«You’re convinced they came from somewhere else, Dunc?»
Griffith nodded. «They must have.»
«From Planet Three, perhaps.»
«We can’t know that. Not yet.»
«Maybe never,» Lawrence said.
He spat out the blade of grass.
«This system,» he said, «is like a pulp whodunit. Everywhere you turn you stumble on a clue and every clue is haywire. Too many mysteries, Dunc. This city here, the metal planet, the looted planets—it’s just too much to swallow. It would be our luck to stumble on a place like this.»
«I have a feeling there’s a tie between it all,» said Griffith.
Lawrence grunted.
«It’s a sense of history,» Griffith said. «A feeling for the fitness of things. Given time, all historians acquire it.»
A footstep crunched behind them and they came to their feet, turning toward the sound.
It was Doyle, the radio man, hurrying toward them from the lifeboat camp.
«Sir,» he said to Lawrence, «I just had Taylor out on Planet Three. He asks if you won’t come. It seems they’ve found a door.»
«A door!» said Lawrence. «A door into the planet. What did they find inside?»
«He didn’t say, sir.»
«He didn’t say!»
«No. You see, sir, they can’t budge the door. There’s no way to open it.»
The door wasn’t much to look at.
There were twelve holes in the planet’s surface, grouped in four groups of three each, as if they might be handholds for a thing that had three fingers.
And that was all. You could not tell where the door began nor where it ended.
«There is a crack,» said Taylor, «but you can just barely see it with a glass. Even under magnification, it’s no more than a hairline. The door’s machined so perfectly that it’s practically one piece with the surface. For a long time we didn’t even know it was a door. We sat around and wondered what the holes were for.
«Scott found it. Just skating around and saw those holes. You could have looked until your eyes fell out and you’d never found it except by accident.»
«And there’s no way to open it?» asked Lawrence.
«None that we have found. We tried lifting it, sticking our fingers in the holes and heaving. You might as well have tried to lift the planet. And, anyhow, you can’t get much purchase here. Can’t keep your feet under you.
This stuff’s so slick you can scarcely walk on it. You don’t walk, in fact; you skate. I’d hate to think what would happen if some of the boys got to horsing around and someone gave someone else a shove. It would take us a week to run them down.»
«I know,» said Lawrence. «I put the lifeboat down as easy as I could and we skidded forty miles or more.»
Taylor chuckled. «I’ve got the big job stuck on with all the magnetics that we have and even then she wabbles if you lean on her. Ice is positively rough alongside this stuff.»
«About this door,» said Lawrence. «It occurred to you it might be a combination?»
Taylor nodded. «Sure, we thought of that. And if it is we haven’t got a ghost. Take the element of chance, multiply it by the unpredictability of an alien mind.»
«You checked?»
«We did,» said Taylor. «We stuck a camera tentacle down into those holes and we took all kinds of shots. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Eight inches deep or so. Wider at the bottom than the top. But smooth. No bumps. No ridges. No keyholes.
«We managed to saw out a hunk of metal so that we could test it. Used up three blades getting it out. Basically, it’s steel, but it’s alloyed with something Mueller can’t tie a tag onto and the molecular structure has him going nuts.»
«Stumped,» said Lawrence.
«Yeah. I skated the ship over to the door and we hooked up a derrick and heaved with everything we had. The ship swung like a pendulum and the door stayed put.»
«We might look for other doors,» said Lawrence, whistling past the graveyard. «They might not be all alike.»
«We looked,» said Taylor. «Crazy as it sounds, we did. Each man-jack of us, creeping on our shinbones. We mapped the area off in sectors and crawled on our hands and knees for miles, squinting and peering. We almost put our eyes out, what with the sun glaring from the metal and our images staring back at us as if we were crawling on a mirror.»
«Come to think of it,» said Lawrence, «they probably wouldn’t have built doors very close together. Every hundred miles, say—or maybe every thousand.»
«You’re right,» said Taylor. «It might be a thousand.»
«There’s just one thing to do,» Lawrence told him.
«Yeah, I know,» said Taylor, «but I hate to do it. We got a problem here. Something we should work out. And if we blast we’ve failed at the first equation.»
Lawrence stirred uneasily. «I know how you feel,» he said. «If they beat us on the first move, we haven’t got a chance at the second or the third.»
«We can’t just sit around,» said Taylor.
«No,» said Lawrence. «No, I guess we can’t.»
«I hope it works,» said Taylor.
It did.
The blast ripped the door free and hurled it into space. It came down a mile away and rolled like a crazy, jagged wheel across the ice-slick surface.
Half an acre or so of the surface itself peeled up and back and hung twisted like a question mark that sparkled in the sun.
The unmanned lifeboat, clamped to the metal by its weak magnetics, like a half-licked stamp, came unstuck when the blast let loose. It danced a heavy-footed skaters’ waltz for a good twelve miles before it came to rest.
The metal of the surface was a mere fourteen inches thick, a paper-thin covering when one considered that the sphere was the size of Earth.
A metal ramp, its upper ten feet twisted and smashed by the explosive force, wound down into the interior like a circular staircase.
Nothing came out of the hole. No sound or light or smell.
Seven men went down the ramp to see what they could find. The others waited topside, sweating them out.
Take a trillion sets of tinker toys.
Turn loose a billion kids.
Give them all the time they need and don’t tell them what to do.
If some of them are non-human, that makes it better yet.
Then take a million years to figure out what happened.
A million years, mister, won’t be long enough. You’ll never do it—not in a million years.
It was machinery, of course. It could be nothing else.
But it was tinker toy machinery, something you’d expect a kid to throw together from sheer exuberance the morning after he got a real expensive set.
There were shafts and spools and disks and banks of shining crystal cubes that might have been tubes, although one couldn’t quite be sure.
There were cubic miles of it and it glistened like a silvery Christmas tree in the fanning of the helmet lights, as if it had been polished no more than an hour before. But when Lawrence leaned over the side of the ramp and ran gloved fingers along a shining shaft, the fingers came back dusty—with a dust as fine as flour.
They had come down, the seven of them, twisting along the ramp until they had grown dizzy and always there was the machinery, stretching away on every side as far as the lights could penetrate the darkness.
Machinery that was motionless and still—and it seemed, for no reason that anyone could voice, that it had been still for many countless ages.
And machinery that was the same, repeating over and over again the senseless array of shafts and spools and disks and the banks of shining crystal cubes.
Finally the ramp had ended on a landing and the landing ran on every side as far as the lights could reach, with the spidery machinery far above them for a roof, and furniture, or what seemed to be furniture, arranged upon the metal floor.