'You?'
'Yes.'
'Then close the place down.'
'It's not that easy, Hutch. I probably should do that. But Henry is desperate.'
Eddie Juliana had no time to waste. 'Red tags first,' he said. Hutch glanced around at stacks of cases, most of them empty; and at rows of artifacts: clay vessels, tools, machines, chunks of engraved stone. Some cases were sealed. These were labeled in red, yellow, and blue.
'Okay,' she said, not certain what she was to do with the red tags.
Eddie moved around the storeroom with the energy of a rabbit in heat. He ducked behind crates, gave anxious directions to someone over his commlink, hurried in and out checking items on his inventory.
He stopped and gazed at Hutch. 'You were planning on helping, right?'
Hutch sighed. 'Tell me what you want done.'
He was thin and narrow with red hair and a high-pitched voice. More than any of the others, he seemed driven by events. Hutch never saw him smile, never saw him relax. He struck her as one of those unfortunate people who see the downside of everything. He was young, and she could not imagine his taking a moment to enjoy himself. 'Sub's waiting,' he said. 'There's a cart by the door, ready to go. Take it over. Carson'11 be there to unload. You come back. I need you here.'
'Okay.'
'You really did come in the Wink, right?'
'Yes.'
'That's good. I didn't trust them not to change their minds, try to save a buck, and send a packet for the evacuation.'
She looked around at the rows of artifacts. 'Is this everything?'
'There are three more storerooms. All full.'
'Okay,' she said. 'We've got plenty of space. But I'm not sure there's going to be time.'
'You think I don't know that?' He stared morosely at a cylindrical lump of corrosion. 'You know what that is?'
'No.'
'It's a ten-thousand-year-old radio receiver.' His fingers hovered over it, but did not touch it. 'This is the case. Speaker here. Vacuum tubes back here, we think. It was a console.' He swung toward her, and his brown, washed-out eyes grew hard. 'It's priceless.' His breast heaved, and he sounded very much like a man who was confronting ultimate stupidity. 'These cases are filled with artifacts like this. They are carefully packed. Please be gentle with them.'
Hutch did not bother to take offense. She drove the cart to the submarine bay, turned it over to Carson and a muscular graduate student whose name was Tommy Loughery, got Carson's opinion that Eddie was a basket case, and came back. 'We have room on the sub for two more loads,' she said.
'How much can your shuttle carry?'
'About two and a half times the capacity of the sub.'
'And ours will carry about half that much.' He looked around in dismay. 'We're going to have to make a few trips. I'd hoped you'd have more capacity.'
'Sorry.'
Stacks of tablets piled on a tabletop caught her eye. They were filled with symbols, drawn with an artistic flair. 'Can we read them?' she asked.
'No,' he said.
'How old are they?'
'Six thousand years. They were good-luck talismans. Made by mixing animal fat with clay, and baking the result. As you can see, they last a long time.'
Hutch would have liked to ask for a souvenir. But that was against the rules, and Eddie looked as if he took rules very seriously.
'And this?' She indicated a gray ceramic figurine depicting a two-legged barrel-shaped land animal that resembled a Buddha with fangs. It had large round eyes and flat ears pressed back on its skull like an elephant's. The body was badly chipped.
Eddie glared at her, angered that she could not see the need for haste. But it was also true that he loved to talk about his artifacts. 'It's roughly eight hundred years old.' The object was intricately executed. He held it out to her. It was heavy. 'The owner was probably one of the last priests.' A shadow crossed his pinched features. 'Think about it: the Temple, or some form of it, had been there since time immemorial. But somewhere toward the end of the fourteenth century, they closed it up. Locked the doors, and turned out the lights. Can you imagine what that must have meant to that last group of priests?' The ventilators hummed in the background. Eddie studied the figurine. 'This is not a sacred object. It had some personal significance. We found several of these in one of the apartments. This one was left near the main altar.'
'Company for the dying god,' suggested Hutch.
He nodded, and she realized at that moment that whatever else he might be, Eddie Juliana was a hopeless romantic.
Two hours later, she was in the air, enroute to Wink.
'Janet, are you there? This is Hutch.'
'Negative, Hutch. Janet's asleep. This is Art Gibbs.'
'Pleased to meet you, Art.'
'What can I do for you?'
'Uh, nothing. I was just bored.'
'Where are you now?'
'Chasing my ship. But I won't catch her for another few hours.' Pause. 'What do you do with this outfit, Art?'
'Dig, mostly. I'm sorry I missed you today. I hear you're a knockout.'
Hutch smiled and switched to video. 'Dispel all illusions,' she said. 'But it's nice to hear.'
Art beamed at her. 'The rumors are short of the mark,' he said gallantly. Art Gibbs was in his fifties, hair gone, a roll of flab around his middle. He asked whether she had been to Quraqua before, what she had done that had so impressed Richard Wald, what her reactions were to the Temple of the Winds. Like the others, he seemed stricken by the impending evacuation.
'Maybe it'll survive,' she said. 'It's underwater. And the Knothic Towers look pretty solid.'
'No chance. A few hours after they knock the icecap into the ocean, we'll get huge tidal waves here—'
She had lost the sun now, was gliding through the dark. Her left-hand window looked out on the Void. She caught a glimpse of the Kosmik space station, a lone brilliant star.
'Somebody else,' continued Art, 'will be along in a few thousand years to try again. Be an interesting puzzle, I'd think: hi-tech wreckage on a low-tech world.'
'Art, have you been to Oz?'
'Yes.'
'What did you think of it?'
'I don't think we'll ever know what it's about.'
'Doesn't it strike you as odd that it got burned at the same time that the military post was destroyed?'
'It burned during the same era' he said gently. 'Don't forget that the fort disappeared during an epoch of worldwide destruction.'
'That's my point. I think. Doesn't it seem likely there's a connection?'
'I don't see how there could be.' He stuck his tongue in the side of his cheek and frowned. 'I really don't.'
'Frank Carson mentioned the connection between the events at Oz and widespread destruction on Quraqua.'
'What could it be? There's only a connection in very general terms, Hutch. The discontinuities occurred over long stretches of time. For all we know, so did the damage inflicted on Oz. But they didn't necessarily happen at the same time. Only during the same era. There's a difference, and I think we fall into a trap when we confuse the
