by Allen Wold
They went down, and in, until at last they reached the core. There they found and entered the museum, in much the way they had before. The only difference was that the museum was lit this time, and was quite a bit larger.
And more of the museum's collection was preserved. They proceeded slowly down a radius toward the center, trying to see everything at once. Rikard recorded as much as he could, with both close-ups and telephoto shots.
"Let's go around this way," Droagn suggested. He pointed to the far side of the chamber as he started along one of the circumferential aisles. All the smaller things were over there. Rikard and Grayshard followed.
As they went they passed through an area where there were fragmentary remains of things made of wood, leather, fabric, and other organic materials. Some of these were just dust, while others were fragile husks, and a few others were nearly solid enough to touch. But none of them was intact enough to identify, even had they known the cyclopean psychology.
When they got to the area where all the small items stood, each on its own base, they started back down a radius toward the center. But this time they paused to each take a number of items—tiny sculptures, or maybe game pieces, representing cyclopeans and other beings, including once an Ahmear; small cylindrical items that might be pens or pencils except that there were no writing points and some of them had dials or sliders that no longer functioned; once a collection of seven rings, each of a slightly different size, all made of gold or something similar, and with three gems in each inset equilaterally in the band that was cast or carved in a variety of abstract shapes; and another time what might have been a book except that the pages were folded funny and made of a kind of plastic/metallic foil with embossed dots.
They took as many of these as they could easily secrete about their persons, though they fully intended to get as much of the other stuff as they could load on their four empty carriers when they came back.
The center of the museum was plain and unadorned, a slightly elevated circular area about five meters in diameter with no stands, no objects, no decorations in the floor. Nor were there any signs of a portal in the floor, or hookups for equipment, or anything at all. It was just a bare circular stage. And yet, it was elevated.
Any city of this size, regardless of the nature of the species that built it, would have to have central communications and information systems, especially if the species was technologically advanced enough to be starfaring, which the cyclopeans must have been. It was Rikard's contention, supported by Grayshard and Droagn, that if the nexus of this system was not at the museum, then at least an important terminal should be. But there was nothing there.
They went back up another radius to the outer wall and examined the area beside each of the radial portals. But they found no clues. Then they went out into the circumferential passage surrounding, looking for some other inward access, but though they found a few closets, there were no signs of a communication center, studio, or remote station.
They returned to the museum, and proceeded slowly toward the center again, where they were all sure the com center should be. After all, the museum was at the center of the cone, which was a series of concentric shells, and the heart of the communications and data storage should be there too. As they went down the aisle between the ancient relics on their pedestals, Droagn focused all his attention on his Prime, and got a distinct though dim impression of hollows both above and below, but not a single clue as to how to get to them.
Rikard stood in the center of the low dais in the middle of the museum and tried, in his own way, to tune in on this place, to empathize with it. He looked around, saw his companions, looked up at the ceiling, at the lights. The only thing that struck him was that there were no lights directly overhead, though there were spotlights that especially illuminated the dais. And that cast the ceiling directly overhead into deep shadow.
Where small details, such as the seam of a trapdoor, might easily be hidden. "Come here," he said to Droagn. "Stand right in the middle here, or whatever it is you do, and reach Gray shard up as high as you can."
Droagn did as he was bid, coiling his tail onto a strong base and lifting himself up with Grayshard in his upper arms. It was not easy to lift his own weight on only the very end of his tail, but he and Grayshard knew exactly what was expected. When Droagn was sure he had his balance, he lifted Grayshard up in his arms as high as he could reach. He was still three meters short of the ceiling. Grayshard took off one glove and stretched a bundle of red-tipped tendrils up, thinning as he reached, until only a strand of five or six tendrils at last touched the ceiling. It feathered across the dark surface a moment.
"Got it," he said at last. "Just a seam." The strand bunched up, thickened as more fibers followed, then it split at the ceiling and the secondary strand drifted across and around.
From below, Rikard watched as Grayshard gripped the invisible gap with more and more tendrils, and then slowly pulled more and more of himself up, leaving his clothes and even his vocalizer behind, until, hanging from the ceiling, he was able to work some of the finest of his tendril ends into the jamb all the way around.
Then he must have found the latch, for he suddenly dropped down to Droagn, who slumped down to the dais. Grayshard grabbed his vocalizer and said, "Look out," but Rikard and Droagn could already see a circular section of the ceiling begin to drop toward them. They moved out of the way and watched as a circular column descended slowly from the ceiling and touched the dais with a soft thump. At that instant, arched openings appeared all around it at floor level.
There was nothing within the arches, it was just an empty chamber. Grayshard got dressed, and then cautiously they entered. The floor underneath them rose, as they had expected it would, without the need to push buttons or select a destination. A light came on above them as they rose into the hollow above the museum. The elevator stopped when its floor was level with that surrounding, and for a long moment they stood in the open cage, looking around them in all directions.
The place was lit from overhead, more dimly than in the elevator, but along the distant walls, and from stations scattered across the floor were many other lights of different colors. It took a moment for their vision to adjust to the low level of illumination.
They moved out into the semidark chamber. The lights not in the ceiling were set into consoles, some wall mounted, some standing alone. Some of these had glowing surfaces like viewscreens. Others made Rikard think of printers, because a white foil, with fading colors, protruded from slots at the top. There were what he assumed to be "keyboards," some of them associated with the "printers."
There were other forms of readout—dials with black ticks but no needles; vertical tubes with ticks and some with a kind of fluid at various levels; small domes that might have been lights. Some of the consoles had analogue input devices, such as a long lever that was free moving where it met the console, or a pentastar with each point flexible, a track ball, or a set of three elastic cords that stretched—or once used to. There were no chairs.
On a few of the consoles were loose objects, such as six-centimeter disks with colored smears; more of the penlike cylinders; a semicircular spring with pads at the ends and connected to a cable that jacked into the console, rather like earphones; pentastars attached to finger-thick rods covered with crumbling foam, which made Rikard think of microphones; and a lot of shallow dishes with a blackened green stain at the bottom.
There was ample room between the floor stations. There were dividers between sections of the wall consoles. And there was other furniture, crescent-shaped desks with drawers on the inside curve and a second level of drawers set back from the work surface; writing tables that were crescents without drawers but that were littered with papers with fading colored marks. But there were no pens or inks. On one side of the chamber was a communications console, with a viewscreen and a goose-necked mike that angled down instead of up.
And as they looked around they became aware o
f the soft sound of air-conditioning.
Physical, psychological, and cultural differences could not conceal the fact that this was the cone's central "computer" —or that it was still functional despite the gap of years. Rikard and his companions moved among the stations and consoles, but didn't touch anything. They didn't know what input devices might still be active, nor could they always tell the differences between input and output, or what might be just decoration.
They went around the upper chamber once, then returned to the center near the elevator and looked the whole place over, especially the stations near the wall.
The communications area was typified by those things that they thought of as microphones, earphones or the equivalent, larger viewscreens, and in some cases speaker grills, and the lack of most of the other kinds of devices. Another section was densely arrayed with a variety of output devices, such as printers, extruders of knobbed string, a variety of viewscreens, and something like an exposed tape drive. And there was another section where there was nothing other than a simple post with a textured sphere on top freely rotating in a socket, probably the command console, or something like. But none of those was really what they were looking for.
But those three stations were arranged on three sides of a square in the circular chamber. On the fourth side...
The station in that position had no visible outputs at all. There were trackballs, scribble-screens, joysticks, and lots of empty jacks. Now jacks for electronic equipment was something Rikard could understand. It was the main input station, and feedback would be provided by ... headsets or the equivalent. Grayshard went over to a console in the middle of the floor and brought back a mike and an earphone.
Rikard took them. "We could be wrong," he said. But each had a cord, which ended in a plug, which fit perfectly into one of the empty jacks on the console. "But we might as well give it a try."
Droagn had gone back to the elevator, and now returned with the large gray case with the black reinforcements and fastenings. He took it from its floater cart and set it down in front of the console. Rikard opened it and took out tools from one of the side drawers. He took apart the cyclopean plug, which consisted of a central conductor and a conducting ring, studied its internal connections for a moment, then built a new one from parts in the gray case, and plugged it in between the case and the console. The simple sensor attached to the cord showed that the power was on, and what the current and flow was. He took out a keyboard, made for large fingers, and jacked it in and handed it to Droagn.
Droagn fiddled with it for a while. A small screen on the case showed characters in his own alphabet, figures and graphs, occasional diagrams that were meaningless to Rikard and Gray shard. Then he stopped and sat back.
"I have no idea what's going on in there," he said. "But silicon and copper and glass are what they are after all, and binary is binary, and a data bank is not the same as a register, and an adder is not the same as a bus, and there seem to be no internal security devices, so I think we can get a dump."
Rikard ran a lead from his recording helmet to Droagn's console, and Droagn initiated the dump. The sheer size of the computer center indicated that the cyclopean's recording medium was relatively bulky compared to the wafers Rikard used in his helmet.
They had no idea of what they were getting. It could be a city directory, a cultural library, insurance records, longdistance phone bills, or important research information. It might take years, if not centuries, to make any sense of it all. Rikard would leave that to the scholars, he just wanted to bring it back to them.
After ten recording wafers were filled, Droagn said, "How many of those do you have left?
"Twenty. Why?"
"It's not going to be enough. I think we got about five percent of what's here. It doesn't help that I can't tell data from programs."
"Then we'll have to do like we did at the Lambeza library. Can you indicate in some way what portion of the data space you've taken so far and what your samples are?"
"Sure, but I'll have to translate it later."
Droagn sampled widely through the remainder of the data space, but at last they were finished. Rikard disconnected and packed everything away in the big gray case.
They returned to the center, entered the elevator that, after a moment, began to descend to the museum. When they got off the elevator it returned to the ceiling.
They loaded all their equipment, including Droagn's portable console, onto one of the carriers, and then, each of them taking one of the four empty floaters and leaving Droagn to pull the loaded one, they separated to go through the museum and each pick out what intrigued them most. That way they would be sure to get a broad range of objects.
But before they could begin to start collecting, several doors opened around the perimeter. Humans, armed and armored, entered, weapons at the ready. Then, at each door, a second person entered, this time a Federal police officer. And then, on one side, a party of people came in, civilians by appearances, who came down the radial to where Rikard and his companions were standing. As they neared, Rikard could begin to make out faces behind the protective helmets. The person in the lead of the party was Karyl Toerson. His precautions had gone for nothing.
The man who walked beside her seemed angry and resentful. "Are you Rikard Braeth?" he asked, using acoustical communication instead of radio.
"I am," Rikard said. He looked at Toerson, who was quietly exultant.
"My name is Igori Oflynn, Deputy Director of Mines, and it's my duty to inform you that you are trespassing on Federally regulated property, and you will have to leave immediately."
"Maybe there's some mistake," Rikard said. "It's my understanding that Federal regulations on this planet concern only the balktapline ore, and there is none at this site." As he spoke he carefully withdrew his folder of passes and documents from its pouch on his protective suit and offered it to Deputy Oflynn. It included his credentials as a duly licensed local historian, which technically should allow him to do research here, whatever other regulations might apply.
Oflynn opened the folder and looked at it unhappily. Toerson just grinned while her minions and the Federal police watched on. Oflynn cursorily flipped through the credentials without really paying them much attention and said, "That's as may be but you crossed the balktapline fields without a permit, and either went over or through the barricade that surrounds this site, which constitutes illegal entry, and this site is an archaeological site not a history base, and your credentials don't cover that."
Toerson kept on smiling. Rikard began to feel that he could truly hate her.
Rikard took off his recorder, tucked the helmet under his arm, and said, "This site represents an entirely new race, one hitherto unknown to the Federation. It is an important discovery, and one that cannot be passed over lightly. I am here on my own authority, it is true, but I have association with several universities that are very interested in seeing my recordings of this place."
"I'm sure you do," Oflynn said. "What have you recorded so far?"
"Hardly anything, really," Rikard said. Gray shard and Droagn just stayed still and silent behind him. "We haven't been here long enough." He flipped a monitor down out of the side of his helmet, held it so Oflynn could see it, and started to play back their passage through the upper levels. "As you can see, we entered," he ran fast forward to when they found the first of the artifacts in the upper and outer layers, "came in and down in as direct a route as we could find," fast forwarded again to scenes of them looking at later samples, "and then came in here." He showed them entering the museum, and played the disk at real time as they first checked it out.
"That's enough," Oflynn said, just before the recording got to where Rikard and his companions had begun to take some of the smaller items. Rikard did not express the sigh he felt as he turned off the playback and closed up the little monitor.
Oflynn made a gesture, and the police came down the radials. Toerson's minions stayed at the
doorways. The police went through the equipment on the loaded carrier, but apparently found nothing they were concerned with.
"Okay then," Oflynn said, "but you'll have to leave now, and take nothing with you but what's on that carrier. Technically I could charge you with trespass, and damaging indigenous artifacts—"
"What did I damage?" Rikard demanded.
"You broke the outer shell of this structure, and several doors coming in. But Msr. Toerson does not wish to press charges."
Toerson smiled.
"And what the hell does she have to do with it?" Rikard demanded.
Karyl Toerson continued to smile as she brought out her own folder of credentials, and took from them papers that she handed to Rikard. As she did so Oflynn glared angrily at her. So it was she, not Rikard, who had aroused his resentment.
"They're all perfectly legal," he grated, and Toerson kept on smiling.
Rikard looked at the documents with a sinking feeling. Though they didn't say so explicitly, they gave her permission to salvage here, and effectively gave her the right to loot the whole cone.
He looked up from the papers and around at the wealth of art objects present. He wanted to protest, but if he did, he would be searched, and the few things he had taken would be found.
"I'm sorry," Oflynn said. The police stood at attention. It was time for Rikard and his companions to depart.
Pulling their three empty floater carts behind them, and the one full of only their own equipment, they left the chamber and started their way back up to the surface of the cone. They did not speak as they retraced their steps. Indeed, Rikard could not have spoken had anyone addressed him. His thoughts were black and his anger and frustration a knotted pain in the back of his head and the center of his chest. His only consolation was that he was sure that Karyl Toerson would not be bright enough to find the computer.
