“That’s because I don’t like it this way. I wanted it to be official. They thought I was a nut. So I have to get us smuggled in here by a newspaper that wants an exclusive. Did you see the look on their faces? They think we’re never coming out.”
“They are not alone,” Alice said.
“You don’t have to come with me.”
“I don’t want to, but I have to. Look! What are they doing now?”
It was barely bright enough to see. A new group of machines were at work. All of the ships had moved outside the silvery platform. The new machines were plasterers. The rectangular buildings were completed. The new machines were in a vast circle around the entire area. Their myriad mechanical arms terminated in flat fingerless hands the size of the top of a small table. Each machine was roughly the shape of a sitting Buddha, with, in place of the stomach, and open cauldron effect. The flat hands dipped into the cauldron, scooping out what looked like molten glass. They patted it into a growing transparent wall. As the wall increased in height the machines, with every evidence of weightlessness floated up with the wall.
“Damn!” Larry said. “Now we can’t get to the buildings. No. Wait! Do you see what I see?”
A third of the way around the circle one of the plastering machines worked busily, but with an empty cauldron. Thus the wall it was building existed only in its mechanical reflexes.
He took Alice by the wrist and hurried her down onto the flats. As they neared the floating machine she dug her heels in. She gasped, “Do you really know what this is all...”
“Just trust me. Come on.” He gave one timid look up at the machine which floated fifteen feet in the air. He ducked instinctively as he ran under it. The silver floor was firm and hard underfoot. The morning sun, just appearing in the east, cast long rays across the compound.
The first building was fifty feet distant. There was a door in the side of it, a door but four and a half feet high. “Little guys,” he said.
They ducked and went in. Her hand was like ice in his. He gave her a reassuring smile. “Standard attribute of intelligence. Desire for privacy and shelter. Probably true everywhere.”
“They won’t mind us poking around, friend?”
“Mind? Of course not.”
The windows were oval and set very low, unglassed. The interior of the building was one room with a ceiling ten feet high. One comer of the room leaned crazily and some of the bricks lay on the inside floor, an open crack extending to the ceiling.
In a far corner was a larger cube, two feet on a side. The top of it glowed softly. Larry approached it, held his hand out, smiled at Alice. “Desire for warmth. Maybe also a constant. Could cook on this thing. I guess that all primitives start civilization by learning about combustion. Lightning did it here on earth. Wonder what did it on their world?”
“Do you have to act like a man renting an apartment?”
“No furniture,” he said. “Hmmm. Notice the softness of the floor in. here. Seems to be a sort of rubbery film. Sprayed on, maybe. Luxury, eh?”
“May we please get out of here now before something bricks up that doorway?”
He shrugged. “No chance of their doing that. I want a look at the central building, the big one, and then we’ll go visiting.”
The doors were larger leading to the big building. It was silent, deserted, and but half constructed. There were many rooms, all empty. On the north side the wall was missing and the unsupported ceiling sagged dangerously at that point.
“Could you break down and start talking sense?” Alice asked.
“This all makes sense,” he said firmly. “I’ll let you figure it out.”
The floating machine was a good ten feet higher when they left the area. It worked busily on the empty air, slapping, patting, smoothing. They could see that the transparent walls, a good yard thick at the base, were tapering slightly and leaning toward the center.
“It’s going to be a big dome,” he said. “Pressure affair. Controlled atmosphere.”
“Oh, fine!”
“Come on. We’ll visit that one over there.”
They went to the foot of the ramp. Larry pulled the two flashlights out of his jacket pocket, handed her one. She looked fearfully up into the dark interior of the ship. He said, “Now act the same way you would crossing 42nd Street in the middle of the block at five thirty in the afternoon. When anything starts moving toward you, just get out of the way.”
“I don’t want anything moving toward me.”
“Come on. There’s nothing in here that wants to hurt you.”
She took a deep breath. “Lead on.”
The ramp led up into a room so vast that their lights barely illuminated the far walls. The floor was pitted and worn.
Larry walked slowly, speaking with the relaxed manner of a licensed guide. “Here, as you can see is the main equipment room. Those arches at either end probably lead to equipment storage. Let’s take a look. Ah, yes. Those jobs over there. They’re the scrapers.”
He led her over. He looked closely and with curiosity at the worn condition of the treads, the pitted blade, the hopper over the slanted blade.
A wide ramp led down from one side of the second room. Below they found the spider creatures which had silvered the raw earth.
Gradually she began to lose her fear. They could not decide the use of some of the equipment. Everything had a look of age, of hard use, of countless centuries of blind toil.
Some of the more delicate machines, made of a different class of metal had crumpled where they stood. He picked up a bit of metal, flaked it between his fingers. “This was a poor specification,” he said.
Back in the main room where the daylight shone in, he stopped, looked all around and said, “Over here. The little ramp.”
They had missed it before. It went up the side wall to a small door at the top. It was but two feet wide and the door at the top was less than five feet high.
Halfway up the ramp she hung back as she heard the busy clacking coming from the little room.
“It’s them!” she gasped.
“I hardly think so,” he said. “You can wait here.”
“No, I’ll come along if... if you’re really going in there.”
The room was but twenty feet square, the walls solid with odd wiring, transparent tubular relays, duplicated in the boards which were erected from the floor in the middle of the room. The clacking came from one of the panel boards. Larry walked over, held his light on the tiny relays.
In his occupation, Larry had become familiar with mechanical accounting and computing equipment. Though the materials were alien, the wiring a nightmare, there was yet a comfortable familiarity about the panel boards. Alice clung with both hands to his left arm, her fingers digging in just above his elbow.
“Sounds like a knitting contest in here,” she said, a shake in her voice.
Larry threw his shoulders back and said resonantly, “Aha!”
Her grip loosened and she stepped back. “Oh, come now! You’re cribbing lines. That’s what the fictional hero says when at last he outwits the invader. Aren’t you getting a shade ahead of yourself?”
Larry gave her a superior smile. He enveloped her in his long thin arms and attempted to kiss her roughly. The kiss landed next to her ear. A high heel thudded against his chin, an elbow drove most of the wind out of him and her forehead thumped him smartly under the eye.
“Now look...” he said indigantly.
“Not like that,” she whispered. “Like this!”
The merry little panel boards clicked and clucked and Larry Graim had the unmistakable sensation that the ship had taken off in the general direction of Alpha Centauri. When the too brief moments ended, he was surprised to find that the space ship was at rest.