“And you,” said Lansing to the Brigadier, “keep your damn mouth shut. You’ve set yourself up to be the leader of this group and you are doing badly at it.”
“I suppose,” said the Brigadier, “you think you should be the leader.”
“We don’t need a leader, General. When your pomposity threatens to overcome you, just remember that.”
A pall hung over the little band while they ate their lunch and drank the tea, then they took up the trek again, with the Brigadier still in the lead and the Parson following close upon his heels.
The rolling countryside continued, with the scattered groves of trees. It was a pleasant land, but the day was warm. Stumping on before them, the Brigadier proceeded at a slower pace than he had before they’d stopped for lunch.
The road had been climbing all the afternoon, up succeeding swales, each one higher than the last. Now, ahead of the others, the Brigadier stopped and raised a shout. The Parson loped to stand beside him and the others hurried to catch up.
The land tumbled down into a bowl, and at the bottom of the bowl stood a cube of heaven blue. Even from the ridgetop it appeared to be a massive structure. It was plain, not fancy — straight sides that rose up to a flat top. From the distance that they viewed it, it looked unadorned. But its size and intense blueness made it spectacular. The road they had been following went down the tumbled, tortured slope in angling curves and switchbacks. Once it reached the bottom of the slope, it arrowed toward the cube, but when it reached it, it swept out to run around one side of it, then continued across the bowl and went climbing up the slope beyond in a zigzag fashion.
Sandra squeaked. “It’s beautiful,” she said.
The Brigadier harumphed. “When the innkeeper mentioned it,” he said, “I never for a moment anticipated it would be anything like this. I didn’t know what to expect. A crumbling ruin, perhaps. I guess I really didn’t think too much about it. I was looking forward to the city.”
The Parson pulled the corners of his mouth down. “I don’t like the looks of it.”
“You don’t like the looks of anything,” said the Brigadier.
“Before we start passing opinions,” said Lansing, “let us go down there and have a look at it.”
It took awhile to get there. They had to follow the road because the sloping ground was too steep and treacherous to do otherwise. By following the road in all its wanderings, they traveled several times the distance between the slope’s summit and its base.
The cube sat in the center of a wide, sandy area that ran all around it, a circle of sand so precise that it seemed it must have been drawn carefully by a survey team — white sand, the kind of sand that one would expect to find in a children’s sandbox, a sugarlike sand that at one time might have been flattened out into a smooth surface but that now had been blown into a series of ripples by the wind.
The walls of the cube rose high. Lansing, measuring them with a careful eye, concluded they rose fifty feet or more. In them there were no breaks, nothing that would suggest a window or a door, and there was, as well, no ornamentation, no artful carving, no dedicatory plaque, no incised symbols that might announce a name by which the cube was known. Viewed close at hand the blueness of the walls held true — a celestial blue that could have represented the purest innocence. Likewise, the walls were smooth. Certainly not stone, Lansing told himself. Plastic, perhaps, although plastic seemed incongruous in this howling wilderness, or ceramic, a cube formed of the finest porcelain.
With scarcely a word spoken, the band walked around the cube, by some unspoken convention not stepping within the circle of sand that surrounded it. Back on the road again, they halted and all stood looking at the blueness.
“It’s beautiful,” said Sandra, drawing in her breath as a sign of continuing astonishment. “More beautiful than it seemed when we glimpsed it from the hilltop. More beautiful than you could expect anything to be.”
“Amazing,” said the Brigadier. “Truly amazing. But does anyone have the foggiest notion what it is?”
“It must have a function,” said Mary. “The size, the mass of it would argue that. If it were merely symbolic, it would not have to be this large. And were it only symbolic, it would be placed where it could be seen from a distance, atop the highest elevation rather than being tucked away down here.”
“It has not been visited recently,” said Lansing. “There are no tracks in the circle of sand around it.”
“If there were tracks,” said the Brigadier, “they would soon be covered by the drifting sand. Even recent tracks.”
“Why are we standing here, simply looking at it?” asked Jurgens. “As if we might be afraid of it.”
“I think, perhaps, we are standing here because we are afraid of it,” said the Brigadier. “It seems quite evident that it was placed here by sophisticated builders. This is no fumbling job such as might have been done by benighted heathens intent on raising a memorial to their deity. Such a great accomplishment, logic says, must be protected in some manner. Otherwise there would be graffiti scribbled all across the walls.”
“There is no graffiti,” Mary said. “Not a single mark upon the walls.”
“Perhaps the walls are of a substance that will not take a mark,” said Sandra. “Any marking device would slide right over them.”
“I still think,” said the robot, “that we should examine it more closely. If we moved close up to it, we might find an answer to some of the questions we are asking.”
Having said that, he began to stride across the circle of sand. Lansing shouted a warning, but Jurgens made no sign that he had heard. Lansing sprang forward, sprinting to catch him. For that circle of sand, he now realized, held a subtle threat, something that all of them, with the exception of Jurgens, must have recognized as well. Jurgens was still striding ahead. Lansing closed on him, reached out a hand to grasp his shoulder. But in the instant before his fingers could close upon the shoulder, some obstruction buried in the sand caught his toe and threw him on his face.
As he struggled to his hands and knees, shaking his head to dislodge the sand that stuck to it, he heard the others shouting back of him. The Brigadier’s voice boomed above all the others: “You damn fool, come back! That place could be booby trapped!”
Jurgens was almost at the wall; he had not slacked his sturdy trudging. As if, Lansing thought, the fool planned to walk head on, full tilt into it. Then, in that instant that he conceived the thought, the robot was tossed into the air, twisting backward and falling in the sand. Lansing put up his hand as if to scrub his eyes, as if to clear his vision, for in that spilt second when Jurgens had been tossed, he had thought he’d seen something (like a snake, perhaps, although it could not have been a snake) emerge momentarily from the sand, striking from the sand and then being there no longer, too quick for the eye to catch, no more than a flicker in the air.
Jurgens, lying on his back, now was turning over, clawing with both hands and thrusting with one leg to skid himself back from the wall. The other leg dragged limply.
Lansing leaped to his feet and ran forward. He grasped the robot by one clawing arm and started dragging him back toward the road.
“Let me,” said someone, and looking up, Lansing saw the Parson standing over him. The Parson stooped, seized Jurgens about his waist and heaved him to his shoulder like a bag of grain, staggering slightly under the robot’s weight.
On the road the Parson let Jurgens down. Lansing knelt beside him.
“Tell me where you hurt,” he said.
“I do not hurt,” said Jurgens. “I am not equipped to hurt.”
“One leg was dragging,” said Sandra. “The right leg. He can’t use it.”
“Here,” said the Brigadier, “let me stand you up. Put you on your feet, see if you can bear your weight.”
He hauled mightily, pulling the robot to his feet, supporting him. Jurgens tottered on his left leg, seeking to put his weight on the right. The right leg folded under him. The Brigadier eased him to a sitting position.
Mary said, “It’s a mechanical problem. We can have a look at it. Or is it entirely mechanical? How about it, Jurgens?”
“I think it is mostly mechanical,” said Jurgens. “There might be some biologies involved. Some biological nerve function. I can’t be sure.”
“If we only had some tools,” said Mary. “Dammit, why didn’t we think to buy some tools?”
“I have a kit of tools,” said Jurgens. “A small kit. Perhaps sufficient of them.”
“Well, that’s better,” said Mary. “Maybe we can do something for you.”
