Haagen bent down and again examined the surface, which was smooth, extraordinarily so, without a mark of any kind, like a mirror. Amazing how sand can polish metal. Well, wind-driven sand wears away the hardest rock.
'There're lots of mysteries in this desert. Lots of things we'll never know.' Dutch Haagen shook his head, then climbed down the ledge toward the waiting Jeep.
Rip followed him. 'Maybe we ought to report this, eh?'
Haagen chuckled. 'To Harvey Quick?' Harvey was their boss. 'What are we going to tell him? That we found a funny piece of metal out in the desert? Ol Harve will wonder what we've been drinking.'
Haagen grinned at Rip. 'Someday you're going to own this oil company, kid, and I'm going to win a big lottery, but right now we both need these jobs.'
That evening Rip told Bill Taggart about the find. 'It's right in the rock, Bill. The rock is weathering away, and as it does, more and more of the metal is exposed. That's the way it looks to me, anyway.'
'What do you think, Dutch?' Bill asked. He was about forty, a heavyset, jowly guy who didn't like the heat. He spent most of his afternoons in the tent plotting the team's work on a computer.
'The kid is leveling with you. I don't know any more than he does. Never saw anything like it.'
'Show it to me in the morning, will you?'
'Sure. If we can find it again.'
Taggart smiled. 'Did I ever tell you fellows about the time we found a still in the Louisiana swamps? Mash was cooking and shine was dripping out the tube. There wasn't a soul around, so we helped ourselves. Didn't get any more work done that day, I can tell you. Ah, that was good stuff.'
'There's something inside that rock,' Rip Cantrell said, unwilling to see his find so quickly relegated to the tall-tale file.
'Maybe it's Martians,' Bill Taggart suggested with a chuckle.
'Or a big black rock,' Dutch put in, 'like they had in 2007:
'Before my time,' Rip said crossly.
'I hate to bring you wild adventurers back to earth,' Taggart said, 'but we are going to have to do something about the food supply.'
'There's nothing wrong with the food,' Rip said.
'You should know. You ate it all. We're darn near out.'
'Maybe we should take an inventory, make a list,' Haagen suggested.
'I already did that.' Taggart passed him a sheet of paper. 'Since the food delivery last week, this kid has personally hogged his way through enough grub to keep a caravan of camel drivers eating for a year. Honest to God, I think he has a tapeworm.'
'The tapeworm theory again! Thank you, Professor.' Rip stalked away. Haagen and Taggart had been kidding him all summer.
'There's something wrong with him,' Bill Taggart assured Dutch. 'Real people don't eat like that.'
Before he went to bed, Rip Cantrell walked a few yards from the fire and sat looking up. Since the desert lacked the haze and light pollution that obscured the night sky in the major cities of the temperate world, the stars were stunning, a million diamonds gleaming amid the black velvet of the universe. Only in this desert had Rip seen the night sky with such awe-inspiring clarity.
The searing memory of this sky, with the Milky Way splashed so carelessly across it — that was what he would take back to college this fall.
Billions of galaxies, each with billions of stars.
As he had done every night this summer, Rip Cantrell lay down on his back in the sand. The warmth of the sand contrasted pleasantly with the rapidly cooling desert air. Lying spread-eagle on his back it almost felt as if he were free of the planet and hurtling through space.
A meteor shower caught his eye, dozens of streaks all shooting across the star-spangled sky at the same angle.
What was buried in that sandstone ledge?
He made a promise to himself to find out.
'See, Bill. I wasn't kidding. It's in the rock. And it wasn't pounded in. The rock is real rock, not concrete or some kind of artificial aggregate.'
'Hmm.' Bill Taggart examined the stone carefully. The sun had been up less than an hour and was shining on the metal at an angle.
When Taggart straightened, Rip set his feet, got a good grip on the sledgehammer, and started swinging.
Each blow took off a few small chunks of sandstone. When he tired, he put the head of the hammer on the ground and wiped his forehead. The humidity was nonexistent, yet the air was just plain hot. Already the thermometer was into the nineties. It seemed as if the heat just sucked the moisture from you.
Dutch brushed away the chips with his fingers. 'Well, you didn't dent it. Exposed a few more inches of it, I'd say.'
'What the hell is it?' Taggart asked.
'Something man-made from damn good metal before that rock was laid there,' Rip told him.
'And what might that be?'
'I don't know,' Rip admitted. 'Dutch, you been knocking around these deserts for a lot of years. What do you think?'
Haagen took his time before answering. 'What's the weather forecast?'
'Clear and sunny,' Rip replied, 'as usual.' He got the weather off the satellite broadcast every morning. 'Not a cloud in the forecast.'
'We're a day or two ahead of schedule. What say we take today off, drive over to the archeology dig, introduce ourselves to our neighbors. Maybe they'll let us borrow an air compressor and jackhammer, if they got one,'
'Yes!' Rip shouted and tossed the hammer to the sand below, near the Jeep.
'An air compressor,' Bill Taggart mused. 'I thought those folks used dental picks and toothbrushes for their excavating.'
'We can ask,' Dutch said and kicked at the metal sticking out of the rock. He frowned at it. It shouldn't be there, and that fact offended him. Frogs don't fly and dogs don't talk and sandstone ledges don't contain metal.
Bill brightened. 'Might get a decent meal over at the dig.'
'Might even see some girls,' Rip said with a laugh. 'You two old farts wouldn't be interested, but I sure am.'
There weren't any girls within ten years of Rip's age at the archeology dig. In fact, the only two females in sight had been on the planet at least half a century and weighed perhaps thirty pounds more than he did. Taggart kidded Rip about it as they walked toward the office tent.
'What are these people digging up?' Rip asked, to divert Taggart from the subject of women.
'Old stuff,' Taggart replied. 'The older the better.' The head archaeologist was Dr. Hans Soldi, from a famous Ivy League university. He shook hands all around, then listened with a skeptical expression as Dutch explained why they needed a jackhammer.
'We have one, to do the heavy digging,' Soldi said when Dutch ran out of steam. 'Now tell me the real reason you want it.'
'It's diamonds, Prof,' Rip said. 'We found King Solomon's mine. We're gonna jackhammer the place, steal everything we can carry, and skedaddle.'
Soldi ignored the young man. 'Metal inside rock is an impossibility,' he said to Haagen and Taggart.
'It's there, sure enough,' Dutch replied quietly. 'Whoever put it there didn't know it was impossible.'
'I will let you borrow the compressor and hammer, if you will swear to me that you are not disturbing an archaeological site.'
