“What are you talking about?” Bram asked.
“See anything over there? Use your top magnification.”
Obediently, Bram searched the distant ruins with his helmet telescope. The liquid crystal display emerged from its clear plastic sandwich and formed a circular image in front of his right eye. He squinted and adjusted the focus.
“I don’t see anything.”
“Turn up the contrast.”
“I think I see some kind of streak or scratch. It’s hard to be sure. I think it’s in my helmet … no, it stays put when I move. It may be a beam of light or a reflection. It’s pointing straight up in the direction of the moon.”
“That’s it,” Jao said.
“That’s what?”
“Oh, no. I’m not saying. I’m not sticking my neck out till we get there.”
“Watch out!” Bram’s suit radio said.
He stepped to one side and saw Lydis and Zef wrestling one of the walkers out of the hatch. They let go, and it floated down to the ground, where it unfolded, shook itself off, and inflated its passenger bubble. The biodevice was a tried and true version of the basic model the Nar had used for airless planetoids and nonrotating space structures. Its fragile, elongated frame would not have stood up under any semblance of real gravity, but it was strong enough for places like this. It had a submetabolism that worked on hydrogen and oxygen, and besides supplying energy, the auxilliary system had water and oxygen to spare for passengers.
“Well, let’s not waste time,” Jao said, with a hop and a dive toward the vehicle. “Did anybody pack a lunch?”
Enry was engrossed in his work. Now he was putting dust samples into little vials. Ame came bounding over from a fissure she had been studying. “That’s more like it,” she said. “Wait till I get my kit.”
Lydis drifted down the ladder and stationed herself in front of the spidery biovehicle. “Hold on,” she said. “We go out two at a time, at least till we know more about this place, and we keep the voice and homing circuits on at all times.”
“What d’ya mean?” Jao said. “The walker’ll carry three.”
“Sorry,” Lydis said. “That’s the way it’s going to be.”
Jao assumed an expression of great regret. “Sorry, Ame. You can take the next trip. Do you want me to bring back any rubble samples for you?”
Ame sputtered. “We’re going to have a first look at the ruins, and it needs someone with some archaeological and paleontological training.” She appealed to Lydis. “Isn’t that so?”
“I’d say so,” Lydis replied.
“Well,” Jao said. “Your daughter has spoken. I guess it’s Ame and me. Sorry, Bram. I’ll give you a running report over the radio.”
“Not a chance,” Lydis said firmly. “Neither your nor Ame is qualified on a walker. Bram’s the driver.”
It was Jao’s turn to sputter. “There’s nothing to steering one of those things.”
“There’s too much trouble an inexperienced driver can get into low gravity,” Lydis said. “You could turn over. Bounce it too high and come down the wrong way. Misjudge a ravine.”
“Sorry, Jao,” Bram said. “You can have the second ride. I’ll find out what that thing is. And give you a report over the radio.”
The walker loped across the jagged landscape, bouncing upward in great buoyant swoops that ate up the miles. Bram, with an occasional corrective jerk of the reins, kept a watchful eye through the inflated bubble on the route ahead. The tumbled lines of rubble they had to cross were not really dangerous to the walker, which was nimble enough to compensate for its stiff-legged gait when it came down wrong-footed on a boulder or crack. But of course it had no long-distance judgment.
“It’s shivery,” Ame said, glancing toward the great glowing hump of a disk that rose out of the ground to their left. As dull and rusty as the light was, it cast long gloomy striations of shadow across the stark plain.
“Shivery?” he teased her. “Is that some sort of technical term you paleontologists use?”
She nestled for comfort against him on the narrow bench. “It’s been dead and broken for millions of years. But I feel that it’s been waiting for us.”
“It has.”
“And that it’s watching us right now.”
“Nothing could live here.”
“We do. And this thing we’re riding in sort of lives.”
“You’re letting your imagination run away with you. But that’s not surprising. This place is haunted. By the entire human race.”
“Yes.” She shuddered. “It’s like our own graveyard. We’re supposed to be immortal. But so were they.”
“That’s why it’s important to find answers here, Ame. And that’s your job.”
She shook off the mood with an effort. “A job for more than me and Enry. We’re going to have to develop a real science of archaeology very quickly. We’ve never had the subject matter before. We don’t want to blunder about, destroying knowledge.”
“How do we go about it?”
“We’ll need a large labor force from the tree,” she said briskly. “We’ll have to establish a grid first, and a cataloging system. The librarians can help there, and everybody else will have to pitch in. Chemists, cultural scholars, everybody.” She challenged him with a direct gaze. “I can hardly wait to get a real team here and start the dig. How soon do you think that will be, Bram-tsu?”
“Right away, if everything looks all right. We’ll spend a few days here first—find a good place to set up a base camp, get an idea of the layout. Lydis ought to be able to move the ship a bit closer. That thing up ahead isn’t a danger now that we know where it is.”
The walker was at the top of a leap, and as it drifted slowly down, both passengers looked ahead through the bubble. The elusive streak at the center of the compound still could not be seen with the naked eye, even from a few miles away. But a couple of stops during the approach and a look through the helmet telescopes had confirmed that it was still there.
Bram had tried bouncing light off it from a hand laser, while Ame made photometer readings. Slashing back and forth with the beam, he had still obtained readings at what a rough triangulation told him was a height of over twenty miles.
Whatever it was, it was indubitably solid matter, and it reached straight up.
“Stop here,” Ame said. “I want to look at something.”
Bram reined the walker in. It reared up in the low gravity, then its front legs settled into the dust. Bram made it kneel, then followed Ame out through the lips of the bubble.
It made a primitive air lock, but it was the best that could be done within the limitations of the scrawny bio-machine. Very little atmosphere was lost if you managed the egress properly. You learned the technique quickly—arms stretched out with your head tucked between them, as if you were diving, then squirm the rest of yourself through sidewise, while the fat inflated edges sealed themselves around you, and a quick pop as you drew your foot through. He and Ame had stayed in their suits with their helmets on even though the bubble was fully pressurized with a breathable atmosphere of fifty percent oxygen. Lydis had insisted on that for safety’s sake.
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.”