He hadn’t gotten it from any bloody Lemurians, that much I was sure of. In this time period, surely only one of Us could have painted these pictures, unless there was a serious security breach somewhere. I’d have to inform the Company.
I reflected on the possibilities as I sped back to my camp. He’d seen my field lab, of course, but I’d only been here a couple of days! He was a psychic, and a powerful one. Had he somehow been picking up transmissions from the station on the mesa nearby? If they’d been careless with their shielding, he might. Anyway it couldn’t be my fault.
I rushed right into the tent and sent a breathless communication outlining what I’d found. As the last green letter flitted away into the ether, I sat back and frowned. Having been put into words, the story sounded even crazier than it was. The crew at the relay station might think I had a screw missing. Maybe I should go back and take some holoes of the clamshells to back up my story. There was still the DNA sample to send, too.
But even as I was preparing it for transmission, the credenza beeped and another message came in. I leaned over to peer at it.
PRIORITY DIRECTIVE GREEN 070218601100 RE: CROME GENERATOR. OBTAIN LIBRARY.
My jaw dropped. Hesitantly I transmitted: CLARIFY? SPECIFY? HOW MANY?
ENTIRE LIBRARY. OBTAIN. PRIORITY.
A long moment later I transmitted ACKNOWLEDGED.
Well, this was just great. What was I supposed to do now? Carry basket after basket of clamshells up to the relay station on the mesa?
Yes, that was exactly what I was supposed to do, and that was the easy part. How was I to obtain the old man’s library in the first place? I’d like to see anybody just sort of slip four hundred pounds of clamshells into her pocket without being noticed, and I was dealing with a psychic at that.
I crawled out of the tent and stood, gloomily staring at the thickets of Oenothera. It wasn’t as though I didn’t have work of my own to do, after all. Look at all these endangered plants. And such specimens of Lupinus chamissonis, Fragaria chiloensis, Calystegia soldanella! Why couldn’t the Company send a Security operative to deal with this? I reached out and broke off a sprig of primrose, examining closely the pattern of viral striping in a deeper pink than the salmon color of the petals….
The petals turned blue. Everything turned blue: my hand, my sleeve, the dune before me. I raised a startled face just in time to see a dark-blue blur cross the sky above me, as the electromagnetic anomaly pulsed and roared like a monster leaping out of the sand at my feet. I tried to yell, but couldn’t remember how; and I fell down a tiny blue tunnel where there was nothing to see but a line of tiny letters and punctuation marks, tangling themselves together in a vain attempt to produce something other than gibberish.
After a long while they did manage tp spell out a word, however, and it blinked on and off steadily. RESET. Oh. I knew what that meant. I was supposed to do something now, wasn’t I? I breathed, blinked, and tried to look around but found I could only move my eyes.
I lay where I had toppled backward, frozen in my last conscious attitude, arm still out, hand still clutching a sprig of Oenothera. A little sand had drifted into my open mouth. It was quiet and peaceful here now, and no longer blue; but the air stung with ozone and some sort of electromagnetic commotion was going on to the north of me.
To hell with it. I closed my eyes, but to my dismay saw red letters flashing behind my eyelids. PRIORITY! OBTAIN LIBRARY! My body jerked as some fried circuit repaired itself and my legs flexed, attempting to pull me up into a standing position. After several tries, during which the rigid upper half of my body jolted to and fro and got me another faceful of sand, my legs righted themselves and set off northward, staggering through the dunes. The rest of me rode along above them like an unwilling maharani atop a drunken elephant. At least some of the sand spilled out of my mouth.
As I lurched nearer I could feel the anomaly throbbing away up ahead, and a fan of blue rays spread themselves like a peacock’s tail above the hermit’s cove. Every instinct I had left was screaming at me to get out of there, but my lower torso blundered along like a goddam Frankenstein’s Monster, stumbling occasionally and pitching me face-forward into the sand again. Frantically I went into my self-repair program and tried to get control, but it was committed to fixing my arms and would not allow override. The best I was able to do was close my mouth.
By the time I came thrashing over the top of the last dune, I had sensation again in my right arm; but what I beheld in the cove below me nearly brought on another fit of electronic apoplexy. Somebody else was stealing the library!
Two small figures were struggling up the face of the opposite dune, carrying each a basket of piled shells. From the prints in the sand ahead of them, I could see that this was not their first trip, and their destination was an indistinct domed something that lay in a shimmer of blue just over the top of the dune.
My jaw worked, I spat out sand and shouted, “Hey!” They turned around and I had the impression that they were a pair of English children in white hooded snowsuits, their facial features tiny and perfect, their skin ashy pale. They wore enormous black goggles. When they saw me they squeaked in horror and ran, plowing up the dune face in their efforts to get away from me and not drop the heavy baskets.
My legs took me down the sand like a juggernaut. I picked up speed across the lawn and started up after them, gaining back more and more of my coordination as I went. They were nearly to the top of the dune now and I could see there was something not quite human in their proportions. Head circumference too big, tubby httle bodies, spindly arms and legs. What the Hell? I searched my index for information on related subjects and was rewarded with a host of terribly earnest UFO titles from the late twentieth century, all illustrated with drawings of these same spindly little people. Aliens? From outer space? Were these the Ascended Masters from whom the Hermit had been stealing his sacred fire, his memorized scraps of improbable knowledge? As I gained on them they began crying openmouthed in their terror, desperately trying to clamber over the top of the dune.
One of them made it but the other stumbled, dropping his basket, and a single clamshell bounced out and went skating down the sand wall toward me. My right hand shot out and closed on it like a trap, in as fine an example of bonehead priority programming as I’ve ever seen, because if I’d been able to ignore it and keep going past I’d have caught the little so-and-so. As it was, in my wasted second he managed to grab up his basket again and hands-and-knees drag it over the top, where his friend had hung back long enough to help him to his feet. They scampered away down the other side just seconds before I was able to pull myself up off the slope.
I looked down into a wide valley of sand, featureless but for the great white circle of a shell midden. There was an airship parked on it.
Now this was 1860, mind you, and here was this thing that looked like an Easter egg designed by Jules Verne sitting on a prehistoric shell midden. It was all of some purply-silver metal and it had portholes, and riveted plates, and scrollwork and curlicues that made no kind of aerodynamic sense. It wasn’t one of our ships, certainly. It bore no resemblance to a silver saucer; but then, this was 1860, wasn’t it? Nearly a hundred years before anything crashed in a place called Roswell.