City of Ruins - By Kristine Kathryn Rusch Page 0,77

going to have to try to figure that out. I assume there are tests you can use on the equipment which will tell us how long it has been unused?”

He directed this last at the scientists.

“Yes and no, sir,” the woman said. “We will know within a few decades how long the equipment’s been sitting there. But we might not learn exactly. It depends on the conditions underground. Without an accurate history, we won’t be able to be precise.”

“Doesn’t the equipment record conditions in the room around it?” Coop directed this last at Cabral.

Cabral looked at the other engineers. They silently conferred.

“I know for a fact that we’ll have a record of the first one hundred and fifty years, sir,” Cabral said. “After that . . .”

He let his voice trail off as he looked at the other engineers again. None of them spoke.

They didn’t know for certain.

“We can date the parts, do experiments to track decay,” one of the scientists said, sounding a little more excited than Coop expected.

“But we’ll just be guessing,” another scientist said.

“We’ll be accurate within a fifty- to hundred-year range,” said the woman.

“I think closer to two hundred years,” said the scientist whose hand she held.

“Clearly, we don’t know, sir,” Rossetti said, more to stop the argument among her people than anything.

“Can we map the corridors from the repair room? Get a sense of the surface?” Coop asked.

“It’ll take time,” one of the engineers said. “The equipment will need a little repair.”

“I think we can map the corridors, sir,” the woman said.

“That’s a start.” Coop stood. He paced for a moment, thinking this through. Then he paused and glanced at Yash.

“Let me see the schematics of the base from our files,” he said.

She pressed a button, and the base’s plans appeared on the screens. A warren of tunnels and corridors and exits onto the surface.

On another screen, she put up a map of Venice City, without him having to request it.

He studied the maps. Cities weren’t like ships. Cities changed over time.

Sometimes cities built over their past. Sometimes they retained their historic buildings.

But every city he had ever visited, whether established by the Fleet or not, had historians and libraries and methods of keeping track of its own past.

“We’re going to need to go up there,” he said, more to himself than to everyone else.

“And how are we going to explain our presence?” Dix asked, his voice wobbling.

Coop turned and looked at him. Dix was gray. He looked ill.

For the first time since Coop met him, Dix actually seemed terrified.

“I mean, if they’re sending outsiders down here, and the outsiders seem surprised at the room itself, and they wear environmental suits that they don’t need—”

“We don’t know if they don’t need them,” Yash said. “They might.”

“You think they have different physiology?” Dix asked.

Yash shrugged. “I don’t know. People get used to different things. Maybe other parts of the sector base are toxic. We don’t know anything.”

Dix’s mouth thinned. He didn’t like what she was saying.

“That’s a side track,” Coop said to Dix. “You were making a point.”

Dix nodded. “Let’s assume that on the surface, they don’t know this base exists. Then we pop out of the ground. How do we explain that?”

“Isn’t that the least of our worries?” Rossetti asked. “After all, we don’t even know if the map is accurate, if the corridors have fallen in, and if the exits still exist.”

“We don’t know if Venice City still exists,” the woman scientist said.

Coop shuddered at that thought. Maybe the old-timers had been right. Maybe they should have been careful about how they named their city. They had named it Venice City because the Earth city had been built on canals. But it had eventually disappeared under the water.

What if this Venice had disappeared as well?

“The history still might be there,” Coop said. “It might help us refine the timeline, if nothing else.”

“We’re going to be here for a long time, aren’t we, sir?” That was Shärf, who hadn’t spoken up at all until now.

Coop looked at him. Unlike Dix, Shärf didn’t seem panicked. In fact, it seemed to Coop like Shärf had asked the question not for himself, but for the other people in the room, as if he was trying to prepare them for the inevitable.

“There’s that possibility,” Coop said. “But we knew that before we landed. Even if the sector base were here and running the way it had been a month ago, we still would have been here a long time.