Immortal Coil - Jeffrey Lang [37]
“Five hundred thousand years?” Soong asked.
Ira’s head snapped around. “Yours, too?” He shook his head. “All right. Yes. So, there’s some kind of impurity in the minerals that’s affecting both tricorders.”
“Or, they’re both right.”
Overhead, they heard Vaslovik begin to make his slow descent. Soong had sent the antigravs up to the older man on a slender line, after warning him about the weak battery. He should be fine. Soong had developed a healthy respect for the professor’s common sense.
“It can’t be true,” Graves denied. “Even a mummified corpse would have disintegrated into dust long ago.”
“Check your readings again, Ira,” Soong said. “It isn’t a corpse; not the way you mean, anyway. Don’t forget what we found upstairs.” Graves’s eyes flicked up toward the top of the cliff, then refocused on the tricorder display.
“Of course,” he said, suddenly growing very excited. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking.” Soong was too exhausted to be shocked, but he filed away the moment for later consideration: Ira Graves had just apologized to him and admitted that he had made a mistake. “Professor,” Graves called through his comm link. “You’re not going to believe what this is.”
“Busy now,” Vaslovik responded. “Half a moment, Ira.” Soong looked up and saw that Vaslovik was about halfway down the cliff and making good time. The line he had tied off with a secure piton was shaking slightly under the strain, but no more than should have been expected. “You’re sure the cliff will hold all three of us?”
“It should be all right,” Soong replied. “This appears to be the remains of a bridge that cracked away a few thousand years ago.” He sent his light down over the edge, but the darkness swallowed the beam before it could reach bottom. “How’s the other pattern enhancer?” he asked, remembering that Ira was carrying it. “Please tell me it didn’t crack when you fell.”
“It’s fine,” Ira said, not really paying attention. He was fixated on the readings he was taking from the body. “It’s hard to be sure,” he muttered, “but I think the atomic structure is essentially identical to the specimen we found in the chamber upstairs.”
“I would agree with that,” Soong said dryly, searching for a bottle of water in his pack. He was afraid it would be frozen into slush by now. “Except that the one upstairs looked human, and it must have been created less than fifty years ago. This one is older.”
Graves muttered, “A lot older,” but then let it go. “Who do you suppose made the other one?” he asked.
“Hard to say,” Soong replied, warming his water bottle-in his hands. “Same people who shot it with a phaser, I hope.”
“Why, ‘I hope’?”
“Because if it was two different people,” Soong reasoned, “that doubles our chances that there’s someone around who won’t be happy we’re here.” The initial excitement of the find was wearing off and he was beginning to worry. Now, Graves was, too.
The professor, apparently, had also been thinking, but not about danger. No sooner did he touch down on the ledge (which he did much more gracefully than either Soong or Graves had), than he was kneeling by the body. Vaslovik stripped off his glove and stroked the frozen surface of the hand with his bare fingertips. As Soong had noted earlier, the figure’s arms and hands seemed elongated, which could have been because of some deformation over time or, perhaps, because the artificial being had been constructed to resemble his maker’s.
“This is extraordinary,” Vaslovik breathed, speaking quickly and almost too low for Graves and Soong to hear him. “You’ve done scans, haven’t you? What do they say? How does this compare to the one we found upstairs?”
“Difficult to say,” Graves replied, doing his best (Soong thought) to sound blasé. “We’ll need to get a sample and run it through a scanner. The sensors in these tricorders aren’t sensitive enough—”
“Don’t play games with me, Ira,” Vaslovik said impatiently. “Use your tools—all of them, including your brain. What does your intuition tell you?”
Graves sighed softly, then murmured, his words almost absorbed by