Sapiosaurus | Out Of Time

by Lon McQuillin

  Reynolds shined his light up, and examined the large shape suspended above them. It bore no writing, but he could see seams outlining shapes in its surface.

  Mitchell moved around to the outside of the second object and photographed the writing on its surface. She didn’t bother with measurements, since the two objects appeared to be virtually identical. Mitchell’s heart was pounding.

  “Hal, I’ve got a feeling I know what these are,” she said, the excitement obvious in her voice.

  “Let me guess,” he replied. “Sarcophagi?”

  “Exactly. Holy shit!” she said, wishing she could fan herself. “Hal, if there are bodies in these, this is the most important archeological find ever! If they’ve been sealed all this time, and if the seal was air-tight, these might not be fossils — they could be corpses! Tissue samples, internal organs, DNA, everything! Oh, man!”

  “Jeez, Steph, couldn’t you show a little enthusiasm here?” Reynolds was grinning at her excitement.

  “Oh, fuck off, Reynolds. Imagine making the biggest find of your career.”

  “Hey, I’m the guy who found this place, remember?”

  “Oh… Um, you’re right. Sorry. I wonder how these things open up?”

  Reynolds shined his light up at the object overhead. “I’d guess this has something to do with it.”

  Mitchell hadn’t paid much attention to the object, and now looked up and added her light. “You suppose there’re mechanisms contained in this thing?”

  “Could be,” Reynolds replied. He turned and walked to the object that looked like a podium. “Oh Stephanie,” he called in a sing-song voice. She joined him, being careful to stay at least three feet away from him. She gasped.

  “Now I may be wrong, but these just might be the controls,” he said.

  On the tilted surface of the “podium” were a series of characters towards the top, also written in raised gold, but smaller than those on the sarcophagi. Below them were larger characters. To the left was the now-familiar layout of a numeric keypad. To the right were five columns of three characters each. “This must be a combination again, but more complicated than a simple door combination,” he said.

  The two of them began photographing the surface in detail.

  While they had been surveying the raised area, Lightfoot and Greissman had split up, each working their way around opposing sides of the main chamber. To either side of the entrance to the chamber were open doorways leading to smaller rooms. Lightfoot had gone to the right, Greissman to the left.

  Carefully watching where he was stepping, Lightfoot entered the first door in the entrance wall and shined his light around the room. Somewhat to his surprise, the far wall didn’t follow the angle of the outer wall, but rather was vertical to a height of about eight feet, where it then began to arc in toward the center of the room. The wall next to which he stood did the same, reaching the inevitable arched peak overhead. The opposite wall was about 20 feet away; shining his light to either side, he guessed the room to be about 80 feet long.

  The room was filled with a large number of objects, strewn about in random order. Some seemed to be of obvious purpose, such as a what might have been a cart if it had wheels. Others were odd shapes, the purpose of which Lightfoot couldn’t begin to guess.

  Along the far wall he could see a large number of long, tall objects, side by side along the wall, apparently attached by clamps or hooks. As he crossed the room and approached them, a sudden chill went up his spine. Even having come from a completely different civilization, there was no mistaking what these were: Weapons. Taking out his camera, he photographed them from several angles and distances, and then took a count. There were 162 of them.

  Below each one was what looked like a handle to a drawer, and looking closely, he could see that a thin gap in the wall surrounded each handle. He decided not to touch them for now, but he was willing to bet that the drawers held ammunition.

  Turning around, he shined his light across the other wall, and found that on either side of the door it was lined with shelves packed with objects of various shapes and sizes. He crossed the room to examine them. Quite a few things appeared to have fallen from the shelves, littering the floor in front of them. There were cylinders ranging from a few inches in diameter and tall to more than a foot in diameter and three feet tall. In another section he found what appeared to be sidearms. There were tools of various types. Some, such as shovels and picks, had obvious uses, but others weren’t identifiable. Lightfoot photographed the shelves, moving systematically from left to right. When he had finished his survey, he left the room, and moved on to the right wall where another door was located.

  At the other end of the wall with the entrance, Greissman had entered another room. Inside, filling the floor, were rows of tall shelves. Greissman was reminded of library shelves. The shelves and the floor were strewn with hundreds, probably thousands altogether, of cylindrical objects. Taking care not to touch anything, he photographed his way around the room, and then left to continue his exploration.

  Fifteen minutes later, Lightfoot and Greissman had completed their surveys, and joined Reynolds and Mitchell at the sarcophagi.

  “What’d you guys find?” asked Reynolds.

  Lightfoot went first. “Some of the stuff I’m guessing about, but one room looks like a combination tool shed and armory…”

  “Armory?” Reynolds interrupted.

  “Yep. Weapons that look like both rifles and handguns, unless I’m completely off base. There’s another room that’s almost certainly a workshop. And the last room looks like a library.

  “Library?” asked Mitchell. “What makes you think that?”

  “Well, it’s got shelf after shelf of things that look like tablets with writing on their spines, along with a bunch of things that look like controls located below what appear to be viewing screens. In other words, like computer stations.”

  “Good grief, how advanced were these critters?” Reynolds wondered.

  “The more I see, the more I think they were way ahead of us,” answered Greissman.

  “Oh, man, if it is a library, think how much we could learn!” said Mitchell. “We might be able to decipher their language!”

  “Oh, and in all three rooms there’s a lot of stuff that looks like it fell off shelves,” said Lightfoot.

  Greissman chimed in. “Yeah, same here. One of my rooms has a huge number of cylindrical objects that I’m guessing are containers. There’s one that I’m almost certain is an infirmary, and there’s one that has about a hundred identical things in it, but I haven’t a clue what they are.”

  “Alright, we’re getting low on our air tanks, so let’s get outta here,” said Reynolds. “But before we go, let’s try one last thing. Let’s stand together and see if we can turn on the lights for a minute.”

  “Hal, are you sure that’s a good idea?” asked Mitchell.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What if doing so turns on something else in addition to the lights?”

  “Yeah, like an air conditioner — a re-oxygenator or something,” said Greissman.

  Reynolds considered for a moment, and then relented. He’d have liked to see the chamber lit the way it was meant to be, but the arguments were valid, and the power was still certainly low, and turning on the lights could wait.

  “Alright, we’ll wait. Let’s go.”

  They returned to the hallway to the air lock, walking around the sand bags. Once outside the air lock, they removed their helmets.

  “Let’s download all our photos to the computer. I’d like to call a meeting to assess what we’ve found and plan a full-scale assault on the Penthouse. Say, around 10 o’clock?”

  The others nodded, and they headed back to the office. Along the way, they collected Matthews and Taylor.

  “Commander, I have the feeling that you and Rank can both stand down,” Reynolds said as they rode up the elevator.

  “Dr. Reynolds, I heard mention of weapons. There w
as also some discussion of how advanced this civilization might have been. I think we’ll maintain a basic level of precaution until we’re a lot more secure about what’s inside that thing.”

  “Well, it’s your call. But please don’t get itchy to push that button.”

  Taylor hesitated, looking at Reynolds almost quizzically. “Dr. Reynolds… Hal… The last thing on Earth that I want to do is push this button.”

  Now it was Reynolds’ turn to look perplexed. Taylor had kept fairly quiet, always seeming to be at the peripheries of activities, but observing rather than participating. Taylor saw the look on Reynolds’ face.

  “Hal, I’ve kept a low profile here, because I know a lot of your team resents me and the reason I’m here. But personally, I’m fascinated by this whole place — this whole thing. I can’t believe I was lucky enough to get assigned to this duty.”

  Reynolds smiled, glanced at Mitchell, and then turned back to Taylor. “Fred,” he said, “I’m very pleased to hear that.”

  Chapter 19

  Realization

  OK, Dan, let’s start with the rooms you surveyed,” said Reynolds. The survey team along with all department heads were present, plus Sandy Ruggiero and Eugene Northrup. Northrup was studiously avoiding looking at Ruggiero. A video projector was set up to display the photos taken by the Penthouse survey team.

  “The first room to the right of the entrance appears to be a storage room for tools and weapons.” As Lightfoot spoke, photos of the room were projected on the screen.

  “Some of the objects in here are easy to identify. These things, for example, correspond pretty directly to the kind of cart you’d find in a warehouse, except for the lack of wheels. This thing over here looks for all the world like a cement mixer. And this looks almost like a golf cart, but again, without wheels.” He frowned, looking at the photo. “You know, I just realized: nothing in the room, including some pretty heavy stuff, has wheels.”

  He continued to narrate his slide show, describing the weapons, the tools and the containers. “My overall impression is that this room held stuff they needed for excursions outside Town Hall and the town itself.”

  “OK, how about your next room,” asked Reynolds.

  “This one looks like a workshop,” said Lightfoot, changing the photo. The scene revealed a series of tables formed of inverted tetrahedrons with their points embedded in the floor. “These things range from about three and a half to about four and a half feet high.” At one end of the room there were a trio of what looked like bathtubs suspended off the floor on pivots. At the middle of the side facing the room was an indentation that could serve as a pouring spout. “I’d be willing to bet these were used to mix concrete.”

  Another slide showed a single wide shelf at about chest height running along the far wall from the entry, and another showed a similar shelf running across the near wall. Above the shelves were numerous shapes and objects. “This isn’t too different from my workshop in the basement,” he observed, “except that I can’t identify what about three quarters of this stuff is.

  “But moving right along, I saved the best for last. Here’s what I’m guessing is the library.” The photo he projected showed the room as seen from the doorway. It was filled with tall shelves, which held row upon row of tall, slender objects. He switched to a close-up view of several of the objects on the floor. “Here are some that had to have fallen off the shelves near where they’re laying. I find it kind of interesting that these are the first things we’ve seen here that don’t follow a triangular design pattern.”

  The objects scattered on the floor were rectangular, with slightly rounded corners. Lightfoot had purposely included his foot in the photo to provide scale. The objects were roughly 15 by 25 inches, and appeared to be just under an inch thick.

  Switching photos, he displayed a close-up view of the tablets still on the shelves. The exposed edges had writing on them.

  “See why I think this is a library?” Lightfoot asked.

  “I don’t think there’s any question about it,” said Mitchell.

  He switched the scene to the far side of the room, where the entire wall was filled with a row of rectangular shapes on the wall itself, with a shelf projecting out from the wall under each one. In a closer view, the shapes on the wall were revealed to be slight recesses, with the same proportions and size as the tablets. The shelves angled down at the near edge. Each shelf had nine columns of nine symbols arranged in a square, with an additional column of nine symbols spaced slightly to the left of the main group.

  “Keyboards,” said Lightfoot. “I can’t imaging what else they might be. That appears to be their entire alphabet and numbers. There are 27 of them altogether. As for the recesses above them, my first thought was that they might be viewing screens, but I’ll bet they actually hold the tablets.”

  “Maybe the tablets form the view screens,” said Reynolds.

  “What holds them in place?” asked Sinclair.

  “Chewing gum?” offered Ruggiero.

  “The simplest solution would be magnetism,” said Dick Behling.

  “Let’s move on to Arnie’s rooms, unless you have anything more, Dan,” said Reynolds. Lightfoot shook his head.

  Ruggiero switched the video projector to display Greissman’s photos, which had been processed and digitized.

  “The first room is obviously a storage room, although for what I haven’t a clue,” Greissman began. His photo showed the presumed containers of various sizes and shapes. He advanced through a series of photos showing the room and its contents from various angles and distances.

  “Until we figure out how to open these, we can only guess what’s inside, but I’m thinking maybe food.”

  “Were there any that had broken open when they fell off the shelf?” asked Mitchell.

  “Nope. These things are evidently well made. I was tempted to pick some up and shake them, but we were told not to touch anything.”

  “Good boy,” replied Mitchell.

  “This room has me baffled,” Greissman said, switching to a new photo. It showed several rows of molded objects, somewhat reminiscent of the toilets in the Outhouse, but taller and narrower. At the top of each one was a smooth oval indentation. “There are four rows of 27 each, for a total of 108. There’s nothing in the room except these things.”

  Advancing to the last room he’d surveyed, his next photo drew some low gasps and a couple of “Wows!” from around the room. The objects in the room included several varieties of things that looked like chiropractor’s tables for an alien species, or more appropriately, for a dinosaur species. Form-fitted and some with holes through which a tail could evidently fit, they appeared to be operating tables.

  “This stuff will let us put together a good approximation of what our dino friends looked like,” said Mitchell, “at least as far as body size and proportions.”

  Greissman continued his show. The inner wall of the room was filled with shelves, which in turn were filled with an assortment of containers. Standing close to the outside wall was a row of objects that appeared in the first shot to be identical to the Outhouse toilets. When Greissman switched to a closer view, however, the photo revealed that the holes were missing.

  “It wasn’t until I saw these that I realized we haven’t seen any furniture until now, assuming that these are chairs,” he said.

  “Yeah, that’s right,” said Ruggiero. “Even in the library, where you’d expect chairs at the computer stations.”

  Greissman finished with a shot that showed the far end of the room, where there was another of the objects, this time with the familiar hole. The Penthouse was evidently equipped with a single toilet.

  “Alright,” said Reynolds, “I’ll let Steph brief you on what we found in the main chamber.”

  Once Ruggiero had switched the display to her computer, Mitchell described the raised area and the three objects it supported. She presented her theory that the two large objects were sarcophagi, and showed the c
ontrol panel and the object suspended from the ceiling. When she was finished, Reynolds again took the floor.

  “OK. What we need to do is to plan our exploration of the Penthouse. The first problem we’ve got is the atmosphere inside, which is unbreathable. Arnie’s guess is that the oxygen’s been removed to prevent oxidation of items stored inside, and on his recommendation, we’ve maintained the atmosphere as best we’ve been able to so far. The question now that we’ve done our preliminary survey is whether we should continue to do so.”

  “Working in full bio suits is gonna be awfully confining,” said Sinclair.

  “I agree,” said Reynolds. “I’d like to hear any thoughts on the pros and cons of normalizing the atmosphere.”

  “Hal,” said Greissman, “I still think it was a wise precaution, but at this point, I’d have to say that from what we found, I think it makes sense to normalize it. I didn’t see anything that would appear to be in immediate danger of damage from exposure to oxygen.”

  “I’m with Arnie,” said Mitchell. “Whatever the original purpose of Town Hall was, that purpose ended, in practical terms, millions of years ago. It’s an archeological site now.”

  “Arnie, do we have your blessing to unseal and remove the air lock?” Reynolds asked.

  “Unless my cultures show something dangerous within the next day or so, I’d say yes.”

  “Rank, can you run ducting up the stairs and around the corner to pump air into the Penthouse?”

  “I’ll have to jury-rig something, but I can get air up there.”

  “Good. Once we’re set up to work inside, this becomes Steph’s show. Steph, you want to describe your plan?”

  “Sure. The first thing we need to do is light the interior ourselves. For the time being I’d like to avoid turning the Penthouse’s own lights on, since we’re not sure what else might get turned on with them. We’re going to have to take some of the lights we’re currently using to recharge Town Hall for lighting the interior.

  “This also means that we have to be careful about keeping distance between ourselves when we’re in there. Assuming that a 260 pound weight will turn on the lights means that Jill and I could stand next to each other,” nodding towards Jill Hodge, who at five feet, three inches barely topped a hundred pounds, “but Hal and Bob can’t.