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Chapter 51

"Well, okay," Rich said cheerfully over dinner four days later, "so I didn't get it quite right. It is a Rosetta Stone. Jane and I are now quite sure of it. Even if we still can't read any of the inscriptions, we can discern enough to see that they are in at least seven very different scripts, maybe eight or nine—we're still arguing about that— which wasn't true on Phobos or anywhere else we've found writing here in Melas Chasma. But they didn't leave it for us. Why should they? We weren't even a gleam in some proto-lemur's eye yet. They left it for other Bemmies. And since they apparently didn't know which group of Bemmies might come, or when, they left the messages in a representative language of what both Jane and I think were all of their major language groups."

He slurped down another spoonful of the evening's entree and swallowed appreciatively. "Joe, my heartfelt congratulations. How you manage to turn that stuff they sent down into meals like this is a mystery."

Joe inclined his head toward Madeline, sitting next to him in the rover. "Thank her, not me. That's one of her bouillabaisse recipes."

Helen's eyes widened. She'd been savoring the meal as much as Rich had. "One of them?"

"Yup. I've got seven others that I know by heart. Of course, I'll have to juggle the ingredients a lot. Even up on Nike, they don't have everything I'd need to do them full justice."

While others had been talking about the meal, A.J. had been staring pensively out of one of Thoat's ports. There was nothing to see out there, of course, now that night had fallen. The Martian starblaze that was such a splendor when standing outside at night—one of the few benefits of the planet's thin atmosphere—was mostly filtered by the port.

Joe finally spotted his friend's preoccupation. "A penny for your thoughts."

The imaging specialist shook his head. "You don't want 'em, Joe. Trust me, you don't."

The bleak tone in his voice was startling. A.J. Baker, depressed and melancholy, was something of an oxymoron. Conversation at the table stopped and everyone swiveled their heads to stare at him.

"What's the problem?"

A.J. finally turned away from the port. "If Rich and Jane are right—and I'm not arguing the point—then consider the implications. Take that spaceship model we found yesterday, that's gotten us so excited."

That had been the most exciting find of all, at least for everyone except Rich and Helen. In one of the rooms had been a two-meter long-model of what was obviously a Bemmie spacecraft. Two meters across, it would be better to say—because the ship was designed something like a tuna can tapering toward the rim.

The model had been very detailed, far too much so to be simply a symbolic representation. Most exciting of all, therefore, had been the fact that, even after long and close examination, nothing that could possibly be a venturi or any sort of exhaust system or mechanism had been found on it. Whatever drive the aliens had used, it worked on some principle completely different from rockets of any kind. Apparently, however it worked, the Bemmies had possessed the long-fabled reactionless drive of many science fiction stories.

Madeline grimaced slightly. Spotting the expression, Joe gave her hand a little squeeze under the table. For Madeline—at the moment, at least—the discovery of that model was more a source of vexation than excitement. They still hadn't transmitted the news up to the Nike, after she'd asked them to wait until she could consider all the security implications.

By now, with the request coming from Madeline, not even A.J. was inclined to argue the matter. Whatever low opinion A.J. held of security policies in general, it no longer spilled onto Madeline Fathom. If that's what she wanted, that's what she would get. No quarrels, no questions asked.

"Explain, A.J.," Helen said.

"The question we were wondering about has just been answered, I think. Whatever drive they were using, and however different it so obviously is from our rocket propulsion systems—Jesus, a reactionless drive!—it's still not a faster-than-light drive. Can't be, or they wouldn't have devoted that much time, labor and resources to creating a time vault and left messages written in many languages. Even went so far as to seal it up in inert gasses."

Joe's eyes widened. "Oh." Then, a moment later: "Damn."

"'Damn' is right," A.J. echoed, sighing. "Our highest hopes just got torpedoed. They didn't have a faster-than-light drive."

Madeline looked back and forth from Joe to A.J. "You're sure?"

Helen answered. "It makes sense, Madeline. I should have thought of it myself. Would have, if"—she flashed a little smile—"I hadn't gotten so preoccupied with all those mummies and models."

She gave A.J. and Joe an apologetic shrug. "Look, guys, I'm sorry. But, for me, this place is already my highest hope. It would be for any paleontologist, at least one specializing in the late Mesozoic." Her voice lowered, became almost a whisper. "After all these years, we finally get to see what they really looked like. No more guessing from skeletons and bones. Tyrannosaurus, triceratops, three species of duckbills—there's even a good sampling of sea life."

A.J. and Joe nodded. Bruce Irwin chuckled. "I think they forgive you your sins, Helen. Grudgingly." That brought a little round of laughs, lightening the atmosphere. But Madeline stubbornly returned to the point.

"I still want it explained." She hesitated. "Guys, I need it explained. Clearly. Clearly enough that even a national security adviser who isn't the sharpest pencil in the—ah, never mind—that even political types in the highest places can understand."

"Okay, Madeline, here it is." A.J. shifted forward in his seat, leaning on the table with his weight on his forearms. "That vault was designed to last for millions of years. Millions, not thousands."

"You're sure?"

"Yes," Joe chimed in. "A.J. and I could prove it with some work, if we concentrated on analyzing the materials, construction, and so on and so forth. But we don't really need to. Any engineer will understand the point. Even given the Bemmies' superior construction methods and materials, nobody except gods could slap together something that would last sixty-five million years under planetary conditions. For Pete's sake, they even designed those main supporting pillars to handle geologic shifts."

"Ah." Madeline leaned forward, matching A.J.'s arms-on-table posture. "I get it. Phobos could be an accident. That base survived because it was in vacuum, not to mention microgravity. The Vault can't be an accident."

"No. Mind you, I'm not saying they planned for sixty-five million years. I suspect they didn't. But they planned for millions, may be a few tens of millions." A.J. glanced at Helen. "Somebody like Nick Glendale who specializes in probability analysis could demonstrate it, I'm pretty sure, just from the math alone."

"I'll ask him to, in fact," Helen said. "Once you and Joe put together the basic data."

"Millions of years . . ." Madeline said softly. "Millions . . . Okay, I get your point. If the Bemmies had a faster-than-light drive, there'd be no reason to create such a vault. Even with all of them dead in this solar system, they'd expect some other Bemmies to come along much sooner than that."

"Yep. They could travel between the stars, but even for them it was a slow business."

"A haphazard one, too," Rich said. He ran fingers through his thinning hair. "Without an FTL drive, there'd be no way to maintain any sort of transsolar political unity of any kind. It'd be hard enough to do, even with one. However the Bemmies were organized, politically, it would have started fragmenting the moment they spread beyond their home system. Give it a few millennia, certainly tens of millennia, and even the records would start getting lost. As if Shelley's poem Ozymandias was repeated over and over again, in one star system after another."

Helen had always loved that poem, to the point where she'd committed it to memory. She recited the closing lines now:
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings, Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away."

Silence filled Thoat, for a time, as they contemplated an alien civilization spreading across star systems over an immense span of time—and losing its memory as it went. The thought was majestic and melancholy at the same time.

Helen herself broke the silence. "I understand. They'd have no reason to expect any other Bemmies to come into our solar system at any given time."

"No, they wouldn't," Joe agreed. "A reactionless drive isn't magic. All it does is make sublight interstellar travel possible, where it really isn't with any kind of rocket drive."

"Why not?" Rich asked.

"Because you're basically driving yourself—any kind of rocket, chemical or nuclear-power, it doesn't matter—by throwing exhaust out the back end. That means the farther and longer you want to go, the more fuel you need to bring with you—but the more fuel you carry, the harder it is to increase your speed. We engineers call it the rocket equation, and it's been a paradox for us since the beginning of the space age."

"Simply put," A.J. elaborated, "the best speed a rocket can reach—relative to the velocity of the exhaust that's driving you forward—is proportional to the natural logarithm of the percentage of mass left after all the fuel is consumed."

Seeing the linguist's cross-eyed look, Joe chuckled. "Let me put it more simply still, Rich. Could you cross the Atlantic in a small boat with an outboard engine? Assume for a moment that the ocean is as still as a pond, and there are no weather problems. Just look at it as a straight fuel-and-engine problem."

"Well . . . no, not really. Oh, I suppose you could eventually get across—assuming, like you said, that we ignored the real conditions of an ocean. But, jeez, it'd take forever."

"Why?"

"Well, it's obvious. To keep the engine going, you'd have to haul a great big damn barge full of gas, and how fast could you possibly go if . . . Oh. I see."

"Yup. Welcome to the rocket equation. On Earth, on the oceans, we can get by just by making the ships big enough. That works, well enough, with speeds that low. But it really doesn't work, if you're trying to cross stellar distances with a rocket drive. That's because the mass ratio problem gets progressively worse, the faster you go. And with distances like that, you have to go very fast, or you'll spend . . . Oh, with chemical fuels, it would take thousands of years just to reach Alpha Centauri—and you'd need a fuel tank about the size of the Moon. Nuclear drives are better, but not that much better."

"What you're saying, in short," Helen came in, "is that a reactionless drive is the equivalent of using sails to cross the ocean. However the Bemmie system worked, they were able to use some sort of energy that they didn't need to carry with them."

"Right. Or, at least, carry just enough fuel to keep whatever the engines were running. But they wouldn't be blowing most of the fuel out the back end. Their drive would still be slow—meaning sublight speeds, even if it was much faster than rockets. But not so slow or with such handicaps that it couldn't be done at all."

He waved a hand, stifling A.J. "Yeah, yeah, I know. Bussard ramjets. But that's just an engineer's daydream, so far as anyone knows. Obviously, the Bemmies never took that route. Why bother, when you have a drive that detours the whole fuel problem altogether?"

Joe had been thinking about it further, even while he talked. With the earlier dream of an FTL drive so rudely shattered by A.J.'s cold logic, a number of other things about the model of the Bemmie spacecraft they'd found in the Vault were starting to make sense.

"I'm willing to bet it wasn't even that fast a drive," he mused. "I hate to say it, but now that I look on that model in the cold light of day, that almost flying-saucer design makes a lot of sense. They spun it, I'll betcha. Because they needed centrifugal force to substitute for gravity just as much as we do."

A.J.'s eyed widened. Unfortunately, there had been no scale provided—that humans could read, anyway—to give any sense of how big the ship modeled actually was. "That big?"

"Why not? Sure, with that modified tuna can design it'd outmass Nike by an order of magnitude. At least. Even assuming it was no bigger—an assumption we have no reason to make. And so what? With a reactionless drive, mass doesn't really mean that much, if you've got the time to make the trip in the first place. And there are a lot of advantages to a big ship, especially for long trips."

He considered the problem, for a few seconds. "I'm also willing to bet that, leaving the issue of propulsion aside, their drive worked more or less along the same principles as our ion drives, in other respects. A very low acceleration—much too low to provide artificial gravity itself, which is why you have to spin the ship—but one you can sustain for a long time. So you could cross interstellar distances. But it'd take an awfully long time. Maybe even require generation ships, although . . . "

A.J. shook his head. "Not if you can keep the acceleration constant. Still, you're talking trips measured in years, maybe decades— and that's just to cross between nearby stars."

"Yep. Alas. Bye-bye that daydream."

Madeline sat up straight. "Put together a short summary of all that, would you? Or, rather—Joe, you do it. A.J. has to concentrate on solving Rich's little problem. If he can."

The imaging specialist sat up even straighter. "If I can? Ha! O ye of little faith, watch—" Madeline smiled at Helen. "See how I cheered him up?"

The next morning, A.J. was scrutinizing Rich Skibow's "little problem."

It wasn't all that little, actually, speaking physically.

"You're sure? That'd be one hell of a big book. Using the term loosely."

"Well, Jane and I aren't sure. But, yes, we're almost positive that has to be the Rosetta Stone. More precisely, the key to getting at any of them." He waved a hand, backward. "The one I thought was a Rosetta Stone when we first entered turns out to be just one of dozens like it. They've all got that multiple-script feature, but Jane and I think this thing is the key to unlocking the puzzle. Insofar as it can be unlocked at all, anyway. Since none of these has a script in a language we know—obviously—they aren't really the same thing as a Rosetta Stone. But it's as close as we'll ever come. Just having a number of languages for comparison will help us a lot—especially because I'm pretty sure this thing is what amounts to a superdictionary."

After Rich finished, A.J. went back to scrutinizing the object. The item in question rested in a case that, from the looks of it, had at one time also been sealed in inert gases. Here, though, the passage of millions of years had taken its toll. However it had happened, one corner of the case had cracked. The crack wasn't much, but it was enough for whatever gas had filled the case to have leaked out long since.

Of course, the case itself had still been in the inert atmosphere that had filled the entire Vault. But the simple fact that the Bemmies had taken the trouble to seal it separately indicated how critical they'd apparently considered the item it contained.

The item itself was a little more than a third of a meter across, composed apparently of mostly manufactured diamond plated over a substrate of their composite with maybe platinum as a coating, since it was shiny like a mirror. A circular mirror with a polychromatic reflective surface; A.J. thought it looked rather like a giant DVD surfaced with faceted crystals.

After studying the thing carefully for a few minutes, A.J. turned back to Rich. "Okay, I'm pretty sure your guess is right. If so, what we have here is something like a digital data disc. They took advantage of refractive tricks to allow them several layers to write on with different wavelengths. They're probably using a binary encoding— that's at least reasonable—but their coding table I'm going to have to figure out . . . hmmm . . . "

He looked back at the item he'd tentatively labeled a data disc. "Looks like it's all here, though. The problem is that we haven't got a reader for it. And whatever readers they might have had—which we haven't found yet, and may never—they wouldn't work by now, anyway. Bemmie super construction notwithstanding, nothing that relies in any way on moving parts is still going to be functional after sixty-five million years. At least, nothing on that level of precision; the door mechanism worked, but that's several orders of magnitude cruder and works on what amounts to brute force. So the question becomes, are we smart enough to build a gadget that will substitute?"

"Are you?"

A.J. frowned. "Of course I'm smart enough. Well. I think. But here I don't have the stuff I'd need. I need emitters in just the right wavelengths—tunable, mind you—I need control circuitry, I need a way to spin the sucker and get the timing right, yada yada yada. And you can bet I'll have to experiment with it a lot, because we're bound to stumble across some obvious, critical, need-to-know information that we don't know, like: 'well, of course the files are all encoded with three primes.' If I was on Earth I could whip together some kind of test-bed, but here I'd have to cannibalize something, especially for the moving parts."

"So you can't do it?" Jane said in a disappointed tone. She was following the discussion from the Nike, using relays established by the bread crumbs that A.J. now had scattered throughout the Vault.

"Stop jumping on me! I know you're excited about this, both of you, but hell, you're asking me . . . Well, it'd be like going back to the 1970s and handing someone a DVD. Even if you told them about it, they might not have the gadgets to read it with, and they'd sure need to think about it. Especially if you left out something about how, oh, MPEG encoding worked. I have to assume these guys gave me all the critical info, but they could have dropped the ball anywhere along the line." A.J. frowned. "I'll think about it for a bit."

He left the inner area and went back, musing on the problem. He found Helen carefully going over the scaly hide of a velociraptor of some kind. A Deinonychus, he thought, although he wasn't sure.

"What's up, sweetheart?"

She jumped. "Don't startle me like that." She pointed to the raptor mummy. "Look close."

He did so, studying the hide in the area she indicated with his usual eye to detail. "Oh, those little depressed markings?"

"Yes. I think those are marks of some kind of parasite—a louse or something. I'm hoping I can find one intact, or at least some pieces left in the scales. The problem with these being preserved is that someone cleaned them up which eliminates all that kind of thing."

"Listen to you! You're complaining about someone having left you perfectly preserved dinosaurs to work on!"

Helen laughed and hugged him suddenly. The spacesuits eliminated the sensuousness of the embrace, but A.J. still found the gesture heartwarming.

"Yeah, pretty ungrateful, aren't I?" She looked back at the dinosaur. "And that's what brought us together, too."

He grinned. "I remember. I came out there to give you a look at your dinosaurs through the rock, and then you guys almost killed me for faking the scan."

"Well, you can't blame us. You were showing off. Mr. 'Look, I have a halo!'"

"Okay, I'm no angel, but—"

He froze.

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