Cosmic Engineers

by Clifford D. Simak

  “And even if we do hit the place,” he said, “it may not be there.”

  Savagely he plunged his thumb against the lever. The rockets thundered and the ship was arcing up. Another pattern and another. They were plunging upward now under the full thrust of rocket power and still the ruined city was all around them, cragged, broken towers shattered by the blasting of atomic energy.

  The soft swirl of light that marked the opening of the time-space tunnel lay between and beyond two blasted towers. Gary fired a short, corrective pattern to line the nose of the ship between the towers and then depressed a stud and fired a blast that drove them straight between the towers, up and over the city, straight for the whirl of light.

  The ship arrowed swiftly up. The directional crossbars lined squarely upon the hub of spinning light.

  “We’re almost there,” he said, his breath whistling between his teeth.

  “We’ll know in just a minute.”

  The cold wind out of space was blowing on his face again; the short hairs on his neck were trying to rise into a ruff. The old challenge of the unknown. The old glory of crusading.

  He snapped a look at Caroline. She was staring out of the vision plate, staring straight ahead, watching the rim of the wheel spin out until only the blackness of the hub remained.

  She turned to him. “Oh, Gary!” she cried, and then the ship plunged into the hub and blackness as thick and heavy and as stifling as the ink of utter space flooded into the ship and seemed to dim the very radium lamps that burned within the room. He heard her voice coming out of the blackness that engulfed them. “Gary, I’m afraid!”

  Then the black was gone and the ship rode in space again—in a star-sprinkled space that had, curiously, a warm and friendly look after the blackness of the tunnel.

  “There it is!” Caroline cried, and Gary expelled his breath in a sigh of relief.

  Below them swam a planet, a planet such as they had seen in the spinning bowl back in the city of the Engineers. A planet that was spotted with mighty mountains weathered down to meek and somber hills, a planet with shallow seas and a thinning atmosphere.

  “The Earth,” said Gary, looking at it.

  Yes, the Earth. The birthplace of the human race, now an old and senile planet tottering to its doom, a planet that had outlived its usefulness. A planet that had mothered a great race of people—a race that always strove to reach what was just beyond, always reaching out to the not-as-yet, that met each challenge with a battle cry. A crusading people.

  “It’s really there,” said Caroline. “It’s real.”

  Gary glanced swiftly at the instruments. They were only a matter of five hundred miles above the surface and as yet there was no indication of atmosphere. Slowly the ship was dropping toward the planet, but still there was no sign of anything but space.

  He whistled softly. Even the slightest presence of gases would be registered on the dials and so far the needles hadn’t even flickered.

  Earth must be old! Her atmosphere was swiftly being stripped from her to leave her bare bones naked to the cold of space. Space, cold and malignant, was creeping in on mankind’s cradle.

  He struck the first sign of atmosphere at slightly under two hundred miles.

  The surface of the planet was lighted by a Sun which must have lost much of its energy, for the light seemed feeble compared to the way Gary remembered it. The Sun, behind them, was shielded from their vision.

  Swiftly they dropped, closer and closer to the surface. Eagerly they scanned the land beneath them for some sign of cities, but they saw only one and that, the telescope revealed, was in utter ruins. Drifting sands were closing over its shattered columns and once mighty walls.

  “It must have been a great city in its day,” said Caroline softly. “I wonder what has happened to the people.”

  “Died off,” said Gary, “or left for some other planet, maybe for some other sun.”

  The telescopic screen mirrored scene after scene of desolation. Vast deserts with shifting dunes and mile after mile of nothing but shimmering sand, without a trace of vegetation. Worn-down hills with boulder-strewn slopes and wind-twisted trees and shrubs making their last stand against the encroachment of a hostile environment.

  Gary turned the ship toward the night side of the planet, and it was then they saw the Moon. Vast, filling almost a twelfth of the sky, it loomed over the horizon, a monstrous orange ball in full phase.

  “How pretty!” gasped Caroline.

  “Pretty and dangerous,” said Gary.

  It must be approaching Roche’s limit, he thought. Falling out of the sky, year after year it had drawn closer to the Earth. When it reached a certain limit, it would be disrupted, torn to bits by the stresses of gravitation hauling and tugging at it. It would shatter into tiny fragments and those fragments would take up independent orbits around old Earth, giving her in miniature the rings of Saturn. But the same forces which would tear the Moon to bits would shake up the Earth, giving rise to volcanic action, world-shattering earthquakes, monstrous tidal waves. Mountains would be leveled, new continents raised. Earth’s face would be changed once again, as it probably had been changed many times before. As it had been changed since early Man had known it, for search as he might, Gary could find no single recognizable feature, not a single sea or continent that seemed familiar.

  He reflected on the changes that must have come to pass. The Earth must have slowed down. Probably a night now was almost a month long, and a day equally as long. Long scorching days and endless frigid nights. Century after century, with the moon tides braking the Earth’s motion, with the addition of mass due to falling meteors, Earth had lost her energy.

  Increase of mass and loss of energy had slowed her spin, had shoved her farther and farther away from the Sun, pushing her out and into the frigidness of space. And now she was losing her atmosphere. Her gravity was weakening and the precious gases were slowly being stripped from her. Rock weathering also would have absorbed some of the oxygen.

  “Look!” cried Caroline.

  Aroused from his daydreaming, Gary saw a city straight ahead, looming on the horizon, a great city a-gleam with shining metal.

  “The Engineer said we would find people here,” Caroline whispered. “That must be where we’ll find them.”

  The city was falling into ruin. Much of it, undoubtedly, already had been covered by the creeping desert that crawled toward it from every direction.

  Some of the buildings were falling apart, with great gaping holes staring like empty, hopeless eyes. But part of it, at least, was standing, and that part gave a breath-taking hint to the sort of city it had been when it soared in full pride of strength at its very prime.

  Smoothly Gary brought the ship down toward the city, down toward a level patch of desert in front of the largest building yet standing. And the building, he saw, was a beauteous thing that almost defied description, a poem in grace and rhythm, seemingly too fragile for this weird and bitter world.

  The ship plowed along the sand and stopped. Gary rose from the pilot’s seat and reached for his helmet. “We’re here,” he announced.

  “I didn’t think we’d make it,” Caroline confessed. “We took such an awful chance.”

  “But we did,” he said gruffly. “And we have a job to do.”

  He set his helmet on his head and clamped it down. “I have a hunch we’ll need these things,” he said.

  She put on her helmet and together they went out of the air lock.

  Wind keened thinly over the empty deserts and the ruins, kicked up little puffs of sand that raced and danced weird rigadoons across the dunes and past the ship, up to the very doors of the shiny building that confronted them.

  A slinking shape slunk across a dune and streaked swiftly for the shelter of a pile of fallen masonry—a little furtive shape that might have been a skulking dog or something else, almost anything at all.

  A sense of desolation smote Gary and he felt an alien fear gripping at his soul
.

  He shivered. This wasn’t the way a man should feel on his own home planet.

  This wasn’t the way a man should feel on coming home from the very edge of everything.

  But it wasn’t the edge of everything, he reminded himself. It was just the edge of the universe. For the universe wasn’t everything. Beyond it, stretching for uncountable, mind-shattering distances, were other universes. The universe was just a tiny unit of the whole, perhaps as tiny a unit of the whole as the Earth was a tiny unit of its universe. A grain of sand upon the beach, he thought—less than a grain of sand upon the beach.

  And this might not be Earth, of course. It might be just the shadow of the Earth—a probability that gained strength and substance and a semblance of being because it missed being an actuality by a mere hair’s-breadth.

  His mind whirled at the thought of it, at the astounding vista of possibilities that the thought brought up, the infinite number of possibilities that existed as shadows, each with a queer shadow existence of its very own, things that just missed being realities. Disappointed ghosts, he thought, wailing their way through the eternity of nonexistence.

  Caroline was close beside him. Her voice came to him through the helmet phones, a tiny voice. “Gary, everything is so strange.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Strange.”

  Cautiously they walked forward, toward the gaping door of the great metal building from whose turrets and spires and froth of superstructure the moonbeams splintered in a cold glitter of faery beauty.

  Sand crunched and grated underfoot. The wind made shrill, keening noises and they could see the frozen frost crystals in the sand, moisture locked in the grip of deadly cold.

  They reached the doorway and peered inside. The interior was dark and Gary unhooked the radium lamp from his belt. The lamp cut a broad beam of light down the mighty, high-arched hallway that led straight from the door toward the center of the building.

  Gary caught his breath, seized with a nameless fear, the fear of the dark and the unfamiliar, of the ghostly and the ancient.

  “We might as well go in,” he said, fighting down the fear.

  Their footsteps echoed and re-echoed in the darkness as the metal of their boots rang against the cold paving blocks.

  Gary felt the weight of centuries pressing down upon him—the eyes of many nations and of many people watching furtively, jealous to guard old tradition from the invasion of an alien mind. For he and Caroline, he sensed, were aliens here, aliens in time if not in blood. He sensed it in the very architecture of the place, in the atmosphere of the long and silent hall, in the quiet that brooded on this dead or dying planet.

  Suddenly they left the hallway and were striding into what seemed a vast chamber. Gary snapped the lamp to full power and explored the place. It was filled with furniture. Solid blocks of seat faced a rostrum, and all about the wall ran ornate benches.

  At one time, now long gone, it might have been a council hall, a meeting place of the people to decide great issues. In this room, he told himself, history might have been written, the course of cosmic empire might have been shaped and the fate of stars decided.

  But now there was no sign of life, just a brooding silence that seemed to whisper in a tongueless language of days and faces and problems long since wiped out by the march of years.

  He looked about and shivered.

  “I don’t like this place,” said Caroline.

  A light suddenly flared and blazed as a door opened and thought-fingers reached out to them, thoughts that were kindly and definitely human:

  “Do you seek someone here?”

  * * *

  Chapter Twelve

  « ^ »

  STARTLED, they swung around. A stooped old man stood in a tiny doorway that opened from the hall—an old man who, while he was human, seemed not quite human. His head was large and his chest bulged out grotesquely. He stood on trembly pipestem legs and his arms were alarmingly long and skinny.

  A long white beard swept over his chest, but his great domed head was innocent of even a single hair. Across the space that separated them, Gary felt the force of piercing eyes that stared out from under shaggy eyebrows.

  “We’re looking for someone,” said Gary, “to give us information.”

  “Come in,” shrieked the thought of the old man. “Come in. Do you want me to catch my death of cold holding the door open for you?”

  Gary grasped Caroline by the hand. “Come on,” he said.

  At a trot, they crossed the room, ducked through the door. They heard the door slam behind them and turned to look at the old man.

  He stared back at them. “You are human beings,” said his thoughts. “People of my own race. But from long ago.”

  “That’s right,” said Gary. “From many millions of years ago.”

  They sensed something that almost approached disbelief in the old man’s thoughts.

  “And you seek me?”

  “We seek someone,” said Gary. “Someone who may tell us something that may save the universe.”

  “Then it must be me,” said the old man, “because I’m the only one left.”

  “The only one left!” cried Gary. “The last man?”

  “That’s right,” said the old man, and he seemed almost cheerful about it.

  “There were others but they died. All men’s life spans must sometime come to an end.”

  “But there are others,” persisted Gary. “You can’t be the last man left alive.”

  “There were others,” said the old one, “but they left. They went to a far star. To a place prepared for them.”

  A coldness gripped Gary’s heart.

  “You mean they died?”

  The old man’s thoughts were querulous and impatient.

  “No, they did not die. They went to a better place. To a place that has been prepared for them for many years. A place where they could not go until they were ready.”

  “But you?” asked Gary.

  “I stayed because I wanted to,” said the old man. “Myself and a few others. We could not forsake Earth. We elected to stay. Of those who stayed all the others have died and I am left alone.”

  Gary glanced around the room. It was tiny, but comfortable. A bed, a table, a few chairs, other furniture he did not recognize.

  “You like my place?” asked the old man.

  “Very much,” said Gary.

  “Perhaps,” said the old man, “you would like to take off your helmets. It’s warm in here and I keep the atmosphere a little denser than it is outside.

  Not necessary that I do so, of course, but it is more comfortable. The atmosphere is getting pretty thin and hard to breathe.”

  They unfastened their helmets and lifted them off. The air was sharp and tangy, the room was warm.

  “That’s better,” said Caroline.

  “Chairs?” asked the old man, pointing out a couple.

  They sat and he lowered his old body into another.

  “Well, well,” he said, and his thoughts had a grandfatherly touch about them, “humans of an earlier age. Splendid physical specimen, the two of you. And fairly barbaric still—but the stuff is in you. You use your mouths to talk with and man hasn’t talked with other than his thoughts for thousands and thousands of years. That in itself would set you pretty far back.”

  “Pretty far is right,” said Gary. “We are the first humans who ever left the solar system.”

  “That is far,” said the old man. “Far, far…”

  His sharp eyes watched them closely. “You must have an interesting story,” he suggested.

  “We have,” said Caroline and swiftly they told it to him, excitedly, first one and then the other talking, adding in details, explaining situations, laying before him the problems which they faced.

  He listened intently, snapping questions now and then, his bright old eyes shining with the love of adventure, the wrinkles in his face taking on a kind benevolence as if they might be children, home from the
first day of school, telling of all the new wonders they had met.

  “So you came to me,” he said. “You came trundling down a crazy timepath to seek me out. So that I could tell you the things you need to know.”

  Caroline nodded. “You can tell us, can’t you?” she asked. “It means so much to us—so much to everyone.”

  “I wouldn’t worry,” said the old man. “If the universe had come to an end, I wouldn’t be here. You couldn’t have come to me.”

  “But maybe you aren’t real,” said Caroline. “Maybe you are just a shadow. A probability…”

  The oldster nodded and combed his beard with gnarled fingers. The breath wheezed in his mighty chest.

  “You are right,” he agreed. “I may be only a shadow. This world of mine may be no more than a shadow-world. I sometimes wonder if there is any reality at all—if there is anything but thought. Whether it may not be that some gigantic intelligence has dreamed all these things we see and believe in and accept as real… if the giant intelligence may not have set mighty dream stages and peopled them with actors of his imagination. I wonder at times if all the universes may be nothing more than a shadow show. A company of shadowy actors moving on a shadow stage.”

  “But you can tell us,” pleaded Caroline. “You will tell…”

  His old eyes twinkled. “I will tell you, yes, and gladly. Your fifth dimension is eternity. It is everything and nothing… all rolled into one.

  It is a place where nothing has ever happened and yet, in a sense, where everything has happened. It is the beginning and the end of all things. In it there is no such thing as space or time or any other phenomena which we attribute to the four-dimensional continuum.”

  “I can’t understand,” said Caroline, lines of puzzlement twisting her face. “It seems so hopeless, so entirely hopeless. Can it be explained by mathematics?”

  “Yes,” said the old man, “but I’m afraid you wouldn’t understand. The mathematics necessary to explain it weren’t evolved until just a few thousand years ago.”