Hardware

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“It’s a computer, that’s what it is,” Koenig said. He seemed a little dazed. “A goddamned billion-and-a-half-year old extraterrestrial computer.”

It didn’t look much like a computer. It looked like a shining wedge-shaped chunk of silvery metal about the size of a football, with round purple indentations along two of its sides and no other visible external features. But you had to consider that it came from another world, one that had been blown to bits some ten million centuries before the first trilobites started crawling around on the floor of Silicon Valley. There was no necessary reason why its designers had to share our notions of the proper shape for data-processing devices.

Koenig and McDermott and I had finished the long slow job of uncovering the thing just the day before, here at the IBM-NASA space lab in Tarrytown where we have the job of analyzing the Spacescoop material. The neutron scanner, searching through the great heap of junk that the unmanned Spacescoop vehicle had brought back from the asteroid belt, had actually spotted it back before Christmas, but it had taken all this time to slice away the rock matrix in which it had been embedded. Naturally we had to be careful. It was the one and only artifact that had turned up in the entire 72 cubic meters of debris that Project Spacescoop had collected.

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