BOUNDARY(109)

"That did it, all right! Slid back almost as though it was still actually working. We're clear to enter."



As soon as the light flashed around the room's interior, Joe grinned.



"Captain, looks like our Bemmies were as fond as we were of different makes and models. Some of these look like the one the alien in the control room carried, but some of them are pretty different, allowing for the fact they've all got arrangements for being held by a Bemmius."



Joe drifted down the rows of racked weapons. One wall was devoted to rifle-style weapons. They had wider-flared bells at the ends, which Joe assumed were a three-"handed" grip and fire method.



"Damn, I wouldn't have wanted to go up against these guys," Harry murmured, looking down the barrel of a rifle. "That must be a two-centimeter bore. Maybe closer to three."



"No, you wouldn't," Helen concurred. "Greater mass and their construction make it fairly clear that with decent design they could hold and fire weapons of much greater caliber than we could."



"Some of these are personalized, I think," Joe said, focusing his light on what looked like swirls and patterns similar to the now-familiar Bemmius writing on the exposed surfaces of one of the handguns. "Maybe most of them, even. But the decorations faded or sublimed away in the millions of years since."



"Probably the side arms of the crew, kept safe when not needed but still personal possessions," Hathaway guessed. "If so, we've found another similarity between us and them."



Joe had reached the next rack. These weapons had odd fins and protrusions along their length. He glanced down the barrel. "Hey, A.J., tell me what you think of this one."



John Henry drifted over, focusing sensors on the indicated weapon. "Well, well, well. That is no chemical propellant weapon."



"What? What have you found?" That was Madeline's voice breaking in, sounding unusually excited. "Sorry, but I am in intelligence, you know. New weapons, that's like my Pavlovian trigger."



"Looks like a gauss gun to me."



"Gauss gun?" Helen repeated.



"A gun that uses magnetic fields to accelerate a metallic projectile to high speeds," Hathaway explained. "Mass drivers and maglev trains work on the same basic principles."



"So the protrusions there are part of the acceleration design?"



"Probably. We'll have a lot of work to make sure. If it is, that does imply some advances in technology over us, unless it's a plug-in model. We'll have to see. Good work, Joe and Harry. Looks like we'll have something to really entertain the folks back home with. Not to mention some gadgets to get our engineers to chew on."



"That's code for 'okay, now get out of there before you mess anything up for the people who will want to record where everything was to the millimeter,' am I right?"



"Otherwise known as 'don't mess with the bonediggers,'" came Helen's voice, darkly.



Hathaway laughed. "I'm so glad I don't have to translate for you. Besides, you've been out there a while. Time to come in."



"Right. Come on, Harry, we've got to lug this opener back. Unfortunately, A.J. didn't have the good sense to design John Henry like a pack mule."





Chapter 36




"Too sparse for an archive."



"Ballocks," Jane Mayhew retorted. She shook her head vigorously—more so than was wise, actually, in a spacesuit. This was only the third time Mayhew had done an EVA outside of training, and she was still awkward at it. "Richard, we have no idea how many things they preferred to put on hard display, or their preferences in seating arrangements for groups or meeting places. We know those little pyramid things in the table were their equivalent of network connections, so accessing archives would be trivial."



Rich Skibow glanced around the room, studying the layout again. His more economical movements were partly a reflection of his personality, and partly due to his greater experience with working in spacesuits.



The wide, very long room had large, solid plaques on the walls— plaques which A.J. thought were bigger equivalents of the noteplaques found in the control room. A number of alien noteplaques were scattered about, with various diagrams and writing still preserved on their surfaces. Many of them rested on a very elongated table or desk, which had a number of the scalloped indentations they suspected were the equivalent of seating areas.



"A.J., would you quit grinning like a hyena?"



A.J. couldn't help it. The two linguists squabbled as though they'd been married for twenty years, and somehow after the one argument he associated the heated debates between them with good luck.