“My feelings, too,” Ralston admitted. “But the other students aren’t that much different, and nobody’s been tightening the bolts in their skulls.”
“For them, I can’t speak. I want to establish a solid reputation for myself,” Leonore said. “My mother says I’ll come running back, that I’ll never be able to do anything she or my father haven’t plotted out in minute detail for me.”
“I think she’s wrong.” Ralston stopped and looked at his wristcom. It provided a distance estimate as well as an inertial tracking fix if needed to return to camp. The tiny red arrow pointed almost directly backward to show the location of the main site. Ralston touched a stud on the side and got a green arrow pointing obliquely left. “That direction, about fifty meters or so to the edge.”
The rain diminished by the time the green arrow turned to a small dot in the center of the wristcom display.
“This is it,” Ralston said. The muddy flats appeared no different from any other stretch they’d passed, but the imaging radar had found the distinct outlines under the surface.
Ralston turned his small ultrasonic cleaner toward the ground and pressed the switch. It hummed for ten seconds, then shut down automatically. The mud had been blasted away in a small trench, but nothing of importance lay at the bottom. Methodically Ralston began a crisscrossing until he found a rectangular block.
“The corner?” asked Leonore. She had been following Ralston with the camera, ready to take a photo of anything uncovered. She trained the camera on the stone block.
“Maybe.” Ralston took the camera from her and flipped on the IR viewfinder. Using this makeshift infrared detector to trace the buried wall for several meters, Ralston mapped out the buried structure. Then a large hotspot showed. He used the sonic whiskbroom again and unearthed a metal door.
“Looks copper-clad,” Leonore said, running her fingernail along the edge and scraping away part of the green corrosion. He silently handed the camera back to Leonore, and she took pictures from several angles. “There’s the lock.” Her brown eyes turned questioningly to Ralston. Procedure dictated that they be more thorough with exterior investigation before opening any tomb. If sealed, they might have to pump out a few liters of trapped air for analysis before opening. A fiber optic probe would then be put into the chamber for a complete photo scan before they tried to open the door. Any number of methods might be employed. Ralston considered building an airtight room, evacuating it, and then opening the door so that no new gases would be introduced. Great care had to be taken to avoid introducing unwanted variables.
And then the real job would start. No datum could be taken for granted.
“It’s been opened. Not too long ago, either,” Ralston said, examining the lock. He gusted out pent-up breath in relief. Several days of tedious work could now be avoided. The air within the find would be the same as that outside. “The scratches around the catch—it’s a simple one—aren’t corroded as heavily. I find it hard to believe this dates back to the decline. Certainly, there’ve been natives opening it since then.” His wristcom worked on the information gathered by a tiny probe Ralston passed close to the scratches and the lock.
Leonore peered over his shoulder. “Opened less than a thousand years ago?”
“Took a while for them to all die off, maybe. This might be a shelter.”
“It might hold the reason for their sudden disappearance.”
Neither spoke for long minutes, each lost in thought. Ralston knew that this tomb held their future on Alpha 3. Publications? Seldom did a solid reason for a culture’s passing present itself. Mostly, archaeologists guessed, made up fanciful theories, spent long hours debating what no one could ever know for sure. This tomb might hold the definitive answer to Alpha 3’s abrupt descent from pre-spaceflight civilization to complete oblivion.
Several good, solid papers could result because he’d followed his instincts. Ralston knew the same thought ran through Leonore’s mind. A dissertation topic that would have the journals begging to publish it came along all too infrequently.
But the procedures for opening such a tomb had been worked out a thousand years back. The earliest archaeologists on Earth had known what to do. Schliemann. Mouhot.
“We can’t open it,” he said simply. “To spoil whatever’s inside is too great a risk. We’ve got to do it carefully, recording every step of the way.” Leonore nodded. Ralston smiled and added, “But we can make a few preliminary checks.”
He pulled the probe, mounted at the tip of a slender fiber optic, from the side of his wristcom. Lowering the probe through the lock, working it around, he got a good view of the lock’s innards. All the while, the wristcom recorded.
“Michael, look out!” cried Leonore.
Ralston jerked the probe back, but the tip caught just inside the rim of the lock. The mechanism had activated at even this innocuous touch. The door let out a moan like a dying man and began sliding sideways. A blast of fetid air struck Ralston in the face. He choked and turned from it. When he looked back, he saw only a dark, yawning cavity. The door had opened fully. Leonore took pictures, switching to an IR light and lens.
“I didn’t think this would happen,” Ralston said.
“But it did. Should we? I mean, nothing seems to have happened. No demons from the pits of hell have rushed up to devour us.” Even as she spoke, she instinctively crossed herself. Ralston doubted she knew that she fell back on the comfort it gave her.
Ralston considered the possibility that Alpha 3 had died from a plague and that this, as a refuge for the few survivors, might be contaminated. Even now millions of viruses or berserk bacteria might be gnawing their way into his blood, taunting his T-cells and daring the leukocytes to resist. He shook that notion off as paranoid. Never had such a naturally occurring disease been found on another planet; even if they had become exposed, their bodies were ecologies where a disease had to find a niche. If too foreign, it wouldn’t survive. If it fit in too well, their bodies, bolstered by the arm-numbing series of vaccinations they’d all taken prior to leaving Novo Terra, would fight successfully against intruders. For the first time, Ralston actually envied Leonore her med-port. He rubbed his arm and thought how painless it would be having the serum injected into the computer-driven box, then slowly pumped into the bloodstream.
Only on the Nex worlds had biological disasters happened—and this because of the P’torra meddling with one bacterium in the food chain. The planet deaths had taken years.
But the slim chance still existed: he and Leonore might have been exposed to a lethal disease. And he hadn’t brought along an analyzer to check.
“Think your wristcom’s good enough to gather the info we need?” the woman asked. Leonore peered down the steps into the vault, eager to go farther.
“We’d better close up and get back right away.”
“I don’t see how the mechanism operated,” she said. She ran her fingers along the edge. “The probe inside the lock acted as a key. What mechanism lasts for ten thousand years? They must have been serious about whatever was placed here.”
“It might not be that old. And if they wanted to protect whatever’s below, why design the door to open so easily?”
“Didn’t want to protect it from people, just the elements,” Leonore guessed.
“Go back to camp,” he said. “Get an analyzer and bring it here right away.”
“Disease?” she asked. Ralston shrugged. Leonore backed from the opening, reluctant to abandon such a find. “I’ll be back as fast as I can run.”
“Don’t slip and kill yourself in the mud,” Ralston cautioned. “The analyzer would be hard to replace.”
“But…” Leonore’s sudden flare of temper faded when she saw he only joked. “I’ll carry it back on a satin pillow. What service, right? Remember me in your paper.”
“Co-authors,” Ralston promised. He adjusted the wristcom to check on his body temperature and pulse rate. While his heart beat more rapidly than normal, no other
vital sign appeared out of the ordinary. This meant nothing, but Ralston took it as a good sign that he hadn’t gotten a faceful of exotic alien microbes. Only a complete blood chemistry would verify his gut-level feeling, though.
“It’s starting to rain again,” he said. “Better get going.”
“It’s always raining. Never stopped. Not really.” Leonore paused and looked directly into his gray eyes. “Be careful.” She held out the camera.
“I won’t enter until we get the analyzer running.”
Leonore’s lips curled into what was almost a sneer. Her head bobbed up and down, then she turned and vanished through the gray wall of rain.
Ralston heaved a deep sigh. She knew him better than he knew himself. The lure of that black square proved too much. “Only a step or two,” he said aloud.
He peered through the IR range finder on the camera and saw a long hallway extending due south from the foot of the stairs. At twenty meters the corridor T-branched, hinting at an extensive subterranean facility. Ralston pulled the fiber optic probe out as far as it would go, then descended another few steps until the door frame came level with his eyes. To one side he saw the mechanism, an elaborately encased set of mechanical gears and weights. This alone might tell much about the culture and its development.
But the corridor. That branching both left and right. No magnet pulled iron more strongly than this mystery drew Michael Ralston.
His wristcom beeped loudly, startling him. He glanced down and saw that he still had the body scan activated. His pulse rate had climbed well past norms from the excitement. Ralston turned off this function and let the full capacity of its tiny block circuit fill with data.
“This is wrong,” he said softly, but he couldn’t help himself. Ralston went down to the lowest step and peered into the darkness. The Stygian black thwarted his eyes, but through the IR lens he saw walls covered with intricately painted murals. If he’d left the wristcom monitoring his pulse, it would have beeped again. Ralston forced himself to calm.
He looked back up the stairs. Rain pelted through the door and dribbled down into the corridor. He shucked off his coat, used it to meticulously clean his boots of all the mud caked on them, and went back up the short stairway. A few minutes tinkering with the door mechanism permitted him to half close the door. The narrow opening he shielded with his coat to keep out the worst of the water.
“IR goggles. We’ll need to get out the IR goggles,” he muttered. Dropping to hands and knees, Ralston began using the ultrasonic whiskbroom to brash the dust on the floor to one side. He made sure that the wristcom and sonic cleaner both recorded the depth of the dust before he moved it. Analysis of the dust could come later.
Centimeter by agonizing centimeter he cleaned a narrow path the length of the corridor to the juncture. Most of the work Ralston had done in semidarkness, using only the wan light entering the door. Now, to both right and left, he saw absolute darkness. Using the IR camera viewfinder, Ralston studied the floor, walls—and beyond.
“Eat your goddamned heart out, Velasquez!” Ralston crowed. “Proteus 4 is shit compared with this!”
Ralston hurriedly whisked a path along the right-hand corridor for a distance of ten meters, then stopped and stood. He cursed volubly, wishing for visible light. He peered through the IR viewfinder in stark amazement at what he saw. Slowly, he took one picture after another, knowing the visible spectrum would reveal even more when they got down into these catacombs with the proper photographic and recording equipment.
“I don’t believe this!” he exclaimed, turning to his left. The corridor stretched far beyond the limited range of the IR camera. He took a few more pictures before retracing his path to the juncture, then going down the left-hand branch.
Ralston had to stop several times and control himself. He shook with excitement. He had always wondered how Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon had felt on entering Tut’s tomb. Or the sense of wonder Griegos had experienced seeing lofty, delicate spires of Vegan spider steel for the first time.
“Dr. Michael Lewis Ralston, explorer,” he said proudly. Ralston had always thought he had a firm, pragmatic opinion of himself and his abilities. Now he found himself more than a bit awed by the discovery he’d made. “Damn, but this is great!” he exclaimed.
Another corridor, again vanishing beyond the limits of his infrared viewfinder, stretched to the right. This vault might extend for untold kilometers. This might be only the top level!
A scratching noise sounded behind him. Ralston didn’t turn. He was too intent on taking in everything before him.
“Bring the analyzer over here, Leonore,” he called. “And I hope you brought a couple more film blocks for the camera. I don’t think a thousand pictures will scratch the surface. This is great!”
The footsteps became more distinct now. The squishing sounds drew Ralston’s attention. Leonore shouldn’t be tracking in water and mud. Not into the find of the century.
“Leonore, clean off your—”
Ralston got no further. Blackness filled blackness as a heavy object smashed into the side of his head. He reeled, then slumped to the floor, unconscious.
FIVE
War drums sounded. It took Michael Ralston several seconds to realize that he hadn’t been mysteriously transported back to a Nex war vessel, that the only pounding lay within his throbbing head. Ralston opened his eyes and thought he’d gone blind, then realized he still lay on the vault floor. Rolling over produced a new constellation of flaring stars in his head, but the pain subsided. To his relief, dim light shone from the direction of the opened door. The wet odor of fresh rain and the gentle pat-pat-pat as it fell reassured him he hadn’t been trapped in this alien subterranean vault.
“Dr. Ralston? Are you there?”
“Leonore, inside. Be careful,” he called. He instantly regretted the effort. Ralston reached back and touched the large, tender knot on his head. His fingers came away sticky with blood.
“You said you wouldn’t go in,” came the woman’s disembodied voice. Ralston tried to understand what had happened to him. Someone had hit him from behind, but it wasn’t Leonore.
At least he doubted it. She sounded both envious and disapproving. Nothing in her tone indicated anger—and not to the extent of physical assault.
Soft shuffling steps neared. Ralston heaved himself erect and swayed slightly. The dizziness and nausea passed before Leonore Disa rounded the corner. In one hand she held a small light. In the other she carried the analyzer.
“Are you all right?” she asked. Ralston thought the concern in her voice sounded too real to be feigned. He decided not to mention the attack.
“Of course. No reason to think otherwise, is there? Just because,” he rushed on, not giving her a chance to speak, “your professor showed his moral and intellectual weakness doesn’t mean anything’s wrong. I don’t think I disturbed anything.”
“You tracked in mud,” she said disapprovingly. Ralston peered at the large chunks of drying mud on the floor between them. Either Leonore had entered, hit him, retreated and then cleaned her boots before re-entering, or she hadn’t been responsible.
“Thanks for not doing the same,” he said. Her boots were spotlessly clean. The woman frowned and Ralston knew why. He, too, had cleaned his boots. She had to wonder who had been tracking in the mud.
Ralston wondered, too.
“We’ll do a quick check, then seal up and evaluate the prelim data,” he said. “After we get a better idea of what we’ve uncovered, then we can bring in the real equipment.” His enthusiasm soared again. The knot on the side of his head still throbbed, but curiosity over their find erased any discomfort.
“Any need to analyze the dirt on the floor?” Leonore asked.
“Later. I want a good set of photos for these.” He took the hand light from her and gave the lens a twist. The narrow cylinder of light expanded into a cone five meters wide at its base. One of the small side chambers lit up.
Leonore ga
sped. Even Ralston had to restrain his impulse to cry out. The scene in the first diorama looked real.
“Them. The natives of Alpha 3,” Leonore said in a voice cracking with emotion. “They preserved themselves in a museum.”
“Are they replicas? It doesn’t look like they’re embalmed,” Ralston said, peering intently into the scene. Unlike most dioramas he was familiar with, this one had no restraining rail or glass partition. Two natives stood, a full head taller than Ralston’s 190 centimeters. Their heads lacked hair or covering of any sort other than a close-cropped down; the most prominent features were the ears. They stuck out like radar dish horns.
“Mobile ears capable of independent movement, just as you surmised,” Ralston said to Leonore. “Good work. You guessed a lot from the moldy corpses we’ve found.”
“They look so… so peaceful,” she said. She started to enter the diorama for a closer examination but Ralston restrained her. “Sorry,” Leonore said. “Got too involved.”
She took out the analyzer and turned it on. The various indicator lights flashed, and tiny beeps came from the guts of the machine as it began photographing, running tests of a dozen different kinds, recording everything, missing nothing.
“This must be the start of the exhibit,” Ralston said. “These two are reaching out in greeting.”
“Or the end of the exhibit,” Leonore said. “They might be waving good-bye.”
Ralston laughed. “It never pays to jump to conclusions. We are scientists and must follow strict procedure, even if we’ve done such a good job of ignoring it so far. Study everything, learn what we can, then come up with theories to explain it all.”
“Do you think this is representative of the terrain?” Leonore asked. The ground under the natives’ taloned feet looked nothing like the mud flats that covered so much of Alpha 3. “They don’t appear to be products of a wet world—not like Muckup is now.”
Ralston reluctantly pulled his attention from the first scene. He wanted it all—now! But there was so much to examine. He had to pick and choose. And be more alert than he had been earlier. Down the length of the corridor he saw particles of mud. Whoever had struck him had rushed on, perhaps performing a cursory examination of his own.
[Weapons of Chaos 01] - Echoes of Chaos Page 5