They sat alone on the sand in the shadow cast by the timespanner gantry eating box lunches provided by the cook tent. Gordon’s meal appeared to be couscous flavored with raisins, nuts, and dates stuffed into pita bread along with shaved lettuce, olives, and a side of green horseradish. This was accompanied by a can of cold tea. From their places they watched the excavation workers haul baskets of dirt and debris up from the base of the escarpment to the fine sorting screens, the immediately visible artifacts having already been recorded and recovered in place. Dr. Taleghani swallowed a mouthful of his sandwich, chewed impatiently, and washed it down with tea.
“The old Landsat Thematic Mapper images gave us the original hints regarding paleorivers under the sand sea in Western Egypt. Have you heard of the Accelerated High Definition Imager satellite? AHDI?” He pronounced it “oddie.”
“Yes. The Army uses it for military geology.”
“Well, AHDI shows that red escarpment over there is the top of a four hundred meter cliff. At its base, far below this cursed sand, was a navigable river that flowed through grassy savannahs and forests of oak, birch, and cedar. It joined another river that went across all of North Africa and eventually drained into the Atlantic. In those times the higher elevations southwest of here had hundreds of active glaciers. There was a short growing season in the lowlands and in winter the rivers would freeze.”
Although no one was near them, Dr. Taleghani lowered his voice to a confidential level. “The AHDI satellite imager showed, along the banks of this river, at the foot of that cliff, evidence of a human settlement—an actual village!” The archeologist’s eyes seemed to light up. “Carbon dating from deep drilling samples shows they were cooking fish and yams in this village approximately one hundred and forty thousand years ago.” He smiled and glanced down. “I’m rather excited by this.”
“I guessed.”
“We’ve never found evidence of settled community life dating this far back. A few bones and stone tools, cave paintings, nothing going back more than sixty thousand years, and those only rather wild suppositions based on dubious evidence. Nothing at all in the Western Desert save the rock art in the Gilf Kebir caves. The provable settlements we have found—barely qualifying as being Paleolithic—show small groupings of fifty or fewer persons, the settlements being little more than shelters of convenience like caves or nomadic hunting camps.” He pointed toward the escarpment. “At the base of that cliff, along the river, and in the near hills we’ve found more than three hundred stone foundations for dwellings.” He stared at Gordon, his eyebrows arched. “Three hundred.”
“Yes,” said Gordon.
“That doesn’t even consider shelters without foundations. Nomadic tribes probably used such a place during summers as a trading center. That would easily treble the fixed population numbers. In Paleolithic terms, my boy, this is bloody London!” He sighed and shrugged, his head moving from side to side in a show of reluctant tolerance. “Of course, there are skeptics who say that the house foundations, ditches, paths and such we’ve detected are simply natural geological formations and flood debris that took shapes familiar enough to modern eyes to be mistakenly interpreted.”
“Another ancient face on Mars,” offered Gordon.
“Exactly. The rock circles I’ve interpreted as foundations are very regular, and I must admit one large circle with three concentric rock circles within it has me a bit puzzled. Very large. Perhaps it was a theater. Regardless, because this little corner of the past was completely wiped out in a catastrophic meteor impact and subsequent mudflow, we can now pin down with a fair degree of accuracy—”
“The second Kebira meteor impact,” interrupted Gordon. “The one that ate the mountain.”
The archeologist nodded. “The first impact was probably thirty million years or more ago. It must have been a devastatingly spectacular occurrence. Dr. Hussein theorizes that it was a close airburst of an asteroid large enough and hot enough to create all that desert glass that’s so common south of here. It also opened a fissure through to the mantle, allowing the formation of a relatively short-lived volcano of perhaps as much as three thousand meters in elevation above the Gilf Kebir plateau and as much as thirty kilometers across at its base.”
“With the second impact, Doctor, what size of a disaster are you talking about?”
“Think of perhaps two hundred Mount Saint Helenses going off at once. It may even have been responsible for ending that period of glaciation.”
“It’s the second impact you think you have pinned down as to when.”
“Within a few hundred years. We’ll be able to narrow that down to minutes.”
Gordon cocked his head toward the timespanner. “With that.”
“Yes. I’ve gotten permission to take a timespanner back for a look at the village at an as yet undetermined point before the impact takes place. On the way there we’ll fix the time of the impact. Dr. Hussein’s computer model shows the village and the entire river valley hit by intense radiant energy immediately after the meteor impact. The shockwave within minutes. If it’s in winter, the local snow pack would already be melting by the time the mudflow and debris from the uplands arrived at the village. The streams and rivers would already be full.”
“Instant devastating flood.”
“Yes.” Dr. Taleghani waved a hand in a gentle arc of dismissal. “The important thing for us is to get in before the impact, have enough time to observe, and then get out again with our data.”
“That’s how you got permission,” said Gordon. “The flood.”
“Yes. The theory is that any possible influence such an intrusion might risk will be canceled out by the devastation before it can introduce any effective changes that would be projected to the present. That is, if we can find insertion windows within the desirable time frame. In other words, we don’t have to worry if the wrong grain of sand gets turned if we know it’s going to get buried beneath hundreds of meters of muck until the present.” He glanced at Gordon. “So I am authorized to go back and have a look.”
“Have a look,” Gordon repeated, a slight mocking tone to his voice. He studied the archeologist’s face until the man looked down at his lunch box. Glancing from Taleghani to the escarpment, from the escarpment to the gantry, and from the gantry back to the archeologist, Gordon nodded, picked up a handful of sand, and let it trickle out between his fingers. “I believe I warned you about keeping me in the dark, Doctor. But perhaps you haven’t done that. A bodyguard who is good with languages. Perhaps I am to use your crossword puzzle book to swat camel ticks that manage to sneak into the capsule—”
“Yes, yes, of course I want to leave the capsule, Mr. Redcliff,” the archeologist interrupted with an angry whisper. “If there is an inhabited village on that river bank, I must visit it. I must see the individuals who live there, record them, speak with them, hear what they can tell me.”
“And that is what you don’t have permission for,” pressed Gordon.
The archeologist looked down. “Yes.”
“Does Dr. Hussein know about this?”
Taleghani nodded once. “I’ve been talking about this ever since we got the AHDI images and realized how close this site is to the Kebir Crater. Numair attempted to discourage me, but he is also my friend.”
“He did seem awfully young to retire,” said Gordon. “Getting out of the desert fast to protect his pension?”
“He has a family to support.”