They don’t like to admit it but even slugs and cybers have use for a fine physcial specimen once in a while. Inwardly I gloat, outwardly I ask pleasantly, “Who are you?”
“Would you care to view my resume?”
I lean back and call up the record on this Jalena LaBelle. My eyes widen as I read. Jalena has been around! There’s a list of science and engineering citations as long as my arm and a couple in organizational behavior. The resume doesn’t reveal if Jalena is a slug “she” or a cyber “it.” Either way she’s a power house in her field, and that makes her someone who should remember me with a warm, fuzzy feeling. I smile and relax in my chair and stare directly at her. I don’t know if cybers/slugs like my baby blues as much as real people but I’m going to find out.
“So what brings you to Methuselah?”
Jalena smiles back, “Opportunity, the same as you, cheri, but I see the opportunity in a different way than you.”
“What opportunity do you see?”
“We are looking at an engineering triumph of an ancient species, a species alive when the world was younger … different. I want to find out what those differences were and how those differences affected what they designed.”
“What sort of differences?”
“Well, have you ever heard of petroleum?”
“I believe so: Complex, hydrophobic hydrocarbons found in trace amounts in earth’s crust. An Earth oddity, nothing like it found anywhere else in the solar system.”
“Trace amounts today, but I suspect that in the times that this tomb was created it was perhaps a million times more abundant.”
I stare at her for a moment, looking for a grin or wink to indicate she’s pulling my leg.
“ … That’s silly. Why … if it was a million times more abundant, it would leak out all over. If you drilled a hole in the ground in the wrong place, it would come spurting out!”
“Sounds silly, doesn’t it? And it may be silly, I don’t know yet. But look carefully at what you see in that bag, Ron. All the things in that bag look silly, don’t they?”
The materials analysis is finished. I look at the report displayed over the table.
“You’re right. These are odd results. Except for the fibers that make up the cloth bag, all these pieces are monolithic construction—just big slabs of uniform material. Why would they construct like that?”
“Discovering that, cheri, is a research project.”