Boundary Read online

  Helen opened her mouth to defend Bemmie reflexively, then grinned. "I did name him Bemmius for a reason, you know."

  Diane frowned.

  "From the old science fiction term, Diane," A.J. explained. "Bug-Eyed Monster, BEM."

  Diane laughed at that, and smiled at A.J.

  Helen wasn't surprised. She'd noticed already that when Diane acted just a bit clueless, it was whenever A.J. was nearby—and always about something A.J. could explain.

  That annoyed her intensely, for some reason. Perhaps just the natural feminism of a woman in a man's profession. Or . . . She chewed on the problem for a moment, and was a little disturbed when she realized that the annoyance was something very old-fashioned. Archaic, even.

  Pure and simple jealousy. Argh!

  She shook it off. "Yes, I don't think I'd have wanted to meet Bemmie in a dark alley, to be honest."

  "Or even in a lighted one," A.J. concurred. "He would've weighed in at, um—"

  "Something over a ton," Helen supplied.

  "—right, something over a ton, and had a hell of a reach to boot. If you're right about those thorn things . . . Well, the thought gets ucky. He could do quite a number on you."

  Diane winced. "And probably eat you afterwards."

  "Doubtful," A.J. said. "If he could catch you in the first place— Bemmie was obviously not built for speed—he probably didn't have chemistry within light-years of ours. Couldn't eat us, anyway."

  "You never know," Helen said, getting a surprised glance from

  A.J. "Preliminary analyses from the fossil site . . . well, it's hard to be certain, given all the time that's passed, bacteria, and so on. But it appears that Bemmie was based on DNA or RNA rather like our own. We eat an awful lot of things that aren't very closely related to us—mushrooms, for instance—and some of them are pretty darn nutritious. But I'd agree that there's a matter of more orders of magnitude involved in this probability."

  "That argument didn't go over with you well a few years ago, Helen," Glendale pointed out from the consultant's station he'd been given at Helen's insistence. "What's a few orders of magnitude between friends?"

  "Well, to turn your own argument back—and hope that I have to eat my words, so to speak, like you—if you can find a set of dinosaur bones with knife and fork marks on them, I'll agree that Bemmie's people could've found us tasty eating."

  Glendale laughed. "Fair enough. And I agree, it's damned unlikely."

  "I wonder if they were hostile or friendly types?" Diane mused. "I mean, if we'd been able to meet them."

  "Maybe we still can," A.J. replied. "They certainly didn't come from this solar system."

  Diane looked at him. "What? How can you be sure? Maybe they were Martians."

  "Because—oh, let's let the expert explain." He glanced at astrophysicist Larry Conley. "Larry?"

  The big, slightly portly scientist shook his head. "No way."

  "But I thought Mars had tons of water way back then."

  "Not that recently, Diane. Hundreds of millions of years—and please note the plural—back to maybe a billion or two. Mars wasn't much different in the age of the dinosaurs than it is now. And if Dr. Sutter's right, Bemmie started out aquatic, so . . . No. I doubt very much that even if we had magic space drives we could meet any of them today. It's been sixty-five million years, remember. If they still had any interest in this place, they'd not only have been here, they'd have taken everything over. No, by now, they've evolved into something completely different, or gone extinct altogether."

  Despite the fact that he'd summoned the expert opinion himself, A.J. choked at it. "Hey, now, that's a couple of big-ass assumptions. I thought evolution stopped once we started controlling the environment."

  Conley raised an eyebrow and ran his fingers through unruly dark hair—which, unfortunately for him, looked much more sloppy and less "artistic genius" than did A.J.'s mop.

  "That's one theory—we came along, invented civilization, and when we found out about Darwin said 'oh, we won't be having any more of that!' But, as other people have pointed out, what we've really done is just created a new environment with new pressures. And even tiny, tiny pressures, over sixty-plus million years, will add up to one hell of a lot of change. And so far no civilization we've had has lasted recognizably more than a few thousand years. You want me to believe these aliens made one that lasted ten thousand times longer than that? I don't think so."

  He pointed to the screen. "That shows they had not just intelligence, but curiosity and the energy and focus to want to go to other solar systems. I'd have to assume that they'd probably have completely colonized this solar system long before now. And we definitely would've found traces of an advanced civilization from even that far back. If they stayed on Earth at all, they only built a few relatively small bases. Otherwise we'd have found something."

  "Still, I wonder what they would've been like. Maybe they were really peaceful types, having worked out all the crap that we still have to deal with. Crossing light-years of space would take a hell of a lot of work."

  "Ah, the old 'more advanced and wiser civilization,' eh, A.J.?" Glendale's voice was amused. "I don't believe so, and I think your image there proves it."

  "Huh?" A.J. glanced back at the image. "Um, he's kinda dead. And just because he wasn't a vegetarian doesn't prove anything. Dogs are carnivores, but they're pretty friendly most of the time. And if they overcame any violent impulses, like Helen said, they could all be vegetarians at this point. Well, at the point this guy got freeze-dried, anyway."

  "They could indeed," Glendale conceded. "Yet not, I think, through being tremendously peaceful. Consider that object shown under the, ah, left arm. It wasn't easily visible in the earlier images, being so close and under the arm that it was in permanent shadow."

  The object in question looked something like a large laundry detergent bottle with the bottom cut off combined with a ridged bowling ball stuck on the end of a plunger, the handle of the plunger stuck through the bottleneck. It was made mostly of metal with some odd ceramic and possibly plasticlike bits and held by some kind of strap or holster affair with the open "bottom" end out. Rotating the model showed that the "plunger handle" was a hollow pipe or tube with fairly thick walls.

  "My fossilized shotgun," Helen finally said, after a long silence.

  "Well, I would say it is more of a pistol. Possibly also a shotgun in terms of its operation, but if I understand the nature of the cutouts on the side there, essentially what you have is a weapon intended to be used one-handed. If we may use the term broadly."

  "So what?" A.J. demanded. "We knew they had weapons. That's no surprise. And the original Bemmie needed 'em, too. If he'd had a few friends with guns along, he might have gotten out alive."

  Glendale smiled, a bit sadly. "A.J., you're quite right he needed one where he died. But our friend here—where was he?"

  The sensor specialist froze for a moment, then sighed. "Yeah."

  "Exactly. Our specimen is armed while in the control room of a base on an airless rock, uncountable miles from any possible hostile wild creatures. Why would he be carrying a weapon in such circumstances? It seems to me obvious that it was considered possible that he might need one, even there. One does not ship something across light years which one does not expect to need at some point. Now, it may be that he is something like a security officer, and that most of his people are not armed. But the need for such an officer still points to the potential for violent disagreements."

  "It could be a symbolic weapon," Diane argued. "Marines still have dress swords, don't they?"

  "Yes, but—correct me if I am wrong—I believe all such ceremonial weapons are associated with groups that on occasion must fight other people, yes?"

  A.J. surveyed the Net. "Not quite all . . . But I won't argue, I'm convinced. Yeah, you don't generally carry weapons when you're a long way from anything that would ever require a weapon to deal with. So much for the enlightened peaceful aliens."


  He shrugged. "Let's see if I can verify your guess, Dr. Glendale."

  "Nicholas or Nick, please. Not—" He flashed a warning glance at Helen, but too late.

  "—Nicky!" she interjected.

  "Okay, Nick," A.J. acknowledged through a grin. "Let's take a look at the data on some other wavelengths. Peel away the layers of Bemmie to get at this thing here . . . hmm . . . enhance . . . nah, too coarse, let's try another . . . Ah, yeah, there we go. Damn, these guys used some funky materials! I think I can tell General Deiderichs and Madeline that, at the least, we can get some neat materials advancements out of this base."

  Helen found the rapid transition of the security official from "Ms. Fathom," A.J.'s potential nemesis, to "Madeline" annoying also. She was quite sure that if Madeline Fathom had been male he would still be "Mr. Fathom" and A.J. wouldn't be at all concerned about whether he was pleased or not.

  Jealous—again?? Stop this, Helen!

  "What do you think of that?" A.J. demanded.

  The main display showed a hugely enlarged version of the alien artifact, shadowy like an old-fashioned X-ray image. Inside the sculpted, ridged "bowling ball" were three well-defined hollows. Two showed nothing inside them, but the middle one was nearly full with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of tiny dots. Small lines ran from the empty hollows to the base of the hollow tube, which had some kind of complex mechanism at that point. The mechanism also connected, via a much larger opening, to the central hollow.

  "Looks very interesting," said Glendale. "What exactly do you think we're seeing?"

  "Well, the first important point is these little dots. If I blow one of them up a bit and check the scale, how large do you think they are?"

  No one said anything for a moment. Then Helen smiled.

  "four point six five millimeters?"

  "On the nose."

  "Ah, yes." Glendale nodded. "The mysterious 'pebbles' that Mike Jennings argued were cysts of some kind in several papers. Shotgun pellets, then?"

  "Right. And these two chambers—they were using a binary propellant design, probably two liquids that have leaked away over the ages. This mechanism meters the amount of propellant and ammunition—I'll bet you could adjust it for volume of fire and so on. I suppose someone else might find another explanation, but I wouldn't bet on it. This is a gun. Nothing else I can think of that would fit."

  Glendale looked at Helen. "And this verifies one of your other hypotheses, if I'm right."

  "What? Oh, yes. We tend to use large single bullets rather than shotguns, but with the way Bemmie's muscles and skeleton connected, or rather didn't really connect, something like a shotgun would be a lot more devastating to them. So it makes sense that their side arms would also be based on shotgun designs. Unfortunately for poor Bemmie, an elephant gun or even a thirty-ought-six would have been a better choice for blowing away raptors. The shotgun hurt them and eventually killed them, but not fast enough."

  "Neat," A.J. said. "I hadn't thought of that before. Guess I didn't read your papers carefully enough. Anyway, let's see what else we can get out of this before I have to go off to today's training session."

  "Right!"

  Chapter 22

  Helen gave vent to a mild curse as she realized her hammer had slid away from her. She leaned reflexively to get it and found herself floating away, scattering sample containers and her other tools in a slow-motion catastrophe across the room. "Oh, dammit, not again!"

  The voice of Walter Myles, the microgravity operations training expert, spoke in her ear. "Sorry, Dr. Sutter, but you should be past simple mistakes like that. I'm not resetting it. You'll have to clean up and recover."

  "Yes, I know. It's just so hard to remember."

  "Well, ma'am, you have to learn somehow. Phobos has barely any gravity, around one two-thousandth that of Earth. That's enough to make things settle eventually, but from your point of view it might as well be nothing. Tidal effects are actually noticeable on that scale."

  Helen didn't answer, as she already knew the numbers. The problem wasn't on the intellectual level, but the level of instinctive reflex. She was trying to retrain a body that had spent four decades in a one-g field to properly react in the almost total absence of gravity.

  Helen checked herself against the far wall, absorbing the impact and grabbing one of the handholds spotted about the room. Thus secured, she was able to survey the situation and decide the best method to address the scattered clutter.

  "You know, in the real situation, I'd have tools and things attached to me, right?"

  "Correct, Doctor, but you'd also be in a real microgravity situation instead of a simulation. We would prefer that you learn to do your work well enough that you won't notice, nor care, whether the tools are attached to lanyards or not."

  "Simulations are pretty damn impressive these days, though. I have to admit that I can't really tell I'm not on Phobos, except that if I concentrate I can tell up and down. But you confuse that by making 'up' be in the direction that it looks like one of the walls should be, instead of the ceiling."

  In actuality, Helen was floating in a huge water tank inside the NASA training facility. The tools and such were, relatively speaking, real; but the exact way she perceived them, and the background against which the action took place, was all being generated for her inside the watertight spacesuit she had on. The spacesuit was also attached to actuators to assist her in moving in a fashion that would feel fairly close to the way real microgravity would feel—minus, as Helen had noted, the absence of an internal method for referencing up and down. That she'd get to experience later.

  Having assessed the situation, Helen pulled a butterfly net from the wall, where it had been held by a magnetic hanger arrangement, and launched herself slowly across the room. It took several minutes, but eventually she had rounded up everything except her pen.

  "Where the hell did that get to?"

  Myles being non-helpfully silent, Helen started another slow survey of the room.

  Nothing.

  All right, she thought, let's reason this through. Which direction would it have been scattered in?

  She thought back, then looked carefully along the rather broad arc that it might have gone in.

  Nothing.

  Then she smacked herself in the head, or rather tried to. The spacesuit thunked obligingly. She called up the record of her mishap and replayed it in slow motion, watching the pen as it slowly, gracefully, somersaulted through the air.

  And slowly, gracefully, somersaulted into the megayears-old ventilation duct.

  There was only one appropriate response to that level of stupid accidental coincidence. "D'oh!" she grunted. "I suppose I am now the solar system's first interplanetary litterbug, as there's no way I'm getting that one back myself. Maybe A.J. would be able to send in a drone someday."

  "Well, not the first," Myles said, his tone amused. "Several other trainees have lost objects effectively permanently before. I will say that yours was the most elegant method for losing something on Phobos I've yet seen."

  "Thanks. I think. Give me another pen and let me start this over."

  "Certainly." The simulation shimmered out of existence, leaving a large tank with objects roughly coinciding with the Phobos control room layout set inside it. "Actually, go get yours back; it's over where the vent would be."

  "Got it." Helen retrieved the pen and prepared to start the research simulation again.

  It's amazing how you can sweat so much in a climate-controlled spacesuit, Helen mused later, as she finished toweling dry. I hope we have a lot of thought put into creature comforts for this cruise. It's going to be a hell of a trip.