She made a sympathetic motion with her hands. “I shouldn’t have asked you. I shouldn’t have insisted. I’m sorry I forced you into telling me. It wasn’t easy for you.”
“I wanted to tell you. I would have told you, but maybe not right yet. But now it’s over with and I feel easier about it. Telling you, I gave some of it away. What they did to me — to us. You said you saw it, too.”
“Not what you saw. Not as devastating. I’m sure the machine did it to us. It takes your mind, your ego, the life force, the personality, and rips it out of you and sends it somewhere else. You said it was like a dream and still it was not a dream. I think it’s actuality, not a dream. A machine would not have a dream concept. If it were possible for someone to go where you went, in all actuality, of course, they’d see what you saw. There were absurdities, of course…”
“I kicked a black hole out of the path. I climbed a starry mountain. Planets crunched like gravel when I stepped on them.”
“Those are the absurdities, Edward. The reaction, rebellion of your mind. A defense mechanism meant to keep you sane. The laughter element. The big guffaw to show you didn’t mind.”
“You mean you think I was really there? That my mind was really there?”
“Look,” she said, “we have to face it. The people who lived in this city were sophisticated scientists, uncanny technicians. They had to be to produce this apparatus and the doors and the Brigadier’s graphics tank. Their minds, their aims, canted in a different direction than yours or mine. They performed chores, sought out answers we’d never think about. Absurd as they may be, the doors are understandable. But what we have here is not understandable. In certain ways, it may be scientific heresy.”
“If you talk that way long enough, you’ll talk me into it.”
“We have to face facts. We’re dealing with a kind of world we do not understand. We’re dealing with what is left of it. God knows what you would have found here at the height of their culture. These may be human concepts. I think they are. They are the kind of heady projects the human race might do. But because of the very fact that they are so far-out human, they may seem more alien to us than something put together by a race on some distant solar system.”
“But their culture failed. Despite all they did or could do, it all came down to nothing. They’re gone and their city’s dead.”
“They might have gone elsewhere. To a world they found.”
“Or they may have overreached themselves. Have you thought of that? They lost their souls — is that what the Parson said?”
“It sounds like him,” said Mary.
“And now yourself. Where did they send you?”
“I caught just a glimpse of it. You must have stayed longer than I did. Just a glimpse was all. Another culture, I think. I really saw no one. I talked with no one. I was like a ghost that no one saw. A shadow that walked in and then went out again. But I sensed the people, the sort of lives they lived, the thoughts they thought. It was beautiful.
“They were godlike. Truly godlike. There is no doubt of that. Stay there long enough, sensing them, seeing how far they stood above you and you would have been reduced to a crawling worm. Gentle gods, I think. Although they were sophisticated. Civilized. Entirely civilized. They have no government. There is no need of one. And no economic sense, no need of economics. It would take a true civilization, the highest concept of civilization, to need no government and no economic system. No money, no buying or selling, no borrowing or loaning, therefore no interest rates, no grubby bankers, no attorneys. There may even have been no such a thing as law.” “How do you know all that?”
“It soaked into me. All of it was there for one to know. Not to see, of course. To know.”
“Instead of telescopes,” said Lansing. “Telescopes?”
“I was just thinking aloud. Back in my world, and I suppose in yours as well, men use telescopes in an attempt to ferret out the secrets of space. But these people — they had no use of telescopes. Instead of looking out, they went out. They could go out there themselves. I suppose wherever they might wish. Having built the sort of installation that is here, they certainly would have known how to use it and control it, so they could go to specific targets. But now the machines — what else can I call them?” “Machines is good enough.” “Now they are running wild. They sent us out at random.”
“Somewhere in this city,” she said, “there must be a control room from which this installation can be handled. Maybe booths in which people who are to be subjected to its operation can be placed — although I guess I’d doubt that. The system would be something far more subtle than that.”
“Even if we found such a place,” he said, “it might take years before we could learn to operate it.”
“Could be, but we could have a shot at it.”
“Maybe this is what happened to the people here. Maybe they found another world, a better world, and sent all their people there.”
“In body as well as in mind?” she asked. “That would take some doing.”
“That’s right. I didn’t think of that. Even if they could that wouldn’t explain everything else being gone. Unless they sent along all their possessions as well.”
“I would doubt that,” Mary said. “Unless they used this apparatus to find another place and they could build another door to it. The two could be related, these machines and the doors, although I’d be more inclined to view the installation here as a research tool to be used to learn from alien worlds. Imagine what could be done with it. You could get all kinds of data that could be adapted to your culture. You could revise political and economic systems, steal technological procedures previously unknown to you, overhaul sociological structures, perhaps even learn of new scientific approaches, even entirely unknown scientific disciplines. For any civilized race, it would be a cultural shot in the arm.”
“You touched on it exactly,” he told her. “An intelligent race, you said. Was the race that lived here intelligent enough? Would your culture or mine be intelligent enough to use what we could find by the proper use of this installation? Or would we simply hunker down, clinging to our old ways, the life we were accustomed to, and misuse or abuse what we found on other worlds — perhaps misuse it disastrously?”
“That’s not up to you or me,” she said. “Not at the moment, it’s not. I think we should go out and see if we can locate that hypothetical control room.”
He rose and reached down a hand to help her to her feet. Once up, she still held to his hand.
“Edward,” she said, “the two of us have been through an awful lot together. Even in so short a time…”
“It’s not seemed short to me,” he told her. “I can’t seem to remember a time without you.”
He bent to kiss her and she held him briefly, then stepped away.
They climbed the stairs back to the alley and began their search. They stayed at it until darkness began to fall. They found no control room.
Back at the building where they were camped, they found Sandra and Jurgens busy preparing the evening meal. The Brigadier was not around.
“He went off by himself,” Sandra explained. “We haven’t seen him since.”
“We found nothing,” Jurgens said. “How about you?”
“No business talk, please, until after supper,” Mary pleaded. “By that time the Brigadier should be back.”
He arrived half an hour later and sat down heavily on his rolled-up sleeping bag. “I don’t mind telling you I’m bushed,” he said. “I covered a good part of the northeast section. For some silly idea I had the hunch that if we were to find anything, we would find it there. I found not a thing.”