“He’s on the second level,” Mitchell whispered, almost as if she was afraid to startle the Sapiosaur. She shivered, knowing that the images they were seeing had been made from within feet of where they now were.
For the next half hour, nothing changed except the positions of the clouds and the occasional flying creature.
And then there began a low rumble, which steadily built into a roar. The scene started to shake, and they could see the trees swaying and shaking at the edge of the jungle. The roar built, and the scene shook ever more violently.
As the shaking continued, first one, then two, and then dozens of glowing objects entered the tops of all three pictures, falling to Earth.
“Lunar debris,” said Hanrahan. “It’s probably falling all over the side facing the Moon.”
The pieces ranged in size, as did the damage caused by their impact. On the far horizon a large piece caused a huge explosion; smaller pieces falling on the city simply bounced off the sides of pyramids or put small craters in the spaces between them.
And then, in the center picture, there was a sudden bright flash, and all three images were violently jarred, and the screen went dark.
Once again, no one said anything for a very long time.
•
Ghoakon had found it difficult to resist the instinct to put his affairs in order, but he managed to do so. What would it matter, after all?
He had spent the morning making certain that Garlmek and Touolok were safely enclosed in their chambers, and that the tablet holding prepared material and the recordings of the impact on the moon from the night before that had been received from Maakt’i was properly set up and ready to record the final moments. He’d then sealed the door of the mastaba himself, and returned to his quarters.
His wife was very quiet, and he found that he also had little to say. They shared a final meal, and he spent some time recording some final thoughts in his journal, against the chance that it might someday be found.
When he saw the expected flash in the sky through the window, he asked his wife if she wished to join him on the verandah of the mastaba to view the end. She declined, as he’d known she would. They embraced for a long moment, and nuzzled each other, and then he’d left.
He strolled through Tarsill, drinking in the crisp air and the beauty of the day, and slowly climbed the stairs of the former administrative building. When he reached the top, he walked to the side that faced North, where he could see the glow on the horizon.
He survived the first few minutes of the earthquakes, but when the large piece of lunar debris hit the base of the building, the concussion killed him instantly.
Chapter 24
Understanding
Hummford was so engrossed in her study that she was startled when Reynolds sat on the stool next to her.
“How’s it coming,” he asked.
Tucking her chin back in towards her throat, she licked her lips and replied: “Glauk touph eraindh’k sorralk dhakhain.”
Reynolds smiled. “I heard it the other way around.”
“Loosely translated, that meant ‘Progress being made by this individual is satisfactory.’ I can understand most of the non-technical things I hear, and about half of what I read.”
She had spent nearly every waking hour for the past eight weeks pouring over the tablets, to and past the point of exhaustion. After she nearly collapsed in the fourth week of study, Deirdre McCollum had ordered her to take a full day off, and to limit herself to 12-hour days thereafter. She was also instructed to come up to the main office for dinner each day.
She had found the tablet she’d been hoping to, the textbook on the Sapiosaurian language. It had let her connect the written language to its spoken form, but had taken her only part of the way towards understanding the meanings and concepts the words represented. The Sapiosaurs’ way of thinking was very different from human thought processes.
She learned that the alphabet was indeed a cross between pictographs and phonetic representation. The most commonly-used words, such as “and” or “Sapiosaur” — actually, they called themselves “Noaud” — were represented by a single character. Other characters represented sounds or sound combinations, which were strung together to form words and sentences. The written language contained no punctuation, relying instead on a highly formal structure to define sentences by context.
Sandy Ruggiero had become Hummford’s full-time assistant, having surprised herself by discovering a knack for picking up and pronouncing the language.
The main chamber and all six rooms surrounding it were now illuminated for 12 hours each day. The team had found that Town Hall’s power management was efficient enough that there seemed to be no limit on the number of lights, computer terminals or other systems they could activate.
The portable computers — there were 18 in all — could be charged with ten hours’ exposure to high-intensity light, and would then run for nearly a week before needing to be recharged.
As Hummford and Ruggiero expanded their understanding of the language, other team members studied tablets concerning their own areas of interest, aided by the audiovisual design of the information. Ruggiero was kept particularly busy helping others understand parts that weren’t illustrated. With their increasing ability to decipher the language, the two were getting ever better at reading the titles on the spines of the tablets, and were becoming more adept at locating tablets on particular subjects.
Dick Behling and Dan Lightfoot had spearheaded the exploration of the tool room and workshop, and with the language team’s help, had made excellent progress toward understanding Sapiosaurian technology.
The firearms that particularly concerned Lightfoot were, they discovered, directed-energy weapons, with four settings, one of which was Off. At the lowest setting, they would stun a creature the size of a Sapiosaur — and presumably, a human. At the medium setting, they’d kill a Sapiosaur or stun a Tyrannosaur. At the high setting, they’d vaporize anything at which they were aimed.
On one of the rare winter days when the sun was out and the wind at only 30 knots, Lightfoot, Behling and Hanrahan took one of the rifles outside for a test-firing. Lashing it to a pair of light stands, Lightfoot first tried to fire it from a distance using a loop of nylon rope around the trigger. When that didn’t work, he gingerly stood at arm’s length and pulled the trigger himself, again with no success. It was only when he thought to take off his glove that the rifle fired, leading to the conclusion that either skin capacitance or warmth acted to override a safety.
Their first target was a piece of two-by-four. The low and medium settings produced nothing except a sharp sizzling sound lasting about a quarter of a second; the wood showed no effect. The high setting produced a visible beam, burned a one-inch hole in the wood, and set it on fire. The rifle burned a similar hole in a cinder block.
They tested the rifle’s capacity by firing it repeatedly at the high setting, and the charge in the cartridge was good for 38 shots. When they swapped in a new cartridge and tested on the low setting, they gave up after firing 600 times, with the rifle still seemingly going strong.
Following this experiment, Lightfoot collected all of the energy cartridges and locked them away, along with all of the sidearms.
The objects in the tool room that appeared to be carts without wheels were exactly that. From the tablets, they learned that throughout the city, the streets and floors carried an electric charge just under the surface, and that the carts operated on a principle akin to magnetic levitation. When fully charged, both the warehouse-style push cart and the larger unit that resembled a golf cart would float about three-quarters of an inch above the floor.
Hanrahan had been especially taken by the way the technology worked. In the case of the push cart, when the handle was grabbed, the cart would respond to pressure on the handle in any direction, moving effortlessly regardless of the amount of mass loaded on it. If the handle was released, the cart would come to a smooth stop and remain i
n place.
Despite this remarkable technology, however, The Sapiosaurs seemed never to have developed any form of air travel. In fact, there was as yet no evidence found that they’d even tried to. They had developed both hot air and helium balloons, but these appeared to be used for recreation or weather observation.
Hanrahan’s earlier comments about the door mechanisms not using magnetic levitation became a bit ironic in light of the new information. The city, it turned out, had been built before the development of the mag-lev technology, “only” a million and a half years before the asteroid.
Bob Fletch had been fascinated by the Sapiosaurs’ construction methods. They had developed a type of electro-reactive acid that literally melted slabs of granite, producing a concrete-like material that could be poured or molded. When the desired shape had been achieved, an electric current was applied to set the concrete almost instantly. With a different chemical mix, the same basic stuff could be turned into wide variety of materials, including a conductor, a solar collector or an electroluminescent material that could be painted on ceilings.
The concrete could also be formulated for a lighter density, as was used for the tablets, the firearms and some of the tools. This lighter form created a tough, resilient plastic-like material.
They had a strong understanding of metallurgy, and created jewelry from gold and silver, but instead of using pure metals or metal alloys for practical items, they in effect “alloyed” metal into their basic concrete.
Behling and Hanrahan took on the examination of the computer technology. It turned out that there was no way to “tap into” the display screens, because they worked in a way completely different from the human video system. Whereas human video is based on a system of scanning, with images drawn on screen line-by-line much as words are written across a page, the Sapiosaurian display was based on quadrangulation of electrical potentials across a conductive layer just under the surface of the screen. The surface layer could be made to glow in any color and at any brightness in a continuous range across its surface. There were no “pixels,” or finite bits of the image.
As for the computers themselves, the complexity of the technology and the still limited understanding of the language left the humans perplexed. There seemed to be no discrete functions, such as microprocessor, memory, clock, etc. Instead, a crystal was “taught” how to function as it was grown, by a method the humans hadn’t yet been able to comprehend.
Since there was no way to directly connect the human video system to the tablets, the team continued to rely on video cameras to record the tablet displays. Hanrahan eventually obtained a number of “lipstick” cameras that he mounted on arms from the wall over the terminals. This let the team members work more comfortably, since they no longer had to stay out of view of cameras on tripods behind them.
Arnold Greissman had been studying the pantry, where his guess had been partly right: the majority of the containers did hold food. The balance were filled with seeds.
In the shed on the surface, he’d set up an isolation box fitted with heavy arm-length gloves, as a precaution against the possibility that the containers held something really nasty. He found that the containers were opened by twisting the top about a quarter turn and then lifting if off, bayonet-action style. At the twist, there was the unmistakable sound of a vacuum seal being broken. Inside, he found the first container packed with cylindrical objects about an inch in diameter. Taking one out, he found it was pliable, and easily broken into pieces. They were either edible, he decided, or explosive.
Running a full spectrum of tests, he determined that they were edible. They contained a blend of proteins and carbohydrates, and had evidently been sterilized during packing.
Having determined that they were safe, he played guinea pig. Breaking off a small piece, he tasted it.
The food would have done an Army supply sergeant proud. It was bland, basic stuff, probably what corresponded to Krations. Altogether, he found three different varieties, which he called by their colors: there was gray food, green food and brown food. And there were tons of it.
In addition to a wide variety of seeds, he also found a good number of containers of water. While high in mineral content, it was, like the food, completely sterilized.
Setting up shop in the infirmary, Deirdre McCollum used one of the portable computers to study Sapiosaur physiology. She found that they were warm-blooded, and were omnivores — they ate both meat and plants, just like humans. Their average adult height, based on comparisons with the operating tables, was slightly over seven feet.
Each fertilized female could produce one egg per year, which she carried in a pouch behind flaps of skin until it was ready to hatch. The young grew quickly, and reached adulthood at 11 years. The Sapiosaurs, however, had practiced birth control, and most females produced two offspring.
They had eliminated nearly all disease in their own species, and the average life span was something over 150 years. The main causes of death were old age, accidents and the occasional consumption by larger species of dinosaurs outside the city.
Their medical skills were extraordinary. In addition to impressive surgical techniques, their medicines accelerated the healing of wounds, and they had developed methods to induce regeneration of severed limbs and heal other types of damage.
Stephanie Mitchell intended to concentrated on Town Hall in general and the two suspension chambers in particular, but her progress had been minimal. She’d not been able to find any tablets that dealt specifically with the design of the central pyramid.
She’d been searching for five weeks, and had come to learn a great deal about the Sapiosaurs and their society, when McCollum brought her one of the medical tablets. “I think this might include some of what you’re looking for, though I’m not sure how much it’ll help,” she said as Mitchell slipped the tablet into her portable. “It shows the process of suspending and then reviving a small dinosaur, but it’s like a lot of the medical tablets I’ve been going through: the language is highly technical, and there’s a lot Flo and Sandy haven’t been able to translate.”
The suspension process involved replacing the blood of the creature with a chemical that produced something like a coma, but with all bodily functions stopped. The creature was then immersed in a gelatinous substance, and a weak electrical current was applied. To revive the creature, it was removed from the gel, its blood was pumped back in along with a chemical that would start the revival, and a complex sequence of electrical pulses would restart bodily functions.
Upon hearing about the role electricity played, Mitchell’s heart sank. “Town Hall’s been buried for millions of years, and when we got here, it was completely inert. If they depended on electricity to make the suspension work, then our friends out there are long dead.”
“I’d have to say that I think you’re probably right. But at this point, we’re speculating. Maybe the process they used on themselves was different. Maybe they took a long suspension into account.”
The comments made Mitchell feel a bit more hopeful, though she knew that she was grasping at straws. She continued to search for clues that would help in an attempt to bring the Sapiosaurs out of hibernation.
Now, after eight weeks, she’d given up hope of finding an instruction manual for the controls in the main chamber. She decided that either one of the team would either stumble across the information she was looking for, or she’d have to wait until the team’s collective understanding of the language and the technology reached a critical mass, allowing them to decipher the writing on the control panel.
A thought had been gnawing at her for several weeks, and one night, as she and Reynolds lay on his cot trying to go to sleep, she discussed it with him.
“You know, I’ve been looking for information on how to revive our sleeping friends, and so far I’ve found diddly squat. I think I know why.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because it isn’t there. Think about it. The Sapios were buil
ding a life boat, so to speak — a time capsule with two of their own inside. They didn’t expect any of their species to survive. So why bother to leave information inside the Penthouse on how to revive the two if there wouldn’t be anyone to read it?” Reynolds frowned, but said nothing.
“There had to be an automated system that would wait for a certain set of conditions to exist, and then trigger the system to revive them. Only it failed. They were never revived.”
Reynolds raised up on his elbow to look at her. “Well, we saw Town Hall get hit with lunar debris. Maybe the system was damaged.”
“That’d make sense. But what if the controls are only designed to initiate the suspension, and not to revive them?”
“I’m no engineer, but it’d seem pretty odd to me to build in one-way controls. For instance, what if their calculations had been off, and the asteroid had missed, or the damage had been much less than expected. Certainly they’d have provided some method for bringing them back out.”
This time it was Mitchell who was quiet.
Reynolds leaned over and kissed her. “Get some sleep,” he said softly, laying back on the pillow.
But it was a while before she drifted off. She wanted desperately to believe there was a chance for revival, even though she knew the possibility was very slim.
Chapter 25
Resurrection
It was Sandy Ruggiero who made the connection. She’d been studying a tablet that covered procedures for dealing with intrusions into the city by large carnivores, and noticed two characters that appeared to translate roughly to mean “emergency.”
She’d worked late one evening, and as she left the library the ceiling light in the main chamber had been turned off. A work light on a stand was the only illumination. As she turned toward the exit, a glint of light reflecting off the control panel caught her eye, and she realized that she hadn’t studied it for several weeks. She decided to take another look.
Sapiosaurus | Out Of Time Page 22