Paw-Prints Of The Gods by Steph Bennion Page B

was the name given to an illegal
yet popular mood-enhancing drug out of Epsilon Eridani. “I’ll tell
Doctor Jones.”
    “Hey, chill out,” the
Jamaican purred. “I ain’t no pusher. This is just between
friends.”
    “No thanks,” Xuthus
said firmly.
    “So where did Ravana
go?” asked Hestia. Xuthus saw her concern and assumed rather
uncharitably she was trying to impress him.
    “Probably crawled
under a rock somewhere,” muttered Urania. “Or Dagan’s alien friends
came along and whisked her away to the planet of the bitches.”
    “Urania!” exclaimed
Hestia.
    “Hey, that’s not
cool,” agreed the Jamaican.
    “Well, we haven’t seen
her,” reiterated the pilot. “We’re just the taxi service. It’s not
our fault if she went wandering off.”
    Xuthus stared at him
in disbelief, unable to comprehend how an adult could abdicate
responsibility so easily. Yet Urania’s taunts aroused feelings of
guilt, for he remembered how he had not stopped his friends
bullying Ravana when they first met many months ago, at the
floating market in Hemakuta on Daode. Ravana had been a very
private person on site, but even though Urania had for some reason
taken an instant dislike to her, he did not believe Ravana would
have run out on them without letting them know why. He still
remembered the infamous finale of the peace conference, when Ravana
and Raja Surya had dared to confront Yuanshi’s political leaders
before hundreds of delegates and millions of holovid viewers. The
girl who took the stage that night would not let someone like
Urania get the better of them.
    He would mention
Ravana’s disappearance to his father when Urania finally got off
the holovid unit, but in the meantime Xuthus knew he should take
his fears to Doctor Jones. Even talking to Dagan might prove more
fruitful than trying to get any sense out the crew. He did not want
to contemplate the horrible possibility that Ravana had somehow
ended up outside the dome.
    “She can’t have just
vanished,” he said. “How far can you get on a dead planet?”
    “Falsafah ain’t as
dead as it looks,” said the Jamaican, giving him an odd look. “I’ve
seen some mighty strange things out there.”
    “That’s because you
take too much egg,” his colleague pointed out.
    Ignoring Urania’s
giggle, Xuthus stared through the cockpit windows at the endless
bleak desert beyond the landing strip. It was hard to imagine
anything surviving out there.
    “Thanks,” he said.
“For nothing.”
     
    * * *
     
    Professor Cadmus
paused beneath the arch and raised the lantern high above his head.
The ancient door had yielded easily under his determined attack
with the mattock, whereupon he had stood and stared for what seemed
an age into the dark ‘Y’-shaped passage beyond. The star chamber
was built of glass blocks as perfectly aligned as those of the
grand gallery in Khufu’s pyramid at Giza. The moment he set eyes
upon the meticulous architecture within he knew without a doubt
that he was right, Doctor Jones was wrong and the mysterious
construction on Falsafah was indeed the work of an unknown alien
intelligence.
    Years before in Egypt,
Cadmus had led the team that discovered the secret vault behind the
wall of the king’s chamber and been the first to gaze upon Khufu’s
long-sought sarcophagus and treasures. The thrill he felt on that
occasion was nothing compared to the fever that gripped him now. At
Giza, he was lauded for finding the prize missed by countless
archaeologists before him, but singularly failed to find the proof
he personally sought that extra-terrestrials built the pyramids.
Here in the Arallu Wastes was something beyond archaeology, beyond
history; this was a discovery to make humanity a mere footnote in
the universal story, the history of everything. To go it alone was
a daunting prospect.
    The floor of the
entrance chamber sloped down and split into two tunnels, leading in
different directions sixty degrees apart, equally dark