but at last his expression brightened a trifle. A few moments later he shoved himself into motion against the nearest wall and headed for the communication room.
The Teacher acknowledged the call at once.
“I suppose you have thought of some more arguments why I should favor the spread of your technology?”
“Not exactly,” replied Kruger. “I wanted to ask a question or two. You said that there were four of you Teachers at that city. I’d like to know whether the others share your attitude in this matter.”
“They do.” The answer was prompt and disconcerted the boy a trifle.
“All right. How about the Teachers in the other cities? I assume you have been telling them about all that has been happening.” This time the answer was not so prompt.
“As a matter of fact, we have not. We do not maintain constant communication; simply check with each other every year. If I were to call now they would probably not be listening. It does not matter; there is no doubt how they would feel. After all, we have maintained for many long years the policy of limiting technology for ourselves and making sure that we were the source of knowledge for the others — the radios they have at the Ice Ramparts were made by us, for example; they do not know how to do it.”
“I see.” The cadet was a trifle discouraged but by no means ready to give up. “Then you would not mind our visiting the other cities and contacting your fellow Teachers directly, to put the proposition to them.” He fervently hoped that it would not occur to the other to ask whether the human beings were all in accord on the matter.
“Certainly. You would, of course, explain the situation as you have to me; they would give the same answer.”
Kruger smiled wickedly.
“Yes, we might do that, or we might tell them a slightly different story — say, that your mind has become affected some way, and you had tricked some information out of us and were tired of the sacrifices involved in being a Teacher, and were going to build devices that would keep a larger part of the planet hot and stop your people’s time of dving…”
“I never heard such nonsense in my whole year of life!”
“Of course you haven’t. Neither have your friends in other cities.
“Wait. I must think.” Silence reigned for many minutes, broken only by a faint crackle of static. Kruger waited tensely.
“You have taught me something, human being.” The Teacher’s voice finally sounded again. “I will not tell you what it is. But Dar Lang Ahn’s Teachers may learn what they can.” He said no more.
Kruger relaxed, with a grin spreading over his face. The plan would work; it couldn’t fail, now.
Dar Lang Ahn would soak up vast quantities of information, enough to fill many books — books which could not possibly be written before the time of dying. Dar Lang Ahn would return to the Ice Ramparts with his knowledge, and he would still be dictating it or writing it himself when the time came to seal the caverns against the rising temperature and changing atmosphere. He would still be inside when that happened, not out in the cities of the “cold” people dying with his fellows. Dar Lang Ahn, by sheer necessity, would become a Teacher; and Nils Kruger would not lose his little friend.
XII. GEOLOGY; ARCHAEOLOGY
ABYORMEN IS larger than the earth and has a smaller percentage of sea area even in the cold time, so the geologists had a great deal of territory to cover. They did not, of course, attempt to do it all; the basic plan was to attempt enough stratigraphic correlation to get a fair idea of its geological history and, if at all possible, find datable radio-actives in the series far enough down to get at least a minimum value for the age of the planet. The last was all the astronomers really wanted, but the biologists had considerably higher standards. They came along, prepared to analyze any fossils found by every technique known to their field.
Layer after layer of sedimentary rock was traced, sometimes for miles underground, sometimes only yards before it vanished — perhaps because quakes had shuffled it into a puzzle that took experience to solve, perhaps because the phenomena which had deposited it in the first place had covered only a limited area and the formation pinched out naturally. A limestone bed laid down over a million square miles at the bottom of a sea is one thing; a sandstone lens that was once the delta of a stream running into a small lake is something else — sometimes a rather inconvenient something else, when a problem of relative dates is in question.
Kruger thanked his luck that Commander Burke was not with this ground party and prayed constantly that he would not overhear any remarks made by the geologists, for Dar Lang Ahn was learning a good deal of English as time went on, and there are few places where a photographic memory can make itself more obvious or useful than in a stratigraphy problem. The geologists without exception regarded the native with awe and felt a friendship for him comparing strongly with Kruger’s own. Sooner or later the commander would learn; the boy hoped that by then his little friend’s popularity would have reached a point where the old officer would be moved to get rid of his suspicions.
Nowhere on the planet did there seem to be structures corresponding with the “shields” which characterize certain parts of Earth. Apparently all the present land surface had been submerged in the not too distant past; there was more than a suggestion that Abyormen suffered much more seismic and orogenic activity than Earth. One of the specialists suggested that a reason for this might lie in the “Long Year” seasonal changes, when the greater part of the sea water was deposited on the ice caps. A seismic check of the cap in the southern hemisphere (
While several of Abyormen’s short years passed before any absolute dating of strata was possible, the astronomers learned what they had feared rather quickly. From the beginning, of course, the geologists had kept their eyes open for pegmatites and other igneous intrusions which might contain radioactives suitable for dating, and fairly soon these were found at several places on the continent they were examining. It was not possible to correlate these rocks with the sedimentaries, at the time, but one of them had a uranium-lead ratio corresponding to an age of just under one and a half billion years. It was a large sample, and ten independent checks were run, none varying more than about twenty million years from the mean. Since the astronomers were not willing to believe that Alcyone had been in existence longer than something like one per cent of that time they accepted the information a trifle glumly.
But dated or not, the sedimentaries had their own fields of interest. If Dar Lang Ahn had ever seen a fossil in his life he had never given it a second thought. This omission was easily remedied, for the sediments had their share of organic remains. A lens of limestone some two hundred miles across, near the center of the continent, seemed to consist largely of a reef deposit, and several hundred different species were found at various points within it. Shellfish that might have come straight from Earth were present by the thousands — at least, so it appeared to Kruger; a biologist spent much time pointing out technical differences.
“I suppose,” he finished, “that you could find a good many creatures virtually identical with these on the shores of your present oceans. There seems to be some ability in the mollusks and their relatives to ride out the changes of a planet. On Earth they’ve been around for half a billion years — changed, to be sure, but the basic plan seems to keep right on going.”
“I understand you in all but one point,” Dar Lang Ahn replied in his slow, careful English. “I have been with you all along here, and have seen fossils like this in many different layers of rock, as you say is reasonable, but I have never seen a living creature which in any way resembles those fossils.”
“Have you ever spent any length of time at the seashore?”
“Much. Nils Kruger and I walked along one for about three hundred miles recently, if the occasions in my previous eight hundred years don’t count.”
“That’s right!” Kruger exclaimed excitedly. “I knew there was something funny about that beach and never
