“Will do,’’ she said. “It’s off now. Starting up again. Blink. Blink. Blink. Pause. Blink. Pause. Blink blink blink blink. Pause. Blink. Pause. Blink blink blink blink blink. Pause. Blink blink blink blink blink blink – oh, damn, I think I’ve lost count. Seven or eight blinks in a row, maybe even nine. Now it’s stopped. Waiting. Here it goes again, now. Blink. Blink. Blink. Pause. Blink. Pause.”

  I glanced over at Vicinanza. He was jotting the blinks down by hand as well.

  Mik Gahune, peering over Gabe’s shoulder, looked up and said, “Tell her to count the long pattern very carefully this time.”

  “You heard that, Fran?”

  “Yes. Here it comes. One, two, three---nine.”

  “Nine?” Gahune said. “Is she sure?” He was grinning broadly.

  “Nine, yes,” came the reply from the terrain vehicle.

  “All right,” said Gahune. “What she needs to do now is to wait until the next cycle comes along, and give us that. Then we’ll tell her what signal to give in return.”

  He nudged Vicinanza, who nodded and grinned.

  He began talking to the computer and numbers started coming up on the screen. The two of them were on to something, all right.

  Out at the great stone building the next cycle had started. The pattern was the same as before, Fran said: Three blinks, one, four, one, five, nine. Stop.

  Gahune said, “Okay. She should reply with this pattern of blinks: Four, two, one, six, one, five.”

  I passed it along. Fran said, “It’s flashing back at us. A new pattern this time. Six blinks. Four. Five.”

  “The reply is Three, Seven, Two.”

  “Three, Seven, Two,” Fran repeated.

  And then an earphone-shattering scream came from her. “The door is opening! The door is opening!”

  I looked at Gahune and Vicinanza in wonder.

  ‘‘Will one of you geniuses please explain how-”

  “Three point one four one five nine,” Gahune said. “Sound familiar?”

  I said almost without thinking, “Pi! The first six digits!”

  “Very good, captain. Gold star and merit badge both.”

  The ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter is the same anywhere in the universe, but you need to be a member of an intelligent species to know that. We asked the computer for the next six digits and she was able to supply them. That’s all the door wanted.”

  “And the Thrynn couldn’t figure that out?” I said, amazed.

  “The Thrynn were getting their synapses scrambled, remember?” said Gahune. “You try remembering pi to six places, let alone twelve, while your brain is cooking! And the androids they sent afterward weren’t smart enough to figure out that the door was asking them a simple mathematical question. But we were.”

  “We’re inside the building!” Fran said, and I could tell from the astonishment in her voice that the building wasn’t empty.

  After half an hour I ordered them to come out and return to the Indomitable.

  They didn’t want to, but I wasn’t going to risk letting them stay that close to the Living Sea any longer. Besides, the rest of us wanted a chance to see what was inside that building.

  When they reached the ship, Fran’s eyes were shining with awe and even the usually stolid Ned Stackman looked transfigured by the marvels he had seen. Visions of fabulous wealth danced in my head as we unloaded the cargo pickup of the terrain vehicle. But they faded quickly as reality came crashing in.

  Jibor and Stackman had found a load of junk.

  Rusted bits of twisted useless stuff. Perhaps they once had been the components of fabulous machines of the ancients but all of it had long ago been smashed to bits. Fragile metal plates bearing inscriptions worn almost to invisibility. Clotted masses of what looked like wire. Humped-up heaps of crud.

  Junk. Esthetic value, zilch. Scientific value, zilch. Market value, zilch. Twenty-five percent of zilch is zilch.

  “But it’s fabulous to be in there’” Fran cried. “To know that you’re walking where some incredibly ancient alien race once walked, before the Old Empire was ever dreamed of –.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m sure it’s a terrific experience, Fran. But isn’t there anything in there that we can sell? Intact sculpture? Tomb offerings? Jewelry? Complete artifacts?”

  “Well – no.” she said.

  We gave the building a thorough going-over.

  I went in with Vicinanza – Fran was right, the place was truly an awesome structure, but awe isn’t a marketable commodity.

  There seemed nothing tangible inside that hadn’t long since rusted away. Gahune took a look, accompanied by Clark, and finally Stackman and Fran made one last sortie. By now the emanations from the sea, though they were still safely sub-lethal, were beginning to make all of us feel a little peculiar. So we packed up our treasure and took the ship back up to the Thrynn habitat.

  Ssspikik was delighted that we had been able to get inside the building, and fascinated and chagrined to learn that the vaunted interrogative code had been nothing more abstruse than pi to a dozen places. When we spread our haul of rusty junk out before him he hissed his appreciation as though we had brought him the greatest treasure of the Old Empire.

  I could tell that he was making the same realistic calculation we had made of the market value of this pitiful stuff.

  His seventy-five percent of zilch wasn’t worth any more than our twenty-five percent of zilch. The difference was that we were broke, and he wasn’t. For him it was just a business venture that hadn’t worked out very well. For us it was a catastrophe.

  “Of course these are just preliminary finds,” he said soothingly. “On your subsequent entries into the building you may discover artifacts of even higher quality.”

  “Of course,” I said. “No doubt we will.”

  I was speaking ironically and Ssspikik was just trying to comfort us. Neither of us really believed that this enterprise was likely to pan out. But we were both wrong.

  The Indomitable made four more trips to the surface of Jathamassa Seven.

  On the fourth and last trip we discovered the artifact that we have come to know as the Time Lens.

  We didn’t have any idea at first what it was. We were working in the lower levels of the building, beneath the flagstone floor, doing some careful stratigraphic excavation in the hope of finding some layer of occupation that had survived the eons better than the material in the upper regions. We figured it was our last chance. As we dug down we found items in a better state of preservation than the previous finds – still nothing spectacular. It was beginning to seem as though the proceeds of selling whatever we had might at least allow us to break even on the voyage. I was brooding when Neel cracked open the top of a stone vault with his laser digger and said sharply, “Hello! What’s this?”

  A column of air suddenly came whooshing out like a genie out of a bottle. Stackman jumped back in surprise. He had stumbled on some sort of insulated container; and that air was thousands or maybe millions of years old.

  There was a container within that one, a third crystalline box within that. With trembling fingers we lifted the lid of that one a little spherical device made of silvery metal, untarnished and in perfect condition.

  The sphere was small enough to hold in one hand, with a couple of little control studs projecting from its top.

  “Finally something worthwhile,” Stackman said, and pounced on it.

  “Wait, Ned,” Fran called. “We need to photograph it in situ, and then we have to –” but Stackman was too excited to worry about proper archaeological procedures. Already he had the thing in his hand and he was pushing the control studs. I yelled at him to stop: what if it was an implosion bomb powerful enough to blow up half a continent, and he had just activated it?

  Sometimes impulsiveness pays off, though.

  A kind of shield slid back on one side of the sphere and a cone of brilliant multi-colored light came streaming forth. We stared in astonishment as the light coalesced into a tight beam that splashed an image on the wall opposite us. We stared at a series of images, a kind of motion picture. A motion picture that was thousands of millions of years old.

  The first image on the wall was what looked very much like a solar system, but a very strange one.

  There was a blazing circle of light at its center and around it were lesser points of light that were moving in planetary orbits.

  We could make out only two planets, one very near the sun, the other at a great distance from it.

  “A two-planet system?” Mik Gahune said. “Is there any such thing?”

  “It isn’t a common configuration,” Stackman said. “But I can think of a few. There’s Lempira, Gran Chingada, and Duud Shabeel, I think –”

  “Look there,” Vicinanza said.

  Whatever recorded this swung around the solar system’s sun, looped past the lone inner planet, and headed toward the remote outer one. It took a minute or two for the distant world to come into focus. We gasped when it did, for at close range we saw that the planet was shining with an eerie high-albedo gleam, a shimmering dazzle of radiance, that had the unique and extraordinary appearance of –

  “Endurium?” I murmured. “Can it be possible?”

  “Nothing else looks like that,” said Stackman. “Nothing.”

  I shook my head in dazed disbelief. “Nothing,” I said, in a barely audible whisper.

  It was incredible. A world covered with endurium?

  A whole planet whose entire surface was the substance on which the entire technology of super photonic transportation is based? That was crazy. Endurium is incredibly rare. You find a little here, a little there – never very much at a time. But surely the weird gleam coming from the planet’s surface could be no other thing. Endurium’s unique spectrographic line is unmistakable.

  A planet of endurium! Not in the wildest of fantasies had anyone ever imagined such a thing. Was the machine playing with us? Toying with our minds, dazzling us with an unthinkable source of wealth?

  ‘‘Now what?” Fran Jibor murmured.

  The image was changing again. Another sun, a galactic wanderer, drifting past the two-planet system! The endurium world spun wildly as potent gravitational forces seized it. It was moving out of orbit, now. Captured by the invader sun? No. No. The other star hadn’t been close enough for that. But under the gravitational stress of the intruder the endurium world seemed to be breaking apart. A great dark crack was appearing, suddenly, on its shining surface. Another, another, another. Immense crevices springing from pole to pole.

  “The planet’s destabilizing,” Stackman muttered.

  Yes. We were being shown an astonishing visual record of an unthinkable catastrophe.

  Within minutes – no doubt the image was being vastly accelerated – we saw that crystalline shield split apart, we saw the endurium planet riven asunder, torn into fragments that whirled in terrible death-throes and were sent spiraling in a wild centrifugal dance, spinning outward, heading in a dozen different directions, drifting toward every corner of the universe. And then the invader star moved on, its damage done.

  We had a final shot showing the original star and its one remaining planet, the inner one, looking lonely and forlorn. Then the cone of light winked out; and we stared silently at each other, too flabbergasted to speak.

  What was the little silvery machine’s purpose? Who knows? Who will ever know? But it had shown us a moment out of incredible antiquity, a newsreel of the inconceivable past. Watching the images on the wall had been like staring back across time. Which is why we started calling Stackman’s little gizmo the Time Lens. We played it again and again and again, watching the death of the endurium world a dozen times, and then a dozen times more, in total fascination.

  So there you have it. Somewhere in the galaxy, probably not very far from the Jathamassa system, there once was a planet bearing an incredible concentration of endurium. Suddenly a cosmic catastrophe pulled that planet apart and its fragments went flying to the far reaches of the heavens. How long ago? Who can possibly say? A million years, five million, ten million?

  One single fragment of that lost planet would be worth a fortune beyond anybody’s ability to count.

  We’re waiting for the archaeological reports now. We need to know how old the stone fortress on Jathamassa Seven is. That may give us some idea of how long ago all this happened. Then we go looking for a sun with a single planet in a close in orbit. Once we know its position we can calculate the paths that the fragments of an exploding planet would have followed over the X million years since the catastrophe. And then we go looking for the fragments, hither and yon around the universe. And maybe we find them.

  The Thrynn are going to bankroll us.

  The original deal still holds: they put up the money for the expenses, we do the work, we split any proceeds 75-25. Even 25 percent of an incredible fortune is an incredible fortune.

  Do we trust them to play fair with us, considering how much is at stake? What do they need us for, now that they know there are whole endurium asteroids floating around out there somewhere?

  Well, I admit it makes us a little uneasy, dealing with the reptilians. But that’s just an atavistic prejudice, going back to some prehistoric Human myth. We’re still striving to overcome that prejudice. And so far the Thrynn have dealt with us in good faith throughout this whole affair.

  We’re filing a full record of the discoveries we made during our Jathamassa expedition with the lnterstel authorities on Arth. We want the whole story on the record. Not that we don’t fully trust our friends the Thrynn, you understand. But I remember what my grandmother used to say about counting the spoons after you’ve had a Thrynn to dinner at your house. Call it prejudice, call it caution, call it anything you like. When trillions of mu’s worth of endurium are out there for the taking and you’ve got Thrynn as your hunting companions, you can’t be too careful, say I.

  We expect to be setting out soon on the quest for that single planet solar system. That’s our starting point. After that – well, we’ll see. Wish us luck!

 

 

  Robert Silverberg, Starflight

 

 

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