She was the last Seiner into the lock. Mouse turned to McClennon. Thomas nodded.
Mouse ordered the lock cycled.
"Think it went over?" McClennon asked.
"I don't know, Tommy. I don't... Tommy? What's the matter? Chief, help me here. Stretcher. Somebody get a stretcher."
The episode was McClennon's worst yet. It took the Psych team three days to bring him out.
It had surprised him completely.
Twenty-three: 3050 AD
The Main Sequence
"I don't think you should go, Thomas," the Admiral said. "Let Mouse handle it. Suppose you had one of your attacks?"
"I'll be all right. Look. Ask Lieutenant Corley. She says it'll take a week to reach another crisis point."
"Mouse?"
"Somebody has to look over their shoulders, right? Otherwise we won't know if they're getting anywhere. That's just the way those people are. They're not going to say anything till they're sure nobody can shoot them down. Scientists would rather be dragged through the streets naked than be wrong. If Tommy goes, we'll have twice as many eyes."
"All right. Thomas, you know the woman who heads the Seiner team. Talk to her. Take a recorder. I want to hear what she says."
Twelve hours later McClennon and Storm, accompanied by a pair of Marine sergeants, entered the cold metal halls of Stars' End. The dock ring of their landing bay was a good twenty kilometers below the featureless planetary surface. The plunge down the long, dark shaft had been harrowing. Mouse had lost his supper.
The Marines began horsing an electric truck off the shuttle.
Mouse walked along a steel passageway, away from the dock ring. He peered into what had to have been Ground Control in an age gone by. "Tommy, come take a look in here."
McClennon had to stoop beneath the passageway ceiling. He joined Storm. "What?" He saw nothing but a Marine sentry.
"By that console thing."
"Oh. A skeleton."
The reports said bones could be found throughout the fortress. Thousands of skeletons had been encountered.
"We're ready, sir," one of the Marines said.
McClennon snapped a picture of the bones. "All right. Mouse, let's hit Research Central first."
"Right. We'll probably get everything there anyway."
"Be charming. Consuela el-Sanga looks vulnerable."
"Am I ever anything else?"
The little truck streaked through the endless halls, down ramps, around perilous turns, ever deeper into the metal world. The Marine driver fled on as if being pursued by the shades of the builders. He shuddered visibly each time they encountered one of the skeletons. They passed through one chamber where a score of the builder folk had died.
"The bones that have touched and shaped our lives," Thomas said. "From afar, like virgin princesses."
"You getting poetic again?"
"I do when I'm depressed." He glanced at the Marines. They stared forward impassively. "And this place is depressing." The soldiers seemed to have come out of a robot factory. They had shown no reaction to the Admiral's tapes.
The driver's suicidal rush was the only evidence that either man was disturbed.
The truck swooped into a level with ceilings vaulting a hundred meters high. Brobdingnagian machines crowded it, rising like the buildings of an alien city. There was life here, and light, but it was all machine.
"I wonder what they are."
"Accumulators for the energy weapons," Mouse guessed.
"Some of them. Some of them must be doing something with the air."
"Look!" Mouse squealed. "Sergeant, stop. Back up. Back up. A little more. Look up there, Tommy. On the fourth catwalk up."
McClennon spotted the androgynous little machine. It was busy working on the flank of one of the towering structures. "A maintenance robot."
"Yeah. All right, Sergeant. Go ahead."
They descended more levels, some as high-ceilinged as that of the robot. They saw more of the mobile machines, built in a dozen different designs.
Obviously, only the builders had perished. Their fortress was very much alive and healthy. Storm and McClennon saw no evidence of breakdown.
"It's like walking through a graveyard," Mouse said, after their driver had had to wend his way across a vast, open floor where hundreds of skeletons lay in neat rows. "Chilling."
"Know what, Mouse? I think this is really a pyramid. It's not a fortress at all."
"You're not serious."
"Why not? Think about it. Can you think of any strategic reason for putting a world fort out here?"
"Sure."
"Such as?"
"Right over there are the Magellanic Clouds. Sic somebody on me willing to spend a few hundred millennia conquering the galaxy and chasing me, and I'd build me an all-time fort across my line of retreat before I jump off for a friendlier star-swarm."
"Now who's getting romantic?"
"Romantic, hell."
"They could just go around it, Mouse."
"That centerward mob don't go around anything. They'd just stay here till they cracked it open."
"Maybe you're right, but I'm going to stick to my theory."
They reached the research center a few minutes later. McClennon located Consuela el-Sanga almost immediately, and found her completely free of animosity. He was surprised.
"Why?" she asked. "I'm no Seiner. I'm just one of their captive scientists."
"I didn't know." He introduced Mouse. He wondered if Consuela had heard from Amy.
"Moyshe... That wouldn't be right, would it?"
"McClennon. Thomas. But call me whatever's comfortable."
"Thomas, this is the most exciting time of my life. We can finally compare notes with your people... It's like opening up a whole new universe. Come on. Let me show you what we're doing." Her walk had a youthful bounce despite the higher than Seiner-normal gravity.
Mouse's eyebrows rose questionably. McClennon shrugged. "Come on. Before she changes her mind."
A horde of people were at work in a nearby chamber, where hundreds of folding tables had been arrayed in long rows. Most were burdened with artifacts, papers, or the tools of the scientists and their helpers. To one side technicians were busy with communicators and a vast, waist-level computer interface.
Consuela explained, "The people at the tables are examining and cataloging artifacts. We brought along several thousand laymen to help explore. Whenever they make a find, they notify comm center. We send an expert to examine the site. The confab over there is an ongoing exchange with your Lunar dig people. The people at the console are trying to reprogram Stars' End's master brain so it can deal directly with human input."
"You found a key to the builder language?" Thomas asked.
"No. That will come after we can talk to the computer."
"You just lost me. That sounds backwards."
"It works like this: The starfish commune with the machine. They relay to our mindtechs. The mindtechs relay to our computer people. They build parallel test programs. Communications send them down. Our computer people here try to feed it back to the master brain. The starfish read the response and feed it to the mindtechs again. And round the circle. The idea is to help the computers develop a common language. So far we've only managed a pidgin level of communication. We think we're on the brink of breakthrough, though."
"Math ought to be a snap," Mouse said. "It's got to be the same all over the universe. But I can see how you'd have trouble working toward more abstract concepts."
"Unfortunately, we're using a non-mathematical interface," Consuela replied. "The starfish aren't mathematically minded. Their conscious concept of number is one-two-three-many."
"Thought you said they were smart, Tommy."
Consuela said, "They are. But theirs is an intuitive rather than empirical intelligence. But we're making headway. When our computers can link... "