He went back down the walk. Abraham and Gideon went into other houses. All of them were empty.
“It may be this village only,” suggested Gideon. “The rest may be quite normal.”
But Gideon was wrong.
Back at the floater, they got in touch with base.
“I can’t understand it,” said Hezekiah, “I’ve had the same report from four other teams. I was about to call you, sir.”
“You’d better get out every floater that you can,” said Sheridan. “Check all the villages around. And keep a lookout for the people. They may be somewhere in the country. There’s a possibility they’re at a harvest festival.”
“If they’re at a festival, sir,” asked Hezekiah, “why did they take their belongings? You don’t take along your furniture when you attend a festival.”
“I know,” said Sheridan. “You put your finger on it. Get the boys out, will you?’
“There’s just a possibility,” Gideon offered, “that they are changing villages. Maybe there’s a tribal law that says they have to build a new village every so often. It might have its roots in an ancient sanitation law that the camp must be moved at stated intervals.”
“It could be that,” Sheridan said wearily. “We’ll have to wait and see.”
Abraham thumbed a fist toward the barn.
Sheridan hesitated, then threw caution to the winds.
“Go ahead,” he said.
Gideon stalked up the ramp and reached the door. He put out a hand and grasped one of the planks nailed across the door. He wrenched and there was an anguished shriek of tortured nails ripping from the wood and the board came free. Another plank came off and then another one and Gideon put his shoulder to the door and half of it swung open.
Inside, in the dimness of the barn, was the dull, massive shine of metal – a vast machine sitting on the driveway floor.
Sheridan stiffened with a cold, hollow sense of terror.
It was wrong, he thought. There could be no machine.
The Garsonians had no business having a machine. Their culture was entirely non-mechanical. The best they had achieved so far had been the hoe and wheel, and even yet they had not been able to put the hoe and wheel together to make themselves a plow.
They had had no machine when the second expedition left some fifteen years ago, and in those fifteen years they could not have spanned the gap. In those fifteen years, from all surface indications, they had not advanced an inch.
And yet the machine stood in the driveway of the barn.
It was a fair-sized cylinder, set on end and with a door in one side of it. The upper end of it terminated in a dome-shaped cap. Except for the door, it resembled very much a huge and snub-nosed bullet.
Interference, thought Sheridan. There had been someone here between the time the second expedition left and the third one had arrived.
“Gideon,” he said.
“What is it, Steve?”
“Go back to base and bring the transmog chest. Tell Hezekiah to get my tent and all the other stuff over here as soon as he is able. Call some of the boys off reconnaissance. We have work to do.”
There had been someone here, he thought – and most certainly there had. A very urbane creature who sat beneath a tree beside a spread-out picnic cloth, swigging at his jug and talking for three solid hours without saying anything at all!
V
The messenger from Central Trading brought his small ship down to one side of the village square, not far from where Sheridan’s tent, was pitched. He slid back the visi-dome and climbed out of his seat.
He stood for a moment, shining in the sun, during which be straightened his SPECIAL COURIER badge, which had become askew upon his metal chest. Then he walked deliberately toward the barn, heading for Sheridan, who sat upon the ramp.
“You are Sheridan?” he asked.
Sheridan nodded, looking him over. He was a splendid thing.
“I had trouble finding you. Your base seems to be deserted.”
“We ran into some difficulty,” Sheridan said quietly.
“Not too serious, I trust I see your cargo is untouched.”
“Let me put it this way – we haven’t been bored.”
“I see,” the robot said, disappointed that an explanation was not immediately forthcoming. “My name is Tobias and I have a message for you.”
“I’m listening.”
Sometimes, Sheridan told himself, these headquarters robots needed taking down a peg or two.
“It is a verbal message. I can assure you that I am thoroughly briefed. I can answer any questions you may wish to ask.”
“Please,” said Sheridan. “The message first.”
“Central Trading wishes to inform you that they have been offered the drug calenthropodensia in virtually unlimited supply by a firm which describes itself as Galactic Enterprises. We would like to know if you can shed any light upon the matter.”
“Galactic Enterprises,” said Sheridan. “I’ve never heard of them.”
“Neither has Central Trading. I don’t mind telling you that we’re considerably upset.”
“I should imagine you would be.”
Tobias squared his shoulders. “I have been instructed to point out to you that you were sent to Garson IV to obtain a cargo of podars, from which this drug is made, and that the assignment, in view of the preliminary work already done upon the planet, should not have been so difficult that -”
“Now, now,” cautioned Sheridan. “Let us keep our shirts on. If it will quiet your conscience any, you may consider for the record that I have accepted the bawling out you’re supposed to give me.”
“But you -”
“I assume,” said Sheridan, “that Galactic Enterprises is quoting a good stiff price on this drug of theirs.”
“It’s highway robbery. What Central Trading has sent me to find out -”
“Is whether I am going to bring in a cargo of podars. At the moment, I can’t tell you.”
“But I must take back my report!”
“Not right now, you aren’t. I won’t be able to make a report to you for several days at least. You’ll have to wait.”
“But my instructions are -”
“Suit yourself,” Sheridan said sharply. “Wait for it or go back without it. I don’t give a damn which you do.”
He got up from the ramp and walked into the barn.
The robots, he saw, had finally pried or otherwise dislodged the cap from the big machine and had it on the side on the driveway floor, tilted to reveal the innards of it.
“Steve,” said Abraham bitterly, “take a look at it.”
Sheridan took a look. The inside of the cap was a mass of fused metal.
“There were some working parts in there,” said Gideon, “but they have been destroyed.”
Sheridan scratched his bead. “Deliberately? A self-destruction relay?”
Abraham nodded. “They apparently were all finished with it. If we hadn’t been here, I suppose they would have carted this machine and the rest of them back home, wherever that may be. But they couldn’t take a chance of one of them falling in our hands. So they pressed the button or whatever they had to do and the entire works went pouf.”
“But there are other machines. Apparently one in every barn.”
“Probably just the same as this,” said Lemuel, rising from his knees beside the cap.
“What’s your guess?” asked Sheridan.
“A matter transference machine, a teleporter, whatever you want to call it,” Abraham told him. “Not deduced, of course, from anything in the machine itself, but from the circumstances. Look at this barn. There’s not a podar in it. Those podars went somewhere. This picnicking friend of yours -”
“They call themselves,” said Sheridan, “Galactic Enterprises. A messenger just arrived. He says they offered Central Trading a deal on the podar drug.”
“And now Central Trading,” Abraham supplied, “enormously embarrassed and financially outraged, will pin the blame on us because we’ve delivered not a podar.”
“I have no doubt of it,” said Sheridan. “It all depends upon whether or not we can locate these native friends of ours.”
“I would think that most unlikely,” Gideon said. “Our reconnaissance showed all the villages empty throughout the entire planet. Do you suppose they might have left in these machines? If they’d transport podars, they’d probably transport people.”
“Perhaps,” said Lemuel, making a feeble joke, “everything that begins with the letter p.”
“What are the chances of finding how they work?” asked Sheridan. “This is something that Central could make a lot of use of.”
Abraham shook his head. “I can’t tell you, Steve. Out of all these machines on the planet, which amounts to one in every barn, there is a certain mathematical chance that we might find one that was not destroyed.”
“But even if we did,” said Gideon, “there is an excellent chance that it would immediately destroy itself if we tried to tamper with it.”
“And if we don’t find one that is not destroyed?”