nice.”
Rahman thought for a while. I guess he was thinking that this from his point of view was mainly a way to sock away some hot money. Profit was secondary. Rahman’s group was making theirs right here on Earth.
“I suppose we could accommodate you,” Rahman said. “Come to Djakarta with me and take a look at our ship. If you approve, we’ll draw up papers. How soon can you begin?”
“We’ve started right now,” I said, looking at Gomez. He nodded.
The City of Djakarta was a pretty good ship. German manufacture, Indonesian ownership. The Krauts made pretty good ships back in those days. We signed a contract, loaded supplies, I made a few phone calls, picked up some information, and in a month we were on our way.
The first planet we checked out, Alquemar IV in Bootes, circled an O-type star in the Borodin cluster, which is a dense region of a couple thousand stars, two-thirds of them with planets. I paid a lot for the information. I got it from a technician attached to a British star-mapping expedition. He hadn’t been against earning a little on the side. There are channels where you can pick up that sort of information. I’m good with a spaceship, but I’m even better at working the channels and making a deal. This info cost a lot, but it looked like it was going to be worth it. My guy said he thought Alquemar IV had ruins, though his group hadn’t gotten close enough to be sure. When Gomez and I got there, we agreed at once that we’d struck paydirt. Now was the time to put down and let Gomez do his thing.
When I checked it out, I found Alquemar IV had enough oxygen for us, and gravity nine-tenths that of Earth. And so we went down hoping for a big strike, like Lefkowitz had when he discovered the Manupta friezes on Elgin XII, and sold them for a bundle direct to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In fact, I knew this had to be good, or I was in trouble. I was using up a lot of fuel. It’s costly to maneuver at sublight speeds in the area of planets.
It was a yellowish-brown planet with some green patches. Those patches showed where there was water and vegetation. We did an aerial recon of the largest patches, and found a section that looked good enough for us to go to the expense of putting the ship down
on the ground. It’s more economical to put the ship in orbit and go back and forth by orbiter, but it also takes more equipment, to say nothing of the cost of an orbiter. We didn’t have one. When something good came up, we wanted the ship right down there with us.
There were ruins, all right. They were spread out over several hundred acres, circular ruins in a jungle. They were surrounded by what had once been a wall. The atmosphere checked out OK, no noxious stuff, so we unpacked our dirt bikes and rode into the area. The first couple days were spent just getting a feel of the place.
It took us almost a week before we hit on an area that looked worth examining closely. It was deep in the jungle, and it appeared to be the remains of a circular building. A temple, maybe. We’d call it that on the report, anyway. We went in slowly, filming everything, because film of these expeditions is worth some money, too. We were looking for just about anything. Household stuff is always good. Furniture, household items, cups, bowls, armor, weapons—anything that might look good hanging on a wall or sitting on a table in a museum or some rich guy’s house. Trouble is, it’s almost impossible to find stuff like that. The disappeared aliens don’t leave you much. It’s a mystery. Hell, everything’s a mystery.
We came across a broken staircase leading down into the ground. This was a very good sign. In most ruins, you don’t even find this much. I gave Gomez a wink. “This one’s going to make us rich, partner.”
Gomez shrugged. “Don’t be too sure. Explorers have been disappointed before.”
“I got a feeling about this one,” I told him.
The steps led down a long ways, and into a big underground chamber. It was a spooky place: low, domed ceiling, protruding rocks casting weird shadows. There were some metal objects lying around on the ground. I picked up a couple of them and showed them to Gomez. He shook his head. “That stuff doesn’t look alien enough.”
That’s a problem in this line of work. People have pretty firm ideas about what they think alien ought to look like. Something alien ought to look like something you couldn’t find on Earth. Something that nobody ever thought of making. Something that gave off an air of mystery. And that’s asking a lot of a pot or a chair. Just about everything you found on an alien planet was alien only by definition. But the few pots and cups that had been found could just as easily have been made on Earth. Not even a letter stating where and when the object had been found would give them any real value. The stuff people paid cash money for had to look alien, not just be alien. It had to fit people’s idea of alien. It presented a challenge.
There was another chamber after the first one. We went into it, our floodlights sweeping the place with white light. And it was there we saw it. The object that came to be called the Eryx.
Now listen, Julie, don’t carry this beautiful but dumb act too far. Everyone on Earth has heard of the Eryx. You’ve got to have heard of it. Maybe in your circle they called it the alien gizmo. Does that ring a bell?
It rested on a piece of shiny cloth with marks on it. It was sitting on a low stone pillar with fluted sides. The object seemed to be shiny metal, though no one has ever discovered what it’s made of. It was about the size of a child’s head. It was carved or cast or worked into shapes I’d never seen before, nor had Gomez. The shapes looked random and chaotic at first, but when you sat down and studied them, you could see there was a logic at work there.
The thing glowed. It glistened. Its shapes and angles seemed to be curved. But it was difficult to say whether they were convex curves or concave ones. Sometimes it looked like one thing, sometimes another. Nor were all the planes identical. Optical effect, a triumph of the eye. Staring at it was like staring into a cubistic candle whose surfaces and facets were unfamiliar but fascinating, which held the eye, drawing it ever deeper.
“Man, we’ve got it,” Gomez said. “The big one. This has to be the art find of the century. And the hell of it is, I can’t tell if it was manufactured or grown, or if it’s a natural form.”
We didn’t speak for a long time, Gomez and me. But we were thinking the same thoughts. Or at least I think we were. I was thinking, this is it, the big one, the pot at the end of the rainbow. This is the mother of all alien objects. It doesn’t look like anything anyone has ever seen before, and it’s small enough to fit on the mantel of the richest man in the world. It was the ultimate desirable object. You couldn’t do better than that.
After gawking at it for a while, we went back to the ship and brought back equipment for carrying it to the ship. We didn’t touch it with our hands. We used a neutral-surface manipulator to lift it and place it, ever so gently, into a padded container. We didn’t know if this thing was fragile or what. We just knew it was important not to break our egg on the way to market. Gomez even made a joke about it.
“We’re putting all our egg into one basket,” he said, as we got it back to the ship and stowed it away in the cargo hold. It was going to be Gomez’s last joke for a while.
We decided to spend no more time on Alquemar. This one find was going to make our fortunes, and we decided to get right onto it. I cranked up the ship’s engine and that’s where we had our first indication that things weren’t going to be quite as simple as we’d expected.
The engine wouldn’t start.
Now, Julie, take my word for it, when your spaceship engine won’t turn over, it’s not a simple matter of changing spark plugs or adding gas. These engines aren’t meant to be fooled with by the likes of me or Gomez. It takes a full maintenance crew working in a factory facility to do anything with one of those things. All we could do was run the diagnostics. All they told us was that the thing wasn’t working. We knew that ourselves. What we didn’t know was why, or what to do about it.
We didn’t give up as easily as that. I went through the whole drill. Reran the diagnostics. Ran diagnostics on the diagnostics. Tried to get a signal to the home office back on Earth. That was futile, of course. Modern spaceship travel leaves you in the curious position of being able to reach a place faster than light can do it, and a hell of a lot faster than any form of signal transmission. It looked like we were stuck. And the hell of it was, there wasn’t anyone who might come out to see what had gone wrong with us. We were like the pioneers trekking across the Rockies to California. Or like Cortes and his conquistador-es slogging across unknown lands in search of Aztec riches. If a conquistador’s horse broke down, Spain didn’t send an expedition out to rescue him. They just wrote him off. And that’s what would happen with us. No one had asked us to come out here. Our Indonesian sponsors didn’t a give damn if we got back or not. Not as long as they kept the insurance paid up.
We didn’t panic. Gomez and I had always known this was one of the risks of this deal. We sat around and hoped maybe the engine would come back on line all by itself. It’s been known to happen. We played chess, we read books, we ate our supplies, and at last we decided to take the Eryx out of storage and take a look at it again. If we had to go, at least we could go in what Gomez called an aesthetic manner.
I guess I haven’t told you why we called it the Eryx. It was because of what we found on that piece of cloth the thing had been sitting on. That cloth was covered with marks and doodles. We thought it was just a design. But it turned out to be the first bit of alien writing anyone had discovered. And it was the only one until a year or so later. Clayton Ross came across the inscribed rock that they called the Space Age Rosetta Stone during his expedition to Ophiuchus II. One part was in an ancient variation of Sanskrit, the rest in three alien languages, one of which corresponded to the writing on the Eryx cloth. Gomez and I had come up with the first writing ever discovered in an alien language.
But we didn’t know that at the time. It took experts to point out that what we had thought was just a decorative pattern was in fact language. As for why we named the gizmo Eryx—follow me on this, Julie. At the top of the cloth, or what we figured was the top, there were four marks larger than the others in what turned out to be the text. We co
uldn’t read them, of course. But the four largest characters looked like the English letters E-R-Y-X. So we called our gizmo the Eryx. The name caught on. Everybody called it that, right from the start.
As you’ve doubt surmised, being the clever little lady you are, we didn’t die on Alquemar. We got off. What happened, you see, is that we brought the Eryx out of the hold and into the main cabin. So we could look at what might be costing us our lives. This put it not only close to us, but also to the engines. When we tried to start up again, something happened. We never did figure out what or why. But suddenly everything was in the green and our engine was working again.
Coincidence? We thought it might have been. But we weren’t so filled with the spirit of scientific experimentation that we were ready to move the Eryx back to the hold just to see if the engine died again. That would be carrying the spirit of experimentation too far. We got the hell out of Alquemar while we could. Got back to Earth.
Rahman met us in the Disneyland Hotel in Jogjakarta. He thought the Eryx was pretty. But you could tell he wasn’t impressed. Or maybe it was because he had a lot of other stuff on his mind. I only learned later that the CIA and local narcotics feds had become very interested in Rahman and his partners. I guess Rahman saw trouble coming. Because he said, “I’m sure we could sell this and realize a fine profit. But I have a better idea. I’ve consulted with my partners. We’re going to give this object to a big American research company, to hold in the public trust, to study for the benefit of all mankind.”
“That’s very civic-minded of you,” I said. “But why would you want to do that?”
“We’d like to stay on the good side of the Americans,” Rahman said. “It could be useful later.”
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