Boundary

by Eric Flint

  "Why is it," A.J. complained, "that you tolerate his stupid jokes?"

  But Madeline ignored him, since she was already passing through the door. The interior of the tunnel beyond was a pearl-gray color, almost nacreous, smooth and seemingly unmarked by the immense span of years. Twenty meters farther down, the tunnel ended in a door, with the widely-separated lever arm design they had seen before.

  Madeline reached it first. Obviously not really expecting any positive result, she gave a small tug upward on the left-hand crossbar.

  The valve lock handle spun smoothly, as though it had been checked and oiled only yesterday. The other arm nearly clipped A.J., who jumped back with a startled exclamation. Madeline had stepped back herself, not having expected any movement at all. When nothing untoward happened, she moved forward and gently turned the lock still further clockwise, until it finally stopped after three full revolutions. They'd learned from experience that the Bemmies opened and closed things in the opposite directly that people generally used.

  Cautiously, she pushed inward. The massive door, well over two meters high and wide and, as they could see as it opened, half a meter thick, swung back without effort or protest.

  "Sixty-five million years," A.J. almost whispered. "And it opens like someone was just here minutes ago. What the hell is this?"

  Madeline entered first, flashing her light around. "Looks like a sort of rotunda with—"

  Her words cut off in a shriek of unrestrained terror.

  Madeline nearly dove out of the doorway. The others backed away hurriedly also—all the faster because Madeline was normally unflappable. Anything that could frighten her that badly . . .

  "Madeline, what was it?" Joe asked. A.J. had yanked the door shut and spun the lock the other way. The people listening in from Nike began asking what had happened with the common morbid mixture of worry and excitement that such events tend to produce.

  Madeline's breathing slowed, and suddenly she started to laugh. More questions began to flood the link. Madeline stopped laughing long enough to choke out: "Hush up, everybody. It just took me by surprise, that's all."

  She took a deep breath and looked over at Helen. "You go in first. You deserve to, I think. Don't worry—it's safe."

  Uncertainly, Helen went to the great door, reopened it, and entered. Her light moved slowly around the room. Suddenly, she gasped. But, forewarned, she didn't come running out or scream the way Madeline had. She just stood there, mostly out of sight half behind the door.

  Joe and A.J. followed. At first, all they could see was Helen, her face inside the mostly-transparent helmet staring in what looked like almost religious rapture. For a moment, they forgot why they had come, seeing tears starting from her eyes. And then, as they turned, they could see what she was staring at. Both of them cursed and stepped back, almost in unison; but they, too, were unable to take their eyes from the sight before them.

  Towering above them, no more than fifteen meters away, rearing meters high under the ceiling of the immense room, the monster seemed poised in the moment of attack. Its hide was banded in shades of green and brown and black, the camouflage of a predator. Behind a gaping maw more than a meter long filled with teeth as long as a man's hand, the eyes seemed to blaze with hunger.

  Tyrannosaurus rex snarled soundlessly, motionlessly, at the first beings to look upon him in sixty-five million years.

  The others came in slowly. Bruce and Rich, warned by their reactions, didn't jump back, but couldn't restrain their own quiet curses of disbelief.

  "A.J.," Helen said quietly, "is it . . . is it . . .?" She reached up to wipe the tears from her eyes, until her hand encountered the helmet.

  A.J., called back from his own stunned amazement, directed his sensors at the looming creature. After a while, he said: "Yes, indeed it is. A mummy, not a model, deliberately mounted and preserved. Before we opened that door it might have been pure nitrogen or some other inert gas in here. I'll know for sure once I analyze the readings."

  "But . . . why?" Madeline asked. "Why in the world would you devote so much of your effort to seal away samples of Earth's life-forms on some other planet—and that planet not your own? I mean, I could understand making a museum or something on your own world, but this was sealed off!"

  Rich was standing stock-still. None of the others noticed until they heard him breathe ". . . could it be?"

  Then he was moving purposefully around the room, flashing his light here and there. A Bemmius flashed into view, this one brightly colored and not dull like the mummies discovered on Phobos, sealed behind some kind of transparent material. Rich's light disregarded that, came to an opening in the wall across from them. Without pause, he entered that corridor, then came to another door. The others were now following him, Helen trailing and staring back at the tyrannosaur as though it might vanish.

  "Rich, what's up?" Joe demanded, puzzled. "What are you looking for?"

  When there was no answer, Joe realized that Richard Skibow was focused so completely on what he was doing that he probably hadn't even heard the question. The door in front of Rich swung inward, and Rich almost lunged through, flashing his light around the short corridor. Then he stopped, and slowly, almost reverently, reached out, touching a shining transparent surface behind which . . .

  Joe would have scratched his head, if he hadn't been wearing a suit. What's this stuff? he wondered. Behind the window—that was all he could call it—was a series of objects, with symbols in the Bemmie language above each group.

  "What is it, Rich?"

  "Not a tomb," Richard said finally, his voice almost a whisper. It held the same near rapture that Helen's had a moment before. "What else have we done, when we seal things away forever?"

  He didn't wait for their reply. "A time capsule. A time capsule— with a Rosetta Stone sealed within." He pointed to the first object, a single oval stone. Over it, a symbol. The next section held two oval stones, and another symbol. The next section, three oval stones. Joe understood suddenly.

  Rich turned and pointed down the corridor; the next door had symbols on it and a different kind of handle. "And a simple key to make you able to tell when you've learned what is here, and then move on."

  His voice rose in excitement. "Jane? Jane, this is it! They've left us their language!"

  Chapter 51

  "Well, okay," Rich said cheerfully over dinner four days later, "so I didn't get it quite right. It is a Rosetta Stone. Jane and I are now quite sure of it. Even if we still can't read any of the inscriptions, we can discern enough to see that they are in at least seven very different scripts, maybe eight or nine—we're still arguing about that— which wasn't true on Phobos or anywhere else we've found writing here in Melas Chasma. But they didn't leave it for us. Why should they? We weren't even a gleam in some proto-lemur's eye yet. They left it for other Bemmies. And since they apparently didn't know which group of Bemmies might come, or when, they left the messages in a representative language of what both Jane and I think were all of their major language groups."

  He slurped down another spoonful of the evening's entree and swallowed appreciatively. "Joe, my heartfelt congratulations. How you manage to turn that stuff they sent down into meals like this is a mystery."

  Joe inclined his head toward Madeline, sitting next to him in the rover. "Thank her, not me. That's one of her bouillabaisse recipes."

  Helen's eyes widened. She'd been savoring the meal as much as Rich had. "One of them?"

  "Yup. I've got seven others that I know by heart. Of course, I'll have to juggle the ingredients a lot. Even up on Nike, they don't have everything I'd need to do them full justice."

  While others had been talking about the meal, A.J. had been staring pensively out of one of Thoat's ports. There was nothing to see out there, of course, now that night had fallen. The Martian starblaze that was such a splendor when standing outside at night—one of the few benefits of the planet's thin atmosphere—was mostly filtered by the port.

 
; Joe finally spotted his friend's preoccupation. "A penny for your thoughts."

  The imaging specialist shook his head. "You don't want 'em, Joe. Trust me, you don't."

  The bleak tone in his voice was startling. A.J. Baker, depressed and melancholy, was something of an oxymoron. Conversation at the table stopped and everyone swiveled their heads to stare at him.

  "What's the problem?"

  A.J. finally turned away from the port. "If Rich and Jane are right—and I'm not arguing the point—then consider the implications. Take that spaceship model we found yesterday, that's gotten us so excited."

  That had been the most exciting find of all, at least for everyone except Rich and Helen. In one of the rooms had been a two-meter long-model of what was obviously a Bemmie spacecraft. Two meters across, it would be better to say—because the ship was designed something like a tuna can tapering toward the rim.

  The model had been very detailed, far too much so to be simply a symbolic representation. Most exciting of all, therefore, had been the fact that, even after long and close examination, nothing that could possibly be a venturi or any sort of exhaust system or mechanism had been found on it. Whatever drive the aliens had used, it worked on some principle completely different from rockets of any kind. Apparently, however it worked, the Bemmies had possessed the long-fabled reactionless drive of many science fiction stories.

  Madeline grimaced slightly. Spotting the expression, Joe gave her hand a little squeeze under the table. For Madeline—at the moment, at least—the discovery of that model was more a source of vexation than excitement. They still hadn't transmitted the news up to the Nike, after she'd asked them to wait until she could consider all the security implications.

  By now, with the request coming from Madeline, not even A.J. was inclined to argue the matter. Whatever low opinion A.J. held of security policies in general, it no longer spilled onto Madeline Fathom. If that's what she wanted, that's what she would get. No quarrels, no questions asked.

  "Explain, A.J.," Helen said.

  "The question we were wondering about has just been answered, I think. Whatever drive they were using, and however different it so obviously is from our rocket propulsion systems—Jesus, a reactionless drive!—it's still not a faster-than-light drive. Can't be, or they wouldn't have devoted that much time, labor and resources to creating a time vault and left messages written in many languages. Even went so far as to seal it up in inert gasses."

  Joe's eyes widened. "Oh." Then, a moment later: "Damn."

  "'Damn' is right," A.J. echoed, sighing. "Our highest hopes just got torpedoed. They didn't have a faster-than-light drive."

  Madeline looked back and forth from Joe to A.J. "You're sure?"

  Helen answered. "It makes sense, Madeline. I should have thought of it myself. Would have, if"—she flashed a little smile—"I hadn't gotten so preoccupied with all those mummies and models."

  She gave A.J. and Joe an apologetic shrug. "Look, guys, I'm sorry. But, for me, this place is already my highest hope. It would be for any paleontologist, at least one specializing in the late Mesozoic." Her voice lowered, became almost a whisper. "After all these years, we finally get to see what they really looked like. No more guessing from skeletons and bones. Tyrannosaurus, triceratops, three species of duckbills—there's even a good sampling of sea life."

  A.J. and Joe nodded. Bruce Irwin chuckled. "I think they forgive you your sins, Helen. Grudgingly." That brought a little round of laughs, lightening the atmosphere. But Madeline stubbornly returned to the point.

  "I still want it explained." She hesitated. "Guys, I need it explained. Clearly. Clearly enough that even a national security adviser who isn't the sharpest pencil in the—ah, never mind—that even political types in the highest places can understand."

  "Okay, Madeline, here it is." A.J. shifted forward in his seat, leaning on the table with his weight on his forearms. "That vault was designed to last for millions of years. Millions, not thousands."

  "You're sure?"

  "Yes," Joe chimed in. "A.J. and I could prove it with some work, if we concentrated on analyzing the materials, construction, and so on and so forth. But we don't really need to. Any engineer will understand the point. Even given the Bemmies' superior construction methods and materials, nobody except gods could slap together something that would last sixty-five million years under planetary conditions. For Pete's sake, they even designed those main supporting pillars to handle geologic shifts."

  "Ah." Madeline leaned forward, matching A.J.'s arms-on-table posture. "I get it. Phobos could be an accident. That base survived because it was in vacuum, not to mention microgravity. The Vault can't be an accident."

  "No. Mind you, I'm not saying they planned for sixty-five million years. I suspect they didn't. But they planned for millions, may be a few tens of millions." A.J. glanced at Helen. "Somebody like Nick Glendale who specializes in probability analysis could demonstrate it, I'm pretty sure, just from the math alone."

  "I'll ask him to, in fact," Helen said. "Once you and Joe put together the basic data."

  "Millions of years . . ." Madeline said softly. "Millions . . . Okay, I get your point. If the Bemmies had a faster-than-light drive, there'd be no reason to create such a vault. Even with all of them dead in this solar system, they'd expect some other Bemmies to come along much sooner than that."

  "Yep. They could travel between the stars, but even for them it was a slow business."

  "A haphazard one, too," Rich said. He ran fingers through his thinning hair. "Without an FTL drive, there'd be no way to maintain any sort of transsolar political unity of any kind. It'd be hard enough to do, even with one. However the Bemmies were organized, politically, it would have started fragmenting the moment they spread beyond their home system. Give it a few millennia, certainly tens of millennia, and even the records would start getting lost. As if Shelley's poem Ozymandias was repeated over and over again, in one star system after another."

  Helen had always loved that poem, to the point where she'd committed it to memory. She recited the closing lines now:

  "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings, Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away."

  Silence filled Thoat, for a time, as they contemplated an alien civilization spreading across star systems over an immense span of time—and losing its memory as it went. The thought was majestic and melancholy at the same time.

  Helen herself broke the silence. "I understand. They'd have no reason to expect any other Bemmies to come into our solar system at any given time."

  "No, they wouldn't," Joe agreed. "A reactionless drive isn't magic. All it does is make sublight interstellar travel possible, where it really isn't with any kind of rocket drive."

  "Why not?" Rich asked.

  "Because you're basically driving yourself—any kind of rocket, chemical or nuclear-power, it doesn't matter—by throwing exhaust out the back end. That means the farther and longer you want to go, the more fuel you need to bring with you—but the more fuel you carry, the harder it is to increase your speed. We engineers call it the rocket equation, and it's been a paradox for us since the beginning of the space age."

  "Simply put," A.J. elaborated, "the best speed a rocket can reach—relative to the velocity of the exhaust that's driving you forward—is proportional to the natural logarithm of the percentage of mass left after all the fuel is consumed."

  Seeing the linguist's cross-eyed look, Joe chuckled. "Let me put it more simply still, Rich. Could you cross the Atlantic in a small boat with an outboard engine? Assume for a moment that the ocean is as still as a pond, and there are no weather problems. Just look at it as a straight fuel-and-engine problem."

  "Well . . . no, not really. Oh, I suppose you could eventually get across—assuming, like you said, that we ignored the real conditions of an ocean. But, jeez, it'd take forever."