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.”