[Visit 14: Survey Mission 1]
Another jump into realspace, another ... world. Wow. I've been maudlin for so long that my creative juices are running dry.
This world looked nice enough from high orbit. Despite the satellite constellation in high orbit we heard nary a peep as we slid into our own mapping and analysis orbit, dumping out reconsats by the bushel...
There was a possibility of a post-technical civilization here but our mapping was not reassuring. There wasn't much left of their cities, though we did find one in high desert.
If we humans had died off I'm not sure I'd be comfortable with Las Vegas being the longest-existing memorial to our existence. Fortunately the city here wasn't as stupid a place and the low humidity had helped preserve quite a few of their records.
Based upon our observations of the condition of other ruins, we estimated the planet to have been depopulated over two thousand years before.
With our archeologists playing detective, feeding the linguists enough information to find us a useful language map, we had a lot of work ahead. With four previous stops remaining a mystery (the occupants had been gone so long that we couldn't find anything except a few satellites to prove they ever existed) we wanted to crack this one.
This world's BioCompatibility index wasn't reassuring; It was starting to look like nobody could really settle here and all surface work was done in isolation gear, which made few people happy. One poor soul got a rip and ended up with quite a rash from the histamine reaction. After that we were all much more careful.
Another quad walked down one of the streets peering into each window they could (carrying a sandblower to blow drifts off of windows and doors and discovered that most of the shops on the main drag were for footgear.
This seemed odd.
We ran across many different confusing things. They'd reached a technological level approximately equivalent to our early 21st century and duplicated some of our mistakes. There in the histories we learned that they'd globalized their economies, tying all of their "nations" together. When the financial system started to fail, the depression was world- wide.
But, given people, they would surely have survived, wouldn't they? Even if they fell back to a state of barbarism? We knew enough of what they'd look like, so our most thorough search of the whole planet showed us only one enclave of these "people"- as near as we could tell, there were fewer than 1000 individuals in this group, so the gene pool was not reassuring.
Our biological folks were quite fascinated in their study of these post-technological primitives. It was interesting to note that they still wore shoes or sandals- which was an odd reflection on the number of shoe stores in the city we were studying.
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Author: Jack C Lipton Title: Shoes for the Dead (incomplete) Part: Universe: Feynman Survey Mission 1-14 Summary: Douglas Adams was *right* about the Shoe Event Horizon Keywords: scifi Revision: $Revision: 1.5 $ Archive: Mailing List: FAQ: RCS: $Id: shoes.x,v 1.5 2003/03/15 16:33:34 jcl Exp $