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Words: 10114 in 6 pages
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ose chase that just didn't pan out, so you really didn't miss a devil of a lot.
As a matter of fact, it was rather disappointing to me, so I've decided to take a long-needed sabbatical leave and combine it with a little research on the half-intelligent natives of Mendez. I'll see you in a year or so.
As ever, Jim Duckworth
Well, that was that, Turnbull thought. It galled him a little to think that he'd been offered a chance to do research with Scholar Duckworth and hadn't been able to take it. But if the research hadn't panned out.... He frowned and turned back to the first letter.
A theory that would "literally kick the supports right out from under every theory that's been evolved for the existence of that city," he'd said. Odd. It was unlike Duckworth to be so positive about anything until he could support his own theory without much fear of having it pulled to pieces.
Turnbull poured himself a second glass of sherry, took a sip, and rolled it carefully over his tongue.
From the very beginning, it had been obvious that whoever or whatever had built that city had not evolved on the planet where it had been built. Nothing more complex than the lichens had ever evolved there, as thousands of drillings into the crust of the planet had shown.
Certainly nothing of near-humanoid construction could ever have come into being on that planet without leaving some trace of themselves or their genetic forebears except for that single huge city.
How long the city had been there was anyone's guess. A thousand years? A million? There was no way of telling. It had been sealed tightly, so none of the sand that blew across the planet's surface could get in. It had been set on a high plateau of rock, far enough above the desert level to keep it from being buried, and the transparent dome was made of an aluminum oxide glass that was hard enough to resist the slight erosion of its surface that might have been caused by the gentle, thin winds dashing microscopic particles of sand against its smooth surface.
Inside, the dry air had preserved nearly every artifact, leaving them as they had been when the city was deserted by its inhabitants at an unknown time in the past.
That's right--deserted. There were no signs of any remains of living things. They'd all simply packed up and left, leaving everything behind.
Dating by the radiocarbon method was useless. Some of the carbon compounds in the various artifacts showed a faint trace of radiocarbon, others showed none. But since the method depends on a knowledge of the amount of nitrogen in the atmosphere of the planet of origin, the rate of bombardment of that atmosphere by high-velocity particles, and several other factors, the information on the radioactivity of the specimens meant nothing. There was also the likelihood that the carbon in the various polymer resins came from oil or coal, and fossil carbon is useless for radio-dating.
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