“All right, Pancake,” I said. “Even with you cooking it, it probably wouldn’t be fit to eat.”
We wound up sitting at a table, looking at the sticks piled the center of it. Doc brought out a bottle and we all had a drink or two. Doc must have been considerably upset to share his liquor with us.
“It stands to reason,” said Frost, “that the sticks are good for something. If the cost of that building is any indication of their value, they’re worth a fortune.”
“Maybe the sticks aren’t the only things in there,” Hutch pointed out. “We just covered part of the first floor. The might be a lot of other stuff in there. And there are all those other floors. How many would you say there were?”
“Lord knows,” said Frost. “When you’re on the ground, you can’t be sure you see to the top of it. It just sort of fades away when you look up at it.”
“You notice what it was built of?” asked Doc.
“Stone,” said Hutch.
“I thought so, too,” said Doc. “But it isn’t. You remember those big apartment mounds we ran into in that insect culture out on Suud?”
We all remembered them, of course. We’d spent days trying to break into them because we had found a handful of beautifully carved jade scattered around the entrance of one of them and we figured there might be a lot of it inside. Stuff like that brings money. Folks back in civilization are nuts about any kind of alien art and that jade sure enough was alien. We’d tried every trick that we could think of and we got nowhere. Breaking into those mounds was like punching a feather pillow. You could dent the surface plenty, but you couldn’t break it because the strength of the material built up as pressure compressed the atoms. The harder you hit, the tougher it became. It was the kind of building material that would last forever and never need repair and those insects must have known they were safe from us, for they went about their business and never noticed us. That’s what made it so infuriating.
And material like that, I realized, would be just the ticket for a structure like the silo. You could build as big or as high as you had a mind to; the more pressure you put on the lower structure, the stronger it would be.
“It means,” I said, “that the building out there could be much older than it seems to be. It could be a million years or older.”
“If it’s that old,” said Hutch, “it could really be packed. You can store away a lot of loot in a million years.”
Doc and Frost drifted off to bed and Hutch and I sat there alone, looking at the sticks.
I got to thinking about some of the things that Doc was always saying, about how we were just a bunch of cut-throats, and I wondered if he might be right. But think on it as hard and as honest as I could, I couldn’t buy it.
On every expanding frontier, in all of history, there had been three kinds of men who went ahead and marked out the trails for other men to follow—the traders and the missionaries and the hunters.
We were the hunters in this case, hunting not for gold or slaves or furs, but for whatever we could find. Sometimes we came back with empty hands and sometimes we made a haul. Usually, in the long run, we evened out so we made nothing more than wages. But we kept on going out, hoping for that lucky break that would make us billionaires.
It hadn’t happened yet, and perhaps it never would. But someday it might. We touched the ghostly edge of hope just often enough to keep us thinking that it would. Although, I admitted to myself, perhaps we’d have kept going out even if there’d been no hope at all. Seeking for the unknown gets into your blood.
When you came right down to it, we probably didn’t do a bit more harm than the traders or the missionaries. What we took, we took; we didn’t settle down and change or destroy the civilizations of people we pretended we were helping.
I said as much to Hutch. He agreed with me.
The missionaries are the worst,” he said. “I wouldn’t be a missionary no matter what they paid me.”
We weren’t doing any good just sitting there, so I got up to start for bed.
“Maybe tomorrow we’ll find something else,” I said.
Hutch yawned. “I sure hope we do. We been wasting our time on these sticks of dynamite.”
He picked them up and on our way up to bed, he heaved them out the port.
The next day, we did find something else.
We went much deeper into the silo than we had been before, following the corridors for what must have been two miles or more.
We came to a big room that probably covered ten or fifteen acres and it was filled from wall to wall with rows of machines, all of them alike.
They weren’t much to look at. They resembled to some extent a rather ornate washing machine, with a bucket seat attached and a dome on top. They weren’t bolted down and you could push them around and when we tipped one of them up to look for hidden wheels, we found instead a pair of runners fixed on a swivel so they’d track in any direction that one pushed. The runners were made of metal that was greasy to the touch, but when you rubbed your fingers on them, no grease came off them.
There was no power connection.
“Maybe it’s a self-powered unit,” said Frost. “Come to think of it, I haven’t noticed any power outlets in the entire building.”
We hunted for some place where we could turn on the power and there wasn’t any place. That whole machine was the smoothest, slickest hunk of metal you ever saw. We looked for a way to get into its innards, so we could have a look at them, but there wasn’t any way. The jacket that covered the works seemed to be one solid piece without an apparent seam or a sign of a bolt or rivet.
The dome looked as though it ought to come off and we tried to get it off, but it remained stubbornly in place.
The bucket seat, however, was something else again. It was lousy with all sorts of attachments to accommodate the sitting surface of almost any conceivable kind of being. We had a lot of fun adjusting it in different ways and trying to figure out what kind of animal could have a seat like that. We got a bit obscene about it, I remember, and Hutch was doubled up laughing.
But we weren’t getting anywhere and we were fairly sure we wouldn’t until we could get a cutting tool and open up one of the machines to find out what made it tick.
We picked out one of them and we skidded it down the corridors. When we got to the entrance, we figured we would have to carry it, but we were mistaken. It skidded along over the ground and even loose sand almost as well as it did in the corridors.
After supper, Hutch went down to the engine room and came back with a cutting tool. The metal was tough, but we finally got at least some of the jacket peeled away.
The innards of that machine were enough to drive you crazy. It was a solid mass of tiny parts all hooked together in the damnedest jumble. There was no beginning and no end. It was like one of those puzzle mazes that go on and on forever and get no place.
Hutch got into it with both hands and tried to figure out how to start taking it apart.
After a while, he sat back on his heels and growled a little at it. “There’s nothing holding them together. Not a bolt or rivet, not even so much as a cotter pin. But they hang together somehow.”
“Just pure cussedness,” I said.
He looked at me kind of funny. “You might be right, at that.”
He went at it again and bashed a couple of knuckles and sat there sucking at them.
“If I didn’t know that I was wrong,” he said, “I’d say that it was friction.”
“Magnetism,” Doc offered.
“I tell you what, Doc,” said Hutch. “You stick to what little medicine you know and let me handle the mechanics.”
Frost dived in quick to head off an argument. “That frictional idea might not be a bad one. But it would call for perfect machining and surface polish. Theoretically, if you place two perfectly polished surfaces to
gether, the molecules will attract one another and you’ll have permanent cohesion.”
I don’t know where Frost got all that stuff. Mostly he seemed to be just like the rest of us, but occasionally he’d come out with something that would catch you by surprise. I never asked him anything about himself; questions like that were just plain bad manners.
We messed around some more and Hutch bashed another knuckle and I sat there thinking how we’d found two items in the silo and both of them had stopped us in our tracks. But that’s the way it is. Some days you can’t make a dime.
Frost moved around and pushed Hutch out of the way. “Let me see what I can do.”
Hutch didn’t protest any. He was licked.
Frost started pushing and pulling and twisting and fiddling away at that mess of parts and all at once there was a kind of whooshing sound, like someone had let out their breath sort of slow and easy, and all the parts fell in upon themselves. They came unstuck, in a kind of slow-motion manner, and they made a metallic thump along with tinkling sounds and they were just a heap inside the jacket that had protected them.
“Now see what you done!” howled Hutch.
“I didn’t do a thing,” said Frost. “I was just seeing if I could bust one loose and one did and the whole shebang caved in.”
He held up his fingers to show us the piece that had come loose.
“You know what I think?” asked Pancake. “I think whoever made that machine made it so it would fall apart if anyone tried to tinker with it. They didn’t want no one to find out how it was put together.”
“That makes sense,” said Doc. “No use getting peeved at it. After all, it was their machine.”
“Doc,” I said, “you got a funny attitude. I never noticed you turning down your share of anything we find.”
“I don’t mind when we confine ourselves to what you might call, in all politeness, natural resources. I can even stomach the pillaging of art-forms. But when it comes to stealing brains—and this machine is brains—”
Frost let out a whoop.
He was hunkered down, with his head inside the jacket of the machine, and I thought at first he’d got caught and that we’d have to cut him out, but he could get out, all right.
“I see now how to get that dome off the top,” he said. It was a complicated business, almost like a combination on a safe. The dome was locked in place by a lot of grooves and you had to know just how to turn it to lift it out of place.
Frost kept his head inside the jacket and called out directions to Hutch, who twisted the dome first this way and then that, sometimes having to pull up on it and other times press down to engage the slotted mechanism that held it locked in place. Pancake wrote down the combinations as Frost called them off and finally the dome came loose in Hutch’s hands.
Once it was off, there was no mystery to it. It was a helmet, all rigged out with adjustable features so it could be made to fit any type of head, just as the seat was adjustable to fit any sitting apparatus.
The helmet was attached to the machine with a retractable cable that reeled out far enough to reach someone sitting in the seat.
And that was fine, of course. But what was it? A portable electric chair? A permanent-wave machine? Or what?
So Frost and Hutch poked around some more and in the top of the machine, just under where the dome had nested, they found a swivel trap door and underneath it a hollow tube extending down into the mass of innards—only the innards weren’t a mass any more, but just a basket of loose parts.
It didn’t take any imagination to figure what that hollow tube was for. It was just the size to take one of the sticks of dynamite.
Doc went and got a bottle and passed it around as a sort of celebration and after a drink or two, he and Hutch shook hands and said there were no hard feelings. But I didn’t pay much attention to that. They’d done it many times before and then been at one another’s throat before the night was over.
Just why we were celebrating was hard to figure. Sure, we knew the machine fitted heads and that the dynamite fitted the machine—but we still had no idea what it was all about.
We were, to tell the truth, just a little scared, although you couldn’t have gotten one of us to admit it.
We did some guessing, naturally.
“It might be a mechanical doctor,” said Hutch. “Just sit in that seat and put the helmet on your head and feed in the proper stick and you come out cured of whatever is wrong with you. It would be a blessing, I can tell you. You wouldn’t ever need to worry if your doctor knew his business or not.”
I thought Doc was going to jump right down Hutch’s throat, but he must have remembered how they had shaken hands and he didn’t do it.
“As long as you’re thinking along that line,” said Doc, “let’s think a little bigger. Let’s say it is a rejuvenation machine and the stick is crammed with vitamins and hormones and such that turn you young again. Just take the treatment every twenty years or so and you stay young forever.”
“It might be an educator,” Frost put in. “Those sticks might be packed full of knowledge. Maybe a complete college subject inside of each of them.”
“Or it might be just the opposite,” said Pancake. “Those sticks might soak up everything you know. Each of those sticks might be the story of one man’s whole life.”
“Why record life stories?” asked Hutch. “There aren’t many men or aliens or what-not that have life stories important enough to rate all that trouble.”
“If you’re thinking of it being some sort of communications deal,” I said, “it might be anything. It might be propaganda or religion or maps or it might be no more than a file of business records.”
“And,” said Hutch, “it might kill you deader than a mackerel.”
“I don’t think so,” Doc replied. “There are easier ways to kill a person than to sit him in a chair and put a helmet on him. And it doesn’t have to be a communicator.”
“There’s one way to find out,” I said.
“I was afraid,” said Doc, “we’d get around to that.”
“It’s too complicated,” argued Hutch. “No telling what trouble it may get us into. Why not drop it cold? We can blast off and hunt for something simple.”
“No!” shouted Frost. “We can’t do that!”
“I’d like to know why not,” said Hutch.
“Because we’d always wonder if we passed up the jackpot. We’d figure that maybe we gave up too quick—a day or two too quick. That we got scared out. That if we’d gone ahead, we’d be rolling in money.”
We knew Frost was right, but we batted it around some more before we would admit he was. All of us knew what we had to do, but there were no volunteers.
Finally we drew straws and Pancake was unlucky.
“Okay,” I said. “First thing in the morning …”
“Morning, nothing!” wailed Pancake. “I want to get it over with. I wouldn’t sleep a wink.”
He was scared, all right, and he had a right to be. He felt just the way I would have if I’d drawn the shortest straw.
I didn’t like barging around on an alien planet after dark, but we had to do it. It wouldn’t have been fair to Pancake to have done otherwise. And, besides, we were all wrought up and we’d have no rest until we’d found out what we had.
So we got some flashes and went out to the silo. We tramped down the corridors for what seemed an endless time and came to the room where the machines were stored.
There didn’t seem to be any difference in the machines, so we picked one at random. While Hutch got the helmet off, I adjusted the seat for Pancake and Doc went into an adjoining room to get a stick.
When we were all ready, Pancake sat down in the seat.
I had a sudden rush of imbecility.
“Look,” I said to Pancake, “you don’t need to do this.�
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“Someone has to,” said Pancake. “We got to find out somehow and this is the quickest way.”
“I’ll take your place.”
Pancake called me a dirty name and he had no right to do that, for I was only being helpful. But I called him another and we were back to normal.
Hutch put the helmet on Pancake’s head and it came down so far you couldn’t see his face. Doc popped the stick into the tube and the machine purred a little, starting up, then settled into silence. Not exactly silence, either—when you laid your ear against the jacket, you could hear it running.
Nothing seemed to happen to Pancake. He sat there cool and relaxed and Doc got to work on him at once, checking him over.
“His pulse has slowed a little,” Doc reported, “and his heart action’s sort of feeble, but he seems to be in no danger. His breathing is a little shallow, but not enough to worry about.”
It might not have meant a thing to Doc, but it made the rest of us uneasy. We stood around and watched and nothing happened. I don’t know what we thought might happen. Funny as it sounds, I had thought that something would.
Doc kept close watch, but Pancake got no worse.
We waited and we waited. The machine kept running and Pancake sat slumped in the seat. He was as limp as a dog asleep and when you picked up his hand, you’d think his bones had melted plumb away. All the time we got more nervous. Hutch wanted to jerk the helmet off Pancake, but I wouldn’t let him. No telling what might happen if we stopped the business in the middle.
It was about an hour after dawn that the machine stopped running. Pancake began to stir and we removed the helmet.
He yawned and rubbed his eyes and sat up straight. He looked a bit surprised when he saw us and it seemed to take a moment for him to recognize us.
“What happened?” Hutch asked him.
Pancake didn’t answer. You could see him pulling himself together, as if he were remembering and getting his bearings once again.
“I went on a trip,” he said.
“A travelogue!” said Doc, disgusted.
Grotto of the Dancing Deer Page 22
