Hal Clement - Fossil

“You’ll be less surprised later,” S’Nash remarked. The Naxian’s words were surprising enough right then. Clearly it/he knew more about everything going on than had been made clear so far, but this sounded almost as though the devious character intended to provide answers it/himself. Hugh refused to worry about it; he had not seen Janice for several Common Days. He left the unloading of what was left of the supplies to the warehouse people.

As far as his wife could tell, the specimens from Ennissee’s dig were very old. This merely meant older than the carbon dating limit; there was no reliable way to go farther with organic specimens. Habranhan “Fossils” were entire frozen remains, not mineralized. The only radionuclide in them with a respectable half life was potassium-forty, and there was very little of that; Habranhan life made do with an extremely low mineral content, not too surprisingly. The argon-forty which was one of its decay products could diffuse fairly rapidly, on the geological time scale, from the immediate area of its production; cross-checking with calcium-forty, the other product, pointless on other worlds because it was ubiquitous, might help a little here, but still all one could hope for was a minimum age. Actually, Janice had found only a little of the potassium and too little of its decay products to measure. The main specimen was certainly older than one hundred sixty thousand Common Years, with another faint probability that it was older than five hundred fifty thousand; but she had no faith whatever in the latter figure.

Such of Ennissee’s plant material as she had had time for was all much younger, safely inside the carbon limits. This, surprisingly, included that which seemed to be associated with the Habra remains. She had no explanation for this. She was still correlating her various results with Ennissee’s collection notes.

“What do our biological friends say?” asked Hugh.

“Just what you’d expect. Irritated because this or that part is missing, so they can’t check this or that theory of Habra evolution.”

“But they are sure it is a Habra ancestor?”

“They seem to be taking it for granted. I may be doing them an injustice, of course.”

“It’s a pretty key point. If there is this much evidence that the Habras did evolve here, that undersea project gets very important indeed.” Janice had not heard about this; Hugh had been too occupied otherwise to remember to tell her what he had learned from Bill and Shefcheeshee on his earlier return from Pwanpwan. He clarified the story now and she nodded.

“Have you told Ged about your dates yet?” her husband asked.

“Yes. There seemed no reason not to.”

Hugh was less sure of this, but reflected that it would take the Samian time to get his article written, if it were to be of degree caliber. If Ged didn’t realize that, which he might not, then perhaps it would be just as well if Janice’s name didn’t appeal on the work. In any case, it was a safe bet that the author would be back with more questions, since Janice was still at work. No need to worry.

In fact, there suddenly seemed no need to worry about anything. The original frozen body, beyond serious doubt, had been brought back in the truck and foisted on them more or less as a dress rehearsal. It would be nice to know where it had actually come from — Ennissee’s mole? From how deep under the ice — but that information could be worked out of Ennissee. It would be a little surprising if both specimens had been found near the Cold Pole.

And Hugh suddenly realized how surprising it was. His own native assistants could never have reached that point without the supplies in the aircraft, or some complex arrangement of food caches such as he had set up earlier for the Crotonites. That was something to be checked immediately through Ted; there might be historical records of such an expedition, or even several, though it was surprising that nothing of the sort had been mentioned in earlier discussion of the truck specimen.

If the other find represented a remote ancestor of the present natives there would of course be no historical record for it — but how had it flown that jar? It had smaller wings than the present species, and at least superficially a smaller brain. How could the Habra equivalent of a Lucy have made such a journey? Where had the specimen actually been found? Granted the general Habranhan chaos, which presumably extended to the surface and subsurface glaciers of the night hemisphere, what were the chances of a primitive flier from the ring continent being carried by a storm to or shortly past the terminator and then borne by ice currents all the way to the Cold Pole?

The first chance was probably respectable, granting Habranha’s storms. The second seemed remarkably close to zero. The seismic study of the Solid Ocean discussed a year or so ago by S’Nash suddenly seemed urgent.

Ennissee would have to be questioned in such a way as to establish the truth or falsehood of his answers beyond reasonable doubt, no argument about it. Rekchellet could be trusted to help with that, since it would make the other Crotonite look subservient to an Erthuma. There could hardly be a better revenge in Crotonite eyes.

The truck might bear further study; it could have been used to transport the second specimen as well. In any case it ought to be either returned to the Port, or have its location reported to the owners. That was not really Pitville responsibility, but Hugh’s people had been involved, and it would be a courtesy. No further excuse should be needed.

Maybe Jan and I should fly out, Hugh thought, with someone to take the aircraft back, and drive the truck back here ourselves. That could be fun; not even a Locrian within dozens of kilometers. We need a vacation from the diving juice. I’ll have Rek give me a quick lesson on that autodriver — no, he doesn’t know how to make it avoid elevation data— wait, that’s all right, if we’re just setting a new route and not back-tracing—

Janice thought it a great idea, though there were many small specimens yet to be dated. Barrar made no fuss this time about a few minutes of flier use; both had rather expected this after recent events. Most unfortunately there was no chance to dejuice themselves; inspection of the Pits was still important, and no one else could yet do it. Hugh, exasperated, had a long conversation with Ted, who seemed to know the people working on the Habra cold protection problem. He got some encouragement, but no assurance of any immediate solution. The Erthumoi decided to take the break anyway.

Third-Supply-Watcher flew them out to the truck, which was still where they had abandoned it, let them off, and waited until they had powered it up and signaled that everything was in working order. The Locrian promptly departed, and the couple began setting up the controls.

It was some time later, with the vehicle well on its way back to Pitville, that an object in the living quarters caught Hugh’s eye.

“That’s the tech supplementary translator we found before, when we hoped to figure who the Erthuma on board might be. Remember that one I told you about, who claims to be from Earth? She probably is. One of the modules seemed to be an Old Planet language.”

“Is it still there?” asked his wife, not greatly interested.

“I suppose so. The unit is. We took the modules out to examine, and then — Hmph. I don’t remember. Let’s see.”

Hugh opened the device. Apparently whoever had been holding the modules when the line of activity had swerved had felt that the best place to put them down was back in their own sockets; they were indeed there. Hugh extracted them, one by one, checking the symbols and nodding slowly, putting each back before extracting the next.