“Someone dug it up!” Einstein exclaimed.
They found themselves standing around the rim of a pit perhaps half a dozen meters in diameter, and the same in depth. Marks in the soil made it obvious that this had been excavated with shovels, and vague footprints proved they had been wielded by humans and not robots. At the deepest part of the excavation, the gray soil had been stained red with rust. But the bottom of the pit was otherwise vacant; whatever had been rusting there was entirely gone. Only a few scraps of hard black plastic, and fragments of steel that had been altogether converted into rust, proved that Einstein hadn’t been lying to them all along.
Ty let himself down carefully into the hole, prodded in the wet, rusty mush with his toe, then reached into it and pulled something out. After shaking off lashings of mud, he underhanded it out of the pit to Beled, who picked it out of the air. It was a bent black cylinder.
“The day is not lost,” Ty announced. “All of us will get to handle an actual ’fact. That, my friends, is a five-thousand-year-old radiator hose.”
A few emotions were competing for the mental energies of the Seven: utter confusion about who had dug this hole, and why. Empathy for the deeply embarrassed Einstein, who had promised them an entire truck. Disappointment that the only things left of it were a rust stain and a radiator hose. A mild sense of alarm at the idea that inexplicable persons with shovels were somewhere about. Swamping all of these, however, like a tsunami cresting over the mountains, was the awareness that they were in the presence of a real artifact from before Zero. As they had established on the flight up here, Doc had seen such things three times in his life, not counting museum exhibits. None of the others had ever seen one at all.
And so they all stood there in silence for several minutes, passing it from hand to hand, thinking about it: the factory where it had been manufactured, the engineers who had designed it, the workers who had assembled the vehicle, the driver who had piloted it around, and the day that the Hard Rain had begun. As it turned out, imagining the fate of seven billion people was far less emotionally affecting than imagining the fate of one.
Beled, after handling the ’fact for a minute and gazing at it inscrutably, handed it off to Kath Two. He withdrew from the edge of the pit and began circling it restlessly. After a minute he called out to the others, but not in a voice of alarm.
About ten meters away, at a break in the slope that afforded a bit of a view down the valley, a sort of totem had been erected: a length of aluminum tubing, white with oxidation, projecting vertically out of the ground to a height about equal to that of a person. At its top, lashed on with a few scraps of copper wire, a circular object: a steel hoop mostly obscured by marred and pitted black stuff, a crossbar through its middle with loose wires dangling from orifices.
“Steering wheel,” Ty said. “The plastic coating burned but the steel rim held it together.”
“Who put it here?” Ariane asked. She was the last to arrive, and had to insinuate herself among taller members of the Seven in order to get a clear view. As a result she nearly tripped over a long, low mound of disturbed earth. The steering wheel totem had been erected at one end of it.
“Whoever buried the driver,” Ty answered.
Doc looked at Einstein. “Were you aware of the existence of human remains?”
Einstein held his hands up. “You have to understand, the truck came down like a dart. Nose first.”
“Naturally,” Doc said. “All the weight was in the engine block. The box, as we have established, was filled with something light.”
“The only part that was sticking out was maybe this much of the bumper, and some of the box.” Einstein was holding his hands about a meter apart. “The place where the human was—”
“The cab,” Ty said.
“—was deep underground. You have to understand, all this digging—”
“Came as a complete surprise to you. Yes, we understand that,” Doc said.
“When were you last here?” Langobard asked.
“Two years ago,” Einstein said. “But you have to understand: if someone from my RIZ had gone up here with shovels and dug up a whole truck, I’d have heard about it.”
“Where’s the incentive?” Ariane asked.
Everyone looked at her.
“As it was—in situ—the truck was priceless. Legally or not, tourists would have paid any amount of money to come and view it. To dig it up makes sense—so that tourists could get a full view of it. But—”
“But instead it has been completely dismantled,” Doc said, “and everything of value taken away.”
“Of value?! I don’t understand what you mean by that word,” Ariane said.
“The Diggers were after the engine block,” Doc said, as if this would answer her question—which it by no means did. But after a few moments she had a thought.