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"Right. Or, at least, carry just enough fuel to keep whatever the engines were running. But they wouldn't be blowing most of the fuel out the back end. Their drive would still be slow—meaning sublight speeds, even if it was much faster than rockets. But not so slow or with such handicaps that it couldn't be done at all."



He waved a hand, stifling A.J. "Yeah, yeah, I know. Bussard ramjets. But that's just an engineer's daydream, so far as anyone knows. Obviously, the Bemmies never took that route. Why bother, when you have a drive that detours the whole fuel problem altogether?"



Joe had been thinking about it further, even while he talked. With the earlier dream of an FTL drive so rudely shattered by A.J.'s cold logic, a number of other things about the model of the Bemmie spacecraft they'd found in the Vault were starting to make sense.



"I'm willing to bet it wasn't even that fast a drive," he mused. "I hate to say it, but now that I look on that model in the cold light of day, that almost flying-saucer design makes a lot of sense. They spun it, I'll betcha. Because they needed centrifugal force to substitute for gravity just as much as we do."



A.J.'s eyed widened. Unfortunately, there had been no scale provided—that humans could read, anyway—to give any sense of how big the ship modeled actually was. "That big?"



"Why not? Sure, with that modified tuna can design it'd outmass Nike by an order of magnitude. At least. Even assuming it was no bigger—an assumption we have no reason to make. And so what? With a reactionless drive, mass doesn't really mean that much, if you've got the time to make the trip in the first place. And there are a lot of advantages to a big ship, especially for long trips."



He considered the problem, for a few seconds. "I'm also willing to bet that, leaving the issue of propulsion aside, their drive worked more or less along the same principles as our ion drives, in other respects. A very low acceleration—much too low to provide artificial gravity itself, which is why you have to spin the ship—but one you can sustain for a long time. So you could cross interstellar distances. But it'd take an awfully long time. Maybe even require generation ships, although . . . "



A.J. shook his head. "Not if you can keep the acceleration constant. Still, you're talking trips measured in years, maybe decades— and that's just to cross between nearby stars."



"Yep. Alas. Bye-bye that daydream."



Madeline sat up straight. "Put together a short summary of all that, would you? Or, rather—Joe, you do it. A.J. has to concentrate on solving Rich's little problem. If he can."



The imaging specialist sat up even straighter. "If I can? Ha! O ye of little faith, watch—" Madeline smiled at Helen. "See how I cheered him up?"





The next morning, A.J. was scrutinizing Rich Skibow's "little problem."



It wasn't all that little, actually, speaking physically.



"You're sure? That'd be one hell of a big book. Using the term loosely."



"Well, Jane and I aren't sure. But, yes, we're almost positive that has to be the Rosetta Stone. More precisely, the key to getting at any of them." He waved a hand, backward. "The one I thought was a Rosetta Stone when we first entered turns out to be just one of dozens like it. They've all got that multiple-script feature, but Jane and I think this thing is the key to unlocking the puzzle. Insofar as it can be unlocked at all, anyway. Since none of these has a script in a language we know—obviously—they aren't really the same thing as a Rosetta Stone. But it's as close as we'll ever come. Just having a number of languages for comparison will help us a lot—especially because I'm pretty sure this thing is what amounts to a superdictionary."



After Rich finished, A.J. went back to scrutinizing the object. The item in question rested in a case that, from the looks of it, had at one time also been sealed in inert gases. Here, though, the passage of millions of years had taken its toll. However it had happened, one corner of the case had cracked. The crack wasn't much, but it was enough for whatever gas had filled the case to have leaked out long since.



Of course, the case itself had still been in the inert atmosphere that had filled the entire Vault. But the simple fact that the Bemmies had taken the trouble to seal it separately indicated how critical they'd apparently considered the item it contained.



The item itself was a little more than a third of a meter across, composed apparently of mostly manufactured diamond plated over a substrate of their composite with maybe platinum as a coating, since it was shiny like a mirror. A circular mirror with a polychromatic reflective surface; A.J. thought it looked rather like a giant DVD surfaced with faceted crystals.