There was a stamp at the top right: "Secret".
Yes, we understood that this could only be a powerful magnetic outcrop, but all the geological data rejected this version. Even a huge iron-nickel meteorite cannot create such an intense field. Then we decided to take a closer look at what it is.
At first, the exploration did not find anything: the usual flat surface, a very thin layer of lunar dust. We started exploratory drilling in the middle of the anomaly to get a core sample for exploration.
The drill stopped at a depth of six meters and did not go any further. Scouts started digging - not a very easy job in suits, I can assure you.
What they found made them hurry back to the base. We sent a larger shipment with better equipment. They were digging for two weeks. The result is known to you.
The screen changed again, and the darkened conference room was full of intense silence. Everybody in the audience has seen this picture many times (which has been allowed to less than a hundred people on Earth and on the Moon so far), but among them, there are none left who wouldn't go ahead, as if hoping to see the new details.
The picture projected on the screen showed a deep excavation; there were people at the bottom of it. The picture was clearly taken at night, somewhere outside the Earth, on the Moon, and maybe even on Mars. But what was next to them has not been seen on any planet so far.
- LMA One," Michaels almost reverently declared. - Looks like it was just yesterday, doesn't it? Really, I don't blame those who thought it existed for just a few years.
But I have never shared that opinion, and now we can establish the age of the anomaly quite accurately - based on local geological data. My colleagues and I, Dr. Floyd, are ready to vouch for their scientific reputation that LMA-1 has nothing to do with humanity because when this monolith was buried, humanity did not exist at all. The fact is that he is about three million years old.
How strange it is, - Floyd thought, - to look at this strange thing and know that the sunlight illuminates it for the first time since the time when the ice age has not yet arrived on Earth.
He raised his head and looked at the Earth, which is clearly visible in the morning sky of the Moon. Of its six billion inhabitants, only a handful knew about this discovery... What will people say when they are finally announced?
The political and social implications of it are enormous.
Every thinking person, everyone who is able to see even a little bit further than his or her nose, realizes that his or her whole life, moral values, and philosophy have become something else. Even if we can't find out more about LMA-1, the mystery of the monolith will remain unsolved forever. People will no longer be able to claim that he is the only intelligent being in the universe. True, he missed those who once stood here for millions of years, but they can still come back. And if they do not return, there may well be others. From now on, mankind, no matter how its future, must take into account this possibility. With such proof...
Floyd's thoughts were suddenly and rudely interrupted.
He woke up vaguely aware of the strange visions as if he were waking up from a deep sleep.
The monolith showed him... Something. Some images.
Some of them were unknown and incomprehensible. Rainbow drawings, shimmering patterns, movements as if of swinging algae in a stream of water. Whole nets of algae...
Part of it is familiar to the disgust. Scenes from animal life. Strange monkeys acted like animals.
And some of them... Some of them were understandable and unfamiliar, and that is why their value exceeded all possible boundaries.
Information about another mind - and information from another mind.
He was not a physicist. He was not a physician or a biologist. He was not an administrator. This and a lot of other information slipped past him.
He was just an astronomer, even if it was a long time ago. And he was able to understand his part of the knowledge.
A dull planetoid on the edge of the solar system. A part of the dual system around which smaller bodies rotate. Very eccentric orbit, then entering the inner orbit of Neptune, then leaving much further. Very difficult to connect with other planets...