The Abyss of Time

Chapter Sixty Three

     "They were fascinating creatures," said Felgin once he'd finished greeting his three visitors. "Fascinating. They had no brains, you know. Sophisticated nervous systems, yes, but spread evenly all through their bodies. And their eyes were on the ends of their arms, just like starfish from our day."

     He was standing in front of a resin model of a Pentapod, the name he'd given to the species. The creature was mottled and lumpy, like a toad. It was about the size of a human but had no head. Instead the torso was divided into five stumpy legs. From half way up each leg rose a nimble, dextrous tentacle the central part of which was lined on one side with rows of tiny tube fingers that looked capable of the fine, delicate manipulation of small objects. The arm as a whole was capable of twining around and grasping objects as well and the model had one arm grasping a surprisingly human looking axe. The end of the tentacle then bulged out to reveal a crest of black tissue that Miller took to be the eye.

     "Have you found fossils?" asked Jack.

     "We've found actual specimens," Felgin replied. "Mummified corpses in a cave, sealed off from the outside world, probably by a rockfall. We think the species originated in the southern polar regions..." He waved an arm to indicate his wife, looking up from a computer screen on the other side of the room. "...because we've found no other echinoderm life here in the north. None at all. Not even fossils. Getting here, across the lifeless equatorial regions, must have been quite a task for them. They would have needed sophisticated technology to make the trip. It would have been their version of a mission to the moon."

     "Have you found any evidence of technology?" asked Jack, staring at the model in fascination.

     "They had an axe very like the one the model is holding. Probably for defence against predators. It was rusted away to nothing but we could still make out its outline. There were other artifacts. Corroded to the point where there's no way of telling what they did but they were originally made of sophisticated alloys. And, of course, their very presence here is proof that they had an advanced civilisation. They lived a little over fifteen million years ago, so far as we can tell. We just missed them."

     "There's a layer of rock dating from their era that has some interesting elements and isotopes in it," said Connie Felgin, standing and crossing the room to join them. "It suggests they had atomic power."

     "Indeed," her husband agreed. "They probably had the ability to leave the planet, or would have if there was anywhere to go. Imagine that. They work out that the world goes around the sun and that the stars are other suns, so they think, quite reasonably, that maybe they have planets as well. Planets they can visit and explore, maybe. Even colonise. And then, when their astronomy is advanced enough, they discover that someone's beaten them to it. That every other planet within reach of their telescopes has been turned into Dyson swarm elements by some previous civilisation. Their planet is the only one left, maybe in the whole galaxy. Imagine what that would do to a civilisation. Imagine what it would do to us."

     "So what happened to them?" asked Miller, interested despite himself. "Did they collapse into a racial, suicidal despair and all die?"

     "We have no idea," the professor replied. "It wasn't war. A nuclear war would leave a distinctive pattern of isotopes in the rocks from that period. The isotopes we find indicate that they only used nuclear power for peaceful purposes."

     "We do have one theory," his wife added, looking at him.

     "It's only a theory," her husband replied. "We have absolutely no evidence to back it up, except for the fact that the entire species seems to have vanished, almost overnight. If there'd been a war, or a plague, there would have been survivors. They would have either rebuilt their civilisation or evolved into post-sapient species, as mankind seems to have done a billion years earlier. On this world, anyway. No what we think..." He looked at his wife, as if embarrassed to give voice to something as outlandish and improbable.