Prologue... Commentary appreciated...
Posted: Thu Aug 08, 2002 10:21 am
Here's something I've been working at in my spare time. Comments are appreciated.<br><br>-----------------------------------------------------<br><br><br>The desert was hot. The sun had bathed the valley floor in light and heat since it rose. Sweltering heat and no breeze made for a harsh place to work. Several people labored away, digging, while pounded by the sun’s intense light. They were archeologists, looking for treasures lost to nature untold millennia ago.<br>        The world had reclaimed what was once life; making ‘ashes to ashes and dust to dust’ seem an apt saying. Digging for old bones emphasized the feeling that humans had walked the earth for a very short time - the proverbial blink of an eye in geological time scales.<br>        George Karmen looked up from his papers as a student came up to him. Joel Lohr was a tall young man with dark eyes and broad shoulders. Joel was also one of George’s best students. George was happy to have him along.<br>        “Professor Karmen! We’ve finally found something!”, John exclaimed. “It’s down about 20 million years ago. Solid as a brick wall.”<br>        “Be careful! I don’t want to have to piece together a shattered skeleton.”, replied George. He set his papers down as he stood up.<br>        “Well Joel, lead the way.”<br>        “Right. It’s strange. What we’ve found, I mean. It’s not bones.”, said Joel as they walked. “It looks like metal. But not like anything I’ve seen in lecture or in the field.”<br>        <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><i> It’s probably some petrified tree</i><!--EZCODE ITALIC END-->, thought George as he said, “Hmm”.<br><br>        The two walked in silence for a short time. The digging site was almost 50 meters from where the tents were. Joel reminded George of a kid in a candy store, bristling with excitement as he walked. George’s own thoughts were wondering what could get the kid so excited and still not part of a skeleton; they were looking for dinosaur remains after all.<br>        Soon the two of them entered a small sunken area of the desert floor. The sandy soil was brownish red all around, and turned shades of orange and yellow as they entered the trenches with marked the digging area. Faces looked up as they walked up to where everyone was gathered. Excited faces.<br><br>        “Okay, what have you found?”, George asked.<br>        “Professor, it seems to be a metal slab. We haven’t found any markings on it, or found any edges. We were wondering if we could do some siesmic mapping to get an idea of how to get around this.”, said one of the students. Matthew Brock stood six feet tall and was good at hard labor as well, but the kid liked to use the explosives whenever he could.<br>        “Let’s see what it looks like before we go blasting away around here. If this area was once a lake of molten metal, I think it would be good to find out what kind.”, George moved down into the trench as he spoke. A steel-gray colored material was visible as he got down to the bottom. The metal seemed to have ripples, as if someone dropped a stone in a pond then suddenly froze the pond. There were cracks in the material as well, which seemed to move in parallel lines across the surface.<br>        “Okay, let’s set up a concentric ring of charges at 25, 50, and 75 meters from this trench. I want a listening stations here, one over on that hill, and two more near the tents. We have to figure out how big this thing is and what it looks like.”, said the professor. He ran a tight ship when it came to business, which was evident as people started to move as soon as he could speak.<br><br>        About two hours later, the group huddled in the big mess tent as they waited for the all set to be radioed from the explosive setters. There were two teams that had gone out to drill the holes necessary, and set the explosives in those holes. The explosives would be detonated, then several seismometers scattered over the surrounding area would pick up the sound waves as they traveled through the earth. Oil companies had used the technique for years to find oil fields in their quest to supply the world with energy. The technique had worked well to find a few meteor impact sites under the ocean as well.<br>        When the last members of the team came back to the mess tent, they had eager looks. They wanted to see the computer generated maps as much as everyone else. Everyone waited eagerly as the first charge was detonated. After three minutes to ensure that the sound waves from the blast had traveled far enough, the second charge was detonated. The third and fourth charges were detonated after similar lengths of time.<br>        The procedure only required one charge, but four were used to gain a higher resolution map of the area under the earth. The computer sat there as the data came in from the seismometers. There were about 20 seismometers scattered over the area, and each was registering a signal. The tension was mounting as everyone watched the computer analyze the data. Twenty minutes of silence later, and the computer was ready to start organizing the data into a map.<br>        As the progress scale neared one hundred percent, the same perplexing look was mirrored on all the faces present.<br>        “What is <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><i> that</i><!--EZCODE ITALIC END-->?”, asked one the students.<br>“It looks like swiss cheese with all those holes.”, said another.<br>        “Yes. Look at those holes, they look like small meteor craters.”, said a third.<br>        <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><i> I wonder what this thing was?</i><!--EZCODE ITALIC END-->, thought George. He had never heard nor seen anything like this in all his years of archeology and digging.<br><br><br>-------------------------------------------------------<br><br><br><br><br>I'm aiming for something somewhat mysterious and draws you in. Well?<br> <p><br><img src=http://www.xmenclan.org/avatars/ashaman2.jpg width=150 align=left><br><left><a href=http://www.dragontalonmercs.com>Dragon Talon Mercenary</a><br><a href=http://www.xmenclan.org>Member of the XMEN</a><br>Have a Nice Day!<br><br>"Politics, war, martial arts;<br>these are tools to bend the <br>universe to your will."</left><br><br><br><p><i>Edited by: <a href=http://pub3.ezboard.com/uxmengambit.sho ... ge=EN>XMEN Gambit</a> <img src=http://www.xmenclan.org/images/x.gif> at: 7/14/02 8:16:26 pm</i></p></p><i></i>
