BOUNDARY(168)

After studying the thing carefully for a few minutes, A.J. turned back to Rich. "Okay, I'm pretty sure your guess is right. If so, what we have here is something like a digital data disc. They took advantage of refractive tricks to allow them several layers to write on with different wavelengths. They're probably using a binary encoding— that's at least reasonable—but their coding table I'm going to have to figure out . . . hmmm . . . "



He looked back at the item he'd tentatively labeled a data disc. "Looks like it's all here, though. The problem is that we haven't got a reader for it. And whatever readers they might have had—which we haven't found yet, and may never—they wouldn't work by now, anyway. Bemmie super construction notwithstanding, nothing that relies in any way on moving parts is still going to be functional after sixty-five million years. At least, nothing on that level of precision; the door mechanism worked, but that's several orders of magnitude cruder and works on what amounts to brute force. So the question becomes, are we smart enough to build a gadget that will substitute?"



"Are you?"



A.J. frowned. "Of course I'm smart enough. Well. I think. But here I don't have the stuff I'd need. I need emitters in just the right wavelengths—tunable, mind you—I need control circuitry, I need a way to spin the sucker and get the timing right, yada yada yada. And you can bet I'll have to experiment with it a lot, because we're bound to stumble across some obvious, critical, need-to-know information that we don't know, like: 'well, of course the files are all encoded with three primes.' If I was on Earth I could whip together some kind of test-bed, but here I'd have to cannibalize something, especially for the moving parts."



"So you can't do it?" Jane said in a disappointed tone. She was following the discussion from the Nike, using relays established by the bread crumbs that A.J. now had scattered throughout the Vault.



"Stop jumping on me! I know you're excited about this, both of you, but hell, you're asking me . . . Well, it'd be like going back to the 1970s and handing someone a DVD. Even if you told them about it, they might not have the gadgets to read it with, and they'd sure need to think about it. Especially if you left out something about how, oh, MPEG encoding worked. I have to assume these guys gave me all the critical info, but they could have dropped the ball anywhere along the line." A.J. frowned. "I'll think about it for a bit."



He left the inner area and went back, musing on the problem. He found Helen carefully going over the scaly hide of a velociraptor of some kind. A Deinonychus, he thought, although he wasn't sure.



"What's up, sweetheart?"



She jumped. "Don't startle me like that." She pointed to the raptor mummy. "Look close."



He did so, studying the hide in the area she indicated with his usual eye to detail. "Oh, those little depressed markings?"



"Yes. I think those are marks of some kind of parasite—a louse or something. I'm hoping I can find one intact, or at least some pieces left in the scales. The problem with these being preserved is that someone cleaned them up which eliminates all that kind of thing."



"Listen to you! You're complaining about someone having left you perfectly preserved dinosaurs to work on!"



Helen laughed and hugged him suddenly. The spacesuits eliminated the sensuousness of the embrace, but A.J. still found the gesture heartwarming.



"Yeah, pretty ungrateful, aren't I?" She looked back at the dinosaur. "And that's what brought us together, too."



He grinned. "I remember. I came out there to give you a look at your dinosaurs through the rock, and then you guys almost killed me for faking the scan."



"Well, you can't blame us. You were showing off. Mr. 'Look, I have a halo!'"



"Okay, I'm no angel, but—"



He froze.





Chapter 52




After a while, he became aware that Helen was poking him.



"A.J.? Answer me! You just cut off there and—"



He made a sharp gesture with his hand and she went quiet; he was glad she could recognize the signs. The idea was there and it was a hell of an idea. It seemed like it could work . . .



"It would work," he muttered to himself, "if I can pull it off. Not easy . . . cross talk . . . network topology . . . emitters, yeah, but how much will I need? Power supply for the whole thing, higher constant use than design . . . but with Nike to help . . ."



He suddenly gave a whoop, picked Helen up and spun her around. In Mars' gravity, this caused them to spin out of control— fortunately for continued harmony, not into the raptor mummy— and over in what might have been an embarrassing position if they hadn't both been wearing spacesuits.