Spidery, squiggly lines weaved around the knobs and lenses. “Could that be writing?” I asked.
Gretchen squinted. “If it is, whoever wrote it had no concept of sentences or punctuation.” She was right. The lines ran continuously around and around the cylinder, sometimes crossing one another, a few of them even winding around the latch points a time or two before continuing on.
They all led to—or issued from—the screw cap on the end.
“Well,” I said, “I think it’s pretty obvious where the action is.”
“You think we should tell anybody what we’ve got before we fool with it?” Gretchen asked.
I shook my head. “You know what they’ll do. They’ll tell us to bring it in for somebody professional to open, and we’ll never see it again.”
“Probably.”
So we strapped it to the work bench we use to repair our tools on, and we unscrewed the cap on the end. I expected the threads to be reversed, but they weren’t. They weren’t even especially tight. I had to put both hands on it and brace my feet in the grips on the floor, but I’ve opened jar lids that were tighter. The cap spun off counterclockwise on fine, precisely machined threads, and I heard a little hiss toward the last as air rushed inside.
Then I pulled the cap off and peered in, half expecting an alien monster to leap out and take my head off, but the cylinder was lined with tiny cubes, each maybe a centimeter on a side. In the center, packed tight in some kind of crinkly foil, was a rectangular object about the size of a deck of cards. I tugged on it gently, sliding it out from its nest, and saw a square indentation on the end, just the right size to plug one of the cubes into. There was a bump off center in the recessed square, no doubt matching a depression in each cube so you could only plug them in one way. A row of tiny projections stuck out of one side.
The size of the thing branded it uncommon, but otherwise this seemed as familiar as the outside of the package was different. The aliens had sent us a book reader and an entire library of books.
“Holy shit, does it work?” Gretchen asked.
“I’m not sure I want to find out.” I held the reader in my hand, looking at one face, then the other. Either one could have been a display. Maybe both were, for redundancy.
What creature had last held this, and how long ago? And why had they sent it to us? Did it contain greetings? Blueprints for new technology? Religious instruction? If each of those cubes held as much information as a regular book disk, then I guessed they had sent all three and then some. Given molecular memory—and I saw no reason to suppose they didn’t have it, since we were close to achieving it ourselves—the entire library of human knowledge could probably fit in those cubes several times over.
Gretchen looked at me impatiently. “What do you mean? Turn it on.”
I looked for the power button, but none of the bumps on the side slid or pushed in or moved in any way. “It can’t have power,” I said. “It was buried under a meter of ice. It’s been there for a long time.”
“How do you know what it can or can’t do?” she asked.
“Good point. Here, you try it.” I handed the reader to her. While she studied it I pulled out the crinkled packing material, hoping for a drawing or something, but there wasn’t anything written on it. The hair on the back of my neck was starting to stand up. This book reader with no instructions seemed somehow ominous.
“Could the memory cubes provide the power to run it, too?” Gretchen asked, reaching into the cylinder and taking a cube from the rack. She plugged it into its socket and tried each of the buttons again. Still nothing.
I could almost taste my relief.
She tried another cube, with the same results. “OK, you’re right, the batteries are probably dead,” she said, and she flipped the reader over, looking for the battery cover that would be there in any human-built model.
“Let’s slow down a minute here,” I said. “Do we really want to do this?”
“Why wouldn’t we?”
“I’m not sure. I’m just thinking aloud. But we know what this has got to be, right?”
Gretchen laughed. “Do we? Maybe it’s a recorder. Maybe all these cubes are blank, and we’re supposed to fill them up with everything we know and box it up and ship it back to them.”
The look on my face made her laugh even harder. “I was kidding, idiot. It’s a library. It’s got to be.” She found a seam running all the way around near the bottom of the reader, and tried twisting, prying with a fingernail, pulling and squeezing. When she squeezed it, something gave with a snap.
“Uh oh.”
But a moment later, one of the flat faces began to glow white.
“Oh, I get it,” she said. “It’s like a light stick; you have to break the pouch with the catalyst in it before it’ll work.”
She started pushing the buttons on the side. The top one did the trick: when she touched it the screen flickered again and a milky white sphere of light about the size of a spacesuit helmet expanded into being in front of it. Gretchen tilted the reader so the sphere was on top. I was drifting at about a forty-five degree angle from her; I pulled myself around so we were both using the same surface for a floor and took a better look at it.
After a few seconds it cleared to near-transparency and an animated hologram showed two smooth white balls that might have been stars orbiting one another. The quality of the hologram was excellent; the images looked so solid I felt as if I could reach in and touch them. I was just about to suggest we were seeing the builders’ home star system when the balls moved apart and their orbits slowed, then one of them shrank to a speck and orbited the other one, then the situation reversed and the second one orbited the first.
“Looks like it’s trying to get across Kepler’s laws,” Gretchen said. The balls continued to move around one another, going into elliptical orbits and parabolic flybys and eventually splitting into three, then four bodies in various combinations of orbits.
If there was any sound, it was beyond the range of our hearing.
“OK so we have an orbital mechanics text,” I said, relieved that it was understandable, yet getting impatient with the simplistic animation. “Let’s try something else.”
“OK” Gretchen popped the cube free and the hologram sphere swirled into static, then disappeared.
“I wonder if we’re supposed to turn it off first?” I asked.
Gretchen shrugged. “If I were designing something for aliens to use, I’d make it as foolproof as possible.”
“Good point.” I took the cube from her and put it back in its niche in the cylinder, then pulled loose the one next to it.
This one showed us how to shave ice or quartz or some other clear mineral into a lens to focus sunlight; how to melt iron and flatten it into sheets; and how to bend the sheets into a parabolic mirror to collect even more sunlight.
Another cube showed how to make an electrical generator, and another one showed how to make a rocket by electrolyzing water and recombining the hydrogen and oxygen for fuel. None of them showed us anything about the aliens who had sent the cubes; just the abstract information.
So far the technology had been familiar, but we were still just working off the first row of cubes. There were hundreds of them deeper inside the cylinder. I reached about halfway in and plucked one at random from the array, and when we played it the level of sophistication had definitely changed.
The image in the sphere was either a machine or an organism, I couldn’t tell which. It was all curves and smooth surfaces, and we were seeing the interior as well as the exterior, as if in X-rays. That got me wondering if the reader was producing X-rays. The images were all in white light, as if to provide as wide a spectrum as possible for alien viewers’ eyes, so it was possible that the wavelengths extended beyond the visible; but my spacesuit was still adrift near the airlock and its radiation warning was silent, so I relaxed. About that, at least.