Robert Silverberg - Across A Billion Years

We’re still trying, as I dictate this three days later.

Removing the laminated slabs of stone covering the door was easy. Kelly cored through until she touched metal, and Mirrik tusked the debris away. It took the two of them almost six hours to lay bare the entire door, which is about seven meters high, four meters wide, and, according to our scans, a meter thick. The High Ones didn’t bother with a keyhole; and in any case we don’t have the key.

We don’t dare blast the door, not with all that High Ones machinery inside. And we aren’t carrying a laser powerful enough to slice through a one-meter thickness of metal. We do have a power winch aboard the ship, and we tried it this morning; we fastened magnetic grapples to the door, ran cables to the winch, and pulled, but the door didn’t budge and there was real danger that our cables would snap under the strain.

408b spent some time studying the hinge this afternoon. He thinks our best bet is to attack the door from that side: pull out the pin of the hinge, somehow, and swing the door open. But the hinge is about five meters long and the pin alone looks like it weighs a couple of tons. Furthermore, that thing hasn’t budged in a billion years, and even on an asteroid without atmosphere or water there’s bound to have been some degeneration of the metal, maybe even complete bonding of pin to hinge. In that case we’re in trouble. We’ll see in the morning.

December 31

A strange, grim, and busy day.

Unless we’ve lost track entirely, which is quite possible, this is the last day of 2375. But a New Year’s Eve celebration seems irrelevant tonight, after the day’s hectic events.

We went to work on the hinge first thing in the morning. Before making any attempt to remove it, we did a complete survey of it, with a tridim scan, measurements, holograms, the works, just as though it were a house beam or something that had to be destroyed in the course of an excavation. Not that the science of paleotechnology had much to learn from it, for it wasn’t a particularly alien kind of hinge; there is evidently only one efficient way to design a hinge for a door, and the High Ones had hit on the same scheme used on Earth and everywhere else, so that the main point of interest about this hinge was how uninteresting it was.

After this we got the most potent laser in the ship and started cutting. It took a couple of hours to slice the hinge the long way. At last we peeled it open and slipped the pin. Next we got the magnetic grapples out, cabled them to the power winch, and started tugging.

The cables went taut, and we cleared back, not wanting to be close at hand if they snapped. But the cables held. So did the door. Captain Ludwig threw the throttle of the winch wide open, so that it was pulling with its full fifty-ton force, but the tug-of-war remained a standoff. “What happens,” Steen Steen asked, “if the winch pulls the ship toward the door, instead of the door toward the ship?” And it was a sharp point, because the pull the winch was now exerting was nearly enough to handle the ship’s own mass and send it toppling forward.

The door yielded first.

It opened on the hinge side by about a centimeter. Ludwig changed a setting on the winch. The door slid reluctantly forward another centimeter. Another. Another.

What scared Ludwig — and the rest of us — was what might happen if the door suddenly gave up altogether and came flying out of its socket. The winch, to take up the tension, might very well haul the door toward the ship so fast there’d be a collision, and the ship would be demolished. Ludwig hovered over the controls of that winch like a virtuoso playing a chromosonic organ in a galactic music competition.

Slowly he peeled the door open.

We realized now that a bolt ran from the door deep into the rock of the hillside. That bolt was bending as the winch pulled on the door from the hinge side. Suddenly the bolt slipped from the rock; instantly Ludwig fed slack to the cable and choked down the winch, and the vast door toppled out of its frame, tipped up on one side, and fell forward, opening the way into the vault.

408b was the first to reach the open vault. It scrambled up onto the fallen door and stood there a moment, peering in and waving its tentacles about in excitement. This was the climactic moment of 408b’s career: the specialist in paleotechnology was staring into a room packed with High Ones machinery in perfect preservation. Just as Jan and I reached the door, 408b rushed ecstatically forward into the vault.

A blinding bolt of yellow light burst from the top of the open doorway. For an instant the entire opening was ablaze. Jan and I stumbled backward, covering our eyes; and when we took our hands away the brightness was gone. And so was 408b. Nothing remained of it but two charred tentacles just within the doorway.

I’ve never seen death — permanent death — before. I once saw a construction accident, and a couple of pedestrian fatalities, but each time, a freezer truck arrived within minutes, and the victim was hustled off to a resurrection lab for repairs. You don’t think of something like that as death, merely an interruption. But 408b was gone. Beyond hope of resurrection; scattered atoms can’t be brought together and given new life. All its skills, its fund of knowledge, its hope of future attainments… gone.

In a civilization where most deaths are so temporary, a real death is a terrifying, shattering thing to behold. The rest of us gathered in a dazed little group in front of the vault. Jan began to cry; I put my arms around her, then found I felt like crying too, but I didn’t. Mirrik prayed, Pilazinool removed and replaced his right arm about twenty times in two minutes, Dr. Schein cursed quietly, Steen Steen had a fit of the shakes, and Leroy Chang turned away, sitting on the edge of the door in a limp heap. Dr. Horkkk was the only one who seemed in full control of himself. “Away from the opening!” he shouted, and as we backed away he picked up a pebble and tossed it in. The lightning flared again.

We weren’t going to be able to get into the vault. That was quite clear.

The death of 408b left us too stunned to proceed immediately. We retreated to the ship, where at Dr. Schein’s request Mirrik conducted a memorial service for the paleotechnologist. Not even Mirrik had any idea what sort of religion they have on Bellatrix XIV, so he delivered a Paradoxian service, short and somehow moving. I won’t try to reproduce it here; I can only recall one piece of it, the most characteristically Paradoxian of all: “Thou endest our time to teach us that time is without an end. Thou shortenest our days so that our days may be made long. Thou makest us mortal so that eternity will be ours. Forgive us, O Father, as we forgive Thee. Amen.”

An hour later we cautiously returned to the vault.

Naturally our mood was dark and bleak; yet we doubted that 408b would have wanted us to go into prolonged mourning on its account when there was important work to do. We had rigged floodlights on the plain to work by during the cutting of the hinge; now we moved them closer, so they would illuminate the interior of the vault. Keeping a wary distance from the entrance, we looked in, and I shivered a little with the chilly shock of recognition as I saw before me precisely the scene depicted in the globe sequence.

A six-walled chamber. Alien, mysterious instruments mounted in back, screens and levers and nodes and panels. Seated in the center of everything, ponderous as a tribal idol, the giant robot whom the High Ones left to guard this cave ten million centuries ago.

Time had not been able to erode the mechanisms within this cave. The blaze of light that ended the life of 408b was ample proof of that.