Artifact Read online

  Artifact

  Chad Oliver

  First published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, June 1955.

  This copy derived from New Worlds issue 46, April 1956.

  Late August, 1971.

  Far above a field in New Mexico, above the blue sky itself, a ship decelerated and floated down toward the Earth. The close star that had seared through blackness lost its nakedness and became the golden sun. White clouds touched the ship that had come from emptiness.

  Hundreds of miles away, across half the state of Texas, Dr. Dixon Sanders sat in his university office and looked out the window. The cool breeze felt good after a hot summer, and the August rains had stroked green across the land.

  He did not know that man had landed on Mars for the first time. He did not know what men had found there.

  Three days later, Sanders got the call from Washington.

  One hour after he had received the call, he climbed into a jet and was flown to a field in New Mexico. “There was no spaceship in sight. He saw only a thick concrete blockhouse, two spidery structures that looked like radio towers, anti-aircraft missiles and sheds. There were jets patrolling the skies.

  A copter lifted him four miles to a neat new settlement in the desert. The houses were white and compact, and concealed irrigation channels had turned the area into an oasis with green trees, grasses, vines and flowers. A big lettered roof sign read: Welcome To Gila Monster Sinkhole. A smaller sign was more official: Greenacre, New Mexico. U.S. Government Property. Landing Prohibited.

  They landed.

  A shaded roof path carried them across six houses, and at the seventh there were three military policemen guarding the roof door. They walked inside and a cool stairway led down into a rustic reception room. Two more MP’s opened a side door for them. Sanders stepped inside. He still knew a general when he saw one, and the impulse to salute was almost uncontrollable.

  “You’re Sanders?”

  “That’s right.”

  “A pleasure to meet you, sir. Have a chair, won’t you?” Sanders sat down, slightly stunned at being addressed as sir by a general.

  “I’m General Ransom, Sanders. Intelligence. I want you to know how much we appreciate your coming up here like this.”

  “No trouble at all.” Sanders wanted a cigarette. The general was a big, pleasantly ugly man with grey hair and sharp blue eyes. Sanders rather liked him.

  “You realise, naturally, that what you see and hear in this place must be treated as top secret information. We’re counting on your discretion.”

  “I understand that, General Ransom.”

  “Okay.” The General paced across the room and then sat down behind his desk. He unlocked a drawer and took out a small box. The box was three inches on a side. It was ordinary enough in appearance, although it was metallic. The General drummed his fingers on his desk. Then, abruptly, he slid the top off the box and handed the box to Sanders. “In your opinion, Dr. Sanders, what is that?”

  Sanders took the box and looked inside. “Can I take it out?”

  “Certainly.”

  He took the object out and held it in his hand. It was a piece of brown rock two and a half inches long by two inches wide. He examined it carefully. The top of the rock was smooth and worn. The bottom had been neatly chipped by pressure-flaking to make a V-shaped edge. The flake scars were clearly visible. Looked at from the side, the object was slightly concave on its worked edge. He gripped it with the smooth top surface in the palm of his hand.

  “Well, Doctor?”

  “I assume this is important, for some reason?”

  “Very important.”

  He picked his words with care. “It’s made out of flint or chert, or something closely resembling it. The bottom edge has definitely been worked—I’d say by means of indirect pressure-flaking. In my opinion, it’s an artifact—a tool made by man. It may be a scraper; that’s a common tool used to flesh hides and that sort of thing. Hard to tell what it was used for, though. It’s a fairly crude implement, but it’s well made of its type. Nothing too unusual, I’m afraid.”

  The General leaned forward. “How old is it?”

  Sanders shrugged. “Sorry, but I can’t tell that from the scraper alone. Most of them are pretty much alike, and you’ll find them all over the world and from the early Pleistocene right on down to the present. If it was found in association with bones or charcoal or pottery or projectile points—damn near anything—or if it was found eroding out of a datable geological stratum, I might be able to take a stab at it.”

  “It was found all by itself, on the surface of a desert,” General Ransom said, smiling.

  “Then dating it would be just guesswork, really.”

  “But it is an artifact?”

  “I’d say so, yes. I didn’t know you boys were so interested in primitive cultures.”

  “That,” said the general, “would depend on where the primitives are.”

  “Apaches on the warpath again?”

  “No—though we do have one over at the field who’s a first class rocket engineer. I wish the Apaches were all we had to worry about. Tell me, Doctor, if you, as an archeologist, had to find out more about this little gadget—who made it, how old it is, that sort of thing—how would you go about it?”

  Sanders frowned. “I’d go back to where it was found and try to find another one in place. If we could get one in a dig—excavate it, that is, association with some other stuff—we should be able to give you more information on it.”

  “Would you be willing to undertake such a search, doctor, if the government asked you to do so?”

  “Certainly, if it’s important. I have classes to think of, of course. Where did it come from, anyway—somewhere around here?”

  “That’s one way of looking at it, Dr. Sanders. It came from Mars.”

  He was a little slow on the up-take. Then it hit him. “But that means—”

  “Exactly,” said General Ransom.

  * * *

  He was a little surprised at his own calm acceptance of the fact that men had landed on Mars, but then he had been expecting it, really, along with everybody else.

  But an artifact was something else again.

  An artifact was a tool made by man.

  Or by something like a man?

  “Why me?” he asked. “I’m no spaceman. I like it here.”

  “I’ll be perfectly frank with you. Our expedition was made on a strictly hush-hush basis; that isn’t necessarily the way I would have preferred it, but with the world situation the way it is that’s the way it had to be. Sooner or later, the news has got to be released. We’ve got a knotty little job ahead of us at the United Nations. We have no right to keep that artifact quiet, and when we talk about it there are some questions that have to be answered. Do you understand me?”

  “Well, I see why you need an archeologist. Why me?”

  “We can’t force you to go.”

  “I realise that. I just want the reasons.”

  Ransom ticked them off. “One, you can be trusted. Two, we feel you’re the man for the job—well trained, but with a shot or two of imagination. Three, you’re in good shape physically—though an examination will have to clear you officially, of course. Finally… may I be blunt?”

  “Sure.”

  “Your wife divorced you I understand.”

  The old pain stabbed at him, but he kept his face expression less. “That’s right.”

  “Your parents are dead. You have one son in the oil business. You don’t get on with him too well.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve chosen to work at a small private college. Your absence can be covered.”

  “In other words, I won’t be missed if I don’t come back.”

  “I wouldn’t put it quite that way.”

  Sanders looked at the artifact in his hand. He put it back in the box and handed it to Ransom. “I’ll do what I can.”

  “We’re grateful, Sanders. You can pick your medal if you want one. And don’t worry: we’ll get you there and we’ll get you back. That ship can carry three men. Your pilot will be Colonel Ben Cooper—he made the first flight, so he’s the best we’ve got. You pick the other man. You know what we want, and you know who you can work with best.”

  Sanders didn’t hesitate. “That’ll be Ralph Charteris over at Santa Fe. He’s thirty-eight, he knows his stuff, and he’s technically unmarried. He’s a research man, so nobody’ll think it is funny if he disappears for a spell.”

  “Got you. Takeoff will be in ten days. You’ll want to get things in shape.”

  “Okay.”

  The two men shook hands.

  * * *

  The ten days went by in a hurry.

  He made out a will, a job he had been postponing for years, and managed to spend a day fishing with two friends in Matagorda Bay.

  He phoned his son Mark in Houston. Their talk was unsatisfactory as usual, full of forced heartinesses. He couldn’t tell him where he was going, and he was glad when the call was over. He didn’t call Ellen.

  The ship lifted on schedule. Within an hour there was no blue sky.

  He thought briefly of himself: forty-two years old, on the thin side, horn-rimmed glasses. He probably looked a lot like a professor. He felt singularly out of place in a spaceship.

  He looked at the screen. He saw cold stars and a frozen sun. He saw black distances and long, long silences. He saw his own life far away and lost: a life that had been too lonely, and too fast. He stopped looking.

  The at
omic drive was soundless except for a high, irritating vibration that seemed part of the ship. Magnets kept him anchored and after an initial vertigo the weightlessness meant an annoying indigestion and little else.

  They had some good bourbon, and it helped.

  They were neither hot nor cold.

  * * *

  Ralph Charteris was a big blonde giant of a man, and little Ben Cooper always referred to him as the biggest mass on the ship. “Let’s talk about rocks, Sanders,” he said. Tell me what the devil that scraper was doing on Mars—figure it out in true Boy Scientist fashion so we can turn around and go home.”

  Sanders smiled, sipping his bourbon. He liked to talk, although he knew it was just a device for getting outside himself. “I’ll give you six fast answers, Ralph.”

  “Fire,” Ralph said, chewing on an empty pipe.

  “Here’s the deal. A ship—the first one, mind you—lands on a supposedly uninhabited planet. It’s mostly all desert and a yard wide, as I understand it, and the air is shy on oxygen. We’ve all been solemnly assured by our astronomical colleagues that people like ourselves couldn’t exist on Mars. Oh, maybe some outlandish freak without any carbon molecules in his carcass, but not people. So what do they run tight smack into? An artifact. Nothing queer or strange or alien. Nothing to make them swat their helmets and holler,” Them’s Martians by gum!” Just a perfectly ordinary scraper—it’s a miracle that botanist spotted it at all. So what’s the most logical explanation, the one that strains the credulity the least?”

  “It’s a hoax,” Ralph said quietly.

  “You thought of it too, hmmmm? The simplest way for that scraper to get there would be for one of the men to have picked it up on Earth, carried it to Mars, tossed it on the sand, and then ‘discovered’ it. The botanist could have done it.”

  “I don’t much think Schlicter was a dishonest man, Sanders,” Ben Cooper said.

  “Remember Piltdown,” Ralph said.

  “Exactly. I don’t say that Schlicter planted that scraper—I just say that’s the simplest explanation.”

  “Let’s have some more ideas.”

  “Here’s another: the artifact is not native to Mars, but was left there by a party of interstellar travellers. In that case, the catch is why they would leave a flint scraper behind. I can’t figure a culture with spaceships and scrapers.”

  “Maybe they were shipwrecked,” Ralph suggested. “Maybe one man was left behind, thrown on his own resources.”

  “Can’t see it,” Ben Cooper objected. “What’s he supposed to scrape with that thing—sand pies? We didn’t spot any animal life to speak of, except for those little things that looked like moles.”

  “Still, we can’t rule it out,” Sanders said. “Try this: there has been some contact between Earth and Mars we don’t know anything about. A ship came here maybe half a million years ago, dropped the scraper for some reason, and hightailed it back home.”

  “This space travel does great things for the imagination,” Ralph said sourly.

  “I’m trying to name possibilities, no matter how far-fetched. I’m aware, I think, of the mythological nature of Atlantis, Mu, Lemuria, and the Lost Continent of Lake Erie. Remember the old dictum of Mr. Holmes: eleminate the impossible, then hang on to what’s left.”

  “What is left?”

  “Number four: just like the last one, but the ship came from Mars, picked up the scraper on Earth, came back home and dropped it. Maybe it happened a million years ago. Since that time, Mars has lost her civilisation and her cities are covered with sand. And don’t tell me civilisations can’t disappear.”

  “Sounds pretty gassy to me.”

  “They had to dig to find Troy. They had to dig to find some Biblical towns. You already have to dig to find some of the army forts on the American frontier—and they’re only a few hundred years old.”

  “It’s your theory, friend.”

  “Number five,” Sanders continued, running a hand through his sandy hair. “Man evolved on Mars then migrated to Earth, maybe half a million years ago when water got scarce. In other words, the primate evolution evidence on Earth is misleading.”

  Ralph Charteris bit down hard on his pipe stem, and then remembered to relax. “You’re kidding. How about the South African stuff—Australopithecus, and all that? How about Pithecanthropus? Sinanthropus? Neanderthal? Swanscombe? How come when they got to Earth they went back to living in caves and rock shelters? Dammit, Sanders, you’re trying to make me sore.”

  “Not at all. Here’s my parting shot: that artifact was left on Mars by some representatives of a galactic civilisation. It was left there on purpose, for us to find, as a kind of I.Q. test. They want to see how we handle the situation. How’s that?”

  “You’re a wild man with a theory, Sanders.”

  “Listen, Doc,” Ben Cooper said slowly. “What do you really think?”

  Sanders looked at him and shook his head. “I don’t know, Ben,” he said. “I just don’t know.”

  They didn’t have much to say after that.

  They started up a poker game with magnetized cards.

  They waited.

  * * *

  Seventeen days later, the ship landed. They put on their airsuits and stepped outside.

  There was no wind and they stood in utter silence. The ship had come down on the flat top of a mesa. Small, thorny plants with tiny green flowers were scattered loosely between worn outcroppings of reddish brown rock. The mesa was not high, and at its base was the desert, a motionless sea of gently rolling sand, so light brown that it almost appeared white.

  The sky was a deep blue, very close to a cold black directly overhead but somewhat lighter near the horizons. There was one large dirty yellow cloud hanging just over the desert floor to the south.

  Sanders shivered, although it was not yet cold. He blinked his eyes, grateful for the filter lenses in his airsuit. The sun was brighter than he had ever seen it on Earth, and it was a fierce, naked brightness that pelted the low hills and deserts with shattering attacks of light.

  Here, in the lost immensities of a strange and silent world, his glib theories of a few days ago could find no expression. Here were fundamentals, and the raw truths of simplicity.

  Quite casually, as though unimpressed by the enormity of the moment, a creature that looked too much like a gopher for comfort stuck its head out from behind a rock and surveyed them with decided suspicion.

  Sanders eyed the gopher the same way.

  “Well,” Ralph said into his suit mike, staring out at the glaring wastelands, “I’d settle for a needle in a haystack any day.”

  A planet is huge, Sanders thought. You cannot imagine how great it is. Suppose some creatures came to Earth searching for artifacts, and all the people were gone. Where would he look? How long would it take? How many undiscovered sites are there on Earth, even today?

  “Ben,” he said, “can you see where the scraper was found from here?”

  Ben Cooper shook his head. “I set her down as close as I could figure to where we landed before, but it’s hard to get your bearings here. We’re close, I’d say—maybe fifty miles. We could get the copter out and spot it—we left a big circle of rocks on the sand.”

  Sanders looked out. It was like standing on the beach of an ocean. There were winds on Mars, and dust storms. When the winds blew, the sands shifted. It was a lousy spot to do archeology.

  “What do you think, Ralph?”

  Ralph put his hands on his hips. Even he was dwarfed by the vastness around him. “No point in digging up the Sahara, I guess. The scraper was a surface find, and Schlicter said he couldn’t find a site under it. If there’s one artifact, and this deal is on the level, there must be another.”

  “I’ll buy that. How about this mesa?”

  Ralph shrugged. “We don’t know what we’re doing. How do we know where they lived? One place is as good as another.”

  Sanders examined the ground. “Lots of erosion. But those rocks and plants held the soil down pretty well. Probably phenominal root systems on those plants—no water that I can see. It beats the desert. It feels like the kind of a place…”

  The excitement grew in him.

  “Let’s have a look,” Ralph said.