"So how does it work, Bob?"
"I'm not entirely certain. I can say this much: you can't see it."
"...okay?"
"No, I mean it's like it's unseeable. Not like something that isn't there or an effect that doesn't register in the visible part of the spectrum, it's more like it takes the visible part of the spectrum and cancels it out."
"How is that useful? Is that useful?" Amelie fought the urge to drum her fingers. Bob was on the surface of the planet, ranging in circles from his lander, while Amelie monitored him and conducted larger, grosser surveys from orbit. There were two other landers on the surface, and they were all linked to each other via a small constellation of relays they had established for the purpose. Bob had been the second to report in, after four hours on the surface.
"It appears to be a kind of stasis field."
"And now you're talking science fiction."
"I promise I'm not. It's weird enough that this thing even works, I think I've figured out the power source which, if the way its weight behaves is any indication, might be a microsingularity."
"A quantum black hole?" She would have to dig into the phrase "the way its weight behaves" at some point, she was sure.
"Yup."
"Okay, that alone would win you some kind of physics prize. But tell me why you think it's powering a stasis field."
"Because I can't touch the unseeable place. I've done everything up to trying to whack it with a hammer and I can't make contact. It's a really thin region, like a nothingth of a millimeter, around what appears to be plain cast iron.
"When I hit it with the hammer, it makes no noise whatsoever. The hammer just stops. No sound."
"All...righty." She definitely wasn't drumming her fingers now, because she had started tapping notes into her station.
"I know how it sounds. But I found the end of this artifact, I swear to you it looks like a little ring of metal around a hole floating in the air. And I can tell it's iron because my magboots stick to it.
"But the field doesn't actually wrap all the way around it, see? I shine my light into the circle and it's just a black hole, I can't see the bottom. But I can see like a couple of millimeters back from the edge of the circle, the field seems to emerge out of the iron surface, inside and outside, and goes down inside the hole. And that does make a noise when you hit it. But it doesn't make a sound like a little circle of iron, it makes a noise like something a lot bigger."
"I've walked all the way around this thing and it's shaped like a really long pipe, or maybe a bottle. About ten meters long. It gets bigger as it goes toward the closed end. I can feel its shape because my hands run into something and don't go any further, but there's nothing to see, see?"
This sounded too amazing. They had found a cratered battleground above which hugely advanced races had fought a war and, aside from picking through blasted-apart junk that was mostly recognizable in human terms, they hadn't been finding a lot. Granted, the gold scavenged from the aliens' control systems was far from worthless but damn. Thirty-three tons of gold is thirty-three tons. Their acceleration had been cut by nearly a fourth.
Thirty-three tons of gold was valuable, no denying. Its value as a precious metal was essentially zero anymore; precious metals weren't precious except for the fact that they were hard to come by. Tons of gold were eminently useful on a practical scale, though it couldn't represent even the tiniest fraction of what those warring races had cost her own species. Earth, rendered uninhabitable, was merely collateral damage. Two opposing fleets of interstellar spacecraft hurling energies and projectiles back and forth at each other, losing ships all the while, never slowing down, and so much fire had rained down from Earth's skies that humanity's population had been reduced to just a hundredth of what it had been. A population of billions, reduced to millions.
The following years - years of endless winter - had reduced them even further. A few hundred million had become a few tens of millions. Humanity had been bombed, population-wise, back to the Stone Age.
"So what do you reckon it is?"
"I couldn't say. If I had to hazard a guess right now with nothing else to go on, I'd say it was a gun barrel whose bursting pressure was artificially increased to infinity."
"Infinity?"
"That, or something close to it. I'm telling you, this little circle of metal floating in the air is only about a millimeter thick, if it were something I could grab hold of with my hands I'm pretty sure I could break a piece of iron this size. And hitting it with my hammer should just shatter it.
"But hitting it with everything I had, I got back nothing."
"Huh."
"If it's a gun, I can't imagine how you'd load it, or even if they were loading it with projectiles. Maybe it's a muzzleloader on a grand scale, I don't know. Maybe they pump energy into it from the muzzle and it somehow accumulates until it's time to fire and boom. Maybe they could turn off the stasis and it's a breech loader. I don't know."
"Okay, that definitely sounds like something we should pick up, if only to try to figure out how it's powered. What would we do with a gun? We're not fighting anybody."
"Oh, I know. But I was wondering what we could do with an engine that had no upper limit on pressure or temperature."
Amelie thought. And thinking about it, thirty-three tons of gold became a small fraction of what her ship and crew would be able to move.
"Grab it." She tapped for general address. "Everybody, wrap it up. Bob found something good and we're taking it home, now."
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