"You have to be willing to take risks for what you believe, Henry."

He had actually considered it. Beyond Earth, they knew of three worlds that had given birth to civilizations. One of the civilizations, the Noks on Inakademeri, still survived. The inhabitants of Pinnacle had been dead three-quarters of a million years.

And Quraqua.

Quraqua, of course, was the gold mine. Pinnacle was too far gone, and since the Noks were still in the neighborhood, the opportunities for investigation were limited. Nonetheless, there was hardly a graduate student who hadn't found a buried city, uncovered the key to a mass migration, tracked down a previously unknown civilization. It was the golden age of archeology. Henry Jacobi understood the importance of saving this world. But he had no inclination to risk anyone's life in the effort. He was too old for that sort of thing.

"Does Maggie know we're in?"

"They're getting her now. The poor woman never gets any rest, Henry."

"She can rest when we're out of here." Maggie was his chief philologist. Code-breaker, really. Reader of Impossible Inscriptions. The lamp on his left wrist flashed green. He activated the energy field.

Carson punched the go pad, and the lock cycled open. Water sloshed in over the deck.

Outside, visibility was poor. They were too close inshore: the marker lights always blurred, the water was always full of sand, and one could seldom see the entire Temple.

The Temple of the Winds.

A bitter joke, that. It had been submerged since an earthquake somewhere around Thomas Jefferson's time created a new shoreline. The Temple was a one-time military post, home for various deities, place of worship for travelers long before humans had laid bricks at Ur or Nineveh.

Sic transit.