Across a Billion Years Read Online Free PDF Page B

know what kind of stash they make? The pension rights? They get sore thumbs from all the spending they do. Or interplanetary law, now, there’s a profession! Alien torts and malfeasances! Hypothecation of assets on nonverbal worlds! Infinite possibilities, Tom, infinite! Why, I knew a lawyer on Capella XII, he did nothing but color-change suits and metamorphoses, and he had a ten-year backlog with six clerks!”
    If you ever play this back, Lorie, I hope you appreciate the skill with which I imitate Our Lord And Master’s voice. I get just the right tone of hearty manliness mixed with stuffy hypocrisy, don’t I? No, blot that. Dad’s not really a hypocrite. He’s consistent to his own rules.
    We all knew he wasn’t the intellectual type, though I at least always felt that despite his extreme concern with piling up stash and keeping a busy thumb, he had some interest in the finer values. He did get a degree from Fentnor, after all, and even though it was in Business Administration they don’t let you escape from Fentnor illiterate. I also felt that Dad was far from being the kind of reactionary vidj that tries to dictate his son’s professional choice. He always struck me as a live and let live type.
    So it hurt when he came down so hard against my going into archaeology.
    No secret what he really wants, which is for me to follow him into the real-estate business and eventually to take over from him. But real estate sings no songs to me, and I made that clear to him, didn’t I, by the time I was sixteen? Dad gets his zingers, not to mention much stash, from building his instant slums out of parapithlite sheeting on faraway worlds, and I suppose for him this is a creative thing. I admit some of his projects have been ingenious, such as the chain of floating houses on that gas-giant world in the Capella system, or the high-grav shopping center with interlocking centrifuges that he whipped up for the Muliwomps. Nevertheless I have always lacked a craving for this entire pocket.
    Anyway, why should I go into a “useful” or “profitable” line of work, to quote two of Dad’s favorite adjectives? What better justification for his bulging bank accounts than that they allowed his son to dedicate himself to the pursuit of pure knowledge?
    Such as the digging up of old odds and ends on miserable cold stormy planets.
    Enough. I need not yammer to you about Dad’s obtuseness, since I think you share my feelings and—as, usual—are 100 percent on my side. Dad went his way, I went mine, and perhaps he’ll soften up and forgive me after a while for turning my back on color-change litigation and housing projects, and if not, I will somehow avoid starvation anyway, doing what I most enjoy doing, which is archaeologizing.
    Though I will not pretend that I’ve enjoyed this current job so far.
    I will take a positive attitude. I will tell myself that we’ll hit the right level any day.
    Three-hour intermission there, during which I helped to perform some hard, dull, valuable work.
    What we did was get fiber telescopes into the hillside to see what’s in there. These are long strands of glass which transmit an optically undistorted image from end to end, given the right illumination. Getting them into the hillside involved drilling holes, which Kelly took care of with her vacuum equipment; this had to be done with unusual care, since the drill might blunder right into the site we’re looking for and chop it up some.
    I may have underestimated Kelly. She handles those corers beautifully.
    Kelly perforated the hill for us; then we mounted the fiber telescopes on sprocket wheels and fed them ticklishly into the ground. We put four in altogether, spaced twenty meters apart; Jan and I worked together on one wheel.
    Now the telescopes are in place. The big shots are peering into the heart of the mound. Night is falling, and it’s raining again. I’m in the dorm, dictating this. If my voice is a little low, it’s because I