the Engineers are.”
'Those are instructions,' said Gary. 'Instructions from the Engineers. We don't dare do anything around here unless they say it's all right.”
The space-suited figures were coming rapidly down the path to the space-field. Gary hailed them as they came nearer. 'Find out what was wrong?' he asked.
Kingsley's voiced boomed at him. 'Several things wrong,' he declared. 'This ought to put it in working shape.”
The four of them advanced on the machine. Gary fell into step with Caroline and looked at the girl's face through her helmet visor. 'You look fagged out,' he said.
'I am tired,' she confessed. They walked a few steps. 'We had so much to do,' she said, 'and apparently so little time to do it in. The Engineers sound as if they are getting desperate. They seem to think the danger is very near.”
'What I can't figure out,' Gary told her, 'is what we are going to do when we get there. They seem to be head and shoulders over us in scientific knowledge. If they can't work it out, I don't see how we can help them.”
Her voice was full of weariness as she answered him.
'Neither do I,' she said, 'but they seemed so excited when they found out who we were, when I described our solar system to them and told them that the race had originated on the third planet. They asked so many questions about what kind of beings we were. It took a lot of explaining to get across the idea that we were protoplasmic creatures, and when they finally understood that they seemed even more excited.”
'Maybe,' suggested Gary, 'protoplasmic beings are a rarity throughout the universe. Maybe they never heard of folks like us before.”
She wheeled on him. 'There's something funny about it all, Gary. Something funny about how anxious they are for us to come, how insistent they are in trying to find out so much about us… the extent of our science and our past history.”
He thought he detected a quaver of fear in her voice. 'Don't let it get you,' he said. 'If it gets too funny, we can always quit. We don't have to play their game, you know.”
'No,' she said, 'we can't do that. They need us, need us to help them save the universe. I'm convinced of that.”
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 Kinsgley. 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
