"Think of it, Clark! A woman with the knowledge of such a race. Before
they enclosed her, they thought-fed her brain with knowledge, and so
arranged the crystal that during all the years of her interment, she
would learn! A brain like that--why it would revolutionize our own
culture. The Earth'd go millions of years ahead in science, if we could
only find her--and bring her back to life!"
Travis had said, "If she's entombed on a hellhole like Flormaseron,
how'd you ever hear of her?"
Martin Kent took Travis by the arm, led him out the door of his office
and into the museum corridor. Here in Solar Museum, Mars Division, Kent
was absolute ruler. Behind him he had the billions of credits that
Earth and Mars and Venus poured into their cultural endeavors. From
all over the solar system Solar brought stuffed animals, crumbling
bricks from ancient cities, rusted weapons that experts studied and
reconstructed in glittering _stil_.
They walked past a panoramic window of a Venusian sea-bottom and into a
narrow room that held a safe inset in its east wall. Kent put the flat
of his hand on the lock, and waited. A deep humming throbbed from
behind the glistening metal wall. The huge door swung open.
Kent reached in and brought out a tiny vial of green metal. He
unscrewed the lid, withdrew a folded scroll. "It's all here, Clark.
Stylogrammed on flexible metal. It's ages old. One of our field parties
came across it in a dried sea-bed on Clex. It puzzled us a long time,
until Fielding came across a key to the writing, and translated it."
Travis turned the metallic paper over, looked at the queerly graceful
writing. He looked at Kent inquiringly.
Kent smiled, "Well, what do you say? I'd go myself if I were younger.
And, if it didn't cost so much, I'd send a field party. But it's a
gamble, and the Board probably wouldn't agree to spending credits on
it. But one man could go. One man--like you."
Travis grinned. He was tall and saturnine, brown with the heat of many
suns. His body had been hardened on the deserts of Proxima Centauri,
and under the seas of Venus.
Kent went on, "You're the best archaeologist I know. You've been in
tight spots before. You can fight, if you have to. A thing like trouble
is an old friend to you."
Travis remembered the polyps in the Venusian water-caves where he'd
almost lost an arm before he got past them to bring the museum the
only specimen of the primal undine race of Venus ever seen above the
sea-mists. He had found a petrified boat on Sirius' third planet, to
prove that at one time there had been seas on that baked potato of a
planet. But for the last six months he had moped around Mars Port,
studying alluvial deposits, wishing for something to take him and his
equipment out into the star-paths again.
"I'll go, Mart. And if you'd only shaved this morning I might kiss you
for the chance!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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