Seeker Read Free

found.
    “Has to be recent,” I said.
    “You mean
yesterday
?”
he asked.
    “Maybe they didn’t know what they had. Just broke in, looked around, and left.”
    “It’s possible, Chase,”
he said.
“Maybe it happened centuries ago. When people still remembered where this place was.”
    I hoped he was right.
    It was usually the case that when archeologists found a ransacked site, the ransacking had been done within a few hundred years of the era during which the site had operated. After a reasonable length of time, people forget where things are. And they get permanently lost. I sometimes wonder how many ships are floating around out in the dark, having blown an engine and eventually faded from the record.
    I should mention that we’re not archeologists. We’re strictly business types, matching collectors with merchandise, and sometimes, as now, hunting down original sources. This had looked like a gold mine moments ago. But now — Alex was holding his breath as we approached the opening.
    The hatch had been cut away by a torch. It lay off to one side. And there was only the lightest coating of dust on it. “
This just happened
,” he said. I’ll confess that Alex is not exactly even-tempered. At home, in social circumstances, he’s a model of courtesy and restraint. But in places like that lunar surface, where society is a long way off, I occasionally get to see his real feelings. He stared at the fallen door, picked up a rock, said something under his breath, and threw the rock halfway into orbit.
    I stood there, a kid in the principal’s office. “Probably my fault,” I said.
    The inner hatch was also down. Beyond it, the interior was dark.
    He looked at me. The visor was too opaque to allow me to see his expression, but it wasn’t hard to imagine. “
How do you mean
?” he asked.
    “I told Windy.” Windy was Survey’s public relations director, and a longtime friend.
    Alex wasn’t appreciably taller than I am, but he seemed to be towering over me. “
Windy wouldn’t say anything
.”
    “I know.”
    “You told her over an open circuit.”
    “Yeah.”
    He sighed. “
Chase, how could you do that
?”
    “I don’t know.” I was trying not to whine. “I didn’t think there’d be a problem. We were talking about something else and it just came up.”
    “Couldn’t resist?”
    “I guess not.”
    He planted one boot on the hatch and shoved. It didn’t budge. “
Well
,” he said, “
no help for it now
.”
    I straightened my shoulders. Shoot me if it’ll make you feel better. “Won’t happen again.”
    “It’s okay.”
He was using his spilled-milk voice.
“Let’s go see how much damage they did.”
    He led the way in.
     
     
    The domes were connected by tunnels. Staircases led to underground spaces. These places are always ghostly, illuminated only by wrist lamps. Shadows chase themselves around the bulkheads, and there seems always to be something moving just outside the field of vision. I remember reading how Casmir Kolchevsky was attacked in a place like this by a security bot that he had inadvertently activated.
    The vandals had been relentless.
    We wandered through the operational sections, through a gym, through private living quarters. Through a kitchen and dining room. Everywhere we went, drawers were pulled out and their contents dumped. Cabinets were cut open, storage lockers broken apart. The place had been ransacked. There wasn’t much remaining that could have been put up for sale or would have been of interest to a museum. We found ourselves treading carefully past broken glass and data disks and overturned tables. Some clothing will survive for a surprisingly long time in a vacuum. But we found only a handful of pieces, most of them victims of whatever chemicals had been in the original material. Or sufficiently mundane that nobody would have cared. It doesn’t much matter where a pullover shirt has come from. Unless it’s been worn by a legendary general or an