It was not difficult — it was downright impossible. She scrambled and fell and couldn't get a body's length up the spire. In the end she untied her rope. As soon as the two men had climbed above her she sobbed hopelessly into her hands. Gulyas must have heard her, or he knew how she felt being left out, because he called back down to her.
"I'll drop you a rope as soon as we get to the top, with a loop on the end. Slip your arms through it, and I'll pull you up."
She was sure that he wouldn't be able to do it, but still she had to try. The beacon — it might not be human-made!
The rope cut into her body, and surprisingly enough he could pull her up. She did her best to keep from banging into the cliff and twisting about: then Gulyas was reaching down to help her. Hautamaki was holding the rope. . and she knew that it was the strength of those corded arms, not her husband's, that had brought her so quickly up.
"Hautamaki, thank you for—"
"We will examine the device now," he said, interrupting her and looking at Gulyas while he spoke. "You will both stay here with my pack. Do not approach unless you are ordered to."
He turned on his heel, and with purposeful stride went to the outcropping where the machine stood. No more than a pace away from it he dropped to one knee, his body hiding most of it from sight, staying during long minutes in this cramped position.
"What is he doing?" Tjond whispered, hugging tight to Gulyas' arm. "What is it? What does he see?"
"Come over here!" Hautamaki said, standing. There was a ring of emotion in his voice that they had never heard before. They ran; skidding on the ice-glazed rock, stopping only at the barrier of his outstretched arm.
"What do you make of it?" Hautamaki asked, never taking his eyes from the squat machine fixed to the rock before them.
There was a central structure, a half-sphere of yellowish metal that clamped tight to the rock, its bottom edge conforming to the irregularities beneath it. From this projected stubby arms of the same material, arranged around the circumference close to the base. On each arm was a shorter length of metal. Each one was shaped differently, but all were pointing skywards like questing fingers. An arm-thick cable emerged from the side of the hemisphere and crawled over to a higher shelf of rock. There it suddenly straightened and stood straight up, rearing into the air above their heads. Gulyas pointed to this.
"I have no idea what the other parts do, but I'll wager that is the antenna that has been sending out the signals we picked up when we entered this system."
"It might be," Hautamaki admitted. "But what about the rest?"
"One of those things that's pointing up towards the sky looks like a little telescope," Tjond said. "I really believe it is."
Hautamaki gave an angry cry and reached for her as she knelt on the ground, but he was too late. She pressed one eye to the bottom of the tube, squinted the other shut and tried to see.
"Why — yes, it is a telescope!" She opened the other eye and examined the sky. "I can see the edge of the clouds up there very clearly."
Gulyas pulled her away, but there was no danger. It was a telescope, as she had said, nothing more. They took turns looking through it. It was Hautamaki who noticed that it was slowly moving.
"In that case — all of the others must be turning too, since they are parallel," Gulyas said, pointing to the metal devices that tipped each arm. One of them had an eyepiece not unlike the telescope's, but when he looked into it there was only darkness. "I can't see a thing through it," he said.
"Perhaps you weren't intended to," Hautamaki said, rubbing his jaw while he stared at the strange machine, then turned away to rummage in his pack. He took a multiradiation tester from its padded carrying case and held it before the eyepiece that Gulyas had been trying to look through. "Infrared radiation only. Everything else is screened out."
Another of the tubelike things appeared to focus ultraviolet rays, while an open latticework of metal plates concentrated radio waves. It was Tjond who voiced the thought they all had.
"If I looked through a telescope — perhaps all these other things are telescopes too! Only made for alien eyes, as if the creatures who built the thing didn't know who, or what, would be coming here and provided all kinds of telescopes working on all kinds of wavelengths. The search is over! We. . Mankind. . we're not alone in the universe after all!"
"We mustn't leap to conclusions," Hautamaki said, but the tone of his voice belied his words.
"Why not?" Gulyas shouted, hugging his wife to him in a spasm of emotion. "Why shouldn't we be the ones to find the aliens? If they exist at all we knew we would come across them sometime! The galaxy is immense — but finite. Look and you shall find. Isn't that what it says over the entrance to the academy?"
"We have no real evidence yet," Hautamaki said, trying not to let his own growing enthusiasm show. He was the leader, he must be the devil's advocate. "This device could have been human-made."
"Point one," Gulyas said, ticking off on his finger. "It resembles nothing that any of us have ever seen before. Secondly, it is made of a tough unknown alloy. And thirdly it is in a section of space that, as far as we know, has never been visited before. We are light-centuries from the nearest inhabited system, and ships that can make this sort of trip and return are only a relatively recent development…"
"And here is real evidence — without any guesswork!" Tjond shouted, and they ran over to her.
She had followed the heavy cable that transformed itself into the aerial. At the base, where it was thickened and fastened to the rock, were a series of incised characters. There must have been hundreds of them, rising from ground level to above their heads, each one clear and distinct.
"Those aren't human," Tjond said triumphantly. "They do not bear the slightest resemblance to any written characters of any language known to man. They are new!"
"How can you be sure?" Hautamaki said, forgetting himself enough to address her directly.
"I know, Shipmaster, because this is my specialty. I trained in comparative philology and specialized in abbicciology — the study of the history of alphabets. We are probably the only science that is in touch with Earth—"
"Impossible!"
"No, just very slow. Earth must be halfway around the galaxy from where we are now. If I remember correctly, it takes about four hundred years for a round-trip communication. Abbicciology is a study that can only grow at the outer fringes; we deal with a hard core of unalterable fact. The old Earth alphabets are part of history and cannot be changed. I have studied them all, every character and every detail, and I have observed their mutations through the millennia. It can be observed that no matter how alphabets are modified and changed they will retain elements of their progenitors. That is the letter L as it has been adapted for computer input." She scratched it into the rock with the tip of her knife, then incised a wavy character next to it. "And this is the Hebrew lamedh, in which you can see the same basic shape. Hebrew is a proto-alphabet, so ancient as to be almost unbelievable. Yet there is the same right-angle bend. But these characters — there is nothing there that I have ever seen before."
The silence stretched on while Hautamaki looked at her, studied her as if the truth or falsity of her words might be written somehow on her face. Then he smiled.
"I'll take your word for it. I'm sure you know your field very well." He walked back to his pack and began taking out more test instruments.
''Did you see that?" Tjond whispered in her husband's ear. "He smiled at me."
"Nonsense. It is probably the first rictus of advanced frostbite."
Hautamaki had hung a weight from the barrel of the telescope and was timing its motion over the ground. "Gulyas," he asked, "do you remember this planet's period of rotation?"