Scott shook his head. «We haven’t seen it all, of course. That would take years and we haven’t years to spend. But we are fairly certain it’s all one machine—a world covered by machinery to the height of twenty miles.»
«And dead machinery,» said Griffith. «Dead because they stopped it. They shut the machinery down and took all their records and all their tools and went away and left an empty shell. Just as they left the city out on Planet Four.»
«Or were driven away,» said Taylor.
«Not driven away,» Griffith declared flatly. «We’ve found no sign of violence anywhere in this entire system. No sign at all of haste. They took their time and packed and they didn’t leave a single thing behind. Not a single clue. Somewhere there must be blueprints. You couldn’t build and you couldn’t run a place like this without some sort of road map. Somewhere there must be records—records that kept tally on the results or the production of this world-machine. But we haven’t found them. And why haven’t we found them? Because they were taken away when the people left.»
«We haven’t looked everywhere,» said Taylor.
«We found repositories where they logically would be kept,» said Griffith, «and they weren’t there. There was nothing there.»
«Some of the cabinets we couldn’t get into. Remember? Those we found the first day on the upper level.»
«There were thousands of other places that we could and did get into,» Griffith declared. «But we didn’t find a tool or a single record or anything to hint anything ever had been there.»
«Those cabinets up on the last level,» said Taylor. «They are the logical place.»
«We shook them,» said Griffith, «and they all were empty.»
«All except one,» said Taylor.
«I’m inclined to believe you’re right, Dunc,» Lawrence said. «This world was abandoned, stripped and left to rust. We should have known that when we found it undefended. They would have had some sort of defenses—automatic probably—and if anyone had wanted to keep us out we’d never gotten in.»
«If we’d come around when this world was operating,» Griffith said, «we’d been blown to dust before we even saw it.»
«They must have been a great race,» Lawrence said. «The economics, alone, of this place is enough to scare you. It must have required the total manpower of the entire race many centuries to build it, and after that many other centuries to keep it operating. That means they spent a minimum of time in getting food, in manufacturing the million things that a race would need to live.»
«They simplified their living and their wants,» said King, «to the bare necessities. That, in itself alone, is a mark of greatness.»
«And they were fanatics,» said Griffith. «Don’t forget that for a moment. Only the sheer, blind, one-track purpose of an obsessed people could do a job like this.»
«But why?» asked Lawrence. «Why did they build the thing?»
No one spoke.
Griffith chuckled thinly. «Not even a guess?» he asked. «Not one educated guess.»
Slowly a man came to his feet from the shadows outside the tiny circle of light cast by the shining stove.
«I have a guess,» he said. «In fact, I think I know.»
«Let’s have it, Scott,» said Lawrence.
The mathematician shook his head. «I have to have some proof. You’d think that I was crazy.»
«There is no proof,» said Lawrence. «There is no proof for anything.»
«I know of a place where there might be proof—just might.»
They sat stock-still—all of them in the tight stove-circle.
«You remember that cabinet,» said Scott. «The one Taylor was talking about just now. The one we shook and something rattled in it. The one we couldn’t open.»
«We still can’t open it.»
«Give me some tools,» said Scott, «and I will get it open.»
«We did that once,» said Lawrence. «We used bull strength and awkwardness to open up the door. We can’t keep on using force to solve this problem. It calls for more than force. It calls for understanding.»
«I think I know,» said Scott, «what it was that rattled.»
Lawrence was silent.
«Look,» said Scott. «If you have something valuable, something you don’t want someone else to steal, what do you do with it?»
«Why,» said Lawrence, «I put it in a safe.»
Silence whistled down the long, dead stretches of the vast machine above them.
«There could be no safer place,» said Scott, «than a cabinet that had no way of being opened. Those cabinets held something that was important. They left one thing, something behind—something that they overlooked.»
Lawrence came slowly to his feet.
«Let’s get the tools,» he said.
It was an oblong card, very ordinary-looking, and it had holes punched in it in irregular patterns.
Scott held it in his hand and his hand was shaking.
«I trust,» said Griffith, bitterly, «that you’re not disappointed.»
«Not at all,» said Scott. «It’s exactly what I thought we’d find.»
They waited.
«Would you mind?» asked Griffith, finally.
«It’s a computation card,» said Scott. «An answer to some problem fed into a differential calculator.»
«But we can’t decipher it,» said Taylor. «We have no way of knowing what it means.»
«We don’t need to decipher it,» Scott told him. «It tells us what we have. This machine—this whole machine, is a calculator.»
«Why, that’s crazy,» Buckley cried. «A mathematical—»
Scott shook his head. «Not mathematical. At least not purely mathematical. It would be something more than that. Logic, more than likely. Maybe even ethics.»
He glanced around at them and read the disbelief that still lingered on their faces.
«It’s there for you to see,» he cried. «The endless repetition, the monotonous sameness of the whole machine. That’s what a calculator is—hundreds or thousands or million or billions of integrators, whatever number you would need to have to solve a stated question.»
«But there would be a limiting factor,» snapped Buckley.
«The human race,» said Scott, «has never paid too much attention to limiting factors. They’ve gone ahead and licked them. Apparently, this race didn’t pay too much attention to them, either.»
«There are some,» said Buckley, stubbornly, «that you just can’t ignore.»
A brain has limitations.
It won’t apply itself.
It forgets too easily, and too many things, and the wrong things—always.
It is prone to worry—and in a brain, that’s partial suicide.
If you push it too hard, it escapes into insanity.
And, finally, it dies. Just when it’s getting good, it dies.
So you build a mechanical brain—a big one that covers an Earth-size planet for the depth of twenty miles—a brain that will tend to business and will not forget and will not go insane, for it cannot know frustration.
Then you up and leave it—and that’s insanity compounded.
«The speculation,» said Griffith, «is wholly without point, for there is no way of knowing what they used it for. You persist in regarding the people of this system as humanoids, when they probably weren’t.»
«They could not have been so different from us,» Lawrence said. «That city out on Four might have been a human city. Here on this planet they faced the same technical problems the human race would face if we tried a similar project, and they carried it out in much the same manner that we would.»
«You overlook,» said Griffith, «the very thing that you, yourself, have pointed out so often—the fanatic drive that made them sacrifice everything to one great idea. A race of humans could not co-operate that closely or that fanatically. Someone would blunder and someone would cut someone else’s throat and then someone would suggest there ought to be an investigation and the pack would be off, howling down the wind.»