"Don't get hot under the collar. If you can help it on this planet. You sound as though one of the boys had been giving you a lecture on the importance of knowing what strata a given series of specimens represent."
"Not one of our boys—they have a little more sense. But there was a young paleontologist when I was covering the Antares worlds whose memory still makes my blood pressure go up. Never mind me; that's not important. But I want to make this dig."
"It will tie up machines, however freely we can spare time," Lampert said slowly. "I'll tell you: how about this? We spend the rest of the day getting cores from other points along these cracks. For one thing, we ought to know more about the structure of the hill, and for another, we might find more of your 'wires.' After all, the chance of our hitting the only one around is pretty remote. I can't quite see a single dropped piece of copper wire showing up in the first two days of a project like this."
"I neither said nor implied that this should be the only piece. I don't doubt for a moment that there are others, whether they are wires or worms."
"Sorry. Well, we take these cores back to camp this evening, together with any others we find of the same sort, and let Hans and Ndomi look them over. If they don't turn out to be something that the boys recognize and can classify right off the bat, we come back tomorrow with all the digging machinery you want, and dig until you either find all you want, satisfy yourself that there's nothing here or find something which obviously requires more specialized attention than we can give it. All right?"
"Nothing could be fairer. Let's go!"
The discussion in camp that evening was animated beyond anything the guide had heard. His original estimate of these men as relatively quiet specimens underwent a sharp revision. Mitsuitei's report of the day's activity at his site had, it is true, been delivered quite calmly; but from then on matters grew progressively livelier. This was not caused by opposition to the archaeologist's plans. The others were all in favor of remaining, for their own reasons. However, the question of just what was likely to be found gave rise to much rather barbed comment on Sulewayo's part. "I don't see how you can expect to find any trace of civilized work here," he said flatly at one point. "The animal and plant life of this planet is at a stage of evolution corresponding to something like Earth's Pennsylvanian age, when the amphibians were the highest known forms of life. I'm not saying that there couldn't be such a thing as an intelligent amphibian. But I do say that the normal set of evolutionary forces which, on both Earth and Viridis, produced creatures of the amphibian pattern could have done that or produced an intelligent fish; not both. If the latter ever evolved, it failed; for the amphibians—pardon me, amphibids—are here. To get an intelligent amphibid on this world will—or would, if the sun were to last long enough—require another orogenic period with the accompanying climatic changes. Then you'd stand a considerably higher chance of getting reptiles instead, if the comparative work done on over four hundred planets carries any meaning."
"I don't doubt the value of the work at all. You are very probably correct. It did not occur to me to expect remains of intelligent amphibians. I saw no reason to pre-suppose that anything in the way of artifacts which I might find would necessarily be native to this planet."
"You think there were other visitors from outside the Beta Librae system?"