Caroline led the way, with Dwayne behind her and her brother bringing up the rear. Jimbo and Chaz stayed outside to keep an eye out for anything on the horizon.
To augment the night-vision lenses, they each broke glow sticks once they were inside the cave. This feeble light couldn’t be seen from outside the cave but was more than enough to illuminate their search. Every detail of the cave’s interior leaped into sharp contrast through the magic of digitized light amplification.
Caroline gasped. There was a depression in the floor of the trench, and skeletal remains lay there.
“Morry, these are the remains you uncovered?” she said.
Dwayne shifted to allow Morris to brush past him in the narrow passage the trench allowed. Morris crouched by Caroline.
There in the garish light were a single skull and set of ribs. The skull was broad, with wide-set eyes and inhumanly large orbital sockets and a pronounced brow ridge. The upper jaw was split in a jagged line leading down from a small hole punched through the occipital bone just below the left eye. A plate in the back of the skull was missing.
“That’s the shaman,” Caroline said. “I shot him with the gun Dwayne gave me, and he’s been lying here all this time.”
Morris couldn’t speak. The last time he had been here, there were three skeletons lying in a jumble. One of the skulls had a porcelain cap on a molar; the same crown a dentist put in place when Caroline was in her sophomore year in Chicago. That skull also had a round hole drilled through the temple; a hole much like the one in the face of the remains lying there now.
Here was proof that the past is changeable, that time is a malleable element that shifts and warps if interfered with. The universe is not a constant, and the evidence was here before them. Five weeks ago, he discovered this cave and uncovered what was clearly the suicide of his little sister, committed one hundred thousand years before her birth. Since then, the Rangers had gone back through the Tube to that same day and rescued Caroline and changed those events. It meant there existed, for a time, an alternate reality in which the Rangers’ rescue failed. It was baffling even to a mind as used to working in a non-linear fashion as Morris’ was.
“Isn’t that astounding?” Caroline said in a rush. “I hardly know what to think of it.”
“Yeah,” was all Morris could manage.
“This confirms that the Tube holds the key to proving String,” she gushed.
“But we’d need to reproduce similar results and record them,” Tauber said.
“Couldn’t happen to a nicer asshole,” Dwayne cut in. “We’re here for the gold, right?”
“Dig here.” Caroline shifted mental gears. She patted the left wall of the trench. “Extend this back into this niche and the gold should be here. Might be here. Theoretically.”
“Based on what?” Dwayne said.
“Based on the fact that the head witch doctor’s body is still here,” she said with a touch of frost. “They left him here where he died. Maybe the aborigines thought the cave was cursed and the gold along with it.”
“So, they just left their own treasure behind?”
“Why not, Dwayne? It’s not like the gold had actual value to them. It’s useless for tools or weapons. They obviously didn’t even have the means to alloy or refine it. They liked it because it was pretty and shiny and easy to work into trinkets and beads.”
“Listen!” Morris raised his voice, anxious to set his mind to anything but the anomalies his mind was struggling to get around.
Caroline and Dwayne turned to him.
“We came all this way,” he said. “Let’s dig and find out if it’s idle supposition or millions in gold, okay?”
The five of them took turns through the night, clearing away dirt and sand and rock with shovels and picks. They handed back buckets to be dumped outside the cave. They reached a layer of packed pebbles and shells that would take real work to scrape away.
Caroline, her clothes and hair and skin brown with dirt, crawled far back into the niche on her belly. She used a trowel and rock hammer to chop at the impacted detritus layered there through the millennia.
Jimbo was working behind her to scoop loose earth and gravel into a bucket. He played the dirt through his fingers, and there were roughly-rounded pebbles of irregular sizes left when the dust fell away. He crawled backward and followed the trench outside. Faint sunlight was just showing over the mesa top.
He pulled off his NODs array and looked at the pebbles rattling in his hand. They cast off a soft yellowish hue. They had holes drilled through them so they could be strung as beads. Dwayne rose from where he was sharing cold coffee and power bars with Chaz and Morris.
“What you got there?” He looked down into Jimbo’s palm.
“What’s it look like to you?” Jimbo grinned. “Pay dirt.”
From inside the cave came a whoop followed by Caroline’s voice.
“You’re going to want to see this!”
The Rangers and Morris jammed themselves into the narrow passage to the rear of the cave where Caroline sat grinning and holding a glow stick against the crudely sculpted face of undeniable ugliness glowing dully with the satin sheen of solid gold.
9
Excavations
They kept to the shade of their camouflaged covers throughout the day. Chaz and Jimbo made a run back to the trucks before the sun was too high. They brought back water jugs. They’d stay cool and hydrated and out of sight until
