Дэймон Найт - Orbit 7

‘We are scientists,’ said Steinleser. ‘We find these. Others have found such. Let us consider the improbabilities of it.’

It was noon, so they ate and rested and considered the improbabilities. Anteros had brought them a great joint of white pork, and they made sandwiches and drank beer and ate pickles.

‘You know,’ said Robert Derby, ‘that beyond the rank impossibility of glass beads found so many times where they could not be found, there is a real mystery about all early Indian beads, whether of bone, stone or antler. There are millions and millions of these fine beads with pierced holes finer than any piercer ever found. There are residues, there are centres of every other Indian industry, and there is evolution of every other tool. Why have there been these millions of pierced beads, and never one piercer? There was no technique to make so fine a piercer. How were they done?’

Magdalen giggled. ‘Bead-spitter,’ she said.

‘Bead-spitter! You’re out of your fuzzy mind,’ Terrence erupted. ‘That’s the silliest and least sophisticated of all Indian legends.’

‘But it is the legend,’ said Robert Derby, ‘the legend of more than thirty separate tribes. The Carib Indians of Cuba said that they got their beads from Bead-spitters. The Indians of Panama told Balboa the same thing. The Indians of the pueblos told the same story to Coronado. Every Indian community had an Indian who was its Bead-spitter. There are Creek and Alabama and Koasati stories of Bead-spitter; see Swanton’s collections. And his stories were taken down within living memory.

‘More than that, when European trade-beads were first introduced, there is one account of an Indian receiving some and saying, “I will take some to Bead-spitter. If he sees them, he can spit them too.” And that Bead-spitter did then spit them by the bushel. There was never any other Indian account of the origin of their beads. All were spit by a Bead-spitter.’

‘Really, this is very unreal,’ Ethyl said. Really it was.

‘Hog hokey! A Bead-spitter of around the year seven hundred could not spit future beads, he could not spit cheap Hong Kong glass beads of the present time!’ Terrence was very angry.

‘Pardon me, yes sir, he could,’ said Anteros. ‘A Bead-spitter can spit future beads, if he faces North when he spits. That has always been known.’

Terrence was angry, he fumed and poisoned the day for them, and the claw marks on his face stood out livid purple. He was angrier yet when he said that the curious dark capping rock on top of the chimney was dangerous, that it would fall and kill someone; and Anteros said that there was no such capping rock on the chimney, that Terrence’s eyes were deceiving him, that Terrence should go sit in the shade and rest.

And Terrence became excessively angry when he discovered that Magdalen was trying to hide something that she had discovered in the fluted core of the chimney. It was a large and heavy shale-stone, too heavy even for Magdalen’s puzzling strength. She had dragged it out of the chimney flute, tumbled it down to the bottom, and was trying to cover it with rocks and scarp.

‘Robert, mark the extraction point!’ Terrence called loudly. ‘It’s quite plain yet. Magdalen, stop that! Whatever it is, it must be examined now.’

‘Oh, it’s just more of the damned same thing! I wish he’d let me alone. With his kind of money he can get plenty girls. Besides, it’s private, Terrence. You don’t have any business reading it.’

‘You are hysterical, Magdalen, and you may have to leave the digging site.’

‘I wish I could leave. I can’t. I wish I could love. I can’t. Why isn’t it enough that I die?’

‘Howard, spend the afternoon on this,’ Terrence ordered. ‘It has writing of a sort on it. If it’s what I think it is, it scares me. It’s too recent to be in any eroded chimney rock formation, Howard, and it comes from far below the top. Read it.’

‘A few hours on it and I may come up with something. I never saw anything like it either. What did you think it was, Terrence?’

‘What do you think I think it is? It’s much later than the other, and that one was impossible. I’ll not be the one to confess myself crazy first.’

Howard Steinleser went to work on the incised stone; and two hours before sundown they brought him another one, a grey soapstone block from higher up. Whatever this was covered with, it was not at all the same thing that covered the shale-stone.

And elsewhere things went well, too well. The old fishiness was back on it. No series of finds could be so perfect, no petrification could be so well ordered.

‘Robert,’ Magdalen called down to Robert Derby just at sunset, ‘in the high meadow above the shore, about four hundred yards down, just past the old fence line —’

‘… there is a badger hole, Magdalen. Now you have me doing it, seeing invisible things at a distance. And if I take a carbine and stroll down there quietly, the badger will stick his head out just as I get there (I being strongly downwind of him), and I’ll blam him between the eyes. He’ll be a big one, fifty pounds.’

‘Thirty. Bring him, Robert. You’re showing a little understanding at last.’

‘But, Magdalen, badger is rampant meat. It’s seldom eaten.’

‘May not the condemned girl have what she wishes for her last meal? Go get it, Robert.’

Robert went. The voice of the little carbine was barely heard at that distance. Soon, Robert brought back the dead badger.

‘Cook it, Ethyl,’ Magdalen ordered.

‘Yes, I know. And if I don’t know how, Anteros will show me.’ But Anteros was gone. Robert found him on a sundown knoll with his shoulders hunched. The odd man was sobbing silently and his face seemed to be made out of dull pumice stone. But he came back to aid Ethyl in preparing the badger.

‘If the first of today’s stones scared you, the second should have lifted the hair right off your head, Terrence,’ Howard Steinleser said.

‘It does, it does. All the stones are too recent to be in a chimney formation, but this last one is an insult. It isn’t two hundred years old, but there’s a thousand years of strata above it. What time is deposited there?’

They had eaten rampant badger meat and drunk inferior whisky (which Anteros, who had given it to them, didn’t know was inferior), and the muskiness was both inside them and around them. The campfire sometimes spat angrily with small explosions, and its glare reached high when it did so. By one such leaping glare, Terrence Burdock saw that the curious dark capping rock was once more on the top of the chimney. He thought he had seen it there in the daytime; but it had not been there after he had sat in the shade and rested, and it had absolutely not been there when he climbed the chimney itself to be sure.

‘Let’s have the second chapter and then the third, Howard,’ Ethyl said. ‘It’s neater that way.’

‘Yes. Well, the second chapter (the first and lowest and apparently the earliest rock we came on today) is written in a language that no one ever saw written before; and yet it’s no great trouble to read it. Even Terrence guessed what it was and it scared him. It is Anadarko-Caddo hand-talk graven in stone. It is what is called the sign language of the Plains Indians copied down in formalized pictograms. And it has to be very recent, within the last three hundred years. Hand-talk was fragmentary at the first coming of the Spanish, and well developed at the first coming of the French. It was an explosive development, as such things go, worked out within a hundred years. This rock has to be younger than its situs, but it was absolutely found in place.’

‘Read it, Howard, read it,’ Robert Derby called. Robert was feeling fine and the rest of them were gloomy tonight.