Cosmic Engineers

by Clifford D. Simak

  She stepped quickly forward to help Kingsley.

  “Hand me that hammer,” said Kingsley’s voice, and Gary stooped down, picked up the heavy hammer from the base of the machine and handed it to the scientist.

  “Hell,” complained Herb, “that’s all we’ve done for days now. We’ve handed you wrenches and hammers and pins and bolts until I see them in my sleep.”

  Kingsley’s chuckle sounded in their helmets as he swung the hammer against a crossbar, driving it into the mechanism at a slightly different angle.

  Gary craned back his neck and gazed up the spiraling, towering height of the machine, out beyond into the blackness of space, studded with cruel-eyed stars. Out there, somewhere, was the rim of space. Out there, somewhere, a race of beings who called themselves the Cosmic Engineers were fighting a great danger which threatened the universe. He tried to imagine such a danger… a danger that would be a threat to that mighty bowl of matter and energy men called the universe, a living, expanding thing enclosed by curving time and space. But his brain swam with the bigness of the thought and he gave it up. It was entirely too big to even think about.

  Tommy Evans was coming across the field from the hangar. He hailed them joyously. “The old tub is ready any time you are,” he shouted.

  Kingsley straightened from adjusting a series of prisms set around the base of the machine. “We’re ready now,” he said.

  “Well, then,” said Herb, “let us get going.”

  Kingsley stared out into space. “Not yet,” he said. “We’re swinging out of direct line with the Engineers. We’ll wait until the planet rotates again.

  We can’t hold the warp continuously. If we did, the rotation of Pluto would twist it out of shape. The machine, once the warp is set up, will act automatically, establishing the warp when it swings into the right position and maintaining it through forty-five degrees of Pluto’s rotation.”

  “What happens,” asked Gary, “if we can’t complete the trip from here to the edge of the universe before Pluto travels that forty-five degrees? We might roll out of the warp and find ourselves marooned thousands of light-years between galaxies.”

  “I don’t know,” said Kingsley. “I’m trusting the Engineers.”

  “Sure,” said Herb, “we’re all trusting the Engineers. I hope to Heaven they know what they’re doing.”

  Together the five of them trudged up the path to the main lock of the laboratory. “Something to eat,” said Kingsley, “and a good sleep and we’ll be starting out. All of us are pretty tuckered now.”

  In the little kitchen they crowded around the table, gulping steaming coffee and munching sandwiches. Beside Kingsleys’ plate was a sheaf of spacegrams that Ted had brought up for him to read. Kingsley leafed through them irritably.

  “Cranks,” he rumbled. “Hundreds of them. All with ideas crazier than the one we have. And the biggest one of them all is the government. Imagine the government forbidding us to go ahead with our work. Orders to desist!” He snorted. “Some damn law that the Purity league got passed a hundred years or more ago and still standing on the statutes. Gives the government power to stop any experiment which might result in the loss of life or the destruction of property.”

  “The Purity league is still going pretty strong,” said Gary, “although it works mostly undercover now. Too much politics mixed up in it.”

  He dug into the pocket of his coat and hauled forth a sheet of yellow paper. “I got this a while ago,” he said. “I plain forgot about it until now. Too much other excitement.”

  He handed the sheet to Kingsley. The folded paper crackled crisply as Kingsley unfolded it. It was a sheet off the teletype in the Space Pup and it read:

  NELSON. ABOARD SPACE PUP ON PLUTO.

  SOLAR GOVERNMENT ORDERED OUT SOLAR POLICE SECRETLY TWO DAYS AGO TO ENFORCE ORDER TO STOP EDGE OF UNIVERSE TRIP. THIS IS A WARNING. KEEP YOUR NOSE OUT OF WHATEVER IS GOING ON.

  Kingsley crumpled the message savagely in his fist. “When did you get this?” he thundered.

  “Just a couple of hours ago,” said Gary. “It will take them days to get here.”

  “We’ll be gone long before they even sight Pluto,” Tommy said, his words mumbled through a huge bite of sandwich.

  “That’s right,” agreed Kingsley, “but it makes me sore. The damn government always meddling in other people’s affairs. Setting itself up as a judge and jury. Figuring it never can be wrong.” He growled wickedly at the sandwich he held in one mighty fist, bit at it viciously.

  Herb looked around the room. “This being sort of a farewell banquet,” he said, “I sure wish we had something to drink. We ought to drink a toast to the Solar System before we leave it. We ought to make it just a little like a celebration.”

  “We’d have something to drink if you hadn’t been so clumsy with that Scotch,” Gary reminded him.

  “Hell,” retorted Herb, “that would have been gone long ago, with you making a pass at it every time you came in reach.” He sighed and tilted his coffee cup against his face.

  Kingsley’s laugh thundered through the room. “Wait a minute, boys,” he said. He went to a cupboard and removed a double row of canned vegetables from a shelf. A quart bottle filled with amber liquor was revealed. He set it on the table.

  “Wash out your coffee cups,” he said. “We haven’t any glasses.”

  The liquor splashed into the coffee cups and they stood to drink a toast.

  The telephone in the next room rang.

  They set down their cups and waited as Kingsley went to answer it. They heard his roar of excitement and quick fire of rumbling questions. Then he was striding back into the room.

  “My assistant, Jensen, was up in the observatory just now,” he shouted at them. “He spotted five ships coming in, only a few hours out. Police ships!”

  Herb had lifted his cup and now with a clatter it fell to the table, breaking. The liquor dripped to the floor.

  Gary flared at him. “What’s the matter with you?” he asked. “You get the shakes every time you get anywhere near a drink.”

  “That message Gary got,” Tommy was saying. “There must have been something wrong. Maybe the ships were out near Neptune when they were ordered out here.”

  “What would they be doing out near Neptune?” snapped Herb.

  Tommy shrugged. “Police ships are always snooping around,” he said. “You find them everywhere.”

  They stared at one another in a deathly silence.

  “They can’t stop us now,” whispered Caroline. “They just can’t.”

  “There’s still a couple of hours before the space warp contact with the Engineers would be broken if we set it up now,” said Tommy. “Maybe we could make it. The ship is ready.”

  “Ask the Engineers,” said Gary. “Find out how soon they can get us there.”

  Kingsley’s voice thundered commands. “Caroline,” he was shouting, “get the Engineers! Find out if it would be safe to start now. Tommy, get out the spaceship! The rest of you grab what stuff we need and get down to the field.”

  The room was a swirl of action. All of them were rushing for the door.

  Kingsley was at the telephone, talking to Andy. “Get the hangar doors open,” he was shouting. “Warm up the tubes. We’re taking off.”

  Through the thud of running feet, the rumbling of Kingsley’s voice, came the high-pitched drone of the thought-machine sending set. Caroline was talking to the Engineers.

  More snatches of telephone conversation. Kingsley talking with Jensen now.

  “Get down to the power house. Stand ready to give us all the juice you have. The leads will carry everything you can throw into them. We’ll need a lot of power.”

  Gary was struggling into his space-armor when Caroline came into the room.

  “We can make it,” she shouted excitedly. “The Engineers say we’ll be there in almost no time at all. Almost instantaneous.”

  Gary held her spacesuit for her while she clambered into it, he
lped her fasten down the helmet. Kingsley was puffing and grunting, hauling the space-armor over his portly body.

  “We’ll beat them,” he was growling. “Damn them, we’ll beat them yet! No government is going to tell me what I can do and what I can’t do.”

  Out of the air lock, they raced down the path to the field. In the center of the field reared the ghostly machine, like a shimmering skeleton standing guard over the bleakness that was Pluto. As he ran, Gary glanced up and out into space.

  A voice sang in his brain, the voice of his own thoughts: “We’re coming! Hang on, you Engineers! We’re on our way. Little puny man is coming out to help you. Mankind, is marching to another crusade! To the biggest crusade he has ever known!”

  Tommy Evans’ mighty ship was at the far end of the field, a gleaming thing of silver, with the tubes a dull red, preheated to stand the sudden flare of rocket blasts in the deadly cold of Pluto’s surface.

  Yes, thought Gary, another crusade. But a crusade without weapons. Without even knowing who the enemy might be. Without a definite plan of campaign.

  With no campaign at all. With just an ideal and the sound of bugles out in space. But that was all man had needed ever. Just an ideal and the blaring of bugles.

  Caroline cried out in wonder, almost in fear, and Gary glanced toward the center of the field.

  The machine was gone! Where it had stood there was nothing, no faintest hint it had ever stood there. Just empty field and nothing else.

  “Jensen turned on the power!” Kingsley shouted. “The machine is warped into another dimension. The road is open to the Engineers.”

  Gary pointed out into space. “Look,” he yelled.

  A faint, shimmering circle of light lay far out into the black depths. A slow wheel of misty white. A nebulous thing that hadn’t been there before.

  “That’s where we go,” said Kingsley, and Gary heard the man’s breath whistling through his teeth. “That’s where we go to reach the Engineers.”

  * * *

  Chapter Seven

  « ^ »

  Tommy’s nimble fingers flew over the rocket bank, set up a take-off pattern. His thumb tripped the firing lever and the ship surged up from the field with the thunder of the rocket blasts shuddering through its frame-work.

  “Hit dead center,” warned Kingsley and Tommy nodded.

  “Don’t you worry,” he snorted. “I will hit it.”

  “I’d like to see the look on the face of them dumb cops when they reach Pluto and find us gone,” said Herb.

  “Thought they were putting over a fast one on us.”

  “It’ll be all right if they don’t set down right into that machine down there,” Gary declared. “If they did that something would happen to them…and happen awful fast.”

  “I told Ted to warn them away from it,” Kingsley said. “I don’t think they’d hurt the machine, but they would sure get messed up themselves. They may try to destroy it, and if they do, they’re in for a real surprise. Nothing could do that.“ He chuckled. ”Stilled atomic-whirl and rigid space-curvature,“ he said. ”There’s material for you!”

  The ship lanced swiftly through space, heading for that wheeling circle of misty light.

  “How far away would it be?” Gary asked and Kingsley shook his head.

  “Not too far,” he said. “No reason for it being too far away.”

  They watched it through the vision plate, saw the wheel of light expand, become a great spinning, frosty rim that filled the plate and in its center a black hole like a hub.

  Tommy set up a corrective pattern and tripped the firing lever. The cross-hairs on the destination panel bore dead center on the night-black hub.

  The wheel of light flared out, the hub became bigger and blacker, a hole in space… as if one were looking through it into space, but into a space where there were no stars.

  The light disappeared. Just the black hub remained, filling the vision plate with inky blackness. Then the ship was flooded with that same blackness, a cloying, heavy blackness that seemed pressing in upon them.

  Caroline cried out softly and then choked back the cry, for the blackness was followed almost instantly by a flood of light.

  The ship was diving down toward a city, a monstrous city that jerked Gary’s breath away. A city that piled height on height, like gigantic steps, with soaring towers that pointed at them like Titan fingers. A solid, massive city of gleaming white stone and square, utilitarian lines, a city that covered mile on mile of land, so that one could see no part of the planet that bore it, the city stretching from horizon to horizon.

  Three suns blazed in the sky; one white, two a misty blue, all three pouring out a flood of light and energy that, Gary realized, would have made Sol seem like a tiny candle.

  Tommy’s fingers flew over the rocket banks, setting up a braking pattern.

  But even as he did, the speed of the ship seemed to slow, as if they were driving into a soft, but resistant cushion.

  And in their brains rang a voice of command, a voice telling them to do nothing, that they and their ship would be brought down to the city in safety. Not so much like words as if each one of them had thought the very thought, as if each one of them knew exactly what to do.

  Gary glanced at Caroline and saw her lips shape a single word. “Engineers.”

  So it hadn’t been a nightmare after all. There really were a people who called themselves the Cosmic Engineers. There really was a city.

  The ship still plunged downward, but its speed was slowing and now Gary realized that when first they had seen this pile of stone beneath them they had been many miles away. In comparison to the city, they and their ship were tiny things… little things, like ants crawling in the shadow of a mountain.

  Then they were within the city, or at least its upper portion. The ship flashed past a mighty spire of stone and swung into its shadow. Below them they saw new details of the city, winding streets and broad parkways and boulevards, like tiny ribbons fluttering in the distance. A city that could thrill one with its mere bigness. A city which would have put a thousand New Yorks to shame. A city that dwarfed even the most ambitious dreams of mankind.

  A million of Man’s puny cities piled into one. Gary tried to imagine how big the planet must be to bear such a city, but there was no use of thinking, for there was no answer.

  They were dropping down toward one of the fifth tiers of buildings, down and down, closer and closer to the massive blocks of stone. So close now that their vision was cut off, and the terrace of the tier seemed like a broad, flat plain.

  A section of the roof was opening, like a door opening outward into space.

  The ship, floating on an even keel, drifted gently downward, toward that yawning trap door. Then they were through the door, with plenty of room to spare, were floating quietly down between walls of delicate pastel hues.

  The ship settled with a gentle bump and was still. They had arrived at their destination.

  “Well, we’re here,” said Herb. “I wonder what we’re supposed to do.”

  As if in answer to his question, the voice came again, the voice that was not a voice, but as if each person were thinking for himself.

  It said: “This is a place we have prepared for you. You will find the gravity and the atmosphere and the surroundings natural to yourselves. You will need no space armor, no artificial trappings of any sort. Food is waiting you.”

  They stared at one another in amazement.

  “I think,” said Herb, “that I will like this place. Did you hear that? Food? I trust there’s also drink.”

  “Yes,” said the voice, “there is drink.”

  Herb’s jaw dropped.

  Tommy stepped out of the pilot’s chair. “I’m hungry,” he said. He strode to the inner valve of the air lock and spun the wheel. The others crowded behind him.

  They stepped out of the ship onto a great slab of stone placed in the center of a gigantic room. The stone, apparently, was merely there for th
e ship to rest upon, for the rest of the floor was paved in scintillating blocks of mineral that flashed and glinted in the light from the three suns pouring in through a huge, translucent skylight. The walls of the room were done in soft, pastel shades, and on the walls were hung huge paintings, while ringed about the ship was furniture, perfect rooms of furniture, but with no dividing walls. An entire household, of palatial dimension, set up in a single room.

  A living room, a library, bedrooms and a dining room. A dining room with massive oaken table and five chairs, and upon the table a banquet to do justice to a king.

  “Chicken!” cried Herb and the word carried a weight of awe.

  “And wine,” said Tommy.

  They stared in amazement at the table. Gary sniffed. He could smell the chicken.

  “Antique furniture,” said Kingsley. “That stuff would bring a fortune back in the solar system. Mostly Chatterton and it looks authentic. And beautiful pieces, museum pieces, every one. Thousand years old at least.”

  He stared from piece to piece. “But how did they got it here?” he burst out.

  Caroline’s laughter rang through the room, a chiming, silver laughter that had a note of wild happiness in it.

  “What’s the matter?” demanded Tommy.

  “I don’t see anything funny,” declared Herb. “Unless there is a joke. Unless that chicken really isn’t chicken.”

  “It’s chicken,” Caroline assured him. “And the rest of the food is real, too. And so is that furniture. Only I didn’t think of it as antique. You see, a thousand years ago that sort of furniture was the accepted style. That was the smartest sort of pieces to have in your home.”

  “But you?” asked Gary. “What did you have to do with it?”

  “I told the Engineers,” she said. “They asked me what we ate and I told them. They must have understood me far better than I thought. I told them the kind of clothes we wore and the kind of furniture we used. But, you see, the only things I knew about were out of date, things the people used a thousand years ago. All except the chicken. You still eat chicken, don’t you?”