Across a Billion Years Read Online Free

civilizations. We had no business disturbing this site; it would be a kind of vandalism if we did, since it rightfully belongs to archaeologists who are specialists in the Higby V native race. If there aren’t any such specialists now, there will be someday. Mirrik saw the logic of that and carefully backfilled what he had unearthed.
    Score one for Dr. Schein. I admire professionalism.
    At last our military escort arrived and transported us from the landing area to the collection of bubbleshacks that passes for Higby V’s greatest metropolis. There we had a vastness of triviations to take care of. Dr. Schein handled the job of making sure our funds had been transferred into a local account, so we’d be able to get food and supplies at the base PX. Such financial details are supposed to be handled automatically by Galaxy Central, but nobody with a proper reverence for stash ever assumes that Galaxy Central gets anything straight, which is why Dr. Schein checked. Checking involved plugging into the telepath hookup. The TP on duty was a surly vidj named Marge Hotchkiss, and if you ever hook horns with her in the course of your daily work, Lorie, give her a nasty overload for me, will you? This Hotchkiss person was plump and plain, with piggy little gray eyes and a very visible mustache. About thirty-five, I guess. Except for her TP powers she is probably an extraordinarily ordinary person, the kind normally destined for a life of quiet spinsterhood in some decayed rooming house; but out here she’s one of about fifty women on a planet populated by several thousand men, and that has made her arrogant beyond her station. When Dr. Schein asked her to make the hookup, she gave him a slicy smirk and insisted on his thumbprint first. He explained that he wasn’t drawing on his thumb account to make the call, that he was merely requisitioning credit information from Galaxy Central and didn’t have to pay. She wanted his thumb on record anyway. So he gave her the print, and then she took her sweet time about making the linkup. “Lots of interference on the line,” she told us.
    Completely phony, that’s sure. The thing about telepathy that makes it the only practical means of interstellar communication, of course, is that there isn’t any interference, no static, no relativistic time-lag, none of the headaches and slowdowns you get in a normal communications channel. (Blot that “normal”! What I mean, of course, is “mechanical.”) All that Marge Hotchkiss had to do was reach out, grab the next TP in the relay chain, and send our message heading at instantaneous propagation toward Galaxy Central. It was her pleasure to stall, though. Finally she put the message through, and confirmed that the credit balance transfer had been made.
    Dr. Schein, Dr. Horkkk, and Pilazinool went off to register their thumbprints, or equivalent identifications, so they could draw against the account here. Saul Shahmoon was given the job of picking up our excavation permit from the base headquarters. The rest of us had nothing much to do for a while, and I started to make talk with the Hotchkiss creature.
    “My sister’s in the TP network,” I said.
    “Oh.”
    “Her name’s Lorie Rice. She works out of Earth.”
    “Oh.”
    “I thought maybe you knew her. You TP people generally make contact with each other all over the place. Sooner or later you must come in touch with everyone else in the whole communications net.”
    “I don’t know her.”
    “Lorie Rice,” I said. “She’s very interesting; I have to say so. I mean, she has this wonderful curiosity about the whole universe, she wants to know everything about everything. That’s because she’s bedridden, she can’t get around anywhere much, and so the TP net sort of serves as eyes and ears for her. She gets to see the whole universe through other people’s eyes, via telepathy. And if you’d ever had any contact with her, you’d remember it, because—”
    “Look, I’m