“Someone’s singing,” Mary whispered.
“We’ll have to go and see,” he said. He didn’t want to go on. If he had done what he wanted, he would have turned about and fled. For while the singing (if it was singing) sounded human, there still was about the whole experience an eerie alienness that set his teeth on edge.
The second flight ended on yet another landing and as he went down the third flight, the singing gained some strength, while downward and ahead of him he saw softly glowing lights — cat eyes staring at him out of darkness. Reaching the foot of the stairs, he moved out a few steps on a metal walkway and Mary came to stand beside him.
“Machinery,” she said. “Or a machine.”
“It’s hard to tell,” he said. “An installation of some sort.”
“And operating,” she said. “Do you realize this is the first live thing we’ve found.”
The machinery, Lansing saw, was not massive. Not overpowering. The many glowing eyes scattered all through it furnished enough light so that the machinery could be seen — guessed rather than seen, he told himself, for the light from the eyes was faint. The whole assembly was a spindly, spidery mass. It seemed to have no moving parts. And it was singing to itself.
When he trained his light ahead, he saw that the metal walkway on which they stood ran straight ahead, forming a narrow path between two conglomerations of machinery. The path ran a long way, well beyond the strength of the flashlight’s beam, and as far as he could see, the spindly forms flanked it on either side.
Walking slowly and carefully, he started down the walkway, with Mary close beside him. When they reached the beginning of the machinery they halted and he trained the light on the nearest segments of the installation.
The machines were not only spindly; they were delicate. The polished metal, if it was metal, gleamed brightly; there was no dust or grease upon it. It didn’t, in fact, look like any machinery he had ever seen. It looked like a piece of metal sculpture that a slap-happy artist had assembled with a pair of pliers, chortling all the while. But, despite the lack of moving parts, despite any indication of actual operation, it seemed to be brimming with a sense of life and purpose. And all the time it sang, crooning to itself.
“It’s strange,” said Mary. “As an engineer, I should have some inkling as to what this could be. But there’s not a single component that I recognize.”
“No notion what it’s doing?”
“None at all,” she said.
“We’ve been calling it machinery.”
“For lack of a better term,” she said.
Lansing found his body unconsciously responding to the rhythm of the song the machines were singing, as if his body, all of his body, was responding to its beat. It seeped into him, formed a background for his life.
It’s taking over, he thought, but the thought came from very far away and did not seem to be a part of him, as if another person might be thinking it. He recognized the danger of being taken over and tried to call out a warning to Mary, but the warning took some little time and before he could cry out, he was another kind of life.
He was light-years tall and each step he took spanned many trillion miles. He loomed in the universe, his body wispy and tenuous, a body that flashed like spangles in the glare of flaring suns that swirled and spun about him. Planets were no more than grating gravel underneath his feet. When a black hole blocked his way, he kicked it to one side. He put out his hand to pluck half a dozen quasars and strung them on a strand of starlight to hang about his neck.
He climbed a hill made of piled-up stars. The hill was high and steep and required a lot of scrabbling to get up it; in the process of climbing he dislodged a number of the stars that made up the hill and, once dislodged, they went clattering down, rolling and bouncing to the bottom of the hill, except that it had no bottom.
He reached the summit and stood upon it, straddle-legged to hold himself secure, and all the universe lay spread out before him, to its farthest edge. He raised a fist and shook it, bellowing out a challenge to eternity, and the echoes of his shouting came back to him from infinity’s farthest curve.
From where he stood he saw the end of time and space and remembered how once he had wondered what lay beyond the end of time and space. Now he saw and recoiled upon himself. He lost his footing and went tumbling down the hill, and when he reached the bottom (but not the bottom, for there was no bottom), he lay spread-eagled in a drift of interstellar dust and gas that surged all about him and tossed him mercilessly, as if he were in the clutches of an angry sea.
Remembering what he had seen beyond the end of time and space, he groaned. And groaning, he came back to where he was, standing on a metal walkway, flanked by spidery machines that were crooning to themselves.
Mary had him by the arm and was tugging to get him turned around. Stupidly, not too sure as yet of where he was, he went along with the tugging and got turned around. The lighted torch, he saw, was lying on the floor and he stooped to pick it up. He did pick it up, but in doing so almost fell upon his face. Mary tugged at him again. “We can stop now. How are you?”
“I’ll be all right,” he said. “I seem to be confused. I saw the universe—”
“So that is what you saw.”
“You mean that you saw something, too.”
“When I came back,” she said, “you were standing frozen. At first I was afraid to touch you. I thought that you might break into a million pieces.”
“Let’s sit down,” said Lansing. “For a minute, let’s sit down.”
“There’s no place for us to sit.”
“On the floor,” he said. “We can sit on the floor.”
They sat upon the hard surface of the walkway, facing one another.
“So now we know,” she said.
“Know what?” He shook his head as if to clear his mind. The haze was clearing slightly, but he was still muddled.
“Know what the machines are supposed to do. Edward, we can’t tell the Brigadier about this place. He’d go hog-wild.”
“We’ve got to tell him,” Lansing said. “We made a deal with him. We must be fair with him.”
“Once again,” she said, “something we don’t know how to handle. Like the doors.”
He looked back over his shoulder at the spidery machines. He could see them more clearly now. The fuzziness was going.
“You said you saw the universe. What do you mean by that?”
“Mary, Mary, Mary! Will you, please, wait a minute.”
“It hit you hard,” she said.
“I think perhaps it did.”
“I came out of it easy.”
“That’s your strong sense of self-perception.”
“Don’t joke,” she said. “Don’t try to make a joke of it. This is serious.”
“I know that. I’m sorry. You want to know. I’ll try to tell you. I visited the universe. I was tall and big. I had a body of shining starlight, maybe a puff of comet tail. It was like a dream, but not really like a dream. I was there. It was all ridiculous, but I was there. I climbed a hill made up of shoveled-together stars and, standing on top of it, I saw the universe, all of the universe, out to the end of time and space, where time and space pinched out. I saw what lay beyond time/space, and I don’t now remember exactly what I saw. Chaos. Maybe that’s the name for it. A churning nothingness, a raging, angry nothingness. I’d never thought of nothing as a raging anger. That’s what shook me. When I say raging I don’t mean hot. It was cold. Not just cold by temperature, for there was no way to know the temperature. Cold in a deadly, venomous way. Uncaring. Worse than uncaring. Angry against everything that exists or ever existed. Raging to get at anything that is not nothingness and put an end to it.”