Kaspar's Box

Randi squatted down and took an object from An Li's hand and looked at it. It wasn't very large, but it was definitely no volcanic oddity. It was a bright, shiny, golden color, so polished that it reflected a distorted vision of whatever image it captured. It was certainly not heavy enough to be pure gold-a hundred and fifty grams, no more. It had a pentagonal base no more than fifty or sixty millimeters long with a series of pentagonal brackets, a half dozen or so, running down its length. Why it wasn't sandblasted or bent and twisted was as much a mystery as what it was or whose it might be. The only thing she was sure of was that it couldn't have been dropped very long ago from the looks of it, and whoever lost it just might come back looking for it.

They were in strange territory now, and needed to tread softly and carefully. She wasn't sure whether to take it or leave it, but An Li made up her mind for her by grabbing it out of her hands and clutching it to her. "Mine!" she said. "Pretty!"

Randi sighed. "All right, you can keep it, but we have to go and find the others. It's going to rain. Get very wet. Can you hear it?"

As if on cue, loud rumblings of thunder sounded far too close to ignore.

An Li got up and took Randi's hand, clutching the strange artifact in the other, and kept pace as much as she could with the larger woman striding off towards where the other two had vanished.

The golden artifact wasn't the first such strange, small, manufactured alien object they'd come across on Melchior, and such things had been reported even in the original scouting reports. It seemed at times as if some alien machine was shedding parts, but it was more likely some minor tool of one of the stranded alien creatures they'd spent time avoiding. No two that they'd found had ever been alike, almost as if each were from a different creature or civilization, but that meant little. It was why the term alien had been invented.

They often had wondered if Doc Woodward up on the paradise-seeming moon of Balshazzar stumbled over these things. Maybe he even found out from his alien friends what they were and why they were scattered all over the place. Still, it would make more sense if he found them on the relatively static garden moon than them finding such things here, on volcanic Melchior, where everything was constantly in motion from dust, quakes, volcanism just under the surface and sometimes on top of it, and violent rainstorms. Things like these should be mostly melted or worn away by now. Most instead looked almost new, like this thing. Even the aliens shipwrecked along the coast had been here long enough to have pretty much exhausted what they'd salvaged and they surely didn't have the kind of technology to make whatever this stuff was. It made no sense at all.

Rocks that stimulated your emotional centers and maybe spied on you and exquisitely manufactured pieces of junk that did nothing. Parts of the puzzle that they'd all love to solve, but which they had about as much chance of solving as they had of flying off this hellish world. Still, they occupied the mind, even Li's.

They came up over a rise and looked for Jerry and Lucky. A fumarole nearby spouted loud white noise and steam from venting the result of rainwater hitting something far too hot and not very far below. All of them had learned not to go too near those roaring holes in the rock.

The storm was really coming towards them now; you could see its darkness creeping towards their position, blotting out the sky and landscape. If they didn't spot the others quickly, it would be necessary to find someplace else to ride out the fury that was clearly unavoidable.

Randi spotted an oval opening about a meter high and perhaps two wide that looked promising. Hoping that it opened out a bit, she headed for it, letting Li get down and back in, then doing the same, but the childlike woman got to the edge of it and suddenly shouted "No!" over the noise of the storm.

"Come on! You've got to! Otherwise you'll be out in the open!" Randi yelled back, but Li shook her head, twisted, broke away and began running off in the direction they'd been heading. Realizing that the only choices were between getting caught outside and staying put, the older woman decided not to chase the other. The gods had a strange protection for the mad.

She backed further in as the storm hit with all its fury and, feeling a bit more room, she managed to get back so that she never lost sight of the opening but could roll over if necessary or crawl on her elbows and knees. She didn't want to get too far in; there would be nothing but absolute darkness not far from where she was now.