Title: Cosmic enginers

Author: Clifford D. Simak
Original copyright year: 1950
Genre: science fiction
Book price (of scanned edition): US$ 0.50
Comments: To my knowledge, this is the only available e-text of this book.
Source: scanned and OCR-read from a paperback edition with Xerox TextBridge
Pro 9.0, proofread in MS Word 2000.
Date of e-text: August 16, 1999
Prepared by: Anada Sucka

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Anticopyright 1999. All rights reversed.

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Cosmic engineers

Clifford D. Simak

From the original short  novel by the same author, Copyright 1939 by Street
and Smith Publications, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

"...  apart from  your  assignments, you  must always  be receptive  to, be
prepared for,  and act upon all news  potential from strange sources though
it may lead you  to the end of the solar system -  perhaps even to the very
edge of the universe..." From the Interplanetary Newsman's Manual

Chapter One

HERB HARPER  snapped on  the radio and  a voice snarled,  billions of miles
away: "Police ship 968.  Keep watch for freighter Vulcan on the Earth-Venus
run. Search ship for drugs. Believed to be..."

Herb spun the dial.  A lazy voice floated through the ship: "Pleasure yacht
Helen, three hours out of Sandebar. Have you any messages for us?"

He spun  the dial again. The voice of  Tim Donovan, radio's ace newscaster,
rasped "Tommy Evans will have to wait a few more days before attempting his
flight  to Alpha  Centauri. The  Solar Commerce  commission claims  to have
found  some faults  in the  construction of  his new generators,  but Tommy
still insists  that those generators will  shoot him along at  a speed well
over that  of light.  Nevertheless, he has  been ordered to  bring his ship
back to Mars so  that technicians may check it before he finally takes off.
Tommy is  out on Pluto now, all poised for  launching off into space beyond
the solar system. At  last reports he had made no move to obey the order of
the commission. Tommy's backers, angered by the order, call it high-handed,
charge there are politics back of it..."

Herb  shut off  the  radio and  walked to  the  door separating  the living
quarters of the Space Pup from the control room.

"Hear that, Gary?" he asked. "Maybe we'll get to see this guy, Evans, after
all."

Gary Nelson,  puffing at  his foul, black  pipe, scowled savagely  at Herb.
"Who wants to see that glory grabber?" he asked.

"What's biting you now?" asked Herb.

"Nothing," said  Gary, "except  Tommy Evans. Ever  since we left  Saturn we
haven't heard a thing out of Donovan except this Tommy Evans."

Herb stared at his lanky partner.

"You sure  got a bad  case of space fever,"  he said. "You been  like a dog
with a sore head the last few days."

"Who wouldn't  get space fever?" snapped Gary.  He gestured out through the
vision plate.  "Nothing but space," he  said. "Blackness with little stars.
Stars that have forgotten  how to twinkle. Going hundreds of miles a second
and you wonder if you're moving. No change in scenery. A few square feet of
space to live in.  Black space pressing all about you, taunting you, trying
to get in..."

He stopped and sat down limply in the pilot's chair.

"How about a game of chess?" asked Herb.

Gary twisted about and snapped at him:

"Don't mention chess to me again, you sawed-off shrimp. I'll space-walk you
if you do. So help me Hannah if I won't."

"Thought maybe it would quiet you down," said Herb.

Gary leveled his pipestem at Herb.

"If I  had the guy who  invented three-way chess," he  said, "I'd wring his
blasted  neck.  The  old   kind  was  bad  enough,  but  three-dimensional,
twenty-seven man..."

He shook his head dismally.

"He must have been half nuts," he said.

"He  did  go off  his  rockers," Herb  told  him, "but  not from  inventing
three-way chess. Guy by  the name of Konrad Fairbanks. In an asylum back on
Earth now.  I took  a picture of  him once, when  he was coming  out of the
courtroom.  Just after  the judge  said he  was only  half there.  The cops
chased hell out of  me but I got away. The Old Man  paid me ten bucks bonus
for the shot."

"I remember that," said  Gary. "Best mathematical mind in the whole system.
Worked out  equations no one  could understand. Went screwy  when he proved
that  there actually  were times when  one and  one didn't quite  make two.
Proved it, you understand. Not just theory or mathematical mumbo-jumbo."

Herb  walked across  the control  room and  stood beside Gary,  looking out
through the vision plate.

"Everything been going all right?" he asked.

Gary growled deep in his throat.

"What could go wrong  out here? Not even any meteors. Nothing to do but sit
and watch.  And there  really isn't any  need of that.  The robot navigator
handles everything." The soft purr of the geosectors filled the ship. There
was no  other sound. The ship seemed standing  still in space. Saturn swung
far  down to the  right, a golden  disk of  light with thin,  bright rings.
Pluto was  a tiny speck of  light almost dead ahead,  a little to the left.
The Sun, three billion miles astern, was shielded from their sight.

The Space Pup was headed for Pluto at a pace that neared a thousand miles a
second. The  geosectors, warping the curvature  of space itself, hurled the
tiny  ship through the  void at a  speed unthought  of less than  a hundred
years before.

And now  Tommy Evans, out on  Pluto, was ready, if  only the Solar Commerce
commission would  stop its  interference, to bullet  his experimental craft
away from  the solar system, out toward  the nearest star, 4.29 light-years
distant. Providing his  improved electro-gravatic geodesic deflectors lived
up to  the boast  of their inventors,  he would exceed the  speed of light,
would vanish  into that limbo of impossibility  that learned savants only a
few centuries before had declared was unattainable.

"It kind of makes a fellow dizzy," Herb declared.

"What does?"

"Why," said  Herb, "this Tommy Evans stunt. The  boy is making history. And
maybe we'll be there  to see him do it. He's the first to make a try at the
stars - and if  he wins, there will be lots of others.  Man will go out and
out  and  still farther  out,  maybe  clear out  to  where  space is  still
exploding."

Gary grunted. "They sure  will have to hurry some," be said, "because space
is exploding fast."

"Now look here," said Herb. "You can't just sit there and pretend the human
race has made no  progress. Take this ship, just for example. We don't rely
on rockets any more except in taking off and landing. Once out in space and
we set the geosectors to going and we warp space and build up speed that no
rocket could  ever hope  to give you.  We got an  atmosphere generator that
manufactures  air. No  more  stocking up  on  oxygen and  depending on  air
purifiers.  Same thing  with  food. The  machine just  picks up  matter and
energy out  of space and transmutes  them into steaks and  potatoes - or at
least their equivalent in food value. And we send news stories and pictures
across  billions of  miles of  space. You  just sit  down in front  of that
spacewriter and  whang away at the keys and in  a few hours another machine
back in New York writes what you have written."

Gary yawned. "How you  run on," he said, "We haven't even started yet - the
human race hasn't. What we have done isn't anything to what we are going to
do.  That is, if  the race doesn't  get so  downright ornery that  it kills
itself off first."

The spacewriter  in the corner of the  room stuttered and gibbered, warming
up under  the impulse  of the warning  signals, flung out  hours before and
three billion miles away.

The two men hurried across the room and hung over it.

Slowly, laboriously, the keys began to tap.

NELSON, ABOARD  SPACE PUP, NEARING PLUTO. HAVE INFO  EVANS MAY TAKE OFF FOR
CENTAURI WITHOUT  AUTHORIZATION OF  SCC. MAKE ALL POSSIBLE  SPEED TO PLUTO.
HANDLE SOONEST. MOST IMPORTANT. RUSH. REGARDS. EVENING ROCKET.

The machine burped to a stop. Herb looked at Gary.

"Maybe that guy Evans has got some guts after all," said Gary. "Maybe he'll
tell the  SCC where to  stick it. They been  asking for it for  a long time
now."

Herb  grunted. "They  won't chase  after him,  that's sure." Gary  sat down
before  the sending  board and threw  the switch.  The hum of  the electric
generators  drowned out  the moan of  the geosectors  as they built  up the
power necessary to hurl a beam of energy across the void to Earth.

"Only one  thing wrong with this setup," said Gary.  "It takes too long and
it takes too much power. I wish someone would hurry up and figure out a way
to use the cosmics for carriers."

"Doe Kingsley,  out on Pluto,  has been fooling around  with cosmics," said
Herb. "Maybe he'll turn the trick in another year of two."

"Doe Kingsley has been fooling around with a lot of things out there," said
Gary. "If  the man would only  talk, we'd have more  than one story to send
back from Pluto."

The dynamos  had settled  into a steady  hum of power. Gary  glanced at the
dials and reached out his fingers. He wrote:

EVENING ROCKET. EARTH. WILL CONTACT EVANS AT ONCE IF STILL ON PLUTO. IF NOT
WILL SEND  STORY ON FLIGHT. NOTHING TO REPORT  OUT HERE. WEATHER FINE. HERB
DROPPED OUR LAST QUART AND BROKE IT. HOW ABOUT A RAISE.

"That last," he said, "will get 'em."

"You didn't have to  put that in about the Scotch," Herb declared. "It just
slipped out of my fingers."

"Sure," said  Gary. "It just  slipped out of your  fingers. Right smack-dab
onto a steel plate and busted all to hell. After this, I handle the liquor.
When you want a drink, you ask me."

"Maybe Kingsley  will have some liquor,"  Herb said hopefully. "Maybe he'll
lend us a bottle."

"If he  does," declared  Gary, "you keep  your paws off of  it. Between you
sucking away  at it and dropping  it, I don't get more  than a drink or two
out of  each bottle. We still got Uranus and Neptune  to do after Pluto and
it looks like a long dry spell."

He got up  and walked to the fore part of the  ship, gazing out through the
vision plate.

"Only Neptune  and Uranus ahead," he  said. "And that's enough.  If the Old
Man ever  thinks up any more screwball stunts, he  can find someone else to
do them. When I  get back I'm going to ask him to  give me back my old beat
at the space terminal and I'm going to settle down there for the rest of my
natural life.  I'm going  to watch the ships  come in and take  off and I'm
going to get  down on my hands and knees and kiss  the ground each time and
be thankful I'm not on them."

"He's paying  us good  dough," said Herb.  "We got bank  accounts piling up
back home."

Gary pretended not to hear him.

"Know Your  Solar System," he  said. "Special articles run  every Sunday in
the  Evening Rocket.  Story by  Leary Nelson.  Pictures by  Herbert Harper.
Intrepid newsmen  brave perils of space  to bring back true  picture of the
solar  system's planets.  One year  alone in  a spaceship, bringing  to the
readers of  the Rocket a detailed account of life in  space, of life on the
planets. Remember how the  promotion gang busted a gut advertising us. Full
page ads and everything."

He spat.

"Stuff for kids," he said.

"The kids probably think  we're heroes," said Herb. "Probably they read our
stuff and then pester the folks to buy them a spaceship. Want to go out and
see Saturn for themselves."

"The Old  Man said it would boost  circulation," declared Gary. "Hell, he'd
commit suicide  if he thought it would  boost circulation. Remember what he
told us. Says he:

'Go out and visit all the planets. Get first-hand information and pictures.
Shoot  them  back to  us.  We'll  run them  every  Sunday  in the  magazine
section.' Just  like he was sending  us around the corner  to cover a fire.
That's all there was  to it. Just a little over a year out in space. Living
in a spaceship and a spacesuit. Hurry through Jupiter's moons to get out to
Saturn and  then take it on the lam for Pluto.  Soft job. Nice vacation for
you. That's what the Old Man said. Nice soft vacation, he said."

His pipe gurgled threateningly  and he knocked it out viciously against the
heel of his hand.

"Well," said  Herb, "we're  almost to Pluto.  A few days more  and we'll be
there.  They  got  a  fueling  station  and  a  radio  and  Doc  Kingsley's
laboratories out there. Maybe we can promote us a poker game."

Gary walked to the telescopic screen and switched it on.

"Let's take a look at her," he said.

The great circular screen glowed softly. Within it swam the image of Pluto,
still almost  half a billion miles away. A dead  planet that shone dully in
the faint light of  the far distant Sun. A planet locked in the frigid grip
of naked space, a  planet that had been dead long before the first stirring
of life had taken place on Earth.

The vision was blurred  and Gary manipulated dials to bring it more sharply
into focus.

"Wait a  second," snapped Herb. His lingers  reached out and grasped Gary's
wrist.

"Turn it back a  ways," he said. "I saw something out there. Something that
looked like a ship. Maybe it's Evans coming back."

Slowly Gary twisted the dial back. A tiny spot of light danced indistinctly
on the screen.

"That's it," breathed Herb. "Easy now. Just a little more."

The spot  of light leaped into  sharper focus. But it  was merely a spot of
light, nothing  more, a  tiny, shining thing  in space. Some  metallic body
that was catching and reflecting the light of the Sun.

"Give it more power," said Herb.

Swiftly the  spot of light  grew, assumed definite shape.  Gary stepped the
magnification up until the thing filled the entire screen.

It was a ship - and yet it couldn't be a ship.

"It has no rocket  tubes," said Herb in amazement. "Without tubes how could
it get  off the ground? You can't use geosectors  in taking off. They twist
space all to hell and gone. They'd turn a planet inside out."

Gary  studied it.  "It doesn't  seem to  be moving,"  he said.  "Maybe some
motion, but not enough to detect."

"A derelict," suggested Herb.

Gary shook his head. "Still doesn't explain the lack of tubes," he said.

The two men lifted their eyes from the screen and looked at one another.

"The Old Man said we were to hurry to Pluto," Herb reminded Gary.

Gary wheeled about and strode back to the controls. He lowered his gangling
frame  into  the pilot's  chair  and  disconnected the  robot control.  His
lingers  reached out,  switched off  the geosectors,  pumped fuel  into the
rocket chambers.

"Find something to hang onto," be said, grimly. "We're stopping to see what
this is all about."

Chapter Two

The mysterious  space-shell was only a few miles  distant. With Herb at the
controls,  the Space Pup  cruised in  an ever-tightening circle  around the
glinting thing that hung there just off Pluto's orbit.

It was  a spaceship. Of that there could be no  doubt despite the fact that
it had  no rocket tubes. It  was hanging motionless. There  was no throb of
power within  it, no apparent  life, although dim light  glowed through the
vision ports  in what  probably were the  living quarters just  back of the
control room.

Gary crouched  in the airlock of the Space Pup,  with the outer valve swung
back. He  made sure  that his pistols  were securely in  their holsters and
cautiously tested the spacesuit's miniature propulsion units.

He spoke into his helmet mike.

"All right, Herb," he said, "I'm going. Try to tighten up the circle a bit.
Keep a close watch. That thing out there may be dynamite."

"Keep your nose clean,"  said Herb's voice in the phones. Gary straightened
and pushed himself out from the lock.

He  floated  smoothly in  space,  in a  gulf  of nothing,  a place  without
direction, without  an up  or down, an  unsubstantial place with  the fiery
eyes of distant stars ringing him around.

His steel-gloved  hand dropped  to the propulsion  mechanism that encircled
his waist.  Midget rocket tubes flared with tiny  flashes of blue power and
he was jerked forward, heading for the mystery ship. Veering too far to the
right, he gave the right tube a little more fuel and straightened out.

Steadily, under  the surging power of the  spacesuit tubes, he forged ahead
through space toward the  ship. He saw the gleaming lights of the Space Pup
slowly circle in front of him and then pass out of sight.

A quarter of a mile away, he shut off the tubes and glided slowly in to the
drifting shell.  He struck its pitted  side with the soles  of his magnetic
boots and stood upright.

Cautiously he  worked his way toward  one of the ports  from which came the
faint  gleam  of  light.  Lying  at  full  length, he  peered  through  the
foot-thick quartz. The light  was feeble and he could see but little. There
was no movement of  life, no indication that the shell was tenanted. In the
center of  what at  one time had been  the living quarters, he  saw a large
rectangular shape, like a huge box. Aside from this, however, be could make
out nothing.

Working his way back to the lock, he saw that it was tightly closed. He had
expected that.  He stamped against the plates  with his heavy boots, hoping
to attract  attention. But if any  living thing were inside,  it either did
not hear or disregarded the clangor that he made.

Slowly he  moved away  from the lock,  heading for the  control-room vision
plate, hoping from there to get a better view into the shell's interior. As
he moved,  his eyes caught a curious irregularity just  to the right of the
lock, as if faint lines had been etched into the steel of the hull.

He dropped  to one knee and  saw that a single  line of crude lettering had
been etched  into the metal. Brushing at it with  his gloved hand, he tried
to make  it out. Laboriously, he struggled with  it. It was simple, direct,
to the  point, a single declaration.  When one writes with  steel and acid,
one is necessarily brief.

The line read:

Control room vision-plate unlocked.

Amazed, he read the line again, hardly believing what he read. But there it
was. That single line, written with a single purpose. Simple directions for
gaining entrance.

Crouched upon  the steel  plating, he felt  a shiver run  through his body.
Someone had  etched that line in hope that  someone would come. But perhaps
he was  too late. The ship  had an old look about it.  The lines of it, the
way the ports were set into the hull, all were marks of spaceship designing
that had become obsolete centuries before.

He felt  the cold chill of  mystery and the utter  bleakness of outer space
closing in about him.  He gazed up over the bulged outline of the shell and
saw the  steely glare  of remote stars.  Stars secure in the  depth of many
light-years,  jeering at  him, jeering  at men  who held dreams  of stellar
conquest.

He shook  himself, trying  to shake off  the probing fingers  of half-fear,
glanced around  to locate  the Space Pup,  saw it slowly moving  off to his
right.

Swiftly, but carefully, he made his way over the nose of the ship and up to
the vision plate.

Squatting in front of the plate, he peered down into the control cabin. But
it wasn't  a control cabin. It was a laboratory. In  the tiny room which at
one time  must have housed the instruments of  navigation, there was now no
trace of  control panel  or calculator or telescopic  screen. Rather, there
were  work  tables, piled  with  scientific  apparatus, banks  and rows  of
chemical containers. All the paraphernalia of the scientist's workshop.

The door  into the living quarters, where he had  seen the large oblong box
was  closed. All  the  apparatus and  the  bottles in  the laboratory  were
carefully arranged,  neatly put  away, as if  someone had tidied  up before
they walked off and left the place.

He puzzled  for a moment. That  lack of rocket tubes,  the indications that
the ship was centuries  old, the scrawled acid-etched line by the lock, the
laboratory in  the control room... what did it all add  up to? He shook his
head. It didn't make much sense.

Bracing himself  against the curving steel hide of  the shell, he pushed at
the  vision-plate.  But he  could  exert  little effort.  Lack of  gravity,
inability to  brace himself securely, made  the task a hard  one. Rising to
his  feet, he  stamped his  heavy boots  against the  glass, but  the plate
refused to budge.

As a  last desperate effort, he might use his guns,  blast his way into the
shell. But that would be long, tedious work... and there would be a certain
danger. There should be, he told himself, an easier and a safer way.

Suddenly the way came  to him, but he hesitated, for there lay danger, too.
He could  lie down on the  plate, turn on the rocket  tubes of his suit and
use his body as a battering ram, as a lever, to force the stubborn hinges.

But it  would be an  easy matter to turn  on too much power,  so much power
that his body would be pounded to a pulp against the heavy quartz.

Shrugging  at the  thought, he  stretched flat  on the plate,  hands folded
under him with fingers  on the tube controls. Slowly he turned the buttons.
The rockets thrust at  his body, jamming him against the quartz. He snapped
the studs shut. It  had seemed, for a moment, that the plate had given just
a little.

Drawing in  a deep breath, he  twisted the studs again.  Once more his body
slammed against the plate, driven by the flaming tubes.

Suddenly  the  plate gave  way,  swung in  and  plunged him  down into  the
laboratory. Savagely he snapped  the studs shut. He struck hard against the
floor, cracked his helmet soundly.

Groggily  he  groped his  way  to  his feet.  The  thin  whine of  escaping
atmosphere came to his ears and unsteadily he made his way forward. Leaping
at the  plate, he slammed it back into place again.  It closed with a thud,
driven deep into its frame by the force of rushing air.

A chair  stood beside  a table and he  swung around, sat down  in it, still
dizzy from the fall. He shook his head to clear away the cobwebs.

There was  atmosphere here.  That meant that an  atmosphere generator still
was operating, that the ship had developed no leaks and was still airtight.

He raised  his helmet slightly.  Fresh pure air swirled  into his nostrils,
better  air  than he  had  inside  his suit.  A  little highly  oxygenated,
perhaps, but  that was  all. If the  atmosphere machine had run  for a long
time unattended, it might  have gotten out of adjustment slightly, might be
mixing a bit too much oxygen with the air output.

He swung the helmet  back and let it dangle on the hinge at the back of the
neck,  gulped  in  great  mouthfuls of  the  atmosphere.  His head  cleared
rapidly.

He looked around the room. There was little that he had not already seen. A
practical,  well-equipped laboratory,  but  much of  the equipment,  he now
realized, was old.

Some of it was obsolete and that fitted in with all the rest of it.

A framed  document hung above a cabinet and getting  to his feet, he walked
across the room to  look at it. Bending close, he read it. It was a diploma
from the College of  Science at Alkatoon, Mars, one of the most outstanding
of several  universities on the Red Planet. The  diploma had been issued to
one Caroline Martin.

Gary read  the name  a second time.  It seemed that  he should  know it. It
raised some  memory in his brain, but just what it  was he couldn't say, an
elusive recognition that eluded him by the faintest margin.

He looked around the room.

Caroline Martin.

A girl  who had  left a diploma in  this cabin, a pitiful  reminder of many
years ago. He bent again and looked at the date upon the sheep-skin. It was
5976. He whistled softly. A thousand years ago!

A  thousand years.  And if  Caroline Martin  had left  this diploma  here a
thousand years  ago, where  was Caroline Martin  now? What had  happened to
her? Dead  in what  strange corner of  the solar system? Dead  in this very
ship?

He  swung  about and  strode  toward  the door  that  led  into the  living
quarters. His  hand reached out and seized the door  and pushed it open. He
took  one step  across the  threshold and  then he  stopped, halted  in his
stride.

In the  center of  the room was  the oblong box  that he had  seen from the
port. But instead of  a box, it was a tank, bolted securely to the floor by
heavy steel brackets.

The tank was  filled with a greenish fluid and in the  fluid lay a woman, a
woman dressed in metallic  robes that sparkled in the light from the single
radium bulb in the ceiling just above the tank.

Breathlessly, Gary  moved closer,  peered over the  edge of the  tank, down
through the  clear green liquid into  the face of the  woman. Her eyes were
closed  and long,  curling black  lashes lay  against the whiteness  of her
cheeks.  Her forehead  was high and  long braids  of raven hair  were bound
about  her  head. Slim  black  eyebrows  arched to  almost  meet above  the
delicately modeled nose. Her  mouth was a thought too large, a trace of the
patrician  in the  thin, red lips.  Her arms  were laid straight  along her
sides and the metallic gown swept in flowing curves from chin to ankles.

Beside her  right hand, lying in  the bottom of the  tank, was a hypodermic
syringe, bright and shining despite the green fluid which covered it.

Gary's breath caught in his throat.

She looked alive and  yet she couldn't be alive. Still there was a flush of
youth and beauty in her cheeks, as if she merely slept.

Laid out as if  for death and still with the lie to death in her very look.
Her face was calm, serene... and something else. Expectancy, perhaps. As if
she only waited for a thing she hoped to happen.

Caroline Martin  was the name on  the diploma out in  the laboratory. Could
this be Caroline Martin?  Could this be the girl who had graduated from the
college of science at Alkatoon ten centuries ago?

Gary shook his head uneasily.

He stepped back from the tank and as he did he saw the copper plate affixed
to its metal side. He stooped to read.

Another simple message, etched in copper... a message from the girl who lay
inside the tank.

I am  not dead. I am in suspended animation. Drain  the tank by opening the
valve. Use the syringe you find in the medicine cabinet.

Gary  glanced across the  room, saw a  medicine chest  on the wall  above a
washbowl.  He looked back  at the tank  and mopped  his brow with  his coat
sleeve.

"It isn't possible," he whispered.

Like a  man in a dream, he stumbled to the  medicine chest. The syringe was
there. He broke it  and saw that it was loaded with a cartridge filled with
a reddish substance. A drug, undoubtedly, to overcome suspended animation.

Replacing the syringe, he went back to the tank and found the valve. It was
stubborn with the years, defying all the strength in his arms. He kicked it
with a heavy boot  and jarred it loose. With nervous hands he opened it and
watched the level of the green fluid slowly recede.

Watching, an  odd calm came upon  him, a steadying calm  that made him hard
and  machine-like to  do the thing  that faced  him. One little  slip might
spoil it.  One fumbling move might undo the work  of a thousand years. What
if the  drug in  the hypodermic had  lost its strength? There  were so many
things that might happen.

But there  was only one thing  to do. He raised a hand  in front of him and
looked at it. It was a steady hand.

He wasted no time in wondering what it was about. This was not the time for
that. Frantic questionings clutched  at his thoughts and he shook them off.
Time enough  to wonder  and to speculate  and question when  this thing was
done.

When  the fluid was  level with the  girl's body,  he waited no  longer. He
leaned over the rim of the tank and lifted her in his arms. For a moment he
hesitated, then turned and  went to the laboratory and placed her on one of
the work tables. The  fluid, dripping off the rustling metallic dress, left
a trail of wet across the floor.

From the  medicine chest he took the hypodermic and  went back to the girl.
He  lifted  her left  arm  and  peered closely  at  it.  There were  little
punctures, betraying previous use of the needle.

Perspiration stood out on his forehead. If only he knew a little more about
this. If only he had some idea of what he was supposed to do.

Awkwardly he  shoved the needle into a vein,  depressed the plunger. It was
done and he stepped back.

Nothing happened. He waited.

Minutes passed  and she took  a shallow breath. He  watched in fascination,
saw her  come to life again... saw the  breath deepen, the eyelids flicker,
the right hand twitch.

Then she was looking at him out of deep blue eyes.

"You are all right?" he asked.

It was, he knew, a rather foolish question.

Her speech  was broken.  Her tongue and  lips refused to work  the way they
should, but he understood what she tried to say.

"Yes, I'm  all right." She lay  quietly on the table.  "What year is this?"
she asked.

"It's 6948," he told her.

Her eyes  widened and she looked  at him with a  startled glance. "Almost a
thousand years," she said. "You are sure of the year?"

He nodded. "That is about the only thing that I am really sure of."

"How is that?"

"Why, finding you here,"  said Gary, "and reviving you again. I still don't
believe it happened."

She laughed,  a funny,  discordant laugh because her  muscles, inactive for
years, had forgotten how to function rightly.

"You are Caroline Martin, aren't you?" asked Gary.

She gave him a quick look of surprise and rose to a sitting position.

"I am Caroline Martin," she answered. "But how did you know that?"

Gary gestured at the diploma. "I read it."

"Oh," she said. "I'd forgotten all about it."

"I am Gary Nelson,"  he told her. "Newsman on the loose. My pal's out there
in a spaceship waiting for us."

"I suppose," she said, "that I should thank you, but I don't know how. Just
ordinary thanks aren't quite enough."

"Skip it," said Gary, tersely.

She stretched her arms above her head.

"It's good  to be alive again," she said. "Good  to know there's life ahead
of you."

"But," said Gary, "you always were alive. It must have been just like going
to sleep."

"It wasn't sleep," she  said. "It was worse than death. Because, you see, I
made one mistake."

"One mistake?"

"Yes, just  one mistake. One you'd never think of.  At least, I didn't. You
see,  when animation was  suspended every  physical process was  reduced to
almost  zero,  metabolism  slowed  down to  almost  nothing.  But with  one
exception. My brain kept right on working."

The horror of it sank into Gary slowly. "You mean you knew?"

She nodded. "I couldn't hear or see or feel. I had no bodily sensation. But
I  could think.  I've thought  for almost  ten centuries.  I tried  to stop
thinking, but I never could.

I prayed  something would go wrong and I would die.  Anything at all to end
that eternity of thought."

She saw the pity in his eyes.

"Don't waste sympathy on  me," she said and there was a note of hardness in
her voice. "I brought  it on myself. Stubbornness, perhaps. I played a long
shot. I took a gamble."

He chuckled in his throat. "And won."

"A billion to one shot," she said. "Probably greater odds than that. It was
madness itself to do it. This shell is a tiny speck in space. There wasn't,
I don't  suppose, a billion-to-one chance, if you  figured it out on paper,
that anyone  would find me. I  had some hope. Hope  that would have reduced
those odds  somewhat. I placed my faith on someone  and I guess they failed
me. Perhaps  it wasn't their fault. Maybe they  died before they could even
hunt for me."

"But how  did you do it?"  asked Gary. "Even today  suspended animation has
our scientists  stumped. They've made  some progress but not  much. And you
made it work a thousand years ago."

"Drugs," she  said. "Certain Martian drugs. Rare ones.  And they have to be
combined  correctly.  Slow  metabolism  to  a  point  where  it  is  almost
non-existent.  But  you have  to  be  careful. Slow  it  down  too far  and
metabolism stops. That's death."

Gary gestured  toward the hypodermic. "And  that," be said, "reacts against
the other drug."

She nodded gravely.

"The fluid in the tank," he said. "That was to prevent dehydration and held
some  food value?  You wouldn't  need much  food with metabolism  at nearly
zero. But how about your mouth and nostrils? The fluid..."

"A mask," she said. "Chemical paste that held up under moisture. Evaporated
as soon as it was struck by air."

"You thought of everything."

"I had to," she declared. "There was no one else to do my thinking for me."

She slid off the table and walked slowly toward him.

"You told me a minute ago," she said, "that the scientists of today haven't
satisfactorily solved suspended animation."

He nodded.

"You mean to say they still don't know about these drugs?"

"There are some of them," he said, "who'd give their good right arm to know
about them."

"We knew  about them a thousand years ago," the  girl said. "Myself and one
other. I wonder..."

She whirled  on Gary. "Let's get out of here," she  cried. "I have a horror
of this place."

"Anything you  want to  take?" he asked.  "Anything I can  get together for
you?"

She made an impatient gesture.

"No," she said. "I want to forget this place."

Chapter Three

The Space Pup arrowed  steadily toward Pluto. From the engine room came the
subdued hum  of the geosectors. The  vision plate looked out  on ebon space
with its far-flung way posts of tiny, steely stars. The needle was climbing
up near the thousand-miles-a-second mark.

Caroline Martin leaned forward  in her chair and stared out at the vastness
that  stretched eternally  ahead.  "I could  stay and  watch  forever," she
exulted.

Gary, lounging back in the pilot's seat, said quietly:

"I've been thinking about  that name of yours. It seems to me I've heard it
somewhere. Read it in a book."

She glanced at him swiftly and then stared out into space.

"Perhaps you have," she said finally.

There was a silence, unbroken except by the humming of the geosectors.

The girl turned back  to Gary, chin cupped in her hands. "Probably you have
read about me;" she said. 'Perhaps the name of Caroline Martin is mentioned
in your  histories. You see, I was a member  of the old Mars-Earth Research
commission during the war  with Jupiter. I was so proud of the appointment.
Just four years out of school and I was trying so hard to get a good job in
some scientific research work.  I wanted to earn money to go back to school
again."

"I'm beginning  to remember now,"  said Gary, "but there  must be something
wrong. The histories say you were a traitor. They say you were condemned to
death."

"I was a traitor," she said and there was a thread of ancient bitterness in
the  words  she spoke.  "I  refused  to turn  over  a discovery  I made,  a
discovery that would have won the war. It also would have wrecked the solar
system. I told them  so, but they were men at war. They were desperate men.
We were losing then."

"We never did win, really," Gary told her.

"They  condemned me to  space," she said.  "They put  me in that  shell you
found me  in and  a war cruiser  towed it out  to Pluto's orbit  and cut it
loose. It  was an old condemned craft,  its machinery outmoded. They ripped
out the rockets and turned it into a prison for me."

She made a gesture of silence at the shocked look on their faces.

"The histories don't tell that part of it," said Herb.

"They probably suppressed it," she said. "Men at war will do things that no
sane man  will do. They would  not admit in peace  the atrocities that they
committed in  the time  of battle. They  put the laboratory  in the control
room as  a final ironic jest. So I could carry  out my research, they said.
Research, they told me, I'd not need to turn over to them."

"Would your discovery have wrecked the system?"

Gary asked.

"Yes," she  said, "it  would have. That's why  I refused to give  it to the
military  board. For  that they called  me traitor.  I think they  hoped to
break me.  I think they thought up to the very  last that, faced with exile
in space, I would finally crack and give it to them."

"When  you didn't,"  Herb  said, "they  couldn't back  down.  They couldn't
afford to let you call their bluff."

"They never found your notes," said Gary.

She tapped  her forehead with a  slender finger. "My notes  were here," she
said.

He looked amazed.

"And still are," she said.

"But how did you get the drugs to carry out your suspended animation?" Gary
asked.

She waited for long minutes.

"That's the part I hate to think about," she said. "The part that's hard to
think about. I worked with a young man. About my age, then. He must be dead
these many years."

She stopped  and Gary could see that she was trying  to marshal in her mind
what next to say.

"We  were  in  love,"  she  said.  "Together we  discovered  the  suspended
animation process.  We had worked on it secretly  for months and were ready
to announce  it when I was  taken before the military  tribunal. They never
let me see him after that. I was allowed no visitors.

"Out in space, after the war cruiser left, I almost went insane. I invented
all  sorts of  tasks  to do.  I arranged  and  rearranged my  chemicals and
apparatus and then one day I found the drugs, skillfully hidden in a box of
chemicals. Only  one person in the world besides  myself knew about them. I
found the drugs and two hypodermic syringes."

Gary's pipe had gone out and now he relit it. The girl went on.

"I knew it would  be a gamble," she said. "I knew he intended that I should
take that gamble. Maybe  he had a wild scheme of coming out and hunting for
me.  Maybe something  happened  and he  couldn't come.  Maybe he  tried and
failed. Maybe the war... got him. But he had given me a chance, a desperate
chance to  beat the fate the  military court had set  for me. I removed the
steel partition in the  engine room to make the tank. That took many weeks.
I etched the copper plate. I went outside on the shell and etched the lines
beside the lock. I'm afraid that wasn't a very good job."

"And then," said Herb, "you put yourself to sleep."

"Not exactly  sleep," she said.  "Because my brain still  worked. I thought
and thought for almost a thousand years. My mind set up problems and worked
them out.  I developed  a flair for  pure deduction, since my  mind was the
only thing left for  me to work with. I believe I even developed telepathic
powers."

"You mean," asked Herb, "that you can read our thoughts?"

She nodded,  then hastened on. "But  I wouldn't," she said.  "I wouldn't do
that to  my friends. I knew  when Gary first came to  the shell. I read the
wonder  and amazement in  his thoughts. I  was so  afraid he'd go  away and
leave me alone  again. I tried to talk to him with  my thoughts, but he was
so upset that he couldn't understand."

Gary shook his head. "Anyone would have been upset," he said.

"But," exploded Herb, "think of the chances that you took. It was just pure
luck we  found you.  Your drug wouldn't  have held up  forever. Another few
thousand years, perhaps, but scarcely longer than that. Then there would be
the chance that the  atmosphere generators might have failed. Or that a big
meteor, or even a  small one, for that matter, might have come along. There
were a thousand things that could have happened."

She agreed with him. "It was a long chance. I knew it was. But there was no
other  way. I could  have just sat  still and  done nothing or  gone crazy,
grown old and died in loneliness."

She was silent for a moment.

"It  would have  been  easy," she  said then,  "if I  hadn't made  that one
mistake."

"Weren't you frightened?" Gary asked.

Her eyes widened slightly and she nodded.

"I heard  voices," she said. "Voices  coming out of space,  out of the void
that lies  between the galaxies. Things  talking over many light-years with
one another.  Things to which the  human race, intellectually, would appear
mere  insects. At  first I  was frightened,  frightened at the  things they
said, at  the horrible hints I sensed in  the things I couldn't understand.
Then, growing  desperate, I  tried to talk  back to them,  tried to attract
their attention.  I wasn't afraid of them any more  and I thought that they
might help.  I didn't care much what happened any  more just so someone, or
something, would  help me. Even take notice of me.  Anything to let me know
that I wasn't all alone."

Gary lit  his pipe again and silence fell for  just a space. "Voices," said
Herb.

They all  stared out  at that darkness  that hemmed them in.  Gary felt the
hairs bristle  at the  nape of his neck.  Some cold wind from  far away had
brushed against  his face, an  unnamable terror out of  the cosmos reaching
out  for him, searching  for him  with dirty-taloned thoughts.  Things that
hurled pure  thought across the  deserts of emptiness that  lay between the
galaxies.

"Tell me," said Caroline, and her voice, too, seemed to come from far away,
"how did the war come out?"

"The war?" asked Gary. Then he understood.

"Oh, the  war," he  said. "Why, Earth and  Mars finally won out.  Or so the
histories  claim. There  was  a battle  out near  Ganymede and  both fleets
limped  home  badly  beaten  up. The  Jovians  went  back  to Jupiter,  the
Earth-Mars fleet  pulled into  Sandebar on Mars.  For months the  two inner
planets  built up  their  fleets and  strengthened home  defenses.  But the
Jovians never  came out again and  our fleets didn't dare  carry the war to
the  enemy. Even  today  we haven't  developed a  ship  that dares  go into
Jupiter's atmosphere. Our geosectors might take us there and bring us back,
but you can't use them near a planetary body. They work on the principle of
warping space..."

"Warping space?" asked the girl, suddenly sitting upright.

"Sure," said  Gary. "Anything peculiar about it?"  "No," she said, "I don't
suppose there is."

Then: "I wouldn't exactly call that a victory."

"That's what the histories  call it." Gary shrugged. "They claim we run the
Jovians to cover and  they've been afraid to come out ever since. Earth and
Mars have taken over Jupiter's moons and colonized them, but to this day no
one has sighted a Jovian or a Jovian ship. Not since that day back in 5980.

"It's just one of them things," Herb decided for them.

The  girl was  staring out at  space again.  Hungry for seeing,  hungry for
living, but with the scars of awful memories etched into her brain.

Gary shivered to himself.  Alone, she had taken her gamble and had won. Won
against time and space  and the brutality of man and the great indifference
of the mighty sweep of stars.

What  had she  thought of during  those long  years? What problems  had she
solved? What  kind of a person could she  be, with her twenty-year-old body
and her thousand-year-old brain?

Gary  nursed the  hot  bowl of  his pipe  between  his hands,  studying the
outline of  her head against the  vision-plate. Square chin, high forehead,
the braided strands wrapped around her head.

What was  she thinking now? Of that lover who  now would be forgotten dust?
Of  how he  might have  tried to find  her, of  how he might  have searched
through space  and failed? Or was  she thinking of the  voices... the voice
talking back and forth across the gulfs of empty space?

The spacewriter,  sitting in  its own dark  corner, broke into  a gibbering
chatter.

Gary sprang to his feet.

"Now what?" he almost shouted.

The chattering  ceased and the machine settled  into the click-clack of its
message.

Gary hurried forward. The  other two pressed close behind, looking over his
shoulder.

NELSON, ABOARD SPACE PUP, NEARING PLUTO. KINGSLEY REPORTS RECEIVING STRANGE
MESSAGES FROM  SOMEWHERE OUT OF THE SOLAR  SYSTEM. UNABLE, OR UNWILLING, TO
GUESS AT  SOURCE. REFUSES  TO GIVE CIRCUMSTANCES UNDER  WHICH MESSAGES WERE
RECEIVED OR  CONTEXT OF THEM, IF IN FACT HE  KNOWS CONTEXT. URGENT THAT YOU
GET STATEMENT FROM HIM SOONEST. REGARDS. EVENING ROCKET.

The machine's stuttering came to an end.'

The three stared at one another.

"Messages," said Herb. "Messages out of space."

Gary  shook his  head. He  stole a swift  glance at  the girl and  her face
seemed pale. Perhaps she was remembering.

Chapter Four

TRAIL'S END,  Pluto's single community, cowering at  the foot of a towering
black  mountain, seemed  deserted.  There was  no  stir of  life about  the
buildings  that  huddled  between  the  spacefield and  the  mountain.  The
spiraling tower  of the radio station  climbed dizzily spaceward and beside
it squatted  the tiny radio shack. Behind it  stood the fueling station and
the hangar,  while half a mile away loomed  the larger building that housed
the laboratories of the Solar Science commission.

Caroline moved closer to Gary.

"It  seems  so lonely,"  she  whispered.  "I don't  like loneliness  now...
after..."

Gary stirred  uneasily, scraping the heavy boots  of his spacesuit over the
pitted rock.  "It's always  lonely enough," he  said. "I wonder  where they
are."

As he  spoke the lock of  the radio shack opened  and a space-suited figure
strode across the field to meet them.

His voice  crackled in their helmet phones. "You  must be Nelson," it said.
"I'm  Ted Smith, operator  here. Kingsley told  me to  bring you up  to the
house right away."

"Fine," said Gary. "Glad to be here. I suppose Evans is still around."

"He is," said Smith.  "He's up at the house now. His ship is in the hangar.
Personally, I figure he's planning to take off and let the SCC do what they
can about it."

Smith fell  in step with them.  "It's good to see  new faces," he declared,
"especially a woman. We don't have women visitors very often."

"I'm sorry," said Gary. "I forgot."

He introduced  Caroline and  Herb to Smith  as they plodded  past the radio
shack and started for the laboratory.

"It gets God-lonesome out here," said Smith. "This is a hellish place, if I
do  say so  myself. No wind.  No moon.  No nothing. Very  little difference
between day  and night because there's never any  clouds to cover the stars
and even in the daytime the Sun is little better than a star."

His tongue,  loosened by  visitors to talk  to, rambled on.  "A fellow gets
kind of queer out here," he told them.

"It's enough  to make  anyone get queer.  I think the doctor  is half crazy
from staying here too long. He thinks he's getting messages from some place
far away. Acts mysterious about it."

"You think he just imagines it?" asked Herb.

"I'm not  saying one way or  the other," declared Smith,  "but I ask you...
where would  you get  the messages from?  Think of the power  it would take
just  to send a  message from Alpha  Centauri. And  that isn't so  very far
away. Not so far as stars go. Right next door, you might say."

"Evans is going to fly there and back," Herb reminded him.

"Evans  is space-nuts,"  said  Smith. "With  all the  solar system  to fool
around in,  he has  to go gallivanting  off to the  stars. He  hasn't got a
chance. I told him so, but he laughed at me. I'm sorry for him. He's a nice
young fellow."

They mounted  the steps,  hewn out of  living stone, which led  to the main
airlock of the laboratory building. Smith pressed a button and they waited.

"I suppose you'll want Andy to go over your ship,"

Smith suggested.

"Sure," said Gary. "Tell him to take good care of it."

"Andy is  the fueling-station  man," the radio operator  explained. "But he
hasn't much to do now. Most of the ships use geosectors. There's only a few
old  tubs, one  or  two a  year, that  need  any fuel.  Used  to be  a good
business, but not any more."

The space  lock swung open and the three  stepped inside. Smith remained by
the doorway.

"I have to  go back to the shack," he said. "I'll  see you again before you
leave."

The  lock hissed shut  behind them and  the inner  screw began to  turn. It
swung  open  and  they  stepped into  a  small  room  that  was lined  with
spacesuits hanging on the wall.

A  man was  standing  in the  center of  the  room. A  big man,  with broad
shoulders and  hands like hams. His unruly shock  of hair was jet-black and
his voice boomed jovially at them.

"Glad to  see all  of you," be  said and laughed, a  deep, thunderous laugh
that seemed to shake the room.

Gary swung back the helmet of his suit and thrust out a gloved hand.

"You are Dr. Kingsley?" he asked.

"That's who  I am," boomed the mighty voice. "And  who are these folks with
you?"

Gary introduced them.

"I didn't know there was a lady in the party," said the doctor.

"There wasn't," said Herb. "Not until just recently."

"Mean to tell me they've taken to hitch-hiking out in space?"

Gary laughed.  "Even better than that, doctor,"  he said. "There's a little
story about Miss Martin you'll enjoy."

"Come on,"  he roared  at them. "Get  out of your  duds. I  got some coffee
brewing.  And you'll  want to meet  Tommy Evans.  He's that young  fool who
thinks he's going to fly four light-years out to old A.C."

And at just that moment Tommy Evans burst into the room.

"Doc," he shouted, "that damn machine of yours is at it again."

Dr. Kingsley turned and lumbered out, shouting back at them.

"Come along. Never mind the suits."

They ran  behind him as he lumbered along.  Through what obviously were the
laboratory's  living  quarters,  through a  tiny  kitchen  that smelled  of
boiling coffee,  into a workroom  bare of everything except  a machine that
stood in one corner. A red light atop the machine was blinking rapidly.

"Whatever you say is off the record, is off the record," Gary told him.

"There's so much of  it," rumbled the doctor, "that sounds like sheer dream
stuff."

"Hell," said Evans, "there always is in everything new. My ships sound like
it, too. But the thing will work. I know it will."

Kingsley perched himself on a heavy kitchen chair.

"It started more than  a year ago," be said. "We were studying the cosmics.
Elusive things,  those rays. Men have studied  them for about five thousand
years and they still  don't know as much about them as you think they would
after all that time. We thought at first that we'd made a really astounding
discovery, for  our instruments, used  on top of the  building, showed that
the  rays  came in  definite  patterns. Not  only  that, but  they came  in
definite  patterns  at particular  times.  We developed  new equipment  and
learned more about the pattern. We learned that it occurred only when Pluto
had rotated into such a position that this particular portion of the planet
was  facing the  Great Nebula  in Andromeda.  We learned that  the pattern,
besides having a certain fixed physical structure, also had a definite time
structure, and  that the  intensity of the bombardment  always remained the
same. In other words,  the pattern never varied as to readings; it occurred
at fixed  intervals whenever  we directly faced  the Great Nebula,  and the
intensity  varied very  slightly,  showing an  apparent constant  source of
energy operating  at specific  times. In between those  times our equipment
registered the general haphazard behavior one would expect in cosmic rays."

The doctor  rumbled on: "The readings had  me down. Cosmic simply shouldn't
behave that  way. There never had been any  instance of their behaving that
way  at   any  time  before.  Of  course,   this  was  the  first  thorough
investigation  far  from the  Sun's  interfering magnetic  fields. But  why
should they behave in  that manner only when we were broadside to the Great
Nebula?

"My two  assistants and I worked  and studied and theorized  and it finally
came  down  to  just  one thing.  The  things  we  were  catching with  our
instruments weren't cosmic rays at all. They were something else. Something
new.  Some strange  impulse coming to  us from  outer space. Almost  like a
signal.  Like  something  or someone  or  God-knows-what  was signaling  to
someone or  something stationed  here on Pluto.  We romanticized a  bit. We
toyed with the idea of signals coming from another galaxy, for you know the
Great Nebula is an exterior galaxy, a mighty star system, some nine hundred
million light years across intergalactic space.

"But that was just  imagining. There was nothing to support it in the light
of factual evidence. We  still aren't sure what it's all about, although we
know a great deal more now than we did then.

"The  facts  we  did  gather, you  see,  indicated  that  whatever we  were
receiving  must be  definite signals,  must originate  within some  sort of
intelligence.  Some intelligence, you  see, that  would know just  when and
where to send them. But there was the problem of distance. Just suppose for
a moment that they were coming from the Great Nebula. It takes light almost
a billion years to reach us from the Nebula. While it is very probable that
the speed  of light can be far exceeded, there  is little reason to believe
at present than anything  could be so much faster than light that signaling
could  be practical  across  such enormous  space. Unless,  of  course, the
matter of time were  mixed up a little, and when you get into that you have
a problem that takes more than just a master mind. There was just one thing
that would  seem a probable answer...  that if the signals  were being sent
from  many light years  distant, they  were being routed  through something
other than all that space. Perhaps through another continuum of space-time,
through  what you might  call, for the  want of  a better term,  the fourth
dimension."

"Doctor," said Herb, "you got me all balled up."

Dr. Kingsley's chuckle rumbled through the room.

"It had  us that  way, too," he  said. "And then  we figured  maybe we were
getting  pure  thought.  Thought  telepathed  across  the  light  years  of
unimaginable space.  Just what the speed  of thought would be  no one could
even guess.  It might  be instantaneous... it  might be no  faster than the
speed  of light...  or any  speed in between  the two.  But we do  know one
thing: that  the signals  we are receiving  are the projection  of thought.
Whether they come straigh through space or whether they travel through some
shortcut, through some manipulation of space-time frames, do not know and I
probably will never know.

"It  took us  months  to build  that machine  you  saw in  the  other room.
Briefly, it  picks up the signals, translates them  from the pure energy of
thought  into actual  thought,  into symbols  our  mind can  read. We  also
developed a method of  sending our own thoughts back, of communicating with
whatever or  whoever it  is that is  trying to talk  with Pluto.  So far we
haven't  been  successful in  getting  an entire  message across.  However,
apparently  we  have  succeeded  in advising  whoever  is  sending out  the
messages  that we  are  trying to  answer, for  recently the  messages have
changed,  have a note  of desperation,  frantic command, almost  a pleading
quality."

He brushed his coat sleeve across his brow.

"It's all so confusing," he confessed.

"But," asked Herb, "why would anyone send messages to Pluto? Until men came
here, there  was no life on  the planet. Just a  barren planet, without any
atmosphere, too cold for anything to live. The tail end of creation."

Kingsley stared solemnly at Herb.

"Young man," he said,  "we must never take anything for granted. How are we
to say there never was life or intelligence on Pluto? How do we know that a
great civilization might not  have risen and flourished here aeons ago? How
do we know that an expeditionary force from some far-distant star might not
have come here and colonized this outer planet many years ago?"

"It don't sound reasonable," said Herb.

Kingsley gestured impatiently.

"Neither do  these signals  sound reasonable," he rumbled.  "But there they
are.  I've  thought about  the  things you  mention.  I am  damned with  an
imagination, something  no scientist  should have. A  scientist should just
plug  along, applying  this bit of  knowledge to  that bit of  knowledge to
arrive  at   something  new.  He  should   leave  the  imagination  to  the
philosophers.  But I'm  not  that way.  I try  to  imagine what  might have
happened or what is  going to happen. I've imagined a mother planet groping
out across  all space,  trying to get  in touch with  some long-lost colony
here on  Pluto. I've imagined someone  trying to re-establish communication
with the people who lived here millions of years ago. But it doesn't get me
anywhere."

Gary filled and lit  his pipe, frowning down at the glowing tobacco. Voices
in space  again. Voices talking across the void.  Saying things to rack the
human soul.

"Doctor,"  he said,  "you aren't the  only one  who has heard  thought from
outer space."

Kingsley swung on him, almost belligerently. "Who else?" he demanded.

"Miss Martin,"  said Gary quietly, puffing at  his pipe. "You haven't heard
Miss Martin's story yet. I have a hunch that she can help you out."

"How's that?" rumbled the scientist.

"Well, you  see," said Gary, softly, "she's  just passed through a thousand
years  of  mind training.  She's  thought  without ceasing  for almost  ten
centuries."

Kingsley's face drooped in amazement.

"That's impossible," he said.

Gary shook his head. "Not impossible at all. Not with suspended animation."

Kingsley opened  his mouth to object again,  but Gary hurried on. "Doctor,"
he asked,  "do you remember  the historical account of  the Caroline Martin
who refused  to give an invention  to the military board  during the Jovian
war?"

"Why, yes,"  said Kingsley.  "Scientists have speculated for  many years on
just what it was she found -"

He started out of his chair.

"Caroline Martin!" he shouted. He looked at the girl.

"Your name is Caroline Martin, too," he whispered huskily.

Gary nodded. "Doctor, this  is the woman who refused to give up that secret
a thousand years ago."

Chapter Five

DR. KINGSLEY glanced at his watch.

"It's  almost time  for the  signals to  begin," he  said. "In  another few
minutes we will be  swinging around to face the Great Nebula. If you looked
out you would see it over the horizon now."

Caroline  Martin sat  in the  chair before  the thought machine,  the domed
helmet settled  on her  head. All eyes in  the room were glued  on the tiny
light atop the mechanism.  When the signals started coming that light would
blink its bright-red eye.

"Lord, it's  uncanny," whispered Tommy  Evans. He brushed at  his face with
his hand.

Gary watched the girl. Sitting there so straight, like a queen with a crown
upon her head. Sitting there, waiting, waiting to hear something that spoke
across a gulf that took light many years to span.

Brain sharpened by a thousand years of thought, a woman who was schooled in
hard and simple logic. She had thought of many things out in the shell, she
said, had set up problems and had worked them out. What were those problems
she had  thought about? What were  the mysteries she had  solved? She was a
young, rather sweet-faced kid,  who ought to like a good game of tennis, or
a dance and she'd thought a thousand years.

Then the light began to blink and Gary saw Caroline lean forward, heard the
breath catch sharply in her throat. The pencil she had poised above the pad
dropped from her fingers and fell onto the floor.

Heavy silence engulfed the room, broken only by the whistling of the breath
in  Kingsley's  nostrils.  He  whispered  to Gary:  "She  understands!  She
understands..."

Gary gestured him to silence.

The red  light blinked out and  Caroline swung around slowly  in the chair.
Her eyes were wide  and for a moment she seemed unable to give voice to the
words she sought.

Then she  spoke. "They think  they are contacting someone  else," she said.
"Some  great  civilization that  must  have  lived here  at  one time.  The
messages come  from far away. From even farther  than the Great Nebula. The
Nebula just  happens to be in the same direction.  They are puzzled that we
do not answer. They  know someone has been trying to answer. They're trying
to  help us to  get through. They  talked in  scientific terms I  could not
understand.  Something  to do  with  the  warping of  space  and time,  but
involving principles  that are  entirely new. They want  something and they
are impatient. It seems  there is a great danger someplace. They think that
we can help."

"Great danger to whom?" asked Kingsley.

"I couldn't understand," said Caroline.

"Can you talk back  to them?" asked Gary. "Do you think you could make them
understand?"

"I'll try," she said.

"All  you have  to  do is  think," Kingsley  told  her. "Think  clearly and
forcefully. Concentrate all that you can, as if you were trying to push the
thought away  from you.  The helmet picks  up the impulses  and routes them
through the thought projector."

Her  slim fingers reached  out and turned  a dial.  Tubes came to  life and
burned into  a blue intensity of  light. A soaring hum  of power filled the
tiny room.

The hum  became a steady drone and the tubes were  filled with a light that
hurt one's eyes.

"She's talking to them now," thought Gary. "She is talking to them."

The minutes seemed eternities, and then the girl reached out and closed the
dial. The  hum of power receded, clicked off and  was replaced by a deathly
silence.

"Did  they understand?"  asked  Kingsley, and  even as  he spoke  the light
blinked red again.

Kingsley's hand  closed around Gary's  arm and his harsh  whisper rasped in
Gary's ear.

"Instantaneous!" he said. "Instantaneous  signals! They got her message and
they  are  answering.  That  means  the  signals are  routed  through  some
extra-dimension."

Swiftly the red light  blinked. Caroline crouched forward in the chair, her
body tensed with what she heard.

The light blinked off and the girl reached up and tore the helmet off.

"It can't be right," she sobbed. "It can't be right."

Gary sprang forward, put an arm around her shoulder.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

"Those  messages," she  cried. "They  come from  the very  edge of  all the
universe... from the farthest rim of exploding space!"

Kingsley leaped to his feet.

"They  are like  the  voices I  heard  before," she  said. "But  different,
somehow.  More  kindly... but  terrifying,  even  so. They  think they  are
talking  to someone else.  To a people  they talked  to here on  Pluto many
years ago... I can't know how many, but it was a long, long time ago."

Gary shook his head in bewilderment and Kingsley rumbled in his throat.

"At first," Caroline whispered,  "they referred to us by some term that had
affection in  it... actual kinfolk  affection, as if there  were blood ties
between them  and the things they  were trying to talk  to here. The things
that must have disappeared centuries ago."

"Longer ago than that," Kingsley told her. "That the thought bombardment is
directed at  this spot would indicate  the things they are  trying to reach
had established some sort  of a center, perhaps a city, on this site. There
are no indications of former occupancy. If anyone was ever here, every sign
of them has been swept away. And here there is no wind, no weather, nothing
to erode,  nothing to blow away. A billion years would  be too short a time
-"

"But who  are they?" asked Gary. "These ones you  were talking to. Did they
tell you that?"

She  shook her  head. "I couldn't  exactly understand.  As near as  I could
come,  they called  themselves the  Cosmic Engineers.  'That's a  very poor
translation. Not sufficient at all. There is a lot more to it."

She paused  as if to marshal a definition.  "As if they were self-appointed
guardians of the entire  universe," she explained. "Champions of all things
that  live within its  space-time frame.  And something is  threatening the
universe.  Some mighty  force  out beyond  the universe  out  where there's
neither space nor time."

"They want our help," she said.

"But how can we help them?" asked Herb.

"I don't  know. They tried to tell me, but the  thoughts they used were too
abstract.  I couldn't  understand  entirely. A  few clues  here  and there.
They'll have to reduce it to simpler terms."

"We couldn't  even get there to help them," said Gary.  "There is no way in
which we  can reach  the rim of  the universe. We  haven't yet  gone to the
nearest star."

"Maybe," suggested  Tommy Evans, "we don't need to  get there. Maybe we can
do something here to help them."

The  red light  was blinking  again. Caroline  saw it  and reached  for the
helmet, put it on her head. The light clicked out and her hand went out and
moved a dial. Again  the tubes lighted and the room trembled with the surge
of power.

Dr. Kingsley was rumbling. "The edge of space. But that's impossible!"

Gary laughed at him silently.

The power  was building  up. The room  throbbed with it and  the blue tubes
threw dancing shadows on the wall.

Gary felt  the cold wind from  space again, flicking at  his face, felt the
short hairs rising at the base of his skull.

Kingsley was  jittery. And he was  jittery. Who wouldn't be  at a time like
this? A message from  the rim of space! From that inconceivably remote area
where  time  and space  still  surged  outward into  that no-man's-land  of
nothingness...  into that  place where  there was  no time or  space, where
nothing had happened yet,  where nothing had happened ever, where there was
no place  and no circumstance and no possibility  of event that could allow
anything to happen. He tried to imagine what would be there. And the answer
was nothing. But what was nothing?

Many years ago some  old philosopher had said that the only two conceptions
which Man was capable of perceiving were time and space, and from these two
conceptions  he  built  the   entire  universe,  of  these  two  things  he
constructed the sum total  of his knowledge. If this were so, how could one
imagine a place where  neither time nor space existed? If space ended, what
was the stuff beyond that wasn't space?

Caroline was closing the  dials again. The blue light dimmed and the hum of
power ebbed off and  stopped. And once again the red light atop the machine
was blinking rapidly.

He watched  the girl closely, saw  her body tense and  then relax. She bent
forward, intent upon the messages that were swirling through the helmet.

Kingsley's  face was  puckered  with lines  of wonderment.  He  still stood
beside  his chair, a  great bear of  a man,  his hamlike hands  opening and
closing, hanging loosely at his side.

Those  messages were  instantaneous.  That meant  one of  two  things: that
thought itself was instantaneous or that the messages were routed through a
space-time  frame   which  shortened  the  distance,   that,  through  some
manipulation  of the  continuum,  the edge  of space  might  be only  a few
miles... or a few feet... distant. That, starting now, one might walk there
in just a little while.

Caroline was taking off  her helmet, pivoting around in her chair. They all
looked at her questioningly and no one asked the question.

"I understand a little better now," she said. "They are friends of ours."

"Friends of ours?" asked Gary.

"Friends  of  everyone  within the  universe,"  said  Caroline. "Trying  to
protect the universe. Calling for volunteers to help them save it from some
outside danger - from some outside force."

She smiled at the circle of questioning faces.

"They want us to come out to the edge of the universe," she said, and there
was a tiny quaver of excitement in her voice.

Herb's chair  clattered to the floor  as he leaped to  his feet. "They want
us..." he  started to shout and then be stopped and  the room swam in heavy
silence.

Gary heard  the rasp  of breath in  Kingsley's nostrils, sensed  the effort
that  the  man  was  making  to  control  himself  as he  shaped  a  simple
question... the question that any one of them would have asked.

"How do they expect us to get out there?" Kingsley asked.

"My  ship is  fast,"  Tommy Evans  said, "faster  than anything  ever built
before. But not that fast!"

"A space-time  warp," said  Kingsley, and his  voice was oddly  calm. "They
must be using a space-time warp to communicate with us. Perhaps...."

Caroline smiled at him. "That's the answer," she said.

"A short  cut. Not the long  way around. Cut straight  through the ordinary
space-time world lines. A hole in space and time."

Kingsley's great fists were  opening and closing again. Each time he closed
them the knuckle bones showed white through the tight-stretched skin.

"How will we do it?" asked Herb. "There isn't a one of us in the room could
do it.  We play around with  geosectors that we use  to drive our ships and
think we're  the tops in progress.  But the geosectors just  warp space any
old way.  No definite pattern, nothing. Like a kid  playing around in a mud
puddle, pushing the mud  this way or that. This would take control... you'd
have to warp  it in a definite pattern and then you'd  have to make it stay
that way."

"Maybe the Engineers," said Evans.

"That's it," nodded Caroline. "The Engineers can tell us. They know the way
to do it. All we have to do is follow their instructions."

"But,"  protested   Kingsley,  "could  we  understand?   It  would  involve
mathematics that are way beyond us."

Caroline's voice cut sharply  through his protest. "I can understand them,"
she replied,  bitterly. "Maybe it will take a little  while, but I can work
them out, I've had... practice, you know."

Kingsley was dumfounded. "You can work it out?"

"I  worked out  new mathematical  formulas, new  space theories out  in the
ship," she said. "They're only theories, but they ought to work. They check
in every detail. I went over them point by point."

She laughed, with just a touch of greater bitterness.

"I had a thousand years to do it," she reminded him. "I had lots of time to
work  them out  and  check them.  I had  to  do something,  don't  you see?
Something to keep from going crazy."

Gary watched  her closely, marveling at  the complete self-assurance in her
face, at the clipped  confidence of her words. Vaguely, he sensed something
else, too.  That she was leader here. That in the  last few minutes she had
clutched in  her tiny  hands the leadership  of this band of  men on Pluto.
That not all their  brains combined could equal hers. That she held mastery
over things they had not even thought about. She had thought, she said, for
almost a thousand years.

How long did the  ordinary man have to devote to thought? A normal lifetime
of useful,  skilled, well-directed adult effort  did not extend much beyond
fifty  years. One third  of that was  wasted in  sleep, one sixth  spent in
eating and  in relaxation, leaving only a  mere twenty-five years to think,
to figure  out things. And then one died and  all one's thoughts were lost.
Embryonic thoughts that might, in just a few more years, have sprouted into
well-rounded  theory. Lost  and  left for  someone else  to discover  if he
could... and probably lost forever.

But  Caroline Martin  had  thought for  forty lifetimes,  thought  with the
sharp, quick  brain of youth, without  interruption or disturbance. No time
out for  eating or for sleeping. She might have spent  a year, or a hundred
years, on one problem, had she wished.

He shivered as he thought of it. No one could even vaguely imagine what she
knew,  what keys  she had  found out  there in  the dark  of interplanetary
space. And  - she had started with the knowledge  of that secret of immense
power she had refused to reveal even when it meant eternal exile for her.

She  was talking  again, her  words crisp  and clipped, totally  unlike the
delightful companion that she could be.

"You see,  I am interested in time and space,  always have been. The weapon
that I discovered and refused to turn over to the military board during the
Jovian  war  was  your  geosector... but  with  a  vast  difference in  one
respect."

"You discovered  the geosector,  the principle of  driving a ship  by space
warp, a thousand years ago?" asked Kingsley.

She nodded.  "Except that they  wouldn't have used it  for driving ships...
not then.  For Jupiter was winning and  everyone was desperate. They didn't
care how a ship was driven; what they wanted was a weapon."

"The geosector  is no weapon," Kingsley  declared flatly. "You couldn't use
it near a planetary body."

"But consider  this," said the girl.  "If you could control  the space warp
created by  the geosector, and if the geosector would  warp time as well as
space, then it would be a weapon, wouldn't it?"

Herb whistled. "I'd say it'd be a weapon," he said, "and how!"

"They wanted  to train it  on Jupiter," Caroline explained.  "It would have
blasted the  planet into nothingness.  It would have scattered  it not only
through space, but through time as well."

"But  think of  what it would  have done  to the solar  system," ejaculated
Kingsley.  "Even if the  space warp  hadn't distorted space  throughout the
entire  system, the  removal  of Jupiter  would have  caused all  the other
planets  to shift their  orbits. There would  have been  a new deal  in the
entire system. Some of the planets would have broken up, some of them might
have  been  thrown into  the  Sun.  There most  certainly  would have  been
earthquakes and tidal waves and tremendous volcanic action on the Earth."

The girl nodded.

"That's why  I wouldn't turn it over to them. I  told them it would destroy
the system. They adjudged me a traitor for that and condemned me to space."

"Why," said Gary, "you  were nine centuries ahead of all of them! The first
workable geosector wasn't built until a hundred years ago."

Nine hundred  years ahead  to start with,  and a thousand  years to improve
upon that start! Gary wondered if she wasn't laughing at them. If she might
not be able to  laugh at even the Cosmic Engineers. Those geosectors out on
the Space Pup must have seemed like simple toys to her.

He remembered  how he had almost  bragged about them, and  felt his ears go
red and hot.

"Young lady,"  rumbled Kingsley,  "it seems to  me that you  don't need any
help from these Cosmic Engineers."

She laughed at him, a tinkling laugh like the chime of silver bells. "But I
do," she said.

The red  light blinked and she picked up  the helmet once again. Excitedly,
the  others watched  her. The poised  pencil dropped  to the pad  and raced
across the smooth white paper, making symbolic marks, setting up equations.

"The instructions," Kingsley whispered, but Gary frowned at him so fiercely
that  he lapsed  into shuffling  silence, his  great hands twisting  at his
side, his massive head bent forward.

The red light blinked out and Caroline snapped on the sending unit and once
again the  room was filled with  the mighty voice of  surging power and the
flickering blue shadows danced along the walls.

Gary's head  swam at the thought of it... that slim  wisp of a girl talking
across billions of light-years of space, talking with things that dwelt out
on the  rim of  the expanding universe,  Talking and understanding  but not
perfectly understanding,  perhaps, for  she seemed to  be asking questions,
something about  the equations she had  written on the pad.  The tip of her
pencil hovered over the paper as her eyes followed along the symbols.

The hum died in the room and the blue shadows wavered in the white light of
the  fluorescent tube-lights. The  red light  atop the thought  machine was
winking.

The  pencil made corrections,  added notes  and jotted down  new equations.
Never once  hesitating. Then the light blinked  off and Caroline was taking
the helmet from her head.

Kingsley strode  across the room and  picked up the pad.  He stood for long
minutes, staring  at it, the pucker of  amazement and bafflement growing on
his face.

He looked questioningly at the girl.

"Do you understand this?" he rasped.

She nodded blithely.

He flung  down the  pad. "There's only  one other person in  the system who
could," he  said. "Only  one person who  even remotely could  come anywhere
near knowing what it's  all about. That's Dr. Konrad Fairbanks, and he's in
a mental institution back on Earth."

"Sure," yelled Herb, "he's  the guy that invented three-way chess. I took a
picture of him once."

They disregarded Herb. All of them were looking at Caroline.

"I understand it well  enough to start," she said. "I probably will have to
talk with  them from time to time to get  certain things straightened in my
mind. But we can always do that when the time comes."

"Those equations,"  said Kingsley,  "represent advanced mathematics  of the
fourth  dimension. They  take into  consideration conditions of  stress and
strain and angular conditions which no one yet has been able to fathom."

"Probably," Caroline suggested, "the  Engineers live on a large and massive
world, so  large that space would be distorted,  where stresses such as are
shown in  the equations would be the  normal circumstance. Beings living on
such a  world would soon solve  the intricacies of dimensional  space. On a
world  that large,  gravity  would distort  space. Plane  geometry probably
couldn't  be  developed because  there'd  be no  such  a thing  as a  plane
surface."

"What do they want us to do?" asked Evans.

"They  want us  to build a  machine," said  Caroline, "a machine  that will
serve as  an anchor post for one end of  a space-time contortion. The other
end will  be on the world of the Engineers.  Between those two machines, or
anchor  posts,  will  be  built up  a  short-cut  through  the billions  of
light-years that separate us from them."

She glanced at Kingsley. "We'll need strong materials," she said. "Stronger
than anything we know  of in the system. Something that will stand up under
the strain of billions of light-years of distorted space."

Kingsley wrinkled his brow.

"I  was  thinking  of  a suspended  electron-whirl,"  she  said. "Have  you
experimented with it here?"

Kingsley  nodded. "We've  stilled the  electron-whirl," he said.  "Our cold
laboratories offer an ideal condition for that kind of work. But that won't
do us any good. I can suspend all electronic action, stop all the electrons
dead in their tracks,  but to keep them that way they have to be maintained
at close  to absolute  zero. The least  heat and they  overcome inertia and
start up  again. Anything  you built of  them would dissolve as  soon as it
heated up, even a few degrees.

"If  we could  crystallize the atomic  orbit after  we had stopped  it," he
said, "we'd  have a  material which would  be phenomenally rigid.  It would
defy any force to break it down."

"We can  do it,"  Caroline said. "We  can create a  special space condition
that will lock the electrons in their places."

Kingsley snorted.  "Is there anything,"  he asked, "that you  can't do with
space?"

Caroline laughed.  "A lot of things  I can't do, doctor,"  she told him. "A
few things  I can do. I  was interested in space.  That's how I happened to
discover the space-time warp  principle. I thought about space out there in
the shell.  I figured  out ways to  control it. It  was something  to do to
while away the time."

Kingsley glanced around the  room, like a busy man ready to depart, looking
to see if he had forgotten anything.

"Well," he rumbled, "what are we waiting for? Let us get to work."

"Now, wait a second," interrupted Gary. "Do we want to do this? Are we sure
we aren't rushing into something we'll be sorry for? After all, all we have
to  go on  are the  Voices. We're  taking them  on face value  alone... and
Voices don't have faces."

"Sure," piped  up Herb, "how do  we know they aren't  kidding us? How do we
know  this isn't some  sort of a  cosmic joke?  Maybe there's a  fellow out
there somewhere laughing fit to kill at how he's got us all stirred up."

Kingsley's face flushed with anger, but Caroline laughed.

"You look so serious, Gary," she declared.

"It's  something to be  serious about,"  Gary protested. "We  are monkeying
around with something that's entirely out of our line. Like a bunch of kids
playing with an atom bomb. We might set loose something we wouldn't be able
to stop. Something might  be using us to help it set up  an easy way to get
at the  solar system. We might  be just pulling someone's  chestnuts out of
the fire."

"Gary," said  Caroline softly,  "if you had  heard that Voice  you wouldn't
doubt. I know it's  on the level. You see, it isn't a voice, really... it's
a thought.  I know there's danger  and that we must  help, do everything we
can. There  are other volunteers, you know,  other people, or other things,
from other parts of the universe."

"How do you know?" asked Gary fiercely.

"I  don't  know how,"  she  defended  herself. "I  just  know. That's  all.
Intuition, perhaps,  or maybe  a background thought in  the Engineer's mind
that rode through with the message."

Gary looked around at  the others. Evans was amused. Kingsley was angry. He
looked at Herb.

"What the hell," said Herb. "Let's take a chance."

Just like  that, thought Gary. A  woman's intuition, the burning  zeal of a
scientist, the devil-may-care, adventuresome  spirit of mankind. No reason,
no logic... mere emotion. A throwback to the old days of chivalry.

Once a  mad monk had stood  before the crowds and shook  a sword in air and
shrieked invective  against another faith, and,  because of this, Christian
armies, year after year,  broke their strength against the walls of eastern
cities.

Those were the Crusades.

This, too, was a crusade. A Cosmic Crusade. Man again answering the clarion
call to arms. Man again taking up the sword on faith alone. Man pitting his
puny  strength, his little  brain against  great cosmic forces.  Man... the
damn fool... sticking out his neck.

Chapter Six

A GHOSTLY machine was taking shape upon the hard, pitted, frozen surface of
the field...  a crazy machine  that glimmered weirdly in  the half-light of
the stars.  A machine with mind-wrenching  angles, with flashing prisms and
spidery  framework, a  towering skeleton  of a  machine that  stretched out
spaceward.

Made  of material  in which the  atomic motion  had been stilled,  it stood
defiant  against  the  most  powerful  forces  of  man  or  void.  Anchored
magnetically to the core of the planet, it stood firmly planted, a spidery,
frail-appearing  thing, but with  a strength  that would stand  against the
unimaginable drag of a cosmic space-time warp.

From  it  long cables  snaked  their way  over  the frozen  surface to  the
laboratory  power plant.  Through  those slender  cables, their  resistance
lowered by the bitter cold, tremendous power loads could be poured into the
strange machine.

"They're space-nuts,"  grumbled Ted Smith at  Gary's elbow. "They're fixing
to blow  Pluto all to hell.  I wish there was  some way for me  to get away
from here before the fireworks start."

Herbs'  voice crackled  in Gary's  helmet-phones, answering  the complaint.
"Shucks, there just won't  nothing happen. That contraption looks more like
something a  kid would build with a tinker toy set  than a machine. I can't
see, for the life of me, how it'll ever work."

"I gave up long ago," said Gary. "Caroline tried to explain it to me, but I
guess I'm just sort  of dense. I can't make head or tall  of it. All I know
is that  it's supposed  to be an  anchor post, a  thing that  will help the
Engineers set  up this  space warp of  theirs and after  it is  set up will
operate to hold it in position."

"I  never did  set any  stock in  that Engineer  talk," Ted told  him, "but
there's been something I've been wanting to tell you two. Haven't been able
to catch you,  you've been so busy. But I wanted to  tell you about it, for
you're the only two who haven't gone entirely star-batty."

"V/hat is it?" Gary asked.

"Well, you know," said Ted, "I don't attach much meaning to it, but it does
seem  kind of  funny. A  few days  ago I  sneaked out  for a  walk. Against
orders, you  know. Not supposed to get out of  sight of the settlement. Too
many things can happen here.

"But,  anyhow, I  went for  a walk.  Out along  the mountains and  over the
carbon dioxide glacier and  down into the little valley that lies just over
the shoulder of the glacier."

He paused dramatically.

"You found something there?" asked Gary.

"Sure  did," declared  Ted  proudly. "I  found some  ruins.  Chiseled white
stone. Scattered all over the valley floor. As if there had been a building
there at one time  and somebody had pulled it down stone by stone and threw
the stones around."

"Sure it wasn't just boulders or peculiar rock formations?" asked Gary.

"No,  sir,"  said Ted,  emphatically.  "There  were chisel  marks on  those
stones.  Workmen had dressed  them at some  time. And  all of it  was white
stone. You show me any white stone around here."

Gary understood  what the  radio operator meant. The  mountains were black,
black  as the  emptiness of  space. He  turned his  head to stare  at those
jagged  peaks  that  loomed over  the  settlement,  their spearlike  points
faintly outlined against the black curtain of the void.

"Say," said Herb, "that  sounds as if what the Engineers said about someone
else living here at one time might be true."

"If Ted found building stone, that's exactly what it means," Gary asserted.
"That would denote a city of some kind, intelligence of some kind, It takes
a certain degree of culture to work stone."

"But," argued Herb, "how  could anyone have lived here? You know that Pluto
cooled  quick, lost  its lighter gases  in a  hurry. Its oxygen  and carbon
dioxide are locked up in snow and ice. Too cold for any life."

"I  know all  that," Gary  agreed, "but it  seems we  can't be too  sure of
anything in  this business.  If Ted is  right, it means  the Engineers were
right on at least one point where we all were wrong. It sort of gives a man
more faith in what is going on."

"Well," said Ted,  "I just wanted to tell you. I was  going to go out there
again some  day and  look around, but  since then I've been  too busy. Ever
since  you  sent  that  story  out,  space  has been  full  of  messages...
governmental stuff,  messages from scientists and  cranks. Don't give a man
no time to himself at all."

As  the  radio  man  walked back  to  his  shack,  Gary  looked toward  the
laboratory. Two space-suited figures were coming out of the main lock.

"That's Caroline  and Kingsley," said Herb. "They've  been up there to talk
to the  Engineers again.  Got stuck on  something. Wanted the  Engineers to
explain it to them."

"Looks to  me like it's about  finished," said Gary. "Caroline  told me she
didn't  know just  how  much longer  it would  take, but  she had  hopes of
getting it  into working order in another day  or two. Tommy's gone without
sleep  the last  twenty hours, working  to get  his ship in  tip-top shape.
They've gone over the thing from control panel to rocket tubes."

"What I'd like to  know," said Herb, irritably, "is just how we're going to
use the ship in getting out to where the Engineers are."

"Those are  instructions," said Gary. "Instructions  from the Engineers. We
don't dare do anything around here unless they say it's all right."

The  space-suited  figures  were  coming  rapidly  down  the  path  to  the
space-field.  Gary hailed  them  as they  came nearer.  "Find out  what was
wrong?" he asked.

Kingsley's voiced boomed at him. "Several things wrong," he declared. "This
ought to put it in working shape."

The four of them advanced on the machine. Gary fell into step with Caroline
and looked  at the girl's face  through her helmet visor.  "You look fagged
out," he said.

"I am  tired," she confessed. They  walked a few steps.  "We had so much to
do," she  said, "and apparently so  little time to do  it in. The Engineers
sound as  if they are getting  desperate. They seem to  think the danger is
very near."

"What I can't figure  out," Gary told her, "is what we are going to do when
we  get there. They  seem to be  head and  shoulders over us  in scientific
knowledge. If they can't work it out, I don't see how we can help them."

Her voice was full of weariness as she answered him.

"Neither do  I," she said, "but they seemed so  excited when they found out
who we  were, when I described our solar system to  them and told them that
the race  had originated on the third planet.  They asked so many questions
about  what kind  of beings  we were. It  took a  lot of explaining  to get
across the idea that  we were protoplasmic creatures, and when they finally
understood that they seemed even more excited."

"Maybe," suggested  Gary, "protoplasmic beings are  a rarity throughout the
universe. Maybe they never heard of folks like us before."

She wheeled on him.  "There's something funny about it all, Gary. Something
funny about how anxious  they are for us to come, how insistent they are in
trying to  find out so much  about us... the extent  of our science and our
past history."

He thought  he detected  a quaver of fear  in her voice. "Don't  let it get
you," he said. "If  it gets too funny, we can always quit. We don't have to
play their game, you know."

"No," she said, "we  can't do that. They need us, need us to help them save
the universe. I'm convinced of that."

She stepped quickly forward to help Kingsley.

"Hand me that hammer," said Kingsley's voice, and Gary stooped down, picked
up  the heavy  hammer from  the base of  the machine  and handed it  to the
scientist.

"Hell," complained Herb, "that's  all we've done for days now. We've handed
you wrenches and hammers and pins and bolts until I see them in my sleep."

Kingsley's chuckle sounded in  their helmets as he swung the hammer against
a crossbar, driving it into the mechanism at a slightly different angle.

Gary craned  back his neck and  gazed up the spiraling,  towering height of
the  machine,  out  beyond  into  the  blackness  of  space,  studded  with
cruel-eyed stars.  Out there, somewhere,  was the rim of  space. Out there,
somewhere, a race of beings who called themselves the Cosmic Engineers were
fighting a great danger  which threatened the universe. He tried to imagine
such a  danger... a  danger that would be  a threat to that  mighty bowl of
matter  and  energy men  called  the  universe, a  living, expanding  thing
enclosed by curving time  and space. But his brain swam with the bigness of
the thought and he gave it up. It was entirely too big to even think about.

Tommy Evans  was coming  across the field  from the hangar.  He hailed them
joyously. "The old tub is ready any time you are," he shouted.

Kingsley straightened from adjusting a series of prisms set around the base
of the machine. "We're ready now," he said.

"Well, then," said Herb, "let us get going."

Kingsley stared out into  space. "Not yet," he said. "We're swinging out of
direct line with the  Engineers. We'll wait until the planet rotates again.
We can't hold the warp continuously. If we did, the rotation of Pluto would
twist  it out  of shape.  The machine, once  the warp  is set up,  will act
automatically, establishing the warp when it swings into the right position
and maintaining it through forty-five degrees of Pluto's rotation."

"What happens," asked Gary, "if we can't complete the trip from here to the
edge of the universe before Pluto travels that forty-five degrees? We might
roll out  of the warp and find  ourselves marooned thousands of light-years
between galaxies."

"I don't know," said Kingsley. "I'm trusting the Engineers."

"Sure," said Herb, "we're all trusting the Engineers. I hope to Heaven they
know what they're doing."

Together  the five  of them  trudged up the  path to  the main lock  of the
laboratory. "Something to eat,"  said Kingsley, "and a good sleep and we'll
be starting out. All of us are pretty tuckered now."

In  the little  kitchen  they crowded  around the  table,  gulping steaming
coffee  and munching  sandwiches. Beside  Kingsleys' plate  was a  sheaf of
spacegrams that Ted had brought up for him to read. Kingsley leafed through
them irritably.

"Cranks," he  rumbled. "Hundreds of  them. All with ideas  crazier than the
one we have. And the biggest one of them all is the government. Imagine the
government forbidding  us to go ahead with our  work. Orders to desist!" He
snorted. "Some  damn law that the Purity league  got passed a hundred years
or more ago and  still standing on the statutes. Gives the government power
to  stop any  experiment  which might  result in  the loss  of life  or the
destruction of property."

"The Purity  league is still going pretty  strong," said Gary, "although it
works mostly undercover now. Too much politics mixed up in it."

He  dug into  the pocket  of his coat  and hauled  forth a sheet  of yellow
paper. "I  got this a while  ago," he said. "I  plain forgot about it until
now. Too much other excitement."

He  handed the  sheet  to Kinsgley.  The folded  paper crackled  crisply as
Kingsley unfolded it. It  was a sheet off the teletype in the Space Pup and
it read:

NELSON. ABOARD SPACE PUP ON PLUTO.

SOLAR GOVERNMENT ORDERED OUT  SOLAR POLICE SECRETLY TWO DAYS AGO TO ENFORCE
ORDER TO STOP EDGE  OF UNIVERSE TRIP. THIS IS A WARNING. KEEP YOUR NOSE OUT
OF WHATEVER IS GOING ON.

Kingsley  crumpled the  message  savagely in  his fist.  "When did  you get
this?" he thundered.

"Just a  couple of  hours ago," said Gary.  "It will take them  days to get
here."

"We'll be  gone long before they  even sight Pluto," Tommy  said, his words
mumbled through a huge bite of sandwich.

"That's right," agreed Kingsley, "but it makes me sore. The damn government
always meddling in other people's affairs. Setting itself up as a judge and
jury. Figuring it never  can be wrong." He growled wickedly at the sandwich
he held in one mighty fist, bit at it viciously.

Herb looked  around the room. "This  being sort of a  farewell banquet," he
said, "I sure wish  we had something to drink. We ought to drink a toast to
the Solar System before we leave it. We ought to make it just a little like
a celebration."

"We'd  have something  to  drink if  you hadn't  been  so clumsy  with that
Scotch," Gary reminded him.

"Hell," retorted Herb, "that would have been gone long ago, with you making
a pass at it every time you came in reach." He sighed and tilted his coffee
cup against his face.

Kingsley's  laugh thundered  through the  room. "Wait  a minute,  boys," he
said. He  went to a cupboard and removed a  double row of canned vegetables
from a shelf. A  quart bottle filled with amber liquor was revealed. He set
it on the table.

"Wash out your coffee cups," he said. "We haven't any glasses."

The liquor splashed into the coffee cups and they stood to drink a toast.

The telephone in the next room rang.

They set  down their  cups and waited  as Kingsley went to  answer it. They
heard his roar of  excitement and quick fire of rumbling questions. Then he
was striding back into the room.

"My assistant,  Jensen, was up in the observatory  just now," he shouted at
them.  "He spotted  five  ships coming  in, only  a  few hours  out. Police
ships!"

Herb  had lifted  his cup  and now  with a  clatter it  fell to  the table,
breaking. The liquor dripped to the floor.

Gary flared  at him. "What's the  matter with you?" he  asked. "You get the
shakes every time you get anywhere near a drink."

"That message Gary got,"  Tommy was saying. "There must have been something
wrong. Maybe  the ships  were out near  Neptune when they  were ordered out
here."

"What would they be doing out near Neptune?" snapped Herb.

Tommy shrugged.  "Police ships  are always snooping around,"  he said. "You
find them everywhere."

They stared at one another in a deathly silence.

"They can't stop us now," whispered Caroline. "They just can't."

"There's still  a couple  of hours before  the space warp  contact with the
Engineers would be broken if we set it up now," said Tommy. "Maybe we could
make it. The ship is ready."

"Ask the Engineers," said Gary. "Find out how soon they can get us there."

Kingsley's voice thundered commands.  "Caroline," he was shouting, "get the
Engineers! Find  out if it would  be safe to start  now. Tommy, get out the
spaceship! The  rest of  you grab what  stuff we need  and get  down to the
field."

The room was a swirl of action. All of them were rushing for the door.

Kingsley  was at  the  telephone, talking  to Andy.  "Get the  hangar doors
open," he was shouting. "Warm up the tubes. We're taking off."

Through the  thud of running  feet, the rumbling of  Kingsley's voice, came
the  high-pitched drone  of the  thought-machine sending set.  Caroline was
talking to the Engineers.

More snatches of telephone  conversation. Kingsley talking with Jensen now.
"Get down  to the  power house. Stand  ready to give  us all  the juice you
have. The leads will carry everything you can throw into them. We'll need a
lot of power."

Gary was struggling into his space-armor when Caroline came into the room.

"We can make it,"  she shouted excitedly. "The Engineers say we'll be there
in almost no time at all. Almost instantaneous."

Gary held  her spacesuit  for her while  she clambered into  it, helped her
fasten  down the  helmet. Kingsley  was puffing  and grunting,  hauling the
space-armor over his portly body.

"We'll beat  them," he  was growling. "Damn  them, we'll beat  them yet! No
government is going to tell me what I can do and what I can't do."

Out of the  air lock, they raced down the path to  the field. In the center
of  the  field  reared  the ghostly  machine,  like  a shimmering  skeleton
standing guard  over the bleakness that was Pluto.  As he ran, Gary glanced
up and out into space.

A voice  sang in his brain,  the voice of his  own thoughts: "We're coming!
Hang on, you Engineers!  We're on our way. Little puny man is coming out to
help you.  Mankind, is marching to another  crusade! To the biggest crusade
he has ever known!"

Tommy Evans' mighty ship  was at the far end of the field, a gleaming thing
of silver,  with the tubes a dull red, preheated  to stand the sudden flare
of rocket blasts in the deadly cold of Pluto's surface.

Yes, thought Gary, another  crusade. But a crusade without weapons. Without
even knowing  who the enemy might be. Without  a definite plan of campaign.
With no campaign at  all. With just an ideal and the sound of bugles out in
space. But that was  all man had needed ever. Just an ideal and the blaring
of bugles.

Caroline cried  out in wonder, almost in fear,  and Gary glanced toward the
center of the field.

The machine  was gone!  Where it had  stood there was  nothing, no faintest
hint it had ever stood there. Just empty field and nothing else.

"Jensen turned on the power!" Kingsley shouted. "The machine is warped into
another dimension. The road is open to the Engineers."

Gary pointed out into space. "Look," he yelled.

A faint,  shimmering circle of light  lay far out into  the black depths. A
slow wheel of misty white. A nebulous thing that hadn't been there before.

"That's  where we  go,"  said Kingsley,  and  Gary heard  the man's  breath
whistling through his teeth. "That's where we go to reach the Engineers."

Chapter Seven

Tommy's  nimble  fingers flew  over  the  rocket bank,  set  up a  take-off
pattern. His thumb tripped the firing lever and the ship surged up from the
field  with  the  thunder  of  the  rocket blasts  shuddering  through  its
frame-work.

"Hit dead center," warned Kingsley and Tommy nodded.

"Don't you worry," he snorted. "I will hit it."

"I'd like  to see the  look on the face  of them dumb cops  when they reach
Pluto and find us gone," said Herb.

"Thought they were putting over a fast one on us."

"It'll be  all right  if they don't  set down right into  that machine down
there," Gary declared. "If  they did that something would happen to them...
and happen awful fast."

"I  told Ted  to warn  them away  from it,"  Kingsley said. "I  don't think
they'd hurt the machine, but they would sure get messed up themselves. They
may try  to destroy  it, and if  they do, they're  in for  a real surprise.
Nothing  could  do  that." He  chuckled.  "Stilled  atomic-whirl and  rigid
space-curvature," he said. "There's material for you!"

The ship lanced swiftly  through space, heading for that wheeling circle of
misty light.

"How far away would it be?" Gary asked and Kingsley shook his head.

"Not too far," he said. "No reason for it being too far away."

They watched  it through the vision  plate, saw the wheel  of light expand,
become a great spinning, frosty rim that filled the plate and in its center
a black hole like a hub.

Tommy  set  up a  corrective  pattern  and tripped  the  firing lever.  The
cross-hairs on  the destination  panel bore dead center  on the night-black
hub.

The wheel of light flared out, the hub became bigger and blacker, a hole in
space... as  if one  were looking through  it into space, but  into a space
where there were no stars.

The  light disappeared.  Just the  black hub  remained, filling  the vision
plate  with  inky blackness.  Then  the  ship was  flooded  with that  same
blackness, a cloying, heavy blackness that seemed pressing in upon them.

Caroline cried  out softly and then choked back  the cry, for the blackness
was followed almost instantly by a flood of light.

The ship was diving down toward a city, a monstrous city that jerked Gary's
breath away. A city  that piled height on height, like gigantic steps, with
soaring towers  that pointed at  them like Titan fingers.  A solid, massive
city of  gleaming white  stone and square,  utilitarian lines, a  city that
covered mile on  mile of land, so that one could see  no part of the planet
that bore it, the city stretching from horizon to horizon.

Three  suns blazed  in  the sky;  one white,  two a  misty blue,  all three
pouring out  a flood  of light and  energy that, Gary  realized, would have
made Sol seem like a tiny candle.

Tommy's fingers  flew over the rocket banks,  setting up a braking pattern.
But even as he  did, the speed of the ship seemed to  slow, as if they were
driving into a soft, but resistant cushion.

And in  their brains  rang a voice of  command, a voice telling  them to do
nothing,  that they and  their ship would  be brought  down to the  city in
safety. Not so much  like words as if each one of them had thought the very
thought, as if each one of them knew exactly what to do.

Gary glanced at Caroline and saw her lips shape a single word. "Engineers."

So it  hadn't been  a nightmare after  all. There really were  a people who
called themselves the Cosmic Engineers. There really was a city.

The ship  still plunged  downward, but its  speed was slowing  and now Gary
realized that when first they had seen this pile of stone beneath them they
had been  many miles away. In  comparison to the city,  they and their ship
were tiny  things... little things, like  ants crawling in the  shadow of a
mountain.

Then they  were within  the city, or  at least its upper  portion. The ship
flashed past a mighty  spire of stone and swung into its shadow. Below them
they saw  new details of the  city, winding streets and  broad parkways and
boulevards, like tiny ribbons fluttering in the distance. A city that could
thrill one  with its mere bigness.  A city which would  have put a thousand
New Yorks  to shame. A city that dwarfed even  the most ambitious dreams of
mankind.

A million  of Man's puny cities  piled into one. Gary  tried to imagine how
big  the planet  must  be to  bear such  a city,  but there  was no  use of
thinking, for there was no answer.

They were  dropping down toward one  of the fifth tiers  of buildings, down
and down,  closer and closer to  the massive blocks of  Stone. So close now
that their  vision was cut off,  and the terrace of  the tier seemed like a
broad, flat plain.

A section of the  roof was opening, like a door opening outward into space.
The ship,  floating on an  even keel, drifted gently  downward, toward that
yawning trap door. Then  they were through the door, with plenty of room to
spare, were floating quietly down between walls of delicate pastel hues.

The  ship settled with  a gentle bump  and was  still. They had  arrived at
their destination.

"Well, we're here," said Herb. "I wonder what we're supposed to do."

As if  in answer to his question, the voice came  again, the voice that was
not a voice, but as if each person were thinking for himself.

It  said: "This  is a  place we have  prepared for  you. You will  find the
gravity and the atmosphere  and the surroundings natural to yourselves. You
will  need no  space armor, no  artificial trappings  of any sort.  Food is
waiting you."

They stared at one another in amazement.

"I  think," said Herb,  "that I will  like this  place. Did you  hear that?
Food? I trust there's also drink."

"Yes," said the voice, "there is drink."

Herb's jaw dropped.

Tommy stepped out of the pilot's chair. "I'm hungry," he said. He strode to
the  inner valve of  the air lock  and spun  the wheel. The  others crowded
behind him.

They  stepped out  of the  ship onto a  great slab  of stone placed  in the
center of a gigantic  room. The stone, apparently, was merely there for the
ship to  rest upon,  for the rest  of the floor was  paved in scintillating
blocks of mineral that flashed and glinted in the light from the three suns
pouring in through a huge, translucent skylight. The walls of the room were
done in  soft, pastel  shades, and on  the walls were  hung huge paintings,
while ringed about the  ship was furniture, perfect rooms of furniture, but
with no dividing walls.  An entire household, of palatial dimension, set up
in a single room.

A living  room, a library, bedrooms  and a dining room.  A dining room with
massive oaken  table and  five chairs, and  upon the table a  banquet to do
justice to a king.

"Chicken!" cried Herb and the word carried a weight of awe.

"And wine," said Tommy.

They stared  in amazement  at the table.  Gary sniffed. He  could smell the
chicken.

"Antique furniture," said Kingsley.  "That stuff would bring a fortune back
in  the  solar  system.  Mostly  Chatterton  and it  looks  authentic.  And
beautiful pieces,  museum pieces, every one.  Thousand years old at least."
He stared  from piece  to piece. "But how  did they got it  here?" he burst
out.

Caroline's laughter rang through  the room, a chiming, silver laughter that
had a note of wild happiness in it.

"What's the matter?" demanded Tommy.

"I  don't see  anything  funny," declared  Herb. "Unless  there is  a joke.
Unless that chicken really isn't chicken."

"It's chicken,"  Caroline assured him. "And  the rest of the  food is real,
too. And  so is that furniture.  Only I didn't think  of it as antique. You
see, a  thousand years ago that  sort of furniture was  the accepted style.
That was the smartest sort of pieces to have in your home."

"But you?" asked Gary. "What did you have to do with it?"

"I told  the Engineers,"  she said. "They asked  me what we ate  and I told
them. They  must have understood me far better than  I thought. I told them
the kind  of clothes  we wore and the  kind of furniture we  used. But, you
see, the only things  I knew about were out of date, things the people used
a thousand years ago.  All except the chicken. You still eat chicken, don't
you?"

"And how," grinned Herb.

"Why," said Gary, "this means the Engineers can make anything they want to.
They can  arrange atoms  to make any  sort of material.  They can transmute
matter!"

Kingsley nodded. "That's exactly what it means," he said.

Herb was hurrying for the table.

"If we don't get there, there won't be anything left," Tommy suggested.

The chicken, the mashed potatoes and gravy, the wine, the stuffed olives...
all the food  was good. It might have come out of  the kitchen of the solar
system's smartest hotel only  a few minutes before. After days of living on
coffee and  hastily slapped-together  sandwiches, they did  full justice to
it.

Herb  regarded with  regret the last  piece of  chicken and shook  his head
dolefully.

"I just can't do it," he moaned. "I just can't manage any more."

"I never tasted such food in all my life," Kingsley declared.

"They asked me what we ate," Caroline said, "so I thought of all the things
I like the best. They didn't leave out a single one."

"But  where are  the Engineers?" asked  Gary. "We  haven't seen a  thing of
them. We  have seen plenty of  what they have done and  can do, but not one
has showed himself."

Footsteps  rasped across  the  floor and  Gary swung  around in  his chair.
Advancing toward them was something that looked like a man, but not exactly
a man. It was  the same height, had the same general appearance - two arms,
two legs, a man-shaped torso and a head. But there was something definitely
wrong with the face; something wrong with the body, too.

"There's the answer to your question," said Tommy.

"There's an Engineer."

Gary  scarcely heard  him.  He was  watching the  Engineer intently  as the
creature approached.  And he knew  why the Engineer was  different. Cast in
human shape,  he was still a  far cry from the  humans of the solar system,
for  the Engineer  was  a metal  man! A  man  fashioned of  metallic matter
instead of protoplasm.

"A metal man," he said.

"That's right," replied Kingsley,  and keen interest rather than wonderment
was in  his words. "This must be a large planet.  The force of gravity must
be tremendous.  Protoplasm probably would  be unable to stand  up under its
pull. We'd  probably just melt down  if the Engineers hadn't  fixed up this
place for us."

"You are right," said  the metal man, but his mouth didn't open, his facial
expression didn't  change. He was speaking to them  as the voice had spoken
to them back on  Pluto and again as they had entered the city. The Engineer
stopped  beside the  table and  stood stiffly,  his arms folded  across his
chest.

"Is everything satisfactory?" asked the Engineer.

It  was  funny,  this  way he  had  of  talking.  No  sound,  no change  of
expression, no  gesture... just words burning  themselves into one's brain,
the imprint of thought thrust upon one's consciousness.

"Why, yes," said Gary, "everything is fine,"

"Fine," shouted Herb, waving a drumstick. "Why, everything is perfect."

"We tried so hard to do everything just as you told us," said the Engineer.
"We  are  pleased  that  everything  is  all  right.  We had  a  hard  time
understanding one  thing. Those paintings  on the wall. You  said they were
things you had and were used to and we wanted so much to make everything as
you wanted  it. But they were something we  had never thought of, something
we  had never  done. We  are sorry that  we were  so stupid. They  are fine
things. When  this trouble is over,  we may make more  of them. They are so
very beautiful. How queer it was we hadn't thought of them."

Gary swung around and  stared at the painting opposite the table. Obviously
it  was a  work  in oils  and seemed  a  very fine  one. It  portrayed some
fantastic  scene, a  scene  with massive  mountains in  the  background and
strange twisted  trees and  waist-high grass and  the glitter of  a distant
waterfall. A picture, Gary  decided, that any art gallery would be proud to
hang.

"You mean," be asked, "that these are the first pictures you ever painted?"

"We hadn't even thought of it before," said the Engineer.

They hadn't known of  paintings before. No single Engineer had ever thought
to capture a scene on canvas. They had never wielded an artist's brush. But
here  was a  painting that was  perfect in  color and in  composition, well
balanced, pleasing to the eye!

"One  thing  about you  fellows,"  said  Tommy, "is  that  you will  tackle
anything."

"It  was so  simple,"  said the  Engineer, "that  we  are ashamed  we never
thought of it."

"But  this trouble," rumbled  Kingsley. "This  danger to the  universe. You
told us  about it back on  Pluto, but you didn't  explain. We would like to
know."

"That," said the Engineer, "is what I am here to tell you..."

No change in the  tone of the thoughts... no slightest trend of emotion. No
change of expression on his face.

"We will do whatever we can to help," Kingsley told him.

"We are  sure of that," said the Engineer. "We are  glad that you are here.
We were  so satisfied  when you said that  you would come. We  feel you can
help us very, very much."

"But the danger," prompted Caroline. "What is the danger?"

"I will  begin," said  the Engineer, "with  information that to  us is very
elemental, although I do not believe you know it. You had no chance to find
it out, being  so far from the edge of the universe.  But we who have lived
here so many years, found the truth long ago.

"This  universe is  only one of  many universes.  Only one of  billions and
billions of universes. We  believe there are as many universes as there are
galaxies within our own universe."

The Earthlings looked in  astonishment at him. Gary glanced at Kingsley and
the scientist seemed speechless. He was sputtering, trying to talk.

"There  are over fifty  billion galaxies  within our universe,"  he finally
said. "Or at least that is what our astronomers believe."

"Sorry to  contradict," said the Engineer. "There  are many more than that.
Many times more than that."

"More!" said Kingsley, faintly for him.

"The universes  are four-dimensional,"  said the Engineer,  "and they exist
within a five-dimensional inter-space, perhaps another great super-universe
with the  universes within it taking the place of  the galaxies as they are
related to our universe."

"A universe within a  universe," said Gary, nodding his head. "And might it
not be possible that  this super-universe is merely another universe within
an even greater super-universe?"

"That might  be so," declared the  Engineer. "It is a  theory we have often
pondered. But we have no way of knowing. We have so little knowledge..."

A little  silence fell upon the room, a silence  filled with awe. This talk
of universes and super-universes.  This dwarling of values. This relegating
of the universe to a mere speck of dust in an even greater place!

"The universes,  even as  the galaxies, are  very far apart,"  the Engineer
went on. "So very  far apart that the odds against two of them ever meeting
are  almost incomprehensibly  great.  Farther apart  than the  suns  in the
galaxies, farther apart, relatively, than the galaxies in the universe. But
entirely possible that once in eternity two universes will meet."

He paused,  a dramatic silence in his thought.  "And that chance has come,"
he said. "We are about to collide with another universe."

They sat in stunned silence.

"Like two  stars colliding,"  said Kingsley. "That's what  formed our solar
system."

"Yes,"  said the  Engineer,  "like two  stars colliding.  Like a  star once
collided with your Sun."

Kingsley jerked his head up.

"You know about that?" he asked.

"Yes, we know about that. It was long ago. Many million years ago."

"How do  you know about this  other universe?" asked Tommy.  "How could you
know?"

"Other beings  in the other  universe told us," said  the Engineer. "Beings
that  know much more  in many lines  of research  than we shall  ever know.
Beings we have been talking to for these many years."

"Then you  knew for many years  that the collision would  take place," said
Kingsley.

"Yes, we knew," said  the Engineer. "And we tried hard, the two peoples; We
of this universe and those of the other universe. We tried hard to stop it,
but there seemed no  way. And so at last we agreed to summon, each from his
own universe, the best  minds we could find. Hoping they perhaps could find
a way... find a way where we had failed."

"But we aren't the  best minds of the universe," said Gary. "We must be far
down the  scale. Our intelligence, comparatively, must  be very low. We are
just beginning.  You know  more than we  can hope to know  for centuries to
come."

"That may be so," agreed the Engineer, "but you have something else. Or you
may have something else. You may have a courage that we do not possess. You
may have  an imagination  that we could  not summon. Each  people must have
something to  contribute. Remember, we had no art, we  could not think up a
painting; our  minds are  different. It is  so very important  that the two
universes do not collide."

"What would happen," asked Kingsley, "if they did collide?"

"The  laws of  the five-dimensional  inter-space," explained  the Engineer,
"are not the laws of our four-dimensional universe. Different results would
occur  under  similar  conditions.  The  two universes  will  not  actually
collide. They will be destroyed before they collide."

"Destroyed before they collide?" asked Kingsley.

"Yes,"  said the  Engineer. "The  two universes  will 'rub,' come  so close
together that  they will set up a friction, or  a frictional stress, in the
five-dimensional  inter-space.  Under the  inter-space  laws this  friction
would  create new  energy...  raw energy...  stuff that  had  never existed
before. Each of the universes will absorb some of that energy, drink it up.
The  energy  will  rush  into  our  universes  in  ever-increasing  floods.
Unloosed, uncontrollable  energy. It will increase  the mass energy in each
universe, will give each a greater mass..."

Kingsley leaped to his  feet, tipping over a coffee cup, staining the table
cloth.

"Increase the mass!" he shouted. "But..."

Then he sat down again, sagged down, a strangely beaten man.

"Of course  that would  destroy us," he  mumbled. "Presence of  mass is the
only cause for the  bending of space. An empty universe would have no space
curvature. In utter nothingness there would be no condition such as we call
space. Totally devoid of mass, space would be entirely uncurved, would be a
straight line and would have no real existence. The more mass there is, the
tighter space  is curved. The more  mass there is, the  less space there is
for it to occupy."-

"Flood  the universe  with energy  from inter-space," the  Engineer agreed,
"and  space begins curving  back, faster  and faster, tighter  and tighter,
crowding the  matter it  does contain into  smaller space. We  would have a
contracting rather than an expanding universe."

"Throw  enough of  that  new energy  into the  universe,"  Kingsley rumbled
excitedly,  "and it  would be  more like  an implosion than  anything else.
Space would  rush together. All life would  be destroyed, galaxies would be
wiped out. Existent mass would be compacted into a tiny area. It might even
be destroyed if the contraction was so fast that it crushed the galaxies in
upon each  other. At  the best, the  universe would have to  start all over
again."

"It would start over  again," said the Engineer. "There would be enough new
energy absorbed  by the  universe for just  such an occurrence  as you have
foreseen. The entire universe would revert to original chaos."

"And me  without my  life insurance paid,"  said Herb. Gary  snarled at him
across the table.

Caroline leaned  her elbows on the table and cupped  her chin in her hands.
"The problem," she said,  "is to find out how to control that new energy if
it does enter the universe."

"That is the problem," agreed the Engineer.

"Mister," said Gary, "if  anyone can do it, this little lady can. She knows
more about a lot of things than you do. I'll lay you a bet on that."

Chapter Eight

The suits  were marvelous things, flexible and  with scarcely any weight at
all, not uncomfortable and awkward like an ordinary spacesuit.

Herb admired his before  he fastened down the helmet. "You say these things
will let  us walk  around on your  planet just as  if we were  at home?" he
asked the Engineer.

"We've tried  to make it  comfortable for you here,"  the Engineer replied.
"We hope you find  them satisfactory. You came so far to help and we are so
glad to see you. We hope that you will like us. We have tried so hard."

Caroline  looked toward the  Engineer curiously.  There was a  queer, vague
undertone to  all his thought-messages, an  inexplicable sense of pleading,
of desire  for praise from her or from Kingsley. She  shook her head with a
little  impatient gesture,  but  still that  deep, less-than-half-conscious
feeling  was  there. It  made  no  sense, she  told  herself.  It was  just
imagination. The  thought-messages were pure thought,  there was nothing to
interpret them, nothing to  give them subtle shades of meaning... no facial
expression, no change of tone.

But that pleading note!

It reminded  her suddenly - with a little mounting lump  in her throat - of
her bird  dog, a magnificent mahogany-and-white  Chesapeake retriever, dead
these thousand  years. Somehow she felt again as she  used to feel when the
dog had looked up at her after placing a recovered bird at her feet.

He was  gone now,  gone with all the  world she'd known. Her  ideas and her
memories were  magnificent antiques, museum pieces,  in this newer day. But
she felt  that if, somehow, that dog could  have been granted eternal life,
he'd be  searching for  her still... searching, waiting,  hungering for the
return that  never came. And rising in  queerly mixed ecstasies of gladness
and shyness if she ever came back to him again.

Kingsley spoke and the rising feeling snapped.

"Gravity suits," said Kingsley,  almost bursting with excitement. "But even
more than that! Suits  that will let a man move about comfortably under any
sort  of  conditions. Under  any  pressure,  any gravity,  in  any kind  of
atmosphere."

"With these," Gary suggested, "we would be able to explore Jupiter."

"Sure," said Tommy, "that  would be easy. Except for one little thing. Find
a fuel that will take you there and take you out again."

"Hell," enthused Herb, "I  bet the Engineers could tell us how to make that
fuel. These boys are bell-ringers all around."

"If there is any  way we can help you, anything you want, anything at all,"
declared the Engineer, "we would be so glad, so proud to help you."

"I bet you would at that," said Herb.

"Only a  few of  the denizens we  called have arrived,"  said the Engineer.
"More  of  them should  have  come.  Others may  be  on their  way. We  are
afraid..."

He must  have decided not to say what was on  his mind, for thought clicked
off, broken in the middle of the sentence.

"Afraid?" asked Kingsley. "Afraid of what?"

"Funny,"  said Gary,  almost to  himself. "Funny  they should be  afraid of
anything."

"Not afraid for ourselves,"  explained the Engineer. "Afraid that we may be
forced to  halt our  work. Afraid of  an interruption. Afraid  someone will
interfere."

"But who would interfere?" asked Caroline. "Who could possibly interfere in
a  thing like  this?  The danger  is a  common one.  All things  within the
universe should unite to try to fight it."

"What you  say is  right," declared the  Engineer. "So right  that it seems
impossible any could think  otherwise. But there are some who do. A race so
blinded  by  ambition and  by  hatred  that they  see  in this  approaching
Catastrophe an opportunity to wipe us out, to destroy the Engineers."

The Earthlings stood stock-still, shocked.

"Now, wait  a second," said Gary slowly. "Let  us understand this. You mean
to  say  that you  have  enemies  who would  die  themselves  just for  the
satisfaction of knowing that you were destroyed, too?"

"Not exactly,"  said the Engineer. "Many of them  would be destroyed, but a
select  few  would survive.  They  would go  back  to the  point where  the
universe must  start again,  back to the  point where space  and time would
once more  begin expanding. And,  starting there, they would  take over the
new universe.  They would shape it  to fit their needs.  They would control
it. They would have complete dominion over it."

"But," cried Gary, "that is mad! Utterly mad. Sacrificing a present people,
throwing away an entire universe for a future possibility."

"Not so  mad," said Kingsley  quietly. "Our own Earth  history will furnish
many  parallels.  Mad  rulers,  power-mad  dictators ready  to  throw  away
everything for  the bare feel of power... ready  to gamble with the horrors
of  increasingly scientific  and  ruthless warfare.  It almost  happened on
Earth once...  back in  2896. The Earth  was almost wiped out  when one man
yearned for power and  used biological warfare in its most hideous form. He
knew  what the  result would  be, but  that didn't  stop him...  Better, he
reasoned, if  there were no more than a thousand  persons left alive, if he
were  the  leader  of  that  thousand.  Nothing  stopped  him.  The  people
themselves later  stopped him, after he had  done the damage... stopped him
like the mad dog that he was."

"They hate us," said the Engineer. "They have hated us for almost a million
years. Because  we, and we alone, have stood  between them and their dreams
of universal conquest. They see us as the one barrier they must remove, the
one obstacle in their  way. They know they never can defeat us by the power
of arms alone, cannot defeat us so utterly that we still cannot smash their
plans to take over the universe."

"And so,"  said Gary, "they are  perfectly willing to let  the collision of
universes wipe  you out, even if it does  mean disaster and destruction for
the most of them."

"They must be nuts," said Herb.

"You  do not  understand," protested  the Engineer.  "For many  millions of
years they  have been educated  with the dream of  universal conquest. They
have been  so thoroughly propagandized with  the philosophy that the state,
the civilization,  the race, is everything...  that the individual does not
count at all... that there is not a single one of them who would not die to
achieve that  dream. They  glory in dying,  glory in any  sort of sacrifice
that advances them even the slightest step toward their eventual goal."

"You said that some  of them would survive even if the universe, as we know
it, were destroyed," said Caroline. "How would they do that?"

"They have  found a way to  burst out of the  universe," said the Engineer.
"How to navigate the inter-space that exists outside the universe. They are
more advanced  in many  sciences that we.  If they wished, I  have no doubt
they could by themselves, with no aid at all, save us from the fate that is
approaching."

"Perhaps,"  rumbled  Kingsley,  "a  treaty could  be  arranged.  A sort  of
eleventh-hour armistice."

The impersonal  thought of  the Engineer struck  at them. "There  can be no
peace with  them. No  treaty. No armistice.  For more than  a million years
they have thought and  practiced war. Their every thought has been directed
toward conquest. To them the very word 'peace' is meaningless. War is their
natural state, peace an  unnatural state. And they would not, in any event,
in the remote chance  that they might consider an armistice, consider it at
this time when they have a chance to prevent us from saving the universe."

"You mean,"  asked Gary, horror in his voice,  "that they actually want the
universe destroyed?  That they would  fight you to prevent  you from saving
it?"

"That,"  said the  Engineer,  "is exactly  what I  mean. You  understand so
well."

"Do you expect them to attack soon?" asked Tommy.

"We do not know. They may attack at any time. We are ready at all times. We
know they will attack eventually."

"We must  find a way," said  Caroline. "We can't let  them stop us! We must
find a way!"

"We will  find a way," rumbled Kingsley. "There has to  be a way, and we'll
find it."

"What do you call these rip-snorters you've been fighting all these years?"
asked Herb.

"We call them the  Hellhounds," said the Engineer, but that was not exactly
what he  meant. The thought brought together  a certain measure of loathing
mixed with fear and hatred. Hellhounds was the nearest the Earthlings could
translate the thought.

"They  can break  through the  time-space curve," said  Caroline, musingly,
"and they  can travel in the  fifth-dimensional inter-space." She flashed a
look at  Gary, a look filled with the  flare of inspiration. 'Perhaps," she
said, "that  is the answer. Perhaps that is what we  should try to find the
answer to."

"I don't know what you mean," said Gary, "but maybe you are right."

"The space-time  curve would be  rigid," said Kingsley. "Rigid  and hard to
unravel. Lines  of stress and force that would  be entirely new. That would
take mathematical knowledge. That and tremendous power."

"The power of new  energy," said Gary. "Perhaps the power of the energy the
rubbing universes will create."

Kingsley stared at him as if he had struck him with an open hand. "You have
it," he shouted. "You have it!"

"But we haven't got the energy," said Gary, bluntly.

"No," agreed Kingsley. "We'll have to get that first."

"And control it," said Caroline.

"Perhaps,"  suggested  the Engineer,  "we  should  go now.  The others  are
waiting for us. They  have come so far, many of them from greater distances
than you."

"How many are there?" asked Gary.

"Only  a few," said  the Engineer, "so  very few.  Life is so  seldom found
throughout the  universe. The universe does not  care for life. I sometimes
think life is merely a strange disease that should not be here at all, that
it is  some accidental arrangement of  matter that has no  right to be. The
universe  is so hostile  to it that  it would  seem almost to  be abnormal.
There are so few places where it can take root and live."

"But  throughout those  billions  of galaxies  there must  be  many races,"
declared Kingsley.

"There may be many  we do not know about," said the Engineer, "but very few
that we can contact. It is so very hard to get in touch with them. And some
of them  would be  useless to us,  races that had  developed along entirely
different lines to achieve a different culture. Races that live without the
application of any of  the practical sciences. Races that are sunken in the
welter of  philosophy and thought. Races  that have submerged themselves in
aesthetics and are untrained  in science. The only ones we could reach were
those scientifically-minded  races that  could catch our  message and could
reply to  us... and after that  could build the apparatus  that would bring
them here."

"Hell," said Herb, "it takes all kinds of people to make a universe."

The Engineer led them through an air lock which opened from the room into a
mighty  corridor...  a  corridor  that  stretched  away  for  inconceivable
distances, a vast place that held a brooding sense of empty space.

The suits  functioned perfectly.  Gravity and pressure were  normal and the
suits themselves were far more comfortable than the spacesuits used back in
the solar system.

Slowly they trudged down the hall behind the Engineer.

"How long did it take to build this city?" asked Gary.

"Many years," said the Engineer. "Since we came here."

"Came here?" asked Gary. "Then this isn't your native planet?"

"No," said the Engineer, but he did not offer to explain.

"Say," said Herb, "you didn't ask our names. You don't know who we are."

Gary thought  he detected a faint  semblance of dry humor  in the answer of
the Engineer.

"Names,"  he said.  "You  mean personal  designations? I  know who  you are
without knowing names."

"Maybe," said  Herb, "but  we can't read  thoughts like you can.  We got to
have  names." He  trotted along at  the heels  of the Engineer.  "Don't you
fellows have names?" he asked.

"We are  designated by numbers," said the Engineer.  "Purely as a matter of
record. The individual doesn't count so much here as he does where you came
from."

"Numbers," said Herb. "Just like a penitentiary."

"If it is necessary for you to designate me," said the Engineer, "my number
is 1824. I should have told you sooner. I am sorry I forgot."

They halted  before a massive door and  the Engineer sounded a high-pitched
thought-wave that  beat fantastically  against their minds.  The great door
slid back  into the  wall and they  walked into a  room that  swept away in
lofty reaches of vast  distances, with a high-vaulted ceiling that formed a
sky-like cup above them.

The room was utterly  empty of any sort of furniture. Just empty space that
stretched away  to the dim, far  walls of soaring white.  But in its center
was a  circular elevation of  that same white stone,  a dais-like structure
that reared ten feet or more above the white-paved floor.

Upon the  dais stood several of the Engineers  and around them were grouped
queer,  misshapen  things,  nightmares snatched  from  some  book of  olden
horrors, monstrosities  that made  Gary's blood run  cold as be  gazed upon
them.

He felt Caroline's fingers closing on his arm. "Gary," her whisper was thin
and weak, "what are they?"

"Those are the ones  that we have called," said the Engineer. "The ones who
have come so far to help us in our fight."

"They  look like something  a man would  want to  step on," said  Herb, and
there was a horrible loathing in his words.

Gary stared  at them, fascinated by their  very repulsiveness. Lords of the
universe, he thought. These  are the things that represent the cream of the
universe's intelligence.  These things that looked,  as Herb had said, like
something you would want to step on.

The  Engineer was walking  straight ahead,  toward the wide,  shallow steps
that led up to the dais.

"Come on," rumbled Kingsley. "Maybe we look as bad to them."

They crossed the hall and tramped up the steps. The Engineer crossed to the
other Engineers.

"These," he said, "are  the ones who have come from the outer planet of the
solar system we have watched so many years."

The Engineers  looked at them. So did the other  things. Gary felt his skin
crawling under the scrutiny.

"They are  welcome," came  the thought-wave of  one of the  Engineers. "You
have told them how glad we are to have them here?"

"I have told them," declared Engineer 1824.

There  were  chairs for  the  Earthlings.  One of  the  Engineers waved  an
invitation to them and they sat down.

Gary looked around. They  were the only ones who had chairs. The Engineers,
apparently  tireless, remained  standing. Some  of the other  things stood,
too. One  of them  stood on a single  leg with his second  leg tucked tight
against his body -  like a dreaming stork - except that he didn't look like
a stork.  Gary tried to  classify him. He wasn't  a bird or a  reptile or a
mammal. He  wasn't anything a  human being had ever  imagined. Long, skinny
legs, great  bloated belly,  head with unkempt hair  falling over brooding,
dead-fish eyes.

One of the Engineers began to speak.

"We  have gathered  here," said  the thought-waves,  "to consider  ways and
means of meeting one of the greatest dangers..."

Just like a political speaker back on Earth, thought Gary. He tried to make
out  which  one of  the  Engineers was  talking,  but there  was no  facial
expression, no movement of any sort which would determine which one of them
the  speaker might  be. He  tried to  pick out  Engineer 1824, but  all the
Engineers looked exactly alike.

The talk rumbled on, a smooth roll of thought explaining the situation that
they faced, the many problems it presented, the need of acting at once.

Gary studied  the other things about  them, the loathsome, unnatural things
that had  been brought here from  the unguessed depths of  the universe. He
shuddered and felt cold beads of sweat break out upon his body as he looked
at them.

Several of them were immersed in tanks filled with liquids. One tank boiled
and  steamed as  if with  violent chemical  action; another was  cloudy and
dirty-looking; another  was clear  as water and  in it lurked  a thing that
struck stark terror into  Gary's soul. Another was confined in a huge glass
sphere through which shifted  and swirled a poisonous-appearing atmosphere.
Gary  felt  cold fingers  touch  his spine  as  he watched  the sphere  and
suddenly was thankful for the shifting mists within it, for through them he
had  caught sight  of something  that he  was certain would  have shattered
one's  mind to  look upon  without the  shielding swirl  of fog  within the
glass.

In a  small glass cage set upon a pedestal  of stone were several writhing,
grub-like things  that palpitated  disgustingly. Squatting on  its haunches
directly across from Gary  was a monstrosity with mottled skin and drooling
mouth,  with  narrow, slitted  eyes  and  slimy features.  He fastened  his
pinpoint gaze upon the Earthman and Gary quickly looked away.

Nothing resembled  mankind, nothing except the  Engineers. Here were things
that were terrible caricatures  of the loathsome forms of Earth life, other
beings  that bore  not even  the most  remote resemblance to  anything that
mankind had ever seen or imagined.

Was this  a fair sample of the intelligence  the universe contained? Did he
and Kingsley and Caroline  appear as disgusting, as fearsome in the eyes as
these other denizens of the universe as they appeared to his?

He shot  a quick glance at  Caroline. She was listening  intently, her chin
cupped in one hand,  her eyes upon the Engineers. Just as well that way, he
thought. She didn't see these other things.

The Engineer had stopped talking and silence fell upon the room. Then a new
impulse of thought beat  against Gary's brain, thought that seemed cold and
cruel, thought that was  entirely mechanistic and consciousless. He glanced
swiftly around,  trying to find who  was speaking. It must,  he decided, be
the thing in the glass sphere. He could not understand the thought, grasped
just vague impressions of  atomic structures and mathematics that seemed to
represent enormous pressure used to control surging energy.

The Engineer was talking again.

"Such a  solution," he was saying,  "would be possible on  a planet such as
yours, where  an atmosphere many  miles in depth, composed  of heavy gases,
creates the pressures that you speak of. While we can create such pressures
artificially, we could not create or maintain them outside the laboratory."

"What the hell," asked Herb, "are they arguing about?"

"Shut  up,"  hissed  Gary,  and  the photographer  lapsed  into  shamefaced
silence.

The cold,  cruel thought was arguing,  trying to explain a  point that Gary
could only  guess at. He  looked at Caroline, wondering  if she understood.
Her face was twisted into tiny lines of concentration.

The  cold stream  of thought had  stopped and  another thought broke  in, a
little piping  thought. Perhaps, thought Gary,  one of the little slug-like
creatures in the glass cage.

Disgusting little things!

Gary  looked at  the mottled,  droopy-eyed creature that  squatted opposite
him. It raised its  head and in the beady eyes he imagined that he caught a
glimmer of amusement.

"By the Lord," he said to himself, "he thinks it's funny, too."

This arguing of hideous  entities! The piping thoughts of slimy things that
should be wriggling through some stagnant roadside ditch back on the planet
Earth. The cold thought  of the brain-blasting thing that lived on a planet
covered by miles of swirling gases. The pinpoint eyes of the being with the
mottled skin.

Cosmic Crusade! He laughed  to himself, deep in his throat. This wasn't the
way  he had  imagined  it. He  had thought  of  gleaming ships  of  war, of
stabbing rays, of might  arrayed against might, a place where courage would
be at a premium.

But there was nothing  to fight. No physical thing. Nothing a man could get
at. Another universe, a  mighty thing of curving space and time... that was
the enemy. A man simply couldn't do anything about a thing like that.

"This place," Herb whispered to him, "is giving me the creeps."

Chapter Nine

"WE  CAN do it,"  said Caroline. She  flicked a  pencil against a  sheet of
calculations. "This proves it," she declared.

Kingsley bent over her  shoulder to look at the sheet. "If you don't mind,"
he said, "would you lead me through it all again. Go slowly, please. I find
it hard to grasp a lot of it."

"Kingsley," said  Herb, "you're just an  amateur. To get as  good as she is
you'd have to think for forty lifetimes."

"You embarrass me," she said. "It's very simple. It's really very simple."

"I'll say it's simple,"  said Tommy. "Just a little matter of bending space
and time  into a tiny universe. Wrapping it about  a selected bit of matter
and making it stay put."

"You could  use it to control the  energy," rumbled Kingsley. "I understand
that  well enough.  When  the universes  begin to  rub  you could  trap the
incoming energy  in an  artificial universe. The energy  would destroy that
universe, but  you'd have another ready for it.  What I can't understand is
how you form this artificial fourth-dimensional space."

"It isn't artificial," snapped  Gary. "It's real... as real as the universe
we live in. But it's made by human beings instead of by some law we have no
inkling of."

He pointed  at the  sheet of calculations.  "Perhaps the secret  of all the
universe is on that  sheet of paper," he declared. "Maybe that's the key to
how the universe was formed."

"Maybe," rumbled  Kingsley, "and  maybe not. There  may be many  ways to do
it."

"One," said Gary, "is good enough for me."

"There's just  one thing," said  Caroline, "that bothers me.  We don't know
anything about  the fifth-dimensional inter-space. We  can imagine that its
laws are different from  our own. Vastly different. But how do they differ?
What kind  of energy would be  formed out there? What  form would it take?"
She  looked from  one  to the  other of  them.  "That would  make a  lot of
difference," she declared.

"It would,"  agreed Kingsley. "It would make a  lot of difference. It would
be like  setting a trap  for some animal. You  might set one for  a rat and
catch a bear... or the other way around."

"The  Hellhounds know,"  said  Tommy. "They  know  how to  navigate in  the
inter-space."

"But they wouldn't tell us," said Gary. "They don't want the universe to be
saved. They want it  to be wrecked so they can build a new world out of the
wreckage."

"It might be light, or matter, or heat, or motion, or it might be something
that's entirely different," said Caroline. "It's not impossible it would be
something else, some new  fearful form of energy with which we are entirely
unacquainted. Conditions  would be just as  different out in inter-space as
fourth-dimensional conditions differ from our three-dimensional world."

"And to be able to control it we would have to have some idea as to what it
is," said Kingsley.

"Or what  it would become when  it entered the hyperspace,"  said Gary. "It
might be  one kind of energy out there, an  entirely different kind when it
entered our universe."

"The people  of the other universe don't seem  to know," Tommy pointed out.
"Even  if they  are the  ones who  found out  about the  universes drifting
together. They don't seem to be able to find out too much about it."

Gary glanced around the  laboratory, a mighty vaulted room that glowed with
soft, white  light... a room with gleaming  tiers of apparatus, with mighty
machines, great  engines purring with tremendous  power, uncanny structures
that almost defied description.

"The funniest  thing about  the whole business,"  he declared, "is  why the
Engineers themselves  can't make any progress. Why do  they have to call us
in? With  all of this equipment,  with the knowledge they  already hold, it
ought to be a cinch for them to do almost anything.".

"There's something queer here," Herb declared. "I've been snooping around a
bit and  this city is enough  to set you batty.  There isn't any traffic in
the streets. You can  travel for hours and you don't see a single Engineer.
No business  houses, no theaters, no nothing.  All the buildings are empty.
Just empty buildings. A city of empty buildings." He puffed out his breath.
"Like a  city that was built  and waiting for someone.  Waiting for someone
who never came."

Something akin to terror crossed Gary's mind. A queer, haunted feeling... a
pity for those magnificent white buildings standing all untenanted.

"A city built for billions of people," said Herb. "And no one in it. Just a
handful  of   Engineers.  Probably   not  more  than   a  hundred  thousand
altogether."

Kingsley was clenching and opening his fists again, rumbling in his throat.

"It does seem queer,"  he said, "that they never found the answer. With all
their knowledge, all their scientific apparatus."

Gary looked  at Caroline  and smiled. A wisp  of a girl. But  one who could
bend space and time  until it formed a sphere... or, rather, a hypersphere.
A girl  who could mold space  as she wanted it,  who could play tricks with
it, make it do what she wanted it to do. She could set up a tiny replica of
the universe,  a little  private universe that  belonged to her  and no one
else. No one before, he was certain, ever had dared to think of doing that.

He looked  at her again, a  swift, sure look that  saw the square-cut chin,
the high  forehead, the braided raven strands  about her head. Was Caroline
Martin greater  than the  Engineers? Could she  master a problem  that they
couldn't even touch? Was she, all unheralded, the master mind of the entire
universe? Did the hope of the universe lie within her mind?

It seemed impossible. And yet, she had thought of time and space for nearly
forty lifetimes.  With nothing but a brain to work  with, with no tools, no
chance of  experimentation - all alone, with  nothing but her thoughts, she
had solved  the deep-shrouded mysteries of  space and time. Never dreaming,
perhaps, that such knowledge could be used to a certain purpose.

Metal feet  scraped across  the laboratory floor  and Gary whirled  to come
face  to face  with Engineer  1824. The  metal man  had advanced  upon them
unawares.

His thought  came to  them, clear, calm,  unhurried thought, devoid  of all
emotion, impersonal, yet with a touch of almost human warmth.

"I heard  your thoughts," he said, "and I am afraid  that you might think I
meant to hear them.  But I am very glad I did. You wonder why the Engineers
brought you here. You wonder why the Engineers can't do this work unaided."

They stood guiltily, like schoolboys caught at some forbidden act.

"I will tell you," the thought went on, "and I hope you will understand. It
is difficult  to tell you. Hard to tell you,  because we Engineers are full
of pride. Conditions being different, we would never tell you."

It sounded like a  confession, and Gary stared at the metal man in stricken
surprise, but there was  no sign of expression upon the metal face, no hint
of thought within the glowing eyes.

"We are  an old  and tired people,"  said the Engineer. "We  have lived too
long. We have always  been a mechanistic people and as the years went on we
became  even  more so.  We  plod  from one  thing  to another.  We have  no
imagination. The knowledge that we have, the powers we hold, were inherited
by us.  Inherited from a great race, the greatest  race that ever lived. We
have added  something to that knowledge, but so  very little. So very, very
little when  you think  of all the time  that has passed away  since it was
handed to us."

"Oh!" cried Caroline and then put her hand up as if to cover her mouth, and
it clanged against the  quartz of the helmet. She looked at Gary and he saw
pity in her eyes.

"No pity for us, please," said the Engineer. "For we are a proud people and
have the  right to be. We  have kept an ancient trust  and kept it well. We
have abided  by the heritage that  is ours. We have  kept intact the charge
that was given us."

In  the little silence  Gary had a  sense of  ancient things, of  old plays
played  out upon  a stage that  had dissolved  in dust these  many thousand
years. A sense of an even greater race upon an even greater planet. An old,
old heraldry carried down through cosmic ages by these metal men.

"But  you  are young,"  declared  the  Engineer. "Your  race  is young  and
unspoiled. You have fallen into no grooves. Your mind is free. You are full
of imagination  and initiative. I sensed it when I  talked with you back in
your own  system. And  that is what we  need... that is what  we must have.
Imagination  to grasp  the  problem that  is offered.  Imagination  to peer
around  the corner.  A dreaming  contemplation of  what is necessary  to be
done, and then the vigorous initiative to meet the challenge that the dream
may bring."

Again a silence.

"That is why we  are so glad to have you here," went on the Engineer. "That
is why I know I can tell you what must be told."

He  hesitated for  a moment and  a million  fears speared at  Gary's brain.
Something that  must be told!  Something they hadn't known  before. An even
greater threat to face?

They waited breathlessly.

"You should know," said the Engineer, "but I almost fear to tell you. It is
this: Upon you, and  you alone, must rest the fate of the universe. You are
the only ones to save it."

"Upon us," cried Tommy. "Why, that is mad! You can't mean it!"

Kingsley's hands  were clenched  and the bearish  rumble was rising  in his
throat. "What about those  others?" he asked. "All those others you brought
here, along with us?"

"I sent them back," declared the Engineer. "They were no help to us."

Gary felt the cold  wind from space reach out and flick his face again. Man
- and Man alone  - stood between the universe and destruction. Little, puny
Man. Man, with a body so delicate that he would be smashed to a bloody pulp
if exposed unprotected to the naked gravity of this monstrous world. Little
Man, groping toward the light, groping, feeling, not knowing where he went.

And then  the blast of trumpets sounded in the  air - the mythical trumpets
calling men  to crusade.  The ringing peal  that for the  last ten thousand
years has sent Man out to war, clutching at his sword.

"But why?" Kingsley was thundering.

"Because," said the Engineer,  "we could not work with them. They could not
work with  one another. We  could hardly understand them.  Their process of
intelligence was  so unfathomable,  their thought process  so twisted, that
understanding  was  almost impossible.  How  we ever  made them  understand
sufficiently to  bring them here, I  will never know. Many  times we almost
despaired. Their minds are so different from ours, so very, very different.
Poles apart in thought."

Why, sure, thought Gary, that would be the way one would expect to find it.
There was no such thing as parallel physical evolution, why should there be
parallel mental evolution?

"Not that  their mentality is not  as valid as our  intelligence," said the
Engineer. "Not  that they  might not have  even a greater  grasp of science
than we.  But there could have been  no co-ordination, no understanding for
us to work together."

"But," said Caroline, "we  can understand your thoughts. You can understand
ours. And yet we are as far removed from you as they."

The Engineer said nothing.

"And you look like us," said Tommy, quietly. 'We are protoplasm and you are
metal, but we each have arms and legs..."

"It means  nothing," said the Engineer. "Absolutely  nothing how a thing is
made, the shape that  one is made in." There was almost an edge of anger in
his thoughts.

"Don't you  worry, old man," said  Herb. 'We'll save the  universe. I don't
know how in hell we'll do it, but we'll save it for you."

"Not for  us," the Engineer corrected, "but for  those others. For all life
that now exists within  the universe. For all life that in time to come may
exist within the universe."

"There," said Gary, hardly  realizing that he spoke aloud, "is an ideal big
enough for any man."

An ideal. Something to  fight for. A spur that kept Man going on, striving,
fighting his way ahead.

Save  the  universe for  that  monstrosity  in the  glass  sphere with  its
shifting  vapors,  for the  little,  wriggling, slug-like  things, for  the
mottled terror with the droopy mouth and the glint of humor in his eyes.

"But how?" asked Tommy. "How are we going to do it?"

Kingsley ruffled at him. "We'll do it," he thundered.

He wheeled  on the Engineer. "Do  you know what kind  of energy would exist
within the inter-space?" he asked.

"No," said  the Engineer, "I cannot tell  you that. Perhaps the Hellhounds.
But that's impossible."

"Is there  any other place?" asked  Gary in a voice  cold as steel. "Anyone
else who could tell us?"

"Yes," said the Engineer. "There is one other race. I think that they might
tell you. But not yet. Not yet. It is too dangerous."

"We don't care," said Herb. "We humans eat up danger."

"Let us  try it," said Gary.  "Just a couple of  us. If something happened,
the others would be left to carry on..."

"No," said  the Engineer, and there  was a terrible finality  in the single
thought.

"Why can't we go  out ourselves and find out?" asked Herb. "We could make a
little   universe  just   for   ourselves.  Float   right  out   into  this
fifth-dimension space and study the energy that we find."

"Splendid," purred  Kingsley. "Absolutely splendid. Except  there isn't any
energy yet.  Won't be until the  two universes rub and  then it will be too
late."

"Yes," said  Caroline, smiling at Herb, "we have  to know before the energy
is produced. When the universes rub, it will flood in upon us in such great
quantity that we'll be  wiped out almost immediately. The first contracting
rush  of space  and time will  engulf us.  Remember, we're just  inside the
universal rim."

"I do  not entirely understand," said the Engineer.  "You spoke of making a
universe.  Can  you  make   a  universe?  Bend  space  and  time  around  a
predetermined mass? I am afraid you jest. That would be difficult."

Gary started. Was it  possible that Caroline had done something an Engineer
thought  impossible  to  do?   Standing  here,  it  seemed  so  simple,  so
commonplace  that  space-time could  be  bent into  a hypersphere.  Nothing
wonderful about it. Just  something to be slightly astonished at and argued
about. Just a few equations spread upon a sheet of paper.

"Sure we can," bellowed Kingsley. "This little lady has it figured out."

"The little lady," commented Herb, "is a crackajack at figures."

The Engineer  reached out his hand  to take the sheet  of calculations that
Kingsley  was handing  to him.  But as  he reached  out his arm  little red
lights began to blink throughout the laboratory and in their ears sounded a
shrill, high-pitched whine - a whine that held a note of sinister alarm.

"What's that?" yelled Kingsley, dropping the sheet.

The thought  of the  Engineer came to  them as calm as  ever, as absolutely
devoid of emotion as it bad always been.

"The Hellhounds," he said "The Hellhounds are attacking us."

As he spoke, Gary watched the sheet of paper flutter to the floor, a little
fluttering sheet that held  the key to the riddle of the universe scratched
upon it in the black scrawlings of a soft-lead pencil.

The Engineer  moved across the laboratory to  a panel. His metallic fingers
reached out,  deftly punched at studs.  A wall screen lighted  up and on it
they  saw the  bowl  of sky  above the  city.  Ships were  shooting  up and
outward, great  silver ships  that had grim  lines of power  about them. Up
from  the  roofs they  arrowed  out  into space,  squadron after  squadron,
following  a grim  trail  to the  shock of  combat. Going  out to  meet the
Hellhounds.

The Engineer  made adjustments  on the panel  and they were  looking deeper
into space,  far out  into the darkness  where the atmosphere  had ended. A
tiny speck  of silver  appeared and rapidly leaped  toward them, dissolving
into a cloud of ships. Thousands of them.

"The Hellhounds," said the Engineer.

Gary heard Herb suck  in his breath, saw Kingsley's hamlike hands clenching
and unclenching.

"Stronger than ever," said  the Engineer. "Perhaps with new and more deadly
weapons, perhaps more efficient  screens. I am afraid, so very much afraid,
that this means the end of us... and of the universe."

"How far away are they?" asked Tommy.

"Only a few thousand miles now," said the Engineer. "Our alarm system warns
us when  they are within ten  thousand miles of the  surface. That gives us
time to get our fleet out into space to meet them."

"Is there anything we can do?" asked Gary.

"We are doing everything we can," said the Engineer.

"But I  don't mean you," said  Gary. "Is there anything  the five of us can
do? Any war service we can render you?"

"Not now,"  said the Engineer. "Perhaps later  there will be something. But
not now."

He adjusted the screen  again and in it they watched the defending ships of
the Engineers shooting spaceward,  maneuvered into far-flung battle lines -
like little dancing motes against the black of space.

In breathless  attention they kept their eyes fixed  on the screen, saw the
gleaming  points  of  light  draw closer  together,  the  invaders and  the
defenders.  Then upon  the screen  they saw  dancing flashes that  were not
reflections  from the  ships,  but something  else -  knifing  flashes that
reached out, probed and stabbed and slashed, like a searchlight's beam cuts
into the  night. A tiny pinpoint of red  light flashed momentarily and then
went out. Another flamed, like lightning bugs of a summer night, except the
flash was red and seemed filled with a terrible violence.

"Those flashes," breathed Caroline. 'What are they?"

"Exploding ships,"  said the  Engineer. "Screens break down  and the energy
drains out and then an atomic bomb or ray finds its way into them."

"Exploding ships," said Gary. "But whose?"

"How can I tell?" asked the Engineer. "It may be theirs or ours."

Even as he spoke a little ripple of red flashes ran across the screen.

Chapter Ten

HALF  the city  was in  ruins, swept  and raked  by the stabbing  rays that
probed down  from the upper reaches of  the atmosphere, blasted by hydrogen
and atomic  bombs that shook the  very bedrock of the  planet and shattered
great,  sky-high  towers  of  white  masonry into  drifting  dust.  Twisted
wreckage fell into the city from the battle area, great cruisers reduced to
grotesque metal heaps, bent and burned and battered out of all semblance to
a ship,  scorched and crushed and  flattened by the energy  unloosed in the
height of battle.

"They  have  new  weapons,"  said the  Engineer.  "New  weapons and  better
screens. We  can hold  them off a little  longer. How much longer  I do not
know."

In  the laboratory,  located  in the  base of  one  of the  tallest  of the
skyscrapers in  the great white city, the  Engineers and the Earthlings had
watched the battle for long hours. Had seen the first impact of the fleets,
had watched the first dogfight out at the edge of atmosphere, had witnessed
the  Hellhounds slowly  drive the  defenders back  until the  invaders were
within effective bombardment distance of the city itself.

"They  have  a screen  stripper,"  said  the Engineer,  "that  is far  more
effective than  anything we  have ever seen.  It is taking too  much of our
ships' energy to hold up their screens under this new weapon."

In  the  telescopic screen  a  brilliant  blue-white flash  filled all  the
vision-plate as  a bomb smashed into  one of the few  remaining towers. The
tower erupted  with a flash of blinding  light and disappeared, with merely
the ragged stump of  masonry bearing mute testimony to its once sky-soaring
height.

"Isn't  there anyone  who can  help us?"  asked Kingsley. "Surely  there is
someone to whom we might appeal."

"There is no one," said the Engineer. "We are alone. For thousands of light
years there are no other great races to be found. For millions of years the
Hellhounds and the Engineers  have fought, and it has always been those two
and just those two  alone. Thus it is now. Before, we have driven them off.
Many times  have we destroyed them almost to  the point of anihilation that
we might hold their  cosmic ambitions under proper check. Now it seems they
will be the victors."

"No other race," said Gary, musing, "for thousands of light years."

He stared  moodily at the screen, saw a piece  of twisted wreckage that had
at  one time  been a  ship crash into  the stump  of broken tower  and hang
there, like a bloody, smoke-blackened offering tossed on the altar of war.

"But there  is," he  said. "There is at  least one great race  very near to
us."

"There is?" asked Caroline. "Where?"

"On  the other universe,"  said Gary. "A  race that  is fully as  great, as
capable as  the Engineers.  A race that should  be glad to help  us in this
fight."

"Great  suffering  snakes,"  yelped  Herb, "why  didn't  we  think of  that
before?"

"I do  not understand," said the  Engineer. "I agree they  are a great race
and very close to  us. Much too close, in fact. But they might as well be a
billion light  years away. They can  do us no good.  How would you get them
here?"

"Yes," rumbled Kingsley, "how would you get them here?"

Gary turned to the  Engineer. "You have talked to them," he said. "Have you
any idea of what kind of people they might be?"

"A great people," said  the Engineer. "Greater than we in certain sciences.
They  are  the ones  who  notified  us of  the  danger  of the  approaching
universes. They  knew they  were nearing our  universe when we  didn't even
know  there was  another  universe other  than  our own.  Such very  clever
people."

"Talk  to them  again,"  said Gary.  "Give them  the information  that will
enable   them  to   make   a  miniature   universe...  one   of  Caroline's
hyperspheres."

"But," said the Engineer, "that would do no good."

"It would," said Gary, grimly, "if they could use the laws of space to form
a blister  on the  surface of their universe.  If they could go  out to the
very edge of their space-time frame and create a little bubble of space - a
bubble that  would pinch off, independent of  the parent universe and exist
independently in the five-dimension inter-space."

Gary heard the rasp of Kingsley's breath in his helmet phones.

"They  could cross  to our  universe," rumbled  the scientist.  "They could
navigate through the inter-space with complete immunity."

Gary nodded inside his helmet. "Exactly," he said.

"Why, Gary," whispered Caroline, "what a thought!"

"Boy," said  Herb, "I  can hardly wait  to see them Hellhounds  when we sic
those fellows on them."

"Maybe," said Tommy, "they won't come."

"I will talk to them," said the Engineer.

He left the room and they followed him through a mighty corridor to another
room filled with elaborate machinery.

The Engineer  strode to  a control panel  and worked with  dials and studs.
Intense blue  power surged through  long tubes and flashed  in dizzy whirls
through coils of glass.

Tubes boomed  into sudden brilliance and the deep  hum of power surged into
the room.

They could  hear the probing fingers  of the Engineer's thoughts, thrusting
out,  calling to  those  other people  in  another universe.  The power  of
thought being  hurled through the very  warp and weave of  twisted time and
space.

Then  came  another  probing  thought,  a  string  of  thoughts  that  were
impossible  to  understand,  hazed  and  blurred  and  all  distorted.  But
apparently perfectly clear to  the Engineer, who stood motionless under the
inverted cone of glass that shimmered with blue fire of power.

Two entities  talking to one another and  the queer, challenging unknown of
five-dimensional inter-space separating them!

The power ebbed and the blue fire sank to a glimmer in the tubes.

The Engineer turned around and faced the Earthlings.

"They will come," he said, "but only on one condition."

Suddenly  a shiver  went  through Gary.  Condition! That  was  something he
hadn't thought  about -  that these other  things might exact  terms, might
want concessions,  might seek to wring  front another universe some measure
of profit for a service done.

He  had always  thought  of them  as benevolent  beings, entities  like the
Engineers, living  a life of service,  establishing themselves as guardians
of their universe. But  that was it. Would they go out of their way to save
another universe? Or would  they fight only for their own? Was there such a
thing as selflessness and  universal brotherhood? Or must the universes, in
time  to come,  be forever at  one another's  throats, as in  ancient times
nations  had torn  at one  another in  savage anger,  in more  recent times
planets had warred for their selfish interests?

"What condition?" asked Kingsley.

"That  we  or  they  find  out  something  concerning  the  nature  of  the
inter-space and  of the energy  which will be generated  when the universes
rub," said  the Engineer. "They are  willing to come and  fight for us, but
they are not willing  to deliberately invite disaster to themselves. No one
knows what  the inter-space is like.  No one knows what  laws of science it
may hold. There may be laws that are utterly foreign to both our universes,
laws that  would defy our every bit of knowledge.  They are afraid that the
budding of a smaller  universe from the surface of their own might serve to
generate the energy they  know will result when two four-dimensional frames
draw close to one another."

"Now,  wait," said  Gary.  "There is  something  I didn't  consider when  I
proposed this  thing. It  just occurred to  me now. When you  said the word
'condition,'  it  came to  my  mind  that they  might  want concessions  or
promises. I was wrong, interpreted the thought wrong. But the idea is still
there. We  don't know what these things in the  other universe might be. We
don't know what they look like or what their philosophy is or what they can
do. If  we allowed  them to come  here, we'd be  giving them a  key to this
universe. Just opening the  door for them. They might be all right and they
might not. They might take over the universe."

"There's  something to  that," said  Tommy. "We  should have thought  of it
before."

"I do  not believe it," said  the Engineer. "I have  some reason to believe
they would not be a menace to us."

"What reason?" rumbled Kingsley.

"They notified us of the danger," said the Engineer.

"They wanted help," said Tommy.

"We have been of little help to them," said the Engineer.

"What difference  does it  make?" asked Herb.  "Unless we can  do something
about this energy, we're  going to be goners, anyhow. And that goes for the
other universe as well.  If they could save themselves by ruining us, maybe
they'd do it, but it's a cinch that if we puff out they go along with us."

"That's right," agreed Kingsley.  "It would be to their interest to help us
beat off the Hellhounds  on the chance that we might find something to save
the universes.  They wouldn't be very  likely to turn on  us until somebody
had figured out something about this energy."

"And we  can't control  something we don't understand,"  said Caroline. "We
have to find  out what that energy is, what it's like,  what form it is apt
to take, something about it, so we will know how to handle it."

"How  much more  time have  we to  find some  way to  save us from  the big
explosion?" asked Gary.

"Very little time," said the Engineer. "Very little time. We are perilously
close to  the danger  point. Shortly the  two space-time frames  of the two
universes will start reacting upon one another, creating the lines of force
and stress that will set up the energy fields in the inter-space."

"And  you  say  there   is  another  race  that  can  tell  us  about  this
inter-space?"

"One other race I  know of," said the Engineer. "There may be others, but I
know  only of  this one.  And it  is hard  to reach. Perhaps  impossible to
reach."

"Listen,"  said Gary,  "it is  our only  chance. We  might as well  fail in
reaching them as waiting here for the energy to come and wipe us out. Let a
couple of us try. The others may find something else before it is too late.
Caroline's  hyperspheres might  take care  of the  energy, but we  can't be
sure. And  we have to be sure. The universe depends  upon us being sure. We
can't just shoot in the dark.

We have to know."

"And if we find out," said Herb, "those guys over in the other universe can
come over and help  us hold the Hellhounds off while we rig up the stuff we
have to have."

"I'm afraid," said Kingsley, "we have to take the chance."

"Chance," said the Engineer.  "It's a whole lot more than chance. The place
I have in mind may not even exist."

"May not even exist?" asked Caroline and there was an edge of terror in her
words.

"It is far away," said the Engineer. "Not far in space - perhaps even close
to us in space. But far away in time."

"In time?" asked Tommy. "Some great civilization of the past?"

"No,"  said the  Engineer. "A  civilization of  the future.  A civilization
which may never exist. One that may never come to be."

"How do you know about it, then?" flared Gary.

"I followed  its world  line," said the  Engineer. "And yet  not its actual
world line, but the world line that was to come. I traced it into the realm
of probability. I followed it ahead in time, saw it as it is not yet, as it
may never be. I saw the shadow of its probability."

Gary's head reeled. What  talk was this? Following of probable world lines.
Tracing the course of an empire before it had occurred! Seeing a place that
might  not ever  exist. Talking of  sending someone  to a place  that might
never be!

But Caroline  was talking now, her  cool voice smooth and  calm, but with a
trace of excitement tinging the tenor of her words.

"You  mean  you used  a  geodesic  tracer to  follow  the  world line  into
probability.  That you  established  the fact  that in  some future  time a
certain  world may  exist under  such conditions  as you saw.  That barring
unforeseen circumstances  it will exist as you saw  it, but that you cannot
be certain it ever will exist, for the world line you traced could not take
into  account that  factor  of accident  which might  destroy the  world or
divert it from the  path you charted, the path that it logically would have
to take."

"That is  correct," said the Engineer.  "Except for one thing.  And that is
that  the  world  will  exist  as  I  saw  it  in  some  measure.  For  all
probabilities  must exist  to some  extent. But  its existence might  be so
tenuous that  we could never reach it... that for  us, in hard, solid fact,
it would have no real existence. In other words, we could not set foot upon
it. For  every real  thing there are infinite  probabilities, all existing,
drawing some shadow of  existence from the mere fact that they are probable
or  have been  probable or will  be probable.  The stress and  condition of
circumstance selects one of these probabilities, makes it an actuality. But
the others have an existence, just the same. An existence, perhaps, that we
could not perceive."

"But you did see this shadow of probability?" rumbled Kingsley.

"Yes,"  said the Engineer,  "I saw it  very plainly.  So plainly that  I am
tempted to  believe it may be  an actuality in time to  come. But of that I
cannot be sure. As  I said, it may not exist, may never exist - at least to
an extent where we  could reach it - where it would have any bearing on our
lives."

"There is a chance, though, that we could reach it?" asked Gary.

"There is a chance," said the Engineer.

"Then," said Herb, impatiently, "what are we waiting for?"

"But," said Gary, "if  the universe is destroyed, if we should fail and the
universe be destroyed, would  that probability still be there? Wouldn't the
fact  that  you saw  it  prove  that we  will  find  some way  to save  the
universe?"

"It proves nothing," said  the Engineer. "Even were the universe destroyed,
the  probability  would  still  exist,  for  the  world  could  have  been.
Destruction  of the  universe  would be  a factor  of accident  which would
eliminate  actuality and  force  all lines  of probability  to  remain mere
probability."

"You mean,"  breathed Caroline, "that we  could go to a  world which exists
only  as  a probable  world  line and  get  information there  to save  the
universe - that even  after the universe is destroyed, if we fail and it is
destroyed, the information which  might have saved it still could be found,
but too late, of course, to be of any use to us, on that probable world?"

"Yes," said  the Engineer, "but there would be no one  to find it then. The
solution would be there, never used, at a time when it would be too late to
use it. It is so hard to explain this thought as it should be explained."

"Maybe it's  all right," said Herb,  "but I crave action.  When do we start
for this place that might not be there when we get where we headed for?"

"I will show you," said the Engineer.

They followed him through a maze of laboratory rooms until they came to one
which boasted only one  piece of equipment, a huge polished bowl set in the
floor, blazing with reflected  light from the single lamp that shone in the
ceiling above it.

The Engineer indicated the bowl. "Watch," he told them.

He walked to a board on the opposite wall and swiftly set up an equation on
a calculating machine. The machine whirred and clicked and chuckled and the
Engineer depressed  a series of studs  in the control board.  The inside of
the bowl clouded and seemed to take on motion, like a gigantic whirlpool of
flowing nothingness. Faster and faster became the impression of motion.

Gary found himself unable to pull his eyes away from the wonder of the bowl
- as if the very motion were hypnotic.

Then the  swirl of  motion began to  take form, misty, tenuous  form, as if
they were  viewing a strange solar  system from a vast  distance. The solar
system  faded from  view as  the vision  in the  bowl narrowed down  to one
planet. Other planets flowed out of the picture and the one grew larger and
larger, a ball swinging slowly in space.

Then  it  filled all  the  bowl  and Gary  could  see seas  and cities  and
mountains  and vast  deserts. But  the mountains  were not high,  more like
weathered hills than mountains,  and the seas were shallow. Deserts covered
most of the spinning globe and the cities were in ruins.

There  was  something  tantalizingly  familiar about  that  spinning  ball,
something that struck a chord of memory, something about the solar system -
as if he had seen it once before.

And then it struck him like an open hand across his mouth.

"The Earth!" he cried. "That is the Earth!"

"Yes," said  the Engineer, "that is your planet, but you  see it as it will
be many millions of years from now. It is an old, old planet."

"Or as it may never be," whispered Caroline.

"You are right," said the Engineer. "Or as it may never be."

Chapter Eleven

TOMMY  EVANS' ship  rested  on one  of the  lower roofs  of the  city, just
outside the laboratories level. In a few minutes now it would be lifted and
hurled through a warp of space and time that should place it upon the Earth
they had  seen in  the swirling bowl...  an Earth that  was no  more than a
probability... an  Earth that  wouldn't exist for  millions of years  if it
ever existed.

"Take good  care of  that ship," Tommy  told Gary. Gary slapped  him on the
arm.

"I'll bring it back to you," he said.

"Well be waiting for you," Kingsley rumbled.

"Hell," moaned  Herb, "I never get  to have any fun.  Here you and Caroline
are going out there to the Earth and I got to stay behind."

"Listen," said  Gary savagely,  "there's no use  in risking all  our lives.
Caroline's going because she  may be the only one who could understand what
the old  Earth people  can tell us, and  I'm going because I  play a better
hand of poker. I beat you all, fair and square."

"I was  a sucker," mourned Herb. "I should have known  you'd have an ace in
the hole. You always got an ace in the hole."

Tommy grinned.

"I got  a lousy band," he  said. "We should have  played more than just one
band."

"It was  one way of  deciding it," said Gary.  "We all wanted to  go, so we
played one hand of poker. We couldn't waste time for more. I won. What more
do you want?"

"You always win," Herb complained.

"Just how much chance have you got?" Tommy asked Caroline.

She shrugged.

"It works out on paper," she declared. "When we came here the Engineers had
to  distort time  and  space to  get us  here, but  they distorted  the two
equally. Same  amount of distortion for each. But  here you have to distort
time  a whole  lot more.  Your factors  are different.  But we have  a good
chance of getting where we're going?'

"If it's  there when you get there..." Herb  began, but Kingsley growled at
him and he stopped.

Caroline was talking swiftly to Kingsley.

"The  Engineer  understands the  equation  for the  hyperspheres," she  was
saying. "Work with him.  Try to set up several of them in our own space and
see if it isn't possible to set up at least one outside the universe. Pinch
it off the time-space warp and shove it out into the inter-space. We may be
able to use it later on."

A  blast of  sound  smote them  and the  solid  masonry beneath  their feet
shivered to the impact of a bomb. For a single second the flashing blaze of
atomic fury made the brilliant sunlight seem pale and dim.

"That one was close," said Tommy.

They were used to bombs now.

Gary  craned  his neck  upward  and  saw the  silvery  flash  of ships  far
overhead.

"The Engineers  can't hold out  much longer," Kingsley rumbled.  "If we are
going to do anything we have to do it pretty soon."

"There is  the old space warp again," said Herb.  He pointed upward and the
others sighted out into space beyond his pointing finger.

There  it was...  the steady  wheel of  light, the  faint spin of  space in
motion... they had seen back on Pluto.

The doorway to another world.

"I guess,"  said Caroline, "that means we have to  go." Her voice caught on
something that sounded like a sob.

She  turned  to Kingsley.  "If  we don't  come  back," she  said, "try  the
hyperspheres anyhow.  Try to absorb the  energy in them. You  won't have to
control  it long.  Just long  enough so  the other universe  explodes. Then
we'll be safe."

She stepped through the  air lock and Gary followed her. He turned back and
looked at the three  of them... great, rumbling Kingsley with his huge head
thrust  forward,  staring through  his  helmet, with  his metal-shod  fists
opening and closing; dapper,  debonair Tommy Evans, the boy who had dreamed
of  flying to  Alpha  Centauri and  had come  to the  edge of  the universe
instead; Herb,  the dumpy little photographer who  was eating out his heart
because he  couldn't go.  Through eyes suddenly bleared  with emotion, Gary
waved  at them  and they  waved back.  And then  he hurried into  the ship,
slammed down the lever that swung tight the air-lock valves.

In the  control room  he took off  his helmet and dropped  into the pilot's
seat. He looked at Caroline. "Good to get the helmet off," he said.

She nodded, lifting her own off her head.

His fingers  tapped out  a firing pattern.  He hesitated for  a moment, his
thumb poised over the firing lever.

"Listen, Caroline," be asked, "how much chance have we got?"

"We'll get there," she said.

"No,"  he snapped,  "don't tell  me that.  Tell me  the truth. Have  we any
chance at all?"

Her eyes met his and her mouth sobered into a thin, straight line.

"Yes, some," she said. "Not quite fifty-fifty. There are so many factors of
error, so  many factors of accident.  Mathematics can't foresee them, can't
take care of them, and mathematics are the only signposts that we have."

He laughed harshly.

"We're shooting  at a target, don't you see?"  she said. "A target millions
of light-years  away, and millions of  years away as well,  and you have to
have a  different set of co-ordinates  for both the time  and distance. The
same set won't do for both. It's difficult."

He looked at her  soberly. She said it was difficult. He could only faintly
imagine how  difficult it  might be. Only  someone who was a  master at the
mathematics of both time and space could even faintly understand - someone,
say, who had thought for forty lifetimes.

"And even if we do hit the place," he said, "it may not be there."

Savagely he plunged his  thumb against the lever. The rockets thundered and
the ship  was arcing  up. Another pattern  and another. They  were plunging
upward now under the  full thrust of rocket power and still the ruined city
was all  around them, cragged,  broken towers shattered by  the blasting of
atomic energy.

The soft  swirl of light that  marked the opening of  the time-space tunnel
lay between  and beyond two blasted towers.  Gary fired a short, corrective
pattern to line the  nose of the ship between the towers and then depressed
a stud  and fired a blast  that drove them straight  between the towers, up
and over the city, straight for the whirl of light.

The ship arrowed swiftly  up. The directional crossbars lined squarely upon
the hub of spinning light.

"We're  almost there,"  he said,  his breath  whistling between  his teeth.
"We'll know in just a minute."

The cold  wind out of space was blowing on his  face again; the short hairs
on  his neck  were trying  to rise into  a ruff.  The old challenge  of the
unknown. The old glory of crusading.

He snapped  a look  at Caroline. She  was staring out of  the vision plate,
staring straight  ahead, watching the rim of the  wheel spin out until only
the blackness of the hub remained.

She turned  to him. "Oh, Gary!"  she cried, and then  the ship plunged into
the hub  and blackness  as thick and  heavy and as  stifling as  the ink of
utter space  flooded into the ship and seemed to  dim the very radium lamps
that burned within the room. He heard her voice coming out of the blackness
that engulfed them. "Gary, I'm afraid!"

Then  the  black  was  gone and  the  ship  rode  in  space  again  - in  a
star-sprinkled space  that had,  curiously, a warm and  friendly look after
the blackness of the tunnel.

"There it  is!" Caroline cried, and  Gary expelled his breath  in a sigh of
relief.

Below them  swam a planet, a  planet such as they  had seen in the spinning
bowl  back in the  city of the  Engineers. A  planet that was  spotted with
mighty mountains  weathered down  to meek and  somber hills, a  planet with
shallow seas and a thinning atmosphere.

"The Earth," said Gary, looking at it.

Yes, the  Earth. The  birthplace of the  human race, now an  old and senile
planet tottering to its  doom, a planet that had outlived its usefulness. A
planet that had mothered a great race of people - a race that always strove
to reach what was  just beyond, always reaching out to the not-as-yet, that
met each challenge with a battle cry. A crusading people.

"It's really there," said Caroline. "It's real."

Gary glanced  swiftly at the instruments.  They were only a  matter of five
hundred  miles above  the surface  and as  yet there  was no  indication of
atmosphere. Slowly the ship was dropping toward the planet, but still there
was no sign of anything but space.

He  whistled  softly.  Even  the  slightest  presence  of  gases  would  be
registered on the dials and so far the needles hadn't even flickered.

Earth must  be old! Her atmosphere  was swiftly being stripped  from her to
leave her bare bones naked to the cold of space. Space, cold and malignant,
was creeping in on mankind's cradle.

He struck the first sign of atmosphere at slightly under two hundred miles.

The surface of the planet was lighted by a Sun which must have lost much of
its energy, for the light seemed feeble compared to the way Gary remembered
it. The Sun, behind them, was shielded from their vision.

Swiftly  they  dropped, closer  and  closer  to the  surface. Eagerly  they
scanned the  land beneath them for  some sign of cities,  but they saw only
one and  that, the telescope  revealed, was in utter  ruins. Drifting sands
were closing over its shattered columns and once mighty walls.

"It  must have  been a  great city  in its  day," said Caroline  softly. "I
wonder what has happened to the people."

"Died off," said Gary, "or left for some other planet, maybe for some other
sun."

The  telescopic  screen  mirrored scene  after  scene  of desolation.  Vast
deserts with  shifting dunes and mile after  mile of nothing but shimmering
sand, without  a trace  of vegetation. Worn-down  hills with boulder-strewn
slopes and  wind-twisted trees  and shrubs making their  last stand against
the encroachment of a hostile environment.

Gary turned  the ship toward the night side of the  planet, and it was then
they saw  the Moon.  Vast, filling almost  a twelfth of the  sky, it loomed
over the horizon, a monstrous orange ball in full phase.

"How pretty!" gasped Caroline.

"Pretty and dangerous," said Gary.

It must  be approaching Roche's limit, he thought.  Falling out of the sky,
year after year it had drawn closer to the Earth. When it reached a certain
limit, it  would be disrupted, torn to bits  by the stresses of gravitation
hauling and  tugging at it. It would shatter  into tiny fragments and those
fragments would take up  independent orbits around old Earth, giving her in
miniature the  rings of  Saturn. But the  same forces which  would tear the
Moon  to bits  would shake up  the Earth,  giving rise to  volcanic action,
world-shattering  earthquakes, monstrous  tidal  waves. Mountains  would be
leveled, new  continents raised. Earth's face  would be changed once again,
as it  probably had been changed many times before.  As it had been changed
since early  Man had known it,  for search as he  might, Gary could find no
single  recognizable feature,  not a  single sea  or continent  that seemed
familiar.

He reflected  on the  changes that must  have come to pass.  The Earth must
have slowed  down. Probably a night now was almost a  month long, and a day
equally  as long. Long  scorching days  and endless frigid  nights. Century
after century,  with the  moon tides braking  the Earth's motion,  with the
addition  of  mass due  to  falling  meteors, Earth  had  lost her  energy.
Increase of  mass and  loss of energy  had slowed her spin,  had shoved her
farther  and  farther away  from  the Sun,  pushing  her out  and into  the
frigidness of space. And now she was losing her atmosphere. Her gravity was
weakening and the precious  gases were slowly being stripped from her. Rock
weathering also would have absorbed some of the oxygen.

"Look!" cried Caroline.

Aroused from  his daydreaming, Gary  saw a city straight  ahead, looming on
the horizon, a great city a-gleam with shining metal.

"The Engineer  said we  would find people here,"  Caroline whispered. "That
must be where we'll find them."

The city  was falling into ruin. Much of  it, undoubtedly, already had been
covered by the creeping desert that crawled toward it from every direction.
Some of  the buildings were falling apart,  with great gaping holes staring
like empty, hopeless eyes. But part of it, at least, was standing, and that
part gave  a breath-taking  hint to the  sort of city  it had  been when it
soared in full pride of strength at its very prime.

Smoothly Gary  brought the ship down  toward the city, down  toward a level
patch  of desert  in front of  the largest  building yet standing.  And the
building, he  saw, was a beauteous thing  that almost defied description, a
poem in  grace and rhythm, seemingly too fragile  for this weird and bitter
world.

The ship plowed along the sand and stopped. Gary rose from the pilot's seat
and reached for his helmet. "We're here," he announced.

"I didn't  think we'd make it," Caroline confessed.  "We took such an awful
chance."

"But we did," he said gruffly. "And we have a job to do."

He set  his helmet on his  head and clamped it down.  "I have a hunch we'll
need these things," be said.

She put on her helmet and together they went out of the air lock.

Wind keened  thinly over the empty deserts and  the ruins, kicked up little
puffs of  sand that raced and  danced weird rigadoons across  the dunes and
past the  ship, up to the very doors of  the shiny building that confronted
them.

A slinking  shape slunk across a dune and  streaked swiftly for the shelter
of a pile of fallen masonry - a little furtive shape that might have been a
skulking dog or something else, almost anything at all.

A sense of desolation  smote Gary and he felt an alien fear gripping at his
soul.

He shivered. This wasn't  the way a man should feel on his own home planet.
This wasn't the way  a man should feel on coming home from the very edge of
everything.

But it wasn't the  edge of everything, he reminded himself. It was just the
edge  of  the universe.  For  the  universe wasn't  everything. Beyond  it,
stretching   for   uncountable,  mind-shattering   distances,  were   other
universes. The universe was  just a tiny unit of the whole, perhaps as tiny
a unit of the  whole as the Earth was a tiny unit  of its universe. A grain
of sand  upon the beach,  he thought - less  than a grain of  sand upon the
beach.

And this might not  be Earth, of course. It might be just the shadow of the
Earth - a probability that gained strength and substance and a semblance of
being because it missed being an actuality by a mere hair's-breadth.

His  mind  whirled  at  the thought  of  it,  at  the  astounding vista  of
possibilities  that  the  thought   brought  up,  the  infinite  number  of
possibilities that  existed as shadows, each  with a queer shadow existence
of  its very  own, things  that just  missed being  realities. Disappointed
ghosts, he thought, wailing their way through the eternity of nonexistence.

Caroline was  close beside  him. Her voice  came to him  through the helmet
phones, a tiny voice. "Gary, everything is so strange."

"Yes," he said. "Strange."

Cautiously they  walked forward, toward the gaping  door of the great metal
building  from whose  turrets and  spires and  froth of  superstructure the
moonbeams splintered in a cold glitter of faery beauty.

Sand crunched  and grated  underfoot. The wind made  shrill, keening noises
and they  could see the frozen frost crystals  in the sand, moisture locked
in the grip of deadly cold.

They reached the doorway  and peered inside. The interior was dark and Gary
unhooked the radium lamp  from his belt. The lamp cut a broad beam of light
down the mighty, high-arched hallway that led straight from the door toward
the center of the building.

Gary caught  his breath, seized with a nameless fear,  the fear of the dark
and the unfamiliar, of the ghostly and the ancient.

"We might as well go in," he said, fighting down the fear.

Their footsteps echoed and  re-echoed in the darkness as the metal of their
boots rang against the cold paving blocks.

Gary felt the weight of centuries pressing down upon him - the eyes of many
nations  and  of  many  people watching  furtively,  jealous  to guard  old
tradition  from the  invasion of  an alien  mind. For  he and  Caroline, he
sensed, were  aliens here, aliens in time if not in  blood. He sensed it in
the  very architecture  of the  place, in  the atmosphere  of the  long and
silent hall, in the quiet that brooded on this dead or dying planet.

Suddenly they  left the hallway and  were striding into what  seemed a vast
chamber. Gary snapped the lamp to full power and explored the place. It was
filled with furniture. Solid  blocks of seat faced a rostrum, and all about
the wall ran ornate benches.

At one  time, now long gone,  it might have been  a council hall, a meeting
place of the people  to decide great issues. In this room, he told himself,
history might  have been  written, the course  of cosmic empire  might have
been shaped and the fate of stars decided.

But now  there was no sign of life, just a  brooding silence that seemed to
whisper in a tongueless  language of days and faces and problems long since
wiped out by the march of years.

He looked about and shivered.

"I don't like this place," said Caroline.

A light  suddenly flared  and blazed as  a door opened  and thought-fingers
reached out to them, thoughts that were kindly and definitely human:

"Do you seek someone here?"

Chapter Twelve

STARTLED, they swung around. A stooped old man stood in a tiny doorway that
opened from the hall - an old man who, while he was human, seemed not quite
human. His head was large and his chest bulged out grotesquely. He stood on
trembly pipestem legs and his arms were alarmingly long and skinny.

A  long white  beard swept  over his  chest, but  his great domed  head was
innocent of even a  single hair. Across the space that separated them, Gary
felt the force of piercing eyes that stared out from under shaggy eyebrows.

"We're looking for someone," said Gary, "to give us information."

"Come in," shrieked the thought of the old man. "Come in. Do you want me to
catch my death of cold holding the door open for you?"

Gary grasped Caroline by the hand. "Come on," he said.

At a  trot, they crossed the room, ducked through  the door. They heard the
door slam behind them and turned to look at the old man.

He stared back at  them. "You are human beings," said his thoughts. "People
of my own race. But from long ago."

"That's right," said Gary. "From many millions of years ago."

They  sensed something that  almost approached  disbelief in the  old man's
thoughts.

"And you seek me?"

"We seek  someone," said Gary. "Someone who may  tell us something that may
save the universe."

"Then it must be me," said the old man, "because I'm the only one left."

"The only one left!" cried Gary. "The last man?"

"That's right,"  said the old man, and he  seemed almost cheerful about it.
"There were  others but they died. All men's  life spans must sometime come
to an end."

"But there  are others,"  persisted Gary. "You  can't be the  last man left
alive."

"There were  others," said the old one, "but they left.  They went to a far
star. To a place prepared for them."

A coldness gripped Gary's heart.

"You mean they died?"

The old man's thoughts were querulous and impatient.

"No, they  did not die.  They went to a  better place. To a  place that has
been  prepared for them  for many years.  A place  where they could  not go
until they were ready."

"But you?" asked Gary.

"I stayed because I wanted to," said the old man. "Myself and a few others.
We could not forsake Earth. We elected to stay. Of those who stayed all the
others have died and I am left alone."

Gary glanced around the room. It was tiny, but comfortable. A bed, a table,
a few chairs, other furniture he did not recognize.

"You like my place?" asked the old man.

"Very much," said Gary.

"Perhaps," said the old man, "you would like to take off your helmets. It's
warm in here and  I keep the atmosphere a little denser than it is outside.
Not  necessary that I  do so, of  course, but  it is more  comfortable. The
atmosphere is getting pretty thin and hard to breathe."

They unfastened  their helmets and lifted  them off. The air  was sharp and
tangy, the room was warm.

"That's better," said Caroline.

"Chairs?" asked the old man, pointing out a couple.

They sat and he lowered his old body into another.

"Well, well,"  he said,  and his thoughts  had a grandfatherly  touch about
them, "humans  of an  earlier age. Splendid  physical specimen, the  two of
you. And  fairly barbaric  still - but  the stuff is  in you.  You use your
mouths to talk with  and man hasn't talked with other than his thoughts for
thousands and  thousands of years. That in itself  would set you pretty far
back."

"Pretty far  is right," said Gary.  "We are the first  humans who ever left
the solar system."

"That is far," said the old man. "Far, far..."

His sharp eyes watched  them closely. "You must have an interesting story,"
be suggested.

"We have," said Caroline  and swiftly they told it to him, excitedly, first
one and  then the other talking,  adding in details, explaining situations,
laying before him the problems which they faced.

He listened intently, snapping  questions now and then, his bright old eyes
shining with  the love of adventure,  the wrinkles in his  face taking on a
kind benevolence  as if they might be children, home  from the first day of
school, telling of all the new wonders they had met.

"So you came to  me," he said. "You came trundling down a crazy timepath to
seek me out. So that I could tell you the things you need to know."

Caroline nodded. "You can tell us, can't you?" she asked. "It means so much
to us - so much to everyone."

"I wouldn't worry," said  the old man. "If the universe had come to an end,
I wouldn't be here. You couldn't have come to me."

"But maybe you aren't real," said Caroline. "Maybe you are just a shadow. A
probability..."

The oldster  nodded and combed  his beard with gnarled  fingers. The breath
wheezed in his mighty chest.

"You are right," he agreed. "I may be only a shadow. This world of mine may
be no more than  a shadow-world. I sometimes wonder if there is any reality
at all - if  there is anything but thought. Whether it may not be that some
gigantic intelligence  has dreamed all  these things we see  and believe in
and accept  as real...  if the giant  intelligence may not  have set mighty
dream stages  and peopled them with actors of  his imagination. I wonder at
times  if all  the  universes may  be nothing  more than  a shadow  show. A
company of shadowy actors moving on a shadow stage."

"But you can tell us," pleaded Caroline. "You will tell..."

His  old eyes  twinkled.  "I will  tell you,  yes,  and gladly.  Your fifth
dimension is eternity. It is everything and nothing... all rolled into one.
It is  a place where nothing  has ever happened and  yet, in a sense, where
everything has happened. It  is the beginning and the end of all things. In
it there is no  such thing as space or time or any other phenomena which we
attribute to the four-dimensional continuum."

"I can't understand," said Caroline, lines of puzzlement twisting her face.
"It  seems  so hopeless,  so  entirely  hopeless. Can  it  be explained  by
mathematics?"

"Yes,"  said the  old  man, "but  I'm afraid  you wouldn't  understand. The
mathematics  necessary  to explain  it  weren't  evolved until  just a  few
thousand years ago."

He stroked the beard down smoothly over his pouter-pigeon chest.

"I do not  wish to make you feel badly," he declared,  "but I can't see how
you would  have the intelligence to  grasp it. After all,  you are a people
from an earlier age, an almost barbaric age."

"Try her," growled Gary.

"All  right," said the  old man, but  there was  a patronizing tone  to his
thoughts.

Gary  gained  a confused  impression  of horrific  equations, of  bracketed
symbols that built themselves into a tangled and utterly confused structure
of meaning - a  meaning that seemed so vast and all-inclusive that his mind
instinctively shuddered away from it.

Then the  thoughts were gone and  Gary's mind was spinning  with them, with
the vital forcefulness that he had guessed and glimpsed behind the symbolic
structure that had been in the mathematics.

He looked at Caroline  and saw that she was puzzled. But suddenly a look of
awe spread over her face.

"Why," she  said, and hesitated slightly,  ".... why, the equations cancel,
represent  both  everything and  nothing,  both  zero and  the ultimate  in
everything imaginable."

Gary caught a sense of surprise and confusion that flashed through the mind
of their host.

"You  understand,"  said  the faltering  thought.  "You  grasp the  meaning
perfectly."

"Didn't I tell you," said Gary. "Of course, she understands." '

Caroline was talking, almost as if she were talking to herself, talking her
thoughts aloud. "That means  the energy would be timeless. It would have no
time factor, and since time is a factor in power, its power would be almost
infinite. There'd be no stopping it, once it started."

"You are right," said  the old man. "It would be raw, created energy from a
region  where  four-dimensional  laws  are no  longer  valid.  It would  be
timeless and formless."

"Formless," said Caroline. "Of course, it would be formless. It wouldn't be
light, or  heat, or matter, or motion, or any other  form of energy such as
we know. But it could be anything. It would be waiting to become something.
It could crystallize into anything."

"Good  Lord,"  said Gary,  "how  could  you handle  stuff  like that?  Your
hyperspheres  wouldn't handle  it.  It could  mold space  itself.  It could
annihilate time."

Caroline looked at him soberly.

"If I could create a fifth-dimensional trap," she said, "if I could trap it
in the framework of  the medium from which it came. Don't you see that such
a  framework would  attract  it, would  gather it  in and  hold it.  Like a
battery holds energy. Like water seeking its own level and coming to rest."

"Sure," agreed Gary, "if you could create a fifth-dimensional trap. But you
can't.  It's eternity.  The  dimension of  eternity. You  can't  go fooling
around with eternity."

"Yes, she can," said the old man.

The two of them stared at him, not believing.

"Listen  closely," said the  oldster. "By  rotating a circle  through three
dimensions you  create a sphere. Rotate  the sphere through four dimensions
and you  have a hypersphere. You  already have created this.  You have bent
time and space around a mass to create a hypersphere, a miniature universe.
Now all  you have to do is  rotate the hypersphere through five-dimensional
space."

"But you'd have to be in five-dimensional space to do that," objected Gary.

"No,  you   wouldn't,"  contended   the  old  man.   "Scattered  throughout
three-dimensional space are ether  eddies and time faults and space traps -
call  them anything  you  like. They  are  a common  phenomena and  they're
nothing  more,  when you  come  right down  to  it, than  isolated bits  of
four-dimensional  space scattered  around through  three-dimensional space.
The same thing would apply to a fifth dimension in the fourth dimension."

"But how,"  asked Caroline, "would one go about it?  How would one rotate a
hypersphere through the fifth dimension?"

Again Gary  had that sense of confusion as the  thoughts of the ancient one
swept  over  him,  thoughts that  translated  themselves  into symbols  and
equations  and brackets of  mathematics that  it seemed impossible  any man
could know.

"Gary," gasped Caroline, "have you a pencil and some paper?"

Gary fumbled in his  pocket and found an old envelope and a stub of pencil.
He handed them to her.

"Please repeat that very slowly," she said, smiling at the old man.

Gary watched  in amazement  as Caroline, slowly and  carefully, jotted down
the formulas, equations, symbols  - carefully checking and going over them,
checking and rechecking so there could be no mistake.

"It  will  take  power,"  she said.  "Tremendous  power.  I  wonder if  the
Engineers can supply it."

"They have  magnetic power," said Gary. "They ought to  be able to give you
all you need."

The old  man's eyes were  twinkling. "I am remembering  the Hellhounds," he
said. "The  ones who  would have the  universe destroyed. I  cannot seem to
like them. It seems to me that something should be done about them."

"But what?"  asked Gary. "They seem to be all-powerful.  By the time we get
back they may have battered the city into a mass of ruins."

The oldster nodded almost sleepily, but his eyes were glowing.

"We have  had ones like that  in our history," he  said. "Ones who overrode
the nations  and imposed their will,  standing in the way  of progress. But
always  someone found  something  that would  break them.  Someone  found a
greater weapon  or a greater strength and they  went their way. Their names
and works were dust  and they were forgotten and the civilization that they
sought  to mold  to their  own selfish ends  went on  as if they  had never
been."

"But I  don't see..." began Gary, and then suddenly he  did - as clearly as
light. He smote his knee and yelled his enthusiasm.

"Of course,"  he cried.  "We have a  weapon. A weapon that  could wipe them
out. The fifth-dimensional energy!"

"Certainly you have," said the old man.

"That would be barbarous," protested Caroline.

"Barbarous!" shouted Gary. "Isn't  it barbarous to want to see the universe
destroyed so the Hellhounds  can go back to the beginning and take it over,
control it, dominate it, take over galaxy after galaxy as a new universe is
born? Shape it to their needs and desires. Hold in thrall every bit of life
that develops on every cooling planet. Become the masters of the universe."

"We must hurry, then,"  said Caroline. "We must get back. Minutes count. We
still  may be able  to save the  Engineers and  the universe, wipe  out the
Hellhounds."

She rose impatiently to her feet.

The old  man protested.  "You would go  so soon?" he asked.  "You would not
stay and eat with  me? Or tell me more about this place  at the edge of the
universe? Or  let me tell you strange things that I  know you would be glad
to hear?"

Gary hesitated. "Maybe we could stay a while," he suggested.

"No," said Caroline. "We must go."

"Listen," said Gary to the old man, "why don't you come along with us? We'd
be glad to  have you. We could use you in the  fight. There are things that
you could tell us that would help."

The old man shook  his bead. "I cannot go," he said. "For, you see, you are
right.  I may  be only a  shadow. A  very substantial shadow,  perhaps, but
still just a shadow of probability. You can come to me, but I can't go back
with you.  If I left this  planet I might puff  into nothingness, revert to
the non-existence of the thing that never was."

He hesitated. "But there's something," he said, "that makes me suspect I am
not  a shadow...  that this is  actuality, that  the Earth will  follow the
course history tells me it has followed."

"What is that?" asked Gary.

"It is a thing," the old man said, "that I cannot tell you."

"Perhaps we  can come  back and see  you again," said  Caroline. "After all
this trouble is over."

"No,  my child," he  said. "You will  never come,  for ours are  lives that
never should have met. You represent the beginning and I represent the end.
And I am proud  that the Earth's last man could have been of service to one
of the beginners."

They fastened down their helmets and walked toward the door.

"I will  walk with you to  your ship," said the  old man. "I do  not walk a
great deal now, for  the cold and the thin air bother me. I must be getting
old."

Their feet whispered through the sand and the wind keened above the desert,
a  shrill-voiced wind  that  played an  eternal overture  for the  stage of
desolation old Earth had become.

"I  live with ghosts,"  said the old  man as  they walked toward  the ship.
"Ghosts of men and events and great ideals that built a mighty race.

"Probably you  wonder that  I resemble a  man so much.  Perhaps you thought
that men,  in time to  come, would evolve into  specialized monstrosities -
great, massive brains that  had lost the power of locomotion, or bundles of
emotional reactions,  unstable as  the very wind,  or foolish philosophers,
or, worse  yet, drab realists. But we became none  of these things. We kept
our balance. We kept our feet on the ground when dreams filled our heads."

They reached the ship and stood before the opened outer valve.

The old man waved a hand toward the mighty metal building.

"The proudest  city Man ever built," he said. "A  city whose fame spread to
the far  stars, to  distant galaxies. A  city that travelers  told about in
bated whispers.  A place to which came the  commerce of many solar systems,
ships from  across far inter-galactic  space. But now it  is crumbling into
dust and ruin. Soon the desert will claim it and the wind will sing a death
dirge for it and little, furry animals will burrow in its bones."

He turned to them and Gary saw a half-mystic light shining in his eyes.

"Thus it  is with cities," he  said, "but Man is  different. Man marches on
and on.  He outgrows cities and  builds others. He outgrows  planets. He is
creating  a heritage,  a mighty  heritage that  in time  will make  him the
master of the universe.

"But there  will be interludes of  defeat. Times when it  seems that all is
lost - that Man will slip again to the primal savagery and ignorance. Times
when the  way seems  too hard and  the price too  great to  pay. But always
there will  be bugles  in the sky  and a challenge  on the  horizon and the
bright  beckoning of  ideals far away.  And Man  will go ahead,  to greater
triumphs, always pushing back the frontiers, always moving up and outward."

The  old  man turned  around  and headed  back  toward the  doorway in  the
building. He  went without a word of farewell and  his sandaled feet left a
tiny, ragged trail across the shifting sand.

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,
be 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. Some thing.

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?

Chapter Fourteen

The next  morning the Hellhounds came, a small  ship quartering down out of
the dawn  light of the great  red sun. It came down  on a long smooth slant
and  landed not more  than half a  mile away,  plowing a swath  through the
mushroom forest  as it grounded.  There was no mistaking  its identity, for
its lines  were distinctive and the insignia upon  its bow was the insignia
that both Caroline and  Gary had seen many times on the ships that screamed
down to lay bombs upon the mighty city of the Engineers.

"And us,"  said Gary, "with nothing but hand guns in  the locker and a ship
that we can't lift."

He  saw the  stricken look  on Caroline's  face and  tried to  make amends.
"Maybe they won't know who we are," he said. "Maybe they..."

"Don't let's fool ourselves," Caroline told him. "They know who we are, all
right. More than likely we're the reason that they're here. Maybe they..."

She hesitated and Gary asked, "Maybe they what?"

"I was  thinking," she said, "that they might  have twisted the tunnel. The
mathematics might have been all right. Somebody might have brought us here.
It might have been the Hellhounds who trapped us here, knowing what we had,
knowing the knowledge that  we carried. They might have brought us here and
now they've come to finish up the job."

"They were not the ones who brought you here," said a voice out of nowhere.
"You were  brought here  but they were  not the ones who  brought you. They
were brought themselves."

Gary whirled around. "Who said that?" he shouted.

"You cannot find me,"  said the voice, still talking out of nowhere. "Don't
waste your time in  trying to find me. I brought you here and I brought the
others  here  and only  the  one  of you  may  leave... the  humans or  the
Hellhounds."

"I don't understand," said Gary. "You are mad..."

"You are  enemies, you and the Hellhounds," said  the voice. "You are equal
in number and  in strength of arms. There are two of  you and there are two
of them.  You have small weapons  only and so have they.  It will be a fair
encounter."

Fantastic, thought Gary. A  situation jerked raw from a latter-day Alice in
Wonderland. A nightmare twisted  out of the strange and grotesque alienness
of this splotched planet. A planet filed with goblins and with nightmares -
a fairyland turned sour.

"You want us to  fight?" he asked. "Fight the Hellhounds? A sort of - well,
you might call it a duel?"

"That is exactly it," the voice told him.

"But what good will it do?"

"You are enemies, aren't you, human?"

"Why, yes,  we are," said Gary, "but anything that  we do here won't affect
the war one way or the other."

"You will fight," said the voice. "You are two and they are two and..."

"But one of us is a woman," protested Gary. "Female humans do not engage in
duels."

The voice did not answer, but Gary sensed frustration in a mind - perhaps a
presence rather than a mind - that was near to them.

He pressed his advantage.  "You say that our arms are equal, that they have
small arms  only and so  have we. But you  can't be sure that  the arms are
equal.  Their arms,  even  if they  are no  bigger than  ours, may  be more
powerful. Size is not  a measure for power. Or their arms may be equal, but
the Hellhounds may be better versed in their use."

"They are small weapons," said the voice. "They are..."

"You want this to be a fair fight, don't you?"

"Why, yes,"  said the voice. "Yes, of course, I do.  That is the purpose of
it, that  everything be even, so  that in all fairness  the two species may
test their true and proper fitness for survival."

"But, you  see," said Gary, "you can't be sure it's  even. You never can be
sure."

"Yes, I can," the voice told him and there was an insane ring of triumph in
it. "I can make  sure that it will be even. You will fight without weapons.
None of  you will have weapons. Just bare hands  and teeth or whatever else
you may have."

"Without..."

"That's it. Neither of you will have weapons."

"But they have guns," said Gary.

"Their guns won't work," the voice said. "And yours won't either. Your ship
won't work and your guns won't work and you will have to fight."

Terrible laughter  came from the  voice, a gleeful laughter  that verged on
hysteria. Then the laughter ceased and they knew that they were alone, that
the mind  - or the presence - with the voice  had withdrawn from them, that
it had gone elsewhere. But that it still was watching.

"Gary," Caroline said softly.

"Yes," said Gary.

"That  voice  was  insane,"  she said.  "You  caught  it,  didn't you.  The
overtones in it."

He nodded.  "Delusion of grandeur. Playing at God. And  the worst of it is,
he can make it  stick. We've stumbled into his yard. There isn't a thing we
can do about it."

Across the  mushroom forest,  the entrance port  of the Hellhound  ship was
swinging  open. From  it  came two  beings, tall  and waddling  things that
glimmered in the feeble light of the great red sun.

"Reptilian," said  Caroline and there  was more disgust than  horror in her
voice.

The  Hellhounds stepped  down from  the ship  and stood  uncertainly, their
snouted faces  turning toward  the Earth ship,  then swinging from  side to
side to take in the country.

"Caroline," said  Gary, "I'll  stay here and  watch. You go in  and get the
guns. They are in the locker."

"They won't work," said Caroline.

"I want to be sure," Gary told her.

He heard  her turn  from his side and  go, climbing up the  ladder into the
entrance lock.

The Hellhounds  still stayed  near their ship. They're  confused, too, Gary
told  himself.  They don't  understand  it  any more  than  we do.  They're
nervous, trying to figure out just what to do.

But they wouldn't stay that way long, he knew.

Shadows  flitted in  the  mushroom forest.  Some of  the  natives, perhaps,
sneaking around, keeping under cover, waiting to see what happened.

Caroline spoke  from the lock. "The guns aren't  any good. They won't work.
Just like the voice said."

He nodded, still watching the Hellhounds. She came down the steps and stood
beside him.

"We haven't got a chance against them," she said. "They are brutes, strong.
They are trained for war. Killing is their business."

The  Hellhounds were walking  out from  their ship, heading  cautiously and
slowly toward the Earth ship.

"Not too  sure of themselves yet,"  said Gary. "Probably we  don't look too
formidable to  them, but  they aren't taking  any chances... not  yet. In a
little while  they'll figure that we're  comparatively harmless and they'll
make their play."

The Hellhounds  were dog-trotting now, their  scaly bodies glistening redly
in  the sun,  their blunt  feet lifting  little puffs  of dust as  they ran
along.

"What are we going to do, Gary?" Caroline asked.

"Fort up,"  said Gary. "Fort up  and do some thinking.  We can't lick these
things,  hand to  hand and  rough and  tumble. It  would be like  trying to
wrestle a combined alligator and grizzly bear."

"Fort up? You mean the ship."

Gary nodded.  "We got to buy  us some time. We  have to get a  thing or two
figured out. As it is, we're caught flatfooted."

"What if they find a way of getting at us, even in the ship."

Gary shrugged. "That's a chance we take."

The Hellhounds  separated, spreading out to left  and right, angling out to
come at the ship from two directions.

"You better get into  the lock," said Gary. "Grab hold of the closing lever
and be ready. When I come, I may have to move fast. There's no telling what
these gents are fixing to uncork."

But even  as he spoke, the  two reptiles charged, angling  in at a burst of
speed that  almost made them blur, a whirlwind  of dust spiraling up behind
them.

"In we go!" yelled Gary.

He heard Caroline's feet beating a tattoo on the steps.

For a  split second he  stood there, still facing  the charging Hellhounds,
then whirled and leaped up the steps, catapulting himself into the lock. He
saw Caroline  swinging the lever down. The ladder ran  up into its seat and
the  lock slammed  home. Through its  closing edge  he caught sight  of the
beasts as they swung about in a skidding turn, cheated of their kill.

Gary  wiped his  forehead. "Close  thing," he  said. "We almost  waited too
long. I had no idea they could move that fast."

Caroline nodded. "They figured that we wouldn't. They saw a chance to catch
us at the very  start. Remember how they waddled. That was to make us think
that they couldn't move too fast."

The voice said to them: "This is no way to fight."

"It's common sense," said Gary. "Common sense and good strategy."

"What is strategy?"

"Fooling  the  enemy,"  said  Gary. "Working  things  so  that  you get  an
advantage over him."

"He'll be  waiting for you when  you come out. And  you'll have to come out
after a while."

"We  rest and  take  it easy,"  said Gary,  "while he  tears up  the ground
outside and wears himself to a frazzle. And we do some thinking."

"It's a lousy way to fight," the voice insisted.

"Look," said Gary. "Who's doing the fighting here?

You or us."

"You, of course," the voice agreed, "but it's still no way to fight."

They sensed the mind withdraw, grumbling to itself.

Gary grinned at Caroline. "Not gory enough to suit him," he said.

Caroline had sat down in a chair and was staring at him, elbow on her knee,
chin cupped in her hands.

"We haven't much to work with," she declared. "No electricity. No power. No
nothing. This  ship is deader than  a doornail. It's lucky  the lock worked
manually or we'd been goners before we even started."

Gary nodded  in agreement. "That voice  bothers me the most,"  he said. "It
has power,  a strange  sort of power. It  can stop a spaceship  dead in its
tracks.  It can  fix  guns so  that they  won't  work. It  can  blanket out
electricity; Lord knows what else it can do."

"It can  reach into the unknown of space and  time," said Caroline. "Into a
place no one else could even find and it did that to bring us here."

"It's irresponsible,"  said Gary. "Back on Earth  we'd call it insanity but
what you and I would term insanity may be normal here."

"There's no yardstick," said  Caroline. "No yardstick to measure sanity. No
way in  which one  can establish a  norm for correct behavior  or a correct
mentality. Maybe the voice  is sane. Maybe he has a purpose and a method of
arriving  at that purpose  we do not  understand and  for that we  call him
crazy. Every  race must  be different, must think  differently... arrive at
the  same conclusion  and  the same  result,  perhaps, but  arrive at  them
differently. You  remember all  those beings that  came to confer  with the
Engineers.  All  of  them  were  capable,  perhaps more  capable  than  we.
Independently they  might have been able to arrive  at the same solution as
we  and  perhaps much  more  easily  and more  effectively...  and yet  the
Engineers sent  them home again, because the  Engineers could not work with
them.  Not because  they  were not  capable,  but because  they thought  so
differently, because their mental  processes ran at such divergent tangents
that there was no basis for co-operation."

"And yet we thought like the Engineers," said Gary.

"Enough like  them, at any rate, that we could  work together. I wonder why
that is."

Caroline wrinkled her forehead.  "Gary, you are certain these goblin things
out there are the same race that came to the city of the Engineers?"

"I would swear it,"  Gary told her. "I got a good look  at the one that was
there. It  sort of...  well, burned itself  into my mind.  I'll never quite
forget it."

"And the  voice," said Caroline. "I wonder if the  voice has anything to do
with the goblins."

"The goblins,"  said the  voice, "are my  pets. Like the dogs  and cats you
keep. A living thing to keep me from loneliness."

It did not surprise them to hear the voice again and each of them knew then
that they had been waiting for it to speak up again.

"But,"  protested Caroline,  "one of the  goblins came  to the city  of the
Engineers."

The  voice chuckled  at them.  "Of course,  human thing,  of course.  As my
representative, of course. For  I must have representatives, don't you see.
In a  material world, I must be fronted for by  something that can be seen,
that can be perceived.  I could not very well go to a meeting of that great
importance as  a disembodied voice, as a  thought stalking the corridors of
that empty city. So I sent a goblin and I went along with him."

"What are you, voice?" Caroline asked. "Tell us what you are."

"I still  don't think," said the voice, "that what you  are doing is a good
way to fight a duel. I think you're making a great mistake."

"What makes you think so, Butch?" asked Gary.

"Because," the  voice said, "the Hellhounds are  building a fire under your
ship. It will be just a matter of time until they smoke you out."

Gary and Caroline glanced swiftly at one another, the same thought in their
mind.

"No power," said Caroline, weakly.

"The heat absorption units," Gary cried.

"No power," said Caroline. "The absorption cells won't work."

Gary glanced toward the  forward vision ports. Thin streamers of smoke were
curling up outside the glass.

"The mushrooms burn well," the voice told them, "when they get old and dry.
There are lots of  old and dry mushrooms around. They'll have no trouble in
keeping up the fire."

"Like smoking out a rabbit," said Gary, bitterly.

"You asked for it," the voice declared.

"Get out of here!"  yelled Gary. "Get out of here and leave us alone, can't
you."

They sensed it leave, mumbling to itself.

Like a  bad dream, Gary thought.  Like a Wonderland adventure,  with he and
Caroline  the  poor bewildered  Alice  stumbling  through a  world of  vast
incredibility.

Listening, they  could hear the crackling of the fire.  Now the smoke was a
dense cloud through the forward ports.

How  do  you fight  when  you have  no  weapon? How  do  you get  out of  a
spaceship-turned-into-an-oven? How do you  think up a smart dodge when your
time is numbered in hours, if not, indeed, in minutes?

What are weapons?

How did they start?

What is the basic of a weapon?

"Caroline," Gary asked, "what would you say a weapon was?"

"Why," she  told him, "that seems simple to me.  An extension of your fist.
An extension  of your  power to hurt,  of your ability to  kill. Men fought
first  with tooth and  nail and fist  and then  with stones and  clubs. The
stones and clubs were extensions of man's fist, an extension of his muscles
and his hate or need."

Stones and clubs, he thought. And then a spear. And, after that, a bow,

A bow!

He swung  on his heel, walked rapidly back along  the ship, jerked open the
door to  the supply  cabinet. Rummaging inside  it, he found  the things he
wanted.

He brought  them out, a fistful of wooden  flagpoles, each with small flags
fastened to  one end, the other  end steel-tipped for easy  sticking in the
ground.

"Explorer flags," he explained  to Caroline. "You go out on an alien planet
and you  want to be sure  that you can find your way  back to the ship. You
plant  these things  at intervals and  then follow  them back to  the ship,
picking them up as you go along. No chance of getting lost."

"But..." said Caroline.

"Evans figured  he was going to  use this ship to  go to Alpha Centauri, He
took some of these things along, just in case."

He placed  the steel-shod tip of  one of the poles  on the floor, threw his
weight against the top end. It flexed. Gary grunted in satisfaction.

"A bow?" asked Caroline.

He nodded.  "Not too  good a one.  Not too accurate. Maybe  not too strong.
When  I was  a kid  I used  to go  out into  the woods  and whack me  off a
sapling. No  curve, no  nothing. Bigger at  one end than the  other. But it
worked as  a bow, after a fashion. Used reeds for  arrows. Killed one of my
mother's chickens with one once. She whaled me good and proper."

"It's getting warm in here," Caroline told him. "We can't waste any time."

He grinned at her, exuberant now that there was something to do.

"Hunt up  some cord,"  he told her. "Any  kind of cord. If  it's not strong
enough, we'll twist several strands together."

Whistling under his breath, he got to work, tearing the flag off the end of
one of the more supple poles, notching either end to hold the cord.

From  another stick  he  split long  wands off  the  straight-grained wood,
fashioning them into arrows.  There'd be no time for feathering... in fact,
there were  no feathers in the  ship, but that was  a refinement that would
not be needed. He would be using the bow at close range.

But he  did have arrowheads. With  snippers, he clipped off  the sharp tips
with which the poles had been shod, drove them into the head of each arrow.
Testing them with a  finger, he was satisfied. They were sharp enough... if
he could get some power behind them.

"Gary," said Caroline, and her voice was almost a whimper.

He swung around.

"There's no cord, Gary. I've looked everywhere."

No cord!

"Everywhere?" he asked.

She nodded. "There isn't any. I looked everywhere."

Clothing,  he thought,  desperately. Strips  torn from their  clothing. But
that would be worse  than useless. It would unravel, come apart between his
fingers when he needed it the most. Leather? Leather was too stiff to start
with, and it would stretch. Wire? Too stiff and no zip to it.

He let the bow-stick fall from his hands, reached up to wipe his face.

"It's getting hot in here," he said.

He twisted  around and stared at the forward visors.  The smoke was a cloud
and there  was a  ruddy reflection in  it, the reflection of  the fire that
blazed around the ship.

How much  longer, he wondered. How  much longer before they'd  have to open
the port  and make a dash  for it, knowing even  as they did that  it was a
hopeless thing to do,  for the Hellhounds would be waiting just outside the
port.

The shell of the spaceship crawled with a dull, dead heat, the kind of heat
that comes up off a dusty road on a still, hot day in August.

And soon, he knew, it would be a live heat, not a dead heat any longer, but
a  blasting furnace  heat that  would pour  from every  angle of  the steel
around them,  that would shrivel the leather of  their shoes and scorch the
clothing  that  they wore.  But  long  before the  leather  of their  shoes
shriveled and curled, they  would have to make their break, a hopeless dash
for freedom that could  end in nothing but death at the hands of the things
that waited by the port.

Like an oven, like two rabbits roasting in an oven.

We  must turn, thought  Gary. We must  keep turning  about so that  we will
roast evenly on all sides.

"Gary!" cried Caroline.

He swung around.

"Hair?" she asked. "I just thought of it. Would hair make you a bowstring?"

He  gasped  at  the  thought. "Hair,"  he  shouted.  "Human  hair! Why,  of
course... it's the best material there is."

Caroline's hands  were busy with her braids. "It's  long," she said. "I was
proud of it and I let it grow."

"It'll have to be braided," said Gary. "Twisted into a cord."

"Your knife," she said, and he handed it over.

The knife flashed close  to her head and one of the braided strands dangled
in her hand.

"We'll have to work fast," said Gary. "We haven't got much time."

The air was dry and hard to breath. It burned one's lungs and dried out the
tissues of the mouth. When he bent over and placed a hand against the steel
plates  of the  ship's deck,  the steel  was warm,  like the pavement  on a
summer's day.

"You'll have  to help," said Gary.  "We have to be  fast and sure. We can't
afford to bungle. We won't have a second chance."

"Tell me what to do," she said.

Fifteen minutes later, he nodded at her.

"Open the  port," he  said, "and when  you do stand back  against the wall.
I'll need all the arm room I can get."

He waited, bow in hand, arrow nocked against the cord.

Not much  of a  bow, he thought.  Nothing you would  want to  try against a
willow  at three  hundred  paces. But  these things  outside  aren't willow
wands. It will last for a shot or two... I hope it lasts for a shot or two.

The port clanged open  as Caroline shoved the lever over. Smoke billowed in
the opening and in the smoke he saw the bulk of the ones who waited.

He brought the  bow up and the wood bent with the  sudden surge of hate and
triumph that coursed in his being... the hate and fear of fire, the hate of
things that  wait to do  a man to death,  the fury of a  human being backed
into a corner by a thing that is not human.

The  arrow made  a whispering sound  and was  a silver streak  that spurted
through the  smoke. The bow bent  again and there was  another whisper, the
whisper of cord and wood and the creak of human muscles.

On the ground outside, two dark shapes were threshing in the smoke.

It was just like shooting rabbits.

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."

Chapter Sixteen

THE city of the Engineers lay in ruins, but above it, fighting desperately,
battling valiantly  to hold off the hordes  of Hellhounds, the tiny remnant
of  the  Engineer  battle   fleet  still  stood  between  it  and  complete
destruction.

The proud  towers were  blasted into dust  and the roadways  and parks were
sifted with  the white  cloud of destruction, the  powdered masonry smashed
and  pulverized to  drifting fragments  by the  disintegrator rays  and the
atomic  bombs. Twisted  bits  of wreckage  littered the  chaotic  wastes of
shattered stone - wreckage  of Engineer and Hellhound ships that had met in
the shock of battle and plunged in flaming ruin.

Gary glanced  skyward anxiously. "I hope they can  hold them off," he said,
"long enough for the energy to build up."

Caroline straightened  from the  bank of instruments mounted  upon the roof
outside the laboratory.

"It's building up fast,"  she said. "I'm almost afraid. It might get out of
control, you know. But  we have to have enough energy to start with. If the
first stroke doesn't utterly destroy the Hellhounds, we won't have a second
chance."

Gary's  mind ran  over the hectic  days of  work, the mad  scramble against
time. He  remembered once again how Kingsley and Tommy  had gone out to the
edge of the universe to create a huge bubble of space-time, warping the rim
of space  into a hump, curving the  time-space continuum into a hypersphere
that finally closed and  divorced itself from the parent body, pinching off
like a yeast bud to become an independent universe in the inter-space.

It had taken power  to do that, a surging channel of energy that poured out
of the magnetic power  transmitter, crossing space in a tight beam to be at
hand for the making  of a new universe. But it had taken even more power to
"skin"  a hypersphere,  to turn  it through  a theoretical  fifth dimension
until it was of  the stuff that the inter-space was made of - a place where
time did not exist, a place whose laws were not the laws of the universe, a
mystery region  that was astonishingly easy  to maneuver through space once
it was  created. It  wasn't a sphere  or a hypersphere  - it  was a strange
dimension  that  apparently  did  not lend  itself  to  measurement, or  to
definition, or to identification by any of the normal senses of perception.

But whatever  it was, it hung  there above the city,  although there was no
clue to its existence.  It couldn't be seen or sensed - just something that
had been  created from  equations supplied by  the last man  living out his
final days on a  dying planet, equations that Caroline had scribbled on the
back of a crumpled envelope. An envelope, Gary remembered, that had carried
an irate letter from  a creditor back on Earth who felt that be should have
long  since  been paid.  "Too  long  overdue," the  letter  had said.  Gary
grinned,  Back on  Earth  the creditor  undoubtedly still  was  sending him
letters pointing out that  the account was becoming longer overdue with the
passing of each month.

Outside  the universe  that  tiny, created  hypersphere was  bumping along,
creating frictional  stress, creating  a condition for the  creation of the
mysterious energy  of eternity - an  energy that even now  was pouring into
the universe and being  absorbed by the fifth-dimensional frame that poised
above the city.

A new,  raw energy from  a region that had  no time, an energy  that was at
once  timeless  and formless,  but  an  energy that  was  capable of  being
crystallized into any form.

Kingsley was standing beside Gary, his great head bent, staring upward. "An
energy field,"  he said, "and what energy! Like  a battery, storing up that
energy from interspace. I hope it does what Caroline thinks it will."

"Don't worry," said Gary. "You saw the mathematics that she brought back."

"Sure, I  saw the  mathematics," Kingsley said, "but  I couldn't understand
them."

He shook his head inside the helmet.

"What's the universe coming to?" he asked.

Caroline spoke quietly to the Engineer.

"There's plenty of energy now," she said. "You may call them down."

The  Engineer, headphones  clamped  upon his  skull, apparently  was giving
orders  to  the  Engineer  fleet, but  the  Earthlings  couldn't catch  his
thoughts.

"Watch now," chirped Herb. "This is going to be a sight worth seeing."

High  above the  city  a ship  dropped,  flashing downward,  like a  silver
bullet. Another dropped and still another, until the entire Engineer fleet,
blackened  and ripped  and decimated,  was in  full retreat,  flashing back
toward the ruined city. And in their wake came the triumphant Hellhounds, a
victorious pack  in full  cry, determined to  wipe out the last  trace of a
hated civilization.

The  Engineer had  snatched the headphones  off, was  racing to the  set of
controls. Gary, glancing from the battle scene above, saw his metal fingers
reach  out  and  manipulate  controls, saw  Caroline  pick  up an  ordinary
flashlight.

He knew  that the Engineer  was shifting the fifth-dimensional  mass into a
position between them and the screaming fleet of death above them, shifting
that field of terrible energy into the Hellhounds' path.

The last  of the  Engineer fleet had  reached the city,  was shrieking down
between the shattered towers, as if fleeing for its very life.

And only a few  miles above them, in what amounted to a mass formation, the
Hellhound  fleet was  plunging  down, guns  silent now,  protective screens
still up, grim and ghastly ships running their quarry to the ground.

Gary's body  tensed as he saw  Caroline's arm swing up,  clutching the tiny
flashlight, pointing it at the on-driving fleet.

He saw  the flash  of light burn upward,  pale in the light  of the sinking
suns -  a tiny, feeble, ineffective beam of  light stabbing at the oncoming
ships. Like taking a swipe at a grizzly bear with a pancake turner.

And  then  the  heavens  seemed to  blaze  with  light  and  a streamer  of
blue-white  intensity  whipped out  toward  the  ships. Protective  screens
flared briefly  and then exploded  into a million flashing  sparks. For the
space of  one split second, before  he could get his  hand up to shield his
eyes against the inferno  in the sky, Gary saw the gaunt black skeletons of
the  Hellhound ships,  writhing and  disappearing in  the surging  blast of
energy that  tore at them and twisted them and  finally, in the snapping of
one's finger, utterly destroyed them.

The sky  was empty, as empty  as if there had  never been a Hellhound ship.
There was  no sign of the fifth-dimensional mass, no hint  of ship or gun -
just the blue of  the sky, ashing into violet as the three suns swung below
the far-off horizon.

"Well," said  Herb, and Gary could hear  his voice sobbing with excitement,
"that's the end of the Hellhounds."

Yes, that was the end of the Hellhounds, thought Gary. There was nothing in
the  universe that  could stand  before such  a blast  of energy.  When the
light, the  tiny, feeble beam  from the ridiculous little  flash had struck
the energy  field, the energy, that  timeless, formless stuff, had suddenly
crystallized, had taken on  the form of the energy that it had encountered.
And  in a  burst  of light  it had  struck at  the Hellhounds,  struck with
terrible effectiveness  - with entire lack of mercy,  had wiped them out in
the winking of one's eye.

He tried  to imagine that blast  of light moving out  into the universe. It
would travel for years, would flash its merciless way for many thousands of
light-years. In  time its energy would  wane, would slowly dissipate, would
lose  some of  its power  in the  vast spaces  of intergalactic  space. And
perhaps the day would come when all its energy would be gone. But meanwhile
nothing could  stand in its way, nothing could resist  it. In years to come
great suns might explode  into invisible gas as the frightful beam of power
reached them and annihilated  them and then passed on. And some astronomer,
catching  the phenomena  in his  lens, would  speculate upon just  what had
happened.

He turned  slowly around and faced Caroline. "How  does it feel," he asked,
"to win a war?"

The face  she turned to him was strained and worn.  "Don't say that to me,"
she said. "I had to do it. They were a terrible race, but they were alive -
and there is so little life in this universe."

"You need some sleep," he said.

He saw the tragic lines of her mouth.

"There is  no sleep," she said.  "No rest at all.  We have just started. We
have  to  save  the universe.  We  have  to create  more  and  more of  the
fifth-dimensional frameworks, many of them and larger. To absorb the energy
when the universes meet."

Gary started.  He had  forgotten the approaching universe.  So absorbed had
they become  in ending the Hellhound  attack that the edge  of the real and
greater danger had been dulled.

But now, brought back to it, he realized the job they faced.

He spun on the Engineer. "How much longer?" he asked. "How much longer have
we?"

"Very little time," said the Engineer. "Very little. I fear that energy may
flood in upon us at any time."

"That energy," said Kingsley, a fanatical flame in his eyes. "Think of what
could   be  done   with  it.  We   could  set   up  a  huge   framework  of
fifth-dimensional space,  use it as  an absorber, a battery.  We could send
energy almost  anywhere throughout the universe.  A central universal power
plant."

"First," declared Tommy, "you'd have to control it, be able to direct it in
a tight beam."

"First,"  insisted Caroline,  "we  have to  do something  about  this other
universe."

"Wait  a second,"  said Gary.  "We've forgotten  something. We  asked those
people in  the other universe to  come over and help  us, but we don't need
them now."

He looked at the Engineer. "Have you heard from them?" he asked.

"Yes,"  said the  Engineer. "I  have heard  from them.  They still  want to
come."

"They still  want to come?" Astonishment rang  in Gary's voice. "Why should
they want to come?"

"They want  to emigrate  to our universe,"  said the Engineer.  "And I have
agreed to allow them to do so."

"You have agreed?" rumbled Kingsley. "And since when has this universe been
in the  market for immigrants? We don't know what  kind of people they are.
They might  be dangerous. They may want to  destroy the present life within
the universe."

"There is plenty of room for them," said the Engineer, and if possible, his
voice seemed colder and more impersonal than ever. "There is room to spare.
We have over fifty  billion galaxies - and more than fifty billion stars in
each galaxy.  Only one out of  every ten thousand of  the stars has a solar
system, that is true,  of course... but only one out of every hundred solar
systems  has life.  And if we  need more  solar systems we  can manufacture
them. With  the power of the  dimension of eternity at  our command, we can
move  stars, we  can hurl them  together to  make solar systems.  With this
power we can reshape the universe, mold it to our needs."

The idea  impacted with stunning force on  Gary's brain. They could reshape
the  universe! Working  with  the raw  materials at  hand, with  the almost
infinite  power at  their command,  they could  alter the course  of stars,
could  realign  the galaxies,  could  manufacture  planets, set  up a  well
coordinated plan to offset  entropy, the tendency to run down, the tendency
to go  amuck. His mind groped  futilely at the ideas,  pawing them over and
over, but  back of it all was a curtain of  wonderment and awe. And through
his  brain  sang  a  subtle warning...  a  persistent  little warning  that
hammered  at his  thoughts.  Mankind itself  wasn't ready  for  such power,
couldn't use it intelligently,  perhaps would destroy the universe with it.
Was there any other entity in the universe qualified to use it? Would it be
wise to place such power in the hands of any entity?

"But why," Caroline was asking, "do they want to come?"

"Because," said  the Engineer, "we  are going to destroy  their universe to
save ours."

It was as if a bombshell had been dropped among them. Silence clapped down.
Gary felt Caroline's hand creep into his. He held it tight.

"But why destroy their universe?" shouted Tommy. "We have the means at hand
to  save   them  both.  All  we  have  to  do   is  create  more  of  those
five-dimensional screens to absorb the energy."

"No," said the Engineer,  "we cannot do it. Given time, we could. But there
is so little time, not nearly enough. The energy would overwhelm us once it
came. It would take so many screens and we have so little time."

His thoughts cut off and Gary heard the shuffle of Kingsley's feet.

"These other  beings," the Engineer went on,  "know that their universe has
very little longer to  exist in any event. It has almost reached the end of
its time. It soon will die the heat death. Throughout its space, matter and
energy are being swiftly distributed. Soon the day will arrive when it will
be equally distributed, when  the heat, the energy, the mass throughout the
universe will be spread so thin that it scarcely exists."

Gary sucked in his breath. "Like a watch running down," he said.

"You're right,"  said Kingsley.  "Like a watch  that has run  down. That is
what will happen to our universe in time."

"Not," said Gary, "if we have the energy from interspace at our command."

"Already," said  the Engineer, "only  one corner of this  other universe is
still suitable for life... the area that is facing us. Into that corner all
life  has been  driven  and now  it has  been,  or is  being,  assembled to
transfer itself to our universe."

"But," asked Herb, "just how are they going to get here?"

"They will  use a  time warp," said  the Engineer. "They will  bud out from
their universe,  but in doing so  they will distort the  time factor in the
walls  of their  hypersphere - a  distortion that  will send them  ahead in
time, will push their  little universe closer to us than to their universe.
Our gravity will grasp their hypersphere and draw it in."

"But  that,"  protested  Gary,  "will  produce more  energy.  Their  little
universe will be destroyed."

"No,"  declared the  Engineer,  "because they  will merge  their space-time
continuum  with the  continuum  of our  universe as  soon  as the  two come
together. They will immediately become a part of our universe."

"You told them how to create a hypersphere?" asked Herb.

"I  did," said the  Engineer. "And it  will save  the people of  that other
universe.  They had  tried  many things,  had worked  out theories  and new
branches of  mathematics in  their efforts to escape.  They discovered many
things  that we do  not know, but  they never  thought of budding  out from
their  universe. They apparently  are a  mechanistic people, a  people very
much  like  we Engineers.  They  seem  to have  lost  that  vital spark  of
imagination with which your people are so well supplied."

"My  Lord," said  Gary,  "think of  it!  Imagination saving  the people  of
another universe.  The imagination of a  little third-rate race that hasn't
even started really using its imagination yet."

"You  are right,"  declared the Engineer,  "and in  the aeons to  come that
imagination will make your race the masters of the entire universe."

"Prophesy," said Gary.

"I know," said the Engineer.

"There's just  one thing," said Herb. "How is  that other universe going to
be destroyed?"

"We are  going to destroy it," said the Engineer,  "in exactly the same way
we destroyed the Hellhounds."

Chapter Seventeen

Tommy  sat in  the pilot's seat  and urged  the ship slowly  forward, using
rocket blast after rocket blast to keep it on its course.

"You have  to fight to stand still here," he  gritted between his teeth. "A
man can't  tell just where he  is. There doesn't seem  to be any direction,
nothing to orient oneself."

"Of course  not," rumbled Kingsley. "We're in a sort  of place no other man
has  ever been.  We're  right out  in the  area  where space  and  time are
breaking down, where lines  of force are all distorted, where everything is
jumbled and broken up."

"The edge of the universe," said Caroline.

Gary stared out through the vision plate. There was nothing to see, nothing
but a  deep blue  void that queerly  seemed alive with a  deep intensity of
life.

He turned from the panel and asked the Engineer:

"Any signs of energy yet?"

"Faint signs," said the  Engineer, bending lower to peer at the dial set in
a detector instrument. "Very faint signs. The other universe is almost upon
us now and the lines of force are just beginning to make themselves felt."

"How much longer will it take?" asked Kingsley.

"I cannot tell," said the Engineer. "We know very little about the laws out
here. It may be a very short while or it may be some time as yet."

"Well," said  Herb, "the fireworks can  start any time now.  The folks from
the other universe have  crossed safely and there's no reason for the other
universe to exist. We can blast it any time we want to."

"Gary," said Kingsley, "you  and Herb better get over to those guns. We may
want action fast."

Gary nodded and walked to the controls of a disintegrator gun. He slid into
the seat  back of the controls  and reached out a  hand to grasp the swivel
butt.  He swung  it back  and forth,  knew that  outside the ship  the grim
muzzle of the weapon was swinging in a wide arc.

Through the  tiny port in front  of him he could  see the blue intensity of
the void in which they moved.

Out here  time and  space were thinning  down and breaking up.  Like a boat
riding on  the surface of a  heaving sea, they were  riding the very rim of
the  universe,   their  ship   tossed  about  by   the  shifting,  twisting
co-ordinates of force.

Out  there somewhere,  very close,  was the mysterious  inter-space. Close,
too,  invisible in  all  its immensity,  was another  universe. An  old and
tottering universe  from which  its inhabitants had fled,  a dying universe
that had been sentenced to death so that a younger universe might live.

In just  a few minutes now  the space between the  universes would begin to
fill with  a charge of  that terrible timeless, formless  energy. Slowly it
would begin seeping into the two universes, slowly at first and then faster
and  faster,  increasing  their   mass,  dooming  them  to  almost  instant
destruction.

But before that could happen, the disintegrator ray, the most terrible form
of energy known to the Engineers, would blast out into that field of latent
energy, would sweep outward toward that other approaching universe.

Instantly the  field of energy would  be turned into the  terrific power of
the disintegrator  ray, but  millions of times  more powerful than  the ray
itself... a blinding sheet of energy that would stop at nothing, that would
smash  the very  mold of time  and space,  would destroy matter  and cancel
other energy.  And this sheet of energy would smash  its way into the other
universe.

And when that happened,  the energy field, draining all its energy into the
disintegrator  blast, would  be diverted  from the younger  universe, would
turn in full force upon the one to be destroyed.

Staggering  under the  onrush of  such a  fierce storm  of energy,  the old
universe  would start  contracting.  Its mass  would build  up,  faster and
faster,  as  the  fifth-dimensional  energy, riding  on  the  beams of  the
disintegrator guns, hurled itself into its space-time frame.

Gary wiped his brow with the back of his hand.

That was  the way  Caroline and the  Engineer had figured it  out. He hoped
that it would work. And yet it seemed impossible that a tiny ship, two tiny
guns manned by the puny members of the human race, could utterly annihilate
a universe, an unimaginably massive space-time matrix.

Yet he  had seen the beam of a tiny  flashlight, crystalizing the energy of
the eternal dimension, blast  out of existence, in the twinkling of an eye,
a  mighty fleet  of warships  protected by  heavy screens,  armored against
vicious bombs, impregnable to anything... to anything except the flashlight
in the hands of a wisp of a girl.

Remembering  that,  it  was  easier  to believe  that  the  disintegrators,
crystalizing  a   much  vaster  field  of   energy,  might  accomplish  the
destruction of a universe.  For it wasn't the guns themselves that would do
the  job, but  the direction  of all  the energy  into the  other universe,
energy rising on the million-mile front set up by the fanning guns.

"The field is building up," said Caroline. "Be ready." Gary grinned at her.
"We'll fire when we see the whites of their eyes," he said.

He  racked his  brain for  the origin  of that  sentence. Something  out of
history. Something  out of the dim old legends of the  past. A folk tale of
some mighty battle of the ancient days.

He shrugged his shoulders. The story, whatever it might be, probably wasn't
true, anyhow. So few  of the ancient legends were. Just another story to be
told of a black night in the chimney corner when the wind howled around the
eaves and the rain dripped on the roof.

His eyes  went to the port again, stared out into  the misty blue, the blue
that seemed to throb with vibrant life.

They had  to wait. Wait until  the energy had built up  to a point where it
would be effective. But not too long. For if they waited too long, it might
pour into their own universe and wipe them out.

"Get ready,"  thundered Kingsley,  and Gary's hand  went out to  the switch
that would  loosen the blast of the  disintegrator. His fingers gripped the
switch tightly, tensed, ready for action.

"Give it to 'em," Kingsley roared, and Gary snapped the switch.

With both hands he  swung the swivel back and forth, back and forth. Beside
him, he knew, Herb was doing the same.

Outside the port blossomed  a maelstrom of fiery light, a blinding, vicious
flare of light that seemed to leap and writhe and then become a solid sheet
of flame.  A solid  sheet of flame  that drove on and  on, leaping outward,
bringing doom to a worn-out universe.

It was over in  just a few seconds... a few seconds during which an inferno
of energy was turned loose to rage between two universes.

Then the misty blue  filled the port again and the ship was bucking, tossed
about like  a chip  in heavy seas,  twisted and dashed about  by the broken
lines of  force that  still heaved and  quivered under the  backlash of the
titanic forces which a moment before bad filled the inter-space.

Gary turned in his  seat, saw that Caroline and the Engineer were bent over
the detector dial, watching it intently.

Kingsley, looking over the Engineer's shoulder, was muttering: "No sign. No
sign of energy."

That  meant, then,  that the  other universe  was already  contracting, was
rushing backward to a new beginning... no longer a menace.

Gary patted the gun.  It and Man's ingenuity had turned the trick. Mere Man
had destroyed  one universe, but  had saved another. It  seemed too utterly
fantastic to be true.

He  looked around  the control  room. Tommy  at the  controls. Herb  at the
second gun.  The other  three watching the energy  detector. Everything was
familiar. Nothing was any different than it was before. All commonplace and
ordinary.

And yet,  for the first time,  tiny beings spawned within  the universe had
taken firm hold of  the universe's destiny. Henceforward Man and his little
compatriots  throughout the  vast gulfs  of space  would no longer  be mere
pawns in the grim tide of cosmic forces. Henceforward life would rule these
forces, bend  them to its will,  put them to work,  change them, shift them
about.

Life was an accident. There was little doubt of that. Something that wasn't
exactly planned.  Something that had crept in,  like a malignant disease in
the ordered  mechanism of the  universe. The universe was  hostile to life.
The depths  of space were too  cold for life, most  of the condensed matter
too hot  for life, space was traversed by  radiations inimical to life. But
life was  triumphant. In the end,  the universe would not  destroy it... it
would rule the universe.

His mind went back to the day Herb had sighted that tiny flash of reflected
light  in the telescopic  screen, back to  the finding  of the girl  in the
space shell.  And before him seemed to unreel the  chain of events that had
led up to this  moment. If Caroline Martin had not been condemned to space,
if she  had not known the secret of  suspended animation, if that suspended
animation had not failed to suspend thought, if Herb had not seen the flash
that revealed the presence of the shell, if he, himself, had been unable to
revive the  girl, if  Kingsley had not  been curious about  why cosmic rays
should form a definite pattern...

And  in that chain  of happenings he  seemed to  see the hand  of something
greater than  just happenstance. What was it the old  man back on Old Earth
had said? Something about a great dreamer creating stages and peopling them
with actors.

"No energy  indications," said the Engineer.  "We have definitely ended the
menace. The  other universe has contracted beyond  the danger point. We are
saved. I am so very happy."

He  faced them.  "And so very  grateful, too,"  he said. "Forget  it," said
Herb. "It was our neck as well as yours."

Chapter Eighteen

HERB polished  the last  chicken bone methodically and  sighed. "That's the
best meal I ever ate," he said.

They sat at the table in the apartment the Engineers had arranged for them.
It had  escaped the  general destruction of the  Hellhound attack, although
the tower above it had been obliterated by a hydrogen bomb.

Gary filled his wineglass again and leaned back in his chair.

"I guess our job is done here," he said. "Maybe we'll be going home in just
a little while."

"Home?" asked Caroline. "You mean the Earth?"

Gary nodded.

"I have almost forgotten the Earth," she said. "It has been so long since I
have seen the  Earth. I suppose it has changed a great  deal since I saw it
last."

"Perhaps it has," Gary told her, "although there are some things that never
change.  The smell  of fresh-plowed  fields and  the scent of  hayfields at
harvest time and the beauty of trees against the skyline at evening."

"Just a poet," said Herb. "Just a blasted poet."

"Maybe there will be things I won't recognize," said Caroline. "Things that
will be so different."

"I'll  show  you  the   Earth,"  said  Gary.  "I'll  set  you  straight  on
everything."

"What  bothers me,"  declared Kingsley,  "are those  people from  the other
universe.  It's just like  letting undesirable  elements come in  under our
immigration schedule on Earth. You can't tell what sort of people they are.
They might be life forms that are inimical to us."

"Or,"  suggested Caroline,  "they might  be possessors of  great scientific
accomplishments  and  a  higher  culture.  They  might  add  much  to  this
universe."

"There isn't  much danger from them," said  Gary. "The Engineers are taking
care of  them. They're keeping them cooped up  in the hypersphere they used
to  cross interspace  until  suitable places  for their  settlement  can be
found. The Engineers will keep an eye on them."

Metallic feet  grated on the floor  and Engineer 1824 came  across the room
toward the table.

He stopped before the table and folded his arms across his chest.

"Everything  is  all right?"  he  asked.  "The food  is  good  and you  are
comfortable."

"I'll say we are," said Herb.

"We are  glad," said the Engineer.  "We have tried so  hard to make it easy
for you.  We are  grateful that you  came. Without you we  never would have
saved  the universe.  We never  would have  gone to  Old Earth to  find the
secret of the energy,  because we are not driven by restless imagination...
an imagination that will not let one rest until all has been explained."

"We did  what we could," rumbled  Kingsley. "But all of  the credit goes to
Caroline. She  was the one who worked out  the mathematics for the creation
of the hypersphere.  She is the only one of us who  would have been able to
understand the equations relating to the energy and the inter-space."

"You are right," said  the Engineer, "and we thank Caroline especially. But
the rest of you had your part to do and did it. It has made us very proud."

"Proud," thought Gary. "Why should he be proud of anything we've done?"

The Engineer caught his thought.

"You ask  why we should be  proud," he said, "and I  shall tell you why. We
have watched  and studied you closely since  you came, debating whether you
should  be told  what there  is to  tell. Under different  circumstances we
probably would allow you to depart without a word, but we have decided that
you should know."

"Know what?" thundered Kingsley.

The rest of them were silent, waiting.

"You  are  aware of  how  your solar  system  came into  being?" asked  the
Engineer.

"Sure," said  Kingsley. "There  was a dynamic encounter  between two stars.
Our Sun and an invader. About three billion years ago."

"That invader,"  said the Engineer, "was  the Sun of my  people, a sun upon
whose planets  they had built a great civilization.  My people knew well in
advance that the collision  would take place. Our astronomers discovered it
first and after that our physicists and other scientists worked unceasingly
in a  futile effort either to avert the collision or  to save what could be
salvaged  of our civilization  when the  encounter came. But  century after
century  passed, with the  two stars  swinging closer and  closer together.
There seemed no chance  to save anything. We knew that the planets would be
destroyed when  the first giant tide  from your Sun lashed  out into space,
that the  resultant explosion  would instantly destroy all  life, that more
than likely some of the planets would be totally destroyed.

"Our astronomers  told us that our Sun would  pass within two million miles
of your  star, that  it would grip  and drag far  out in space  some of the
molten mass  which your  Sun would eject. In  such a case we  could see but
little hope for the continuance of our civilization."

His thoughts  broke off, but no  one said a word.  All eyes were staring at
the impassive metal face of the Engineer, waiting for him to continue.

"Finally,  knowing  that  all   their  efforts  were  hopeless,  my  people
constructed vast  spaceships. Spaceships designed for  living, for spending
many years  in space.  And long before  the collision occurred  these ships
were launched,  carrying select groups of  our civilization. Representative
groups. Men of different sciences, with many records of our civilization."

"The Ark," said Caroline, breathlessly. "The old story of the Ark."

"I do not understand," said the Engineer.

"It doesn't matter," Caroline said. "Please go on."

"From  far out in  space my people  watched the  two stars sweep  past each
other," said  the Engineer.  "It was as  if the very  heavens had exploded.
Great tongues of gas  and molten matter speared out into space for millions
of miles. They saw their own Sun drag a great mass of this stellar material
for billions  of miles out into  space, strewing fragments of  it en route.
They saw  the gradual formation of the matter around  your Sun and then, in
time, they  lost sight of it,  for they were moving  far out into space and
the eruptive masses were settling down into a quieter state.

"For generation after generation, my people hunted for a new home. Men died
and were given burial in space. Children were born and grew old in turn and
died. For century after  century the great ships voyaged from star to star,
seeking a planetary system on which they might settle and make their homes.
One of the ships  ran too close to a giant sun and  was drawn to its death.
Another was split wide open when it collided with a dark star. But the rest
braved the dangers and  uncertainties of space, hunting, always hunting for
a home."

Another pause and still there were no questions. The Engineer went on:

"But  no  planetary system  could  be found.  Only  one star  in every  ten
thousand has  a planetary system, and they  might have hunted for thousands
of years without finding one.

"Finally, tired out with searching, they decided to return to your Sun. For
while there was as yet no planetary system there, they knew that in ages to
come there would be."

The cold  wind from space was  flicking Gary in the  face again. Could this
tale the Engineer was  telling be the truth? Was this why the Engineers had
been signaling to Pluto?

The Engineer's thoughts were coming again.

"After many years they reached your Sun, and as they approached it they saw
that planets were beginning  to form around the centers of relatively dense
matter. But there was something else. Swinging in a great, erratic orbit on
the very edge of this nebula-like mass of raw planetary matter was a planet
which they  recognized. It was one  of the planets of  their old home star,
fourth  out from  their Sun.  It had  been stolen  from their Sun,  now was
swinging in an orbit of its own around its adopted star.

"My people  had found a home at last. They descended  to the surface of the
planet to  find that its atmosphere  was gone, that all  life had vanished,
that all signs of civilization had been utterly wiped out.

"But  they  settled there  and  tried to  rebuild,  in part  at least,  the
civilization that was their  heritage. But it was a heart-rending task. For
years and  centuries they watched the slow  formation of your solar system,
saw the planets take on shape and slowly cool, waiting against the day when
the  race might  occupy them.  But the  process was  too slow. The  work of
building their civilization anew, the lack of atmosphere, the utter cold of
space, were  sapping the strength of  my people. They foresaw  the day when
they  would perish,  when  the last  one of  the race  would die.  But they
planned for the future. They planned very carefully.

"They created  us and gave  us great ships and  sent us out to  try to find
them new  homes, hoping against hope  that we would be  able to find them a
better home  before it was too late. For out  in space our ships separated,
each traveling its own way, bent on a survey of the entire universe if such
were necessary."

"They  created you?"  asked  Gary. "What  do  you mean?  Aren't you  direct
descendants of that other race, the race of the invading star?"

"No," said  the Engineer.  "We are robots.  But so carefully  made, so well
endowed  with a  semblance  of life  that we  cannot be  distinguished from
authentic life forms. I sometimes think that in all these years we may have
become  life in all  reality. I have  thought about  it a great  deal, have
hoped  so  much that  we  might in  time  become something  more than  mere
machines."

In the  silence, Gary wondered why he had not  guessed the truth before. It
had been  there to  see. The form,  the very actions of  the Engineers were
mechanistic.  Once  the  Engineer  had  told  them  that he  was  bound  by
mechanistic  precepts,  that  he   and  his  fellows  possessed  almost  no
imagination. And machines, of course, would have no imagination.

But they had seemed  so much like people, almost like human beings, that he
had  thought of  them  as actual  life, but  cast  in metallic  rather than
protoplasmic form.

"Well, I'll be damned," said Kingsley.

"Boy," said Herb, "you're topnotch robots, if I do say so."

Gary snarled at him across the table. "Pipe down," he warned.

"Maybe you aren't robots any more," Caroline was saying. "Maybe through all
these years  you have become  real entities. Your creators  must have given
you electrochemical  brains, and that,  after all, is what  the human brain
amounts to.  In time those  brains would become real,  almost as efficient,
probably in  some instances even more  efficient than a protoplasmic brain.
And  brain power, the  ability to think  and reason,  seems to be  all that
counts when everything is balanced out."

"Thank you,"  said the Engineer. "Thank  you very much. You  are so kind to
say so. That is what I have tried to tell myself."

"Look here," said Gary. "It really doesn't matter, does it? I mean, whether
you are  robots or  independent entities. You  serve the same  purpose, you
follow  the same  dictates of  conscience, you  create the same  destiny as
things that move and act through the very gift of life. In many ways, to my
mind, a robotic existence might be preferable to a human existence."

"Perhaps it  doesn't really matter," agreed the  Engineer. "I told you once
that we  were a proud people, that we had inherited  a great trust, that we
had carried out that  trust. Pride might have kept us from telling you what
we  were,  but now  I  am glad  I  have, for  the  rest will  be easier  to
understand."

"The rest," said Tommy in surprise. "Is there more?"

"Much more," said the Engineer.

"Wait a second," rumbled Kingsley. "Do you mean that all you Engineers were
created by  a race that flourished  three billion years ago,  that you have
lived through that space of time?"

"Not all of us," said the Engineer. "My people made only a few of us, a few
to man  each ship. We ourselves have made  others, copies of ourselves. But
in each  new creation we have tried to inculcate  some of the factors which
we  find missing  in  ourselves. Imagination,  for one  thing,  and greater
initiative, and a greater scope of emotional perception."

"You yourself  are one  of the original  robots made back  on Pluto?" asked
Caroline.

The Engineer nodded.

"You are eternal and immortal," suggested Kingsley.

"Not  eternal nor  immortal,"  said the  Engineer. "But  with  proper care,
replacement  of worn-out parts,  and barring  accident, I will  continue to
function for many more billions of years to come."

Billions of years, thought  Gary. It was something a man could not imagine.
A human  mind could  not visualize a  billion years or a  thousand years or
even a hundred years.  Man, in general, could visualize not much beyond the
figure four.

But if  the Engineers had lived for three billion  years, how come they had
been unable to create  a hypersphere, why hadn't they probed out beyond the
universe to learn the  laws of inter-space? Why must this work wait for the
arrival of the human mind?

"I have  answered that  before," said the  Engineer, "and I  will answer it
again. It is because of imagination and vision... the ability to see beyond
facts, to  probe into  probabilities, to visualize  what might be  and then
attempt to make it  so. That is something that we cannot do. We are chained
to mechanistic action and mechanistic thought. We do not advance beyond the
proven fact. When two  facts create another fact, we accept the third fact,
but  we do  not reach out  in speculation,  collect half a  dozen tentative
facts  and  then try  to  crystallize  them. That  is  the  answer to  your
question."

Gary looked  startled. He hadn't realized that  the Engineer could read his
undirected  thoughts. Caroline was  looking at  him, a smile  twitching the
corners of her mouth.

"Did you ask him something?"

"I guess I did," said Gary.

"Did you ever hear from the other Engineers?" asked Kingsley. "The ones who
were in the other ships?"

"No," said  the Engineer, "we never did. Presumably  they have by now found
other planets  where they are doing  the same work as  we. We have tried to
get in touch with them, but we have never been able to do it."

"What is your work?" asked Gary.

"Why," said Caroline, "you should know that, Gary. It is to prepare a place
for  the  Engineers' people  to  live.  Isn't that  right?"  she asked  the
Engineer.

"It is right," said the Engineer.

"But," protested Gary, "those  people are dead. There is no sign of them in
our solar system and they certainly didn't start out looking for some other
planet. They died off on Pluto."

He remembered  the chiseled masonry that Ted Smith  had found. The hands of
the Engineers' creators had  cut those stones, billions of years ago... and
today they  still were on Pluto's surface,  mute testimony to the greatness
of a race that had died while the solar system's planets still were cooling
off.

"They are  not dead," said the Engineer, and his  thoughts seemed to have a
particular warmth in them.

"Not dead," said Gary. "Do you know where they are?"

"Yes," said the Engineer. "I do. Some of them are in this very room."

"In this  roorn,' began Caroline, and then  she stopped as the significance
of what the Engineer had said struck home.

"In this room," said  Herb. "Hell, the only people who are in this room are
us. And we aren't your people."

"But you  are," declared the Engineer. "There  are differences, to be sure.
But you are much like them, so like them in many ways. You are protoplasmic
and they  were protoplasmic. Your general  form is the same  and, I have no
doubt, your metabolism. And above all, the way your mind works."

"That,"  said Caroline,  "was  why we  could understand  you and  you could
understand us.  Why you kept us here when you  sent the other entities back
to their homes."

"Do you mean," asked  Kingsley, "that we are the direct descendants of your
people... that your people finally took over the planets? That seems hardly
possible, for  we know we started  from very humble beginnings.  We have no
legends, no evidence pointing to such a genesis."

"Not that,"  said the Engineer. "Not  exactly that. But I  suppose you have
wondered how  life got its start  on your planet. There  are many planetary
systems, you  know, where life is entirely  unknown. Planets that are fully
as old as yours that are barren of all life."

"There is  the spore  theory," said Kingsley,  and as he said  the words he
pounded the table with his massive fist.

"By Lord,  that's it,"  he shouted. "The  spore theory. Your  people out on
Pluto,  only  a  few  of  them  left,  with  the planets  still  unfit  for
habitation, knowing  that they faced the  end... couldn't they have insured
life on the young planets by the development and planting of life spores?"

"That," said  the Engineer, "is what  I thought. That is  the theory that I
hold."

"But  if  that were  the  case,"  objected Caroline,  "why  should we  have
developed  as  we  did?  Why should  a  life  form  almost duplicating  the
Engineers'  people  have  developed?  Surely  they  couldn't  have  planted
determinants in  the spore... they  couldn't have seen or  planned that far
ahead. They couldn't possibly have planned the eventual evolution of a race
re-creating their own!"

"They were  a very ancient people,"  said the Engineer, "and  a very clever
people. I do not doubt that they could have planned it as you say."

"Interesting," said Herb. "But what does it make us?"

"It makes  you the  heir of my  people," said the Engineer.  "It means that
what we have done  here, all we have, all we know is yours. We will rebuild
this city, we will  condition it in such a manner that your people can live
here.  Also that  whatever the other  Engineers may  have found or  done is
yours. We want nothing for ourselves except the joy and the satisfaction of
knowing that we have served, that we have done well with the trust that was
handed to us."

They sat stunned, scarcely believing what they heard.

"You mean,"  asked Kingsley, "that you  will rebuild this city  and hand it
over to the people of our solar system?"

"That is  what I  mean," said the Engineer.  "It is yours. I  have no doubt
that you  descended in  some manner from  my people. Since you  came here I
have studied  you closely.  Time and again  I have seen  little actions and
mannerisms,  little  mental quirks  that  mark  you as  being  in some  way
connected with the people who created us."

Gary tried  to reason it out.  The Engineers were handing  the human race a
heritage from  an ancient  people, handing them  a city and  a civilization
already built, a city  and a civilization such as the race itself would not
achieve for the next many thousand years.

But there was something wrong, something that didn't click.

He remembered  Herb's comment  that the city  looked like a  place that was
waiting  for  someone who  had  never come.  Herb  had hit  upon the  exact
situation. This  city had  been built for  a greater race, for  a race that
probably had  died long  before the first  stone had been laid  in place. A
race that must have  been so far advanced that it would make the human race
look savage in comparison.

He tried  to imagine what effect such a city  and such a civilization would
have  upon the  human race.  He tried  to picture  the greed and  hate, the
political maneuvering, the fierce  trade competition, the social inequality
and its  resultant class struggle...  all of it inherent  in humanity... in
this white city under the three suns. Somehow the two didn't go together.

"We can't do  it," he said. "We aren't ready yet. We'd  just make a mess of
things. We'd  have too much power, too  much leisure, too many possessions.
It would smash our civilization and leave us one in its stead that we could
not manage.  We haven't  put our own  civilization upon a  basis that could
coincide with what is here."

Kingsley stared at him.

"But think of the  scientific knowledge! Think of the cultural advantages!"
he shouted.

"Gary is right," said Caroline. "We aren't ready yet."

"Sometime," said Gary. "Sometime in the future. When we have wired out some
of the  primal passions. When we have solved  the great social and economic
problems that  plague us  now. When we  have learned to  observe the Golden
Rule... when  we have lost some of the lustiness  of our youth. Sometime we
will be ready for this city."

He  remembered the  ancient  man they  had met  on Old  Earth. He  had said
something about the rest  of the race going away, to a far star, to a place
that had been prepared for them.

That place the old  man had spoken of, he realized now, was this very city.
And  that meant  that  the Old  Earth they  had visited  had been  the real
Earth... no  shadow planet, but  the actuality existing in  the future. And
the old man had  spoken as if the rest of the race had gone to the city but
a short while earlier.  He had said that he refused to go, that he couldn't
leave the Earth.

The time  would be  long, then. Longer  than he thought. A  long and bitter
wait for the day when the race might safely enter into a better world, into
a heritage left to them by a race that died when the solar system was born.

"You understand?" he asked the Engineer.

"I understand,"  the Engineer replied. "It means that  we must wait for the
masters that we worked for... that it will be long before they come to us."

"You waited  three billion years,"  Gary reminded him. "Wait  a few million
more for  us. It  won't take us  long. There's a  lot of good  in the human
race, but we aren't ready yet."

"I think you're crazy," said Kingsley, bitterly.

"Can't you see," asked Caroline, "what the human race right now would do to
this city?"

"But magnetic  power," wailed Kingsley, "and  all those other things. Think
of how they would help us. We need power and tools and all the knowledge we
can get."

"You may  take certain information with  you," said the Engineer. "Whatever
you  think is  wise. We  will watch  you and  talk with you  throughout the
years, and it may be there will be times that you will wish our help."

Gary  rose from  the table.  His hand  fell on  the Engineer's  broad metal
shoulder.

"And in  the meantime there is work for you," he  said. "A city to rebuild.
The  development of  power  stations to  use the  fifth-dimensional energy.
Learning  how to  control  and use  that energy.  Using  it to  control the
universe.  The day  will come, unless  we do  something about it,  that our
universe will run down, will die the heat death. But with the eternal power
of the  inter-space, we can shape and control the  universe, mold it to our
needs."

It seemed that the metal man drew himself even more erect.

"It will be done," he said.

"We must work, not for Man alone, but for the entire universe," said Gary.

"That is right," said the Engineer.

Kingsley heaved himself to his feet.

"We should be leaving for Pluto," he said. "Our work here is done."

He stepped  up to the Engineer.  "Before we go," he  said, "I would like to
shake your hand."

"I do not understand," said the Engineer.

"It  is a  mark  of respect,"  Caroline explained.  "Assurance that  we are
friends. A sort of way to seal a pact."

"That is  fine," said  the Engineer. He  thrust out his hand.  And then his
thoughts broke.  For the  first time since  they had met him,  in this same
room, there was emotion in his voice.

"We  are so  glad," he said.  "We can talk  to you  and not feel  so alone.
Perhaps some day I can come and visit you."

"Be sure to do that," bellowed Herb. "I'll show you all the sights."

"Are you coming, Gary?" asked Caroline, but Gary didn't answer.

Some day Man would  come home... home to this wondrous city of white stone,
to marvel  at its  breathtaking height, at  its vastness of  design, at its
far-flung  symbol of  achievement reared  against an  alien sky. Home  to a
planet where  every power and  every luxury and every  achievement would be
his. Home to a  place that had grown out of a dream... the great dream of a
greater people who had  died, but in dying had passed along the heritage of
their  life to  a new-spawned solar  system. And  more than that,  had left
another heritage  in the  hands and brains  of good stewards  who, in time,
would give it up, in fulfillment of their charge.

But  this  city and  this  proud  achievement were  not  for  him, nor  for
Caroline, nor  Kingsley, nor Herb, nor Tommy.  Nor for the many generations
that would come after  them. Not so long as Man carried the old dead weight
of primal  savagery and  hate, not so long  as he was mean  and vicious and
petty, could he set foot here.

Before he  reached this city, Man would travel  long trails of bitter dust,
would know the sheer  triumphs of the star-flung road. Galaxies would write
new alphabets  across the  sky, and the  print of many  happenings would be
etched upon the tape of time. New things would come and hold their sway and
die, Great  leaders would stand up and have their  day and shuffle off into
oblivion and  silence. Creeds would  rise and flourish and  be sifting dust
between the worlds. The night watch of stars would see great deeds, applaud
great happenings, witness great defeat, weep over bitter sorrows.

"Just think," said Caroline. "We are going home."

"Yes," said Gary. "At last, we're going home."