Analog SF, September 2003 by Dell Magazine Authors

Author:Dell Magazine Authors [Authors, Dell Magazine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Magazine, 2012
Publisher: www.Fictionwise.com
Published: 2001-07-03T04:00:00+00:00

Copyright © 2003 by Richard A. Lovett.

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The First Lesson by Edward Muller

Behold the tortoise....

[Back to Table of Contents]

Five minutes into the restricted area, the frantic human voice of Director Ling replaced the increasingly strident warnings of Tobias’ spacesuit.

“Tobias, what the hell do you think you're doing?”

“I'm going inside the vault,” Tobias replied with a casualness he didn't really feel, as he hoisted himself further up the cliff face. Another few meters and he would reach the top of the plateau.

“Are you mad?” Ling asked him after a barely noticeable lightspeed delay. “The Guardian will kill you!”

“Not if my theory is right.”

“And if it's wrong?”

“Then the Guardian will kill me.”

The edge of the restricted area coincided with the base of the plateau upon which the vault stood. As his head cleared the top of the plateau, Tobias beheld the vault: A tetrahedron, a three-sided pyramid a kilometer and a half high and formed of a single, solid piece of a material whose structural strength exceeded that of diamonds. Decades of exposure to New Thebes’ hurricane-force sandstorms had failed to put so much as a single nick in the vault's mirror-smooth surfaces. It looked just the same as it had in the pictures the first robot probes to visit the Alpha Centauri A system had sent back more than a century before.

No, Tobias corrected himself, not quite the same. Over the past few decades, a circle of wreckage had slowly built up around the base of the vault, the diced remains of dozens of robots that had ventured too close to the vault and been destroyed by its robot guardian.

Tobias pulled himself onto the top of the plateau.

“Tobias, I know this is a difficult time for you. I was eighteen myself once.”

Sounds like he's getting advice from a psychology program, Tobias thought. He recognized the telltale cadence in Ling's voice. All adults spoke like that when they started parroting advice from the base computer. Tobias could have easily forgiven Ling for his lack of skill in dealing with young people. It was a rare thing for a child to be born these days, now that human beings were getting used to immortality. He suspected the only reason his parents had had him was to provide the crew of the Heyerdahl with a distraction during the long and tedious trip from Sol System. What he found unforgivable was that adults thought him too stupid to tell when they were trying to manipulate him.

Tobias started walking. He made good time. New Thebes had less than a quarter of the two gravities he'd grown up in, the increased gravity of the station being a clandestine way to get the researchers there to exercise.

Even from six hundred meters, the vault entrance was visible, a triangular opening in the vault wall at ground level. No one knew what the opening led to. The material of which the vault was made was impervious to every scanning technology humans possessed. The only clue about the

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