The Centauri Surprise

by Alastair Mayer

  She snickered. “I don’t have to answer that. But if you’re jumping, it would be the aft cargo hatch, not the airlock. It’s a moot point, though. I’m pretty sure the airspace over the preserve is restricted. I won’t risk my courier license for that.”

  “Surely it’s only restricted to a certain altitude. I’ll just jump from higher than that.”

  “I don’t think you’ve thought it through, Carson. Aside from the risks involved—what are you going to do if you land in a tree? Or are attacked by a leopard?—how are you going to get back out? Walk? That’s got to be fifty or sixty kilometers to the nearest civilization, which is Camp Anderson, itself a historic site, and there’ll be questions raised about where you came from. That’s if you’re not eaten by a leopard or a terror bird before you get there.”

  “It’s not that much of a hike. We did it on Chara III, heading to the pyramid. I’ll admit I have a few details to work out.”

  “A few?”

  “Come on, Jackie. Organizing field expeditions is part of what I do.”

  “And how many of those have involved parachute insertions into wild terrain where possession of firearms is considered prima facie evidence of poaching?”

  Carson sighed and shook his head. “Okay, you have a point. This might have a few added complications.”

  “Might?” she said, her voice rising. “This is your problem, Carson. Going off half-cocked and making it up as you go. If I did that flying a starship, I’d probably be dead by now, along with any passengers.”

  And that was one of their fundamental differences, Carson realized. Even though she was exaggerating his position, she had a valid point that space travel was necessarily much more exacting than his archeological field trips, at least until it came down to methodical excavation. There were some fundamental opposites in their two personalities. Maybe that was the attraction. Well, that and the fact that Jackie was an attractive, intelligent, and competent woman.

  “All right,” he said, conceding. “I’ll give it some more thought. That was just brainstorming.”

  “Why don’t you just tell Ducayne? Maybe he’ll come up with something.”

  “I’m not quite ready to do that,” Carson said. “When we discussed it before, I got the impression he had several other things going on with the Sawyers World government and didn’t want to ask for any more favors. This is still hypothetical. For all we know there’s something we haven’t found somewhere on Kakuloa, or elsewhere on this planet. After all, we’ve got a talisman that points to Sol with nothing found so far on Earth.”

  “What about Mars?” Jackie said with a half smile. “There’s the Cydonia pyramid.”

  Carson rolled his eyes. He knew she was joking, but said, “That one’s five-sided. And you and I both know it’s a natural formation that only looks like a pyramid.”

  “And Pete’s Peak isn’t? So, what, you want to prove it’s a pyramid before asking to excavate it?”

  “You have to admit, that would be a lot more convincing. All it would take is enough digging to find carvings on it. Finley was too high up when he looked.”

  “How do you suppose he would react if he knew you had a tal—, um, chart that pointed to Alpha Centauri?”

  Carson considered that. It had been one of Pete’s first questions, and he had chided Carson for not having such an important piece of evidence. Would he believe Carson now? But there was a physical talisman to show him, and his partner, Naomi Maclaren, could validate that it was authentic. Wait, was it authentic? The star pattern had proved out, but he hadn’t had the technetium battery isotope-dated for age. In fact, he hadn’t even checked that it had a technetium battery. His enthusiasm was interfering with his archeological rigor. Maybe Jackie had a point. And she was looking at him, waiting for an answer to her question.

  “I don’t know how Pete would react,” he said. “I intend to ask him.” Just as soon as I authenticate the dang thing, he mentally added.

  “What about Ducayne?”

  Carson shrugged. “It’s not like I’d be telling Pete anything he doesn’t already know by now.”

  “No, just confirming it.”

  “Maybe. Despite what he said at our meeting, he may have confirmed it for himself fifty years ago, and just hasn’t admitted it.”

  CHAPTER 26: THE CHARA ARTIFACT

  Sawyer Spaceport

  DUCAYNE WATCHED THROUGH the window of his more-public office, a small room on the mezzanine that surrounded the hangar floor. The window overlooked the work area. The ship, a C-class modified to convert much of its cargo area to fuel tankage for range, waited until the hangar doors rolled shut behind it, then its own main hatch opened. Ducayne was on his way down the mezzanine’s metal stairway as soon as the hangar doors had closed.

  “Find anything interesting?” he asked as Walter Black, his agent in charge of the archeology team on Chara III, came down the boarding ramp.

  “We did indeed. Carson’s tip about the room he found in the Verdigris pyramid paid off. It took us a while to reach it because there was still some debris from the explosion Hopkins set off, but when we found the panel, it still worked. There was intact equipment on the pedestal he’d described.”

  “And?”

  “We’ve no idea what it is, of course, but we took careful notes of the connections. We can power it up again.”

  “You brought it?”

  “Of course. I figured you’d send me straight back if I didn’t.”

  “You’re probably right,” Ducayne said.

  “Well, let me tell you it was a pain in the ass maneuvering it down the access shaft we came in by.”

  “Carson said that on Verdigris, the previous visitors had just blown a hole in the wall.”

  “Believe me, I was tempted,” Black said.

  “What about the rest of the pyramid?”

  “As their report described. Multiple levels beneath it, engravings on the walls and the exhibits. Mostly simple stuff. Carson’s hypothesis of a teaching museum makes some sense. The lowest levels were getting into quantum mechanics but there were fewer practical examples and more diagrams and formulas. The specialists are making inroads on the language; it looks like it was designed to be easy to decipher.”

  “No new tech?”

  “Nothing obvious in the museum area. There may be some interesting tidbits, but mostly it seemed intended to bootstrap a civilization to about mid-twentieth century level.”

  “Huh.” Ducayne considered that. “It does make a weird kind of sense. If the locals didn’t wipe themselves out with that, they’d presumably be less of a threat when they eventually developed interstellar travel.”

  Black nodded his agreement. “That was about the best explanation I could come up with too. It’s not like the builders had laid out the plans for atomic bombs, but there was enough information to give someone so inclined a head start on them.”

  “And if they were warlike, they’d use them. That’s one way to eliminate a short-sighted civilization.” Ducayne had to wonder if the Pyramid Builders’ intent was as altruistic as Carson thought it was.

  “Yeah. They wouldn’t have much access to fossil fuels.”

  Ducayne saw Black’s point. With the terraformed planets only having had multi-cellular, Earth-like life for about 65 million years, they had never gone through anything like Earth’s Carboniferous era, nor had they had hundreds of millions of years to form extensive coal beds and oil formations. There were some such, just as on Earth there were a few younger formations, but nothing that would lend itself to the scale of fossil fuel use that Earth went through for two centuries. Any civilization arising on a terraformed planet would have to bootstrap its technology with wood, methane, alcohol and other biofuels, before moving to wind, solar and ultimately nuclear electric. The timoans of Taprobane had already started in that direction—and apparently on their own; no pyramid had been found there. “Damned crafty, whoever built that thing.”

  “If they really wanted to encou
rage a nuclear war, wouldn’t they have placed more than one pyramid per planet?” Black said.

  “That’s an interesting point, but enough of this. Let’s see what you brought back.”

  Black and Ducayne walked back to the cargo area.

  “We crated it up for shipping, of course,” Black was saying. “I can show you pictures and the scans we took.” The crate was about two meters long by a meter high and wide. It could have been a large coffin.

  “I’ll want to look at those, but since we’re here. . .” Ducayne gestured at the container.

  Black shrugged and helped Ducayne with the tie-down straps, then undid the latches. “It’s not really much to look at,” he said, and raised the lid.

  He was right. Nestled in the foam padding, the device could have been any large piece of control equipment. It had a rectangular boxy shape, made of plastic or enameled metal, it wasn’t obvious which at first glance. On one side was a panel with indicators or switches.

  “We laid it on its back, the connectors are along this edge,” Black pointed. “It’s fairly heavy. I’d suggest leaving it in the container until we get it down to the labs.”

  Ducayne nodded. “Interesting. There are some superficial similarities in size and shape, but it’s nothing like the other one. No reason it should be, of course.”

  “Other one? What other one?”

  “The other alien artifact. One was brought back from a wrecked ship on a planet orbiting Kapteyn’s Star. From the reports it looked like it had been added after the fact.”

  Black was suddenly full of questions. “Whose ship? What was the artifact? And where’s Kapteyn’s Star”

  “The star is a red dwarf a few light-years away,” Ducayne said, “and we have no idea regarding either the ship or the artifact. This ship almost certainly wasn’t human, and the artifact is unlikely to be whatever this is; it looks quite different.”

  “I suppose if it were built by a different culture, it could still serve the same purpose,” Black said. “But for all I know this is just a control console and all the interesting stuff is still in the pyramid.”

  “Did you find any other passages, or signs of same?”

  “Nothing definitive. The team I left there is still looking. The previous ship brought in some deep x-ray gear.”

  Ducayne nodded. That had been something Carson had suggested. “Either way,” he said, “whoever ransacked the pyramid on Verdigris thought the console was worth taking. Anyway, get it to the lab. I have to leave now for an off-site meeting, but I’ll want a full briefing later.”

  “Will do.”

  CHAPTER 27: FINLEY REVISITED

  Maclaren Industrial Research Corporation

  CARSON’S MEETING WITH Finley was set up in an office at one of Naomi MacLaren’s companies in town. That was easier for him to get to.

  “Thank you for seeing me again, Dr. Finley,” Carson said, “and especially for letting me meet with you here.”

  “You said you had new evidence, and something Naomi might want to see? You just better not be wasting our time.”

  “I have, and I think you’ll agree I’m not. Where is she, by the way?”

  “She has things to do. She’s in the building. I’ll let her know if it’s worth her time. So, what have you got?”

  “A little while back, someone inherited a collection of alien artifacts, many of them apparently illegally gathered. It happens, that’s one of the hazards of my business. Anyway, the person decided to do the right thing and sent the collection to various museums and university archeology departments.”

  “Okay, so what does that have to do with my volcanic plug?”

  “When we last met, you asked me if I had a talisman with a star chart that pointed to Alpha Centauri.” Carson reached into his pocket and pulled out a specimen bag, then carefully slid the talisman out into his hand and held it up. “I do now.”

  Finley’s eyes widened, then narrowed. “That’s rather convenient.”

  “It was actually in my possession when you asked the first time. I just hadn’t examined it closely, or correlated the pattern with actual stars. It would have been more convenient if I had. But I’m not asking you to take my word for it.” He handed the talisman to Finley. “I’ve had the technetium inside sampled and tested — that’s the tiny hole drilled into the back — you’re welcome to check it out yourself, although I’ll have to insist that the talisman doesn’t leave my sight.”

  Finley examined the talisman, turning it over in his hands, feeling the surface, tapping his fingernail against it. He tapped the omni on his wrist. “Naomi, get in here. You’ll want to see this.”

  He tapped his omni again and held the talisman up to it. As he turned it around so the small hole faced it, Carson heard the rising squeal of a radiation alert, which faded again when Finley moved the talisman away.

  At that moment the door opened and a woman entered, of medium height and tanned skin, with silvering hair. She looked to be perhaps fifty or sixty, but if that was Naomi Maclaren, she had to be in her eighties. Another benefactor of squidberry extract.

  “G’day,” she said. “I reckon you must be Hannibal Carson. I’ve heard a bit about you.” She looked to Finley. “Right then, what’s he brought us?”

  Finley tossed the talisman to her, causing Carson to wince at the cavalier handling of the artifact, but she caught it deftly.

  “He says it’s a talisman that points here, to Alpha Centauri. Technetium battery inside. It is slightly radioactive, I just checked.”

  Maclaren turned it over in her hands. “It is a supercircle, I’ll give ‘em that.” She took her omni out of a pocket, held the talisman up and photographed the pattern of stones and lines. She handed the talisman back to Carson. “Here, mate, hold onto that,” she said, and turned back to her omni.

  A moment later she looked up from it. “He’s right, it does seem to point to Alpha Centauri. Story is consistent, at least.”

  “Wait,” Carson said, astonished that MacLaren just happened to have a program on her omni that could decipher the star pattern. “How did you do that?”

  “Don’t look so boggled, mate,” she said, grinning at his expression. “Pete told me the story. When he said you were coming here with new evidence, I figured I’d rig up a program like your Jackie Roberts did. Writing the program was easy. The hard part was figuring out what the colors represented, and she’d already done that. She sounds like a clever girl; you should hang on to her.”

  “I, but. . . Yes, she’s very intelligent,” Carson said, not knowing quite how to react to that.

  MacLaren frowned at him. “Or are you not as smart as I thought? Anyway, that’s none of my business. This talisman is, or at least you’ve made it so. A technetium battery, eh? Have you dated it?”

  “Yes, of course.” Carson brought up the data on his own omni. “It’s 14,723 years old, give or take two-fifty.”

  “Two-fifty? That’s pretty sloppy measurement. I assume you mean standard years?”

  “Yes, standard years. The problem is we don’t know exactly where it’s been for most of that time, so we can’t adjust for cosmic ray or neutrino flux.” He slipped his omni from his wrist and passed it to her. “Here are the details.”

  She scanned the data briefly. “Hmm. Okay. Mind if I take a copy of this?”

  “No, go ahead.”

  She tapped his omni to hers and handed his back. “Thanks. Now, mind if I run the analysis myself?”

  Carson had half-expected this. “No, but I’d rather not let the artifact out of my possession. How long would it take?”

  “Just a few minutes. Come on, follow me down to the lab.”

  “A few—? The university lab takes days,” Carson said, hurrying to catch up as she left the office. Pete Finley was right behind him.

  “They’re either understaffed or have woefully out-of-date equipment,” she said.

  “Probably both,” he admitted.

  The two men followed her down the
hall to another office, this one with a security panel by the door. Maclaren waved her hand across it, and the door slid open. Carson didn’t see what the panel had reacted to; her omni was in her pocket again, and she wore no badge or anything on her wrist. Another of her high-tech toys, no doubt.

  She stopped before a bench with a large piece of equipment on it. The device had a chamber built into it, with a clear plastic door, and a panel with several buttons and a screen beside it. She touched a button and the chamber door slid up.

  “Go ahead and place your talisman in that chamber. How did you sample the technetium?”

  “We drilled a small hole in the back, away from anything else that looked like circuitry. We did the same with the Chara talisman, so it should still function.”

  “Okay, center the hole face up.” She touched another button, and a bright green dot, as from a targeting laser, appeared on the surface of the talisman. “Put the hole where the laser beam is pointing. I’ll focus it in.”

  “Wait, how does this work, exactly? I don’t want any more damage done.”

  “We’ll do less damage than you’ve already done. The green is just for coarse targeting. The real laser fires a nanosecond burst which will boil off less than a picogram of the material to be analyzed. Then we use a combination of optical and mass spectrography to analyze the atoms, and the built-in computer does the math.”

  “Wow,” Carson said, duly impressed. “I would love to have something like this for our department. What does one cost?”

  MacLaren had closed the chamber door and was lining the crosshairs up on a magnified image on the built-in screen. She turned to him and smiled. “Sorry, mate, this one’s a prototype. As the saying goes, if you have to ask. . . .”

  “Then I can’t afford it. Sigh.”

  “Afraid so. But we hope to have them in production before long. We’ll see about a stripped-down version for the educational market.”