Ame headed for one of the low ridges of rubble that crisscrossed the area, as she had done on previous stops. It looked no different from any of the other ridges of rubble as far as Bram could see.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Another rooftop,” she said. “Pretty intact under there, I should think. A warehouse or distribution center, maybe, from the size of it and from the way it’s situated—you can see how long that unbroken ridgeline goes on.”
“But why—”
“Come on. This way.” She had already planted a locater beacon in the debris for future reference, and now she scrambled up a low slope, sending up clouds of dust and chips that hung there in the inconsequential gravity.
“Careful of your suit,” Bram cried, but she had already disappeared over the edge. With a sigh he leaped after, soared over the peak with his legs tucked up, and dragged a toe to put himself down just on the other side. Unexpectedly, he found himself standing next to Ame on a forty-five-degree slope that ended at the base of what was ummistakably an uncovered wall of stone one hundred feet away.
“I thought I saw it when we were at the top of that last jump,” she said complacently. “Collapsed roof. Quake, maybe—we’ll have to ask Enry how quakes would work on a body with stresses like this one. Or maybe a meteorite strike. Look, it took four levels with it—it must be all tumbled down underneath there.”
She pointed, and Bram saw the broken ledges on the wall opposite, each with its cap of dust.
“And that will tell us how deep the regolith lies on a body like this one after we measure the slump,” she said. “You know, there must have been a lot of leftover junk in this system after Original Man got through with his construction project. We’ve got seventy million years’ worth of impact debris and dustfall. Lot of digging to do. Small bodies tend to lose mass because of high-energy impacts. The gravity doesn’t hold on to the stuff that fountains up. But on a body like this, even though the surface gravity is low because of rotation, there’s still the attraction of all that mass. The impact debris has no place to go, really, and over the eons it settles down in a slow rain and stays.”
“You’ve been studying your astronomy.”
She gave a pleased laugh. “It’s the same as geology in a place like this, isn’t it?”
“What do you expect to find under all that rubble?” He gestured at the tipped slope they stood on.
Her eyes shone. “Fossils, if we’re lucky. There’d be organic material if this was a food depot—or even if people lived or worked here, away from the operational center. People leave garbage. And garbage means mold, bacteria, microfossils. Maybe even the bones of vermin. Original Man must have had vermin.”
Bram remembered a childhood tale: The Dappled Piper of Shu-shih.
“Yes, indeed,” he said. “They called them rats.”
“Member of the order Rodentia” she said with a frown. “They’re in the mammal list, but Original Man doesn’t have much to say about them.”
“I’ll settle for a few dessicated bacteria. Would there be any DNA left after seventy million years?”
“Maybe. This place isn’t cold. But it’s airless and dry. Original Man ressurected something called Tyrannosaurus rex from a bone fragment after a similar period. In his twenty-first century. They kept them in zoos.”
He caught something of her excitement. “What a find a few bone fragments of Original Man would be! If we could do some DNA sequencing on a big enough sample, we could find out if he edited us before broadcasting our genetic code.”
“We don’t know his burial customs. But millions of people must have lived here over a period of time to operate the beacon. There would have been accidents … illnesses that got out of hand … the rare individual who was immune to the immortality virus—” She broke off, abruptly aware that Jao would be listening through the radio link.
“We’d better get going,” Bram said. “You’ve left a marker; we can send an excavation team later.”
But Ame was unclipping a folding shovel from her belt. She flexed the stub of a handle once to activate the memory plastic and an instant later had a proper shovel. “Let’s see how deep the regolith is where it’s slid down here,” she said. “Help me clear some of this away.”
Bram worked with his gloved hands while Ame shoveled, and within a tenth of an hour they had uncovered a smooth, hard gray surface.
“No miracle materials, those,” Ame said. “They made the walls and roof of ordinary melted and poured stone. They could afford to mold it thick enough to cover expanses like this. There was plenty of stone, and power to spare before they switched on the transmitter.”
“Twenty-three sextillion kilowatts, Jao figured,” Bram said. “Trillions of times as much energy as the entire Nar civilization had at its disposal. It’s a little disappointing to find that their building construction was so prosaic.”
“Sophisticated megaliths,” Ame said. “That’s what they are. Great slabs meant to outlast eternity. Only this one didn’t.”
She rapped the end of her shovel sharply; hydrogen atoms spilled from the reservoir they had fled to, preempted bonds again, and once more the shovel handle shrank to fit into her belt. She occupied herself for a moment chipping a rock sample from the slab. “I’ll take this back to Enry for analysis,” she said.
She bobbed to her feet a little too quickly, and Bram pulled her out of the air. “Ready?” he asked. He was anxious to return to the walker and continue toward the apparent center of the complex.
“Just a minute,” Ame said.
She looked down the rubble-strewn slope of where its edge abutted the vertical wall and studied the V-shaped trench it made. “There’s broken rock in places along the edge,” she said. “If any of them correspond to broken sections of the underside of the slab, we could get underground without digging.”
“No,” he said. “We’re not going to crawl through caves without any backup. It’s too dangerous. This place will still be here when we get back. Let’s get going. We’re wasting our air supply on the outskirts.”
“As long as we’re here, let’s just take a look,” she said.
“All right.”
He gave in and followed her down the slope. He didn’t like it. They were in a deep groove, cut off from sight of the walker and the never-ending landscape. Only the stars burned overhead.
Ame was unconcerned. She played the light of her torch along the join of the two surfaces. Color vision returned, showing Bram vitreous streaks of green, brown, and yellow mixed with the gray. Even to the naked eye it was apparent that the rubble had slid down the slope to cover any possible cracks to a depth of many feet. It would take a lot of work to clear it away.
But he was wrong. Ame’s torch played on a gaping black aperture that ran down the rocky crease in a spot that seemed remarkably free of rubble. In fact, the rubble seemed to be piled higher on either side of it.
“It goes all the way down,” she said. “About twenty feet to where the floor is. Big enough to squeeze through, and then there’s a sort of triangular tunnel made by the edge of the roof slab and the angle of the floor and wall. The tunnel’s clean—hardly any debris to clear away. I wouldn’t have expected that. The roof must have collapsed with miraculous precision. Half our work’s been done for us already. And when we explore the whole length of the cleft, we’re bound to find places where we can get through into the main part of the ruin.” Her voice rose with excitement. “Acres and acres of undisturbed …anything! Bram-tsu, why don’t we just—”
“No,” he said firmly. “We’re not going to go crawling in there now. For one thing, we’d be out of radio contact. Come on, Ame. We’ve seen everything there is to see for the moment.
“I suppose you’re right,” she sighed. She played the beam of her torch in widening spirals around the entrance. “But I don’t understand where all the rubble went.”
Then they saw the footprints.
The tracks converged on the hole from
all directions. Heavy traffic. The reason they weren’t obvious in the immediate vicinity of the hole was that they became too thick there, obliterating outlines and churning up the dust. Besides, getting in and out of the hole meant belly crawling, further erasing any tracks.
But they were very plain farther away.
They were longer and narrower than an ordinary human footprint, but they covered about the same area and presumably would have supported a body of similar weight. The foot that had made the imprint had been encased in a tubelike boot with a ridged underside.
When he was able to catch his breath he said, “How long ago?”
Even his untrained eye could see that the outlines of the footprints were not as sharp as the prints he and Ame had left.
Ame produced a tiny measuring stick and compared the depth of the two sets of prints. Then she poked the rod into the dust in several places.
“They’re recent,” she said.
That startled him. “How recent?”
Her features worked within the helmet. “We’ll have to assume that the dustfall on this world has been diminishing during the last seventy million years, as the disks swept out their orbit. Dimishing on a logarithmic scale, maybe. Most of the dustfall must have taken place in the first few million years. But the roof must have collapsed, too, within a few million years of the time when Original Man abandoned the place, because of the later buildup that replaced the dust that slid down into the crevice.”
“Ame—how recent?”
“It could have been within the last thirty million years.”
Bram swayed in the low gravity. “More than forty million years after we thought the human race died out,” he whispered. He grasped her space-suited arm. “Could these prints have been made by a human foot?”
She shrugged. “Depends on what you want to consider human. It took the human foot only a few million years to evolve from a grasping organ that looked something like our hands. I suppose that in another forty million years, it could have evolved into something that looked like that.”
She splashed her light around the prints. “It’s hard to tell what might have been inside that boot,” she said finally. “But the elongated proportions aside, that could be a foot with the normal configuration of heel, instep, and toes. They always bend in the same place, so they had bones. Not like a Nar footprint that varied from step to step.”
“They brought animals with them.”
The light revealed meandering chains of shallow little paw prints, hardly larger than a human thumb. Then it struck Bram.
“What kind of animal could live in vacuum?”
The paw prints divided into five slender toes. Whatever had made them had been bare to space.
Ame leaned for a closer look. “A terrestrial animal. We’ve got quite a few drawings to go on. All terrestrial vertebrates had limbs based on a plan of five digits—even those that evolved into hoofs or wings. Bram-tsu, I’ve seen pictures of paws that must have looked something like these, on little climbing creatures like tree shrews, and raccoons, and … and squirrels!”
“And rats?” he suggested. “Yes, those, too.”
“Could this world once have had air?”
“N-no. Not with the low gravity. Besides, these prints show no signs of weathering. They’re perfectly preserved.”
Bram stood up. His knees felt weak. “We’ve never seen another terrestrial animal,” he said. “On all the Nar worlds, we were the only specimen. Now it appears that we’re standing on a world that once held at least two more specimens. Let’s get going, Ame. The sooner we finish our survey, the sooner you can start digging for fossils.”
“Bram-tsu, have you noticed something?” She moved her beam of yellow light around the area, holding it low to cast shadows.
The little paw marks were always superimposed over the footprints. Never the other way around.
“The animals were later,” he said.
“A lot later,” she said. She rested the light on a nearby cluster of paw prints. “Look at these. They’re very shallow because of the low gravity and because a creature that size wouldn’t have massed very much. They can’t be more than a millimeter deep. But even so, every detail is sharp. They’re not at all blurred by dustfall. They couldn’t possibly be more than a million years old.” She traced the paw prints with the light to where they disappeared into the crevice. “They might have been made yesterday.”
It was a ladder to the moon.
Bram and Ame left the walker at the edge of the massive circular housing and walked over to where the two thick ropes rose straight up into the sky, taut as bowstrings.
The ropes were semitranslucent and so thick around that it would have taken six or seven people joining hands in a circle to have embraced them. The bulge of the winding strands was sufficient to have served as a spiral staircase.
“The moon’s tethered,” Bram said. “Like a captive balloon.”
They stared up to where the cables disappeared into the sky. They were visible, Bram guessed, to a height of a couple of miles.
One of the cars that once had plied the tremendous mooring line was stalled about a hundred yards up, like a bead on a string. It was a flattish ovoid with portholes around the rim, and the beam of torch reached high enough to show it to be painted a jolly shade of red. The cable passed through the car’s center. Bram could only guess at the nature of the mechanism that climbed the braided cord—worm gears or ratchets or cogwheels. But there must have been an inner carousel that housed it, to keep the passengers from getting dizzy.
What a ride it must have been! Being whirled upward at thousands of miles an hour. How would they have managed turnover so that they could land on the moon right side up? Was there a way station at the point where the moon’s gravitational influence took over? A transfer point linking the two cables? There would have to be one car coming down for every car going up, to maintain equilibrium: One didn’t fool around with stresses like these!
His eyes moved across a mile of circular plaza to where a second set of sky ropes had been guyed. One of them had snapped. The end of the cable lay in ruins amid the buildings it had smashed. The dangling end of the rope was visible about a half mile up. The remains of an ovoid car that had slipped off the end of the rope lay strewn across the plaza.
Bram hoped no one had been in it. The disaster most likely had happened millions of years after the departure of man—maybe even millions of years after the time of the narrow-footed visitors. But the remaining set of cables had been strong enough to hold the moon down. The astonishing system had been engineered for redundancy.
Unable to resist, Bram reached out a cautious hand and touched the glasslike rope where it rose out of an encircling collar. He might have been touching a column carved out of solid steel. It was utterly hard, utterly immovable.
“Now we know what those hairline markings on the moon are,” he said. “The moon’s wearing a harness.”
“Bram-tsu, Jao is going crazy,” Ame reminded him delicately.
“Sorry, Jao,” Bram said, switching on the receiver of his suit radio. “I guess you’ve been listening to me and Ame oohing and ahing. I forget that you can’t see it.”
A howl of the purest agony reached him. After a moment, Bram realized that words were embedded in the incoherent gargling sounds.
“Describe it. What are the dimensions? What does the surface look like? What colors do you get when you flash light on it? How’s it anchored? Careful of loose threads, if there are any. You could lose a finger.”
Bram gave him a brief description of the rope and the surrounding installation. “I can’t imagine what it would be made of,” he said. “And I can’t see how it’s anchored. It just disappears into the ground.”
“Yar,” Jao said, breathing hard. “Each thread is a single continuous molecule that reaches from here to the moon. My guess is that it’ll turn out to be mostly oxygen bonded to silica, magnesium, and aluminum, with a carbon backbone to help ou
t with all the connections. It’d be harder than diamond and with a higher tensile strength than amorphous boron to start with, and then there’d be some kind of submolecular weaving between adjacent chains … And, oh yah, you won’t find where it’s anchored, because it reaches all the way down to the original core of this world, forty-five million miles under your feet. That’s because it’s only a guide thread—part of the warp and woof that held this world together while they were spinning it.”
“Slow down,” Bram said. “I can believe in your tied, down moon because I can see the evidence here with my own eyes—and by the way, you’d better radio Jun Davd right away and tell him that we’ve solved the mystery of why the moons are lower than they ought to be for synchronous orbit. I’ll even accept your endless molecule till a better explanation comes along. But how could it support another forty-five million miles of its own weight?”
“It’s the other way around,” Jao said smugly. “The idea isn’t to hold the moon down. The moon is what holds the world up.”
Bram looked around at an apparently solid landscape. They were near one edge of the rim here. The avenues of rubble stretched to the opposite side, fifty miles away. The rectilinear mounds were higher at the lunar longitude than they had been on the outskirts of the enormous complex—the buildings had been taller and more important here. It had not occurred to Bram to wonder why the moonropes were peripheral and not centered, because, after all, the entire surface of the diskworld was the “equator.”
“You’re getting too farfetched,” he said, and waited for the next dizzying supposition from Jao.
“Am I?” Jao retorted. “I’ll bet you anything you care to name that when we cross that plain to the other side, we’ll find another cable car station and another set of ropes. Making an equilateral triangle with a fifty-mile base and its apex on the moon. Wait a minute! Make that a very narrow tetragon! Why not? The angle of divergence is minuscule on that scale. You might as well have parallel tethers. No, wait again! How about spreading the moon terminal still farther apart? At an angle that converges at the disk’s core? With a little truing of curves, you could have a ninety-million-mile section of parabola for your. antenna. Bram, we’ve got to map the whole topography of this disk! I’ll bet it has a concave cross section. Hard to detect, but it would make this razor’s edge of a rim the widest part, except for the leftover bulge at the hub!”
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