«Strata», Terry Pratchett

I met a mine foreman who has a piece of coal with a 1909 gold sovereign embedded in it. I saw an ammonite, apparently squashed in the fossil footprint of a sandal.

There is a room in the basement of the Natural History Museum which they keep locked. Among other oddities in there are the tyrannosaurus with a wristwatch and the Neanderthal skull with gold fillings in three teeth.

What are you going to do about it?

Dr Carl Untermond

The Overcrowded Eden

It was, of course, a beautiful day -- a Company brochure day. At the moment Kin's office overlooked a palm-fringed lagoon. White water broke over the outer reef, and the beach was of crushed white coral and curious shells.

No brochure would have shown the nightmare bulk of the pontoon-mounted strata machine, the small model for islands and atolls under fifteen kilometres. As Kin watched, another metre of beach spilled out of the big back hopper.

She wondered about the pilot's name. There was genius in that line of beach. A man who could lay down a beach like that, with the shells just right, deserved better things. But then, perhaps he was a Thoreau type who just liked islands. You got them sometimes; shy silent types who preferred to drift across the ocean after the volcano teams, dreamily laying complicated archipelagos with indecent skill. She'd have to ask.

She leant over her desk and called up the area engineer.

'Joel? Who's on BCF3?'

The engineer's lined brown face appeared over the intercom.

'Guday, Kin. Let me see now. Aha! Good, is it? You like it?'

'It's good.'

'It's Hendry. The one who's the subject of all those nasty depositions you've got on your desk. You know, the one who put the fossil dino in--'

'I read it.'

Joel recognized the edge to her voice. He sighed.

'Nicol Plante, she's his mixer, she must have been in on it too. I put them on island duty because, well, with a coral island there is not the temptation--'

'I know.' Kin thought for a while. 'Send him over. And her. It's going to be a busy day, Joel. It's always like this at the end of a job, people start to play around.'

'It's youth. We've all done it. With me it was a pair of boots in a coal measure. Not so imaginative, I admit.'

'You mean I should excuse him?'

Of course he did. Everyone was allowed just one unscripted touch, weren't they? Checkers always spotted them, didn't they? And even if one went unnoticed, couldn't we rely on future palaeontologists to hush it up? Huh?

Trouble was, they might not...

'He's good, and later on he'll be great,' said Joel. 'Just gnaw one ball off, eh?'

A few minutes later Kin heard the machine's roar stutter and stop. Soon one of the outer office robots came in, leading--

--a squat fair-haired youth, tanned lobster pink, and a skinny bald girl hardly out of her teens. They stood staring at Kin with a mixture of fear and defiance, dripping coral dust onto the carpet.

'All right, sit down. Want a drink? You both look dehydrated. I thought they had air conditioning in those things.'

The pair exchanged glances. Then the girl said, 'Frane likes to get the feel of his work.'

'Well, OK. The freezer's that round thing hovering right behind you. Help yourself.'

They jerked away as the freezer bumped into their shoulders, then grinned nervously and sat down.

They were in awe of Kin, which she found slightly embarrassing. According to the files they were both from colony planets so new the bedrock had hardly dried, while she was manifestly from Earth. Not Whole, New, Old, Real or Best Earth. Just Earth, cradle of humanity, just like it said in their history books. And the double-century mark on her forehead was probably something they'd only heard of before joining John Company. And she was their boss. And she could fire them.

The freezer drifted back to its alcove, describing a neat detour around a patch of empty air at the back of the room. Kin made a mental note to get a tech to look at it.

They sat gingerly on the float chairs. Colony worlds didn't have them, Kin recalled. She glanced at the file, gave them an introductory glare, and switched on the recorder.

'You know why you're here,' she said. 'You've read the regulations, if you've got any sense. I'm bound to remind you that you can either choose to accept my judgement as senior executive of the sector, or go before a committee at Company HQ. If you elect for me to deal with it, there's no appeal. What do you say?'

'You,' said the girl.

'Can he speak?'