He manages to make me feel like a complete idiot and I nearly turn back, but the stubbornness remains. It has been pointed out to me that stubbornness is not strength. It is in fact a weakness. I keep driving. Two hours pass and the first tremor hits. As the tunnel vibrates and little flecks of ice fall onto the crawler’s screen, I replay the conversation I’d had with Duren as we walked back to his crawler after viewing the dead alien.
‘Most people would wonder if they are in cryostasis,’ I had said.
‘They’re not,’ Duren replied. ‘They are decayed, even though they were pickled in brine before that brine froze.’
‘Were they all preserved at the same time?’ I asked.
‘Oh yes.’
‘How do you account for that then: a hundred million of them going into their sarcophagi at the same time?’
Duren was silent for a while. I didn’t push him.
‘I did say that they are not in cryostasis,’ he said. ‘I did not say that some attempt may not have been made to put them in such.’
‘Is that what you think?’
‘It’s one possibility. Other possibilities include mass murder and mass suicide. It’s weird, it’s an anomaly, and it just is.’
A lump of ice falls from the ceiling and bounces off the screen of the crawler. I nearly fill my pants.
‘You’ve got a lot of seismic activity out there,’ says Linser over the com.
‘No shit,’ I reply.
Just at that moment a big one hits and the crawler slides a couple of yards to one side. I steer back central and note a huge crack dividing the icy ceiling and exposing rock a couple of metres above. Something occurs to me then, and I wonder if I will get a reply that will again make me feel stupid.
‘Hey, Linser.’
‘Yes.’
‘They’ve been here for three quarters of a million years, I make that about a thousand conjunctions. How come I haven’t seen any old damage in these tunnels? That’s a thousand earthquakes.’
Again there is that long pause and I await Linser’s slapdown. It does not come.
‘That is an interesting question, Mr Gregory. There is no damage in the area where you are and that area is an unstable one. You must remember though that we only recently acquired the low-energy scanners and that area is the only unstable area we have mapped so far.’
‘Yeah. Wouldn’t it have been an idea to have mapped some of the other unstable areas before the conjunction?’
‘For what purpose?’ he asks.
‘To find out if there’s any old damage there.’
‘I’m sure such information would be of interest to a planetary geologist, but we are here for the archaeology,’ he says.
He either doesn’t get it or is trying to give me the brush-off.
‘If there’s no damage there that will be because the damage has been repaired. Oh, by the way, you got any other crawlers in this area?’
‘To answer your question: no we do not have any other crawlers in that area.’
‘Then it looks like I’ve found Duren … Tell me, Linser, have you found any evidence, other than the tunnels and the sarcophagi, of their technology?’
‘No, we have not.’
‘Funny that,’ I say, and get out of the crawler.
Duren is inside a large chamber that contains three sarcophagi. He has strung up lights all around and as I walk in through the round door he has his back to me. He is using a cutter to slice open a sarcophagus. There seems nothing scientific about what he is doing. It looks like vandalism. I speak to him over private com.
‘Duren,’ I say.
He turns and holds the business end of the cutting unit in my direction. The disruption field only has a range of a couple of centimetres. I have no intention of getting within that range.
‘You. . what are you doing out here?’ he asks.
It strikes me that he does not sound particularly irrational.
‘I’ve come to see what you are trying to prove,’ I say.
Duren stares at me for a long moment then abruptly turns back to cutting open the sarcophagus. I move round to a position where I can better see what he is doing.
‘You know, it was this place being frozen that led us astray,’ he says. ‘First you think of cryostasis and expect the bodies to be perfect. We found decayed bodies in thick frozen brine and thought it was cryostasis gone wrong. When we found no sign of their technology we then assumed this was some kind of burial.’
‘What is the truth?’ I ask.
