He got up from the chair and moved toward the door.
“I still got that bottle, Ira.”
“No, thanks,” Warren said.
He sat and listened to Bar Ears’ feet going down the stairs.
Kenneth Spencer, the alien psychologist, came into the cabin and sat down in the chair across the desk from Warren.
“We’re finally through,” he said.
“You aren’t through,” challenged Warren. “You haven’t even started.”
“We’ve done all we can.”
Warren grunted at him.
“We’ve run all sorts of tests,” said Spencer. “We’ve got a book full of analyses. We have a complete photographic record and everything is down on paper in diagrams and notes and –”
“Then tell me: What is that junk out there?”
“It’s a spaceship engine.”
“If it’s an engine,” Warren said, “let’s put it together. Let’s find out how it runs. Let’s figure out the kind of intelligence most likely to have built it.”
“We tried,” replied Spencer. “All of us tried. Some of us didn’t have applicable knowledge or training, but even so we worked; we helped the ones who had training.”
“I know how hard you worked.”
And they had worked hard, only snatching stolen hours to sleep, eating on the run.
“We are dealing with alien mechanics,” Spencer said.
“We’ve dealt with other alien concepts,” Warren reminded him. “Alien economics and alien religions and alien psychology …”
“But this is different.”
“Not so different. Take Pollard, now. He is the key man in this situation. Wouldn’t you have said that Pollard should have cracked it?”
“If it can be cracked, Pollard is your man. He has everything – the theory, the experience, the imagination.”
“You think we should leave?” asked Warren. “That’s what you came in here to tell me? You think there is no further use of staying here?”
“That’s about it,” Spencer admitted.
“All right,” Warren told him. “If you say so, I’ll take your word for it. We’ll blast off right after supper. I’ll tell Bat Ears to fix us up a spread. A sort of achievement dinner.”
“Don’t rub it in so hard,” protested Spencer. “We’re not proud of what we’ve done.”
Warren heaved himself out of the chair.
“I’ll go down and tell Mac to get the engines ready. On the way down, I’ll stop in on Bar Ears and tell him.”
Spencer said, “I’m worried, Warren.”
“So am I. What is worrying you?”
“Who are these things, these other people, who had the other spaceship? They’re the first, you know, the first evidence we’ve ever run across of another race that had discovered space flight. And what happened to them here?”
“Scared?”
“Yes. Aren’t you?”
“Not yet,” said Warren. “I probably will be when I have the time to think it over.”
He went down the stairs to talk to Mac about the engines.
He found Mac sitting in his cubby hole, smoking his blackened pipe and reading his thumb-marked Bible.
“Good news,” Warren said to him.
Mac laid down the book and took off his glasses.
“There’s but one thing you could tell me that would be good news,” he said.
“This is it. Get the engines ready. We’ll be blasting off.”
“When, sir? Not that it can be too soon.”
“In a couple of hours or so,” said Warren. “We’ll eat and get settled in. I’ll give you the word.”
The engineer folded the spectacles and slid them in his pocket. He tapped the pipe out in his hand and tossed away the ashes and put the dead pipe back between his teeth.
“I’ve never liked this place,” he said.
“You never like any place.”
“I don’t like them towers.”
“You’re crazy, Mac. There aren’t any towers.”
“The boys and me went walking,” said the engineer. “We found a bunch of towers.”
“Rock formations, probably.”
“Towers,” insisted the engineer doggedly.
“If you found some towers,” Warren demanded, “why didn’t you report them?”
“And have them science beagles go baying after them and have to stay another month?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Warren said. “They probably aren’t towers. Who would mess around building towers on this backwash of a planet?”
“They were scary,” Mac told him. “They had that black look about them. And the smell of death.”
“It’s the Celt in you. The big, superstitious Celt you are, rocketing through space from world to world – and still believing in banshees and spooks. The medieval mind in the age of science.”
Mac said, “They fair give a man the shivers.”
They stood facing one another for a long moment. Then Warren put out a hand and tapped the other gently on the shoulder.
“I won’t say a word about them,” he said. “Now get those engines rolling.”
Warren sat in silence at the table’s head, listening to the others talk.
“It was a jury-rigged job,” said Clyne, the physicist. “They tore out a lot of stuff and rebuilt the engine for some reason or other and there was a lot of the stuff they tore out that they didn’t use again. For some reason, they had to rebuild the engine and they rebuilt it simpler than it was before. Went back to basic principles and cut out the fancy stuff – automatics and other gadgets like that – but the one they rebuilt must have been larger and more unwieldy, less compact, than the one that they ripped down. That would explain why they left some of their supplies behind.”
“But,” said Dyer, the chemist, “what did they jury-rig it with? Where did they get the material?”
Briggs, the metallurgist, said, “This place crawls with ore. If it wasn’t so far out, it would be a gold mine.”
“We saw no signs of mining,” Dyer objected. “No signs of mining or smelting and refining or of fabrication.”
“We didn’t go exploring,” Clyne pointed out. “They might have done some mining a few miles away from here and we’d have never known it.”
Spencer said, “That’s the trouble with us on this whole project. We’ve adopted suppositions and let them stand as fact. If they had to do some fabrication, it might be important to know a little more about it.”
“What difference does it make?” asked Clyne. “We know the basic facts – a spaceship landed here in trouble, they finally repaired their engines, and they took off once again.”
Old Doc Spears, down at the table’s end, slammed his fork on his plate.
“You don’t even know,” he said, “that it was a spaceship. I’ve listened to you caterwauling about this thing for weeks. I’ve never seen so damn much motion and so few results in all my born days.”
All of them looked a little surprised. Old Doc was normally a mild man and he usually paid little attention to what was going on, bumbling around on his regular rounds to treat a smashed thumb or sore throat or some other minor ailment. All of them had wondered, with a slight sickish feeling, how Old Doc might perform if he faced a real emergency, like major surgery, say. They didn’t have much faith in him, but they liked him well enough. Probably they liked him mostly because he didn’t mix into their affairs.
And here he was, mixing right into them truculently.
Lang, the communications man, said, “We found the scratches, Doc. You remember that. Scratches on the rock. The kind of scratches that a spaceship could have made in landing.”