Possible Worlds of Science Fiction

by Groff Conklin

If some of them are nonhuman, 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 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 pools 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 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: There 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 loony 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 solve 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 ? 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 but 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 have gotten in.”

  “If we’d come around when this world was operating,” Griffith said, “we’d have been blown to dust before we even saw it.”

  “They must have been a great race,” Lawrence said. “The economics, alone, of this place are 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.”

  Slowly a man came to his feet from the shadows outside the tiny circle of light cast by the shining stove.

  “I have a guess,” he said. “In fact, I think I know.”

  “Let’s have it, Scott,” said Lawrence.

  The mathematician shook his head. “I have to have some proof. You’d think that I was crazy.”

  “There is no proof,” said Lawrence. “There is no proof for anything.”

  “I know of a place where there might be proof—just might.”

  They sat stock-still, all of them, in the tight stove circle.

  “You remember that cabinet,” said Scott. “The one Taylor was talking about just now. The one we shook and something rattled in it. The one we couldn’t open.”

  “We still can’t open it.”

  “Give me some tools,” said Scott, “and I will get it open.”

  “We did that once,” said Lawrence. “We used bull strength and awkwardness to open up the door. We can’t keep on using force to solve this problem. It calls for more than force. It calls for understanding.”

  “I think I know,” said Scott, “what it was that rattled.”

  Lawrence was silent.

  “Look,” said Scott. “If you have something valuable, something you don’t want someone else to steal, what do you do with it?”

  “Why,” said Lawrence, “I put it in a safe.”

  Silence whistled down the long, dead stretches of the vast machine above them.

  “There could be no safer place,” said Scott, “than a cabinet that had no way of being opened. Those cabinets held something that was important. They left one thing, something, behind—something that they overlooked.”

  Lawrence came slowly to his feet.

  “Let’s get the tools,” he said.

  ~ * ~

  It was an oblong card, very ordinary-looking, and it had holes punched in it in irregular patterns.

  Scott held it in his hand, and his hand was shaking.

  “I trust,” said Griffith bitterly, “that you’re not disappointed.”

  “Not at all,” said Scott. “It’s exactly what I thought we’d find.”

  They waited.

  “Would you mind?” asked Griffith finally.

  “It’s a computation card,” said Scott. “An answer to some problem fed into a differential calculator.”

  “But we can’t decipher it,” said Taylor. “We have no way of knowing what it means.”

  “We don’t need to decipher it,” Scott told him. “It tells us what we have. This machine—this whole machine—is a calculator.”

  “Why, that’s crazy,” Buckley cried. “A mathematical—”

  Scott shook his head. “Not mathematical. At least not purely mathematical. It would be something more than that. Logic, more than likely. Maybe even ethics.”

  He glanced around at them and read the disbelief that still lingered on their faces.

  “It’s there for you to see,” he cried. “The endless repetition, the monotonous sameness of the whole machine. That’s what a calculator is— hundreds or thousands or millions or billions of integrators, whatever number you would need to have to solve a stated question.”

  “But there would be a limiting factor,�
�� snapped Buckley.

  “The human race,” said Scott, “has never paid too much attention to limiting factors. They’ve gone ahead and licked them. Apparently this race didn’t pay too much attention to them, either.”

  “There are some,” said Buckley stubbornly, “that you just can’t ignore.”

  ~ * ~