“Brigadier,” said Lansing, “we found it this afternoon. But I must warn you that—”
The Brigadier leaped to his feet and the bottle went flying from his lap. It hit the floor but did not break. It went rolling across the floor, and Lansing caught it.
“You found it!” yelled the Brigadier. “What is it? Tell me what you found.”
“Brigadier, sit down,” said Lansing, speaking sharply, as one might address a naughty child.
Apparently astonished at the tone of Lansing’s voice, the Brigadier sat down meekly. Lansing leaned forward and handed him the bottle. He took it and placed it back in his lap.
“Now let’s talk about this quietly,” Mary said. “Let us consider it. Let’s not go charging off. I suggested to Edward that we should say nothing of our discovery, but he said we had made a bargain—”
“But why?” shouted the Brigadier. “Why say nothing?”
“Because what we found is beyond our understanding. We know at least one thing that it can do, but there is no way to control it. It’s dangerous. It’s nothing to fool around with. We told ourselves that somewhere there must be a control room, but we couldn’t find it.”
“You’re an engineer,” said Jurgens. “You, of all of us, should know the most about it. Why don’t you go ahead and tell us what you found.”
“Perhaps you, Edward,” Mary said.
Lansing said, “No, it’s yours to tell.”
She told them and they listened intently. There were a few questioning interruptions, but not many.
After she had finished, a long silence ensued. Finally Jurgens turned to Mary. “What you are saying is that the people here had a thrust toward other worlds. Alien worlds, most likely, rather than alternate Earths.”
“They may not have been aware of the alternate Earths,” said Lansing.
“They wanted to get away from here,” said Jurgens. “The installation that you found and the doors are tied together, part of the same research effort.”
“It seems likely,” Mary told him.
The Brigadier said, quietly, quite unlike his earlier shouting, “You two are the only ones who have seen it. The rest of us, all five of us, should have a look at it.”
“I’m not saying we should not investigate,” said Mary. “What I do say is that we should be careful what we do. Both Edward and I were taken over, but only for a moment. That may be no more than a sample of what it can do.”
“You have searched for a control room?”
“We searched till dark,” said Lansing.
“It would seem the control should be housed with the apparatus,” said the Brigadier.
“We thought of that, of course. But there is no room. All the space is taken up by the installation. Then we figured that in a building close by…”
“That would not necessarily be the case,” said Mary. “I know that now. The control room could be anywhere in the city. Anyplace at all.”
“You say the mechanism is unrecognizable? That you have no idea what it is?”
“There is not a single piece of it,” said Mary, “that I recognized as anything that would correspond to any kind of mechanism familiar to my world. Of course a closer look, a closer examination might make for a marginal understanding. The point is that I wouldn’t want to get that close, get that involved with it. That would be sticking your neck out. Edward and I did not experience the full effect, I’m sure. Get more involved, closer to it, I can’t imagine what might happen.”
“The feature of this city that worries me the most,” said Sandra, “is the flatness of it. Not of the city itself, but the culture that it represents. It exhibits a cultural poverty that is simply impossible. There are no churches, no recognizable places of worship, nothing that ever seems to have been a library or an art gallery or a music hall. It seems impossible to me that any people could have been so destitute of sensitivity, could have been satisfied to live out such flat lives.”
“They may have been a one-idea people,” said Lansing.
“Absorbed, the entire body of them, in one area of research and endeavor. This, of course, is hard to understand, but we cannot know their motives. It would be possible, I suppose, to have so strong a motive…”
“This discussion is getting us nowhere,” growled the Brigadier. “We’ll have a look in the morning. Or at least I will have a look. The others of you will be taking off.”
“We’ll stay with you,” said Lansing, “long enough to have that look.”
“But, for God’s sake,” said Mary, “everyone be careful.”
I DOUBT,“ THE BRIGADIER observed, ”that there is as much danger here as would appear to be the case. The machines may be able to affect a sensitive, whereas a man of stronger fiber who had his feet solidly planted on the ground…”
“I suppose,” said Lansing, “you are thinking of yourself. If that is the case, don’t let me hold you back. Go ahead and walk straight into it.”
“You’re dead wrong,” Mary told the Brigadier. “I’m not a sensitive. It’s just possible Edward may be and Sandra certainly. The Parson was and—”
“The Parson,” said the Brigadier, “could not have been a sensitive. Unstrung, perhaps, unstable, but otherwise a clod.”
Mary sighed in resignation. “Have it your own way,” she said.
The five of them stood on the metal walkway, well clear of the machines, which still were glowing with their cat eyes, still singing to themselves.
“I had anticipated,” said Jurgens, “that being half machine myself I might be able to discern some affinity with this installation. I could not know, of course, for on my world there are only the simplest machines. Nothing remotely like these. As I say, I had looked forward to a possibly interesting experience, but I am deeply disappointed.”
“You feel nothing?” Sandra asked.
“Not a thing,” he said.
“Well, now that we have seen these machines,” the Brigadier asked, “what do we do about them? What do we do next?”
“We promised you nothing,” Lansing said, “except that we would come along with you to have a look at them. For my part, that’s all I’m going to do. Have another look at them.”
“Then what’s the use of finding them?”
“We told you,” Mary said, “that at the moment there is no way of understanding them. You were looking for something—you had no idea what it was—so we went out and found it for you. I told you the other night that this city will kill us one by one. The Parson told you it was evil and he fled the evil that he saw. If the Parson was right and there is evil in this city, the machines may be a part of it.”
“You don’t think this, do you?”
“No, I don’t. I don’t think machines have a capacity for evil. But the city is no place to stay and I am leaving it, right now. Are you coming, Edward?”
“You lead the way. I’ll be right behind you.”
“Now wait a minute!” stormed the Brigadier. “You can’t desert me now. Not when we are on the brink.”
“The brink of what?” asked Jurgens.
“The brink of finding the answer we seek.”
“It’s not here,” said Jurgens. “The machines may be a part of it, but they’re not all of it and you can’t get the solution from them.”
The Brigadier sputtered at him, but no words came out. His face was puffed and red with anger and frustration. Then suddenly his sputtering stopped and he shouted at them. “We’ll see about that! I’ll show you. I’ll show all of you!”
As he shouted at them he leaped forward, running down the walkway, straight between the two banks of machines.
Jurgens took two quick steps in pursuit, struggling to get solid footing with his crutch on the smoothness of the metal walkway. Moving deliberately, Lansing kicked the crutch out from under him and sent the robot sprawling.
The Brigadier still was running. He was far down the walkway when suddenly he sparkled all along his entire body. The sparkle flared for
a small fraction of a second and the Brigadier was gone.
Blinded by the flare, they all stood stockstill, horrified. Jurgens, using the crutch to pull himself erect, scrambled to his feet.
“I think,” he told Lansing, “that I must thank you for my life.”
“I told you, long ago,” said Lansing, “that if you ever tried another stupid trick, I’d clobber you with whatever was at hand.”
“I can’t see him,” said Sandra. “The Brigadier’s not there.”
Mary directed a flashlight beam down the walkway. “Neither can I,” she said. “The beam doesn’t carry far enough.”
“I think it does,” said Jurgens. “The Brigadier is gone.”
“But it wasn’t that way with us,” Mary said to Lansing. “Our bodies stayed behind.”
“We weren’t as far down the walkway as the general was.”
“That may be it,” she said. “You spoke of the machines being able to take over the body as well as the mind. I told you it would be impossible. Maybe I was wrong.”
“Two of us gone,” said Sandra. “The Parson and the Brigadier.”
“The Brigadier may come back,” said Lansing.
“Somehow I don’t think so,” said Mary. “There was a lot of energy involved. The Brigadier could very well be dead.”
“You can say this for him,” said Jurgens. “He went out in a blaze of glory. No! No! I’m sorry. I apologize. I did not mean that; I should not have said it.”
“You’re forgiven,” Lansing said. “You just beat another one of us to saying it.”
“Now what?” asked Sandra. “What do we do now?”
“That’s a problem,” Mary told her. “Edward, do you have any kind of hunch that he’ll be coming back? As we came back.”
“No hunch. Since we came back, I thought…”
“But this was different.”
“The damn fool,” said Lansing. “The poor, pitiful damn fool. The leader to the end.”
They stood, huddled together, looking down the walkway in all its emptiness. The cat eyes glowed, the machines kept up their crooning.
“Maybe we should wait awhile,” said Mary, “before we leave the city.”
“I think we should,” said Jurgens.
“If he does come back, he’ll need us,” Sandra said.
“Edward,” Mary asked, “what do you think?”
“That we should wait,” he said. “At a time like this, we can’t desert the man. I can’t imagine he’ll come back, but if he should…”
They moved their camp into the alley, near the stairs that went down into the cavern where the machines sang softly to themselves. Each night the lonesome beast came out on the hills above the city and cried out its bitterness and lostness.
On the morning of the fourth day, after consulting the map that might have represented this part of the world, they left the city and found the westward continuation of the road they’d walked to reach it.
EARLY IN THE AFTERNOON they reached the summit of the hills that ringed in the city and entered a grotesque world of erosion carving. The trail plunged downward through a colorful nightmare of earthen turrets, castles, battlements, towers and other fantastic shapes, tinted by the unending range of hues exhibited by the many geological layers of the different earths.
The going was slow; they did not try to hurry. The trail no longer could claim the distinction of being called a road. At times they would come out into the flatness of small floodplains, but then they would leave them to drop again into the weird, color-riotous madness of the tortured terrain.
Well before night closed in, they chose a camping place in the angle of a soaring clay cliff. Wood they found in tangled heaps of drift, deposited at some time long ago when great trees had come riding on the crests of the raging torrents that had carved the land. Wood, but no water. The day had not been excessively hot, however, and their canteens were almost full.
Vegetation grew sparse. Except for occasional patches of stout grasses and a few clumps of small conifers, hugging close against the ground, the sculptured earth was bare.
After supper they sat and watched the glory of the colors fade. When night fell, the stars came out bright and hard. Searching the skies, Lansing spotted familiar constellations. There could be no doubt, he told himself, that this place was Earth, but not the old familiar Earth that he had known. It was not another planet in another solar system; it was one of the alternate Earths that Andy had talked about, never for a moment suspecting there could be such other Earths.
The time factor bothered Lansing. With the constellations so little changed, if changed at all, the time differential between this Earth and the one that he had known must be no greater than a few tens of thousands of years at most. And yet, on this Earth, a great civilization had risen to heights as great or greater than had been the case on his Earth—had risen, developed, flourished and died. Could it be, he asked himself, that here Man had gotten an earlier start? Could the race of man here have developed some millions of years earlier? Was it possible, he wondered, that the crisis point between the two had been the dying out of mankind on his Earth, necessitating a starting over? That idea bothered him. If man died out on one Earth, what would be the chance of starting over again, of being given a second chance? Reason told him that the chance would be well nigh impossible.
“Edward,” Mary called, “you’ve scarcely said a word. What is going on?”
He shook his head. “A few random thoughts. Nothing of any great importance.”
“I’ll never feel quite right,” said Sandra, “for having left so soon. We really didn’t give the Brigadier much chance of getting back.”
“Why didn’t you speak up?” asked Mary. “You never said a word. We would have listened to you.”
“I was as anxious as the rest of you to get away. I couldn’t bear the thought of spending another day in the city.”
“For my part,” said Jurgens, “I think we wasted time waiting for him. He’s gone and gone for good.”
“What will happen to us now?” asked Sandra.
“Because the Parson and the Brigadier are gone?” asked Jurgens.
“Not that the two of them are gone, not those two alone. But there were six of us and now there are four. When will there be only three of us, or two?”
“We’ll have a better chance out here than we had in the city,” Mary said. “The city was a killer. We lost our people in the city.”
“We’ll be all right,” said Jurgens. “We’ll feel our way along. We’ll keep close watch and we won’t take chances.”
“But we don’t know where we’re going,” Sandra wailed.
“We never have,” said Jurgens. “Not since we were first thrown into this world have we known where we were going. Maybe the next bend down the trail will tell us. Maybe the day after tomorrow or the day after that.”
That night the Sniffler came back again. It sniffed all around the camp but did not intrude. They sat and listened to it. There was something comforting about its presence, as if an old friend had come back, as if a straying dog had come home again. There was no terror in the sniffling. The Sniffler had not entered the city with them; perhaps it liked the city no more than they had. But now that they were on the trail again, it had returned to join them.
Well before dark on the second day, they came on a tumbled ruin that sat on a small terrace above the trail.
“A place to spend the night,” said Jurgens.
They climbed the terrace and came to a rubble of fallen stones, soft sandstone blocks that at one time had formed a low wall around the small, ruined building that stood in the center of the rectangle formed by the scattered wall.
“Sandstone,” said Lansing. “Where could it have come from?”
“Over there,” said Jurgens, pointing to a low clay cliff that formed a backdrop for the place. “A strata of sandstone in the clay. There are signs, old signs, of quarrying.”
“Strange,” said Lansing.
“Not so strange,” Jurgens told him. “Here and there, along the way, there have been sandstone outcrops.”
“I hadn’t noticed.”
“You have to look sharp to see them. They are of the same color as the clay. I saw the first one by accident and then kept looking for them.”
The area within the shattered walls might have covered half an acre, scarcely more. The ruin standing in its center at one time had been a one-room structure. The roof had fallen in, part of the walls had tumbled down. Some broken crockery was scattered about on what once had been a well-trodden earthen floor, and in one corner of it Jurgens found a tarnished, battered metal pot.
“A stopping place for travelers,” said Sandra. “A caravansary.”
“Or a fort,” said Jurgens.
“A fort against what?” asked Lansing. “There is nothing here to fort up against.”
“At one time there might have been,” the robot said.
Outside the ruined building they found evidence of an old campfire, a bed of ash and smoke-blackened stones placed at intervals around it, perhaps to serve as cooking hearths. Beside the fire site was piled some driftwood.
“The last party through,” said Jurgens, “gathered more than was needed. It should last us out the night.”
“How about water?” Lansing asked.
“I think we have enough,” said Mary. “We’ll have to find some tomorrow.”
Lansing walked out to the ruined wall and stood, looking out over the monstrously sculptured terrain. Badlands, he thought, that was the word he had been searching for during the last two days and that had eluded him till now. Out in the western area of the two Dakotas were stretches of such lands as these that the first explorers—French, perhaps, although he could not remember with any certainty—had called badlands, bad lands to travel through. Here, unknown years ago great freshets of water, probably originating in torrential rains, had chewed up the land, gouging it out, washing it away, with a few areas of more resistant material withstanding the raging waters to finally turn into the twisted shapes that now remained.