Anne McCaffrey: The Ship Who Searched

She took the tools her parents had discarded out of the wagon; the broken trowel that Braddon had mended for her, the worn brushes, the blunted probes, and set to work.

Several hours later, she sat back on her heels and looked at her first find, frowning. This wasn't a lump of flint after all. In fact, it seemed to be some kind of layered substance, with the layers fused together. Odd, it looked kind of wadded up. It certainly wasn't any kind of layered rock she'd ever seen before, and it didn't match any of the rocks she'd uncovered until now.

She chewed her lower lip in thought and stared at it; letting her mind just drift, to see if it could identify what kind of rock it was. It didn't look sedimentary.

Actually, it didn't look much like a rock at all. Not like a rock. What if it isn't a rock?

She blinked, and suddenly knew what it did look like; layers of thin cloth or paper, wadded up, then discarded.

Finagle! Have I-

She gently, very gently, pried another lump off the outcropping, and carefully freed it of its gritty coating. And there was no doubt this time that what she had was the work of intelligent hands. Under the layer of half-fused sand and flaking, powdery dust, gleamed a spot of white porcelain, with the matte edge of a break showing why it had been discarded.

Oh, decom, I found the garbage dump!

Or, at least, she had found a little trash heap. That was probably it; likely there was just this lump of discard and no more. But anything the EsKays left behind was important, and it was equally important to stop digging now, mark the site in case another sandstorm came up and capriciously buried it as it had capriciously uncovered it, and bring some evidence to show Mum and Dad what she had found.

Except that she didn't have a holo-camera. Or anything to cast with.

Finally she gave up trying to think of what to do. There was only one thing for it Bring her two finds inside and show them. The lump of fabric might not survive the touch of real air, but the porcelain thing surely would. Porcelain, unlike glass, was more resilient to the stresses of repeated temperature changes and was not likely to go to powder at the first touch of air.

She went back inside the dome and rummaged around for a bit before returning with a plastic food container for the artifacts, and a length of plastic pipe and the plastic tail from a kite-kit she'd never had a chance to use. Another well-meant but stupid gift from someone Dad worked with; someone who never once thought that on a Mars-type world there weren't very many opportunities to fly kites.

With the site marked as securely as she could manage, and the two artifacts sealed into the plastic tub, she returned to the dome again, waiting impatiently for her parents to get back.

She had hoped that the seal on the plastic tub would be good enough to keep the artifacts safely protected from the air of the dome. She knew as soon as the airlock pressurized, though, that her attempt to keep them safe had failed. Even before she pulled off her helmet, the external suit-mike picked up the hiss of air leaking into the container. And when she held the plastic tub up to the light, it was easy enough to see that one of the lumps had begun to disintegrate. She pried the lid off for a quick peek, and sneezed at the dust The wadded lump was not going to look like much when her parents got home.

Decom it, she thought resentfully. That's not fair!

She put it down carefully on the counter top; if she didn't jar it, there might still be enough left when Mum and Dad got back in that they would at least be able to tell what it had been.

She stripped out of her suit and sat down to wait. She tried to read a book, but she just couldn't get interested. Mum and Dad were going to be so surprised, and even better, now the Psychs at the Institute would have no reason to keep her away from the Class Two site anymore, because this would surely prove that she knew what to do when she accidentally found something. The numbers on the clock moved with agonizing slowness, as she waited for the moment when they would finally return.

The sky outside the viewport couldn't get much darker, but the shadows lengthened, and the light faded. Soon now, soon.

Finally she heard them in the outer lock, and her heart began to beat faster. Suddenly she was no longer so certain that she had done the right thing. What if they were angry that she dissected the first two artifacts? What if she had done the wrong thing in moving them?

The 'what ifs' piled up in her head as she waited for the lock to cycle.

Finally the inner door hissed, and Braddon and Pota came through, already pulling off their helmets and continuing a high-speed conversation that must have begun back at the dig.

"but the matrix is all wrong for it to be a food preparation area, "

"yes, yes," Pota replied impatiently," but what about the integument, "

"Mum!" Tia said, running up to them and tugging it her mother's elbow. "I've found something!"

"Hello, pumpkin, that's very nice," her mother replied absently, hugging her, and going right on with her conversation. Her intense expression showed that she was thinking while she spoke, and her eyes never wandered from her husband's face, and as for Braddon, the rest of the world simply did not exist.

"Mum!" Tia persisted. "I've found an artifact!"

"In a moment, dear," Pota replied. "But what about, "

"MUM!" Tia shouted, disobeying every rule of not interrupting grown-ups in desperation, knowing from all the signs that she would never get their attention otherwise. Conversations like this one could go on for hours. "I've found an artifact!"

Both her parents stopped their argument in midsentence and stared at her. Silence enveloped the room; an ominous silence. Tia gulped nervously.

"Tia," Braddon finally said, disapproval creeping into his voice. "Your mother and I are in the middle of a very important conversation. This is not the time for pretend."

"Dad, it's not pretend!" she said insistently, pointing to her plastic box. "It's not! I found an artifact, and there's more."

Pota raised an eyebrow at her husband and shrugged. Braddon picked up the box, carelessly, and Tia winced as the first lump inside visibly disintegrated more.

"I am going to respect your intelligence and integrity enough to assume that you think you found an artifact," Braddon replied, prying the lid from the container. "But Tia, you know better than to,"

He glanced down inside, and his eyebrows arched upward in the greatest show of surprise that Tia had ever seen him make.

"I told you," Tia could not resist saying, triumphantly.

"so they took the big lights out to the trench, and the extra field-generators," she told Ted E. Bear after she'd been put to bed for the night. "They were out there for hours, and they let me wait up to hear what it was. And it was, I did find a garbage dump! A big one, too! Mum made a special call to the Institute, 'cause this is the first really big EsKay dump anybody's ever found."

She hugged Ted closer, basking in the warmth of Pota's praise, a warmth that still lingered and made he fed happy right down to her toes. "You did everything exactly right with the equipment you had," Pota had told her. "I've had undergraduates that didn't do a well as you did, pumpkin! You remember what I told you, when you asked me about why I wanted to find garbage?"

"That we learn more from sentients' garbage than from anything other than their literature," she recited dutifully.

"Well," Pota had replied, sitting on the edge of he bed and touching her nose with one finger, playfully. "You, my curious little chick, have just upgraded this site from a Class One to a Class Three with four hours of work! That's more than Braddon and I have ever done!"