«Like any other death,» I said. «Death is death. Someone turns out the light.»
«Not quite,» he said. «Not quite like any other death. No one likes the prospect of death. It may not be death itself, but the loss of identity we fear. The fear of being blotted out. Many men facing death are able to await it calmly because they feel they’ve made a good job out of life. They have done certain tasks or have stood for something they feel will cause them to be remembered. They are, you see, not losing identity entirely. They will be remembered, and that in itself is a matter of some identity. This is important for the individual; it is even more important for a race—a race proud of the culture it has built. Racial identity is even more important than individual identity. It is not too difficult for a man to accept the inevitability of his own death; it is almost impossible for him to accept the fact that some day there may be no humans, that the species will have disappeared.»
«I think I see,» I said. I had never thought of it before.
«So this race on the planet soon to be dead,» he said, «took steps to preserve their culture. They broke it down to its basic concepts and essentials and they recorded it and put it into capsules …»
I started in surprise. «You mean this?» I asked, gesturing at the cylinder enclosed within the stone.
«It is my hope,» he said, far too calmly, far too surely.
«You must be nuts,» I said. «First for believing all this …»
«There were many capsules,» he said. «There was a number indicated, but since we could not decipher their notation …»
«But they must have broadcast them. Simply flung them into space.»
He shook his head. «They aimed them at suns. Given the kind of technology they had, many would have reached their destinations. They were gambling that one of them would come to earth on some distant planet and be picked up by some intelligence with enough curiosity and enough ingenuity …»
«They would have burned up when they entered the atmosphere.»
«Not necessarily. The technology …»
«Four hundred million years ago,» I said. «That long ago this precious planet of yours could have been across the galaxy from us.»
«We did not know, of course, how long ago,» he said, stubbornly, «but from our calculations our sun and their sun would never have been impossibly far apart. They have matched galactic orbits.»
I squatted there and tried to think, and all I had was a roaring in the brain.
It was impossible to believe, but there was the cylinder, embedded in the stone, a cylinder that ticked industriously to call attention to itself.
«The ticking,» said Charles, as if he knew my thoughts, «is something we had never thought of. Perhaps it’s activated when anything fulfilling certain biological requirements comes within a certain distance of it. But, then, of course, we never expected to stumble upon one of the capsules.»
«What did you expect, then?» I asked. «From what you’ve said, you have been hunting for a capsule.»
«Not really hunting for one,» he told me. «Just hoping we’d find some evidence that some time in the past one had been found. Either found and destroyed or lost—maybe found and at least a portion of its message extracted from it, extracted perhaps, then lost again because it did not fit in with human thought. Always hoping, of course, that we might find one tucked away in some obscure hiding place, in a small museum, maybe, in an attic or a storeroom of an ancient house, in some old temple ruin.»
«But why come back into the past, why come here? Surely in your own time—»
«You do not understand,» he said. «In our time there is very little left. Very little of the past. The past does not last forever—either materially or intellectually. The intellectual past is twisted and distorted; the material past, the records and the ruins of it, are destroyed or lost or decay away. And if by ‘here’ you mean in this particular place and time, we do few operations here. The Lodge—I understand that is what you call it—is what in your time you might term a rest and recreation area.»
«But the years you’ve spent at it,» I said. «All these years in a search that had so little chance.»
«There is more to it than that,» he said. «The finding of an alien capsule, how would you say it in the idiom of today? The finding of a capsule is the big prize on the board. It was something we were always on the lookout for, our investigative sense was always tuned to some hint that one might exist or at one time had existed. But we did not spend all our time—»
«Investigative? You said investigative. Just what the hell are you investigating?»
«History,» he said. «Human history. I thought there was no question that you would have guessed it.»
«I am stupid,» I said. «I didn’t guess it. You must have shelves of history. All you have to do is read it.»
«As I told you, there’s not much of the past left. When there are nuclear wars and a large part of the planet goes back to barbarism, the past goes down the drain. And what little there is left becomes very hard to find.»
«So there will be nuclear wars,» I said. «We had begun to hope that Earth might never have to face that. Could you tell me—»
«No,» said Charles, «I can’t.»
We hunkered there, the two of us, looking at the capsule.
«You want it?» I asked.
He nodded.
«If we can get it out undamaged,» I said.
The capsule clucked quietly at us, companionably.
I pulled the rock hammer out of my belt.
«Here,» I said, handing him the flashlight.
He took it and held it with its light trained on the capsule while I leaned close and studied the rock.
«We might be in luck,» I said. «There is a bedding plane, a seam, running just below the capsule. Limestone’s funny stuff. The layers can be either thick or thin. Sometimes it peels, sometimes it has to be broken.»
I tapped the bedding plane with the hammer. The stone flaked under the blows. Turning the hammer around to use the chisel end, I pecked away at the seam.
«Hand me the pick,» I said, and he handed it to me.
I had little room to work in, but I managed to drive the sharp end of the pick deep into the seam and a layer of the limestone peeled away and fell.
The capsule was exposed along its lower side, and it took only a little more judicious chipping away of the rock to free it. It was some eighteen inches long and heavier than I had imagined it would be.
Charles put the flashlight down on the floor of the cave and reached out his hands for it.
«Not so fast,» I said. «We have a deal to make.»
«You can keep the saddle.»
«I already have it,» I said. «I intend to keep it.»
«We’ll repair it for you. We’ll even exchange a new one for it. We’ll teach you how to use it.»
«I don’t think so,» I said. «I’m satisfied right here. I know how to get along right here. Seems to me a man could get into a lot of trouble taking off to other times. Now if you had some more photographs like the Marathon photograph … Say a couple of hundred of them, of selected subjects.»