space. That's how I happened to discover the space-time warp principle. I thought about space out there in the shell. I figured out ways to control it. It was something to do to while away the time.”
Kingsley glanced around the room, like a busy man ready to depart, looking to see if he had forgotten anything.
'Well,' he rumbled, 'what are we waiting for? Let us get to work.”
'Now, wait a second,' interrupted Gary. 'Do we want to do this? Are we sure we aren't rushing into something we'll be sorry for? After all, all we have to go on are the Voices. We're taking them on face value alone… and Voices don't have faces.”
'Sure,' piped up Herb, 'how do we know they aren't kidding us? How do we know this isn't some sort of a cosmic joke? Maybe there's a fellow out there somewhere laughing fit to kill at how he's got us all stirred up.”
Kingsley's face flushed with anger, but Caroline laughed.
'You look so serious, Gary,' she declared.
'It's something to be serious about,' Gary protested. 'We are monkeying around with something that's entirely out of our line. Like a bunch of kids playing with an atom bomb. We might set loose something we wouldn't be able to stop. Something might be using us to help it set up an easy way to get at the solar system. We might be just pulling someone's chestnuts out of the fire.”
'Gary,' said Caroline softly, 'if you had heard that Voice you wouldn't doubt. I know it's on the level. You see, it isn't a voice, really… it's a thought. I know there's danger and that we must help, do everything we can. There are other volunteers, you know, other people, or other things, from other parts of the universe.”
'How do you know?' asked Gary fiercely.
'I don't know how,' she defended herself. 'I just know. That's all.
Intuition, perhaps, or maybe a background thought in the Engineer's mind that rode through with the message.”
Gary looked around at the others. Evans was amused. Kingsley was angry. He looked at Herb.
'What the hell,' said Herb. 'Let's take a chance.”
Just like that, thought Gary. A woman's intuition, the burning zeal of a scientist, the devil-may-care, adventuresome spirit of mankind. No reason, no logic… mere emotion. A throwback to the old days of chivalry.
Once a mad monk had stood before the crowds and shook a sword in air and shrieked invective against another faith, and, because of this, Christian armies, year after year, broke their strength against the walls of eastern cities.
Those were the Crusades.
This, too, was a crusade. A Cosmic Crusade. Man again answering the clarion call to arms. Man again taking up the sword on faith alone. Man pitting his puny strength, his little brain against great cosmic forces. Man… the damn fool… sticking out his neck.
Chapter Six
A ghostly machine was taking shape upon the hard, pitted, frozen surface of the field… a crazy machine that glimmered weirdly in the half-light of the stars. A machine with mind-wrenching angles, with flashing prisms and spidery framework, a towering skeleton of a machine that stretched out spaceward.
Made of material in which the atomic motion had been stilled, it stood defiant against the most powerful forces of man or void. Anchored magnetically to the core of the planet, it stood firmly planted, a spidery, frail- appearing thing, but with a strength that would stand against the unimaginable drag of a cosmic space-time warp.
From it long cables snaked their way over the frozen surface to the laboratory power plant. Through those slender cables, their resistance lowered by the bitter cold, tremendous power loads could be poured into the strange machine.
'They're space-nuts,' grumbled Ted Smith at Gary's elbow. 'They're fixing to blow Pluto all to hell. I wish there was some way for me to get away from here before the fireworks start.”
Herbs' voice crackled in Gary's helmet-phones, answering the complaint.
'Shucks, there just won't nothing happen. That contraption looks more like something a kid would build with a tinker toy set than a machine. I can't see, for the life of me, how it'll ever work.”
'I gave up long ago,' said Gary. 'Caroline tried to explain it to me, but I guess I'm just sort of dense. I can't make head or tall of it. All I know is that it's supposed to be an anchor post, a thing that will help the Engineers set up this space warp of theirs and after it is set up will operate to hold it in position.”
'I never did set any stock in that Engineer talk,' Ted told him, 'but there's been something I've been wanting to tell you two. Haven't been able to catch you, you've been so busy. But I wanted to tell you about it, for you're the only two who haven't gone entirely star-batty.”
'V/hat is it?' Gary asked.
'Well, you know,' said Ted, 'I don't attach much meaning to it, but it does seem kind of funny. A few days ago I sneaked out for a walk. Against orders, you know. Not supposed to get out of sight of the settlement. Too many things can happen here.
'But, anyhow, I went for a walk. Out along the mountains and over the carbon dioxide glacier and down into the little valley that lies just over the shoulder of the glacier.”
He paused dramatically.
'You found something there?' asked Gary.
'Sure did,' declared Ted proudly. 'I found some ruins. Chiseled white stone. Scattered all over the valley floor. As if there had been a building there at one time and somebody had pulled it down stone by stone and threw the stones around.”
'Sure it wasn't just boulders or peculiar rock formations?' asked Gary.
'No, sir,' said Ted, emphatically. 'There were chisel marks on those stones. Workmen had dressed them at some time. And all of it was white stone. You show me any white stone around here.”
Gary understood what the radio operator meant. The mountains were black, black as the emptiness of space. He turned his head to stare at those jagged peaks that loomed over the settlement, their spearlike points faintly outlined against the black curtain of the void.
'Say,' said Herb, 'that sounds as if what the Engineers said about someone else living here at one time might be true.”
'If Ted found building stone, that's exactly what it means,' Gary asserted.
'That would denote a city of some kind, intelligence of some kind, It takes a certain degree of culture to work stone.”
'But,' argued Herb, 'how could anyone have lived here? You know that Pluto cooled quick, lost its lighter gases in a hurry. Its oxygen and carbon dioxide are locked up in snow and ice. Too cold for any life.”
'I know all that,' Gary agreed, 'but it seems we can't be too sure of anything in this business. If Ted is right, it means the Engineers were right on at least one point where we all were wrong. It sort of gives a man more faith in what is going on.”
'Well,' said Ted, 'I just wanted to tell you. I was going to go out there again some day and look around, but since then I've been too busy. Ever since you sent that story out, space has been full of messages…
governmental stuff, messages from scientists and cranks. Don't give a man no time to himself at all.”
As the radio man walked back to his shack, Gary looked toward the laboratory. Two space-suited figures were coming out of the main lock.
'That's Caroline and Kingsley,' said Herb. 'They've been up there to talk to the Engineers again. Got stuck on something. Wanted the Engineers to explain it to them.”
'Looks to me like it's about finished,' said Gary. 'Caroline told me she didn't know just how much longer it would take, but she had hopes of getting it into working order in another day or two. Tommy's gone without sleep the last twenty hours, working to get his ship in tip-top shape.
They've gone over the thing from control panel to rocket tubes.”
'What I'd like to know,' said Herb, irritably, 'is just how we're going to use the ship in getting out to where
