“If we can understand them,” said Mary. “If they’ll talk to us. If they don’t chase us out or clap us into jail.”
“Yes, there are those considerations,” agreed the Brigadier.
“It’s time, I think, that we should turn in,” said the Parson. “We’ve had a long, hard day and we’ll need our rest for yet another.”
“I’ll stand the first watch,” offered the Brigadier. “After that Lansing and you, Parson, will split the remainder of the watch. You can make your own arrangements.”
“There is no need of anyone standing watch,” said Jurgens. “That particular chore is mine. I never sleep. I have no need of sleep. I promise that I will stay alert. You can place your trust in me.”
11
After breakfast they went across the road to the cube. The grass was still wet with dew. Jurgens had aroused them at the first light of dawn, with the oatmeal and coffee cooking.
In the slanting morning light the cube was not as blue as it had been when seen in the full light of day. It had an opallike appearance, delicate and fragile.
“Now it looks like porcelain,” said Sandra. “It looked, at times, like porcelain when we first saw it, but now it can’t be mistaken. It must be porcelain.”
The Parson picked up a fist-size rock and hurled it against the cube. The rock bounced back. “It’s not porcelain,” the Parson said. “That’s a hell of a way to find out,” said Lansing. “The cube may remember who it was who threw the rock.” “You talk as if it may be alive,” said Mary. “I wouldn’t bet it isn’t.”
“We’re wasting time standing here and talking,” said the Parson. “I’m against it, for I still think this thing is evil, but if the rest of you are set on investigating, let’s investigate. The sooner we get done with it, the sooner we can get on to something else.”
“That’s right,” said the Brigadier. “Let’s go back to the grove and cut some poles. We can use them to probe the area before we move into it.”
Lansing did not go with the Brigadier and Parson. He trailed along behind Jurgens, who was trying out his crutch. The robot was making awkward work of it, but after a time, Lansing told himself, he’d begin to catch the hang of it. Twice he fell and Lansing helped him up each time.
“Leave me alone,” Jurgens finally told him. “You upset me, hovering over me, ready with a helping hand. I appreciate your concern but I have to work this out myself, in my own way. If I fall, I’ll manage to get up.”
“Okay, pal,” said Lansing. “More than likely you are right.”
Leaving Jurgens, he began a slow circuit of the cube, staying just outside the circle of sand. He studied the walls with care, hoping that somewhere on their surface he would see some seam, some discontinuity that might be significant. He saw nothing. The walls rose smooth and without any kind of break. The material of which they were constructed appeared to be a solid piece.
Occasionally he sneaked a look at Jurgens. The robot was not doing well, but he was sticking to the job. Once he fell, used the crutch to pull himself erect and then went on. None of the others was in sight. The Brigadier and the Parson were at the campsite, cutting poles; at times Lansing heard the sound of chopping. Mary and Sandra probably were on the other side of the cube.
He stood, looking at it, questions racing in his mind. Could it be a living space, a house in which dwelled an unknown family of beings? Could they be inside now, going about their affairs, at times some of them looking out of windows (windows?) at the strange, befuddled bipedal creatures who had stumbled on their home? Or was it, perhaps, a repository of knowledge, a library, a treasury of fact and thought wholly alien to the human mind, although not necessarily alien in itself, but the fact and thought of another branch of the human race many millennia beyond the world that he had known? Which was quite possible, he thought. The night before he and Jurgens had talked of that, of the disparity of time that might be possible in alternate worlds. It was quite apparent from what Jurgens had told him that the robot’s time had been many thousands of years in the future beyond the time of Lansing’s Earth. Or could the cube be a structure out of time itself, seen only dimly through the misty veil of otherwhen and otherwhere? That didn’t seem to make much sense, for the cube was not difficult to see. It was as sound as anyone might wish.
He continued in his slow walk around the cube. Now that the sun was up, the day was fine. The dew had disappeared and the sky was high and blue, with no fleck of cloud to mar its depth. Plodding toward the road came the Brigadier and Parson, each of them carrying a long, trimmed pole cut from a sapling. They crossed the road and came up to him.
“You walked around it?” asked the Brigadier. “All the way around it?”
“I did,” Lansing told him, “and it’s the same as here. There is nothing. Not a thing at all.”
“Get up close to it,” said the Parson, “and one might see something that you’d miss standing out here. A close look is always better than the long look.”
Lansing agreed with him. “That is right,” he said.
“Why don’t you go and cut a pole?” asked the Brigadier. “With the three of us, the investigation would go faster.”
“I don’t think I will,” said Lansing. “I think it’s a waste of time.”
Both of them looked at him for a moment and then they turned away. The Brigadier said to the Parson, “Let’s work it this way. Let’s start about twelve feet apart and cover the ground outside ourselves and the ground between ourselves, overlapping. Probing with poles so that if there’s something there, it will attack the poles instead of us.”
The Parson nodded knowingly. “That is what I had in mind.”
So they started out, the Brigadier saying, “We’ll work in to the wall and when we get in next to the wall, we’ll separate, you going to the left, I to the right. We’ll work carefully around the wall until we meet.”
The Parson did not answer and they went along, working slowly toward the wall, each one probing with his pole.
And what, Lansing wondered, if the thing, or things, that were in the sand circle were programmed or trained to snap at a living being that had invaded its domain, but at nothing else? But he said nothing and sauntered down the road, looking for Mary and Sandra. A short distance down the road he glimpsed them, coming around the cube, keeping well outside the sand circle that surrounded it.
A yelp behind him jerked him around. The Brigadier was running at full gallop through the sand circle toward the road. The pole the Brigadier carried was only half a pole. It had been sheared off cleanly in the middle and the other half of it lay on the sand against the wall. The Parson was standing stark, as if petrified, against the wall, swiveling his head around to look over his shoulder at the fleeing Brigadier. To the right of the Brigadier something flickered from the sand, so swift that there was no chance of seeing what it was, and the other half of the half pole the Brigadier was carrying flew into the air, neatly bitten off. The Brigadier bawled in terror and flung away the remainder of the pole. In a running broad jump, he cleared the last few feet of sand and piled up on the grassy surface between the sand circle and the road.
Mary and Sandra were running now to reach the fallen Brigadier while the petrified Parson still stood stiff against the wall.
The Brigadier scrambled to his feet and dusted off his tunic. Then, as if unconscious that anything had happened, he assumed the military starkness, the stiff-as-a-ramrod posture softened by a regal nonchalance that was his ordinary pose.
“My dears,” he said to the two women as they pulled up in front of him, “I might say that we have some lurking force out there.”
He turned about and bawled, in parade-ground thunder, at the Parson.
“Come on back,” he said. “Turn about and come back slowly, probing all the way, being careful to follow the track that you made going in.”
“I notice,” said Lansing, “that you were not so meticulous as to follow your old trail. You broke new ground, in a manner of speaking.”
The Brigadier ignored him.
