Cosmic Engineers

Chapter Fifteen

"Very ingenious," said the voice. "You won fair and square. You did much better than I thought you would.”

"And now," said Caroline, "you will send us back again. Back to the city of the Engineers.”

"Why, certainly," said the voice. "Why, of course, I will. But first, I have to clean up the place. The bodies, first of all. Cadavers are such unsightly things.”

Fire puffed briefly and the bodies of the two Hellhounds were gone. A tiny puff of yellow smoke hung over where they had been and a tiny flurry of ashes eddied in the air.

"I asked you once before," said Caroline, "and you didn't tell me. What are you? We looked for signs of culture and…”

"You are befuddled, young human," the voice told her. "You seek for childish things. You looked for cities and there are no cities. You looked for roads and ships and farms and there are none of these. You expected to find a civilization and there is no civilization such as you would recognize.”

"You are right," said Gary. "There are none of those.”

"I have no city," said the voice, "because I need no city. Although I could build a city at a second's notice. The mushroom forests are the only farms I need to feed my little pets. I need no roads and ships because I can go anywhere I wish without the aid of them.”

"You mean you can go in your mind," said Caroline.

"In my mind," the voice said. "I go wherever I may wish, in either time or space, and I am there. I do not merely imagine that I am there; I am really there. Long ago my race forsook machines, knowing that in its mental ability, within the depth of its collective mind it had more potentiality than it could ever get from a clattering piece of mechanism. So the race built minds instead of machines. Minds, I say. But mind, one mind, a single mind, is the better explanation. I am that mind today. A single racial mind.

"I used that mind to pluck you from the space-time tunnel at the very moment you were about to emerge above the city of the Engineers. I used that mind to bring the Hellhounds here. That mind grounded your ship and blanketed your guns and that mind could kill you in a moment if I thought the thought.”

"But you," said Caroline. "The personal pronoun that you use. The 'I' you speak of. What is that?”

"I am the mind," the voice told them, "and the mind is me. I am the race. I have been the race for many million years.”

"And you play God," said Caroline. "You bring lesser things together, into the arena of this world, and you make them fight while you sit and chuckle…”

"Why, of course," the voice said. "Because, you see, I'm crazy. I'm really, at times, quite violently insane.”

"Insane!”

"Why, certainly," the voice told them. "It's what would be bound to happen.

You can't perfect a mind, a vast communal mind, a mighty racial mind to the point that my mind is perfected and expect it to keep a perfect balance as a good watch would keep perfect time. But the mind's behavior varies.

Sometimes," the voice said, quite confidentially, "I'm battier than a bedbug.”

"And how are you now?" asked Gary.

"Why, now," the voice said, "as funny as it seems, I'm quite rational. I'm very much myself.”

"Then how about fixing it up so that we can get back?”

"Right away," said the voice, very businesslike. "I'll just clean up a thing or two. Don't like the residue of my irrationality cluttering up the planet. That Hellhound ship over there….”

But instead of the Hellhound ship, it was the Earth ship that went skyward in a terrific gout of flame that sent a wash of heat across the barren land.

"Hey, there…" yelled Gary and then stood stock still as the enormity of what had happened crackled in his mind.

"Tsk, tsk," said the voice. "How very stupid of me. How could I have done a thing like that! Now I'll never be able to send you home again.”

His cackling laughter filled the sky and beat like a mighty drum.

"The Hellhound ship!" yelled Gary. "Run… run…”

But even as they whirled to race toward it, it was gone in a blaze of fire, followed by a trail of smoke that hung briefly above the scorched piece of the ground where the ship had lain.

"You couldn't have operated it, anyhow," said the voice. "It wouldn't have done you a single bit of good.”

He laughed again and the laughter trailed off into distance, like a retreating thunderstorm.

Gary and Caroline stood side by side and looked at the emptiness of the bog and mushroom forest. A goblin ducked out of a clump of mushrooms and hooted at them, then dashed back in again.

"What do we do?" asked Caroline and it was a question that went echoing down the long corridor of improbability, a question for which there was, at the moment, no satisfactory answer.

Swiftly, Gary made an inventory:

The clothes they stood in.

A few matches in his pocket.

A bow and some arrows, but the bow didn't count for much.

And that was all. There was nothing else.

"More pets," said Caroline, bitterly.

"What's that?" asked Gary, not sure he heard her right.

"Let it go," she said. "Forget I ever said it.”

"There's nothing to get hold of," Gary said. "Nothing you can touch. The voice… the voice is nothing.”

"It's a horrible thing," said Caroline. "Don't you see, Gary, what a horrible thing it is. The tag end of some great race. Think of it. Millions of years, millions of years to build up a mighty mental civilization. Not a mechanical civilization, not a materialistic culture, but a mental civilization. A striving toward understanding rather than toward doing.

"And now it's a senile thing, an insane thing that has gone back to its second childhood, but its power is too great for a child to wield and it is dangerous… dangerous…”

Gary nodded. "It could masquerade as anything it pleased. It sent one of the goblins to the city of the Engineers and the Engineers thought the goblin was the mentality that they had contacted. But it wasn't. It was a simple, foolish puppet, but the voice moved it as it wished, talked through its flimsy mind.”

"The Engineers must have sensed the inherent insanity of that mind," said Caroline. "They may not have been sure, but they must, at least, have sensed it, for they sent it away with all the rest of them. The voice could have worked with us. You notice how it talks the way a human talks…

that's because it picked our minds, because it found the thoughts and words we used, because it was able to know everything we know.”

"It could see everything in the universe," said Gary. "It could know everything that there was to know.”

"Perhaps it did," Caroline told him. "Perhaps the weight of the knowledge was too great. When you overload an engine, the engine will burn out. What would happen if you should overload a mind, even a great communal mind such as we have here?”

"Insanity, maybe," said Gary. "Lord, I don't know. It's like nothing I ever ran across before.”

Caroline moved close to Gary.

"We're alone, Gary," she said. "The human race stands all alone. No other race has the balance that we have. Other races may be as great, but they do not have the balance. Look at the Engineers. Materialistic, mechanical to a point where they cannot think except along mechanistic lines. And the voice. It goes on the opposite tangent. No mechanics at all, just mentality. An overwhelming and an awful mentality. And the Hellhounds.

Savage killers. Bending every knowledge to the business of killing.

Egomaniacs who would destroy the universe to achieve their own supremacy.”

They stood silent, side by side. The great red sun was nearing the western horizon. The goblins scuttered through the mushrooms, chirping and hooting.

A disgusting thing, a couple of feet long, crawled out of the slimy waters of the bog, reared itself and stared at them, then lumbered around and slid into the water once again.

"I'll start a fire," said Gary. "Night will be coming soon. We'll have to keep the fire going once we get it started.

I only have a few matches.”

"Maybe we can eat the mushrooms," said Caroline. "Some of them may be poisonous," Gary told her. "We'll have to watch the goblins, eat what they eat. No absolute guarantee, of course, that what they eat wouldn't poison us, but it's the only way we have of knowing. We'll eat just a little at a time, only one of us eating…”

"The goblins! Do you think they will bother us?”

"Not likely," Gary told her, but he wasn't as confident as he made it sound.

They gathered a stack of the dried stems of the mushrooms and corded them against the night. Gary, carefully shielding the flame with a protecting hand, struck a match and started a small fire.

The sun had set and the stars were coming out in the hazy darkness of the sky… but stars they did not know.

They crouched by the fire, more for the companionship of its flames than for the heat it gave, and watched the stars grow brighter, listening to the chattering of the busy goblins in the mushrooms behind them.

"We'll need water," said Caroline.

Gary nodded. "We'll try filtering it. Lots of sand. Sand is a good filter.”

"You know," said Caroline, "I can't feel that this has happened to us. I keep thinking, pretty soon we'll wake up and it will be all right. It hasn't really happened. It…”

"Gary…" she gasped.

He jerked upright at the alarm in her tone.

Her hands were at her head, feeling of the braids of hair.

"It's there again!" she whispered. "The braid I cut off to make a bowstring. I cut it off and it was gone and it is there again!”

"Well, I'll be…" But he did not finish the sentence. For there, not more than a hundred feet away, was the ship… Tommy Evans' ship, the ship that the voice had destroyed in a single flash of fire. It sat on the sand sedately, with light pouring from its ports, with the shine of starlight on its plates.

"Caroline!" he shouted. "The ship! The ship!”

"Hurry," said the voice to them. "Hurry, before I change my mind. Hurry, before I go insane again.”

Gary reached down a hand and pulled Caroline to her feet.

"Come on," he shouted.

"Think of me as kindly as you can," said the voice. "Think of me as an old man, an old, old man, who is not quite the man he was… not quite the man he was.”

They ran, stumbling in the darkness, toward the ship. "Hurry, hurry," the voice shouted at them. "I cannot trust myself.”

"Look!" cried Caroline. "Look, in the sky!”

The wheel of light was there, the slow, lazy wheel of light they first had seen on Pluto… the entrance to the space-time tunnel.

"I gave you back the ship," said the voice. "I gave you back the strand of hair. Think kindly of me please… think kindly…”

They clambered up the ladder to the open port and slammed the lock behind them.

At the controls, Gary reached out for the warming knob, found that it was already turned on. The tubes, the indicator said, were warm.

He gunned the ship into the sky, centering the cross hairs on the wheel that shimmered above them.

They hit it head-on and the black closed in around them and then there was light again and the city of the Engineers was below them… a blasted city, its proud towers gone, great heaps of rubble in its streets, a cloud of stone-dust, ground in the mills of atomic bombing, hanging over it.

Gary glanced over his shoulder, triumphant at their return, and saw the tears that welled in Caroline's eyes and trickled down her cheeks.

"The poor thing," she said. "That poor old man back there.”