They stood together in a tight-packed group and their lights stabbed out defiantly and they were strangely quiet in the darkness and the silence and the ghost of another time and people.
«An office,» said Duncan Griffith, finally.
«Or a control room,» said Ted Buckley, the mechanical engineer.
«It might be their living quarters,» Taylor said.
«A machine shop, perhaps,» suggested Jack Scott, the mathematician.
«Have you gentlemen considered,» asked Herbert Anson, the geologist, «that it might be none of these? It might be something which is not allied with anything we know.»
«All we can do,» said Spencer King, the archaeologist, «is to translate it as best we can in the terms we know. My guess is that it could be a library.»
Lawrence thought: There were seven blind men and they chanced to come upon an elephant.
He said: «Let’s look. If we don’t look, we’ll never know.»
They looked.
And still they didn’t know.
Take a filing cabinet now. It’s a handy thing to have.
You take some space and you wrap some steel around it and you have your storage space. You put in sliding drawers and you put nice, neat folders in the drawers and you label the folders and arrange them alphabetically. Then when you want a certain paper you almost always find it.
Two things are basic—space and something to enclose it, to define it from other space so that you can locate your designated storage space at a moment’s notice.
The drawers and the alphabetically filed folders are refinements. They subdivide the space so you can put your fingers instantly on any required sector of it.
That’s the advantage of a filing cabinet over just heaving everything you want to save into a certain corner of the room.
But suppose someone built a filing cabinet without any drawers.
«Hey,» said Buckley, «this thing is light. Someone give me a hand.»
Scott stepped forward quickly and between them they lifted the cabinet off the floor and shook it. Something rattled inside of it.
They put it down again.
«There’s something in there,» said Buckley, breathlessly.
«Yes,» said King. «A receptacle. No doubt of that. And there’s something in it.»
«Something that rattles,» said Buckley.
«Seems to me,» declared Scott, «it was more like a rustle than a rattle.»
«It won’t do us much good,» said Taylor, «if we can’t get at it. You can’t tell much about it by just listening to it while you fellows shake it.»
«That’s easy,» said Griffith. «It’s fourth dimensional. You say the magic words and reach around a corner somewhere and fish out what you want.»
Lawrence shook his head. «Cut out the humor, Dunc. This is serious business. Any of you got an idea how the thing is made?»
«It couldn’t be made,» wailed Buckley. «It simply wasn’t made. You can’t take a sheet of metal and make a cube of it and not have any seams.»
«Remember the door up on the surface,» Anson reminded him. «We couldn’t see anything there, either, until we got a magnifier on it. That cabinet opens somehow. Someone or something opened it at one time—to put in whatever rattled when you shook it.»
«And they wouldn’t put something in there,» said Scott, «if there was no way to get it out.»
«Maybe,» said Griffith, «it was something they wanted to get rid of.»
«We could rip it open,» said King. «Get a torch.»
Lawrence stopped him. «We’ve done that once already. We had to blast the door.»
«There’s half a mile of those cabinets stretched out here,» said Buckley.
«All standing in a row. Let’s shake some more of them.»
They shook a dozen more.
There wasn’t any rattle.
There was nothing in them.
«Cleaned out,» said Buckley, sadly.
«Let’s get out of here,» said Anson. «This place gives me the creeps. Let’s go back to the ship and sit down and talk it over. We’ll go looney batting out our brains down here. Take those control panels over there.»
«Maybe they aren’t control panels,» Griffith reminded him. «We must be careful not to jump at what seem obvious conclusions.»
Buckley snapped up the argument. «Whether they are or not,» he said, «they must have some functional purpose. Control panels fill the bill better than anything I can think of at the moment.»
«But they have no markings,» Taylor broke in. «A control setup would have dials or lights or something you could see.»
«Not necessarily something that a human could see,» said Buckley. «To some other race we might qualify no better than stone blind.»
«I have a horrible feeling,» said Lawrence, «that we are getting nowhere.»
«We took a licking on the door,» said Taylor. «And we’ve taken a licking here.»
King said: «We’ll have to evolve some orderly plan of exploration. We must map it out. Take first things first.»
Lawrence nodded. «We’ll leave a few men on the surface and the rest of us will come down here and set up camp. We’ll work in groups and we’ll cover the situation as swiftly as we can—the general situation. After that we can fill in the details.»
«First things first,» said Taylor. «What comes first?»
«I wouldn’t know,» said Lawrence. «What ideas have the rest of you?»
«Let’s find out what we have,» suggested King. «A planet or a planetary machine.»
«We’ll have to find more ramps,» said Taylor. «There must be other ramps.»
Scott spoke up. «We should try to find out how extensive this machinery is. How much space it covers.»
«And find out if the machine’s running,» said Buckley.
«What we saw wasn’t,» Lawrence told him.
«What we saw,» Buckley declared, «may be no more than one corner of a vast machine. All of it might not work at once. Once in a thousand years or so a certain part of the machine might be used and then only for a few minutes or maybe even seconds. Then it might be idle for another thousand years. But it would have to be there for the once in a thousand years that it might be needed.»
«Somehow,» said Griffith, «we should try to make at least an educated guess what the machinery’s for. What it does. What it produces.»
«But keep your hands off it,» warned Buckley. «No pushing this and pulling that just to see what happens. Lord knows what it might do. Just keep your big paws off it until you know what you are doing.»
It was a planet, all right.
They found the planetary surface—twenty miles below. Twenty miles through the twisting maze of shining, dead machinery.
There was air, almost as good as Earth’s, and they established camp on the lower levels, glad to get rid of space gear and live as normal beings.
But there was no light, and there was no life. Not even an insect, not one crawling, creeping thing.
Although life had once been there.
The ruined cities told the story of that life. A primitive culture, King had said. A culture not much better than Twentieth Century Earth.
Duncan Griffith squatted beside the small atomic stove, hands spread out to its welcome glow.
«They moved to Planet Four,» he was saying smugly. «They didn’t have the room to live here, so they went out there and camped.»
«And mined two other planets,» Taylor said, «to get the ore they needed.»
Lawrence hunched forward, dejectedly. «What bothers me,» he said, «is the drive behind this thing—the sheer, unreasoning urge, the spirit that would drive an entire race from their home to another planet, that would enable them to spend centuries to turn their own planet into one vast machine.»
He turned his head to Scott. «There isn’t much doubt, is there,» he asked, «that it’s nothing but machinery?»