The chain was only a part of it. There were a lot of other doodads and each one of them was the sort of thing to snatch your breath away.
Ben shrugged at the question in my eyes. «Don’t ask me. It’s only some stuff we picked up. The caves are full of it. Stuff like this and a whole lot more. We just picked up one thing here and another there—whatever was pocket-size and happened to catch our eye. Trinkets. Samples. I don’t know.»
Like jackdaws, I thought. Or pack-rats. Grabbing a thing that shone or had a certain shape or a certain texture—taking it because it was pretty, not knowing what its use might be or if, in fact, it had any use at all.
«Those caves may have been storehouses,» said Ben. «They’re jammed with all sorts of things—not much of any one thing, apparently. All different, as if these aliens had set up a trading post and had their merchandise on display. There seems to be a sort of curtain in front of each of the caves. You can see a shimmer and hear a hissing, but you can’t feel a thing when you step through it. And behind that curtain, all the junk they left is as clean and bright and new as the day they left it.»
I looked at the articles spread on the blanket. It was hard to keep your hands off them, for they felt good in your hands and were pleasing to the eye and one seemed to get a sense of warmth and richness just by handling them.
«Something happened to those folks,» said Jimmy. «They knew it was going to happen, so they took all this stuff and laid it out—all the many things they had made, all the things they’d used and loved. Because, you see, that way there always was a chance someone might come along someday and find it, so they and the culture they had fashioned would not be entirely lost.»
It was exactly the kind of silly, sentimental drivel you could expect from a glassy-eyed romantic like Jimmy.
But for whatever reason the artifacts of that vanished race had gotten in the caves, we were the ones who’d found them and here once again they’d run into a dead end. Even if we had been equipped to puzzle out their use, even if we had been able to ferret out the basic principles of that long-dead culture, it still would be a useless business. We were not going anywhere; we wouldn’t be passing on the knowledge. We’d live out our lives here on this planet, and when the last of us had died, the ancient silence and the old uncaring would close down once again.
We weren’t going anywhere and neither was Lulu. It was a double dead end.
It was too bad, I thought, for Earth could use the knowledge and the insight that could be wrested from those caves and from the mounds. And not more than a hundred feet from where we sat lay the very tool that Earth had spent twenty years in building to dig out that specific kind of knowledge, should Man ever happen on it.
«It must be terrible,» said Jimmy, «to realize that all the things and all the knowledge that you ever had, all the trying, all the praying, all the dreams and hopes, will be wiped out forever. That all of you and your way of life and your understanding of that life will simply disappear and no one will ever know.»
«You said it, kid,» I chipped in.
He stared at me with haunted, stricken eyes. «That may be why they did it.»
Watching him, the tenseness of him, the suffering in his face, I caught a glimpse of why he was a poet—why he had to be a poet. But even so, he still was an utter creep.
«Earth has to know about this,» Ben said flatly.
«Sure,» I agreed. «I’ll run right over and let them know.»
«Always the smart guy,» Ben growled at me. «When are you going to cut out being bright and get down to business?»
«Like busting Lulu open, I suppose.»
«That’s right. We have to get back somehow and Lulu’s the only way to get there.»
«It might surprise you, Buster, but I thought of all that before you. I went out today and looked Lulu over. If you can figure how to bust into her, you’ve a better brain than I have.»
«Tools,» said Ben. «If we only had—»
«We have. An ax without a handle, a hammer and a saw. A small pinch-bar, a plane, a draw-shave—»
«We might make some tools.»
«Find the ore and smelt it and—»
«I was thinking of those caves,» said Ben. «There might be tools in there.»
I wasn’t even interested. I knew it was impossible.
«We might find some explosive,» Ben went on. «We might—»
«Look,» I said, «what do you want to do—open Lulu up or blow her to bits? Anyhow, I don’t think you can do a thing about it. Lulu is a self-maintaining robot, or have you forgotten? Bore a hole in her and she’ll grow it shut. Go monkeying around too much and she’ll grow a club and clout you on the head.»
Ben’s eyes blazed with fury and frustration. «Earth has to know! You understand that, don’t you? Earth has got to know!»
«Sure,» I said. «Absolutely.»
In the morning, I thought, he’d come to his senses, see how impossible it was. And that was important. Before we began to lay any plans, it was necessary that we realize what we were up against. That way, you conserve a lot of energy and miss a lot of lumps.
But, come morning, he still had that crazy light of frustration in his eyes and he was filled with a determination that was based on nothing more than downright desperation.
After breakfast, Jimmy said he wasn’t going with us.
«For God’s sake, why not?» demanded Ben.
«I’m way behind on my writing,» Jimmy told him, deadpan. «I’m still working on that saga.»
Ben wanted to argue with him, but I cut him off disgustedly.
«Let us go,» I said. «He’s no use, anyhow.»
Which was the solemn truth.
So the two of us went out to the caves. It was the first time I had seen them and they were something to see. There were a dozen of them and all of them were crammed. I got dizzy just walking up and down, looking at all the gadgets and the thingumbobs and dofunnies, not knowing, of course, what any of them were. It was maddening enough just to look at them; it was plain torture trying to figure out what use they might be put to. But Ben was plain hell-bent on trying to figure something out because he’d picked up the stubborn conviction that we could find a gadget that would help us get the best of Lulu.
We worked all day and I was dog-tired at the end of it. Not once in the entire day had we found anything that made any sense at all. I wonder if you can imagine how it felt to stand there, surrounded by all those devices, knowing there were things within your reach that, rightly used, could open up entirely new avenues for human thoughts and technique and imagination. And yet you stood there powerless—an alien illiterate.
But there was no stopping Ben. We went out again the next day and the day after and we kept on going out. On the second day, we found a dojigger that was just fine for opening cans, although I’m fairly sure that was not at all what it was designed for. And on the following day, we finally puzzled out how another piece of equipment could be used for digging slanted postholes and, I ask you, who in their right mind would be wanting slanted postholes?
We got nowhere, but we kept on going out and I sensed that Ben had no more hope than I had, but that he still kept at it because it was the one remaining fingerhold he had on sanity.
I don’t think that for one moment he considered the source or significance of that heritage we’d found. To him, it became no more than a junkyard through which we searched frantically to find one unrecognizable piece of scrap that we might improvise into something that would serve our purpose.