“Yeah, that’s why I wanted you to bring some of your tools—”
“Bust through the concrete surface there, and dig through three or four feet of fill, and get down to the—get down to the debris of El Modena Elementary School, 1905 to 1960 A. D.?”
“That’s right!”
“Well, shoot,” Abe says. “What’re we waiting for?”
“Ahhh, hahahahahahahaha…”
Out of the car, grab up packs of equipment, walk down Chapman. Faces stare from passing cars at the sight of people walking. Jim is getting excited. “There was a foundation stone, too, with the date carved on it. If we could find that…”
At Fluffy’s people dressed in the bright spectrum-bend primaries fashionable this year are downing incandescent green and purple and yellow donuts, then setting out into the holo reality of what appears to be African savanna. The four friends skirt the building and enter a small dark parking lot, bounded by Fluffy’s, a supermarket wall on one side, a movie complex wall on the other, and an apartment complex wall at the back. The glow of OC, reflected off low clouds, gives them all the light they need. Jim points out the chalkmarks he made during his reconnaissance trip, there on oil-splotched old concrete just behind the wall of Fluffy’s. “Should be right under here.”
Abe and Tash take off the backpacks and get out Abe’s freeway rescue tools. Abe shakes his head at the sight of them. “I really shouldn’t have taken these, we always have spares but you never know.…” He picks up an oscilloscopic saw, Tash a needlejack, and they crack the surface and chop a hole fairly quickly. It’s noisy work, but the ambient white noise of the city covers most of the sound. They put on work gloves and start pulling up broken blocks of concrete. The blocks are only about four inches thick, so there isn’t much problem. Stuck to the undersides of the pieces are inch-thick crusts of old asphalt. “They just poured it right over the old surface,” Jim says. “Great stratification at this site.”
Soon there’s a square hole about four feet on a side, there in the parking lot. “They’re going to think someone was trying to break in and steal the secret donut formulas,” says Tash. He and Sandy sing the Fluffy advertisement in a soft falsetto:
All sugar lovers in the know
Love what we leave in that round hole.…
“Well, Jim?” Tash inquires. “I don’t see any El Modena Elementary School. Looks like dirt to me.”
“Of course. That’s the fill. We’ve got to clear it out.”
Sandy hands Jim a short-handled aluminum shovel. “Your turn.”
So Jim goes to work.
He is not strong; he was the flyweight on their wrestling team, in the 123-pound class despite medium height, and he relied more on speed than brute force, even when Coach “Mad Dog” Beagle had them lifting weights four hours every day.
Nor is he skillful; every stab and scoop of the shovel yields only a handful of dirt. Disgusted with these results, he puts one foot forward, takes the shovel in both hands, raises it far overhead, brings it down in a vicious strike—only to be jerked to a halt by Tashi’s big hand grabbing the stock in midair. “Goddamn, Jim, you were just about to amputate your own foot! Watch what you’re doing, will you?”
“Ahh, hahahahahahaha…”
But he is enthusiastic. And eventually the hole is about two feet deep, and Jim is having serious trouble keeping dirt from his side walls from sliding down to the bottom of the hole. Abe takes over and makes better progress. An hour or so after the start of the operation, he drives the shovel down and there is a wooden thunk. “Oh ho! Yo ho ho, in fact! Buried treasure.”
Abe clears dirt away from a big beam of wood. It’s solid hardwood, dry and unrotted. Next to it they find a dressed stone block, one side beveled and fluted.
“All right!” Jim exclaims. “This is it! This is the kind of foundation stone that’s supposed to have the date on it.”
Abe scrapes the stone’s side clear of dirt. No date. “Might be on the other side.…”
“Gee, Abe,” says Tash, nudging Sandy with an elbow. “How much do you think that stone weighs?”
Abe gives it a kick. “I don’t know. Maybe a ton.”
“Ah, come on!” says Jim.
“Yeah, okay… maybe only seven, eight hundred pounds.”
“Ah, hahahahahahaha.”
“How about a piece of this beam for a souvenir,” Abe suggests to Jim. “Just a starter, of course.” He takes the oscilloscopic saw and neatly slices off a triangular section that looks like a wooden prism, or an antique ruler. He hands it up to Jim. “Don’t touch the black side for a minute or two.”
Jim regards it dubiously. So this is the past.…
“Whoops!” says Sandy, who has ESP in these matters. He looks around the corner and out to the street. “Police.” He has an escape route already planned, and without a pause he is gone down an alley between the supermarket and the ap wall, into the applex. Sandy can’t afford even casual conversations with the police, much less an arrest for violating a parking lot surface.
The others snatch up Abe’s tools and follow Sandy, just as a cosmic white light xenon beam snaps into existence and torches the parking lot with its glare. Amped-up voices of authority command them to stop, but they’re already into the warren of the applex, as safe as roaches under the refrigerator. Except this time the police are in after them, can’t let these hoodlums be tearing up the parking lots of OC, and it’s chase time, the four friends dodging in irregular dispersal from the closetlike courtyards to second- and third-story walkways, dumpster nooks, doorway niches… The applex is typical L-5 architecture, dominant form of the twenty-first century, but it’s smaller than most OC applex mazes, and there just aren’t as many good spots to scurry into. Crossing one twelve-by-twelve courtyard Jim stumbles over a kid’s robot and drops his archaeological find, it clatters away and he’s hopping around trying to locate it when Sandy runs into him and drags him off into a nearby elevator nook. Just in time, because a policeman wearing a helmet with an IRHUD happens by and well, who knows but what he can see the heat of their footprints right there on the ground!
Maybe so. He’s paused in the courtyard. Sandy and Jim, praying that their shoe soles have been thick enough, crouch in the dark elevator doorway and watch the policeman’s headlamps swing around the minicourtyard.
For a moment the beam of light illuminates the fragment of wood, there under a dead bush.
“Now, that’s a piece of wood,” Sandy whispers in Jim’s ear. “And that”—gesturing after the departing policeman—“is a night in jail. You have to weigh your priorities, Jim. You’ve got to think before you act.…”
They recover the piece of wood and sneak off in the other direction. By this time Jim is hopelessly disoriented, but part of Sandy’s ESP is a perfect internal compass, and he leads them east, then back down through the applex’s laundry/recreation/administration building, with its wall of five hundred mailboxes, and out to Chapman Avenue again.
The copcar is still parked in front of Fluffy’s. Ah ha, there’s Abe and Tash, up ahead of them. After them and across the street to Jim’s car. “What happened to you guys?” Tash asks.
“I dropped the piece of wood,” Jim says. “Had some trouble finding it.”
“I hope you were successful,” Abe chides him, “or we’re sending you back for it!”
“No, here it is! See?”
His friends laugh loud and long. All’s well that ends well. They jump in the car, click on the motor, slide back onto the track and roll out onto Chapman. Abe says, “Let’s get this precious fragment to the museum and track down to Sandy’s to see how the party’s going.”