America 2040 - Golden World Part 16

Allen Jones's recovery and preservation of the boat from Stanton Bay attracted quite an audience. The object was approximately twenty feet long and ten feet wide, an ungainly shape for a boat. It had a flat bottom and thin sides, which extended upward almost four feet-a very high freeboard for a boat. There were those who argued that the underwater archaeologists had made some mistake in their reconstruction of the boat, perhaps thinking that what might have been a double-planked bottom was actually material from the sides.

Both bow and stern were rounded equally, making it impossible to say which was front and which was back. There was no evidence of oars, no masts for sails. The material was of a wood not yet encountered by the colonists. Carbon dating showed varied results, anywhere from five thousand to five hundred years, making some wonder if the carbon dating test would be valid on Omega.

Everyone had his or her own opinion of the purpose of holes s.p.a.ced at regular intervals along the sides of what was thought to be the gunwale.

When the boat had been reconstructed and preserved, the salt.w.a.ter removed from the wood and replaced with a bonding resin to keep it from crumbling into nothing, it was an unimpressive object.

Everyone soon lost interest, everyone but Allen Jones and Duncan Rodrick.

"It worries me," Jones told the captain. "It's about as sorry a boat as I've ever seen. "

It worried Rodrick, too. Intelligent beings had built that boat and the abandoned city in what was now called Stoner's Valley. Where were they?

The archaeological team in Stoner's Valley soon gave Rodrick more data about the intelligent past residents of Eden. The sands that had drifted in the dead city's streets began to give up shards of ceramic vessels and, in one exciting find, a hammered-gold bracelet, which, they decided, had been made for a child. Carbon datings of decayed wood residue from the city were uniform enough to allow the archaeologists to state that the city had been inhabited up to three thousand standard years ago.

Sophisticated detectors searched the entire valley for more metallic artifacts and found several axheads and spearheads. Detectors showed areas where the subsoil had once been disturbed by digging, and excavation turned up nothing more than an area of dirt more siliceous than the surrounding earth. This led to speculation that the area had been used as burial sites for a life form with the same basic life system as the miners and that the intelligent beings who had built the city were a silicon-based life form.

If that supposition was true, it meant that the beings who had expressed themselves in metallurgy, ceramics, and stonework had been as alien to human life as the miners. And, Rodrick thought, a race that had been working metals three thousand years before theSpirit of America landed could have made some rather startling advancement... if they were still around.

So Rodrick had his worries, but he was not the only one. Max Rosen had problems, too. He had filled out the marriage-license form, and both he and Grace had signed it. Max had personally delivered it to the captain for his signature but couldn't get Grace away from those d.a.m.ned miner burrows long enough to set a date.

Rodrick kept saying, "Look, Max, this should be a big affair. We can make it our first celebration onOmega. Let's hold off until we get things settled down a little bit." So Max went to work on the rocket-fuel plant now that it was certain that there was rhenium on Omega. The plant would be built near the river Dinah in the industrial sector.

Grace, meanwhile, was trying to establish communications with the miners. She and Paul Warden had become the unofficial amba.s.sadors, as well as chief trade representatives, to the underground nation. The population of miners was far greater than had at first been thought. To find a miner, Paul or Grace would put a pan of synthetic congealed fat near a trap-and traps were scattered all over Eden, from the coast to the snowy mountains, from the southern marshes to the northern desert-and the dead-white, evil-looking miner would come sc.r.a.pe-sc.r.a.ping up to slice a neat, round hole in the sod and extend that k.n.o.bbed cone of a head.

As a result, the supply of metals was growing. Gold was the most common trade material brought up from the depths of the earth by the miners. Grace tried to get the idea across to the miners that she wanted a particular kind of metal by putting an empty pan next to the trap and putting rhenium samples from Max directly beside it. The miners continued to deliver other metals and ores, but aside from minute amounts of rhenium in the copper ores, she got no direct results.

By s.h.i.+fting her samples to gold or iron or copper, she found that the miners' intelligence was not at fault, for she soon had a dozen individuals trained to deliver gold, copper, or iron on order.

"There's just too little rhenium," Stoner McRae decided. "And it's not in easily accessible form, like the gold and other metals."

Since it was obvious that there was communication among the miners, Grace began to try to find out what kind of a system they used. At night she would record the sc.r.a.ping, tapping, and gurgling of the miners, and then the next morning she'd try to make sense of the sounds. She was slowly building up what she thought was a vocabulary for the miners. She was already sure that some of the gurglings had to do with the mating process, for she had recorded several instances in which two miners would slowly converge, gurgle for a long period, frantically sc.r.a.pe for a brief period, and then separate from each other.

Grace finally had to admit that the sounds made by the miners were as untranslatable as the songs of whales and the whistles of dolphins on Earth, and were probably of the same level of communication.

Max growled, "Think we might be able to set a date now?"

"Let's do," Grace said, giving him a kiss that was, miraculously, not interrupted for a full two minutes.

Then Captain Rodrick called and asked Max to join him and the two scouts Jacob West and Renato Cruz in the captain's office.

Jacob and Renato were good friends, supporting the old tenet that opposites attract. Although both men were Apache Indians, Jacob was not typical of the Native American stereotype. He hated the outdoors, for one thing. Stocky, round-faced, and cheerful, he held a Ph.D. in physics and had helped to develop a new rocket fuel before deciding to be a shuttle pilot, then scout. He was known affectionately as Chief Sky Flyer, and Jacob, liking the name, used it as his call name on his scout s.h.i.+p,Apache One .

Renato, whose scout s.h.i.+p was calledApache Two , was moody, silent, and tended toward drink. He spoke often of the injustices done to Indians in the early days of North American colonization. For this reason, his friends called him Sobbing Wolf. It made one wonder whether he had signed on for this expedition as a means of making sure history from the 1600s did not repeat itself four centuries later onanother planet.

When Max came into Rodrick's office, he found the men comfortably slouched in their chairs around the conference table, their long legs stretched out.

"Max," Rodrick began after the chief engineer was seated with a cup of coffee in hand, "Jacob and Renato have been trying to get a photo of the big life forms in the equatorial jungles."

"The only thing we've come up with so far is this," Jacob continued, handing Max an enlargement in color of the surface of a body of water. Max had to look closely to see the shadows form under the water.

"Whale?" he asked.

"I don't think so," Jacob answered. "That's a freshwater river."

"Big," Max said. A scale printed on the side of the photograph told him that the shadowy shape under the water was over thirty feet long.

"Listen to this," Renato Cruz said, pus.h.i.+ng a b.u.t.ton that activated a recording device. "We recorded it while hovering just above the jungle canopy."

Something big was crus.h.i.+ng its way through the jungle. Now and then a sharp snap could be heard, as if some sizable tree had been broken.

"The problem," Renato explained, "is that the big life forms, like the one making that noise, are in the deep jungle, and I mean deep. The canopy is so tight, there's no break in it. We can locate the big boys by life signal and sound, but we can't see them."

"Send someone in on the surface," Max suggested.

"Come with us down there and see if you'll still say that," Jacob said. "Maybe you'll volunteer to cut your way through a few hundred miles of that stuff, but I won't."

"Burn some clearings," Max said.

"We did and set up monitors. Nothing came close to them. And the undergrowth began to cover the clearings in less than a week."

"Jacob wants to put a landing pad on top of the canopy," Rodrick said.

"Then we can push a camera through the canopy on a long probe," Jacob said.

Max's face took on his pained thinking look. "Yeah," he answered after a few moments. "Yeah. You think the treetops will hold the weight, huh?"

"We lifted a big fallen tree from the edge of the jungle and set it down onto the canopy in the central areas," Jacob said. "The tree weighed just over four tons. It sank a bit, but it stayed right there on top. If we had some way to spread the weight-"

"Captain," Max said, "don't plan anything for Sunday after next." "Will it take you that long to rig something up?" Jacob asked.

"No, that's when I'm gonna get married," Max said. "We can put a grill down on the trees in a couple of days. We'll weld together some steel-mesh dividers. But if you don't want to do it, Dunc, we'll get one of the ministers."

"It's an honor I wouldn't miss," Rodrick said.

"You'll have to ferry the d.a.m.ned thing all the way south slung underneath," Max said to Jacob, who was a little confused from the two conversations.

"Congratulations," Renato Cruz offered.

"h.e.l.l, it's nothing. Won't take more than a couple of hours to weld it together," Max said.

"I mean on your wedding," Cruz said.

"Maybe we shouldn't weld it here," Max said. "Maybe we should carry it down closer to the jungle in pieces and weld it there. How much closer could we get to the deep jungle?"

"At least a thousand miles," Jacob said.

"You think Cindy McRae would like to be our flower girl?" Max asked, looking up into the air.

"I think she'd be honored," Rodrick said. "Who do you have in mind for best man?"

"It gets complicated," Max said. "We'll need to figure out a way to be sure to recover that grill. Can't leave that much good steel just rotting down in the jungle."

Max stood and walked to the door, tried to open it from the wrong side, grunted, found the right point, and went out. Rodrick laughed. "I think, gentlemen, that we'd better get the chief married, and quickly. "

"Captain," Jacob asked, "have we got your approval on this project?"

"On two conditions," Rodrick said. "First, as Max said, we have to recover that metal. Steel is as valuable as gold on this planet. Second, you're not to go down to the jungle floor without specific permission from me."

"Apache Two," Jacob said, rising, "let's go get ready to take us a look at a thunder lizzard."

"If you're that sure you're going to see something down there like a dinosaur?" Rodrick asked.

"Whatever it is," Jacob said, "it's big. It shakes the ground when it walks, and it goes through the small trees and undergrowth like a tank."

"Let me know when Max has your treetop landing pad ready," Rodrick said.

Max went directly to Grace's lab when he left the captain's office. He almost collided with PaulWarden, who was conning out of the lab. He grunted a greeting and went into the room to find Grace just focusing an electron microscope.

"What are you up to?" he asked.

"Cross sections of nerve endings in the brain of a miner," Grace said.

"Don't plan anything for Sunday after next," Max said.

"I just don't know what's wrong with that woman," Grace remarked.

Max got a pained look on his face.

"That Sage Bryson, " Grace said, her face hidden in the viewer of the microscope. "He's such a nice man, too."

"Hey, Grace-"

"You set the date without asking me?"

"If it was gonna get set, someone had to do it," Max growled, going up to put his hands on the outflowing line of her hips and kissing her on the neck.

"The brain fluid is an interesting series of compounds. If I can ever find out what exactly happens-"

"Turn around," Max ordered.

"Sometimes I get reactions as if the silicon is going to burst into life," she said, turning into his arms, lifting her own arms, putting one hand at the back of his head, fingers moving into his hair. "Couldn't you have decidedthis Sunday?"

He had just found her lips when the admiral burst in, "Grace-" He paused. Max groaned and pushed Grace away. She did not feel like laughing.

"Excuse me," the admiral said.

"Is there a problem?" Grace asked.

"It can wait, Grace."

"Go ahead," Max said in deep agony. "I gotta go build a landing pad for the jungle."

"Watch out for snakes," Grace called as he left.

"Maybe I'll find one that eats robots," Max said.

The admiral looked after Max, his face showing puzzlement. His face should not have shown anything.

She hadn't constructed him to be able to express emotion.

"He was joking," she explained. "Now what is this problem that can wait but seems so important?" "I don't know how to say it," the admiral said.

"By forming words one at a time in some logical order," Grace said.

"You're angry with me because I interrupted your lovemaking."

"A bit irritated, perhaps. Not angry," she said.

"I'm sorry."

d.a.m.n it, she was thinking,he's becoming a teenager . She reached out and put her hand on his arm. He smiled. d.a.m.n, he was handsome.

"I think I need to ask your advice, Grace, on a personal matter."

"I'll be glad to help," she said.

"What is love?" he asked with a serious look on his face.

She'd learned long ago when she was momentarily stunned by a question to borrow time by answering with a question.

"Why do you ask?"

"I realize that it is a question without a simple answer," he said. "I have a.s.similated all of the material suggested to me by Miss Evangeline, in the library."

"It's a tough question," Grace agreed. "People have been trying to give a concise answer, or a definition, for thousands of years. Is this a new research project or something?"

"In a way," he said. He turned away so that she could not see his face. "Actually, it's about Tina."

"Ah," she said.

"I know I'm not human, Grace."