Unexpected Turns: Forgotten Words

"No."

"Is it one of them Asian satellites ? I heard they lost some a while ago ?"

"No."

"What kind of markings are they ? Russian ? "

"You tell me."

"Never seen that before ? "

"Weird."

They listened for an hour, and wondered at the sounds. This was their own world, but from some three thousand years ago. Very nearly, they had missed out on hearing it. The probe had almost failed.

They had sent it out through a wrinkle in the universe, where it had slipped into the past. It was programmed to land on Earth and record human speech, but it was also programmed to remain undetected, so it had chosen the remote mountains and waited. It waited nearly three thousand years. That was its sole mission. When it was full, its program told it to return to the curve in the space-time dimension it had come from and drop down on the Earth of the future again. Many other probes had been sent with the same mission, but only this one had achieved it. All the other probes had either self-destructed, or completely missed the Earth.

The worst part of the mission was getting the co-ordinates right. There arc no fixed points in the universe. It is all moving. The galaxies turn, the solar system spins, and the Earth gyrates and wobbles as it follows the pinwheel of its own galaxy's unwinding. At no two points in time is the Earth, or any part of it, in exactly the same place. The equator itself spins at over one and a half thousand kilometers per hour. To hit the Earth twice, through a time-slip was as remote an endeavor as hitting a fly from a hundred yards with a single arrow. But the probe had made it both ways.

"Someone ought to know about this thing. "

"We can't radio out till we get to base. "

"I know that."

"I'm taking some notes. I want a copy of that writing."

"Maybe its a code?"

"Maybe."