Free Orphan of Creation by Roger MacBride Allen Page B

open up that way. He got on with his picture taking.
    Now and again, Barbara would call him over to snap one little patch of gravel that looked like all the others to him. She was very excited to discover a little washout—evidence, so she said, of an intermittent stream that had run alongside the present road some years before. She traced the stream bed, wholly invisible to his eyes, right through the length of the site, and carefully noted its location in a sketch map she was making.
    Finally, she seemed satisfied and put away her notebook. “Okay, Liv, let’s break out the metal detector.” He got it from the barrow and handed it over. She started working the detector at one edge of the site, and Livingston followed behind. Almost immediately, she got a strike. She pulled her trowel out of her hip pocket and dug up an old masonry nail.
    Livingston bent down eagerly. “That it? You found it already?”
    Barbara didn’t answer. Instead, she shoved the nail in her pocket, stood up, and started again with the detector. She got another immediate find, this time an old bolt. In short order she had dug up a broken hinge, two more nails, a crumbled piece of wire, and a rusty tin can, all from a few square meters. She shut off the detector, squatted back on her haunches, and sighed. “I was afraid of this,” she said. “Junk. J-U-N-K junk. The whole topsoil is riddled with whatever fell off the cart going past for the last hundred and fifty years. I’ve got the metal detector set at minimum sensitivity as it is. We’ll never find the caskets with all this garbage over top of them.”
    Livingston groaned to himself. She was going to want all the topsoil scraped off, that was next. He very definitely didn’t want to dig a hole eight inches deep and a hundred yards across. He thought fast. “Look, Barb. Can we get rid of it with the rider-mower? I thought I saw some sort of tiller attachment, and maybe we could rig up some sort of drag-plow for it.”
    Her face brightened. She didn’t think removing topsoil was fun either. “Hey, good thinking. Let’s get to it.”
    They actually got halfway to the garden shed before Barbara remembered all her early lessons about being overeager. “Wait a second, Liv. We’re about to make more work for ourselves.”
    “Huh? What do you mean?”
    “I’ve got a space maybe thirty meters on a side mowed down over there. That’s nine hundred square meters of topsoil, say 10 centimeters thick, to clear off. Do you want to move 90 cubic meters of dirt, even using a jury-rig plow?”
    “Ah.” Livingston had done some landscaping work as a high school kid. His muscles started to ache in advance. “So what do we do?”
    “We find the old crossroads point first , and just clear the area immediately around it.”
    She turned around and led him back to the site. Consulting her sketch map, she relocated a part of the old washout she had found before. She stood in the middle of the broad, shallow depression and turned to her cousin. “Okay, Liv, my guess is that this is the old road.”
    “C’mon, Barb,” Livingston protested. “This is a stream bed. You said so yourself.”
    “Yeah, but how did it get to be one? Where’s it running from? The land here is as flat as a pancake. I figure that the road was here—just a dirt road at the time, of course—and the wheel traffic wore down the ground level, scraped away the topsoil. Then the rains would come and the waters would funnel down to the lowest ground. A flood or two, erosion, and the road keeps sinking lower and lower. Happens all the time. When they first paved the road, maybe fifty years ago, by the looks of things, they said the hell with it and moved the roadway over twenty feet or so. Over the years, with no more traffic to keep it worn down, the gullied-out road filled itself back in. Most of it is already filled in completely. That all make sense?”
    “Yeah, okay, I get it,” Livingston said, his voice betraying a hint