“Or it might be fuel,” I said. “Pop a stick into a ship engine that was built to use it and it would keep it going for a year or two.”
Pancake blew the chow horn and we all went in.
After we had eaten, we got to work.
We found a flat rock that looked like granite and above it we set up a tripod made out of poles that we had to walk a mile to cut and then had to carry back. We rigged up a pulley on the tripod and found another rock and tied it to the rope that went up to the pulley. Then we paid out the rope as far as it would go and there we dug a foxhole.
By this time, the sun was setting and we were tuckered out, but we decided to go ahead and make the test and set our minds at rest.
So I took one of the sticks that looked like dynamite and while the others back in the foxhole hauled up the rock tied to the rope, I put the stick on the first rock underneath the second and then I ran like hell. I tumbled into the foxhole and the others let go of the rope and the rock dropped down on the stick.
Nothing happened.
Just to make sure, we pulled up and dropped the rock two or three times more and there was no explosion.
We climbed out of the foxhole and went over to the tripod and rolled the rock off the stick, which wasn’t even dented.
By this time, we were fairly well convinced that the stick couldn’t be set off by concussion, although the test didn’t rule out a dozen other ways it might blow us all up.
That night, we gave the sticks the works. We poured acid on them and the acid just ran off. We tried a cold chisel on them and we ruined two good chisels. We tried a saw and they stripped the teeth clean off.
We wanted Pancake to try to cook one of them, but Pancake refused.
“You aren’t bringing that stuff into my galley,” he said. “You do, you can cook for yourselves from now on. I keep a good clean galley and I try to keep you guys well fed and I ain’t having you mess up the place …”
“All right, Pancake,” I said. “Even with you cooking it, it probably wouldn’t be fit to eat.”
We wound up sitting at a table, looking at the sticks piled the center of it. Doc brought out a bottle and we all had a drink or two. Doc must have been considerably upset to share his liquor with us.
“It stands to reason,” said Frost, “that the sticks are good for something. If the cost of that building is any indication of their value, they’re worth a fortune.”
“Maybe the sticks aren’t the only things in there,” Hutch pointed out. “We just covered part of the first floor. The might be a lot of other stuff in there. And there are all those other floors. How many would you say there were?”
“Lord knows,” said Frost. “When you’re on the ground, you can’t be sure you see to the top of it. It just sort of fades away when you look up at it.”
“You notice what it was built of?” asked Doc.
“Stone,” said Hutch.
“I thought so, too,” said Doc. “But it isn’t. You remember those big apartment mounds we ran into in that insect culture out on Suud?”
We all remembered them, of course. We’d spent days trying to break into them because we had found a handful of beautifully carved jade scattered around the entrance of one of them and we figured there might be a lot of it inside. Stuff like that brings money. Folks back in civilization are nuts about any kind of alien art and that jade sure enough was alien. We’d tried every trick that we could think of and we got nowhere. Breaking into those mounds was like punching a feather pillow. You could dent the surface plenty, but you couldn’t break it because the strength of the material built up as pressure compressed the atoms. The harder you hit, the tougher it became. It was the kind of building material that would last forever and never need repair and those insects must have known they were safe from us, for they went about their business and never noticed us. That’s what made it so infuriating.
And material like that, I realized, would be just the ticket for a structure like the silo. You could build as big or as high as you had a mind to; the more pressure you put on the lower structure, the stronger it would be.
“It means,” I said, “that the building out there could be much older than it seems to be. It could be a million years or older.”
“If it’s that old,” said Hutch, “it could really be packed. You can store away a lot of loot in a million years.”
Doc and Frost drifted off to bed and Hutch and I sat there alone, looking at the sticks.
I got to thinking about some of the things that Doc was always saying, about how we were just a bunch of cut-throats, and I wondered if he might be right. But think on it as hard and as honest as I could, I couldn’t buy it.
On every expanding frontier, in all of history, there had been three kinds of men who went ahead and marked out the trails for other men to follow—the traders and the missionaries and the hunters.
We were the hunters in this case, hunting not for gold or slaves or furs, but for whatever we could find. Sometimes we came back with empty hands and sometimes we made a haul. Usually, in the long run, we evened out so we made nothing more than wages. But we kept on going out, hoping for that lucky break that would make us billionaires.
It hadn’t happened yet, and perhaps it never would. But someday it might. We touched the ghostly edge of hope just often enough to keep us thinking that it would. Although, I admitted to myself, perhaps we’d have kept going out even if there’d been no hope at all. Seeking for the unknown gets into your blood.
When you came right down to it, we probably didn’t do a bit more harm than the traders or the missionaries. What we took, we took; we didn’t settle down and change or destroy the civilizations of people we pretended we were helping.
I said as much to Hutch. He agreed with me.
The missionaries are the worst,” he said. “I wouldn’t be a missionary no matter what they paid me.”
We weren’t doing any good just sitting there, so I got up to start for bed.
“Maybe tomorrow we’ll find something else,” I said.
Hutch yawned. “I sure hope we do. We been wasting our time on these sticks of dynamite.”
He picked them up and on our way up to bed, he heaved them out the port.
The next day, we did find something else.
We went much deeper into the silo than we had been before, following the corridors for what must have been two miles or more.
We came to a big room that probably covered ten or fifteen acres and it was filled from wall to wall with rows of machines, all of them alike.
They weren’t much to look at. They resembled to some extent a rather ornate washing machine, with a bucket seat attached and a dome on top. They weren’t bolted down and you could push them around and when we tipped one of them up to look for hidden wheels, we found instead a pair of runners fixed on a swivel so they’d track in any direction that one pushed. The runners were made of metal that was greasy to the touch, but when you rubbed your fingers on them, no grease came off them.
There was no power connection.
“Maybe it’s a self-powered unit,” said Frost. “Come to think of it, I haven’t noticed any power outlets in the entire building.”
We hunted for some place where we could turn on the power and there wasn’t any place. That whole machine was the smoothest, slickest hunk of metal you ever saw. We looked for a way to get into its innards, so we could have a look at them, but there wasn’t any way. The jacket that covered the works seemed to be one solid piece without an apparent seam or a sign of a bolt or rivet.
The dome looked as though it ought to come off and we tried to get it off, but it remained stubbornly in place.