beautiful.
“They were godlike. Truly godlike. There is no doubt of that. Stay there long enough, sensing them, seeing how far they stood above you and you would have been reduced to a crawling worm. Gentle gods, I think. Although they were sophisticated. Civilized. Entirely civilized. They have no government. There is no need of one. And no economic sense, no need of economics. It would take a true civilization, the highest concept of civilization, to need no government and no economic system. No money, no buying or selling, no borrowing or loaning, therefore no interest rates, no grubby bankers, no attorneys. There may even have been no such a thing as law.” “How do you know all that?”
“It soaked into me. All of it was there for one to know. Not to see, of course. To know.”
“Instead of telescopes,” said Lansing. “Telescopes?”
“I was just thinking aloud. Back in my world, and I suppose in yours as well, men use telescopes in an attempt to ferret out the secrets of space. But these people — they had no use of telescopes. Instead of looking out, they went out. They could go out there themselves. I suppose wherever they might wish. Having built the sort of installation that is here, they certainly would have known how to use it and control it, so they could go to specific targets. But now the machines — what else can I call them?” “Machines is good enough.” “Now they are running wild. They sent us out at random.”
“Somewhere in this city,” she said, “there must be a control room from which this installation can be handled. Maybe booths in which people who are to be subjected to its operation can be placed — although I guess I’d doubt that. The system would be something far more subtle than that.”
“Even if we found such a place,” he said, “it might take years before we could learn to operate it.”
“Could be, but we could have a shot at it.”
“Maybe this is what happened to the people here. Maybe they found another world, a better world, and sent all their people there.”
“In body as well as in mind?” she asked. “That would take some doing.”
“That’s right. I didn’t think of that. Even if they could that wouldn’t explain everything else being gone. Unless they sent along all their possessions as well.”
“I would doubt that,” Mary said. “Unless they used this apparatus to find another place and they could build another door to it. The two could be related, these machines and the doors, although I’d be more inclined to view the installation here as a research tool to be used to learn from alien worlds. Imagine what could be done with it. You could get all kinds of data that could be adapted to your culture. You could revise political and economic systems, steal technological procedures previously unknown to you, overhaul sociological structures, perhaps even learn of new scientific approaches, even entirely unknown scientific disciplines. For any civilized race, it would be a cultural shot in the arm.”
“You touched on it exactly,” he told her. “An intelligent race, you said. Was the race that lived here intelligent enough? Would your culture or mine be intelligent enough to use what we could find by the proper use of this installation? Or would we simply hunker down, clinging to our old ways, the life we were accustomed to, and misuse or abuse what we found on other worlds — perhaps misuse it disastrously?”
“That’s not up to you or me,” she said. “Not at the moment, it’s not. I think we should go out and see if we can locate that hypothetical control room.”
He rose and reached down a hand to help her to her feet. Once up, she still held to his hand.
“Edward,” she said, “the two of us have been through an awful lot together. Even in so short a time…”
“It’s not seemed short to me,” he told her. “I can’t seem to remember a time without you.”
He bent to kiss her and she held him briefly, then stepped away.
They climbed the stairs back to the alley and began their search. They stayed at it until darkness began to fall. They found no control room.
Back at the building where they were camped, they found Sandra and Jurgens busy preparing the evening meal. The Brigadier was not around.
“He went off by himself,” Sandra explained. “We haven’t seen him since.”
“We found nothing,” Jurgens said. “How about you?”
“No business talk, please, until after supper,” Mary pleaded. “By that time the Brigadier should be back.”
He arrived half an hour later and sat down heavily on his rolled-up sleeping bag. “I don’t mind telling you I’m bushed,” he said. “I covered a good part of the northeast section. For some silly idea I had the hunch that if we were to find anything, we would find it there. I found not a thing.”
Sandra dished up a plate of food and handed it to him. “Let’s eat,” she said.
The Brigadier took the plate and began eating, without waiting for the rest of them, shoveling the food into his mouth. He looked tired, Lansing thought. Tired and old. For the first time, the Brigadier showed a touch of age.
When they had finished eating, the Brigadier dug a bottle out of his pack and passed it around the circle. When it came back to him, he took a long pull at it, recapped it and sat cuddling it in his lap.
“This is two days,” he said. “That is what you promised me. I am a man of my word. I will not try to hold you further. Mary, I know you and Lansing will be moving on. How about you other two?”
“I think we’ll go with Mary and Lansing,” Sandra said. “I know I will. The city frightens me.”
“How do you feel?” the Brigadier asked Jurgens.
“With all due respect,” the robot told him, “there seems no point in staying.”
“As for myself,” said the Brigadier, “I’ll stay on for a while. Later I may catch up with you. I’m sure there is something to be found here.”
“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
