Seven Diamonds

by Mr. David R. Dorrycott

© 1996

Seven diamonds lay in Bob’s paw. Seven very large, perfectly cubic, perfect, beautiful, alien and completely useless diamonds. Looking out over the spotless white sand beach before him he closed his paw. Out there were the hunters, those whom he had stolen his treasure from. They were not happy furs after all, eventually they would find this place. Somehow that they had traced Clara and he over several thousand miles of mountains, ocean and anything else that they could put between them. Another day, two at the most and they would be here. He didn’t know how he knew that, he just did. Looking over his shoulder at the tall metal tower behind him, its squat boxy structure at its top Bob shrugged. One way or another, in a very short time he would be very, very dead. Checking again the length of wire laying in the sand beside him he shrugged, patting it carefully with his free paw. Its bare wire ends reflected the setting sun’s light, making lie as to their deadly danger.

Turning his head again he looked towards the small grave he’d dug with his own paws. Carla’s grave. Now how could he ever explain that to her husband. Paul had been his best friend after all. He had promised to protect her with his life. Now all that was past. There was nothing left to do but sit, and wait. Yawning Bob leaned his back against a shattered section of concrete and fell asleep.

“Donuts” Carla call as she entered the lab. “Nice fresh out of the oven thick chocolate soaked cream cheese filled donuts.” She sat the Chunking Donuts box on a work table, peeling out of her winter coat. As she hung her damp coat up Bob wondered is she knew how much he was attracted to her. Had always been attracted to her. That rare bright auburn bushy tail in a population where evolution allowed only one in ten to have more than a vestige stub. Those soft rounding curves that even her natural heavy winter coat had trouble hiding. Those sparkling green eyes and that voice. If Paul hadn’t asked before Bob had dragged up the nerve, maybe she would have married him instead. But that wasn’t to be, so he had pushed back his feelings, burying them into his work.

“So how’s the coding going” Carla asked, leaning over Bob’s shoulder while she studied the printout in his paws. “Found the latest bug yet?”

Bob fought the urge to turn around, drag her into his arms and let her know his feelings. No, don’t do that he told himself. Four months married it would hurt her, and ruin the best friendship he’d had in his life. Shaking himself while at the same time forcing his own stub tail to unfluff Bob picked up a red pen. “Fixed the first bug hours ago” he reported. “Then popped up the next one and the next. I’m on number thirty two right now. Whoever designed KOBOW should be hung by his toeclaws over a harvester ant bed, then coated with honey.”

“Mmmm.. Honey. Love it. Can I lick it off before the ants get to him” Carla asked. Her chest, pressed against Bob’s back, vibrated in a low frequency that had his tail stub wagging in a second.

‘Down boy’ he cursed to himself, regaining control of his bodies natural reactions. “Only if its that handsome husband of yours” he admitted. “I think Paul would be upset if you licked honey off some stranger.”

Carla laughed, stepping away. “Point to you. Let me get my lab coat on, then I need you to come with me. I want to examine that device closer.”

That device. Something that had fallen in Rosewood Newland two years ago. By the time military teams had gotten there the whole town had seen it. One smart officer (who soon found himself assigned to a certain hush hush project) had sent in a civilian scientist, a Lieutenant and two privates. All with orders to act as unmilitary as they could. Somehow the ruse had worked, now everyone firmly believed that the ‘alien device’ was nothing more than a B movie prop that had drifted off on its balloon then fallen to Terra. Nothing important, a lot of people got signatures from the ‘Assistant Special Effects Director’ and his three actors. Other than the local weekly paper absolutely nothing further came of the event.

But is wasn’t a movie prop. It was a real alien device. A device made of alloys no one had even dreamed about. We’ll, unless you included the science fiction writers of course. It had proven easy to open, easy to disassemble. But its components were so far beyond anything their civilization knew as to be almost completely useless. They were cavefoxes holding a vacuum tube in their paws. Knowing it was important, yet completely lacking the foundation to even begin to understand what it was or how to use it.

Almost that was. For Carla had discovered how to access the devices computer, after Paul had discovered what kind of power the thing needed. It had once used a thermoatomic battery of some kind, one that had so long ago ceased producing power that only traces of its original plutonium core could be recognized. A core encapsulated in some kind of material that their civilization had no equivalent for. More importantly, its core contained data. Corrupted by time and radiation yes (at least everyone thought it was corrupted.) The key though had been its massive camera and sensor pack. This was a survey device. Not a weapon, not a spy. It was a scout. Others were rebuilding those cameras, at least what was understandable. They were electronic cameras, focusing their images on now corroded little squares of something. Meaning of course that there was and never had been any film. What Bob knew and only a small group of others suspected was that, once deciphered this device would kick start his nations technology three, maybe four hundred years past any other nation on this planet. His problem though was his access program. Every time he thought he was getting somewhere the device threw him a curve ball. Of course because of security, there were no other programmers to bounce ideas off of. No one to try another line of reasoning.

“Its like they used a completely different base system” he complained as he stood.

“Base two works” Carla replied. “Base ten works. What other base is there?”

“None that I’m aware of” Bob admitted as he grabbed his own lab coat. “I mean, five bites make a word, two bits make a bite. What are we looking at again?”

“The inputs” Carla explained. “You missed the last meeting. Something about exhausted sleep kept you away. Jenkins is of a mind that we’re missing something important that’s right in front of our muzzles. Linguistics wants more data too. They claim that just under two hundred pages of alien text isn’t enough to break a language. If it really is a language. They want mathematical tables, the elemental table would be perfect. Bob, there has to be more data hidden in there, we all know that.”

“Of course there is, I’ve barely scratched the surface” he snapped, his exhaustion getting the better of him. “Sorry. Tired is all. Look Carla, if my wildest dreams are even close that thing holds more data than the National Book Depository. All right then, let me get my meters.”

Three hours later and they had come no further than the had before. “Base Ten” Bob yawned. He noticed a small plate that had recently been carefully cleaned. “Wonder what these squiggles are though?”

“Six characters. From their language. At least I recognize them from the alphabet we’ve worked out” Carla answered.

“Six characters?” Bob almost dropped his meter. “Carla. Yjat’s sixteen characters. Xero to nine, then letters to indicate the other numbers. Its Base sixteen. Their using base sixteen. My Ghodd, we don’t use Base sixteen because only one in twenty-thousand people can even understand the concept. No wonder...” Whatever else he was going to say Carla never heard, as he had rushed out of the clean room. She soon followed, to find him laboring over his punch card machine making changes to his code.

Late that night Bob realized that he had the answer. Base sixteen. Why would anyone use such an odd system. Still on the printer a picture was forming. A solar system, apparently eight planets. Two were monsters, two were huge. The rest were much smaller. He followed a line that ran from a group of alien characters to the third planet. “Here we are” he whispered. Though he couldn’t read those alien words he had just spoken exactly what they said.

Months passes. Months where he tweaked his program, forgot to eat, slept on a cot in his office, played host to dozens of high ranking people. From Priests to Politicians to Military. But not one scientist he noted. Not even a student. They were months during which his program ferreted out that alien computers structure. Then came the Eureka moment when Paul absently noticed something. “Isn’t that the same file structure we saw three days ago” he asked, pointing to several lines on the latest printout. “Could it be ah table contents, or index?” His clawtip made a tiny indentation at the place he was talking about.

Dragging another mug of hot coffee into his mouth Bob rubbed tired eyes. “Which page” he asked, trying to put life back into his voice. Though everyone in their very small group was working hard, only he and Paul had managed to grasp the devices unexpected base sixteen coding. Of all the highly skilled electronics technicians available, their Masters only trusted Carla. Carla, who current slept on Bob’s tiny cot behind him. Not that it helped, by this many months together her scent had saturated the entire computing chamber.

Paul went to one of the folding worktables that had been brought in long ago, raking the surface of now useless equipment. Even knowing what he was looking for it took the brown furred male nearly half an hour to find it. “Here” he abruptly announced. But by now Bob was sound asleep at his keyboard while Carla still sawed logs from the cot. Grinning to himself Paul carefully carried the huge printout to a nearer table, then slipped the other from under his greyfurred friends arm. They were overworked he knew, but then this had evolved from a scientific curiosity to a military project. Of the three of them only he knew this, and only because of a conversation he’d woken to overhear while sleeping in another room.

Some of the data that had been teased out of that ancient, unworldly devices memory had already advanced their physical sciences generations. Perhaps hundreds of years. Paul was from a traditional military clan, so were Bob and Carla else they would never have been allowed to remain near the device. Though in full truth between the three of them they were reaching into blackness with bare paws hoping that what they found would not drag them in. Setting the second printout next to its cousin he began an hours long comparison between the two. It would be a matter of finding corresponding symbols. Perhaps a table, or an equation that they already understood. It wasn’t long before he found what he was looking for.