by Chad Oliver
As usual when something interesting turned up, nobody said anything at first. But to his practiced eye the signs were unmistakable: all the students had stopped digging by tacit agreement and were watching Charles Kelley clear something in his square. There were other signs as well—the very air seemed cooler, and all at once no one was tired any longer, and even lunch was pushed momentarily into the background.
Shackelford walked over, trying to see through the knot of spectators, and wondered what it was. There was a slight buzz of conversation, an undertone of interest, but he couldn’t make anything out of the scattered words and wisecracks.
“What is it?” he asked, and the others fell back to let him through.
Charles Kelley, who was a graduate student who knew his business thoroughly, looked up and grinned. “You tell me,” he said. He hoisted himself up from his archeologist’s crouch and moved back to let Shackelford look.
Shackelford squatted down and looked at the thing in the bottom of the trench, still imbedded in the earth. He dusted it with his whisk broom and got down closer. He scratched his head and cleared it a little around the edges with his sharp brick-layer trowel and looked again.
It still didn’t make sense.
It wasn’t anything spectacular, and in other circumstances it would hardly have attracted attention at all. It was a round object, about six inches in diameter, and it seemed to have cogs around the edges. It was hard, like pottery, but it didn’t feel like pottery. It was too dirty to tell him much, but he knew immediately that this thing—whatever it was—didn’t belong in a prehistoric Indian village on the Mexican hillside.
“Well,” asked Kelley, not entirely without malice, “what is it?”
“You got me,” Shackelford admitted. And then he added, lamely: “Must be some sort of ceremonial object.”
“Looks like a gear to me,” John Symmes smiled.
“Maybe it belongs to an ancient Chevrolet,” suggested Jim Fecho.
Shackelford grinned, but he wasn’t feeling too happy. What was the thing? What was it doing here? “Carl,” he said, “get a picture of this in place before we take it out, just in case. Some of you guys measure it in, will you? Then we’ll grab some lunch, ready or not.”
He took out his pocket tape and got a rough depth measurement from the surface. Thirty centimeters. Hardly a vast distance, of course—but still it definitely wasn’t surface. What was it?
He heard the Rollei click softly as Carl got his pictures, and he took down the coordinates and datum as Symmes and Fecho called them out. Then he carefully removed the disc with his pocket knife, looked at it once, and started down the hill for lunch, carrying it in his hand.
That was the way it started.
His wife, Dawn, had been on the cook detail, and so the canned meat and beans had been rendered fairly edible for a change. Shackelford ate hungrily at the plank table under the sagging sheet of canvas and, not for the first time, occupied his mind by thinking up grisly fates for the young lady who had faked her references as a camp cook and who had turned out to be one of those joyless females whose very proximity caused the food to give up and collapse.
After lunch, during the brief siesta which gave the clouds a chance to reform their ranks for what the students referred to as the Daily Typhoon, he took the thing out of his pocket and showed it to Dawn. He had cleaned it superficially, and two things were clear: it wasn’t pottery, and it did have neat, regular cogs in it.
Dawn gave up trying to straighten their little tent and looked at it, her rather impish eyes belying the ethereal quality of her name. “Could be a plant,” she suggested. “Remember the story that Dr. Mac tells about the cigar store Indian in Chicago?”
Bill settled himself on the cot and frowned. “I saw it in place,” he said, “but of course that could have been faked. But I don’t much think it’s a plant; these are all pretty serious students, even with all the kidding around. If anyone did pull a stunt like that, it would be Symmes, Fecho or Kelley—and it’s not a clever enough plant for that. Something like a Folsom point or a bit of Eskimo carving would be more down their alley. This thing doesn’t fit at all; it just simply doesn’t belong there.”
He looked at it. There it was—quiet, unfrightening, a little absurd. Just a neat disc of something that looked like plastic, dug out of the earth where it never could have been. Even in the higher cultures of central Mexico it would have been an utter anachronism, and here, in a relatively simple farming village, it was out of the question. The Indians weren’t using any plastics two thousand years ago—nor any wheels of any type, much less a wheel with gear cogs on it. The closest thing to it that had turned up amidst the scrapers and manos and projectile points of the site on the hill had been a small pottery spindle whorl, which was a far cry from the thing he held.
“What are you going to do with it?” asked Dawn, cocking an eyebrow.
Shackelford shrugged. “What can I do with it? It doesn’t fit in context, it doesn’t belong up there. The only thing to do with it is to call it intrusive and file it away somewhere. It’s like digging up a Neanderthal in Kansas. The best thing to do is to just cover him up again, unless you want the whole profession knifing you in the back.”
“Ummm,” said Dawn.
“What does that mean? You know there weren’t any Neanderthals to be found in the New World.”
“As far as we know,” corrected Dawn. “Science is supposed to be self-correcting, remember? No dogmas.”
“Ummm,” Shackelford said in turn, and lapsed into silence. Dawn was right, of course, as usual. He didn’t really believe for a minute that the disc was intrusive, that it just “happened” to be in the site, thirty centimeters underground. That, to him, was fantastic. The big questions were: how did it get there, and what did it mean?
He began to wonder. How many other inexplicable, unsensational artifacts had been dug up in archeological sites, then quietly filed away somewhere because their finders had been trained to believe that they couldn’t have been found where they had been found? Every archeologist could tell plenty of stories about things that didn’t fit. The whole picture of early man was undergoing extensive revision, but you didn’t read anything about it in the technical journals. There were certain things that just weren’t talked about.
Why?
Shackelford looked at the thing in his hand again and felt a queer tingling along his spine. He put it back in his pocket and got to his feet.
“Back to work,” he said. “Better bring your raincoat, hon, and go by and wake up Betty and Jenkins before you come up.”
As if to punctuate his words, the afternoon’s first thunder muttered above them in the mountains, and a cool breeze rustled across the valley floor.
The afternoon passed without incident, aside from the expected rain, and supper was unusually good, someone having managed to pick up some filets in Toplanque. It was after eight when Shackelford saw the jeep coming down the ranch road and got up from the poker game to greet their host.
One problem that an archeological field party encountered in Mexico was a place to stay. After you were greeted profusely by the mayor and the governor and all the town dignitaries, you still had to have a site to pitch your camp on. This had been solved in Shackelford’s case by the foreman of a large American-owned ranch in the hills thirty miles from Toplanque, and periodically they got a courtesy call from the ranch owner, Thomas Fitz-James, when he was in the vicinity. Fitz-James was a very wealthy beer manufacturer who kept three ranches in Mexico as hideaways for his children on summer vacations.
The jeep stopped and Fitz-James telescoped out from behind the wheel. “Telescoped” was literally the right word, Shackelford thought, but even that left something to be desired. Fitz-James was the biggest man Shackelford had ever seen. An incredible seven feet two inches tall, he was perfectly proportioned, and at distance seemed to be merely a tall man. But when he came toward you and kept looming larger and larger he gave you the creeps.
>
“Howdy,” said Shackelford, extending his hand to be crushed.
“Good evening,” said Fitz-James in a well-modulated, only slightly arrogant voice. “I just flew in from Cuba and thought I’d stop by to see how you folks are getting along.”
“Won’t you have some coffee?” Shackelford felt dwarfed and uneasy, which, he told himself, was ridiculous. Fitz-James had been a perfect host.
“Thank you, no. I’m expecting some people at the ranch tonight. I hope you’ve found your digging here interesting?”
“Fine so far,” Shackelford told him. “We did find a rather curious thing today.”
“Oh?” said Fitz-James, towering over him, his gray hair silver in the early starlight.
“Nothing very interesting to look at, I’m afraid—just a little plastic disc that looks like a gear or something. You haven’t been running any experimental machinery on the hill, I don’t suppose?”
Fitz-James laughed softly. “Hardly,” he said. “Perhaps one of the men dropped it up there, however.” He didn’t seem particularly interested, and Shackelford remembered that his first question had probably been simply a matter of courtesy. “If I can be of any help, just let me know,” the giant continued. “Goodnight to you.”
“Goodnight,” said Shackelford, and watched him leave through the darkness.
Quite suddenly, for no reason at all, the night seemed cold and lonely.
That night, lying in his sleeping bag in the tent, Shackelford stayed awake for a long time. He smoked three cigarettes and watched the little V of stars that glittered through the tent flap. He heard Dawn’s regular breathing by his side, and he lay very still so as not to disturb her.
The little stream fifty yards from his tent chuckled by softly in the darkness outside and a gentle breeze tugged at the canvas over his head. It was cool, but not cold, and there was a smell of pines in the air. It was an unusually fine night for the rainy season.
Shackelford usually had no trouble sleeping, and he was annoyed with himself. He thought about a lot of things, but he knew what was keeping him awake. It was the plastic disc, now sitting in a cardboard box under his cot. The thing was certainly commonplace enough, in a way. There was nothing alarming about it, nothing exciting. Most people would have simply written it off as one of those things and forgotten about it.
But Shackelford couldn’t understand it, and that bothered him. He had been around too long. He knew that the phrase “just one of those things” didn’t mean anything. Everything was important once you had the key, once you could read it. Shackelford didn’t respect theories overmuch; each year saw a brand new crop of “correct” theories. But evidence was something else again, and that disc was evidence. If he couldn’t interpret the evidence, he reasoned, that was his fault, not that of the evidence.
“Damn it,” he said aloud.
To most people it wouldn’t have been anything at all. But Bill Shackelford wasn’t most people. If he had been, he would not have been here at all, in a little tent in the mountains of Mexico. The thing haunted him.
It was late when he finally fell asleep, and he dreamed about giants. In the morning, when he woke up to call the cooks, the cardboard box under his cot was still there.
But the plastic disc was gone.
II
“We really have no choice, you know,” Thomas Fitz-James said quietly.
The Advisor smiled. The trip had been hurried and rather inconvenient, but he was glad to see Fitz-James again, and he was feeling relaxed and sociable. “Nothing to be alarmed about, Fitz,” he said. “You’re jumping to conclusions again.”
Fitz-James sipped his wine slowly and tapped his finger on the table, his ruby ring giving a soft blood-glow under the lamp. “I’m jumping to exactly one conclusion,” he said evenly, “and it’s this: I want to go on living the way I have been living, and I want my children to have the chance to do the same.”
There was a moment of silence while the Advisor digested this. The two men—Fitz-James was slightly taller than the Advisor, but both men topped seven feet handily—faced each other across a polished wood table in a back room of the ranch house. They were comfortable in sturdy, well-upholstered armchairs and while they were quite sober, they were feeling their wine pleasantly. There was no tenseness in the room; the keynote was rather that of grace and urbanity, and both men spoke softly, with the assurance of a lifetime of habit. Strident or unpleasant speech, of course, would have been a social error of grave magnitude.
“An Erasure would be quite time-consuming, naturally,” the Advisor pointed out, pouring another glass of wine from the iced bottle on the table. “And no pun intended.”
“I am aware of that,” Fitz-James said, filling his pipe with fragrant tobacco and lighting it with a special jet lighter. “I might suggest, however, that it is a small investment indeed when weighed against the possible consequences.”
The Advisor smiled again. Poor Fitz was getting old; he was beginning to worry about trivia. “Suppose we simply do nothing, Fitz—do you seriously believe that any harm will come of it?”
Fitz-James blew a lazy smoke ring at the ceiling. “There are two possible answers to your question, my friend. The first is that isolated events, of themselves, are seldom as important or significant as we think they are. The most momentous and obvious crises are all made possible by a million other events, known and unknown, that have combined to render them meaningful. If the first fish had never flopped out into the mud, we would not be here tonight. The time to take action is before the situation becomes critical, not after. The second answer is that this fellow Shackelford does not impress me as a fool. He is not stupid, and it would be a tactical error to treat him as though he were. I would remind you that we have not attained our present position on this planet by underestimating the opposition. Agreed?”
“Perhaps, perhaps.” The Advisor sipped his wine. “It is your opinion, then, that this man will not lose interest of his own accord if he is let alone?”
“That is my opinion, yes.”
“And you don’t think that an Erasure at this point will only stimulate his curiosity further?”
Fitz-James shrugged. “The old question,” he said. “We can’t know for certain what the correct policy is; we can only try and see. I believe that this man will be intelligent enough to take the hint, as others have before him. If I am wrong—”
“Yes?”
“Then, obviously, stronger measures will be called for. I repeat that I consider the situation to be potentially a nuisance to us, even a danger. As you know, I do not share the conviction of our time that we are utterly invincible. As was pointed out long ago by our perhaps wiser predecessors, apathy breeds disaster.”
The Advisor chuckled. “I don’t share your gloomy outlook, Fitz,” he said, “but I respect your point of view. Your request is not unreasonable, and I’ll back you on it. I suggest we get it over with as soon as possible, and check in at Tracer tonight. I presume you’ll want to direct things personally?”
“I’d like to, yes.”
The Advisor smiled and pushed back his chair. “Let’s go,” he said.
The two men stepped into an Arch in Toplanque, Mexico, sat for five minutes in an electric grayness, and emerged in the Tracer Station in Los Angeles, California. The station was located in a comfortable sub-cellar beneath a walled mansion in Beverly Hills, but would probably have attracted little attention on the surface, California never having been noted for its rigid conformity to standardized ways of living. There were no flashing lights or obscure, mysterious machinery, nor were there black-clad guards prowling about with murder in their eyes. Rather, there was a large, air-conditioned, well-lighted room. Paintings hung on the walls, and several tall people were engaged in watching and listening to a symphony on television in one corner of the room. There was a desk along one wall, and at the desk sat a woman.
“Fitz,” she exclaimed, rising. “So good to see you.”
Fitz-James
smiled and exchanged pleasantries. Anne was an attractive woman and well-dressed, but she was inclined to be over-talkative and gushy. Fitz-James had never understood why she had been entrusted with even the clerical work of a Tracer Station, but then, he told himself, that was none of his business and, of course, it was the job of all of them to help one another.
“Business or pleasure, Fitz?” she asked, after running at breakneck speed through the biographies of mutual acquaintances. She smiled with what was meant to be coyness, and Fitz-James recalled that Anne was single again.
“Business, I’m afraid,” he said, “and rather important business at that, Anne. Would you alert the staff, please, and get a crew ready to go back?”
“Of course, Fitz.” She began jabbing buttons and opening relays.
Fitz-James nodded and moved across the room with the Advisor. They passed through a door into a smaller room, and a Tracer technician was waiting for them. He was old and quite gray, but his dark eyes were alert and capable.
“We’ll get right on it, gentlemen,” the technician said. “If you’ll just give us the data, please?”
Fitz-James puffed on his pipe, approving. “We’ll just need a small crew, I believe,” he said. “Nothing difficult—we’ll have to go back two thousand years or so, to Coordinate MDF-604. The clean-up crew that went back to thirty thousand years did very well, but they missed a cog-wheel that later turned up inside a more recent agricultural Indian village. We’ll have to go and get it.”
The technician thought a moment, then nodded. “I see you understand the technical difficulties involved,” he said. “Two thousand years should be safe enough, and cause a minimum of alteration. Anything more recent would be a major operation, and I suppose five years one way or the other won’t matter in this case?”