Analog SFF, March 2012 Read Online Free PDF

that had move faster than the eye to stretch from this new doorway to the entrance behind us. The trench or T had indeed been a kind of track.
    We waited in silence. When nothing more happened, Karen took a step toward them.
    "Please,” I said, “please don't touch them."
    "No,” she said. “It's just . . . do you see motion in there?"
    The boxes looked mostly opaque to me, their surface like the walls in the room: like a gold etched silicon chip. But I stepped closer and, as I watched, it did seem that, dimly visible, something twitched below the surface.
    "God that is frightening,” I whispered.
    I looked up the row. “These things are aimed at the door,” I said. “We're getting out of here, now. We're going to close the door. And we're going to think this through."
    For once, they didn't argue with me.
    * * * *
    I was disoriented when I pulled the helmet off. It seemed I was still in the VR. Then I realized the sun had set and it was dark in the tent. We'd spent so much time that day preparing the suits that our short hour in the device had taken us to sundown. Karen closed the door of the device. As my eyes adjusted, I took the rest of the suit off, and then pushed outside the tent.
    The sky was still blue, but darkening. The forest was full of shadow, the sun far behind a hill—mountain?—to our west.
    "It's starting to get cold,” I said to Karen as she came to my side.
    "Don't complain,” she said. “You should see this place in black fly season. I'll start a fire."
    "Isn't that my job?” I asked.
    "Get real."
    * * * *
    We roasted hot dogs on sticks. Daltry was appalled. We discovered he was a food snob of a ferocity rare, perhaps unique, to a coder. He hadn't eaten a hot dog—"nor processed food"—since he was a teen. Karen laughed at him and handed him a tube of mustard and a bun. Daltry rolled his chair so close to the fire that moisture steamed out of the damp wheels. Then he dutifully impaled his hot dog on a stripped stick, and thrust it into the flames.
    I tried to get them to talk about the radio signals coming from the device, but they weren't interested. None of us had the skills really to analyze the output. And they were mesmerized now by the romance of exploring the machine. Staring at the signal seemed so pedestrian in comparison. “We can do that later,” Karen said.
    "Alright,” I said. “Let's talk about the real issue. I think we need to go to the UN. We could drive there tomorrow. This is too big for just the three of us. This thing is old. It's extraterrestrial or extrasomething. And it's functional."
    Karen and Daltry stared at me.
    Finally, Karen's eyes slipped to Daltry. She gave him a pleading look. After a pause, Daltry said to her, “So tell me about this pre-Cambrian."
    I had forgotten this about her. She had this way of winning loyalty—almost a sense of conspiratorial familiarity—from people she'd only just met. It had made me jealous, and eventually furious, when we were lovers. She could always make me feel the outsider, the one left out.
    "Pre-pre-cambrian,” she said. “Ediacarian."
    "Right."
    "Well. Some paleontologists think it was an Eden. No predators had evolved yet. Just colony organisms. The oceans would have been full of colony organisms, different filter feeders floating about, with a few creeping alone the shallows as slow as slime mold."
    "So our machine arrives, and things are a bit boring, and so it decides to wait for some intelligence to show up."
    "We can't assume that,” I said.
    "And,” Karen said, “it may have been on Earth a billion years already. I can only promise you the rock it's in is five hundred and fifty, maybe five hundred and sixty, million years old. I can't say how old that thing is."
    "So what do you think it was meant to do?” Daltry demanded, squirting mustard on his hot dog. He bit into it with gusto. I resisted teasing him about it.
    They talked through it for hours, even though there was really nothing to be said. We