Fileclerk checked the coordinates, looked it up in the catalog, and found that it was GGC 2787891, also known as McBurney’s Star. It had been mapped and surveyed in 2280, but no landings had ever been made on any of its planets.
Nothing surprising about that, of course. There are millions of stars, billions of planets; and the exploration of the galaxy is a long way from complete. We don’t share Dihn Ruuu’s pathetic belief that there still is a thriving outpost of High Ones in the system of McBurney’s Star, but certainly we’ll find a major archaeological site there. Which is reason enough for making the trip.
So our expedition, instead of tying us down for two cold and rainy years on Higby V, is turning into a galactic odyssey. First to this asteroid in the system of GGC 1145591, then to McBurney’s Star, and who knows where Dihn Ruuu will lead us next? We’ll follow. The profits from that mercury mine will take care of the stash problem, and we can worry about detailed archaeological excavation later; these sites won’t vanish. Mysteries that we thought forever insoluble are cracking open every day. I mean, here we are talking to a robot of the High Ones, asking all kinds of questions about the civilization of its masters and getting answers. And we have the projections from our globe to study, and also the scenes Dihn Ruuu has shown us, and all this machinery in the vault —
The one sad thing is that 408b isn’t here to share in the glory and the wonder of it all. Everything we’re learning would have been right in its pocket.
We leave here next week — I hope.
When Dr. Schein hired that ultradrive cruiser to bring us here from Higby V last October, he shrewdly hedged his bet. He knew there was a good chance that we wouldn’t find the vault in this system, in which case we’d be stranded here with nothing to do and without a TP to summon a ship to pick us up. (Nick Ludwig’s ship isn’t equipped for ultraspace travel; it’s strictly local-haul chartering.) Therefore Dr. Schein arranged that when the cruiser made its return trip through this part of the universe in mid-January, it would detour and come within radio range of us so we could request pickup, if necessary. Buying that detour was expensive, but it put a lid on the possible span of time we could waste here in the event of our pulling a zero in the asteroid belt.
The cruiser will be within radio range in three days. We’ve already begun broadcasting an all-band pickup signal, just in case they forget to call us. We assume that they’ll come down and get us; the big bosses can then negotiate a new ultraspace hop, and off we go to McBurney’s Star with Dihn Ruuu as our guide.
Maybe.
Meanwhile we zig along in busywork and routine; we quiz Dihn Ruuu a lot (it’s amazing how fast the vocabulary of the robot is growing) and study the machinery in the vault. Now that Dihn Ruuu feels released from its orders by the disappearance of the High Ones’ star, and is about to abandon the vault, we have free access to all the gadgetry. Most of it is communications equipment, we now know — not too different in principle, I gather, from our radio setup — but there’s also a lot of weaponry. Dihn Ruuu is disarming it now. The robot claims that one small snub-nosed tube sticking out of the side wall is capable of blowing up a sun at a distance of three light-years. We haven’t asked for a demonstration. The other stuff includes the High Ones’ equivalent of computer banks — more bits of data recorded on one electron than we get into a whole long protein chain — and some kind of energy accumulator that works off starlight and keeps this whole array powered.
We’re just a little worried about the impact of all these wondrous things on the technology of twenty-fourth-century Earth, Thhh, Calamor, Dinamon, and Shilamak. Are we ready for such a horde of High Ones marvels? Assuming that we can learn to use one one-thousandth of what we’ve found in this vault alone, we’re in for a third Industrial Revolution that may transform society more radically than the steam engine did in the eighteenth century and the computer in the twentieth.
As I say, we worry. But it’s not up to us to make the decision; as scientists we have no right to suppress this find. We’re not administrators; we’re archaeologists. We discovered this vault, but we have no responsibility for the later use or misuse of its contents.
If that sounds like moral wishy-washiness, so be it. I’d rather be considered wishy-washy than be considered an enemy of knowledge. There are always some risks in making discoveries; but we’d still be living in caves and eating our meat raw if somebody, somewhere along the line, hadn’t taken the risk of using his brain. The big difference here is that these gadgets aren’t the products of slow, patient human toil, developed within the context of our civilization. They’re coming to us all in one shot as hand-me-downs from a vastly more mature and complex race. Whether we’re capable of handling such things at this stage in our development is yet to be seen.
I repeat: it’s not our decision to make. Like Pontius Pilate in that episode in the Near East twenty-four centuries ago, we wash our hands of the matter and accept no blame for what follows. It’s our job to find things, and we can’t help it if they may be dangerous.
Somehow, though humans are a chimpo lot, I’m not really worried. If we haven’t succeeded in blowing ourselves up by A.D. 2376, we’re probably going to make out all right.
Maybe.
It’s January 14, and we’ve made contact with the cruiser. It’ll be landing shortly to pick us up. We won’t go immediately to McBurney’s Star; the cruiser has its own route to consider. But it will take us (and Ludwig’s ship, riding piggyback through ultraspace) to the Aldebaran system, where we can hire an outbound ultradrive ship to get us where we want to go.
The stash from the mercury mine isn’t going to cover all this. We’d better come up with a uranium mountain the next time.
Three weeks more have passed since I last put down this cube. It’s February 8, and we’ve just completed a two-day stop at Aldebaran IX. Aldebaran is a big red thing, rather handsome, and it has a pack of planets, several of them colonized. We didn’t sightsee. We didn’t even land, in fact. Dr. Schein handled the whole thing by radio, arranging for an immediately outbound ultraspace cruiser to take us to McBurney’s Star. We are currently hanging in orbit around Al-debaran IX in Nick Ludwig’s ship, waiting for the cruiser to come up and meet us; Nick will once again piggyback his little ship to the cruiser and off we’ll
go.
This is the first time we’ve been within reach of a TP communications net since leaving Higby V. So Dr. Schein has sent a full report on our discoveries back to Galaxy Central. I hope everybody is duly croggled by the amazing news.
I wish I had been able to find some excuse for putting a skull-to-skull call through to you, Lorie. I want so much to say hello, to tell you what a grand time I’m having, how well we’re doing. But you know that private chitchat by TP is prohibitively expensive, especially calling Earth from Aldebaran. My biggest hope is that you’ve taken part in the relay work on some of our messages and that you know a little of what we’re up to.
We leave tonight for McBurney’s Star. They calculate that we’ll be there by the end of the month.
February 30
Right on the old zogger! Here it is the last day of the month, and here we are in orbit around the fourth world of the McBurney system. The ultradrive crew, as usual, didn’t stay even for a peek. More fools they.