Part 2

Also, Lee told them, he had been able to partially translate one of the folk tales of the Vegan people.

"Stripped of its nonessentials, it tells of a cataclysmic war between the ancestors of the Vegan people and another race, mentioned only as the Others."

He paused and looked at them, sitting around the table. They seemed engrossed.

"The Vegan folk tales relate that the Others won an overwhelming victory, and smashed forever their Golden Age, when they travelled through the skies and lived in unbelievable splendor.

"I'd like to make one final point. The Vegan and Sirian peoples are hardly human, by our standards. In addition to slight physiological differences, they live in caves and eat shellfish and giant insects. They do not hunt meat-bearing animals, simply because there are not yet any meat-bearing animals on their planets. The humans on those planets did not evolve there; they are a billion years ahead of the natural evolution of their worlds."

Bennett spoke up. "In other words, they were originally a colony from Earth."

"Exactly."

"That's a lot to swallow in one sitting," Patrick said, quietly.

"I know," Lee answered. "But it fits in with what we've found here. Elaine, I'm certain that if you knew where to look, you could find on Earth the remains of a human civilization that is more than a million years old...."

She shook her head. "That's contrary to every known scrap of evidence about early man. Besides, a million years of weathering would wipe out almost anything on Earth. Wind, rain, Ice Ages, earthquakes ... it would be impossible."

"What about the Moon?" Petchkovich asked. "There should be some archeological evidence on the Moon that hasn't been completely destroyed. Maybe buried under the dust or lava flows...."

"At any rate," Lee said, "I'm convinced that there was a human culture a million years ago; that it expanded out through the Solar System and to the stars; that it met an implacably hostile alien race; and that the humans were utterly defeated. Nearly wiped out."

"And the machine out there?"

"It was built by the Others. It's alien. And hostile," Lee said. "That's why we must find out what it's doing, and how."

* * * * *

You could feel the change in attitude throughout the center after that conference. An invisible, but almost palpable wave of tension swept through every office, every lab, every section of the underground community. Not everyone believed Lee's theory about the Others. But they could never look at those strange buildings again without wondering. What had been a puzzling, frustrating riddle took on the attributes of a living, intelligent enemy; an enemy that mocked their efforts to understand, to control; an enemy that seemed in every way superior to the feeble powers of the men from Earth.

* * * * *

A few days after that conference, Dr. Bennett left Titan for good. Lee was in full command now.

He was just finishing a quick lunch at the robocafeteria when Elaine walked by and stopped at his table.

"Hi boss. I'm on my way out to the buildings. Want to come along?"

Lee punched a button at the end of the table, and the dishes slid into a wall receptacle. "No thanks," he said. "I've got some paperwork to do...."

"Sid, you're going to have to come out and face it sooner or later. Why don't you come now? There's practically nobody there."

He looked up at her. "You're not a part-time psychotech, are you?"

"No," she said, grinning. "But I wouldn't want anybody to start thinking that you're afraid to go into the buildings. And I especially don't want _you_ to think that."

"Okay," he said, getting up from his chair. "You're right ... as usual."

They took a lift chute to the surface bubble, a dome of clear plastisteel that housed ground vehicles and miscellaneous outdoor equipment. There they squirmed into pressure suits, complete with fishbowl helmets. After checking out their oxygen tanks, heaters and radios, they were ready to go outside.

"Want to walk?" Elaine asked.

Lee nodded.

It took him a few minutes to get accustomed to the low-gravity shuffle that you must employ to walk on Titan, with its one-third Earth gravity.

They headed for the buildings, under the double shadows cast by the distant Sun and the ever-present, overpowering Saturn. The buildings loomed straight up from the dark plain, gaunt gloomy specters from a bygone age haunting this shadow world. There were five low, square featureless structures ringed around a central pentagonally-shaped tower that swept upward to a series of spires and antennas. Several doors had been cut into the outer buildings' walls by the inquiring Earthmen. Originally, the walls had been perfectly blank.

"Did you bring a torch?" Lee asked.

Elaine shook her head. "Don't need one anymore. We installed lights inside. They're tripped by a photocell as we cross through a doorway."

He could feel it coming on as they approached the buildings--the tenseness, the prickling along the spine, as if a deeply-buried memory was writhing within his mind.

Even before they entered the doorway he could sense the throbbing, beating _purposefulness_ of the machines.

And then they were inside, surrounded by them, row on row, tier on tier, inhuman untiring infallible machines humming, growling, whining, filling the vast building with the rumbling power of their work. Driving, constantly driving at their unknown tasks. Along catwalks that snaked through the maze of machines, automatic maintenance vehicles scurried along, stopping here for a quick adjustment, there for replacement of a faulty part.

No matter where the two invading humans went along the twining catwalks, the maintenance vehicles avoided them. If they stopped before a machine that was to be serviced, the maintenance vehicle would hover nearby, glowering at them, waiting for them to get out of the way.

* * * * *

He could feel it again--the alienness, the lurking presence of an intelligence that scorned the intruders from Earth. Every nerve in his body screamed the same message: get out, get away, this thing is evil, hostile, a weapon against all mankind. In the conference room, telling them of his theory, he had inwardly wondered how much of it he himself really believed. But here, in the midst of these implacably efficient machines--he _knew_. This is the product of a cosmic hatred, the work of those who seek to destroy man, our ancient enemy, the unknown, the nameless Others.

"Are you all right?"

Elaine's voice in his earphones snapped him back to reality.

"Why, do I look green?"

She came up close enough so that their helmets nearly touched. "A little green," she said, smiling. "It gives me the creeps, too. Want to go?"

"No," he answered. "Let's see the work that's going on."

He took a firm grip on himself and went through it all, from the combined crews of archeologists and engineers tracing wiring circuits, to the handful of physicists conducting further tests on the power generator buried deep in the central building's foundation.

"It goes awfully slowly," Elaine said as they trudged back to the center.

"We're on the outside looking in," Lee said. "If we could only determine the _purpose_ of the machinery, then the rest of it would come pretty easily."

They returned to the surface bubble and took off their pressure suits.

"Nearly dinner time," Elaine said, as they descended to the living area. "How about eating in my quarters?" she asked.

"Can you cook?"

"You'll find out."

* * * * *

A few hours later, he had decided that she definitely could cook, and that she had somehow managed to bring to Titan some of the best wine he had tasted in years.

Now the table was folded back into the wall, and they were sitting together on the couch, listening to music tapes.

"What's that?" he asked.

"Villa-Lobos, a Twentieth Century composer. _Bachianas Brazilieris._ Number eight, I think...."

They listened in silence for a few moments to the moody, restless music.

"Reminds me of topside, standing at the shore of the ammonia sea when a storm is coming up," he said.

Elaine nodded. "Yes ... the wind, and the dark, and the waves...."

Abruptly, the music snapped off.

"Oh damn!" Elaine blurted. "I thought I had the thing fixed."

"Let me take a look at it," Lee said getting up from the couch.

He tinkered with the recorder for a while, to no avail. "I'm no electronics tech, that's for sure."

Elaine shrugged. "Don't worry about it. I'll have it repaired tomorrow."

She went into the kitchenette and called back, "How about some brandy?"

"Fine," he answered.

She returned and handed him a glass.

"Ad astra," he said, as they touched glasses.

"Amen."

Elaine walked slowly away from him, swishing the liquor in her glass. "Let's go topside and see the stars," she said, suddenly.

"H'mm?"

"Up to the bubble. Come on."

* * * * *

So they left her one-room quarters and took the lift tube up to the bubble. It was deserted. Overhead, Saturn was low on the horizon, silhouetting the alien buildings. They turned to the other side of the sky, where it was clear and dark. Thousands of stars twinkled in the darkness; they made out Sirius and Vega, then Mars, and finally Earth--a bright blue jewel that outshone all the others.

"I guess Jupiter's on the other side of the Sun," Lee said.

Elaine nodded. "It looks so far away," she said, staring at Earth, "and so lonely, out there in all that emptiness."

"A psychotech would call that 'projection.'"

"I know. We're the lonely ones, aren't we?"

She was perfectly serious now.

"You know that Ruth and I have split up," he said.

"I heard ... that she left you."

He shrugged. "That's a matter of viewpoint. She got tired sitting Earthside while I batted around the Solar System. When I told her I was going to Vega, she called it quits."

"Couldn't she have gone with you?"

"If she had wanted to...."

"Do you still love her?" Elaine asked.

"I don't know. I don't think I know what love really is, anymore. All I know is ... on that long trip out to Vega, when I had nothing to do but sit and think, it wasn't Ruth I was thinking about. It was you."

"Oh...."

They talked a bit more, and finally he took her in his arms and kissed her and she was his, at least for a little while.

* * * * *

Weeks lapsed into months, and the work on Titan inched steadily along. If he stopped to think about it, Lee knew that all they were doing was scratching around the base of the problem, and making precious little headway. _The blind men and the elephant_, he told himself. But then he asked himself what else they could possibly do, and the answer was always, nothing. But the machine was still there, doing whatever it was designed to do, and he could sense the scornful laughter of its creators as he vainly tried to understand their work. Only the thought of Elaine, the sight of her, the touch of her, allowed him to keep his sense of balance.

People left Titan, baffled and confused; new people arrived--eager, full of energy, excited at the chance to tackle the unknown, undimmed--at first--by the day-to-day frustrations of trying to unlock a door that has no key.

* * * * *

Lee dialed his selection at the robocafeteria and waited a few moments for the tray of food to appear at the pickup table. He had spent the morning shut away in his office, searching months worth of reports for some glimmer of encouragement. There was progress, of course; there was always progress. But it was never in a direction that would take them closer to the final answer.

And, carefully tucked into the top drawer of his desk was a nasty yellow sheet that bore a querulous message from Earth: What is the status of the project? Why are expenditures constantly climbing? Is a ninety-three-man staff really needed? When can some solid results be expected?

Lee picked an unoccupied table and sat down. As he started to eat, a quartet of young engineers, headed by Dr. Kurtzman, came in and sat at the next table.

"I still don't see why they keep digging," one of them was saying. "They'll never find anything outside the buildings."

Another countered, "Look, they've got to follow every possible angle. The only way we're ever going to understand this thing is to put together every scrap of evidence we can find until there's enough to form an understandable picture."

Kurtzman shook his head. "Not at all. This isn't going to be solved by putting pieces together, like a puzzle. There's more evidence in those buildings than we can ever hope to digest. It's not a matter of adding up clues ... this is going to be a _gestalt_. One of these days, somebody's going to get a few thousand million of his brain cells turned the right way, and he'll say, "Ah-HAH!" Then we'll have it. Until then, it's our job to keep poking around, hoping to find the right piece of information to trigger the _gestalt_."

The first one spluttered. "But that ... that's non-scientific!"

"So?" Kurtzman asked, arching his eyebrows. "Do you see science making any great strides around here? We're in over our heads. Intuition is the only thing that can save us."

"If we're that bad off, we might as well quit," the first one said. "In fact, that might be the best idea of all. Forget it and go home. Let the damned machine run for another million years, if it wants to."

Lee could not keep quiet any longer. "That would be fine, wouldn't it?" he said, turning on the surprised engineer. "Give it up and forget about it, without knowing where it came from, or what it's doing, or why."

"I didn't mean...."

"Listen to me. It's not just that the thing could be a weapon. It may not be. But we don't know. And as long as we don't know, we've got to keep trying to find out. Understand?"

"Yes, but...."

"And there's more at stake here than just an intellectual puzzle," Lee insisted. "If we turn our backs on this machine, we've turned our backs on a basic premise of all scientific thought. If we admit that we can't understand this machine, then we admit that there's an absolute limit to our ability to understand the universe. We give in to the old witch-doctor's claim that there are some things in the world that man must not tamper with. Taboo!

"The basic nature of man and science is at stake here! We've got to understand that machine. Our claim to the stars is tied up in it."

Lee looked up and saw that everyone in the dining hall was watching him. He stood up.

"Sorry; I didn't mean to get so vehement," he mumbled to the engineer. "Guess I'm a bit edgy today."

He walked quickly out of the dining area and returned to his office.

* * * * *

Slowly, quietly, the work went on. Dr. Petchkovich spent six weeks on Mercury, supervising at first hand the investigation of the area where the machine's antennas were focused. He returned to Titan in high excitement.

"We have definitely proved that there is a disturbance in the interplanetary magnetic field at the focal point of the machine's antennas," he announced to the department heads, when they convened in the conference room to hear his report.

"How strong a disturbance?" Dr. Kulaki asked.

Petchkovich hesitated a moment. "Well, it's only one part in a hundred thousand...."

The excitement died quickly. It was a discovery, yes. But it did not bring them any closer to understanding the machine and its purpose.

* * * * *

Lee was sitting at his desk, staring moodily at a graph that Dr. Childe had left with him: the results of the Orbital Computing Center's extrapolation of the wave patterns broadcast by the machine.

The phone buzzer sounded. Without taking his eyes from the graph, Lee flicked the phone on.

"Are you busy right now?"

He looked up and saw Elaine's face on the screen. "No, not really," he answered. "Come on in."

"I'll be there in a few minutes."

As soon as she came through the door he knew that something was wrong. She was trying too hard not to look concerned.

"What's up?" he asked her.

She shrugged and sat down in front of the desk. "I just thought we might talk for a while."

"In my office?"

"It concerns official business."

"I see."

She looked at the graph. "What's that? Something new?"

_Changing the subject_, he thought to himself. _What's she afraid of?_

Aloud, he answered, "It's Childe's results from the Big Brain ... the machine's wave patterns extrapolated over a million years." He turned the graph around so she could see it better.

Elaine studied it for a moment, then shook her head. "Childe was right, wasn't he? It doesn't make any sense at all. No pattern, no rhyme, no reason."

"I don't know," Lee said. "There's something ... well, something strange about these waves. They don't follow a regular pattern, and yet...."

"What?"

He frowned. "They're just too damned irregular to be really random. That doesn't make much sense, does it? Well, anyway, I've got the feeling that I've seen this pattern--or lack of pattern--before. Somewhere I've seen something that looks a lot like this ... but I can't remember where."

Elaine looked at the graph again, at the multiple curves swinging back and forth across the paper, intertwining in seeming confusion. "It looks like some of the graphs I drew when I was an undergrad."

He laughed. "Maybe that's where I saw it."

There was an awkward silence. Lee got up from his seat and walked around the desk. He pulled up another chair and sat beside Elaine. "Now, what's the trouble?"

"I've been thinking," she said slowly. "I ... I've decided to transfer off Titan."

"Leave? But why?"

"For us, Sid. For both of us. Before we get so wrapped up in each other that we won't be able to break it up without really getting hurt...."

"I don't understand," he said.

She spoke calmly and softly, no tears, no hysterics. She had thought it all out very carefully. "Sid, take a look around you. We're like two castaways on a desert world. We love each other--here and now. But we won't always be here. What happens when we leave Titan? What happens when we're not faced with the loneliness and that ... that _thing_ out there? Suppose we find that we don't really need each other? What then?"

"But I do need you, Elaine. I love you."

"You do now," she answered. "But how long will it last? Sid, I have to get away, at least for a little while. I need a sense of perspective."

"I see," he said, shifting his gaze away from her. "That doesn't leave me much to say, does it? All right, Elaine. Make out a transfer request and I'll sign it."

"Thanks. I ... I hope you understand." She got up and started slowly toward the door.

"I'm not so sure that you understand this yourself," he replied. "But I know this--I don't want to lose you, Elaine. If you haven't worked this out within a month or so after you leave Titan, I'll come looking for you."

She turned and, without a word, went over and kissed him. Then she quickly left the office.

Lee returned to his desk. He sat down and stared at Childe's graph again. After a few minutes, he angrily slapped it in a drawer, slammed the thing shut, and stamped out of the room.

* * * * *

Personal matters were soon buried in the excitement of another discovery, this time an important one. It looked promising.

Kurtzman and Kulaki finally discovered what form of energy the antennas were beaming out.

After years of trial-and-error experimentation, the engineer and electronicist asked Richards and Childe to lend a hand. With a firm theoretical and mathematical background to bolster their work, Kurtzman and Kulaki started out on a process of elimination.

They soon proved that the antennas were not broadcasting any known form of electromagnetic energy, from gamma to long-radio waves. They investigated one possibility after another, turning up a steady succession of negative answers. Negative, but answers all the same. It was time-consuming, but at least they were definitely determining which avenues were blind alleys.

Then Childe started tinkering with a hunch, and showed his paperwork to Richards. The two of them made a few suggestions to Kurtzman and Kulaki. Their problem was that their detection instruments were drawing blanks, when applied to the antennas' output. But the power input to the antennas showed they were working continuously.

Childe showed, mathematically, that their output must be an extremely weak, low-frequency form of energy. Richards agreed, and pointed out that there was only one known form of energy that fulfilled these conditions: gravity.

"Gravity waves?" Kurtzman asked, incredulously, when they told him about it.

Kulaki's mind reacted faster. "Knowing it's gravity waves, on paper, and proving it experimentally are two different things."

But they were up to the test. They had to scavenge equipment from the center's grav screen machinery, and the whole underground community was without its Earth-normal grav field for two and a half days, but when the field was returned to normal (and people stopped hopping and bouncing all through the center) Kurtzman and Kulaki had proved that the antennas were indeed beaming out gravity waves.

_It's all here_, Lee thought, as he read their combined report. _Now we know what the machine is doing. But to what purpose? What influence does this have on Earth?_

Then he put down the report and turned to another bit of paperwork that lay on his desk: Elaine's official request for a transfer. He looked through it automatically. There was a place marked _Justification for Request_. Elaine had typed simply, "Personal." Lee flipped to the last page and signed.

He leaned back in his chair and tried to let his mind float free; forget about her, forget about the buildings out there, forget about everything ... at least for a few moments. Just drift and let your mind wander where it pleases....

* * * * *

The automatic secretary on his desk hummed into life and announced, "Department heads' meeting starts in five minutes."

To hell with the department heads. To hell with Titan. A world of cold and dark and ice. Like Dante's Inferno. Titan is hell. A place where sinning scientists are sent. Their punishment is to stand out in the cold and try to solve the unanswerable. Forever. Stand in the icy darkness and try to understand the unknown. Once in a while you make a discovery that excites you; but when you look again, your discovery is meaningless, you know as little about the real answer as you knew before. The discoveries are just part of the punishment, part of the eternal torment, they just keep you going after the carrot on the stick, but the carrot is always out of reach....

"Department heads' meeting beginning now," the automatic voice said.

Lee cocked an eye at the tiny device. "All right," he said, getting up, "I'm going."

The meeting was strictly routine. The reaction had set in. A week ago they had all been agog with the gravity-waves discovery. Now it had become apparent that the discovery had not opened the door they were trying to get through. _We're like children_, Lee thought, _trying to put together a stereo transceiver from an assembly kit; all the pieces are there, but we can't get them together in the proper way_.

It was a short meeting. As they broke up, Lee saw Richards walk over to Elaine.

"I hear you're leaving us," the young physicist said. "Going Earthside?"

"Yes," Elaine answered. "For a while, at least."

Richards broke into his feline grin again. "Good. I'll be vacationing on Earth in a few weeks. Do you like to ski?"

"I haven't skied in years...."

"There's a lodge I go to in Switzerland. Really fine. And the skiing is marvelous. Even if you don't want to ski, there are mountains to climb ... and glaciers...."