Across a Billion Years Read Online Free PDF Page A

wasn’t room for him with the others. Jan and Kelly bunked with Dr. Horkkk, Pilazinool, 408b, and Steen Steen. For all I know they had wild orgies over there all night.
    I slept poorly. It wasn’t just Mirrik’s fragrance, which I’ll adapt to in time, but the excitement that got to me. Sleeping a hundred meters away from a treasure trove a billion years old, piled high with the artifacts left behind by the mightiest and most advanced race the universe has ever known. What wonders will we find in that hillside?
    I’ll know soon. It’s morning, now. Pale, straggly light is coming over the horizon. I was the first one up in our dorm; but when I came outside I found Dr. Horkkk doing some kind of weird calisthenics, and Pilazinool sitting on the ground stripped down to a torso and one arm, polishing his other limbs, while 408b was meditating. Those aliens don’t sleep much.
    An hour from now we’ll tackle the site. More news later.

three
    August 23, I think, 2375
    Higby V
    W E’VE BEEN AT IT a week. No luck. I almost think we’ve been hoaxed.
    The site is a hillside outcropping exposed by recent erosion, as I think I may have said already. The top forty meters of countryside here did not exist when the High Ones had their camp on Higby V; all of this gritty, sandy yellowish soil piled up hundreds of millions of years after their time, deposited by wind and flood in the long-ago days when this planet still had weather. Then after we got here and reintroduced weather, the topsoil started to erode, permitting the discovery last year of characteristic High Ones artifacts. Fine.
    Then Dr. Schein and a couple of grad students from Marsport came here last year to do the preliminary survey. They went into action with neutrino magnetometers and sonar probes and density rods, and calculated that the zone of High Ones occupation constituted a large lenticular cone running deep into the hillside. Fine. They covered the whole site with a plastic weather shield and went away to raise funds for a full-scale excavation operation, in which I have been allowed to take part. Fine. We are here. Fine. We have begun the customary resurvey procedures. Fine. Fine. Fine. We haven’t found a thing. Not so fine.
    I don’t understand what’s wrong.
    What we have to do, basically, is very gently lift off the top of the hillside so we’ll have access to what was the surface of the ground a billion years ago. Then we gently work our way down, layer by layer, to the High Ones strata. Then we gently take everything out, one scrap at a time, recording relative positions in a dozen different ways. If we’re gentle enough we may learn something about the High Ones here. If we aren’t gentle, our names will go down in the black book of archaeology alongside the spinless sposhers who took that Martian temple apart to see what was underneath it, and couldn’t get it back together again. Or the zoobies who found the key to Plorvian hieroglyphics and dropped it overboard in a methane ocean. Or the feeby quonker who stepped on the Dsmaalian Urn. The first rule in archaeology is: Be careful with the evidence. It isn’t replaceable.
    No, that’s the second rule. The first one is: Find your evidence.
    We commenced by scanning the top of the hill. We found some intrusive Higby V burials up there, maybe 150,000 years old, dating from the last epoch before this planet lost its atmosphere. The natives of this planet were of no special cultural interest, never having got much past the level of Stone Age man; and as Dr. Schein had already made clear, we are here exclusively to study High Ones remains. Still, once we stumbled onto this Higby V stuff, we had to treat it with some respect, since it might be somebody else’s specialty. So Mirrik reverently cleared the site, Kelly Watchman got to work vacuum-coring, and we transferred the whole business to an open space back of the hill, where Steen Steen and I sealed it up and marked it for future