But we had stopped our feverish crating of ordinary antiques when Russ had found that solar engine, all but buried by an ancient rockslide from the desolate mountains. On two Ionian days—forty-two hours long, they are—we put in protracted work-shifts, digging the thing out of the rubble that had preserved it.
It must have weighed a hundred tons, even in that weak gravity. We could never get it carted back to Earth. It didn't look like a good financial prospect. But lots of times enigmas are more fascinating than filthy lucre.
"We'll never have any peace until we see whether the engine'll run, Milt," old Russ had told me. And I knew he was right. Though later I was aware we should have left well-enough alone.
So we'd polished the reflecting mirrors of the sun-plant. We'd patched and repaired the leaks and dents in the boiler, turbine, and other parts. We'd filled the dried-out boiler from our ship's precious supply of water. We'd applied oil liberally, where necessary. Just at evening we'd got that huge, tip-tilted reflector frame turned around on its pivot, so it would face the sun at dawn.
And now, coming back from our ship in the early afternoon, we were flabbergasted to see that world-old engine already in operation, its throttle evidently opened by an automatic device!
Russ Abfall scrambled around to the dynamo.
"Is it really delivering juice, Russ?" I demanded, running after him.
"Yeah! Plenty!" he responded after a moment, pointing through a glass-covered peephole in its side. Peering there, I saw fat blue sparks of electricity playing steadily about some peculiarly-formed metal brushes.
"But where is all that juice going?" I asked. "The Ionians didn't use electricity much. They had those radioactive lamps to light up their digs, for instance."
Russ shrugged and pointed to the enamel-insulated wires leading out of the generator, and into a heavy iron pipe that went right down into the rocky ground, to some hidden destination. Tracing it to its end would be difficult, if we wanted to avoid the possibility of breaking an important part of the whole mechanism.
"We'll find out one way or another what's happening to the current," Russ reassured me. '"Right now let's watch—here. There's enough to see."
HE spoke briskly, but I could tell he was getting worried. As for myself, I felt an unpleasant tautening of the hide along my back, and the nape of my neck. It was like a premonition of disaster.
There really was plenty to see, just watching the sun-engine itself. As the hours went by, a gear-system became active, turning and tilting the reflector frame on its pivot and gimbals, keeping the great, iron ring and its mirrors faced toward the sun, so as to collect all the heat possible for the boiler.
After a while I went to a grotto nearby—part of that last Ionian city—while Russ, who is a much better mechanic and scientist than I am, stayed behind to keep an eye on the solar engine. For hours and hours I walked down bas-relief-flanked passages, and through gloomy halls, searching for some sign of where that electric current was disappearing to; but long search by the light of my ato-flash revealed no trace of an answer.
It was there, in that dust and silence, and wreckage of quaint household fittings, that a definite wave of intense mental discomfort came over me. It was as sudden as a hammer-blow. I hurried back to the surface, a vague suspicion in me becoming half conviction. It was already late afternoon.
Russ was walking around and around the sun-plant, his nerves and mind evidently responding to the same weird influence as were mine.
He had one arm drawn out of the sleeve of his space suit. His hand, thus freed, was thrust up under the collar of his oxygen helmet, and this way he was smoking a cigarette.
"Something's happened, Russ," I grated. "But what?"
"I know it!" he returned, swinging around to face me. "I feel queer as the deuce, Milt! I'm all tense and tight inside; I want to do something, though just what it is I can't say. I've got to get these arms and legs of mine busy. I can't relax at all. It's like I was about ready to explode!"
The sun plant. We both stared at it, accusation in our hearts. Russ was fingering the pistol at his belt, as though he wanted to fire a dynamium capsule at that ancient mechanism, and blow it to smithereens.
"Maybe," he said slowly, his voice shriller, even, than usual, "—maybe we ought to anyway shut this damned thing off. That electricity the dynamo is delivering—it's going down there under ground. It's energizing something. It's making us feel the way we do...."
"I suppose we should trace that pipe—that carries those wires—right away, Russ," I added. "We'll have to, eventually, I suppose, to see what kind of a funny apparatus they're hooked to."
ROCKING on his metal-shod heels, Russ seemed to consider; but he vetoed what I had suggested, at last, just as we'd both vetoed it before.
"No, not yet, Milt," he said, barely audible, as though his heavy breathing made it hard for him to speak. "Some circumstance might turn up by itself, to explain everything to us. Meanwhile we can't take the chance of wrecking any important works. If we did, we might never learn the—truth. This seems to be big stuff, Milt."
That ugly, bearded image, which was the boiler of the solar engine, grinned its secret grin. The sun was dropping lower and lower in the dark firmament. It was already very close to the sullen hills. Soon, frigid darkness would come. Jupiter, as always, hung with just about one fourth of its great grey-and-red streaked disc above the horizon.
"It'll be sundown soon, Russ," I said, trying to reassure not only him, but myself as well—trying to ignore that increasing and nameless tension within me. "Then, deprived of energy to keep up steam, the engine'll have to stop."
I was right, of course. True to my predictions, the turbine and generator ceased turning at sunset. But the sinister spell that had come over Russ and me, didn't quit! Somewhere, energy from the power-plant must have been stored up, to operate whatever apparatus and force it was, that was acting on our nervous systems.
"I guess it's about time to do something about—all this!" Russ grumbled, his voice wavering.
"Yeah!" I seconded.
I was thinking, somehow, of all the skeletons I'd seen on Io—and mummies, too. White-furred bodies, dehydrated and preserved by the dryness. Everywhere those old Ionians had died at their tasks. Digging canals and reservoirs to collect and hoard the precious water of the rare snows. The conditions under which they had lived, in those final days, must have been terrible. Yet many of the mummies still wore eternal and mysteriously happy smiles on their withered faces. The Ionians seemed to have perished in joy. But why? How? In that question there was a blood-chilling enigma.
Well, we started back for our ship, to get our blast-excavators. We were going to dig down and see just what was hidden under the solar engine. But as we hurried through the swift-gathering night, I heard a dim rattle behind me, transmitted by the tenuous atmosphere.
STARTLED, we looked back at the machine—the sun-plant—which was now a hundred yards away. The whole frame of it was turning around slowly, majestically, a black, bizarre silhouette against the still-lighted west. It was turning to face the east—to wait for the dawn. Gears were moving it. As to where the power came from—well, I could guess on that point. An electric generator is built just about like a motor, and can serve as one, if electricity is fed back to it. So I figured juice was coming up along those wires that led into the ground—enough stored juice to revolve the dynamo and work the gears, turning the ring, and the reflector of the power plant east.
At sight of that eerie, automatic motion, Russ gave an inarticulate gurgle. We both knew then, that with its efficient steam condensers keeping the boiler always full, the engine could run every day, indefinitely, till it wore out. But we didn't get a chance to discuss the situation, or to act. Strange events happened too suddenly, bewildering us.
I can't say just what it was that reminded me, not of those final Ionians, but of their still more ancient ancestors, who had lived in the warm age of Io's youth. Maybe it was my increasing hatred of
the starkness of my surroundings, and of the greater and greater menace in them.
I glanced along the mountain gorge, toward the small desert plain beyond, where those last cultivated fields of Io had been. I expected to see, in the harsh, bluish twilight, only those dry irrigation trenches, and the twisted iron pillars that had supported the glass roofs of those hothouse fields, smashed long ago by infrequent meteor showers. Beyond that mass of rock there, the cigar-shape of the Sun Spot should be resting, still hidden from view.
But—there was something else—collecting and forming against the picture of that dreary scene. Call it a kind of mirage—something that resembled a photograph superimposed upon another photograph by double-exposure. And the second of the two was becoming more solid, more real, every moment.
THERE was a lake there, on that dry plain—or there seemed to be. It was a beautiful lake ruffled by little moving wavelets. Along its shores were odd trees. Beyond them loomed a city wall, covered with vines. And rearing up over the rampart were high buildings topped by carved pavilion-like structures, ornate as Burmese pagodas. Over it all was a sky, soft and blue as if it belonged to a summer evening on Earth—except for the many moons that hung in it, not almost airless moons like those of the present, for each was clad in the cloudy veil of an atmosphere.
And there was Jupiter, still three-quarters hidden below the horizon, but not streaked and cold anymore. It glowed with a dusky, luminous redness, and it seemed that I could feel its warmth.
I knew then, at least, what the mirage, or whatever you care to call it, represented. Primitive Io, long before the last days—when the whole Jovian system was new. I had thought of those times, and here, somehow, it was crystallizing before me. Real.
"Russ," I gasped. "Russ—I see a city—like the ruins of the most ancient cities here on Io. The ones whose foundations you can hardly trace! Down there on the plain at the end of the gorge!"
I pointed with an extended arm, while I babbled on, describing what I seemed to see. I was too bewildered to think of danger.
Russ, beside me, gave a nervous grunt. Then he stammered: "No, I can't make out—anything—Milt. But I feel damned—funny!..."
He paused there, as if startled. Pretty soon he gasped in sheer surprise. "You're right, Milt!" he grated. "I see it now—the city—the details filling themselves in, each one as you describe it. The lake, the wall, the vines! It's what you'd imagine one of those oldest cities to be—from the ruins.... And I see a city gate. People are coming out of it—goblin people, very slender and pallid, and without the great lungs and chests of their descendants. They're like those original folk must have been! Except for their natural fur, white, and much less heavy than that of the last men, they wear no clothing—only metal ornaments. And I hear strange music...."
Russ and I stood there, staring, at the mouth of the gorge. And—it was funny! I hadn't seen that gate my pal spoke of, before! But I did now! I hadn't seen the people either, or heard the music. But these parts of the vision were all there, now, clear and vivid! It was as though everything was imaginary, somehow, though it all seemed so real, and that Russ' descriptive words were helping my imagination to fill in the details. From what Russ had just said, it had been the same with him. He hadn't seen the ancient city at all, until I had described it to him. Apparently, then, I had reached the nameless stage of being able to observe the impossible, a moment or so ahead of Russ.
I was in a kind of drunken fuddle. The lake there, fascinated me. I saw goblin-folk wading into it, the cool water splashing around their thin knees.... Suddenly I was aware of a tremendous yearning, stronger than any perhaps more logical fear.
"Russ," I mumbled. "The lake.... Let's go swimming. It's been so damned long. Out here on Io we never could—before. Dust, and skeletons, and cold stars. That's all we've been living with—for a month...."
WELL, right then Russ Abfall began to swear at me. "You loony nut!" he shrilled at last in his cracked voice. "Don't you realize this is all a fake—a mental phantasmagoria of some kind? It's one of the enigmas of a dying race—something they must have employed in desperation! You don't want to get mixed up any more than you are with something like that, do you?... That damned sun-plant—and what ever its underground-wires are attached to! Visions! Hallucinations! Somehow that hidden apparatus causes them! And we can't even guess what kind of a hellish end this thing we've tangled with, can have! It must be like a drug—opium or hashish! It can't work like them of course—but—"
He stopped and stared at me. His tone was changed utterly, when he spoke again. "Milt," he said in wondering simplicity. "You've got a swim-suit on."
I examined myself quickly. Yep, it was true! My heavy space armor had apparently vanished. And I was clad in a one-piece outfit of blue cellutex fabric, common on Earthly beaches. Looking at Russ, through that antique dusk and its weird illumination, I saw that he was rigged out just as I was! We were two contemporary Earthmen on primal Io!
"You're ready for the water too, I see, Russ," I told him.
His confusion was almost humorous when he looked down at himself. He swore rather weakly. Then he wheeled about, as if to search for the sun engine with his eyes. I looked too, but what I saw was—not a desolate expanse at the foot of the northern cliffs, but a dense forest. A soft mild wind blew against my body. And the stars overhead were pale.... The mirage or hallucination had closed in on me almost completely.
Russ' voice was a bit odd, and far away, when he spoke; but I was sure that it, at least, was still real. Sure because of the worry in it, and the momentary groping for fact.
"It isn't there, Milt!" he was stammering. "The sun-plant, I mean... At least I can't see it. Can you?"
"No!" I shouted, straining, so that I would be sure to reach him. "I see just trees...."
"So do I, Milt," he returned. "It's natural we'd imagine the same thing, there. Old Io. We both know the archeology, Milt. How things were...." And then Russ sighed in capitulation. "I wonder if it matters—really," he continued. "Maybe you were right, Milt—about a swim. I've been a space-man off and on for forty-one years. You get sick of things out here on these damned silent worlds sometimes—damned sick...." His voice seemed to trail away.
BUT I knew from my own experience just what was back of what he had said. Space. That awful nostalgia that grows on you. It was largely the humanness in old Russ, and the intriguing pull of the visions that had surrounded us, that had made him give up. And it was the same with me. We both knew that we were toying with something that justly should have made our flesh crawl; but we didn't care. I wasn't worried a bit. And I had the oddest idea that anything I wanted would happen.
Russ and I walked down to the lake together. Or anyway seemed to. Perhaps we were already going our separate ways, along separate dream-channels, as our individual fancies dictated. We waded out into the water, mingling with those ancient Ionians. Their voices echoed around me, speaking a beautiful, liquid language. Or was it a language at all? Probably it was just a lot of pleasing sounds which my mind created for itself. But those ancients paid no attention to me, however—most likely because I wanted to think, alone—then. I swam far out from the shore, feeling the heady glory of that tropic night....
Yes, I knew it was just a dream. But what did that matter? Pretty soon I began to wish that I wasn't on Io—that I was back on Earth instead. Almost at once, then, the scene around me, vanished. I was riding a San Francisco belt-walk—one I knew well. Ahead of me, in the morning sunshine, was the new Farwell building, finished in 2314. Chet Robbins, an old friend of mine, was with me. He works for the Wenz Rocket Motor Company, and he likes magic.
"Got a new card trick to spring on the gang tonight, Milt," he was saying, his broad face all pleased good-nature. "It's a real honey! Boy, it'll make your eyes pop!"
I'd never been able to catch on to those clever stunts of Chet's, and sometimes this had made me kind of mad. But now, in this dream, I was sure I had him. All I had to do was imagine—for instan
ce—the Farwell building floating up into the sky....
I saw that two thousand foot spire doing just that. I heard a rending of metal, as the aerial street-spans connecting it with other buildings, parted. I heard people scream distantly. And I could see Chet's face turn suddenly pale and foolish. He gasped, speechless.
"Never mind, Chet," I said, laughing. "I'll bring it down again." And I did. A moment later the Farwell building was back in place on the ground once more, and the street-spans were intact. Chet was looking at me utterly flabbergasted.
It made me feel a little silly. This wasn't the real Chet Robbins at all. Petty revenge was out of place. So shifted the scene again—I don't remember to what.
BUT it's easy to see what I'd started for myself. Anything was possible in my imaginary environment. I could imagine myself Caesar or Alexander the Great, if I wanted to, and my fancies would seem perfectly real around me. Historical accuracy would depend on my limited knowledge in each case, if history happened to be involved. For instance, I don't know much about how Caesar's Roman legions were organized, and their equipment is hazy to me—but still I could construct for myself a vivid living picture.
I didn't ever try Roman times more than briefly, but I tried countless other things. Pulled by a strong nostalgia, I relived fragments of my own life. I'd played football for California Tech, and I did so again, now. Saturday afternoons. Yelling crowds. Coach McKay giving us his hardboiled lectures. Fun and fight all over again. And then the training school at Vananis, Mars, where I'd learned to fly rockets. We'd had some nice blowouts—our class—in that quaint old city, which twenty-five thousand Earth people had colonized, replacing the Martian race, dead in some ancient plague. Dances. Parties. The faces of friends.
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