“I do have an idea,” Kaitlin told them. “If we could set things up this way…”
EIGHT
WEDNESDAY, 15 APRIL 2042
The Dig, Picard Base
Mare Crisium, the Moon
1438 hours GMT
“So, anyway,” Kaminksi said, “I was wonderin’ if we could, well, trade e-mails or something. I really enjoyed learning that stuff you were telling me about on Mars, and I keep wanting to ask you questions about it. And it looks like you’ve got a lot more to learn here.” They were standing on the Lunar surface, among the crisscrossing trenches of the French excavation. It seemed like a huge area for two men to search.
“That,” David said, grinning inside his helmet, “is an understatement! I’d be delighted to correspond with you, Ski. You’re not afraid to ask questions, and you have a knack for asking the right ones.”
“Thanks! I’ll try not to be a pest with it, but, well, the news, Triple-N, and all, they always seem to get the facts tangled up, at least from what you were saying.”
“Sometimes they do.”
“So, anyway, you was sayin’ that the aliens who built the Face, and all that stuff on Mars, they’re different from the aliens who were here on the Moon?”
“That’s right, Ski,” David replied. “The Cave of Wonders, the Face, all of that is about half a million years old. Whatever crashed here was a lot more recent. Eight thousand years, six thousand years, something like that.”
Kaminski turned slowly, surveying the harshly illuminated patch of the crater floor, trying to imagine what must have happened here. This part of the Moon was now completely dark. Only the worklights cast any light at all, and they made this one tiny corner of the Lunar surface seem very small and isolated. Even the stars were banished by their glare, though the Earth, a blue-and-white first quarter, still hung in its unvarying spot in the western sky.
“Quite a mess, isn’t it, Ski?” David asked, misinterpreting Kaminski’s silent gaze.
“What do you mean?”
David, swaddled and clumsy in his government-issue space suit, turned to face Kaminski. “In proper archeology,” David told him, “we’re interested in the layers, the strata, of debris, of how things are laid down one on top of another. We’re also very interested in the precise locations in which artifacts are found, relative to one another, and to the terrain. We’re very careful about such things, laying out precisely numbered grids, taking photographs of everything in situ, making sure we understand everything there is to know about an object’s position before we remove it.”
“You were tellin’ me about all that on Mars, sir,” Kaminski said.
“So I did. The problem there, of course, was far too much in the way of buildings, artifacts, and debris to explore and catalog, with far, far too few people to do the work. It’s different here.” Turning again, David waved one arm, taking in the entire black panorama of the crater floor, the trenches and excavated pits beneath the worklights, the mounds of debris piled nearby. “We archeologists have a technical term for this sort of site,” David told him. “We call it fubaritic strata.”
“Yeah?”
“As in fubar.”
“Ah! As in ‘Situation Normal, All Fucked Up.’”
“Exactly. See? We’ll make an archeologist out of you yet.” David started to walk. Kaminski followed, shouldering the massive canvas satchel he’d been packing for Alexander since they’d left the hab. It didn’t weigh very much in the Lunar gravity, but its inertia made it a chore to move or to stop.
With the satchel, his PLSS, and his slung ATAR, Kaminski was beginning to feel like a caddie following a VIP around a golf course. A golf course with grays instead of greens that was one big sand trap from tee to hole.
“So, how’s it screwed up?” Kaminski asked.
“We just had two small armies tramping back and forth through these trenches the other day, Ski. What else would it be?” They arrived at the edge of a large, shallow pit. David jumped in, followed a moment later by Kaminski. The floor was covered by treaded-boot prints, with tangles of white string scattered about seemingly at random. “Looks like they had that area laid out in a proper grid for photography and cataloging, with string and posts, but so many people stampeded through that the grid lines are all torn down. I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to recreate Dr. Billaud’s survey work here.”
“Maybe you could get him to help? I mean, back in the hab this morning, you were tellin’ those Army guys that he was cooperatin’ with you. He told you all that stuff about Sumeria.”