Wall Around a Star

FIVE

As the robot lander made its occasional course correc­tions, it spun lazily sometimes this way, sometimes that. The port by Jen Babylon's head sometimes showed the great sweep of black, oppressive nothingness that was the external sky, broken only by the distant spiral glitter of the Galaxy that contained his home. Then there was a shudder and a slow swing, and he was looking directly down on the vast bulk of Cuckoo. It did not grow as they approached. It had seemed endless even in the first minutes; but as they descended the scale enlarged. Mottled blurs resolved them­selves into mountain ranges and seas. Pale-hued splotches became clouds—cloud banks hundreds of thousands of kilo­meters across, many of them, with tints in every fre­quency of the spectrum of visible light. From where he clung behind Babylon's neck, Doc Chimp chattered: "Im­pressive, isn't it? A world with air and seas and land— twenty thousand times the diameter of Earth! Half a billion times the area!"

"Give it a rest, Doc," Ben Pertin begged, staring at the instrument panel. "We're about to enter the atmosphere— anyway, Jen's head is bulged out with facts and figures by now. We don't want it blowing up."

"Thanks," Babylon muttered; because the joke was al­most true. For many hours—he had lost count of how many—Pertin and the chimp had been talking endlessly, often both at once. In one ear Doc Chimp whispering fear­fully of strange cabals among the alien creatures on the orbiter; in the other Ben Line Pertin, alternately sobbing about his loneliness and his lost love, and boasting of how much they would accomplish now that Jen Babylon was here. Both kept a wary eye on the Scorpian, but if the robot paid any attention it was hard to detect. It hovered in the middle of the control cabin when the thrusters were off, occasionally darting to the instrument panel or to the ports with jets of hot-oil-smelling steam.

It was all too much to take in, but the central facts were certain. Fact one: Something strange was going on in the orbiter. Fact two: Something stranger still waited for them on the ground, a wrecked spaceship of unimaginable age, still capable of defending itself against intruders. And fact three: This was the end of the road for Jen Babylon. What­ever else happened, Jen Babylon—or some Jen Babylon— would live out his life on and around that peculiar body called Cuckoo; and from that verdict there was no appeal.

"Let's hear what's happening," Pertin muttered, and moved a switch. At once the sweet electronic voice of the pilot program spoke to them from the instrument panel:

"Approaching entry point. Prepare for deceleration, in­creasing to twenty-eight meters per second squared, plus or minus three. Warning! Ten seconds. Five. Two. One—"

The safety rack squirmed behind Babylon's body, drag­ging him with it. Outside, the black sky turned gray, then blazed into a sudden flare of orange as the thrusters hurled forth their vapor. He felt crushing pressure for a mo­ment—three full gravities!—then slightly less.

"Sorry about that," Doc Chimp giggled in his ear. "Ben Line warned you this lander was a rough one."

Babylon didn't answer. He was staring at the spectacle outside the port. There they were, the layered clouds of Cuckoo: steel dust in the highest reaches, from crystals of frozen oxygen; lower down, luminous seas of rose, gold, green.

These were not the ragged, diffuse clouds of Earth. Their edges were sharp as knives. They were swarms of tiny airborne creatures, collective beings like the aliens from a world in the constellation Bootes, called Boaty-Bits. Each was a separate entity, but together they made a superindividual, a flock or school or herd that moved together through the air. Lower still were real clouds . . . and below that, sinister and dark, the rough surface of Cuckoo itself.

"Prepare for landing," trilled the sweet voice of the pilot program.

Another sudden surge of thrust; a twisting moment of vertigo; and they were stopped. Actually, the landing was surprisingly gentle. The surface gravity of Cuckoo was so insignificant that landing was only a matter of slowing the speed at the proper time. There was no clutch of gravity to cause a real crash, only the possibility of flying into the unyielding surface.

As Babylon struggled with the straps of his restraining cocoon there was a sudden stillness. Only a moment; felt more in the brain than perceived in any sensory organ. And then an immense sharp crash, like a pistol shot beside the ear. Babylon shouted in surprise and sudden shock. To his wonderment his fellow travelers seemed to take it as a matter of course. Even Ben Line Pertin only nodded, and offered a weak laugh.

"Worse than ever," he crowed. "Why, they missed us by several minutes!"

"What in God's name was it?" Babylon demanded.

Pertin sobered. "I told you the ship tried to repel invad­ers," he said, busying himself with his own harness. "But it's very old, Jen, and its reflexes are slow. And getting slower. Why, the first time I landed here it only missed us by a fraction of a second! Of course," he added soberly, "its aim's bound to get better as we get closer in."

"Pertin," blazed Jen Babylon, "I've had a bellyful of you! This is the last time I let you get me into something I can't get out of!"

Pertin shrugged morosely. "Better get your gear on," he suggested, strapping a slim cylinder to his own shoulders. "You want me to apologize? The hell I will. I didn't ask for this job, either—and you might as well know there's a good chance that this will be the last time for anything at all, for either of us!"

There was not much gear to put on, but none of it was familiar to Babylon. The Pmal translator was the easiest part, and the least strange: it was a simple language pro­cessor, but good enough for most galactic tongues, and Babylon had worked with far more complex versions of it back in the linguistics labs. A thruster was strapped be­tween his shoulders—"Walking's much too slow here," Doc Chimp chattered as he helped Babylon on with it. "Believe me, you've got to move briskly if you want to make it past the defenses!" And there were a dozen tools and imple­ments and weapons, none of which Babylon had ever seen before: getting into the ship was evidently not going to be easy!

The lander lay in a small declivity, with only the mottled sky of Cuckoo overhead. There was not much light; only what the distant clouds gave, no more than starlight on Earth. Babylon had hoped that on Cuckoo he would weigh some normal amount again, but the soap-bubble object was so tenuous that he seemed to weigh no more than a kilo­gram. Underfoot was a waste of sand, velvet-black, track­less, untroubled by any wind. But it was not featureless. Blue sparks of light flashed from random points within it, like the glow of a tropic surf with its luminescent organ­isms. Babylon could see the outline of his feet against the diamond sparkles of the sand more clearly than he could see the rest of him, or the others.

"Better get started," said Pertin, his voice queerly strained as he peered over the gentle rise toward their ob­jective. "Go easy with your thruster, Jen. Take time to practice; stay behind the rest of us, you can catch up later."

Doc Chimp showed him the little lever that turned on the gentle steam jet, all the energy needed to move about in the insignificant gravity of Cuckoo. But even that was a lot! At first thrust he soared into the ebony sky, suddenly meters up in the air.

Doc Chimp, giggling, jetted after and caught him. "That way, Dr. Babylon," he said, pointing. "No sense trying to get back to the orbiter this way—you'd never make it." Then he sobered as they leveled off. "Question is," he mut­tered, "will we make it at all?"

They were in the heart of an immense dark plain, and throughout it were scattered vast dark shapes. They looked like buildings, though Babylon knew that they were not But they were not natural, surely? He could not see the tops, could not even guess how high they stood. But far up he could see a section of a distant, pale cloud, cut off where a corner of one of the structures intersected it. It was at least two hundred meters over his head. "Doc, what are these things?" he demanded, staring about. "It looks like a city I"

"Heaven knows, Dr. Babylon. The T'Worlie say they're natural—maybe living organisms. But, oh, don't they look like a good old Earthly city skyline? Not as nice, though." The chimpanzee was staring about worriedly. "We'd best move along—look, Ben Line and the Scorpian are halfway there."

"Where's 'there'?" Babylon demanded.

"Right where those structures are thickest," sighed the chimp. "You'll see. Oh, never fear. You'll see." He twisted his spidery body in midair, activated his thruster, and soared away, Babylon following clumsily. The gentle Cuckoo gravity was forgiving and in a few moments he was able to control the direction of thrust well enough to keep a course. Below and behind him the lander had started its automatic scoops, shoveling the diamond-sparkly dust into hoppers for transport back to the orbiter, to be turned into plasma mass for the tachyon receiver. Directly under him was a cluster of jet-black prisms, then a tetrahedron of dull copper, then to one side half a dozen tall tapering cones that glowed pale gold. There were cubes like blocks of blue ice, glassy cylinders, spidery shapes that could not have ex­isted on a denser world—they stretched for endless kilome­ters across the sparkling sand, and ahead of them, past the forms of Ben Line Pertin and the robot, they seemed to cluster around a darker and less regular shape.

"That's it," Doc Chimp called over his shoulder, pointing as he flew through the sultry air. Real fear was in his voice as he added, "We'd better get there fast—looks like they're waking up again."

Babylon realized that something had changed. The struc­tures which had been only hazy outlines in the gloom were sharper and clearer now. His eyes had not become dark- adapted; the shapes really were brighter, with a glow from inside. As the chimp and Babylon caught up with the oth­ers, the Scorpian robot rattled peremptorily, and Babylon's Pmal translated: "Caution! I sense a powerful electrostatic potential building up!"

"Get down!" Pertin yelled, gesturing toward the ragged shape at the center of the structures. The robot spurted steam and arrowed toward the ground, Doc Chimp and Pertin following quickly. Swearing, Babylon struggled to direct his thruster and join them. He made it—barely. As he touched ground and was caught by the skinny arms of the chimpanzee the brightest flash he had ever seen crack­led through the air above them, followed by the grand­father of all thunderclaps.

In the blinding blackness that followed, Babylon lay sprawled on the cold, dry sand, his ears ringing. He felt a tingle over his head and arms, and the air had a biting tang of ozone.

"Close," Ben Line grunted, pushing himself erect. "Thank God they're slow. It'll be four or five minutes be­fore the next one." He peered at the great irregular black shape before them, then gestured off to the side. "See that gouge?"

The diamond sand was plowed into a furrow so huge that Babylon had not seen it at first. It stretched as far as the eye could see, and in it structures like the ones all around them had grown. "That's what this ship dug out when it crashed," Pertin said, "and that's the way we came last time. There's not as much shelter there; maybe that's why Doc and I got aced." He said it so easily! Babylon thought. But he was talking about the death of his own self—or one of his selves—a self as real and aware as the one that was speaking. "There wasn't any entrance on that side," he continued, "and that's probably why we got it. But tachyar surveillance shows one over here somewhere." He was peering around the bleak, shattered face of the huge object before them. "Wish I could see it," he grumbled.

The Scorpion robot, hovering just above them on the lazy wisps of its steam jets, rattled out: "Possible entrance structure detected. Ferronickel alloy. Surface oxidized as if from great heat and long exposure. Structure intact" A lance of red laser light sprang from one of the faces of the cube to indicate the spot.

Cautiously Babylon activated his jet, rising a bit to get a better look. "I think we can get in there," he decided. "We'll probably have to cut—"

"Get back down here, man!" cried Doc Chimp, clawing at his ankle; and the Scorpian reinforced him:

"Electrostatic potential building again," it rapped out "Nearing maximum—"

Flash and thundercrack struck at the same instant, well over their heads, and at once Ben Line Pertin leaped up. "Now!" he cried. "Let's see if we can get inside before the next one!" And he was already arrowing toward the spot the Scorpian had pointed out with the robot close behind. Doc Chimp grasped Babylon by the nape of the neck, activated his own thruster, and dragged him through the air.

"Sorry to be rude," he panted. "But I don't want to be airborne when that goes off again—"

"But there was plenty of time between shots before," Babylon choked out.

"Oh, Dr. Babylon, never think that," cried the ape. "They speed up, you see. That's how we got killed before. Now!" And he dragged Babylon down to the shelter of the - huge, ancient artifact.

A third bolt raged through the air they had just left. Babylon felt an electric sting in his teeth; it was that close.

Amazingly, Ben Line Pertin was jubilant. "Made it this far," he cried, "and I never thought we would! Now all we have to do is get inside!"

Something, very long ago, had plunged through the shal­low gravity well of Cuckoo to wind up in this strange, black place. According to the tachyar observations, it was irregularly shaped metal with a gross mass in the tens of millions of tons—very similar to the orbiting objects they had detected high above the body, but had never been able to reach to study. Pertin's conjecture was that one of the orbiters, ages ago, had crashed there. The reason was any­one's guess; but the fact was their hope. Every other instal­lation on Cuckoo or around it had defenses of such might that it was impossible to get close. But this one was a wreck. Its defenses still existed, all these unimaginable ages after its crash, but they had been weakened, had become less sure and deadly.

"Deadly" was an appropriate word, Babylon thought, peering up at the irregular wall of metal that was the shell ' of the spacecraft. Black, rugged, shrouded in mystery, it seemed to emanate an aura of menace and immense age. Doc Chimp, peering up along with Babylon, whimpered faintly and shook his furry head. "Oh, Dr. Babylon," he mourned, "what are us civilized primates doing here? That thing doesn't want us!"

"Grab your tools and shut up," Ben Pertin ordered. "We're safe here for a little while—I think. But I don't want to be hanging around out here if this thing gets the range and decides to blow us into atoms!"

"What can I do?" Babylon asked, as Pertin and the chimpanzee began pulling tools out of their backpacks.

"Stay out of the way," Ben Line panted. "When we get inside you'll have plenty to do, but this is specialist work. I got a Watcher to show me how the seals on their fortresses work—I think this is the same plan."

"Keep an eye on that robot for us, won't you?" asked Doc Chimp, extending a metal construction like a pair of dividers.

Babylon nodded, and turned away. The Scorpian, ignor­ing what the humans were doing, was thrusting away along the bottom of the derelict. So close, Babylon was able to get an idea of the object's real size. It bulged out over their heads, roughly a globe a thousand meters through, but mis­shapen by design and by chance. Great wedges and cre­vasses had been torn out of it as it plunged through the air and along the ground; others seemed to have been designed into it by its builders—whoever they might have been. Or whatever. It had piled up a scarp of debris and soil at one end as it struck, so that one side was buried under dozens of meters, while the other, the one they were on, lay nearly bare. Twisted and fused stumps of mysterious instruments jutted from it.

"Babylon!" Ben Pertin panted. "Now give us a hand!"

He and Doc Chimp had deployed the most complex of their tools, an affair of suction cups mounted on long pipe- stems. One set was affixed to a dimly outlined circular area that they had decided was an entrance port, the other to the scarred old hull itself. There was a crank that was meant to turn the inner circle; but in the fragile gravity of Cuckoo there was nothing for either man or chimp to brace himself against. Babylon grabbed the handle, overlapping the grips of the other two; but all three combined had not enough weight to move it.

As they struggled a drumroll from behind told them that the Scorpian had returned. "Desist!" their Pmal translators barked. "I will move that!" Panting, they backed away as the robot moved in. Metal grapples on its fore end locked around the handle of the crank. It positioned itself care­fully, and then erupted a shrieking blast of steam. The crank quivered and began to turn, and slowly the inset disk shuddered free. "Get back," the chimpanzee chattered, as the Scorpian began to revolve with the crank. It looked like a hissing, white-plumed pinwheel as it spun faster and faster around the narrow circumference of the crank arm; and then it stopped, and the disk slid free.

An explosion of light came from inside. "Good heavens," Doc Chimp cried. "It's still got power, after all this awful time!" And so it did, not only for its weaponry but for a host of automatic machines, all activated by the opening of the port. A vast hooting clamor reverberated through the chamber. As the sound died, Babylon heard a beeping trouble signal from his Pmal.

"It's language," he cried. "The ship's talking to us!" He checked the machine translator and found what he had ex­pected: its input circuits had diagnosed the presence of lan­guage, but it lacked any sort of translation match to deal with it.

"I think I know how to translate it," Doc Chimp mut­tered hoarsely. "It's telling us to get out!"

The Scorpian rattled: "Dr. Babylon! Are you recording all this?"

Before Babylon could speak, Doc Chimp interposed: "I'm doing it for him. Don't worry, sound, vision, even smells and vibrations—it's all in here!" He patted the bubble-recorder strapped under his arm.

"Then let us proceed," the robot declaimed. "This cavity is an airlock. The ship itself lies beyond that second valve."

Again the three terrestrials struggled to attach the gears and suction cups, and again the robot disdainfully ordered them away. The loud hooting continued, and the flood of light waned and waxed in varying hues and intensity. Babylon, leaping back to give the robot access to the crank, recognized the barest outlines of pattern in the sounds and lights, confirming the Pmal's diagnosis. But none of it re­sembled any language family in his experience, and he took time to check Doc Chimp's recorder to make sure it was all being preserved.

"What's the matter, Scorpian? Getting tired?" Doc Chimp called. The shriek of steam was perceptibly weaker, and the flashing pinwheel slower as the robot toiled at the crank.

"Acknowledge datum," the robot rapped. "Reaction mass significantly depleted. Project inability to repeat pro­cess more than one more time."

"We won't need more than this one," Ben Line Pertin cried as the disk fell away. "We're inside!"

And they pushed through the circular hole into silent gloom.

Whatever energies the ship had stored seemed all con­centrated in the external defenses and the lock itself. The interior was dark and still. Ben Pertin produced a search lamp, and the Scorpian suddenly did something that caused the end of one of its tentacles to flare into light. In the uncertain illumination they stared around.

If this were really a ship, Babylon thought, its crew must have been beings far larger than men. The passageways were tall and wide, and every outrageously unfamiliar structure was immense. They slid across wide planes of massive metal lace—perhaps decks? perhaps perforated for lightness? or for ventilation? The decks were at a crazy angle, and only the easy motion possible on Cuckoo's sur­face allowed the party to move across them. They scuttled around immense rectangular structures, some pale green, others eye-straining deep metallic blue, and stared with awe at a thick column of blackness. Too light-absorbent to be anything material, it rose through one opening in the deck and vanished through another opening above.

Ben Pertin halted, flashing his light about in silence for a moment. "My God," he said at last.

The Scorpian robot, sailing across the empty space, brought up sharply near his head. "Reference not under­stood," it rapped severely. "Request clarification."

Pertin shook his head wearily. "I can't explain it to you. It's just that—ah, Jen, what did I bring you out here for? I thought all we had to do was get inside and then it would all be clear. And now that we're here, in this ship that's heaven knows how many million years old—I don't know what to do next!"

A furious drumroll came from the robot. "Clarification understood. Problem not significant. I will lead the expedi­tion from this point."

"You!" Pertin said contemptuously. "How would you know? You weren't even supposed to come along!"

Another drumroll from the robot, and the Pmal transla­tor rattled into Jen Babylon's ear: "Objection irrelevant. Follow!" And the silvery cube steamed away. The white- hot spark of light at the end of its tentacle shrank with distance, outlining vast regular shapes that glinted with metal or soaked up the light like carbon black.

"Ben Line," the chimpanzee quavered, "I don't like this place, and most of all I don't like following that tin can! If we primates don't know what to do, how would he?"

Pertin scowled and rubbed his chin. "For that matter, how did he know we were coming here?" he asked. "There're things going on I don't understand! But what choice do we have? Have either of you got a better idea?" He paused for a second, then nodded. "I thought not, so let's tag along. At least he's moving slower now—too much reaction mass gone, I guess!"

Babylon tagged after the other two, his thoughts as bleak as the choking darkness they moved through. Doc Chimp, taking Babylon's skill as now established, had left him to struggle with the delicate balance and aim of his thruster by himself; and in the black, with no reference points to guide him, his skills were barely up to it The distant spark of the robot was almost out of sight; the search beam Pertin carried was rapidly receding before Babylon could get squared away.

As his arms flailed, his wrist passed before his eyes and he caught a glimpse of his watch. He looked again, then swore in disbelief. Less than ten hours had passed since he had emerged from the tachyon transporter! Less than a week, really—never mind whatever time he spent as a stream of coded pulses between Earth and the orbiter—less than a week since he had been quietly taping Old Poly­nesian in the Southwest Pacific, with no worry greater than whether there would be fresh pineapple again at lunch. It was incredible. There had simply been no warning, no hint anywhere in the world he could see that he was about to be ' thrust into this mad adventure, played for stakes he did not understand, against opponents he did not know.

And meanwhile he sailed down immense black corridors on the trail of the winking flare of the Scorpian robot.

When he caught up with the party they were clustered around a narrow doorway that led into a vast black room. Pertin was expostulating with the Scorpian, to no avail. The robot rapped a contemptuous dismissal, and sailed into the blackness. The hot blue arc on its tentacle flooded the room with harsh light and the three terrestrials peered in­side.

What they saw was a hollow globe, with a bridge across it. At the center of the sphere the bridge widened to form a disk rimmed with structures, faced with dials and knobs and buttons, patterned with strange symbols. Doc Chimp chattered nervously, "Are we going in there, Ben Line? It looks awfully strange to me!"

Pertin shrugged. "I think he's found the right place," he admitted grudgingly. "God knows how. That Scorpian knows more than he ought to! When we get back to the orbiter I'm going to have a lot of questions—questions about how this thing came to be and how it was destroyed. If it was an orbital fort, brought down by military action, was it maybe manned by mutineers against whatever rules Cuckoo? What sort of beings were involved? And what was their quarrel?"

"Mighty big questions." Doc Chimp jumped and clutched a metal bar three meters above the bridge. A rail­ing, maybe, if giants had walked it. He clung there, squint­ing uneasily into the dark ahead. "Don't ask them too fast. I think the answers could kill us again."

Babylon pulled his shoulder pack forward and started his own set of omnirecording instruments. Doc Chimp's might be adequate, but he chose to take no chances. There was no knowing what this race had used for communication— sound, modulated light, radio, perhaps even gamma-ray signals; the recorder would sample everything.

The rap of the Scorpian robot interrupted him. "Desist!" bis Pmal rattled. "I have not instructed you to record."

Babylon looked up at the shining hulk of the robot, which had flashed back toward him and hovered omi­nously overhead. "I'm doing my job," he said.

"Correction! Language specimens of second priority! First priority assigned to technological data, emphasis weapons systems!"

Babylon felt a sudden rush of fury. "You idiot," he snapped, "language is why I'm here! I know nothing about weapons!" He stopped as Ben Pertin touched his arm.

"Let me handle this, Jen," the other man said, and con­fronted the robot. "Buzz off," he ordered. "We have an assigned mission and you're only a hitchhiker. We're look­ing for records of some sort, not weapons."

The robot hovered silently, its thoughts unguessable; then, without responding, it flashed away. "Oh, how I loathe that thing!" Doc Chimp chattered. "Come on, Dr. Babylon. Do what you have to do, so we can get out of here!"

How far all this was from the orderly acquisition of knowledge in some library or among some distant tribe! Jen Babylon could not believe that he was. here, in this ancient vessel, on this incredible world. Yet his reflexes worked as well as in Cambridge or on Moorea. He found himself in­volved in the puzzle of what, for these long-dead people, had constituted a language. The more personal puzzle of what was going to happen to him next remained outside his focus of thought. They sailed through immense black corri­dors, dived into pits of black mystery, emerged along the bridge that widened to form a disk. All this Jen recorded on his instruments and fed into the emerging pattern in his brain: the language, then, was not wholly unlike human, in that it used graphic representations (the markings on the instruments) and sound modulation (the challenge at the entrance) to convey information. That was pure profit! It could have been much harder.

Somewhere in the shadows they saw the robot's hot blue arc, cutting into something or carving something away; Babylon shuddered at the thought of what forces it might be releasing, but did not hesitate. He reached out and touched the devices before him . . .

They were still alive! A dial glowed. Shadows began to flicker across the dark curve before him. "Oh, Dr. Baby­lon," whispered the chimp beside him in awe, "we're look­ing outside! Those are the towers!"

They were; the picture shook and then firmed itself. Babylon could make out the angular outlines of the crystal mountains—or crystal beings—around the wreck, and the vast swath it had cut when it fell. Squinting upward, he caught a pale shimmer of color, clearly the luminous sky of Cuckoo; but beneath them was only darkness shot with brief flares of scarlet and gold. "It's the control room, all right," he said. "The walls are a screen to show everything around—damaged now, I would guess, so that only part of it works. Help me find a readout or tape speaker—some sort of records!"

"I don't know what to look for, Dr. Babylon," the chimp complained.

"Neither do I! Use your brain!" The chimp turned away dolefully; Pertin was already touching, peering at, even smelling every object in sight. It was not even physically easy. Babylon decided that the operators of the ship must have been twice human height, and their hands must have had no human shape; everything was uncomfortable and unfamiliar. From the doorway Doc Chimp chattered:

"Look here, Dr. Babylon! There's stuff missing!" There was a thing that might have been a cabinet, but its shelves were empty. "Somebody else got here ahead of us! Oh, Dr. Babylon, what do we do if they come back?"

"Oh, come off it, Doc," Babylon snapped. "It was prob­ably ten thousand years ago—anyway, what do you sup­pose these things are?"

It was a rack of slim black hexagonal rods, neatly stacked on spindles on a massive block of something slick and black. Each hexagon was patterned along one face with markings that could be nothing but writing. Babylon gently pulled one off its spike. It was light enough to be plastic, strong enough to be steel, and apart from its mark­ings totally featureless.

It was Doc Chimp who found the answer to the puzzle. "That slot," he chattered. "Wouldn't one of them fit into it?"

They clustered around, peering at the six-sided slot in the corner of the block. They did not have to speak; Baby­lon knew the same thoughts were in all their minds: tape recorder of sorts? Or weapons-arming system? Or self- destruct commands? Or something wholly unguessable?

There was only one way to find out. Babylon slid one of the hexagons into the slot before either of the others could object.

There was a soft chime, and the block became semitransparent. Swirling plumes of colored light moved within it.

Babylon bent to his instruments, and the Pmal monitor beeped instantly. "Receiving apparent signal," it whirred. "Wave shapes indicate high-order complexity. No apparent match in database."

Babylon pulled the hexagonal rod out of the slot, and the colors died. "I think this is what we came for," he said. "I don't know what it is—ship's log, maybe; maybe porn shows for the crew—who knows? But it's some sort of cor­pus, in some sort of context. If we can get it back to farlink I think I might be able to reconstruct it."

"Get what back?" Pertin demanded. "Those sticks?"

"All of them—and the block, too."

"Jen! That's got to weigh hundreds of kilos!"

"Do you have a better idea?" Babylon demanded.

Pertin stared glumly at the block. At last he sighed. "Guess we'd better get that damned Scorpian back with his torch; that thing's never going to come loose any other way." He tugged at the block experimentally. "Nope. Part of the structure. And how do we know that cutting it free won't ruin it? And even if we did—"

But while Pertin was talking, Doc Chimp was tugging and poking and prying; down at the base of it he was pok­ing his long fingers into unfamiliar recesses, and something clicked. The chimp shoved at it with his skinny arms, and the whole block came ponderously free.

Babylon exhaled a sigh of relief. "Thank God for small favors," he breathed. "Now we just—"

A dull explosion stopped him.

For a moment he thought the recording device had been booby-trapped, but Pertin snarled: "That crazy Scorpian! He must've bit into something that bit back! I'd better find out what he's up to—and then we'd better get the hell out of here!"

The block would have weighed half a metric ton on Earth, but here its weight was only a few kilograms. Nev­ertheless, it had its half-ton of mass. When Babylon and the chimp pulled it out of place, it moved slowly at first, like a half-ton ice floe afloat in still water; but then it kept coming with inertia that would not be denied. They man­aged to get it moving back in the direction from which they had come, just as Pertin returned with the Scorpian's bright light visible far behind. "He found his damn weapons!" Pertin yelled, half sobbing and half laughing, "and much good it did him! The idiot blew himself up. He's going to be damn little use getting back with this stuff!"

Babylon cut his thruster, panting, as the massive block for a moment seemed willing to go in the right direction. "He can't help us?" he asked in dismay.

"He can barely help himself—and he's got a thousand kilos of bits and pieces that he's pulling along. Come on! Let's get this thing back to the ship if we can—the Scorpian'll have to take care of himself!"

If we can . . . The outcome was in doubt. The three of them attacked the block like pilot fish nudging a shark, and slowly, slowly they made their way back through the ship, back out the entrance port, with the distant howling of the crippled Scorpian always behind; and then the trou­ble had only begun. Moving the mass was easier out in the gloomy canyons walled with those broken pillars of pale and shifting light, but the towers were not wholly quiescent now. They woke more quickly, fired their Jovian bolts more accurately. A dozen times before they were clear of the towers the lightnings struck close enough to leave them gasping and tingling.

With the line of flight reasonably clear, Doc Chimp, complaining vigorously, was sent back to help the Scorpian. The two parties arrived at the ebony plain almost together, the chimp gibbering frantically, "Ben Line! Dr. Babylon! Please, wait for me! Don't leave this old monkey in this spooky place!"

In the faint light from the luminous, distant sky, Baby­lon could see that the robot had been sorely stricken. There were great gashes in its shiny surface, and the steam jets puffed only weakly and at strange angles; but it would not relinquish the net of objects it was bringing home. The chimpanzee had a net of its own, larger than Doc Chimp himself.

And then Ben Line Pertin cried out in dismay: "The lander! It's been hit!"

Clearly the towers had not suspended their attack while the party was in the ship. The lander's scoops lay bent, scorched, half-retracted on the ebony velvet sand. There were great rents in its hull; the pilot window was shattered; fuel had leaked and burned out of split tanks.

They would never get back to the orbiter in that.

A wartime sailor of centuries before, seeing his torpe­doed ship go down in the middle of a shark-filled, stormy sea, must have felt as Babylon did at that moment. It was their link with the real, gentle world outside; and it was gone. "Jen!" Pertin roared in his ear. "Don't daydream— get inside!"

"For what?" Babylon managed; but Pertin did not an­swer, and then his hands were full. Pertin was already dragging himself in through the shattered hatchway, tug­ging at the unwieldy block from the ship. Babylon guided it, flailing desperately out of the way as one corner of it threatened to crush his foot between its own bulk and the fabric of the lander, and then they were inside. To what point, Babylon could not imagine. The thing would never fly! Its shattered hull might protect them for a brief time, but when the lightnings found them again it would be all ' over for it—and them.

And one struck almost at once. Babylon's muscles con­vulsed in a tetany of shock. Not more than a millionth of the energy of the discharge flowed through the hull and into him, but it was the worst pain he had ever felt. Dizzy and shaken, he felt himself thrust out of the way by the skinny arms of Doc Chimp, crowding in behind him. "Oh, Dr. Babylon," the chimp chattered, "what a terrible place this is! And now what?"

Pertin snapped brutally, "Shut up and help me with this stuff! You too, Jen! Come on!"

"What's the use?" Babylon demanded, but no one took the time to answer. Pertin was opening a gate in a locker behind the control couches, now smoldering faintly, and the chimp was thrusting the great block toward him. Cryp­tic lights raced and flashed in patterns over the gate, and Pertin exhaled a sigh of relief. "Get the damn Scorpian, Doc!" he ordered, tugging at the block from the ship. "Give a hand, Jen!"

Another bolt smote the ship, stunning Babylon. Doc Chimp rolled back into the lander on the heels of it, shoe- button eyes rolling in terror, chattering with fear. "Here he is, that clanking mass of "confusion," he gasped, as the Scorpian limped slowly after him, "but what we need him for I'll never know."

"Just shut up and bear a hand!" Pertin was opening the gate again—

For a moment Babylon's heart had leaped with hope— he recognized the box at last, a tachyon transmitter, their one remaining hope of escape. But when the gate opened and he saw what was inside, the hopeless anguish closed in again. The block was still there! Unchanged! The machine obviously had been too damaged to work, and they were doomed!

Queerly, Pertin and the chimp were pulling the block out and shoving the robot's bag of tricks in its place—glinting crystal rods and disks, ebon artifacts of geometrically strange shape, hexagons like the ones Babylon himself had brought. "But—but it's not working!" Babylon objected feebly.

The chimp stared at him, incredulously. Pertin did not answer: the lights flashed, the door opened again, the two wrestled the net sack out and turned to Babylon. "You next!" Pertin ordered.

"But—for what—"

"Dr. Babylon," the chimp chattered pleadingly, "will you get in?"

Unwillingly, Babylon bent himself double and allowed himself to be squeezed into the chamber—helped, at the last, by Pertin's firmly shoved boot. He felt the door slammed upon him.

For a timeless moment he was crushed into an unbear­able position, in a chamber without light or air—

And then the door opened again.

He was dragged out by a creature that looked like a fig­ure poked out of dough, sprouting tentacles that gripped him and pulled him free. The gloom of the wrecked lander was gone; he was in a harshly bright metal chamber, and as the Sheliak released him he flew across it and slammed into a wall.

He was alive. He was on the orbiter. Somehow he had been saved.

That was the greatest wonder. He was alive.

Dazed, Jen Babylon caught a cable and hung against the wall as a squirming, flailing Doc Chimp sailed at him, col­lided, scrabbled for a hold. Arms and legs grappling the cables, the chimp panted, "We made it, Dr. Babylon! Oh, this poor old monkey never thought he'd see this place again! Watch out!" Behind him, the smoking hulk of the Scorpian robot soared out of the tachyon chamber and crashed against the wall. It made no attempt to grasp a hold, and its jets steamed at random; it floated slowly out toward the middle of the chamber.

And that was all.

Doc Chimp moaned softly beside him and sprang out toward the chamber. There was a quick exchange with the doughy Sheliak, and then the chimp launched himself back . to the wall, his face working with woe.

"Oh, Dr. Babylon," he sobbed, "poor old Ben! That's the last of us. He didn't make it."

Babylon stared at him uncomprehendingly. "I—I don't see how any of us did," he managed.

The chimp's sobs turned into what was almost a giggle. "Tachyon transmission, Dr. Babylon," he said. "That's all. Confuses you, doesn't it?—but I thought you'd know, seeing you just came all that way from Earth."

"But the machine didn't work! I saw Ben take the block out again!"

"The original of the block," the chimp corrected. "It's still there, though the duplicate's here—probably slagged to a cinder by now, just like poor Ben. Just like the originals of you and me."

Babylon stared at him with horror. "Us?"

"The ones that stayed behind," the chimp explained, and giggled hysterically. "So you're beginning to understand, Dr. Babylon? And now you know how it feels! What it's like knowing you just died, ten thousand kilometers away!"

It was more than ten thousand kilometers.

The lander was a smoking ruin. That other Jen Babylon lay half stunned, with the dead body of the chimp behind him at the shattered door of the transmitter and the wrecked Scorpian robot lodged queerly across his legs, waiting for the final bolt that would end his pain. Had he made it to the orbiter? Did some "he" still live—somehow, somewhere?

His last thought, as the final bolt caught him, was that, even if the answer was yes, it did not ease the terror or the pain.