Cosmic Engineers

by Clifford D. Simak

  “And how,” grinned Herb.

  “Why,” said Gary, “this means the Engineers can make anything they want to. They can arrange atoms to make any sort of material. They can transmute matter!”

  Kingsley nodded. “That’s exactly what it means,” he said.

  Herb was hurrying for the table.

  “If we don’t get there, there won’t be anything left,” Tommy suggested.

  The chicken, the mashed potatoes and gravy, the wine, the stuffed olives…all the food was good. It might have come out of the kitchen of the solar system’s smartest hotel only a few minutes before. After days of living on coffee and hastily slapped-together sandwiches, they did full justice to it.

  Herb regarded with regret the last piece of chicken and shook his head dolefully.

  “I just can’t do it,” he moaned. “I just can’t manage any more.”

  “I never tasted such food in all my life,” Kingsley declared.

  “They asked me what we ate,” Caroline said, “so I thought of all the things I like the best. They didn’t leave out a single one.”

  “But where are the Engineers?” asked Gary. “We haven’t seen a thing of them. We have seen plenty of what they have done and can do, but not one has showed himself.”

  Footsteps rasped across the floor and Gary swung around in his chair.

  Advancing toward them was something that looked like a man, but not exactly a man. It was the same height, had the same general appearance—two arms, two legs, a man-shaped torso and a head. But there was something definitely wrong with the face; something wrong with the body, too.

  “There’s the answer to your question,” said Tommy. “There’s an Engineer.”

  Gary scarcely heard him. He was watching the Engineer intently as the creature approached. And he knew why the Engineer was different. Cast in human shape, he was still a far cry from the humans of the solar system, for the Engineer was a metal man! A man fashioned of metallic matter instead of protoplasm.

  “A metal man,” he said.

  “That’s right,” replied Kingsley, and keen interest rather than wonderment was in his words. “This must be a large planet. The force of gravity must be tremendous. Protoplasm probably would be unable to stand up under its pull. We’d probably just melt down if the Engineers hadn’t fixed up this place for us.”

  “You are right,” said the metal man, but his mouth didn’t open, his facial expression didn’t change. He was speaking to them as the voice had spoken to them back on Pluto and again as they had entered the city. The Engineer stopped beside the table and stood stiffly, his arms folded across his chest.

  “Is everything satisfactory?” asked the Engineer.

  It was funny, this way he had of talking. No sound, no change of expression, no gesture… just words burning themselves into one’s brain, the imprint of thought thrust upon one’s consciousness.

  “Why, yes,” said Gary, “everything is fine,”

  “Fine,” shouted Herb, waving a drumstick. “Why, everything is perfect.”

  “We tried so hard to do everything just as you told us,” said the Engineer.

  “We are pleased that everything is all right. We had a hard time understanding one thing. Those paintings on the wall. You said they were things you had and were used to and we wanted so much to make everything as you wanted it. But they were something we had never thought of, something we had never done. We are sorry that we were so stupid. They are fine things. When this trouble is over, we may make more of them. They are so very beautiful. How queer it was we hadn’t thought of them.”

  Gary swung around and stared at the painting opposite the table. Obviously it was a work in oils and seemed a very fine one. It portrayed some fantastic scene, a scene with massive mountains in the background and strange twisted trees and waist-high grass and the glitter of a distant waterfall. A picture, Gary decided, that any art gallery would be proud to hang.

  “You mean,” he asked, “that these are the first pictures you ever painted?”

  “We hadn’t even thought of it before,” said the Engineer.

  They hadn’t known of paintings before. No single Engineer had ever thought to capture a scene on canvas. They had never wielded an artist’s brush. But here was a painting that was perfect in color and in composition, well balanced, pleasing to the eye!

  “One thing about you fellows,” said Tommy, “is that you will tackle anything.”

  “It was so simple,” said the Engineer, “that we are ashamed we never thought of it.”

  “But this trouble,” rumbled Kingsley. “This danger to the universe. You told us about it back on Pluto, but you didn’t explain. We would like to know.”

  “That,” said the Engineer, “is what I am here to tell you…”

  No change in the tone of the thoughts… no slightest trend of emotion. No change of expression on his face.

  “We will do whatever we can to help,” Kingsley told him.

  “We are sure of that,” said the Engineer. “We are glad that you are here. We were so satisfied when you said that you would come. We feel you can help us very, very much.”

  “But the danger,” prompted Caroline. “What is the danger?”

  “I will begin,” said the Engineer, “with information that to us is very elemental, although I do not believe you know it. You had no chance to find it out, being so far from the edge of the universe. But we who have lived here so many years, found the truth long ago.

  “This universe is only one of many universes. Only one of billions and billions of universes. We believe there are as many universes as there are galaxies within our own universe.”

  The Earthlings looked in astonishment at him. Gary glanced at Kingsley and the scientist seemed speechless. He was sputtering, trying to talk.

  “There are over fifty billion galaxies within our universe,” he finally said. “Or at least that is what our astronomers believe.”

  “Sorry to contradict,” said the Engineer. “There are many more than that. Many times more than that.”

  “More!” said Kingsley, faintly for him.

  “The universes are four-dimensional,” said the Engineer, “and they exist within a five-dimensional inter-space, perhaps another great super-universe with the universes within it taking the place of the galaxies as they are related to our universe.”

  “A universe within a universe,” said Gary, nodding his head. “And might it not be possible that this super-universe is merely another universe within an even greater super-universe?”

  “That might be so,” declared the Engineer. “It is a theory we have often pondered. But we have no way of knowing. We have so little knowledge…”

  A little silence fell upon the room, a silence filled with awe. This talk of universes and super-universes. This dwarfing of values. This relegating of the universe to a mere speck of dust in an even greater place!

  “The universes, even as the galaxies, are very far apart,” the Engineer went on. “So very far apart that the odds against two of them ever meeting are almost incomprehensibly great. Farther apart than the suns in the galaxies, farther apart, relatively, than the galaxies in the universe. But entirely possible that once in eternity two universes will meet.”

  He paused, a dramatic silence in his thought. “And that chance has come,” he said. “We are about to collide with another universe.”

  They sat in stunned silence.

  “Like two stars colliding,” said Kingsley. “That’s what formed our solar system.”

  “Yes,” said the Engineer, “like two stars colliding. Like a star once collided with your Sun.”

  Kingsley jerked his head up.

  “You know about that?” he asked.

  “Yes, we know about that. It was long ago. Many million years ago.”

  “How do you know about this other universe?” asked Tommy. “How could you know?”

  “Other beings in the other universe told us,” said the Engineer. “Beings
that know much more in many lines of research than we shall ever know. Beings we have been talking to for these many years.”

  “Then you knew for many years that the collision would take place,” said Kingsley.

  “Yes, we knew,” said the Engineer. “And we tried hard, the two peoples; We of this universe and those of the other universe. We tried hard to stop it, but there seemed no way. And so at last we agreed to summon, each from his own universe, the best minds we could find. Hoping they perhaps could find a way… find a way where we had failed.”

  “But we aren’t the best minds of the universe,” said Gary. “We must be far down the scale. Our intelligence, comparatively, must be very low. We are just beginning. You know more than we can hope to know for centuries to come.”

  “That may be so,” agreed the Engineer, “but you have something else. Or you may have something else. You may have a courage that we do not possess. You may have an imagination that we could not summon. Each people must have something to contribute. Remember, we had no art, we could not think up a painting; our minds are different. It is so very important that the two universes do not collide.”

  “What would happen,” asked Kingsley, “if they did collide?”

  “The laws of the five-dimensional inter-space,” explained the Engineer, “are not the laws of our four-dimensional universe. Different results would occur under similar conditions. The two universes will not actually collide. They will be destroyed before they collide.”

  “Destroyed before they collide?” asked Kingsley.

  “Yes,” said the Engineer. “The two universes will ‘rub,’ come so close together that they will set up a friction, or a frictional stress, in the five-dimensional inter-space. Under the inter-space laws this friction would create new energy… raw energy… stuff that had never existed before. Each of the universes will absorb some of that energy, drink it up.

  The energy will rush into our universes in ever-increasing floods.

  Unloosed, uncontrollable energy. It will increase the mass energy in each universe, will give each a greater mass…”

  Kingsley leaped to his feet, tipping over a coffee cup, staining the table cloth.

  “Increase the mass!” he shouted. “But…”

  Then he sat down again, sagged down, a strangely beaten man.

  “Of course that would destroy us,” he mumbled. “Presence of mass is the only cause for the bending of space. An empty universe would have no space curvature. In utter nothingness there would be no condition such as we call space. Totally devoid of mass, space would be entirely uncurved, would be a straight line and would have no real existence. The more mass there is, the tighter space is curved. The more mass there is, the less space there is for it to occupy.”

  “Flood the universe with energy from inter-space,” the Engineer agreed, “and space begins curving back, faster and faster, tighter and tighter, crowding the matter it does contain into smaller space. We would have a contracting rather than an expanding universe.”

  “Throw enough of that new energy into the universe,” Kingsley rumbled excitedly, “and it would be more like an implosion than anything else.

  Space would rush together. All life would be destroyed, galaxies would be wiped out. Existent mass would be compacted into a tiny area. It might even be destroyed if the contraction was so fast that it crushed the galaxies in upon each other. At the best, the universe would have to start all over again.”

  “It would start over again,” said the Engineer. “There would be enough new energy absorbed by the universe for just such an occurrence as you have foreseen. The entire universe would revert to original chaos.”

  “And me without my life insurance paid,” said Herb. Gary snarled at him across the table.

  Caroline leaned her elbows on the table and cupped her chin in her hands.

  “The problem,” she said, “is to find out how to control that new energy if it does enter the universe.”

  “That is the problem,” agreed the Engineer.

  “Mister,” said Gary, “if anyone can do it, this little lady can. She knows more about a lot of things than you do. I’ll lay you a bet on that.”

  * * *

  Chapter Eight

  « ^ »

  The suits were marvelous things, flexible and with scarcely any weight at all, not uncomfortable and awkward like an ordinary spacesuit.

  Herb admired his before he fastened down the helmet. “You say these things will let us walk around on your planet just as if we were at home?” he asked the Engineer.

  “We’ve tried to make it comfortable for you here,” the Engineer replied. “We hope you find them satisfactory. You came so far to help and we are so glad to see you. We hope that you will like us. We have tried so hard.”

  Caroline looked toward the Engineer curiously. There was a queer, vague undertone to all his thought-messages, an inexplicable sense of pleading, of desire for praise from her or from Kingsley. She shook her head with a little impatient gesture, but still that deep, less-than-half-conscious feeling was there. It made no sense, she told herself. It was just imagination. The thought-messages were pure thought, there was nothing to interpret them, nothing to give them subtle shades of meaning… no facial expression, no change of tone.

  But that pleading note!

  It reminded her suddenly—with a little mounting lump in her throat—of her bird dog, a magnificent mahogany-and-white Chesapeake retriever, dead these thousand years. Somehow she felt again as she used to feel when the dog had looked up at her after placing a recovered bird at her feet.

  He was gone now, gone with all the world she’d known. Her ideas and her memories were magnificent antiques, museum pieces, in this newer day. But she felt that if, somehow, that dog could have been granted eternal life, he’d be searching for her still… searching, waiting, hungering for the return that never came. And rising in queerly mixed ecstasies of gladness and shyness if she ever came back to him again.

  Kingsley spoke and the rising feeling snapped.

  “Gravity suits,” said Kingsley, almost bursting with excitement. “But even more than that! Suits that will let a man move about comfortably under any sort of conditions. Under any pressure, any gravity, in any kind of atmosphere.”

  “With these,” Gary suggested, “we would be able to explore Jupiter.”

  “Sure,” said Tommy, “that would be easy. Except for one little thing. Find a fuel that will take you there and take you out again.”

  “Hell,” enthused Herb, “I bet the Engineers could tell us how to make that fuel. These boys are bell-ringers all around.”

  “If there is any way we can help you, anything you want, anything at all,” declared the Engineer, “we would be so glad, so proud to help you.”

  “I bet you would at that,” said Herb.

  “Only a few of the denizens we called have arrived,” said the Engineer. “More of them should have come. Others may be on their way. We are afraid…”

  He must have decided not to say what was on his mind, for thought clicked off, broken in the middle of the sentence.

  “Afraid?” asked Kingsley. “Afraid of what?”

  “Funny,” said Gary, almost to himself. “Funny they should be afraid of anything.”

  “Not afraid for ourselves,” explained the Engineer. “Afraid that we may be forced to halt our work. Afraid of an interruption. Afraid someone will interfere.”

  “But who would interfere?” asked Caroline. “Who could possibly interfere in a thing like this? The danger is a common one. All things within the universe should unite to try to fight it.”

  “What you say is right,” declared the Engineer. “So right that it seems impossible any could think otherwise. But there are some who do. A race so blinded by ambition and by hatred that they see in this approaching Catastrophe an opportunity to wipe us out, to destroy the Engineers.”

  The Earthlings stood stock-still, shocked.

  “Now, wait a second,” sa
id Gary slowly. “Let us understand this. You mean to say that you have enemies who would die themselves just for the satisfaction of knowing that you were destroyed, too?”

  “Not exactly,” said the Engineer. “Many of them would be destroyed, but a select few would survive. They would go back to the point where the universe must start again, back to the point where space and time would once more begin expanding. And, starting there, they would take over the new universe. They would shape it to fit their needs. They would control it. They would have complete dominion over it.”

  “But,” cried Gary, “that is mad! Utterly mad. Sacrificing a present people, throwing away an entire universe for a future possibility.”

  “Not so mad,” said Kingsley quietly. “Our own Earth history will furnish many parallels. Mad rulers, power-mad dictators ready to throw away everything for the bare feel of power… ready to gamble with the horrors of increasingly scientific and ruthless warfare. It almost happened on Earth once… back in 2896. The Earth was almost wiped out when one man yearned for power and used biological warfare in its most hideous form. He knew what the result would be, but that didn’t stop him… Better, he reasoned, if there were no more than a thousand persons left alive, if he were the leader of that thousand. Nothing stopped him. The people themselves later stopped him, after he had done the damage… stopped him like the mad dog that he was.”

  “They hate us,” said the Engineer. “They have hated us for almost a million years. Because we, and we alone, have stood between them and their dreams of universal conquest. They see us as the one barrier they must remove, the one obstacle in their way. They know they never can defeat us by the power of arms alone, cannot defeat us so utterly that we still cannot smash their plans to take over the universe.”

  “And so,” said Gary, “they are perfectly willing to let the collision of universes wipe you out, even if it does mean disaster and destruction for the most of them.”

  “They must be nuts,” said Herb.

  “You do not understand,” protested the Engineer. “For many millions of years they have been educated with the dream of universal conquest. They have been so thoroughly propagandized with the philosophy that the state, the civilization, the race, is everything… that the individual does not count at all… that there is not a single one of them who would not die to achieve that dream. They glory in dying, glory in any sort of sacrifice that advances them even the slightest step toward their eventual goal.”