"At least it's useful for something," said the Doctor, watching.
The Engineer sat hunched over, his head in his hands, a picture of dejection. He said nothing, and even when receiving his plate of food only grunted. Then, unexpectedly, he stood up and asked, "Well, and what now?"
"We go to sleep, of course." The Doctor solemnly took a cigarette from his pack, lit it, and inhaled with obvious pleasure.
"And tomorrow?" asked the Engineer.
"Henry, you're acting like a child," said the Captain, cleaning the saucepan with a handful of sandy earth. "Tomorrow we'll investigate more of the factory. Today we must have covered a quarter of a mile."
"And you think we'll find something different?"
"I don't know. We'll have the whole morning. In the afternoon we return to the ship."
"Wonderful," grumbled the Engineer. He stretched, groaned. "I feel as if I've been beaten."
"So do we," the Doctor assured him good-humoredly. "But listen, you really can't tell us anything about this?" He pointed the glowing tip of his cigarette at the barely visible shape holding down the tent.
"Of course. Isn't it obvious? It's a device to—"
"No, seriously. After all, the thing has so many parts. But this is not my line."
"And you think it's mine?!" the Engineer exploded. "It's the work of a lunatic, or, rather"—he pointed in the direction of the factory—"lunatics. A civilization of lunatics, that's what this damned Eden is!" Then he added calmly: "The object we hauled here was manufactured by a whole series of processes—compression, segmentation, thermal treatment, polishing. It's made of polymers, inorganic crystals. What it's for, I have no idea. It's a part, not a whole. But even as a part, taken out of this crack-brained mill, it looks crazy to me."
"What do you mean?" asked the Captain. The Chemist, having put away the utensils, was spreading out his blanket. The Doctor extinguished his cigarette and carefully put the unsmoked half back in his pocket.
"I have no proof. There are power cells, units of some kind, in there—not connected to anything. Like a closed circuit, but crisscrossed by a strange insulating substance. This thing … cannot function. That's how it looks to me. After a number of years a man develops a kind of professional intuition. I could be mistaken, but … no, I'd rather not talk about that."
The Captain got up. The others followed his example. When they extinguished the stove, they were plunged into total darkness. The stars above sparkled intensely in what seemed a peculiarly low sky.
"Deneb," said the Physicist softly. The men looked up.
"Where? There?" asked the Doctor. Unconsciously they lowered their voices.
"Yes. And the smaller star nearby is Gamma Cygni. Very bright!"
"About three times brighter than on Earth," said the Captain.
"We're a long way from home," muttered the Doctor. Nobody said anything more. One by one they crawled into the round tent. They were so tired that, when the Doctor said his customary "Good night," deep breathing was the only reply.
He lay awake, thinking. Were they being careless? What if something nasty crawled out of the neighboring scrub during the night? They should have posted a sentry. For a while the Doctor considered getting up and standing guard, but then he smiled his ironic smile in the darkness, turned over with a sigh, and fell sound asleep.
The morning greeted them with sunshine. There were more white cumulus clouds in the sky than before. The men ate little breakfast, saving the rest of their food for a final meal before returning to the ship.
"If only I could wash!" the Cyberneticist complained. "I stink. There must be water here somewhere!"
"Where there's water, there must be a barber," the Doctor added, peering into a small mirror and grimacing. "Only I'm afraid that on this planet a barber, after shaving you, would put all the hairs back."
"You'll joke on your deathbed," the Engineer said.
"Well," replied the Doctor, "that's not a bad way to go."
They gathered their things, deflated and packed the tent, and set off along the undulating screen, until they were almost a mile from their campsite.
"Maybe I'm mistaken, but the wall seems a bit higher here," said the Physicist, squinting at the ripples going in both directions. Higher up, they shimmered, like silver.
The men put their packs down in one pile and entered the factory without incident, as on the previous day. The Physicist and the Cyberneticist were the last to enter.
"How does that disappearing work?" asked the Cyberneticist. "So much happened yesterday, I forgot all about it."
"Something to do with refraction," the Physicist replied, without conviction.
"And what supports the roof? It can't be that." He pointed to the rippling curtain before them.
"I don't know. Maybe the supports are inside somewhere, or on the other side."
"Alice in Wonderland," the Doctor's voice greeted them. "Shall we begin? I seem to be sneezing less today. Perhaps we're adapting. Which way do we go first?"
The place was similar to what they had seen the day before. They walked through it now with greater confidence and speed. At first it seemed that everything was the same: the columns, the wells, the forest of pulsing tubes, the incandescence, the whole flickering confusion of processes taking place at different tempos. But the "finished products," whose troughlike receptacle it took them a while to discover, were not the same; they were larger and shaped differently from those of yesterday. And that was not all.
These "products," which were also being reclaimed and recycled, were not identical. They all resembled half of an egg, each notched at the top and with various details that indicated it was to be joined to other things. The half-egg also had protruding pipes, in the mouths of which were lens-shaped pieces that moved like valves. But some of the objects had two pipes, and others three or four. The additional pipes were smaller and often seemed unfinished, as though work on them had been interrupted. Sometimes a lens filled the entire bore of a pipe, sometimes only part of it, and sometimes there was no lens, or only the "bud" of one, a particle hardly bigger than a pea. The surface of the half-egg was smooth, polished.
And the pipes varied in other ways: in one half-egg the men found two pipes fused together and communicating through a small opening, their lenses forming something in the nature of a figure eight. The Doctor called this "Siamese Twins." And the mouths of some small pipes were closed.
"What do you say to this?" asked the Captain, kneeling as the Engineer worked his way through an entire collection fished out of the trough.
"For the time being, nothing. Let's move on," said the Engineer, getting up. But it was obvious that his spirits were improved.
They now saw that the hall was divided into sections, according to the process being performed in the cycle. The production mechanisms themselves—such as the forest of esophaguslike tubes—were everywhere the same. Half a mile farther on, the men came to a section that, while going through the same motions as the one before, carried nothing in its tubes, deposited nothing into its wells, and absorbed, treated, and melted nothing. Thinking at first that the product was so transparent as to be invisible, the Engineer leaned over to a chute and put out his hand to catch what should have been dropping out, but there was indeed nothing.
"This is crazy," said the Chemist.
But somehow the Engineer was not that surprised. "Interesting," he said, and they walked on.
They approached an area of increasing noise. It was a dull noise, but deafening—as of millions of heavy, wet pieces of leather dropping on a huge untightened drum. Then the noise became more distinct.
From dozens of club-shaped, quivering stalactites hanging from the ceiling overhead, a veritable hail of black objects fell, and were deflected, now on one side, now on the other, by inflated gray membranes, like bladders, then were snatched in midair by fast arms and arranged neatly at the bottom, side by side, in quadrangles and straight rows. Every so often a huge thing, the size of a whale's
head, would emerge and with a long sigh suck in several rows of "finished product" at a time.
"The storehouse," the Engineer explained. "They arrive from above—that's a kind of conveyor—and are collected and returned to the cycle."
"How do you know they're returned?" asked the Physicist.
"Because the storehouse is full."
Nobody really understood this, but they said nothing and continued on.
It was almost four o'clock when the Captain gave the order to leave. They were in a section consisting of two parts. The first part produced rough disks equipped with handles; the second cut off the handles and attached elliptical rings in their place, whereupon the disks journeyed underground and returned smooth—"clean-shaven," as the Doctor said—in order to have ear-shaped handles affixed to them again.
When the men came out on the plain, the sun was strong, still high overhead. As they walked to the spot where they had left their tent and packs, the Engineer said, "Well, it's beginning to make sense."
"Really?" the Chemist sneered.
The Captain nodded and turned to the Doctor. "How would you describe it?" he asked.
"A corpse," the Doctor said.
"What do you mean, a corpse?" asked the Chemist, who was still in the dark.
"An animated corpse," the Doctor added. They went on a bit farther in silence.
"Is someone going to explain or not?" asked the Chemist, irritated.
"It's an automated complex for the production of miscellaneous parts, which eventually, in the course of time, went completely out of kilter, because it was left unsupervised," the Engineer said.
"Ah! And how long ago, do you think…?"
"That I don't know."
"A rough guess … several decades," said the Cyberneticist.
"Or even longer. I wouldn't be surprised if the complex was abandoned two hundred years ago."
"Or a thousand years ago," the Captain said.
"Management computing systems fail at a rate corresponding to the coefficient—" the Cyberneticist began, but was interrupted by the Engineer:
"Their systems may operate on different lines from ours; they may not even be electronic. Personally, I don't think they are. The elements are nonmetallic, semifluid."
"Never mind that," said the Doctor. "What do you think the prospects are? Myself, I'd say they're poor."
"You mean the planet's inhabitants?" asked the Chemist.
"That's precisely what I mean."
III
It was late at night when they reached the knoll where their ship was. To travel faster, and also to avoid meeting any denizens of the copse, they went by way of an area where the vegetation parted to form a lane about sixty feet wide, as though an enormous plow had gone through. Nothing grew here but a velvety lichen and moss.
Hungry, tired, with only one flashlight, they decided to pitch their tent outside the ship. The Physicist had such a terrible thirst—their water supply had run out on the trek back—that he entered the tunnel and went into the ship. He was gone a long time. They were inflating the tent when they heard him shouting in the tunnel. They hurried over and helped him out. He was trembling, so upset that he couldn't speak.
"What happened? Calm down!" they shouted. The Captain grabbed him firmly by the shoulders.
The Physicist pointed to the hull looming above them. "There was something in there."
"What was it?"
"I have no idea."
"How do you know something was there?"
"I entered the navigation room by mistake. It was full of soil before, and now the soil is gone."
"Gone? Where is it?"
"I don't know."
"You looked into the other rooms?"
"Yes. I … wasn't sure that the navigation room had been full of soil, so at first I dismissed the thought, and went to the storeroom, where I found some drinking water, but I didn't have a cup, so I tried your cabin"—he glanced at the Cyberneticist—"and there…"
"What was it, damn it?!"
"Everything was covered with mucus."
"Mucus?"
"Sticky, transparent mucus—I must still have some of it on my boots!"
"But that could have been something leaking from the tanks, a chemical reaction. Remember, half our instruments in the laboratory were smashed."
"Ridiculous! Look at my boots!"
The Doctor's flashlight wandered down to the boots in question, which in places gleamed, as though coated with polyurethane.
"But that doesn't mean we had a visitor," said the Chemist lamely.
"It didn't sink in at first," the Physicist went on. "I took a cup and returned to the storeroom. I felt my soles sticking, but paid no attention. I had a drink of water, and on my way back suddenly decided to check the library—I don't know why. I was uneasy. I opened the door and—no soil, not a trace! But I had dumped that soil myself! And then I knew that the soil had disappeared in the navigation room, too."
"And then?" asked the Captain.
"I ran back here."
The flashlight illuminated the patch of ground where the men stood around the Physicist, who was still out of breath.
"Do we go in, or what?" asked the Chemist, though it was obvious that he was not volunteering.
"Let me see those boots again," said the Captain.
He almost banged his head against the Doctor's when the latter bent over simultaneously. They exchanged glances. Neither said a word.
"We have to do something," the Cyberneticist said desperately, as the Captain carefully examined the shiny layer that clung to the leather.
"All that happened was that a specimen of local fauna entered the ship and, finding nothing of interest, left," said the Captain at last.
"Some worm, perhaps, the size of a shark or two," the Cyberneticist babbled. "But what about the soil?"
"Yes, that is strange…"
The Doctor began to pace, then walked away. The beam of his flashlight swept the ground, then went higher, into the darkness.
Suddenly he shouted, "Here, I've found it!"
They ran over to him. He was standing near a furrow about thirty feet long that in places was covered by bits of shiny membrane.
"It looks as if it really was a worm," said the Physicist in a low voice.
"In that case we'll have to spend the night in the ship," the Captain decided.
"But we'll have to search the ship thoroughly before we can close the hatch."
"That will take all night!" groaned the Chemist.
"It can't be helped."
They left the tent to the mercy of whatever might be out there and went into the tunnel.
Every nook and cranny of the ship was inspected. The Physicist thought that pieces of broken panel in the control room had been moved, but no one was sure. Then the Engineer began to wonder if the tools used to dig the tunnel were in the same position in which they had left them.
"Look," said the Doctor impatiently, "we can't start playing detective now—it's almost two!"
At three they lay down on mattresses removed from the bunks, and it would have been even later had the Engineer not decided to forgo checking both levels of the engine room and simply to bolt from inside the doors leading to it in the steel bulkhead. The air was close, with an unpleasant lingering odor, but they were dropping with fatigue, and no sooner did they take off their boots and suits and extinguish the light than they fell into a heavy sleep.
The Doctor woke in total darkness. He raised his watch to his eyes—and was confused for a moment, because the time did not correspond to the darkness, but then he remembered that he was underground in the ship. The green dial said it was almost eight. Why did he wake so early? He grumbled to himself and was about to turn over when he froze.
Something was happening in the depths of the ship. He could feel it more than hear it: the floor throbbed. There was a distant thrumming, barely audible. He sat up, his heart pounding.
"It's come back!" he thought, imagining t
he creature whose slimy trail the Physicist had discovered. "It's trying to force open the entrance hatch."
The ship suddenly shuddered, as though some huge hand were trying to push it still deeper into the ground. One member of the crew groaned in his sleep. For a moment the Doctor felt his hair stand on end: the ship weighed sixteen thousand tons! The floor started shaking in a rapid, irregular rhythm. Then he understood. It was one of the drive units! Someone had got it going!
"Everybody up!" he shouted, groping for the flashlight.
The crew sprang to their feet, stumbling into one another in the dark and shouting, until the Doctor finally found the flashlight and turned it on. In a few words he explained.
The Engineer, still groggy, listened to the sound. The ship began to shake, and a mounting groan filled the air. "The air compressors in the port nozzles!" he cried.
The Captain said nothing as he zipped up his suit, and the others dressed hurriedly, but the Engineer ran out into the corridor as he was, in an undershirt and shorts, snatching the flashlight from the Doctor's hand on the way.
"What are you going to do?"
They hurried after him as he ran to the navigation room. The floor shook more and more violently. "Any moment now it'll snap the blades," he muttered, bursting into the room that had been cleared by the intruder. He rushed over to the main terminals and threw the switch.
A light went on in the corner. The Engineer and the Captain, now together, took the jector from the locker, removed it from its case, and connected it to the terminals as quickly as they could. The dials were broken, but the tube on the barrel showed bright blue. There was current; the jector was charging!
The floor shook so much that the metal tools on the shelves rattled, and a glass object fell off and shattered. Then suddenly all was still, and the light went out.
"Is it charged?" asked the Physicist.
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