Jack McDevitt - SEEKER

There was an open door.

Well, not open in the sense that the hatch was ajar. Someone had cut into it. Had cut a large hole that we should have seen coming down if we’d been paying attention.

Alex grumbled something over the circuit about vandals and started angrily toward it.

I fell in behind. “Watch the gravity,” I said, as he stumbled but caught himself.

“Damned thieves.” Alex delivered a series of imprecations. “How’s this possible?”

It was hard to believe that someone had beaten us here because artifacts from Gideon V had never appeared on the market. And there was no historical record that the base had been found.

“Has to be recent,” I said.

“You mean yesterday?” he asked.

“Maybe they didn’t know what they had. Just broke in, looked around, and left.”

“It’s possible, Chase,” he said. “Maybe it happened centuries ago. When people still remembered where this place was.”

I hoped he was right.

It was usually the case that when archeologists found a ransacked site, the ransacking had been done within a few hundred years of the era during which the site had operated. After a reasonable length of time, people forget where things are. And they get permanently lost. I sometimes wonder how many ships are floating around out in the dark, having blown an engine and eventually faded from the record.

I should mention that we’re not archeologists. We’re strictly business types, matching collectors with merchandise, and sometimes, as now, hunting down original sources.

This had looked like a gold mine moments ago. But now-Alex was holding his breath as we approached the opening.

The hatch had been cut away by a torch. It lay off to one side. And there was only the lightest coating of dust on it. “This just happened,” he said. I’ll confess that Alex is not exactly even-tempered. At home, in social circumstances, he’s a model of courtesy and restraint. But in places like that lunar surface, where society is a long way off, I occasionally get to see his real feelings. He stared at the fallen door, picked up a rock, said something under his breath, and threw the rock halfway into orbit.

I stood there, a kid in the principal’s office. “Probably my fault,” I said.

The inner hatch was also down. Beyond it, the interior was dark.

He looked at me. The visor was too opaque to allow me to see his expression, but it wasn’t hard to imagine. “How do you mean?” he asked.

“I told Windy.” Windy was Survey’s public relations director, and a longtime friend.

Alex wasn’t appreciably taller than I am, but he seemed to be towering over me.

“Windy wouldn’t say anything.”

“I know.”

“You told her over an open circuit.”

“Yeah.”

He sighed. “Chase, how could you do that?”

“I don’t know.” I was trying not to whine. “I didn’t think there’d be a problem. We were talking about something else and it just came up.”

“Couldn’t resist?”

“I guess not.”

He planted one boot on the hatch and shoved. It didn’t budge. “Well,” he said, “no help for it now.”

I straightened my shoulders. Shoot me if it’ll make you feel better. “Won’t happen again.”

“It’s okay.” He was using his spilled-milk voice. “Let’s go see how much damage they did.”

He led the way in.

The domes were connected by tunnels. Staircases led to underground spaces. These places are always ghostly, illuminated only by wrist lamps. Shadows chase themselves around the bulkheads, and there seems always to be something moving just outside the field of vision. I remember reading how Casmir Kolchevsky was attacked in a place like this by a security bot that he had inadvertently activated.

The vandals had been relentless.

We wandered through the operational sections, through a gym, through private living quarters. Through a kitchen and dining room. Everywhere we went, drawers were pulled out and their contents dumped. Cabinets were cut open, storage lockers broken apart. The place had been ransacked. There wasn’t much remaining that could have been put up for sale or would have been of interest to a museum. We found ourselves treading carefully past broken glass and data disks and overturned tables. Some clothing will survive for a surprisingly long time in a vacuum. But we found only a handful of pieces, most of them victims of whatever chemicals had been in the original material. Or sufficiently mundane that nobody would have cared. It doesn’t much matter where a pullover shirt has come from. Unless it’s been worn by a legendary general or an immortal playwright, nobody cares. But the jumpsuits, which usually carry a shoulder patch, or a stenciled identity over a pocket, GIDEON BASE or some such thing, are worth their weight. We found only one, badly frayed. The inscription was of course in Celian characters, framing a tall, narrow peak. “The station’s emblem,” said Alex.

They’d also stripped the operations center. Electronic gear had been taken. They’d torn the panels apart to get access. Again, the objective had been to find parts marked as belonging to the base. It looked as if anything not meeting that standard had been yanked out and dropped on the deck.

Alex was in a rage by the time we were finished. All four domes, and the underground network, had been treated the same way. There’d been one exception to the general chaos. We found a common room, littered with debris. The deck was covered with projectors and readers, and data crystals that would have gone dry long before six centuries had passed. A broken pitcher and some ice lay in one corner, and a partially torn-up carpet had been dragged into another. But a small table stood in the center of the room, and a book lay open on it, arranged for the convenience of anyone seated in the lone chair.

“Well,” I said, looking down at it, “at least it won’t be a complete blowout. That thing will bring some money.”

Or maybe it wouldn’t.

It was last year’s edition of The Antiquarian Guide.

“Look as if the vandal knew we’d be here,” Alex said. “He’s saying hello.”

I told him he was an idiot. I explained that he was auctioning off our history, converting it to baubles and handing it over to people who had no concept who Mike Esther was. And that when he was finished, when the last crystal had been taken from the museum and sold to the jewelers, there would be nothing left of the men and women who had built our world. He smiled and shook his head and I thought for a moment that his voice caught. “Old friend,” he said, “they are already long gone.” -Haras Kora, Binacqua Chronicles, 4417 C.E.

Winetta Yashevik was the archeological liaison at Survey, and she doubled as their public relations chief. Windy was the only person to whom I’d revealed our destination, but I knew she would never have given information away to any of Alex’s rivals. She was a true believer. In her view, we turned antiquities into commodities and sold them to private buyers. It was an offense against decency, and she always contrived, without saying anything directly, to make me feel that I was ethically unfit. I was, if you like, the lost sheep. The one that had been corrupted by the mendacity of the world and didn’t seem able to find its way home.

It was easy enough for her to sit in judgment. She’d been born into wealth and never known what it was to go without anything. But that’s another matter.

When I stopped by her office at the Survey complex, on the second floor of the Kolman building, she brightened, waved me inside, and closed the door. “You’re back more quickly than I expected. Did you not find the place? I hope.”