BOUNDARY(164)

"A.J.," Helen said quietly, "is it . . . is it . . .?" She reached up to wipe the tears from her eyes, until her hand encountered the helmet.



A.J., called back from his own stunned amazement, directed his sensors at the looming creature. After a while, he said: "Yes, indeed it is. A mummy, not a model, deliberately mounted and preserved. Before we opened that door it might have been pure nitrogen or some other inert gas in here. I'll know for sure once I analyze the readings."



"But . . . why?" Madeline asked. "Why in the world would you devote so much of your effort to seal away samples of Earth's life-forms on some other planet—and that planet not your own? I mean, I could understand making a museum or something on your own world, but this was sealed off!"



Rich was standing stock-still. None of the others noticed until they heard him breathe ". . . could it be?"



Then he was moving purposefully around the room, flashing his light here and there. A Bemmius flashed into view, this one brightly colored and not dull like the mummies discovered on Phobos, sealed behind some kind of transparent material. Rich's light disregarded that, came to an opening in the wall across from them. Without pause, he entered that corridor, then came to another door. The others were now following him, Helen trailing and staring back at the tyrannosaur as though it might vanish.



"Rich, what's up?" Joe demanded, puzzled. "What are you looking for?"



When there was no answer, Joe realized that Richard Skibow was focused so completely on what he was doing that he probably hadn't even heard the question. The door in front of Rich swung inward, and Rich almost lunged through, flashing his light around the short corridor. Then he stopped, and slowly, almost reverently, reached out, touching a shining transparent surface behind which . . .



Joe would have scratched his head, if he hadn't been wearing a suit. What's this stuff? he wondered. Behind the window—that was all he could call it—was a series of objects, with symbols in the Bemmie language above each group.



"What is it, Rich?"



"Not a tomb," Richard said finally, his voice almost a whisper. It held the same near rapture that Helen's had a moment before. "What else have we done, when we seal things away forever?"



He didn't wait for their reply. "A time capsule. A time capsule— with a Rosetta Stone sealed within." He pointed to the first object, a single oval stone. Over it, a symbol. The next section held two oval stones, and another symbol. The next section, three oval stones. Joe understood suddenly.



Rich turned and pointed down the corridor; the next door had symbols on it and a different kind of handle. "And a simple key to make you able to tell when you've learned what is here, and then move on."



His voice rose in excitement. "Jane? Jane, this is it! They've left us their language!"





Chapter 51




"Well, okay," Rich said cheerfully over dinner four days later, "so I didn't get it quite right. It is a Rosetta Stone. Jane and I are now quite sure of it. Even if we still can't read any of the inscriptions, we can discern enough to see that they are in at least seven very different scripts, maybe eight or nine—we're still arguing about that— which wasn't true on Phobos or anywhere else we've found writing here in Melas Chasma. But they didn't leave it for us. Why should they? We weren't even a gleam in some proto-lemur's eye yet. They left it for other Bemmies. And since they apparently didn't know which group of Bemmies might come, or when, they left the messages in a representative language of what both Jane and I think were all of their major language groups."



He slurped down another spoonful of the evening's entree and swallowed appreciatively. "Joe, my heartfelt congratulations. How you manage to turn that stuff they sent down into meals like this is a mystery."



Joe inclined his head toward Madeline, sitting next to him in the rover. "Thank her, not me. That's one of her bouillabaisse recipes."



Helen's eyes widened. She'd been savoring the meal as much as Rich had. "One of them?"



"Yup. I've got seven others that I know by heart. Of course, I'll have to juggle the ingredients a lot. Even up on Nike, they don't have everything I'd need to do them full justice."



While others had been talking about the meal, A.J. had been staring pensively out of one of Thoat's ports. There was nothing to see out there, of course, now that night had fallen. The Martian starblaze that was such a splendor when standing outside at night—one of the few benefits of the planet's thin atmosphere—was mostly filtered by the port.