Cosmic Engineers

Chapter Thirteen

The black tunnel of the space-time wheel ended and the ship was in normal space again. Normal, but not right.

Gary, hunched over the controls, heard Caroline's quick gasp of surprise.

"There's something wrong!" she cried.

There was a world, but it was not the planet of the Engineers. No great city grew upon it from horizon to horizon. Instead of three blue suns, there was one and it was very large and red, a dull brick red, and its rays were so feeble that one could stare straight into it and at the edges it seemed that one could see straight through the fringe of gases.

There was no Hellhounds fleet, no flashing ships of the defender… no war.

There was peace upon this world… a quiet and deadly peace. The peace, thought Gary, of the never-was, the peace of all-is-over.

It was a flat splotched world with a leprous look about it, not gray, but colored as a child with water paints might color a paint book page when he was tired and all the need of accuracy and art were things to be forgotten.

Something happened, Gary told himself. And he felt the chill of fear in his veins.

Something happened and here we are — in what strange corner of the universe?

"Something went wrong," Caroline said again. "Some inherent weakness in the co-ordinates, some streak of instability in the mathematics themselves, perhaps.”

"More likely," Gary told her, "the fault lies in the human brain — or in the brain of the Engineer. No man, no being, can see far enough ahead, think so clearly that be will foresee each eventuality. And even if he did, he might be inclined to let some small factor slip by with no other thought than that it was so small it could do no harm.”

Caroline nodded at him. "The mistakes creep in so easy," she admitted.

"Like mice… mice running in the mind.”

"We can turn around and go back," said Gary, but even as he said it he knew that it was no good. For if the tunnel of distorted time-space through which they had come was jiggered out of position at this end, it would be out of focus at the other end as well.

"But we can't," said Caroline.

"I know we can't," said Gary. "I spoke too quickly. Without thinking.”

"We can't even try," said Caroline. "The wheel is gone." He saw that she was right. The wheel of light was no longer in the sky. It had snuffed out and they were here alone.

Here? he asked. And where was here?

There was a simple answer. They simply did not know. At the moment, there was no way of telling.

"Lost," said Caroline. "Like the babes in the woods. The robins came, you remember, and covered them with leaves.”

The ship was gliding down toward the planet and Gary swung around to the controls again.

"We'll look it over," he said.

"There may be someone there," said Caroline.

Someone, Gary thought, was not quite the word. Something would be more like it. Something.

The planet was flat, a world without mountains, without rivers, without seas. There were great green bogs instead of seas and flat arid plains with splotches of color that might be vegetation or might be no more than the outcropping of different geological strata.

The ship took up its descent spiral and Gary and Caroline hung close above the visor, watching for some sign of habitation, for some hint of life. A road, perhaps. Or a building. Or a vehicle moving on the ground or in the air. But there was nothing.

Finally Gary shook his head. "There's nothing here," he said. "We might as well go down. One place on this planet is as good as any other.”

They landed on a flat expanse of sand between the shore of one of the green bogs and the edge of a patch of splotched vegetation, for by now it was apparent that the color spots on the planet's surface were vegetation of a sort.

"Toadstools," said Caroline, looking out the vision plate. "Toadstools and that other kind of funny stuff, like asparagus spears, only it's not asparagus.”

"Like something out of a goblin book," said Gary.

Like something that you thought about when you were a kid and couldn't go to sleep after grandmother had read you some story about a shivery place and you had pulled the covers up over your head and listened for the footsteps to start coming through the dark.

They made the tests and the planet was livable without their suits — slightly high in oxygen, a little colder and a slighter gravity than Earth, but livable.

"Let's go out," said Gary, gruffly, "and have a look around.”

"Gary, you sound as if you might be scared.”

"I am," he admitted. "Pink with purple spots.”

The silence smote them as they stepped outside the ship. An awesome and abiding silence that was louder than a shattering sound.

There was no sound of wind, and no sound of water. No song of birds. No grass to rustle.

The great red sun hung in the sky above them and their shadows were soft and fuzzy on the sand, the faint, fugitive shadows of a cloudy day.

On one hand lay the stagnant pools of water and the hummocks of slimy vegetation that formed the bog and on the other stretched the forest of giant mushrooms, towering to the height of an average man.

"You'd expect to see a goblin," Caroline said, and she shivered as she said it.

All at once the goblin was there.

He stood underneath one of the toadstools and he was looking at them. When he saw that they had seen him, he lowered one eyelid in a ponderous and exaggerated wink and his slobbering mouth twisted into a grimace that might have been a smile. Its skin was mottled and its eyes were narrow, slitted eyes and even as they watched, an exudation of slimy substance welled out of one of the gland-like openings which pitted its face and ran down its cheek and dripped onto its chest.

"Good Lord!" said Gary. "I know that fellow!”

The goblin leaped into the air and cracked its heels together and gobbled like an excited turkey.

"He's the one that was there the day the Engineers held the conference,”

said Gary. "You remember, when they got all the aliens together — all those that had come through space to the city of the Engineers. It was him — or one just like him. He sat opposite me and he winked at me, just like he did now, and I thought that…

"There's another one," said Caroline.

The second one was perched on top of one of the mushrooms, with his splayed feet swinging over the edge.

Then there was a third one peeping from behind a stem and still another one, sitting on the ground and leaning against a stem. All of them were watching and all of them were grinning, but the grins were enough to strike terror and revulsion into one's soul.

Caroline and Gary retreated backward to the ship, step by slow step until they stood with their backs against it.

Now there was sound, the soft padding of feet coming through the toadstool forest, the clucking noises that the goblins made.

"Let's go away," said Caroline. "Let's get in the ship and go.”

"Wait," counseled Gary. "Let us wait a while. We can always go. These things are intelligent. They have to be, since they were among the ones the Engineers called in.”

He stepped out from the ship two slow paces and called.

"Hello," he called.

They stopped their clucking and their running and stood and looked at him out of slitted eyes.

"We are friends," said Gary. They didn't move a muscle.

Gary held up his empty hands, palms outward in the human gesture of peace.

"We are friends," he said.

The silence was on the world again — the dreadful, empty silence. The goblins were gone.

Slowly Gary came back to the ship.

"It doesn't work," he said. "I had no reason to believe it would.”

"All things," said Caroline, "would not necessarily communicate by sound.

That's just one way of making yourself understood. There would be many other ways. These things make sounds, but that doesn't mean they would have to talk with sound. They may have no auditory apparatus. They may not even know that they make sounds, might not know what sound is.”

"They're back again," said Gary. "You try this time. Try thinking at them.

Pick out one of them and concentrate on him.”

A minute passed, a minute of utter silence.

"It's funny," said Caroline. "I couldn't reach them at all. There wasn't even a flicker of response. But I had the feeling that they knew and that they rejected what I tried to tell them. They closed their minds and would not listen.”

"They don't talk," said Gary. "And they either can't or won't telepath.

What's next?”

"Sign language," Caroline said. "Pictures after that. Pantomime.”

But it did no good. The goblins watched with interest when Gary tried sign language. They crept close to watch as he drew diagrams in the sandy soil.

And they squealed and chortled when he tried pantomime. But that they understood any of it they gave not a single sign.

Gary came back to the ship.

"They're intelligent," he said. "They have to be, otherwise how would they ever have been brought to the rim of the universe by the Engineers.

Something like that takes understanding, a mechanical aptitude, a penchant for higher mathematics.”

He gestured in disgust. "And yet," he said, "they do not understand even the most elementary symbolism.”

"These ones may not be trained," said Caroline. "There may be others here who are. There may be an elite, an intelligentsia. These may be the peasants and the serfs.”

Gary said wearily: "Let's get out of here. Make a circuit or two of the planet. Watch closely for some sign of development, some evidence of culture.”

Caroline nodded. "We could have missed it before.”

They went into the ship and closed the port behind them. Through the vision plates they saw the goblins, a large crowd of them by now, lined up at the edge of the mushroom forest, staring at the ship.

Gary lowered himself into the pilot's chair, reached out for the warming knob and twisted it over. Nothing happened. He twisted it back and turned it on again. Silence swam within the ship — no sound of warming jets.

Lord, thought Gary, what a place to get stuck.

Outside the ship, equipped with a kit of tools, he crawled into the take-off tubes, took off the plates that housed the warming assembly and pried into their innards.

An hour later he had finished. He crawled out, grimed and smudged with carbon.

"Nothing wrong," he told Caroline. "No reason why they shouldn't work.”

He tried again and they didn't work.

He checked the feed line and the wiring. He ripped off the control panel and went over it, wire by wire, relay by relay, tube by tube. There was nothing wrong. But still it wouldn't work.

"The goblins," Caroline guessed.

He agreed. "It must be the goblins. There is nothing else to think.”

But how, he asked himself, could such simple-minded things turn an almost foolproof, letter-perfect spaceship into a heap of junk?