by Noel Keyes
A footstep crunched behind them and they came to their feet, turning toward the sound.
It was Doyle, the radio man, hurrying toward them from the lifeboat camp.
“Sir,” he said to Lawrence, “I just had Taylor out on Planet Three. He asks if you won’t come. It seems they’ve found a door.”
“A door!” said Lawrence. “A door into the planet. What did they find inside?”
“He didn’t say, sir.”
“He didn’t say!”
“No. You see, sir, they can’t budge the door. There’s no way to open it.”
The door wasn’t much to look at.
There were twelve holes in the planet’s surface, grouped in four groups of three each, as if they might be handholds for a thing that had three fingers.
And that was all. You could not tell where the door began nor where it ended.
“There is a crack,” said Taylor, “but you can just barely see it with a glass. Even under magnification, it’s no more than a hairline. The door’s machined so perfectly that it’s practically one piece with the surface. For a long time we didn’t even know it was a door. We sat around and wondered what the holes were for.
“Scott found it. Just skating around and saw those holes. You could have looked until your eyes fell out and you’d never found it except by accident.”
“And there’s no way to open it?” asked Lawrence.
“None that we have found. We tried lifting it, sticking our fingers in the holes and heaving. You might as well have tried to lift the planet. And, anyhow, you can’t get much purchase here. Can’t keep your feet under you. This stuff’s so slick you can scarcely walk on it. You don’t walk, in fact; you skate. I’d hate to think what would happen if some of the boys got to horsing around and someone gave someone else a shove. It would take us a week to run them down.”
“I know,” said Lawrence. “I put the lifeboat down as easy as I could and we skidded forty miles or more.”
Taylor chuckled. “I’ve got the big job stuck on with all the magnetics that we have and even then she wabbles if you lean on her. Ice is positively rough alongside this stuff.”
“About this door,” said Lawrence. “It occurred to you it might be a combination?”
Taylor nodded. “Sure, we thought of that. And if it is we haven’t got a ghost. Take the element of chance, multiply it by the unpredictability of an alien mind.”
“You checked?”
“We did,” said Taylor. “We stuck a camera tentacle down into those holes and we took all kinds of shots. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Eight inches deep or so. Wider at the bottom than the top. But smooth. No bumps. No ridges. No keyholes.
“We managed to saw out a hunk of metal so that we could test it. Used up three blades getting it out. Basically, it’s steel, but it’s alloyed with something Mueller can’t tie a tag onto and the molecular structure has him going nuts.”
“Stumped,” said Lawrence.
“Yeah. I skated the ship over to the door and we hooked up a derrick and heaved with everything we had. The ship swung like a pendulum and the door stayed put.”
“We might look for other doors,” said Lawrence, whistling past the graveyard. “They might not be all alike.”
“We looked,” said Taylor. “Crazy as it sounds, we did.
Each man-jack of us, creeping on our shinbones. We mapped the area off in sectors and crawled on our hands and knees for miles, squinting and peering. We almost put our eyes out, what with the sun glaring from the metal and our images staring back at us as if we were crawling on a mirror.”
“Come to think of it,” said Lawrence, “they probably wouldn’t have built doors very close together. Every hundred miles, say—or maybe every thousand.”
“You’re right,” said Taylor. “It might be a thousand.”
“There’s just one thing to do,” Lawrence told him.
“Yeah, I know,” said Taylor, “but I hate to do it. We got a problem here. Something we should work out. And if we blast we’ve failed at the first equation.”
Lawrence stirred uneasily. “I know how you feel,” he said. “If they beat us on the first move, we haven’t got a chance at the second or the third.”
“We can’t just sit around,” said Taylor.
“No,” said Lawrence. “No, I guess we can’t.”
“I hope it works,” said Taylor.
It did.
The blast ripped the door free and hurled it into space. It came down a mile away and rolled like a crazy, jagged wheel across the ice-slick surface.
Half an acre or so of the surface itself peeled up and back hung twisted like a question mark that sparkled in the sun.
The unmanned lifeboat, clamped to the metal by its weak magnetics, like a half-licked stamp, came unstuck when the blast let loose. It danced a heavy-footed skaters’ waltz for a good twelve miles before it came to rest.
The metal of the surface was a mere fourteen inches thick, a paper-thin covering when one considered that the sphere was the size of Earth.
A metal ramp, its upper ten feet twisted and smashed by the explosive force, wound down into the interior like a circular staircase.
Nothing came out of the hole. No sound or light or smell. Seven men went down the ramp to see what they could find. The others waited topside, sweating them out.
Take a trillion sets of tinker toys.
Turn loose a billion kids.
Give them all the time they need and don’t tell them what to do.
If some of them are non-human, that makes it better yet.
Then take a million years to figure out what happened.
A million years, mister, won’t be long enough. You’ll never do it—not in a million years.
It was machinery, of course. It could be nothing else.
But it was tinker toy machinery, something you’d expect a kid to throw together from sheer exuberance the morning after he got a real expensive set.
There were shafts and spools and disks and banks of shining crystal cubes that might have been tubes, although one couldn’t quite be sure.
There were cubic miles of it and it glistened like a silvery Christmas tree in the fanning of the helmet lights, as if it had been polished no more than an hour before. But when Lawrence leaned over the side of the ramp and ran gloved fingers along a shining shaft, the fingers came back dusty—with a dust as fine as flour.
They had come down, the seven of them, twisting along the ramp until they had grown dizzy and always there was the machinery, stretching away on every side as far as the lights could penetrate the darkness.
Machinery that was motionless and still—and it seemed, for no reason that anyone could voice, that it had been still for many countless ages.
And machinery that was the same, repeating over and over and over again the senseless array of shafts and spools and disks and the banks of shining crystal cubes.
Finally the ramp had ended on a landing and the landing ran on every side as far as the lights could reach, with the spidery machinery far above them for a roof, and furniture, or what seemed to be furniture, arranged upon the metal floor.
They stood together in a tight-packed group and their lights stabbed out defiantly and they were strangely quiet in the darkness and the silence and the ghost of another time and people.
“An office,” said Duncan Griffith, finally.
“Or a control room,” said Ted Buckley, the mechanical engineer.
“It might be their living quarters,” Taylor said.
“A machine shop, perhaps,” suggested Jack Scott, the mathematician.
“Have you gentlemen considered,” asked Herbert Anson, the geologist, “that it might be none of these? It might be something which is not allied with anything we know.”
“All we can do,” said Spencer King, the archaeologist”
“Is to translate it as best we can in the terms we know. My guess is that it could be a library.”
Lawrence thought: T
here were seven blind men and they chanced to come upon an elephant.
He said: “Let’s look. If we don’t look, we’ll never know.”
They looked.
And still they didn’t know.
Take a filing cabinet now. It’s a handy thing to have.
You take some space and you wrap some steel around it and you have your storage space. You put in sliding drawers and you put nice, neat folders in the drawers and you label the folders and arrange them alphabetically. Then when you want a certain paper you almost always find it.
Two things are basic—space and something to enclose it, to define it from other space so that you can locate your designated storage space at a moment’s notice.
The drawers and the alphabetically filed folders are refinements. They subdivide the space so you can put your fingers instantly on any required sector of it.
That’s the advantage of a filing cabinet over just heaving everything you want to save into a certain corner of the room.
But suppose someone built a filing cabinet without any drawers.
“Hey,” said Buckley, “this thing is light. Someone give me a hand.”
Scott stepped forward quickly and between them they lifted the cabinet off the floor and shook it. Something rattled inside of it.
They put it down again.
“There’s something in there,” said Buckley, breathlessly.
“Yes,” said King. “A receptacle. No doubt of that. And there’s something in it.”
“Something that rattles,” said Buckley.
“Seems to me,” declared Scott, “it was more like a rustle than a rattle.”
“It won’t do us much good,” said Taylor, “if we can’t get at it. You can’t tell much about it by just listening to it while you fellows shake it.”
“That’s easy,” said Griffith. “It’s fourth dimensional. You say the magic words and reach around a corner somewhere and fish out what you want.”
Lawrence shook his head. “Cut out the humor, Dune. This is serious business. Any of you got an idea how the thing is made?”
“It couldn’t be made,” wailed Buckley. “It simply wasn’t made. You can’t take a sheet of metal and make a cube of it and not have any seams.”
“Remember the door up on the surface,” Anson reminded him. “We couldn’t see anything there, either, until we got a magnifier on it. That cabinet opens somehow. Someone or something opened it at one time—to put in whatever rattled when you shook it.”
“And they wouldn’t put something in there,” said Scott, “if there was no way to get it out.”
“Maybe,” said Griffith, “it was something they wanted to get rid of.”
“We could rip it open,” said King. “Get a torch.”
Lawrence stopped him. “We’ve done that once already. We had to blast the door.”
“There’s half a mile of those cabinets stretched out here,” said Buckley. “All standing in a row. Let’s shake some more of them.”
They shook a dozen more.
There wasn’t any rattle.
There was nothing in them.
“Cleaned out,” said Buckley, sadly.
“Let’s get out of here,” said Anson. “This place gives me the creeps. Let’s go back to the ship and sit down and talk it over. We’ll go looney batting out our brains down here. Take those control panels over there.”
“Maybe they aren’t control panels,” Griffith reminded him. “We must be careful not to jump at what seem obvious conclusions.”
Buckley snapped up the argument. “Whether they are or not,” he said, “they have some functional purpose. Control panels fill the bill better than anything I can think of at the moment.”
“But they have no markings,” Taylor broke in. “A control setup would have dials or lights or something you could see.”
“Not necessarily something that a human could see,” said Buckley. “To some other race we might qualify no better than stone blind.”
“I have a horrible feeling,” said Lawrence, “that we are getting nowhere.”
“We took a licking on the door,” said Taylor. “And we’ve taken a licking here.”
King said: “We’ll have to evolve some orderly plan of exploration. We must map it out. Take first things first.” Lawrence nodded. “We’ll leave a few men on the surface and the rest of us will come down here and set up camp. We’ll work in groups and we’ll cover the situation as swiftly as we can—the general situation. After that we can fill in the details.”
“First things first,” said Taylor. “What comes first?”
“I wouldn’t know,” said Lawrence. “What ideas have the rest of you?”
“Let’s find out what we have,” suggested King. “A planet or a planetary machine.”
“We’ll have to find more ramps,” said Taylor. “There must be other ramps.”
Scott spoke up. “We should try to find out how extensive this machinery is. How much space it covers.”
“And find if the machine’s running,” said Buckley.
“What we saw wasn’t,” Lawrence told him.
“What we saw,” Buckley declared, “may be no more than one corner of a vast machine. All of it might not work at once. Once in a thousand years or so a certain part of the machine might be used and then only for a few minutes or maybe even seconds. Then it might be idle for another thousand years. But it would have to be there for the once in a thousand years that it might be needed.”
“Somehow,” said Griffith, “we should try to make at least an educated guess what the machinery’s for. What it does. What it produces.”
“But keep your hands off it,” warned Buckley. “No pushing this and pulling that just to see what happens. Lord knows what it might do. Just keep your big paws off it until you know what you are doing.”
It was a planet, all right.
They found the planetary surface—twenty miles below. Twenty miles through the twisting maze of shining, dead machinery.
There was air, almost as good as Earth’s, and they established camp on the lower levels, glad to get rid of space gear and live as normal beings.
But there was no light, and there was no life. Not even an insect, not one crawling, creeping thing.
Although life had once been there.
The ruined cities told the story of that life. A primitive culture, King had said. A culture not much better than Twentieth Century Earth.
Duncan Griffith squatted beside the small atomic stove, hands spread out to its welcome glow.
“They moved to Planet Four,” he was saying smugly. “They didn’t have the room to live here, so they went out there and camped.”
“And mined two other planets,” Taylor said, “to get the ore they needed.”
Lawrence hunched forward, dejectedly. “What bothers me,” he said, “is the drive behind this thing—the sheer, unreasoning urge, the spirit that would drive an entire race from their home to another planet, that would enable them to spend centuries to turn their own planet into one vast machine.”
He turned his head to Scott. “There isn’t much doubt, is there,” he asked, “that it’s nothing but machinery?”
Scott shook his head. “We haven’t seen it all, of course. That would take years and we haven’t years to spend. But we are fairly certain it’s all one machine—a world covered by machinery to the height of twenty miles.”
“And dead machinery,” said Griffith. “Dead because they stopped it. They shut the machinery down and took all their records and all their tools and went away and left an empty shell. Just as they left the city out on Planet Four.”
“Or were driven away,” said Taylor.
“Not driven away,” Griffith declared flatly. “We’ve found no sign of violence anywhere in this entire system. No sign at all of haste. They took their time and packed and they didn’t leave a single thing behind. Not a single clue. Somewhere there must be blueprints. You couldn’t build and you couldn’t run a place
like this without some sort of road map. Somewhere there must be records—records that kept tally on the results or the production of this world-machine. But we haven’t found them. And why haven’t we found them? Because they were taken away when the people left.”
“We haven’t looked everywhere,” said Taylor.
“We found repositories where they logically would be kept,” said Griffith, “and they weren’t there. There was nothing there.”
“Some of the cabinets we couldn’t get into. Remember? Those we found the first day on the upper level.”
“There were thousands of other places that we could and did get into,” Griffith declared. “But we didn’t find a tool or a single record or anything to hint anything ever had been there.”
“Those cabinets up on the last level,” said Taylor. “They are the logical place.”
“We shook them,” said Griffith, “and they all were empty.”
“All except one,” said Taylor.
“I’m inclined to believe you’re right, Dune,” Lawrence said. “This world was abandoned, stripped and left to rust. We should have known that when we found it undefended. They would have had some sort of defenses—automatic probably—and if anyone had wanted to keep us out we’d never gotten in.”
“If we’d come around when this world was operating,” Griffith said, “we’d been blown to dust before we even saw it.”
“They must have been a great race,” Lawrence said. “The economics, alone, of this place is enough to scare you. It must have required the total manpower of the entire race many centuries to build it, and after that many other centuries to keep it operating. That means they spent a minimum of time in getting food, in manufacturing the million things that a race would need to live.”
“They simplified their living and their wants,” said King, “to the bare necessities. That, in itself alone, is a mark of greatness.”
“And they were fanatics,” said Griffith. “Don’t forget that for a moment. Only the sheer, blind, one-track purpose of an obsessed people could do a job like this.”
“But why?” asked Lawrence. “Why did they build the thing?”
No one spoke.
Griffith chuckled thinly. “Not even a guess?” he asked. “Not one educated guess.”