The Unorthodox Engineers

a compulsory cessation of work. Even then it was difficult to actually get some folk off the site and into their beds.

Here and there alien towers were already exposed above the sand, unimaginable obelisks of incomprehensible architecture, curiously distorted and decayed by time and the ravages of wind and sand. Some, the sand shored back to greater depths, were firmer on the lower levels, and the architecture was even more marvellously apparent. Occasionally, vertical pits descended at points where logic had decreed there lay something more Intriguing or exciting or simply yielding greater bounty for the effort it entailed.

Fritz was fascinated beyond measure. The sheer otherworldliness drew his imagination on with an inescapable lure. As an engineer he fought to tame the logic of the structures which were being uncovered before him, but something in his soul trapped him in the wonder of the whole. He was the technologist who came for a dispassionate analysis and stayed to gawp.

Nevill watched him in amusement. “I know, it takes us all like that. It’s both wonderful and sad to be uncovering the remains of so great a culture: wonderful because the culture was so great, and sad because we find their city empty of the creatures who created it.”

“What the hell happened to them?” asked Fritz. “After they’d got all this way? They had mastered their environment to a degree comparable to ourselves, then in the space of a few short centuries they faded and died away—and then the sand moved in and covered all their marvels. But what happened? It’s something we must discover in case one day we’re faced with it ourselves.”

Four

By sundown the last hut had been transferred to its new position near the workings. The day had been one of great activity intermixed with frustration. As Fritz had expected the huts had proved themselves capable of being moved bodily across the sand, but the condition of the cats and tractors was such that the path of the move was plainly marked with a trail of abandoned vehicles spread broadly across the sandy steppes. Indeed, by the end of the day only five cats remained in operation.

After organizing a team to recover any repairable machinery, Jacko went to look for Fritz and found him in the workshop idly strumming the Tazoon harp with the air of a man evoking the muses as an aid to inspiration.

“You know, Jacko, I wish I could work out what happened to the Tazoons. I simply can’t understand why such a highly advanced and organized culture should suddenly fall to pieces. Planetary war—or assault from outside—would have left obvious traces, recognisable even after this long. It’s a highly disturbing thought that a catastrophe which could destroy a race with significant levels of technology could leave so little trace. It’s as though they suddenly closed the doors and walked out to die on a mass trek to the equator.”

“What about famine?” asked Jacko.

“Possibly. That’s virtually what Nevill suggested—widespread soil erosion. For some reason the major forests in this zone died suddenly. That rather suggests a prolonged drought—but you’d think a major technology fighting for survival could cope with that. The sea is an atrocious mineral stew, but I’m willing to bet you could desalinate enough water to maintain a pretty fair agricultural belt if the need arose.”

“But without nuclear energy where would you get that sort of power?” asked Jacko. “Distillation of sea- water on that scale would take a great deal of energy. And we’ve seen nothing that might suggest the remains of fusion plants.”

“Even the more primitive sort of fission reactor would have left pretty obvious traces. I know.”

Fritz sat up. “That’s the crux of the problem! Come to think of it, where did they get their power from anyway? Let’s put a few facts together. We know that at a certain stage in the history of Tazoo something happened—something which in the span of a couple of centuries destroyed the civilized inhabitants of the planet.

“Curiously, the wildlife forms survived for a considerable time afterwards, and some are still to be found in the forest belts. Now the basic difference between civilized and wild-life forms is that the former are power dependent animals while the latter are not. Jacko, you’ve hit upon the heart of the matter, and no mistake.”

“It’s just a gift,” said Jacko modestly.

“Then seeing it didn’t cost you anything, see if you can stretch it a little further. Let’s play for a moment with the assumption that the Tazoons had become power-dependent creatures—as we have ourselves. What would their basic source of energy have been, and why did it fail so suddenly and disastrously?”

“Oil or natural gas, perhaps,” said Jacko.

“Not very convincing. By all appearances the Tazoons were great power users. From what Nevill’s uncovered recently I’d say the power consumption in this area alone must have been quite enormous even by Terran standards. Now, you don’t develop a heavy power-consuming technology without creating the resources to maintain it. To do otherwise would be technological suicide.”

“That’s assuming they thought about the problem in the same way that a human being would.”

“I wouldn’t know about human beings,” said Fritz drily, “but engineers I do know about, and their thought processes must be essentially similar whether they have one head or six. There are an infinite number of ways of solving any engineering problem, but the simpler answers will always look familiar. It’s just the nature of the beast.

“Give a ten-armed Dingbat a head of steam and tell him to convert it into electrical energy. I don’t care what the influence of his racial characteristics, training or personal geometry, he’s going to produce something that any engineer would recognise as a turbine generator. So, I don’t think we can go far wrong if we tackle this problem from our own standpoint, and currently we are assuming they had a power supply which appeared infallible yet failed. Now we need to know what was the source of that energy. If we knew that maybe we could work out why it stopped.”

The portable radio squawked and Fritz picked it up.

Nevill. “I’d like to see you first thing in the morning, Fritz. There’s something I want you to take a look at.”

“Okay. Something promising?”

“Oh yes. The team has just uncovered something which looks like the entrance to a mine of some sort. Perhaps you’d like to look it over.”

“We’ll be there first thing,” said Fritz, and dropped the handset back on the desk.

“What’s up?” asked Jacko.

“Nevill’s team have discovered what he thinks may be the entrance to a mine.”

“In the centre of a city?”

“Yes, that’s what I thought, too,” said Fritz. “I don’t think that a mine as such is particularly likely, though it might just be connected with our lost energy source—or he may have stumbled on something I’ve been looking for myself.”

“What’s that?”

“Jacko, in a city as large and as complex as this one appears to be, where’s the logical place to put the bulk passenger transport system?”

“Underground,” said Jacko, “same as always.”

“Precisely, and that’s what I’m hoping Nevill’s hit upon.”

“God!” said Jacko. “An alien subway scarcely bears thinking about.”

Fritz van Noon stood in the glare of floodlights, watching Jacko Hines pack spare torch batteries into his belt pouches. Then they moved cautiously through the doorway.

Further in from the door they had to use the flashlights. Here the sand had not penetrated so deeply, and by the time they had reached the head of the shaft only a brief dusting covered the floor.

The shaft was equipped with the normal Tazoon-type stairway—a central pole with round horizontal bars set in a helix, but on a broader pattern than they had encountered hitherto and with a deeper pitch.

Such a stairway was not adapted to human physiology, but it was traversable—just— by those with climbing experience or suicidal tendencies. Jacko had neither.