Cosmic Engineers

by Clifford D. Simak

  “I’m beginning to remember now,” said Gary, “but there must be something wrong. The histories say you were a traitor. They say you were condemned to death.”

  “I was a traitor,” she said and there was a thread of ancient bitterness in the words she spoke. “I refused to turn over a discovery I made, a discovery that would have won the war. It also would have wrecked the solar system. I told them so, but they were men at war. They were desperate men. We were losing then.”

  “We never did win, really,” Gary told her.

  “They condemned me to space,” she said. “They put me in that shell you found me in and a war cruiser towed it out to Pluto’s orbit and cut it loose. It was an old condemned craft, its machinery outmoded. They ripped out the rockets and turned it into a prison for me.”

  She made a gesture of silence at the shocked look on their faces.

  “The histories don’t tell that part of it,” said Herb.

  “They probably suppressed it,” she said. “Men at war will do things that no sane man will do. They would not admit in peace the atrocities that they committed in the time of battle. They put the laboratory in the control room as a final ironic jest. So I could carry out my research, they said. Research, they told me, I’d not need to turn over to them.”

  “Would your discovery have wrecked the system?” Gary asked.

  “Yes,” she said, “it would have. That’s why I refused to give it to the military board. For that they called me traitor. I think they hoped to break me. I think they thought up to the very last that, faced with exile in space, I would finally crack and give it to them.”

  “When you didn’t,” Herb said, “they couldn’t back down. They couldn’t afford to let you call their bluff.”

  “They never found your notes,” said Gary.

  She tapped her forehead with a slender finger. “My notes were here,” she said.

  He looked amazed.

  “And still are,” she said.

  “But how did you get the drugs to carry out your suspended animation?” Gary asked.

  She waited for long minutes.

  “That’s the part I hate to think about,” she said. “The part that’s hard to think about. I worked with a young man. About my age, then. He must be dead these many years.”

  She stopped and Gary could see that she was trying to marshal in her mind what next to say.

  “We were in love,” she said. “Together we discovered the suspended animation process. We had worked on it secretly for months and were ready to announce it when I was taken before the military tribunal. They never let me see him after that. I was allowed no visitors.

  “Out in space, after the war cruiser left, I almost went insane. I invented all sorts of tasks to do. I arranged and rearranged my chemicals and apparatus and then one day I found the drugs, skillfully hidden in a box of chemicals. Only one person in the world besides myself knew about them. I found the drugs and two hypodermic syringes.”

  Gary’s pipe had gone out and now he relit it. The girl went on.

  “I knew it would be a gamble,” she said. “I knew he intended that I should take that gamble. Maybe he had a wild scheme of coming out and hunting for me. Maybe something happened and he couldn’t come. Maybe he tried and failed. Maybe the war… got him. But he had given me a chance, a desperate chance to beat the fate the military court had set for me. I removed the steel partition in the engine room to make the tank. That took many weeks.

  I etched the copper plate. I went outside on the shell and etched the lines beside the lock. I’m afraid that wasn’t a very good job.”

  “And then,” said Herb, “you put yourself to sleep.”

  “Not exactly sleep,” she said. “Because my brain still worked. I thought and thought for almost a thousand years. My mind set up problems and worked them out. I developed a flair for pure deduction, since my mind was the only thing left for me to work with. I believe I even developed telepathic powers.”

  “You mean,” asked Herb, “that you can read our thoughts?”

  She nodded, then hastened on. “But I wouldn’t,” she said. “I wouldn’t do that to my friends. I knew when Gary first came to the shell. I read the wonder and amazement in his thoughts. I was so afraid he’d go away and leave me alone again. I tried to talk to him with my thoughts, but he was so upset that he couldn’t understand.”

  Gary shook his head. “Anyone would have been upset,” he said.

  “But,” exploded Herb, “think of the chances that you took. It was just pure luck we found you. Your drug wouldn’t have held up forever. Another few thousand years, perhaps, but scarcely longer than that. Then there would be the chance that the atmosphere generators might have failed. Or that a big meteor, or even a small one, for that matter, might have come along. There were a thousand things that could have happened.”

  She agreed with him. “It was a long chance. I knew it was. But there was no other way. I could have just sat still and done nothing or gone crazy, grown old and died in loneliness.”

  She was silent for a moment.

  “It would have been easy,” she said then, “if I hadn’t made that one mistake.”

  “Weren’t you frightened?” Gary asked.

  Her eyes widened slightly and she nodded.

  “I heard voices,” she said. “Voices coming out of space, out of the void that lies between the galaxies. Things talking over many light-years with one another. Things to which the human race, intellectually, would appear mere insects. At first I was frightened, frightened at the things they said, at the horrible hints I sensed in the things I couldn’t understand.

  Then, growing desperate, I tried to talk back to them, tried to attract their attention. I wasn’t afraid of them any more and I thought that they might help. I didn’t care much what happened any more just so someone, or something, would help me. Even take notice of me. Anything to let me know that I wasn’t all alone.”

  Gary lit his pipe again and silence fell for just a space. “Voices,” said Herb.

  They all stared out at that darkness that hemmed them in. Gary felt the hairs bristle at the nape of his neck. Some cold wind from far away had brushed against his face, an unnamable terror out of the cosmos reaching out for him, searching for him with dirty-taloned thoughts. Things that hurled pure thought across the deserts of emptiness that lay between the galaxies.

  “Tell me,” said Caroline, and her voice, too, seemed to come from far away, “how did the war come out?”

  “The war?” asked Gary. Then he understood.

  “Oh, the war,” he said. “Why, Earth and Mars finally won out. Or so the histories claim. There was a battle out near Ganymede and both fleets limped home badly beaten up. The Jovians went back to Jupiter, the Earth-Mars fleet pulled into Sandebar on Mars. For months the two inner planets built up their fleets and strengthened home defenses. But the Jovians never came out again and our fleets didn’t dare carry the war to the enemy. Even today we haven’t developed a ship that dares go into Jupiter’s atmosphere. Our geosectors might take us there and bring us back, but you can’t use them near a planetary body. They work on the principle of warping space…”

  “Warping space?” asked the girl, suddenly sitting upright.

  “Sure,” said Gary. “Anything peculiar about it?” “No,” she said, “I don’t suppose there is.”

  Then: “I wouldn’t exactly call that a victory.”

  “That’s what the histories call it.” Gary shrugged. “They claim we run the Jovians to cover and they’ve been afraid to come out ever since. Earth and Mars have taken over Jupiter’s moons and colonized them, but to this day no one has sighted a Jovian or a Jovian ship. Not since that day back in 5980.

  “It’s just one of them things,” Herb decided for them.

  The girl was staring out at space again. Hungry for seeing, hungry for living, but with the scars of awful memories etched into her brain.

  Gary shivered to himself. Alone, she had taken her ga
mble and had won. Won against time and space and the brutality of man and the great indifference of the mighty sweep of stars.

  What had she thought of during those long years? What problems had she solved? What kind of a person could she be, with her twenty-year-old body and her thousand-year-old brain?

  Gary nursed the hot bowl of his pipe between his hands, studying the outline of her head against the vision-plate. Square chin, high forehead, the braided strands wrapped around her head.

  What was she thinking now? Of that lover who now would be forgotten dust?

  Of how he might have tried to find her, of how he might have searched through space and failed? Or was she thinking of the voices… the voice talking back and forth across the gulfs of empty space?

  The spacewriter, sitting in its own dark corner, broke into a gibbering chatter.

  Gary sprang to his feet.

  “Now what?” he almost shouted.

  The chattering ceased and the machine settled into the click-clack of its message.

  Gary hurried forward. The other two pressed close behind, looking over his shoulder.

  NELSON, ABOARD SPACE PUP, NEARING PLUTO. KINGSLEY REPORTS RECEIVING STRANGE MESSAGES FROM SOMEWHERE OUT OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM. UNABLE, OR UNWILLING, TO GUESS AT SOURCE. REFUSES TO GIVE CIRCUMSTANCES UNDER WHICH MESSAGES WERE RECEIVED OR CONTEXT OF THEM, IF IN FACT HE KNOWS CONTEXT. URGENT THAT YOU GET STATEMENT FROM HIM SOONEST. REGARDS. EVENING ROCKET.

  The machine’s stuttering came to an end.

  The three stared at one another.

  “Messages,” said Herb. “Messages out of space.”

  Gary shook his head. He stole a swift glance at the girl and her face seemed pale. Perhaps she was remembering.

  * * *

  Chapter Four

  « ^ »

  TRAIL’S END, Pluto’s single community, cowering at the foot of a towering black mountain, seemed deserted. There was no stir of life about the buildings that huddled between the spacefield and the mountain. The spiraling tower of the radio station climbed dizzily spaceward and beside it squatted the tiny radio shack. Behind it stood the fueling station and the hangar, while half a mile away loomed the larger building that housed the laboratories of the Solar Science commission.

  Caroline moved closer to Gary.

  “It seems so lonely,” she whispered. “I don’t like loneliness now…after…”

  Gary stirred uneasily, scraping the heavy boots of his spacesuit over the pitted rock. “It’s always lonely enough,” he said. “I wonder where they are.”

  As he spoke the lock of the radio shack opened and a space-suited figure strode across the field to meet them.

  His voice crackled in their helmet phones. “You must be Nelson,” it said.

  “I’m Ted Smith, operator here. Kingsley told me to bring you up to the house right away.”

  “Fine,” said Gary. “Glad to be here. I suppose Evans is still around.”

  “He is,” said Smith. “He’s up at the house now. His ship is in the hangar. Personally, I figure he’s planning to take off and let the SCC do what they can about it.”

  Smith fell in step with them. “It’s good to see new faces,” he declared, “especially a woman. We don’t have women visitors very often.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Gary. “I forgot.”

  He introduced Caroline and Herb to Smith as they plodded past the radio shack and started for the laboratory.

  “It gets God-lonesome out here,” said Smith. “This is a hellish place, if I do say so myself. No wind. No moon. No nothing. Very little difference between day and night because there’s never any clouds to cover the stars and even in the daytime the Sun is little better than a star.”

  His tongue, loosened by visitors to talk to, rambled on. “A fellow gets kind of queer out here,” he told them.

  “It’s enough to make anyone get queer. I think the doctor is half crazy from staying here too long. He thinks he’s getting messages from some place far away. Acts mysterious about it.”

  “You think he just imagines it?” asked Herb.

  “I’m not saying one way or the other,” declared Smith, “but I ask you…where would you get the messages from? Think of the power it would take just to send a message from Alpha Centauri. And that isn’t so very far away. Not so far as stars go. Right next door, you might say.”

  “Evans is going to fly there and back,” Herb reminded him.

  “Evans is space-nuts,” said Smith. “With all the solar system to fool around in, he has to go gallivanting off to the stars. He hasn’t got a chance. I told him so, but he laughed at me. I’m sorry for him. He’s a nice young fellow.”

  They mounted the steps, hewn out of living stone, which led to the main airlock of the laboratory building. Smith pressed a button and they waited.

  “I suppose you’ll want Andy to go over your ship,” Smith suggested.

  “Sure,” said Gary. “Tell him to take good care of it.”

  “Andy is the fueling-station man,” the radio operator explained. “But he hasn’t much to do now. Most of the ships use geosectors. There’s only a few old tubs, one or two a year, that need any fuel. Used to be a good business, but not any more.”

  The space lock swung open and the three stepped inside. Smith remained by the doorway.

  “I have to go back to the shack,” he said. “I’ll see you again before you leave.”

  The lock hissed shut behind them and the inner screw began to turn. It swung open and they stepped into a small room that was lined with spacesuits hanging on the wall.

  A man was standing in the center of the room. A big man, with broad shoulders and hands like hams. His unruly shock of hair was jet-black and his voice boomed jovially at them.

  “Glad to see all of you,” be said and laughed, a deep, thunderous laugh that seemed to shake the room.

  Gary swung back the helmet of his suit and thrust out a gloved hand.

  “You are Dr. Kingsley?” he asked.

  “That’s who I am,” boomed the mighty voice. “And who are these folks with you?”

  Gary introduced them.

  “I didn’t know there was a lady in the party,” said the doctor.

  “There wasn’t,” said Herb. “Not until just recently.”

  “Mean to tell me they’ve taken to hitch-hiking out in space?”

  Gary laughed. “Even better than that, doctor,” he said. “There’s a little story about Miss Martin you’ll enjoy.”

  “Come on,” he roared at them. “Get out of your duds. I got some coffee brewing. And you’ll want to meet Tommy Evans. He’s that young fool who thinks he’s going to fly four light-years out to old A.C.”

  And at just that moment Tommy Evans burst into the room.

  “Doc,” he shouted, “that damn machine of yours is at it again.”

  Dr. Kingsley turned and lumbered out, shouting back at them.

  “Come along. Never mind the suits.”

  They ran behind him as he lumbered along. Through what obviously were the laboratory’s living quarters, through a tiny kitchen that smelled of boiling coffee, into a workroom bare of everything except a machine that stood in one corner. A red light atop the machine was blinking rapidly.

  “Whatever you say is off the record, is off the record,” Gary told him.

  “There’s so much of it,” rumbled the doctor, “that sounds like sheer dream stuff.”

  “Hell,” said Evans, “there always is in everything new. My ships sound like it, too. But the thing will work. I know it will.”

  Kingsley perched himself on a heavy kitchen chair.

  “It started more than a year ago,” he said. “We were studying the cosmics. Elusive things, those rays. Men have studied them for about five thousand years and they still don’t know as much about them as you think they would after all that time. We thought at first that we’d made a really astounding discovery, for our instruments, used on top of the building, showed that the rays came in definite p
atterns. Not only that, but they came in definite patterns at particular times. We developed new equipment and learned more about the pattern. We learned that it occurred only when Pluto had rotated into such a position that this particular portion of the planet was facing the Great Nebula in Andromeda. We learned that the pattern, besides having a certain fixed physical structure, also had a definite time structure, and that the intensity of the bombardment always remained the same. In other words, the pattern never varied as to readings; it occurred at fixed intervals whenever we directly faced the Great Nebula, and the intensity varied very slightly, showing an apparent constant source of energy operating at specific times. In between those times our equipment registered the general haphazard behavior one would expect in cosmic rays.”

  The doctor rumbled on: “The readings had me down. Cosmic simply shouldn’t behave that way. There never had been any instance of their behaving that way at any time before. Of course, this was the first thorough investigation far from the Sun’s interfering magnetic fields. But why should they behave in that manner only when we were broadside to the Great Nebula?

  “My two assistants and I worked and studied and theorized and it finally came down to just one thing. The things we were catching with our instruments weren’t cosmic rays at all. They were something else. Something new. Some strange impulse coming to us from outer space. Almost like a signal. Like something or someone or God-knows-what was signaling to someone or something stationed here on Pluto. We romanticized a bit. We toyed with the idea of signals coming from another galaxy, for you know the Great Nebula is an exterior galaxy, a mighty star system, some nine hundred million light years across intergalactic space.

  “But that was just imagining. There was nothing to support it in the light of factual evidence. We still aren’t sure what it’s all about, although we know a great deal more now than we did then.

  “The facts we did gather, you see, indicated that whatever we were receiving must be definite signals, must originate within some sort of intelligence. Some intelligence, you see, that would know just when and where to send them. But there was the problem of distance. Just suppose for a moment that they were coming from the Great Nebula. It takes light almost a billion years to reach us from the Nebula. While it is very probable that the speed of light can be far exceeded, there is little reason to believe at present than anything could be so much faster than light that signaling could be practical across such enormous space. Unless, of course, the matter of time were mixed up a little, and when you get into that you have a problem that takes more than just a master mind. There was just one thing that would seem a probable answer… that if the signals were being sent from many light years distant, they were being routed through something other than all that space. Perhaps through another continuum of space-time, through what you might call, for the want of a better term, the fourth dimension.”