Cosmic Engineers

by Clifford D. Simak

  “Doctor,” said Herb, “you got me all balled up.”

  Dr. Kingsley’s chuckle rumbled through the room.

  “It had us that way, too,” he said. “And then we figured maybe we were getting pure thought. Thought telepathed across the light years of unimaginable space. Just what the speed of thought would be no one could even guess. It might be instantaneous… it might be no faster than the speed of light… or any speed in between the two. But we do know one thing: that the signals we are receiving are the projection of thought.

  Whether they come straight through space or whether they travel through some shortcut, through some manipulation of space-time frames, do not know and I probably will never know.

  “It took us months to build that machine you saw in the other room. Briefly, it picks up the signals, translates them from the pure energy of thought into actual thought, into symbols our mind can read. We also developed a method of sending our own thoughts back, of communicating with whatever or whoever it is that is trying to talk with Pluto. So far we haven’t been successful in getting an entire message across. However, apparently we have succeeded in advising whoever is sending out the messages that we are trying to answer, for recently the messages have changed, have a note of desperation, frantic command, almost a pleading quality.”

  He brushed his coat sleeve across his brow.

  “It’s all so confusing,” he confessed.

  “But,” asked Herb, “why would anyone send messages to Pluto? Until men came here, there was no life on the planet. Just a barren planet, without any atmosphere, too cold for anything to live. The tail end of creation.”

  Kingsley stared solemnly at Herb.

  “Young man,” he said, “we must never take anything for granted. How are we to say there never was life or intelligence on Pluto? How do we know that a great civilization might not have risen and flourished here aeons ago? How do we know that an expeditionary force from some far-distant star might not have come here and colonized this outer planet many years ago?”

  “It don’t sound reasonable,” said Herb.

  Kingsley gestured impatiently.

  “Neither do these signals sound reasonable,” he rumbled. “But there they are. I’ve thought about the things you mention. I am damned with an imagination, something no scientist should have. A scientist should just plug along, applying this bit of knowledge to that bit of knowledge to arrive at something new. He should leave the imagination to the philosophers. But I’m not that way. I try to imagine what might have happened or what is going to happen. I’ve imagined a mother planet groping out across all space, trying to get in touch with some long-lost colony here on Pluto. I’ve imagined someone trying to re-establish communication with the people who lived here millions of years ago. But it doesn’t get me anywhere.”

  Gary filled and lit his pipe, frowning down at the glowing tobacco. Voices in space again. Voices talking across the void. Saying things to rack the human soul.

  “Doctor,” he said, “you aren’t the only one who has heard thought from outer space.”

  Kingsley swung on him, almost belligerently. “Who else?” he demanded.

  “Miss Martin,” said Gary quietly, puffing at his pipe. “You haven’t heard Miss Martin’s story yet. I have a hunch that she can help you out.”

  “How’s that?” rumbled the scientist.

  “Well, you see,” said Gary, softly, “she’s just passed through a thousand years of mind training. She’s thought without ceasing for almost ten centuries.”

  Kingsley’s face drooped in amazement.

  “That’s impossible,” he said.

  Gary shook his head. “Not impossible at all. Not with suspended animation.”

  Kingsley opened his mouth to object again, but Gary hurried on. “Doctor,” he asked, “do you remember the historical account of the Caroline Martin who refused to give an invention to the military board during the Jovian war?”

  “Why, yes,” said Kingsley. “Scientists have speculated for many years on just what it was she found—”

  He started out of his chair.

  “Caroline Martin!” he shouted. He looked at the girl.

  “Your name is Caroline Martin, too,” he whispered huskily.

  Gary nodded. “Doctor, this is the woman who refused to give up that secret a thousand years ago.”

  * * *

  Chapter Five

  « ^ »

  DR. KINGSLEY glanced at his watch.

  “It’s almost time for the signals to begin,” he said. “In another few minutes we will be swinging around to face the Great Nebula. If you looked out you would see it over the horizon now.”

  Caroline Martin sat in the chair before the thought machine, the domed helmet settled on her head. All eyes in the room were glued on the tiny light atop the mechanism. When the signals started coming that light would blink its bright-red eye.

  “Lord, it’s uncanny,” whispered Tommy Evans. He brushed at his face with his hand.

  Gary watched the girl. Sitting there so straight, like a queen with a crown upon her head. Sitting there, waiting, waiting to hear something that spoke across a gulf that took light many years to span.

  Brain sharpened by a thousand years of thought, a woman who was schooled in hard and simple logic. She had thought of many things out in the shell, she said, had set up problems and had worked them out. What were those problems she had thought about? What were the mysteries she had solved? She was a young, rather sweet-faced kid, who ought to like a good game of tennis, or a dance and she’d thought a thousand years.

  Then the light began to blink and Gary saw Caroline lean forward, heard the breath catch sharply in her throat. The pencil she had poised above the pad dropped from her fingers and fell onto the floor.

  Heavy silence engulfed the room, broken only by the whistling of the breath in Kingsley’s nostrils. He whispered to Gary: “She understands! She understands…”

  Gary gestured him to silence.

  The red light blinked out and Caroline swung around slowly in the chair.

  Her eyes were wide and for a moment she seemed unable to give voice to the words she sought.

  Then she spoke. “They think they are contacting someone else,” she said. “Some great civilization that must have lived here at one time. The messages come from far away. From even farther than the Great Nebula. The Nebula just happens to be in the same direction. They are puzzled that we do not answer. They know someone has been trying to answer. They’re trying to help us to get through. They talked in scientific terms I could not understand. Something to do with the warping of space and time, but involving principles that are entirely new. They want something and they are impatient. It seems there is a great danger someplace. They think that we can help.”

  “Great danger to whom?” asked Kingsley.

  “I couldn’t understand,” said Caroline.

  “Can you talk back to them?” asked Gary. “Do you think you could make them understand?”

  “I’ll try,” she said.

  “All you have to do is think,” Kingsley told her. “Think clearly and forcefully. Concentrate all that you can, as if you were trying to push the thought away from you. The helmet picks up the impulses and routes them through the thought projector.”

  Her slim fingers reached out and turned a dial. Tubes came to life and burned into a blue intensity of light. A soaring hum of power filled the tiny room.

  The hum became a steady drone and the tubes were filled with a light that hurt one’s eyes.

  “She’s talking to them now,” thought Gary. “She is talking to them.”

  The minutes seemed eternities, and then the girl reached out and closed the dial. The hum of power receded, clicked off and was replaced by a deathly silence.

  “Did they understand?” asked Kingsley, and even as he spoke the light blinked red again.

  Kingsley’s hand closed around Gary’s arm and his harsh whisper rasped in Gary’s ear.


  “Instantaneous!” he said. “Instantaneous signals! They got her message and they are answering. That means the signals are routed through some extra-dimension.”

  Swiftly the red light blinked. Caroline crouched forward in the chair, her body tensed with what she heard.

  The light blinked off and the girl reached up and tore the helmet off.

  “It can’t be right,” she sobbed. “It can’t be right.”

  Gary sprang forward, put an arm around her shoulder.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “Those messages,” she cried. “They come from the very edge of all the universe… from the farthest rim of exploding space!”

  Kingsley leaped to his feet.

  “They are like the voices I heard before,” she said. “But different, somehow. More kindly… but terrifying, even so. They think they are talking to someone else. To a people they talked to here on Pluto many years ago… I can’t know how many, but it was a long, long time ago.”

  Gary shook his head in bewilderment and Kingsley rumbled in his throat.

  “At first,” Caroline whispered, “they referred to us by some term that had affection in it… actual kinfolk affection, as if there were blood ties between them and the things they were trying to talk to here. The things that must have disappeared centuries ago.”

  “Longer ago than that,” Kingsley told her. “That the thought bombardment is directed at this spot would indicate the things they are trying to reach had established some sort of a center, perhaps a city, on this site. There are no indications of former occupancy. If anyone was ever here, every sign of them has been swept away. And here there is no wind, no weather, nothing to erode, nothing to blow away. A billion years would be too short a time—”

  “But who are they?” asked Gary. “These ones you were talking to. Did they tell you that?”

  She shook her head. “I couldn’t exactly understand. As near as I could come, they called themselves the Cosmic Engineers. That’s a very poor translation. Not sufficient at all. There is a lot more to it.”

  She paused as if to marshal a definition. “As if they were self-appointed guardians of the entire universe,” she explained. “Champions of all things that live within its space-time frame. And something is threatening the universe. Some mighty force out beyond the universe out where there’s neither space nor time.”

  “They want our help,” she said.

  “But how can we help them?” asked Herb.

  “I don’t know. They tried to tell me, but the thoughts they used were too abstract. I couldn’t understand entirely. A few clues here and there. They’ll have to reduce it to simpler terms.”

  “We couldn’t even get there to help them,” said Gary. “There is no way in which we can reach the rim of the universe. We haven’t yet gone to the nearest star.”

  “Maybe,” suggested Tommy Evans, “we don’t need to get there. Maybe we can do something here to help them.”

  The red light was blinking again. Caroline saw it and reached for the helmet, put it on her head. The light clicked out and her hand went out and moved a dial. Again the tubes lighted and the room trembled with the surge of power.

  Dr. Kingsley was rumbling. “The edge of space. But that’s impossible!”

  Gary laughed at him silently.

  The power was building up. The room throbbed with it and the blue tubes threw dancing shadows on the wall.

  Gary felt the cold wind from space again, flicking at his face, felt the short hairs rising at the base of his skull.

  Kingsley was jittery. And he was jittery. Who wouldn’t be at a time like this? A message from the rim of space! From that inconceivably remote area where time and space still surged outward into that no-man’s-land of nothingness… into that place where there was no time or space, where nothing had happened yet, where nothing had happened ever, where there was no place and no circumstance and no possibility of event that could allow anything to happen. He tried to imagine what would be there. And the answer was nothing. But what was nothing?

  Many years ago some old philosopher had said that the only two conceptions which Man was capable of perceiving were time and space, and from these two conceptions he built the entire universe, of these two things he constructed the sum total of his knowledge. If this were so, how could one imagine a place where neither time nor space existed? If space ended, what was the stuff beyond that wasn’t space?

  Caroline was closing the dials again. The blue light dimmed and the hum of power ebbed off and stopped. And once again the red light atop the machine was blinking rapidly.

  He watched the girl closely, saw her body tense and then relax. She bent forward, intent upon the messages that were swirling through the helmet.

  Kingsley’s face was puckered with lines of wonderment. He still stood beside his chair, a great bear of a man, his hamlike hands opening and closing, hanging loosely at his side.

  Those messages were instantaneous. That meant one of two things: that thought itself was instantaneous or that the messages were routed through a space-time frame which shortened the distance, that, through some manipulation of the continuum, the edge of space might be only a few miles… or a few feet… distant. That, starting now, one might walk there in just a little while.

  Caroline was taking off her helmet, pivoting around in her chair. They all looked at her questioningly and no one asked the question.

  “I understand a little better now,” she said. “They are friends of ours.”

  “Friends of ours?” asked Gary.

  “Friends of everyone within the universe,” said Caroline. “Trying to protect the universe. Calling for volunteers to help them save it from some outside danger—from some outside force.”

  She smiled at the circle of questioning faces.

  “They want us to come out to the edge of the universe,” she said, and there was a tiny quaver of excitement in her voice.

  Herb’s chair clattered to the floor as he leaped to his feet. “They want us…” he started to shout and then be stopped and the room swam in heavy silence.

  Gary heard the rasp of breath in Kingsley’s nostrils, sensed the effort that the man was making to control himself as he shaped a simple question… the question that any one of them would have asked.

  “How do they expect us to get out there?” Kingsley asked.

  “My ship is fast,” Tommy Evans said, “faster than anything ever built before. But not that fast!”

  “A space-time warp,” said Kingsley, and his voice was oddly calm. “They must be using a space-time warp to communicate with us. Perhaps…”

  Caroline smiled at him. “That’s the answer,” she said. “A short cut. Not the long way around. Cut straight through the ordinary space-time world lines. A hole in space and time.”

  Kingsley’s great fists were opening and closing again. Each time he closed them the knuckle bones showed white through the tight-stretched skin.

  “How will we do it?” asked Herb. “There isn’t a one of us in the room could do it. We play around with geosectors that we use to drive our ships and think we’re the tops in progress. But the geosectors just warp space any old way. No definite pattern, nothing. Like a kid playing around in a mud puddle, pushing the mud this way or that. This would take control… you’d have to warp it in a definite pattern and then you’d have to make it stay that way.”

  “Maybe the Engineers,” said Evans.

  “That’s it,” nodded Caroline. “The Engineers can tell us. They know the way to do it. All we have to do is follow their instructions.”

  “But,” protested Kingsley, “could we understand? It would involve mathematics that are way beyond us.”

  Caroline’s voice cut sharply through his protest. “I can understand them,” she replied, bitterly. “Maybe it will take a little while, but I can work them out, I’ve had… practice, you know.”

  Kingsley was dumfounded. “You can work it out?”

  “I worked out ne
w mathematical formulas, new space theories out in the ship,” she said. “They’re only theories, but they ought to work. They check in every detail. I went over them point by point.”

  She laughed, with just a touch of greater bitterness.

  “I had a thousand years to do it,” she reminded him. “I had lots of time to work them out and check them. I had to do something, don’t you see? Something to keep from going crazy.”

  Gary watched her closely, marveling at the complete self-assurance in her face, at the clipped confidence of her words. Vaguely, he sensed something else, too. That she was leader here. That in the last few minutes she had clutched in her tiny hands the leadership of this band of men on Pluto.

  That not all their brains combined could equal hers. That she held mastery over things they had not even thought about. She had thought, she said, for almost a thousand years.

  How long did the ordinary man have to devote to thought? A normal lifetime of useful, skilled, well-directed adult effort did not extend much beyond fifty years. One third of that was wasted in sleep, one sixth spent in eating and in relaxation, leaving only a mere twenty-five years to think, to figure out things. And then one died and all one’s thoughts were lost.

  Embryonic thoughts that might, in just a few more years, have sprouted into well-rounded theory. Lost and left for someone else to discover if he could… and probably lost forever.