The Star by H. G. Wells

  

Above were the lava, hot gases and ash, and below the seething floods and the whole earth swayed and rumbled with the earthquake.

Here is an impressive story based on the inter-action of planetary bodies and of the sun upon them. A great star is seen approaching the earth. At first it is only an object of interest to the general public, but there is an astronomer on the earth, who is watching each phase and making mathematical calculations, for he knows the intimate relation of gravitation between bodies and the effect on rotating bodies of the same force from an outside source. He fears all sorts of wreckage on our earth. He warns the people, but they, as usual, discount all he says and label him mad. But he was not mad. H. G. Wells, in his own way, gives us a picturesque description of the approach of the new body through long days and nights—he tells how the earth and natural phenomena of the earth will react. Though this star never touches our sphere, the devastation and destruction wrought by it are complete and horrible. The story is correct in its astronomical aspects.

The Star 

by H. G. Wells

Author of “The War of the Worlds”, “The Time Machine”, Etc.

It was on the first day of the new year that the announcement was made, almost simultaneously from three observatories, that the motion of the planet Neptune, the outermost of all the planets that wheeled about the sun, had become erratic. Ogilvy had already called attention to a suspected retardation in its velocity in December. Such a piece of news was scarcely calculated to interest the world the greater portion of whose inhabitants were unaware of the existence of the planet Neptune, nor outside the astronomical profession did the subsequent discovery of a faint remote speck of light in the region of the perturbed planet cause any great excitement.

Scientific people, however, found the intelligence remarkable enough, even before it became known that the new body was rapidly growing larger and brighter, that its motion was quite different from the orderly progress of the planets, and that the deflection of Neptune and its satellite was becoming now of an unprecedented kind.

Few people without training in science can realize the huge isolation of the solar system. The sun with its specks of planets, its dust of planetoids, and its impalpable comets swims in vacant immensity that almost defeats the imagination. Beyond the orbit of Neptune there is space, vacant so far as human observation has penetrated, without warmth or light or sound, blank emptiness, for twenty billion times a million miles. That is the smallest estimate of the distance to be traversed before the nearest of the stars is attained. And, saving a few comets, more unsubstantial than the thinnest flame, no matter had ever to human knowledge crossed the gulf of space, until early in the twentieth century this wanderer appeared.

A vast mass of matter it was, bulky, heavy, rushing without warning out of the black mystery of the sky into the radiance of the sun. By the second day it was clearly visible to any decent instrument, as a speck with a barely sensible diameter, in the constellation Leo near Regulus. In a little while an opera glass could attain it.

On the third day of the new year the newspaper readers of two hemispheres were made aware for the first time of the real importance of this unusual apparition in the heavens. “A Planetary Collision,” one London paper headed the news, and proclaimed Duchine’s opinion that this strange new planet would probably collide with Neptune. The leader writers enlarged upon the topic. So that in most of the capitals of the world, on Jan. 3, there was an expectation, however vague, of some eminent phenomenon in the sky; and as the night followed the sunset round the globe thousands of men turned their eyes skyward to see—the old familiar stars just as they had always been.

Until it was dawn in London and Pollux setting, and the stars overhead grown pale. The winter’s dawn it was, a sickly filtering accumulation of daylight, and the light of gas and candles shone yellow in the windows to show where people were astir. But the yawning policeman saw the thing, the busy crowds in the market stopped agape, workmen going to their work betimes, milkmen, the drivers of news carts, dissipation going home jaded and pale, homeless wanderers, sentinels on their beats, and in the country, laborers trudging afield, poachers slinking home, all over the dusky quickening country it would be seen—and out at sea by seamen watching for the day—a great white star, come suddenly into the westward sky!

Brighter it was than any star in our skies; brighter than the evening star at its brightest. It still glowed out white and large, no mere twinkling spot of light but a small round clear shining disk, an hour after the day had come. And where science has not reached, men stared and feared, telling one another of the wars and pestilences that are foreshadowed by these fiery signs in the heavens. Sturdy Boers, dusky Hottentots, Gold Coast negroes, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Portuguese, stood in the glow of the sunrise watching the setting of this strange new star.

And in a hundred observatories there had been suppressed excitement, rising almost to shouting pitch, as the two remote bodies had rushed together. There had been a hurrying to and fro to gather photographic apparatus and spectroscope; to gather this appliance and that, to record the novel astonishing sight, the destruction of a world,—for it was a world, a sister planet of our earth, far greater than our earth indeed, that had so suddenly flashed into flaming death. Neptune it was, which had been struck, fairly, and squarely, by the planet from outer space and the heat of concussion had incontinently turned two solid globes into one vast mass of incandescence.

Round the world that day, two hours before the dawn, went the pallid great white star, fading only as it sank westward and the sun mounted above it. Everywhere man marveled at it, but of all those who saw it none could have marveled more than those sailors, habitual watchers of the stars, who far away at sea had heard nothing of its advent and saw it now rise like a pigmy moon and climb zenithward and hang overhead and sink westward with the passing of the night.

And when next it rose over Europe everywhere were crowds of watchers on hilly slopes, on house roofs, in open spaces, staring eastward, waiting for the rising of the new star. It rose with a white glow in front, like the glare of a white fire, and those who had seen it come into existence the night before cried out at the sight of it. “It is larger,” they cried. “It is brighter!” And, indeed, the moon a quarter full and sinking in the west was in its apparent size beyond comparison, but scarcely in all its breadth had it as much brightness now as the little circle of the strange new star.

“It is brighter!” cried the people clustering in the streets. But in the dim observatories the watchers held their breath and peered at one another. “It is nearer,” they said. “Nearer!”

And voice after voice repeated. “It is nearer,” and the clicking telegraph took that up, and it trembled along telephone wires, and in a thousand cities grimy compositors fingered the type. “It is nearer.” Men writing in offices, struck with strange realization, flung down their pens, men talking in a thousand places suddenly came upon a grotesque possibility in those words, “It is nearer.” It hurried along awakening streets, it was shouted down the frost-stilled ways of quiet villages, men who had read these things, from the throbbing tape stood in yellow-lit doorways shouting the news to the passers-by. “It is nearer.” Pretty women flushed and glittering, heard the news told jestingly between dances, and feigned an intelligent interest they did not feel. “Nearer! Indeed. How curious! How clever people must be to find out things like that!”

Lonely tramps faring through the wintry night murmured those words to comfort themselves—looking skyward. “It has need to be nearer, for the night’s as cold as charity. Don’t seem much warmth from it if it is nearer, all the same.”

“What is a new star to me?” cried the weeping woman kneeling beside her dead.

The schoolboy, rising early for his examination work, puzzled it out for himself—with the great white star shining broad and bright through the frost-flowers of his window. “Centrifugal, centripetal,” he said, with his chin on his fist. “Stop a planet in its flight, rob it of its centrifugal force, what then? Centripetal has it, and down it falls into the sun! And this——!”

“Do we come in the way? I wonder——”

The light of that day went the way of its brethren, and with the later watches of the frosty darkness rose the strange star again, And it was now so bright that the waxing moon seemed but a pale yellow ghost of itself, rising huge in the sunset hour. In a South African city a great man had married, and the streets were alight to welcome his return with his bride. “Even the skies have illuminated,” said the flatterer. Under Capricorn, two negro lovers, daring the wild beasts and evil spirits, for love of one another, crouched together in a cane brake where the fireflies hovered. “That is our star,” they whispered, and felt strangely comforted by the sweet brilliancy of its light.

The master mathematician sat in his private room and pushed the papers from him. His calculations were already finished. In a small white phial there still remained a little of the drug that had kept him awake and active for four long nights. Each day, serene, explicit, patient as ever, he had given his lecture to his students, and then had come back at once to his momentous calculation. His face was grave, a little drawn, and hectic from his drugged activity. For some time he seemed lost in thought. Then he went to the window, and the blind went up with a click. Half way up the sky, over the clustering roofs, chimneys, and steeples of the city, hung the star.

He looked at it as one might look into the eye of a brave enemy. “You may kill me,” he said after a silence, “But I can hold you—and all the universe for that matter—in the grip of this little brain. I would not change even now.”

He looked at the little phial. “There will be no need of sleep again,” he said. The next day at noon, punctual to the minute, he entered his lecture theater, put his hat on the end of the table as his habit was, and carefully selected a large piece of chalk. It was a joke among his students that he could not lecture without that piece of chalk to fumble in his fingers, and once he had been stricken to impotence by their hiding his supply. He came and looked under his gray eyebrows at the rising tiers of young fresh faces, and spoke with his accustomed studied commonness of phrasing, “Circumstances have arisen—circumstances beyond my control,” he said and paused, “which will debar me from completing the course I had designed. It would seem, gentlemen, if I may put the thing clearly and briefly, that—man has lived in vain.”

The students glanced at one another. Had they heard aright? Mad? Raised eyebrows and grinning lips there were, but one or two faces remained intent upon his calm gray-fringed face. “It will be interesting,” he was saying, “to devote this morning to an exposition, so far as I can make it clear to you, of the calculations that have led me to this conclusion. Let us assume——”

He turned toward the blackboard, meditating a diagram in the way that was usual to him. “What was that about ‘lived in vain’?” whispered one student to another. “Listen,” said the other, nodding toward the lecturer.

And presently they began to understand.

That night the star rose later, for its proper eastward motion had carried it some way across Leo toward Virgo, and its brightness was so great that the sky became a luminous blue as it rose, and every star and planet was hidden, save only Jupiter near the zenith, Capella, Aldebaran, Sirius, and the pointers of the Bear. It was white and beautiful. In many parts of the world that night a pallid halo encircled it about. It was perceptibly larger; in the clear refractive sky of the tropics it seemed as if it were nearly a quarter of the size of the moon. The frost was still on the ground in England, but the world was as brightly lit as if it were midsummer moonlight. One could see to read quite ordinary print by that cold clear light, and in the cities the lamps burnt yellow and wan.

And everywhere the world was awake that night, and throughout Christendom a somber murmur hung in the keen air over the countryside like the buzzing of the bees in the heather, and this murmurous tumult grew to a clangor in the cities. It was the tolling of the bells in a million belfry towers and steeples, summoning the people to sleep no more, to sin no more, but to gather in their churches and pray. And overhead, growing larger and brighter, as the earth rolled on its way and the night passed, rose the dazzling star.

And the streets and houses were alight in all the cities, the shipyards glared, and whatever roads led to high country were lit and crowded all night long. And in all the seas about the civilized lands ships with throbbing engines, and ships with bellying sails, crowded with men and living creatures, were standing out to ocean and the north. For already the warning of the master mathematician had been telegraphed over the world, and translated into a hundred tongues. The new planet and Neptune, locked in a fiery embrace, were whirling headlong, ever faster and faster, toward the sun. Already every second this blazing mass flew a hundred miles, and every second its terrific velocity increased. As it flew its course, it must pass a hundred million of miles wide of the earth and scarcely affect it.

But near its destined path, as yet only slightly perturbed, spun the mighty planet Jupiter and his moons sweeping splendid around the sun. Every moment now the attraction between the fiery star and the greatest of the planets grew stronger. And the result of that attraction? Inevitably Jupiter, would be deflected from its orbit to a new elliptical path, and the burning star, swung by his attraction wide of its sunward rush, would “describe a curved path” and perhaps collide with and certainly pass close to, our earth. “Earthquakes, volcanic outbreaks, cyclones, sea waves, floods, and a steady rise in temperature to I know not what limit”—so prophesied the master mathematician.

And overhead, to carry out his words, lonely and cold and livid, blazed the star of the coming doom.

To many who stared at it that night until their eyes ached, it seemed that it was visibly approaching. And that night, too, the weather changed, and the frost that had gripped all Central Europe and France and England softened towards a thaw.

But you must not imagine because I have spoken of people praying through the night and people going aboard ships and people fleeing towards mountainous country that the whole world was already in a terror because of the star. As a matter of fact, use and wont still ruled the world, and save for the talk of idle moments and the splendor of the night, nine human beings out of ten were still busy at their common occupations. In all the cities the shops, save one here and there, opened and closed at their proper hours, the doctor and the undertaker plied their trades, and workers gathered in the factories, soldiers drilled, scholars studied, lovers sought one another, thieves lurked and fled, politicians planned their schemes. The presses of the newspapers roared through the nights, and many a priest of this church and that would not open his holy building to further what he considered a foolish panic.

The newspapers insisted on the lesson of the year 1000—for then, too, people had anticipated the end. The star was no star—mere gas—a comet; and were it a star it could not possibly strike the earth. There was no precedent for such a thing. Common sense was sturdy everywhere, scornful, jesting, a little inclined to persecute the obdurate fearful. That night at 7:15 by Greenwich time the star would be at its nearest to Jupiter. Then the world would see the turn things would take. The master mathematician’s grim warnings were treated by many as so much mere elaborate self-advertisement. Common sense at last, a little heated by argument, signified its unalterable convictions by going to bed. So, too, barbarism and savagery, already tired of the novelty, went about their nightly business: and save for a howling dog here and there the beast-world left the star unheeded.

And yet, when at last the watchers in the European states saw their star rise, an hour later, it is true, but no larger than it had been the night before, there were still plenty awake to laugh at the master mathematician—to take the danger as if it had passed.

But hereafter the laughter ceased. The star grew—it grew with a terrible steadiness hour after hour, a little larger each hour, a little nearer the midnight zenith, and brighter and brighter, until it had turned night into day. Had it come straight to the earth instead of in a curved path, had it lost no velocity to Jupiter, it must have leapt the intervening gulf in a day; but as it was it took five days altogether to come by our planet. The next night it had become a third the size of the moon before it set to English eyes, and the thaw was assured.

It rose over America nearly the size of the moon, but blinding white to look at, and hot; and a breath of hot wind blew now with its rising and gathering strength, and in Virginia and Brazil and down the St. Lawrence valley it shone intermittently through a driving reek of thunder clouds, flickering violet lightning, and hail unprecedented. In Manitoba were a thaw and devastating floods. And upon the mountains of the earth the snow and ice began to melt that night, and all the rivers coming out of high country flowed thick and turbid, and soon—in their upper reaches— with swirling trees and the bodies of beasts and men. They rose steadily, steadily in the ghostly brilliance, and came trickling over their banks at last, behind the flying population of their valleys.

And along the coast of Argentina and up the South Atlantic tides were higher than they had ever been in the memory of man, and the storms drove the waters in many cases scores of miles inland, drowning whole cities. And so great grew the heat during the night that the rising of the sun was like the coming of a shadow. The earthquakes began and grew until all down America from the Arctic Circle to Cape Horn hillsides were sliding, fissures were opening, and houses and walls crumbling to destruction.

China was lit glowing white, but over Japan and Java and all the islands of eastern Asia the great star was a ball of dull red fire because of the steam and smoke and ashes the volcanoes were spouting forth to salute its coming. Above were the lava, hot gases, and ash, and below the seething floods, and the whole earth swayed and rumbled with the earthquake shocks. Soon the immemorial snows of Tibet and the Himalayas were melting and pouring down by ten million deepening converging channels upon the plains of Burma and Hindustan. The tangled summits of the Indian jungles were aflame in a thousand places, and below the hurrying waters around the stems were dark objects that struggled feebly and reflected the blood red tongues of fire. And in a ungovernable confusion a multitude of men and women fled down the broad riverways to that one last hope of men—the open sea.

Larger grew the star, and larger, hotter, and brighter with a terrible swiftness now. The tropical ocean had lost its phosphorescence, and the whirling steam rose in ghostly wreaths from the black waves that plunged incessantly, speckled with storm-tossed ships.

And then came a wonder. It seemed to those who in Europe watched for the rising of the star that the world must have ceased its rotation. In a thousand open spaces of down and upland the people who had fled thither from the floods and the falling houses and sliding slopes of hill watched for that rising in vain. Hour followed hour through a terrible suspense, and the star rose not. Once again men set their eyes upon the old constellations they had counted lost to them forever. In England it was hot and clear overhead, though the ground quivered perpetually; but in the tropics Sirius and Capella and Aldebaran showed through a veil of steam. And when at last the great star rose, near ten hours late, the sun rose close upon it, and in the center of its white heart was a disk of black.

Over Asia the star had begun to fall behind the movement of the sky, and then suddenly, as it hung over India, its light had been veiled. All the plain of India from the mouth of the Indus to the mouths of the Ganges was a shallow waste of shining water that night, out of which rose temples and palaces, mounds and hills, black with people. Every minaret was a clustering mass of people, who fell one by one into the turbid waters as heat and terror overcame them. The whole land seemed a-wailing, and suddenly there swept a shadow across that furnace of despair, and a breath of cold wind, and a gathering of clouds out of the cooling air. Men looking up, nearly blinded, at the star, and saw that black disk creeping across the light. It was the moon, coming between the star and the earth. And even as men cried to God at this respite, out of the east with a strange, inexplicable swiftness sprang the sun. And then star, sun, and moon rushed together across the heavens.

So it was that presently, to the European watchers, star and sun rose close upon each other, drove headlong for a space, and then slower, and at last came to rest, star and sun merged into one glare of flame at the zenith of the sky. The moon no longer eclipsed the star, but was lost to sight in the brilliance of the sky. And though those who were still alive regarded it for the most part with that dull stupidity that hunger, fatigue, heat, and despair engender, there were still men who could perceive the meaning of these signs. Star and earth had been at their nearest, had swung about one another, and the star had passed. Already it was receding, swifter and swifter, in the last stage of its headlong journey downward into the sun.

And then the clouds gathered, blotting out the vision of the sky; the thunder and lightning wove a garment around the world; all over the earth was such a downpour of rain as men had never seen before; and where the volcanoes flared red against the cloud canopy there descended torrents of mud. Everywhere the waters were pouring off the land, leaving mud stilted ruins, and the earth littered like a storm-worn beach with all that had floated, and the dead bodies of the men and brutes, its children.

For days the water streamed off the land, sweeping away soil and trees and houses in the way and piling huge dikes and scooping out titanic gullies over the countryside. Those were the days of darkness that followed the star and the heat. All through them, and for many weeks and months, the earthquakes continued.

But the star had passed, and men, hunger-driven and gathering courage only slowly, might creep back to their ruined cities, buried granaries, and sodden fields. Such few ships as had escaped the storms of that time came stunned and shattered and sounding their way cautiously through the new marks and shoals of once familiar ports. And as the storms subsided men perceived that everywhere the days were hotter than of yore, and the sun larger, and the moon, shrunk to a third of its size, took now fourscore days between its new and new.

But of the new brotherhood that grew presently among men, of the saving of laws and machines, of the strange change that had Iceland and Greenland the shores of Baffin’s Bay, so that the sailors coming there presently found them green and gracious, and could scarce believe their eyes, this story does not tell. Nor of the movement of mankind, now that the earth was hotter, northward and southward towards the poles of the earth. It concerns itself only with the coming and the passing of the star.

The Martian astronomers—for there are astronomers on Mars, although they are different beings from men—were naturally profoundly interested by these things. They saw them from their own standpoint, of course. “Considering the mass and temperature of the missile that was flung through our solar system into the sun,” one wrote, “it is astonishing what little damage the earth, which it missed so narrowly, has sustained. All the familiar continental markings and the masses of the seas remain intact, and indeed the only difference seems to be a shrinkage of the white discoloration (supposed to be frozen water) round either pole.” Which only shows how small the vastest of human catastrophies may seem at a distance of a few million miles.

The Nothing Equation by Tom Godwin

The Nothing Equation

By

Tom Godwin

Word Count: 2,930

Genre: Sci-fi, Horror

Published 1957 in Amazing Stories, Vol. 32, No. 12

The cruiser vanished back into hyperspace and he was alone in the observation bubble, ten thousand light-years beyond the galaxy’s outermost sun. He looked out the windows at the gigantic sea of emptiness around him and wondered again what the danger had been that had so terrified the men before him.

Of one thing he was already certain; he would find that nothing was waiting outside the bubble to kill him. The first bubble attendant had committed suicide and the second was a mindless maniac on the Earthbound cruiser but it must have been something inside the bubble that had caused it. Or else they had imagined it all.

He went across the small room, his magnetized soles loud on the thin metal floor in the bubble’s silence. He sat down in the single chair, his weight very slight in the feeble artificial gravity, and reviewed the known facts.

The bubble was a project of Earth’s Galactic Observation Bureau, positioned there to gather data from observations that could not be made from within the galaxy. Since metallic mass affected the hypersensitive instruments the bubble had been made as small and light as possible. It was for that reason that it could accommodate only one attendant.

The Bureau had selected Horne as the bubble’s first attendant and the cruiser left him there for his six months’ period of duty. When it made its scheduled return with his replacement he was found dead from a tremendous overdose of sleeping pills. On the table was his daily-report log and his last entry, made three months before:

I haven’t attended to the instruments for a long time because it hates us and doesn’t want us here. It hates me the most of all and keeps trying to get into the bubble to kill me. I can hear it whenever I stop and listen and I know it won’t be long. I’m afraid of it and I want to be asleep when it comes. But I’ll have to make it soon because I have only twenty sleeping pills left and if—

The sentence was never finished. According to the temperature recording instruments in the bubble his body ceased radiating heat that same night.

The bubble was cleaned, fumigated, and inspected inside and out. No sign of any inimical entity or force could be found.

Silverman was Horne’s replacement. When the cruiser returned six months later bringing him, Green, to be Silverman’s replacement, Silverman was completely insane. He babbled about something that had been waiting outside the bubble to kill him but his nearest to a rational statement was to say once, when asked for the hundredth time what he had seen:

“Nothing—you can’t really see it. But you feel it watching you and you hear it trying to get in to kill you. One time I bumped the wall and—for God’s sake—take me away from it—take me back to Earth ...”

Then he had tried to hide under the captain’s desk and the ship’s doctor had led him away.

The bubble was minutely examined again and the cruiser employed every detector device it possessed to search surrounding space for light-years in all directions. Nothing was found.

When it was time for the new replacement to be transferred to the bubble he reported to Captain McDowell.

“Everything is ready, Green,” McDowell said. “You are the next one.” His shaggy gray eyebrows met in a scowl. “It would be better if they would let me select the replacement instead of them.”

He flushed with a touch of resentment and said, “The Bureau found my intelligence and initiative of thought satisfactory.”

“I know—the characteristics you don’t need. What they ought to have is somebody like one of my engine room roustabouts, too ignorant to get scared and too dumb to go nuts. Then we could get a sane report six months from now instead of the ravings of a maniac.”

“I suggest,” he said stiffly, “that you reserve judgement until that time comes, sir.”

And that was all he knew about the danger, real or imaginary, that had driven two men into insanity. He would have six months in which to find the answer. Six months minus— He looked at the chronometer and saw that twenty minutes had passed since he left the cruiser. Somehow, it seemed much longer ...

He moved to light a cigarette and his metal soles scraped the floor with the same startling loudness he had noticed before. The bubble was as silent as a tomb.

It was not much larger than a tomb; a sphere eighteen feet in diameter, made of thin sheet steel and criss-crossed outside with narrow reinforcing girders to keep the internal air pressure from rupturing it. The floor under him was six feet up from the sphere’s bottom and the space beneath held the air regenerator and waste converter units, the storage batteries and the food cabinets. The compartment in which he sat contained chair, table, a narrow cot, banks of dials, a remote-control panel for operating the instruments mounted outside the hull, a microfilm projector, and a pair of exerciser springs attached to one wall. That was all.

There was no means of communication since a hyperspace communicator would have affected the delicate instruments with its radiations but there was a small microfilm library to go with the projector so that he should be able to pass away the time pleasantly enough.

But it was not the fear of boredom that was behind the apprehension he could already feel touching at his mind. It had not been boredom that had turned Horne into a suicide and Silverman into—

Something cracked sharply behind him, like a gunshot in the stillness, and he leaped to his feet, whirling to face it.

It was only a metal reel of data tape that had dropped out of the spectrum analyzer into the storage tray.

His heart was thumping fast and his attempt to laugh at his nervousness sounded hollow and mirthless. Something inside or outside the bubble had driven two men insane with its threat and now that he was irrevocably exiled in the bubble, himself, he could no longer dismiss their fear as products of their imagination. Both of them had been rational, intelligent men, as carefully selected by the Observation Bureau as he had been.

He set in to search the bubble, overlooking nothing. When he crawled down into the lower compartment he hesitated then opened the longest blade of his knife before searching among the dark recesses down there. He found nothing, not even a speck of dust.

Back in his chair again he began to doubt his first conviction. Perhaps there really had been some kind of an invisible force or entity outside the bubble. Both Horne and Silverman had said that “it” had tried to get in to kill them.

They had been very definite about that part.

There were six windows around the bubble’s walls, set there to enable the attendant to see all the outside-mounted instruments and dials. He went to them to look out, one by one, and from all of them he saw the same vast emptiness that surrounded him. The galaxy—his galaxy—was so far away that its stars were like dust. In the other directions the empty gulf was so wide that galaxies and clusters of galaxies were tiny, feeble specks of light shining across it.

All around him was a void so huge that galaxies were only specks in it....

Who could know what forces or dangers might be waiting out there?

A light blinked, reminding him it was time to attend to his duties. The job required an hour and he was nervous and not yet hungry when he had finished. He went to the exerciser springs on the wall and performed a work-out that left him tired and sweating but which, at least, gave him a small appetite.

The day passed, and the next. He made another search of the bubble’s interior with the same results as before. He felt almost sure, then, that there was nothing in the bubble with him. He established a routine of work, pastime and sleep that made the first week pass fairly comfortably but for the gnawing worry in his mind that something invisible was lurking just outside the windows.

Then one day he accidentally kicked the wall with his metal shoe tip.

It made a sound like that from kicking a tight-stretched section of tin and it seemed to him it gave a little from the impact, as tin would do. He realized for the first time how thin it was—how deadly, dangerously thin.

According to the specifications he had read it was only one-sixteenth of an inch thick. It was as thin as cardboard.

He sat down with pencil and paper and began calculating. The bubble had a surface area of 146,500 square inches and the internal air pressure was fourteen pounds to the square inch. Which meant that the thin metal skin contained a total pressure of 2,051,000 pounds.

Two million pounds.

The bubble in which he sat was a bomb, waiting to explode the instant any section of the thin metal weakened.

It was supposed to be an alloy so extremely strong that it had a high safety factor but he could not believe that any metal so thin could be so strong. It was all right for engineers sitting safely on Earth to speak of high safety factors but his life depended upon the fragile wall not cracking. It made a lot of difference.

The next day he thought he felt the hook to which the exerciser spring was attached crack loose from where it was welded to the wall. He inspected the base of the hook closely and there seemed to be a fine, hairline fracture appearing around it.

He held his ear to it, listening for any sound of a leak. It was not leaking yet but it could commence doing so at any time. He looked out the windows at the illimitable void that was waiting to absorb his pitiful little supply of air and he thought of the days he had hauled and jerked at the springs with all his strength, not realizing the damage he was doing.

There was a sick feeling in his stomach for the rest of the day and he returned again and again to examine the hairline around the hook.

The next day he discovered an even more serious threat: the thin skin of the bubble had been spot-welded to the outside reinforcing girders.

Such welding often created hard, brittle spots that would soon crystallize from continued movement—and there was a slight temperature difference in the bubble between his working and sleeping hours that would daily produce a contraction and expansion of the skin. Especially when he used the little cooking burner.

He quit using the burner for any purpose and began a daily inspection of every square inch of the bubble’s walls, marking with white chalk all the welding spots that appeared to be definitely weakened. Each day he found more to mark and soon the little white circles were scattered across the walls wherever he looked.

When he was not working at examining the walls he could feel the windows watching him, like staring eyes. Out of self defense he would have to go to them and stare back at the emptiness.

Space was alien; coldly, deadly, alien. He was a tiny spark of life in a hostile sea of Nothing and there was no one to help him. The Nothing outside was waiting day and night for the most infinitesimal leak or crack in the walls; the Nothing that had been waiting out there since time without beginning and would wait for time without end.

Sometimes he would touch his finger to the wall and think, Death is out there, only one-sixteenth of an inch away. His first fears became a black and terrible conviction: the bubble could not continue to resist the attack for long. It had already lasted longer than it should have. Two million pounds of pressure wanted out and all the sucking Nothing of intergalactic space wanted in. And only a thin skin of metal, rotten with brittle welding spots, stood between them.

It wanted in—the Nothing wanted in. He knew, then, that Horne and Silverman had not been insane. It wanted in and someday it would get in. When it did it would explode him and jerk out his guts and lungs. Not until that happened, not until the Nothing filled the bubble and enclosed his hideous, turned-inside-out body would it ever be content ...

He had long since quit wearing the magnetized shoes, afraid the vibration of them would weaken the bubble still more. And he began noticing sections where the bubble did not seem to be perfectly concave, as though the rolling mill had pressed the metal too thin in places and it was swelling out like an over-inflated balloon.

He could not remember when he had last attended to the instruments. Nothing was important but the danger that surrounded him. He knew the danger was rapidly increasing because whenever he pressed his ear to the wall he could hear the almost inaudible tickings and vibrations as the bubble’s skin contracted or expanded and the Nothing tapped and searched with its empty fingers for a flaw or crack that it could tear into a leak.

But the windows were far the worst, with the Nothing staring in at him day and night. There was no escape from it. He could feel it watching him, malignant and gloating, even when he hid his eyes in his hands.

The time came when he could stand it no longer. The cot had a blanket and he used that together with all his spare clothes to make a tent stretching from the table to the first instrument panel. When he crawled under it he found that the lower half of one window could still see him. He used the clothes he was wearing to finish the job and it was much better then, hiding there in the concealing darkness where the Nothing could not see him.

He did not mind going naked—the temperature regulators in the bubble never let it get too cold.

He had no conception of time from then on. He emerged only when necessary to bring more food into his tent. He could still hear the Nothing tapping and sucking in its ceaseless search for a flaw and he made such emergences as brief as possible, wishing that he did not have to come out at all. Maybe if he could hide in his tent for a long time and never make a sound it would get tired and go away ...

Sometimes he thought of the cruiser and wished they would come for him but most of the time he thought of the thing that was outside, trying to get in to kill him. When the strain became too great he would draw himself up in the position he had once occupied in his mother’s womb and pretend he had never left Earth. It was easier there.

But always, before very long, the bubble would tick or whisper and he would freeze in terror, thinking, This time it’s coming in ...

Then one day, suddenly, two men were peering under his tent at him.

One of them said, “My God—again!” and he wondered what he meant. But they were very nice to him and helped him put on his clothes. Later, in the cruiser, everything was hazy and they kept asking him what he was afraid of.

“What was it—what did you find?”

He tried hard to think so he could explain it. “It was—it was Nothing.”

“What were you and Horne and Silverman afraid of—what was it?” the voice demanded insistently.

“I told you,” he said. “Nothing.”

They stared at him and the haziness cleared a little as he saw they did not understand. He wanted them to believe him because what he told them was so very true.

“It wanted to kill us. Please—can’t you believe me? It was waiting outside the bubble to kill us.”

But they kept staring and he knew they didn’t believe him. They didn’t want to believe him ...

Everything turned hazy again and he started to cry. He was glad when the doctor took his hand to lead him away ...

The bubble was carefully inspected, inside and out, and nothing was found. When it was time for Green’s replacement to be transferred to it Larkin reported to Captain McDowell.

“Everything is ready, Larkin,” McDowell said. “You’re the next one. I wish we knew what the danger is.” He scowled. “I still think one of my roustabouts from the engine room might give us a sane report six months from now instead of the babblings we’ll get from you.”

He felt his face flush and he said stiffly, “I suggest, sir, that you not jump to conclusions until that time comes.”

The cruiser vanished back into hyperspace and he was alone inside the observation bubble, ten thousand light-years beyond the galaxy’s outermost sun. He looked out the windows at the gigantic sea of emptiness around him and wondered again what the danger had been that had so terrified the men before him.

Of one thing he was already certain; he would find that nothing was waiting outside the bubble to kill him ...

The Towers Of Titan by Ben Bova

---

Across the frozen cliffs they loomed—the unbelievably
ancient towers with the unimaginable engines deep inside
them still pouring out their endless power. Dr. Sidney Lee,
back from living death, vowed to find the secret of ...

The TOWERS of TITAN

By BEN BOVA

Illustrated by EMSH

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Amazing Stories January 1962.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

---

The landing port at Titan had not changed much in five years.

The ship settled down on the scarred blast shield, beside the same trio of squat square buildings, and quickly disgorged its scanty quota of cargo and a lone passenger into the flexible tube that linked the loading hatch with the main building.

As soon as the tube was disconnected, the ship screamed off through the murky atmosphere, seemingly glad to get away from Titan and head back to the more comfortable and settled parts of the Solar System.

The passenger, Dr. Sidney Lee, stood by the window-wall of the main building and watched the ship disappear into the dark sky. He was tall and lean, seemingly all bone and tendon, with graying dark hair and faintly haunted eyes set deep into a rough-hewn, weather-worn face. When the ship was nothing more than another star overhead, he turned and looked at the place.

Five years hasn't made any difference, he thought. The single room of the main port building was unchanged: a little grimier, perhaps, and a little more worn. But essentially unchanged. There were the same turnstiles and inspection machines, the same processing and handling gadgets for your papers and baggage, the same (it couldn't be, but they looked the same) two bored techs sitting at the far end of the room, unwilling to lift an eyebrow unless specifically commanded to do so.

Lee walked over to the papers processor and pushed his credentials into its slot. After a few wheezes and clanks its green light flickered on and the papers fell into the "return" bin properly stamped and approved. At the same time, his lone bag slid along a conveyor belt and onto the pickup table.

With his credentials back inside his jacket and the bag in hand, Lee looked toward the two clerks. They were studiously avoiding his eyes, searching intently through some schedules that they kept on hand for just such emergencies.

"Sid! Hi!"

He turned at the sound of her voice.

"I'm sorry to be late," she said, hurrying across the big empty room, "but we never know when the Ancient Mariner is going to arrive. It's not a matter of whether it'll be on schedule or not ... just a question of guessing how late it's going to be."

He smiled at her. "Hello, Elaine. It's good to see you again."

She hadn't changed either, and this time he was glad of it. She was still slim and young, her hair a reddish gold, her eyes gray-green. She was dressed with typical casualness: comfortable boots, dark slacks and sweater that outlined her trim figure, and a light green scarf for a touch of color. Outwardly, at least, she seemed cheerful.

"Come on," she said, "I've got a buggy in the parking area. I wanted to get a few more of the old gang to come out and meet you, but there's not many of them left, and they're all pretty busy...." Her voice trailed off.

"I didn't expect a brass band and a key to the city," Lee said. Then he added, "You're pretty gay for a female scientist," he said.

"I'm always gay when I meet old friends again."

He said nothing.

"I wish you'd cheer up," Elaine coaxed.

"I will; give me time."

---

They entered the parking building and got into a bubble-top car. Elaine gunned it to life, and they slid out of the near-empty parking area, through the pressure doors, and into Titan's unbreathable atmosphere.

"Have you been here straight through since I left?" he asked.

"No. I spent about eighteen months on Venus, slushing through the swamps in search of ruins that couldn't possibly have survived a century in that climate."

"And?"

"That's it," she said, shrugging. "Something ventured but nothing found. So I asked to be returned here."

"It's got you, too, hasn't it?"

Her face became serious for the first time. "Certainly it's got me. It's got all of us. Do you think we'd stay out here otherwise?"

"Anything new turned up?"

Elaine shook her head. "Nothing you haven't seen in the reports. Which means nothing, really."

He lapsed into silence and watched the frozen landscape slide by as the car raced along Titan's only highway. They crossed a bleak, frozen plain, bluish-white in the dim twilight from the distant Sun. The stars twinkling in the dark sky overhead made the barren scene look even colder. The road climbed across a row of hills, and as they made a turn around the highest bluff, Saturn came into view.

No matter how many times Lee had seen the planet, it had always thrilled him. Now, five years later, it was still an experience. Three times larger than the full moon as seen from Earth, daubed with brilliant yellow, red and orange stripes, and circled about its middle by the impossible-looking rings, Saturn hung fat and low on the horizon, casting shadows stronger than the Sun's.

"It's a compensation, isn't it?" Elaine said.

Soon they were down on the plain again, but now it was a shattered, broken expanse of jagged rock and ice. A greenish methane cloud drifted over the face of Saturn, and Lee finally turned his eyes away.

"You can see the towers from here," Elaine reminded him.

"I know," he said. He could not make out any detail, but there they were, just as they had been for—how long? Ten thousand years? A hundred thousand? Five towers jutting straight up from the bleak plain, clustered around a central, taller tower.

"Is the machinery still running?" he asked, pointlessly.

"Of course."

"There was some talk a year or so back about trying to stop it."

She shook her head. "They wouldn't dare."

---

The machine had been discovered more than ten years earlier, when the first Earthmen landed on Titan. Saturn's largest satellite was devoid of life, a world of dark and cold, of hydrogen atmosphere and methane clouds, of ammonia seas and ice mountains.

And there in the midst of it all stood the machine: a brazenly unconcealed cluster of mammoth buildings, with its five stately towers surmounted by the soaring central sixth. And within, row upon row of unexplained machinery, fully automated, operating continuously in perfect order.

Alien.

The discoverers soon concluded that the machine was unbelievably old, older than the Egyptian pyramids, perhaps even older than the Martian canals. And it was running smoothly. For untold centuries, for uncounted millennia, it had continued to operate efficiently, tended only by automatic machines.

A clear challenge to the space-rovers from Earth. Who made this machine? How does it work? Why is it here? What is it doing?

As soon as its discovery was made known, the machine was visited by a steady stream of Earthmen—physicists, archeologists, engineers of a thousand different specialties, and soldiers, politicians, men who were now forced to believe the inevitable. The machine was photographed, x-rayed, blueprinted, analyzed spectroscopically, philosophically, even theologically.

Who built it? How does it work? Why is it here?

No answers.

Dr. Sidney Lee, an anthropologist who had made a name for himself by unraveling the history of the ruins on Mars, arrived on Titan full of optimism and enthusiasm. Twenty months later he was taken from Titan to a psychomedical center on Earth—completely irrational and suffering from man's oldest dread: the unknown.

---

Returning to the underground center that had grown over the years near the machine, to house the living and working quarters of the tiny scientific community on Titan, was something like returning home for Dr. Lee. Someone had seen to it that he got his old quarters back again. Most of the people he had known from five years ago had gone elsewhere, but a few remained.

---

Lee spent his first few days renewing acquaintances and meeting the new men and women. He was surprised at their youth, until he tried to recall how he must have looked and acted when he first arrived on Titan.

"Makes you realize how time takes its toll, regardless of geriatrics," he said to Dr. Kimball Bennett. Official director of the center, Bennett had called Lee into his office for a chat.

"Come on now," Bennett scoffed, "you're talking like a man of ninety. Why, you won't need geriatrics for at least another month."

They both laughed. Bennett was a shy-looking, slender astrophysicist who spoke softly, never seemed to exert himself, and yet commanded the unabashed admiration of every member of the center.

"All right," Lee said. "You didn't call me to discuss my failing years. What's on your mind?"

"Oh, I just thought it's about time you got to work. You've been loafing around for a week now. We can't afford to feed you free forever, you know."

"No, I guess you can't," Lee agreed, smiling.

Bennett leaned back in his chair and studied Lee for a long moment. "I won't ask you why you wanted to come back. But I was delighted when I saw the paperwork with your name on it. Want to know why?"

"Now I am curious."

"I want to leave Titan. I've been heading this operation for too many years, now. I want out. And I really can't leave until I have a top-notch man to run this little show. You're my replacement."

"As director?"

"Yes."

"Not me," Lee said, shaking his head. "I couldn't."

"Why not?"

"Why? Hell, Kim, you saw them carry me out of here five years ago. How do you know the same thing won't happen again? How do I know it?"

A trace of a smile flickered across Bennett's face. "Look, the fact that you returned to Titan—to this center and to that infernal machine out there—well, that's proof enough to me that you've licked whatever it was that caused your breakdown."

"Maybe you're satisfied," Lee countered, "but how about the rest of the staff? How will they feel about having a reconditioned neurotic heading the show?"

Bennett's smile broke into an open grin. "Self-pity is a terrible thing. Do you know what those kids think of you? You're Dr. Sidney Lee, the foremost xeno-anthropologist of the human race. You're the man who deciphered the Martian Script, who uncovered the ruins on Tau Ceti, who did the definitive studies on the cave man cultures on Sirius and Vega. Your troubles here on Titan are just a six-month incident in the middle of a dazzling career. Haven't you noticed the deference with which they've been treating you? You're a big man on this campus."

"I don't know...."

"It won't be a lifetime job," Bennett coaxed. "In a couple of years some of the young squirts around here will have acquired enough poise and self-control to run the show. Then you can go on to something else."

Lee got up from his chair and paced slowly to the bookshelf that lined one wall of the office. "Why don't you stay on for another year or so, and then turn it over to one of the youngsters?"

Bennett wordlessly extended his arms over the desk. His hands were trembling, almost imperceptibly, but trembling.

Lee stared at the hands. "You too?"

Bennett placed his hands palms down on the desk. "Do you think you're the only one who worries about an alien race who can build a machine that we can't understand after ten years of investigation and study?"

---

The official transfer took place the following day, shortly after breakfast. Bennett called a meeting of the six department heads and announced that he would leave Titan on the next ship. It came as no surprise.

"From here on, I'm just an interested observer," he said. "Dr. Lee is in charge." He paused for a moment, then went on, "I thought this would be a good time to review what's been going on most recently, and where we stand."

Lee took an old pipe out of his jacket pocket and filled it while he watched them try to decide who would talk first. The six department heads all looked young and eager, he thought. Elaine was among them, of course, as head of the archeology group.

After a bit of finger-pointing and head-shaking, Dr. Richards took the floor. Head of the physics section, he had one of those open, clear-eyed, crew-cut faces that would look young even after his hair turned gray.

"It just so happens," he began, "that we finished a study yesterday that may be of some slight significance." From the size of his grin, Lee judged that the physicist was making a weak attempt to underplay his speech.

Richards walked to the viewscreen at the far end of the room and turned a dial. The screen flickered for a moment, then showed a chart.

"You remember from our last meeting," he said, "that our group finally succeeded in reaching the generating unit that powers all the machinery out there. Uh, Dr. Lee, this is something we've been working on for more than a year. The power unit is buried in the sublevel of the main building out there, and it's damned difficult to get to it without tearing out other machines. We finally wormed a man down there about a month ago."

---

Richards turned back to the rest of the group. "This chart shows what we've been able to learn about the power unit. Which isn't much. There's no input to it. No batteries, no solar cells, nothing. There's a fuel tank—at least, we think it's a fuel tank—that's sunk inside a cryogenic magnetic coil."

Elaine spoke up. "You told us that last time. Have you been able to get into the tank?"

Richards shook his head. "Not unless we break up the coil, which we don't dare try. It would probably mean destroying the power unit and stopping all the machinery. And we can't do that until we're certain of what the machinery's doing."

"We all know that," said Dr. Kulaki, a wiry Polynesian who headed the electronics group.

"Yes. Well, we did make a very elegant experiment," Richards continued, "a variation of Cavendish's experiment to obtain the gravitational constant, in the Eighteenth Century...."

"Spare the history," Dr. Kurtzman said, half-smiling.

"Okay, okay," Richards said. "We determined the mass of the fuel tank, and therefore of the fuel in it. The tank contains a degenerate gas...."

"What?"

"A degenerate gas," Richards repeated. "The stuff must weigh several tons per spoonful."

Dr. Petchkovich, the astronomer, frowned puzzledly. "Wait a minute. Degenerate gases are found only in the cores of certain types of stars ... are you saying that this magnetic field they've put around the fuel tank is strong enough to create a pressure similar to the weight of a star?"

"Take a look at the chart," Richards said, pointing to the viewscreen. "If you know of any other type of substance with a density like that, I'll eat it."

There was a brief conversation, then Dr. Bennett said, "All right, Pat. Is that all?"

"Hell no," Richards said, his cat-like grin returning. "There's more."

He tapped a button on the viewscreen control panel, and another chart came up on the screen.

---

"We know the power output of the generator. That was simply obtained, since the one unit powers all the machinery in the buildings out there. So we calculated all the known methods for obtaining power from a degenerate gas, and checked them against the amount of fuel the system has used up so far...."

Lee interrupted. "How do you know how much fuel has been used if you can't get into the tank?"

Richards' grin broadened. "Oh, that's easy, Dr. Lee. We know how much a degenerate gas should weigh, per unit volume. We know the size of the tank, and therefore how much it can hold, when full. So we can estimate how full the tank is simply by measuring its mass and comparing it to the mass it would have if it were full."

"Doesn't the chemical composition of the gas have any effect on the mass? Wouldn't uranium be heavier than hydrogen?"

"Yes, but not much. A factor of a hundred. You'll see in a minute that it's not enough to matter at this stage of the game."

Lee nodded and the physicist went on. "Well, anyway, you can check out our math in the report we'll issue later this month. But it turns out that the only possible energy source for this gadget is total annihilation of the gas particles into energy."

"Total annihilation? How?"

"That's a good question. I don't think we'll be able to answer it until we can start taking the damned machine apart." He flicked a new graph on the screen. "But, we can calculate how long the thing has been running, on the basis of the fuel it's used up, and the energy rates we've assumed...."

A slow wave of astonishment crept through the small room as, one by one, they grasped the significance of the curving lines on the graph.

"That's right," Richards said. "Unless our rough calculations are completely off the beam, which I doubt, the damned thing has been operating continuously for something like ten-to-the-fifth or ten-to-the-sixth Earth years."

A hundred thousand to a million years.

The rest of the meeting was quiet and orderly. They were all subdued by Richards' report. It's been running continuously for a million years, Lee kept thinking. A million years.

He listened automatically as the other department heads made their reports.

Ray Kurtzman was first. His report was actually a combined discussion of the work that his engineering group, and Dr. Kulaki's electronics people, had been jointly undertaking. They had tried to determine (for the nth time) just what sort of power was being beamed by the antennas atop the machine's towers. No luck. The machinery was using power, the antennas were broadcasting something, but whatever it was could not be detected by any instrument the Kurtzman and Kulaki had applied to the problem.

Elaine gave a routine report on the latest digging expeditions that had been sent out. No artifacts, no foundations, no remains of any sort. Blank.

Dr. Childe, a short, sharp-voiced mathematician, gave his report on his department's analysis of the wave patterns that were being sent out by the antennas. The patterns had been deduced from the fluctuations in energy consumption by the antenna equipment. Childe reported another blank. The patterns were completely random.

"It's foolish to call them patterns at all," Childe complained. "They look more like the ramblings of an idiot than anything produced by intelligence."

---

Finally, Petchkovich reported on the latest astronomical studies. The antennas were tracking an empty section of space between the Sun and the planet Mercury. Careful observations had shown no noticeable effect in the widespread area where the antennas were focused.

"It is my belief," he concluded, "that the antennas were originally focused on one of the planets, but have since become disoriented in some way, and are now well off-target."

Kurtzman huffed. "Not very likely. If they—whoever they are—could make this whole damned set of buildings full of machinery to operate continuously for a million years, do you think they'd slip up on where the antennas are pointing?"

"If it's a million years we're talking about," Petchkovich answered slowly, "then the chances for errors are simply that much greater."

Lee decided it was time for him to step in. "Have there been any other attempts to date the buildings or the machines? Radioactive decay rates, or something like that?"

Elaine nodded. "It's been tried at least once or twice a year, every year. Nothing conclusive has ever been established. The buildings are obviously very old ... but million years...."

They all lapsed into silence.

Lee took a deep breath and began once more. "This million-year-business throws a new light on the whole subject. Up to now, I think, we've all been looking at this machine on a day-to-day basis. I mean, we've been examining what it's doing now. It might be worth our while to sit back a little and try to extrapolate the behavior we've observed back over a million years."

"Could you be a bit more explicit?" Richards asked.

"I'll try. It's mostly a matter of viewpoint, I think. Let's start looking at this machine as something that's been in operation for a million years. Let's admit to ourselves that what we see today is only a very small slice of the whole picture. Dr. Petchkovich, you're an astronomer; you're accustomed to studying a star for a few months and coming up with a story that covers perhaps billions of years. Right?"

"Yes, but this is entirely different...."

"I know. I know," Lee said. "But the line of attack isn't so different. For instance: Dr. Childe, suppose you send your wave patterns to the Orbital Computation Center at Earth and have the Big Brain work them over. Do you think it might come up with something useful?"

Childe shrugged elaborately. "Maybe. If we try to extrapolate the sample patterns we have now over a million years, maybe something will show up."

"It'll take months to get the Big Brain's time," Elaine said. "They're waiting in line all the way back to Mars for it."

"What are months compared to the time we've already spent?" Bennett countered.

"Or to a million years?" Lee added.

Kulaki suddenly started to bob up and down in his chair. "Say, we might be on the track of something here," he said. "If those circuits have been in continuous operation for a million years ... we could learn an awful lot about reliability...."

Lee nodded in agreement. "We have a lot to learn, that's true enough." He cleared his throat nervously. "There's one more thing, I am about to publish a paper ... it's a sort of a general paper, but it has some bearing on the work going on here. I wonder if you'd be good enough to be a tryout audience for me?"

They sat back to listen.

---

Lee gave only the basic outline of his paper. He discussed his findings among the ruins on Mars and on the lone planet circling the star Tau Ceti; and he drew some conclusions from his investigations of the primitive human cultures found on the planetary systems of Sirius and Vega.

First, both Sirius and Vega have both been long known to be comparatively young stars. Astrophysical evidence compiled from the Twentieth Century onward, and finally geophysical data from the planets themselves, showed that Sirius and Vega—and their planets—were considerably less than a billion years old. By contrast, the Solar System was known to be at least five billion years old.

Now, the development of life takes time. It took close to three billion years for life to make its first appearance on Earth. Another two billion years of evolution were necessary before man arose.

"If the planets circling Sirius and Vega are less than one billion years old," Lee stated, "then the human populations of those planets—no matter how primitive they are—could not have originated there. They must have come from another planetary system. The closest system that could have born life on its own is our Solar System."

Second, the ruins on Tau Ceti and on Mars were both definitely built by human beings. The plans of the buildings, their furnishings and utensils, the scant writings and pictures that survived—all were of human origin.

"Although dating the time of destruction of these buildings is very difficult," Lee went on, "we can definitely say two things: they were destroyed suddenly in some immense cataclysm; and they were destroyed at very nearly the same time, both on Mars and Tau Ceti. I hadn't realized the correlation until this morning, but the destruction might easily be dated at approximately one million years ago."

There was a stir of reaction at the mention of the time period.

Also, Lee told them, he had been able to partially translate one of the folk tales of the Vegan people.

"Stripped of its nonessentials, it tells of a cataclysmic war between the ancestors of the Vegan people and another race, mentioned only as the Others."

He paused and looked at them, sitting around the table. They seemed engrossed.

"The Vegan folk tales relate that the Others won an overwhelming victory, and smashed forever their Golden Age, when they travelled through the skies and lived in unbelievable splendor.

"I'd like to make one final point. The Vegan and Sirian peoples are hardly human, by our standards. In addition to slight physiological differences, they live in caves and eat shellfish and giant insects. They do not hunt meat-bearing animals, simply because there are not yet any meat-bearing animals on their planets. The humans on those planets did not evolve there; they are a billion years ahead of the natural evolution of their worlds."

Bennett spoke up. "In other words, they were originally a colony from Earth."

"Exactly."

"That's a lot to swallow in one sitting," Patrick said, quietly.

"I know," Lee answered. "But it fits in with what we've found here. Elaine, I'm certain that if you knew where to look, you could find on Earth the remains of a human civilization that is more than a million years old...."

She shook her head. "That's contrary to every known scrap of evidence about early man. Besides, a million years of weathering would wipe out almost anything on Earth. Wind, rain, Ice Ages, earthquakes ... it would be impossible."

"What about the Moon?" Petchkovich asked. "There should be some archeological evidence on the Moon that hasn't been completely destroyed. Maybe buried under the dust or lava flows...."

"At any rate," Lee said, "I'm convinced that there was a human culture a million years ago; that it expanded out through the Solar System and to the stars; that it met an implacably hostile alien race; and that the humans were utterly defeated. Nearly wiped out."

"And the machine out there?"

"It was built by the Others. It's alien. And hostile," Lee said. "That's why we must find out what it's doing, and how."

---

You could feel the change in attitude throughout the center after that conference. An invisible, but almost palpable wave of tension swept through every office, every lab, every section of the underground community. Not everyone believed Lee's theory about the Others. But they could never look at those strange buildings again without wondering. What had been a puzzling, frustrating riddle took on the attributes of a living, intelligent enemy; an enemy that mocked their efforts to understand, to control; an enemy that seemed in every way superior to the feeble powers of the men from Earth.

---

A few days after that conference, Dr. Bennett left Titan for good. Lee was in full command now.

He was just finishing a quick lunch at the robocafeteria when Elaine walked by and stopped at his table.

"Hi boss. I'm on my way out to the buildings. Want to come along?"

Lee punched a button at the end of the table, and the dishes slid into a wall receptacle. "No thanks," he said. "I've got some paperwork to do...."

"Sid, you're going to have to come out and face it sooner or later. Why don't you come now? There's practically nobody there."

He looked up at her. "You're not a part-time psychotech, are you?"

"No," she said, grinning. "But I wouldn't want anybody to start thinking that you're afraid to go into the buildings. And I especially don't want you to think that."

"Okay," he said, getting up from his chair. "You're right ... as usual."

They took a lift chute to the surface bubble, a dome of clear plastisteel that housed ground vehicles and miscellaneous outdoor equipment. There they squirmed into pressure suits, complete with fishbowl helmets. After checking out their oxygen tanks, heaters and radios, they were ready to go outside.

"Want to walk?" Elaine asked.

Lee nodded.

It took him a few minutes to get accustomed to the low-gravity shuffle that you must employ to walk on Titan, with its one-third Earth gravity.

 

---

They headed for the buildings, under the double shadows cast by the distant Sun and the ever-present, overpowering Saturn. The buildings loomed straight up from the dark plain, gaunt gloomy specters from a bygone age haunting this shadow world. There were five low, square featureless structures ringed around a central pentagonally-shaped tower that swept upward to a series of spires and antennas. Several doors had been cut into the outer buildings' walls by the inquiring Earthmen. Originally, the walls had been perfectly blank.

"Did you bring a torch?" Lee asked.

Elaine shook her head. "Don't need one anymore. We installed lights inside. They're tripped by a photocell as we cross through a doorway."

He could feel it coming on as they approached the buildings—the tenseness, the prickling along the spine, as if a deeply-buried memory was writhing within his mind.

Even before they entered the doorway he could sense the throbbing, beating purposefulness of the machines.

And then they were inside, surrounded by them, row on row, tier on tier, inhuman untiring infallible machines humming, growling, whining, filling the vast building with the rumbling power of their work. Driving, constantly driving at their unknown tasks. Along catwalks that snaked through the maze of machines, automatic maintenance vehicles scurried along, stopping here for a quick adjustment, there for replacement of a faulty part.

No matter where the two invading humans went along the twining catwalks, the maintenance vehicles avoided them. If they stopped before a machine that was to be serviced, the maintenance vehicle would hover nearby, glowering at them, waiting for them to get out of the way.

---

He could feel it again—the alienness, the lurking presence of an intelligence that scorned the intruders from Earth. Every nerve in his body screamed the same message: get out, get away, this thing is evil, hostile, a weapon against all mankind. In the conference room, telling them of his theory, he had inwardly wondered how much of it he himself really believed. But here, in the midst of these implacably efficient machines—he knew. This is the product of a cosmic hatred, the work of those who seek to destroy man, our ancient enemy, the unknown, the nameless Others.

"Are you all right?"

Elaine's voice in his earphones snapped him back to reality.

"Why, do I look green?"

She came up close enough so that their helmets nearly touched. "A little green," she said, smiling. "It gives me the creeps, too. Want to go?"

"No," he answered. "Let's see the work that's going on."

He took a firm grip on himself and went through it all, from the combined crews of archeologists and engineers tracing wiring circuits, to the handful of physicists conducting further tests on the power generator buried deep in the central building's foundation.

"It goes awfully slowly," Elaine said as they trudged back to the center.

"We're on the outside looking in," Lee said. "If we could only determine the purpose of the machinery, then the rest of it would come pretty easily."

They returned to the surface bubble and took off their pressure suits.

"Nearly dinner time," Elaine said, as they descended to the living area. "How about eating in my quarters?" she asked.

"Can you cook?"

"You'll find out."

---

A few hours later, he had decided that she definitely could cook, and that she had somehow managed to bring to Titan some of the best wine he had tasted in years.

Now the table was folded back into the wall, and they were sitting together on the couch, listening to music tapes.

"What's that?" he asked.

"Villa-Lobos, a Twentieth Century composer. Bachianas Brazilieris. Number eight, I think...."

They listened in silence for a few moments to the moody, restless music.

"Reminds me of topside, standing at the shore of the ammonia sea when a storm is coming up," he said.

Elaine nodded. "Yes ... the wind, and the dark, and the waves...."

Abruptly, the music snapped off.

"Oh damn!" Elaine blurted. "I thought I had the thing fixed."

"Let me take a look at it," Lee said getting up from the couch.

He tinkered with the recorder for a while, to no avail. "I'm no electronics tech, that's for sure."

Elaine shrugged. "Don't worry about it. I'll have it repaired tomorrow."

She went into the kitchenette and called back, "How about some brandy?"

"Fine," he answered.

She returned and handed him a glass.

"Ad astra," he said, as they touched glasses.

"Amen."

Elaine walked slowly away from him, swishing the liquor in her glass. "Let's go topside and see the stars," she said, suddenly.

"H'mm?"

"Up to the bubble. Come on."

---

So they left her one-room quarters and took the lift tube up to the bubble. It was deserted. Overhead, Saturn was low on the horizon, silhouetting the alien buildings. They turned to the other side of the sky, where it was clear and dark. Thousands of stars twinkled in the darkness; they made out Sirius and Vega, then Mars, and finally Earth—a bright blue jewel that outshone all the others.

"I guess Jupiter's on the other side of the Sun," Lee said.

Elaine nodded. "It looks so far away," she said, staring at Earth, "and so lonely, out there in all that emptiness."

"A psychotech would call that 'projection.'"

"I know. We're the lonely ones, aren't we?"

She was perfectly serious now.

"You know that Ruth and I have split up," he said.

"I heard ... that she left you."

He shrugged. "That's a matter of viewpoint. She got tired sitting Earthside while I batted around the Solar System. When I told her I was going to Vega, she called it quits."

"Couldn't she have gone with you?"

"If she had wanted to...."

"Do you still love her?" Elaine asked.

"I don't know. I don't think I know what love really is, anymore. All I know is ... on that long trip out to Vega, when I had nothing to do but sit and think, it wasn't Ruth I was thinking about. It was you."

"Oh...."

They talked a bit more, and finally he took her in his arms and kissed her and she was his, at least for a little while.

---

Weeks lapsed into months, and the work on Titan inched steadily along. If he stopped to think about it, Lee knew that all they were doing was scratching around the base of the problem, and making precious little headway. The blind men and the elephant, he told himself. But then he asked himself what else they could possibly do, and the answer was always, nothing. But the machine was still there, doing whatever it was designed to do, and he could sense the scornful laughter of its creators as he vainly tried to understand their work. Only the thought of Elaine, the sight of her, the touch of her, allowed him to keep his sense of balance.

People left Titan, baffled and confused; new people arrived—eager, full of energy, excited at the chance to tackle the unknown, undimmed—at first—by the day-to-day frustrations of trying to unlock a door that has no key.

---

Lee dialed his selection at the robocafeteria and waited a few moments for the tray of food to appear at the pickup table. He had spent the morning shut away in his office, searching months worth of reports for some glimmer of encouragement. There was progress, of course; there was always progress. But it was never in a direction that would take them closer to the final answer.

And, carefully tucked into the top drawer of his desk was a nasty yellow sheet that bore a querulous message from Earth: What is the status of the project? Why are expenditures constantly climbing? Is a ninety-three-man staff really needed? When can some solid results be expected?

Lee picked an unoccupied table and sat down. As he started to eat, a quartet of young engineers, headed by Dr. Kurtzman, came in and sat at the next table.

"I still don't see why they keep digging," one of them was saying. "They'll never find anything outside the buildings."

Another countered, "Look, they've got to follow every possible angle. The only way we're ever going to understand this thing is to put together every scrap of evidence we can find until there's enough to form an understandable picture."

Kurtzman shook his head. "Not at all. This isn't going to be solved by putting pieces together, like a puzzle. There's more evidence in those buildings than we can ever hope to digest. It's not a matter of adding up clues ... this is going to be a gestalt. One of these days, somebody's going to get a few thousand million of his brain cells turned the right way, and he'll say, "Ah-HAH!" Then we'll have it. Until then, it's our job to keep poking around, hoping to find the right piece of information to trigger the gestalt."

The first one spluttered. "But that ... that's non-scientific!"

"So?" Kurtzman asked, arching his eyebrows. "Do you see science making any great strides around here? We're in over our heads. Intuition is the only thing that can save us."

"If we're that bad off, we might as well quit," the first one said. "In fact, that might be the best idea of all. Forget it and go home. Let the damned machine run for another million years, if it wants to."

Lee could not keep quiet any longer. "That would be fine, wouldn't it?" he said, turning on the surprised engineer. "Give it up and forget about it, without knowing where it came from, or what it's doing, or why."

"I didn't mean...."

"Listen to me. It's not just that the thing could be a weapon. It may not be. But we don't know. And as long as we don't know, we've got to keep trying to find out. Understand?"

"Yes, but...."

"And there's more at stake here than just an intellectual puzzle," Lee insisted. "If we turn our backs on this machine, we've turned our backs on a basic premise of all scientific thought. If we admit that we can't understand this machine, then we admit that there's an absolute limit to our ability to understand the universe. We give in to the old witch-doctor's claim that there are some things in the world that man must not tamper with. Taboo!

"The basic nature of man and science is at stake here! We've got to understand that machine. Our claim to the stars is tied up in it."

Lee looked up and saw that everyone in the dining hall was watching him. He stood up.

"Sorry; I didn't mean to get so vehement," he mumbled to the engineer. "Guess I'm a bit edgy today."

He walked quickly out of the dining area and returned to his office.

---

Slowly, quietly, the work went on. Dr. Petchkovich spent six weeks on Mercury, supervising at first hand the investigation of the area where the machine's antennas were focused. He returned to Titan in high excitement.

"We have definitely proved that there is a disturbance in the interplanetary magnetic field at the focal point of the machine's antennas," he announced to the department heads, when they convened in the conference room to hear his report.

"How strong a disturbance?" Dr. Kulaki asked.

Petchkovich hesitated a moment. "Well, it's only one part in a hundred thousand...."

The excitement died quickly. It was a discovery, yes. But it did not bring them any closer to understanding the machine and its purpose.

---

Lee was sitting at his desk, staring moodily at a graph that Dr. Childe had left with him: the results of the Orbital Computing Center's extrapolation of the wave patterns broadcast by the machine.

The phone buzzer sounded. Without taking his eyes from the graph, Lee flicked the phone on.

"Are you busy right now?"

He looked up and saw Elaine's face on the screen. "No, not really," he answered. "Come on in."

"I'll be there in a few minutes."

As soon as she came through the door he knew that something was wrong. She was trying too hard not to look concerned.

"What's up?" he asked her.

She shrugged and sat down in front of the desk. "I just thought we might talk for a while."

"In my office?"

"It concerns official business."

"I see."

She looked at the graph. "What's that? Something new?"

Changing the subject, he thought to himself. What's she afraid of?

Aloud, he answered, "It's Childe's results from the Big Brain ... the machine's wave patterns extrapolated over a million years." He turned the graph around so she could see it better.

Elaine studied it for a moment, then shook her head. "Childe was right, wasn't he? It doesn't make any sense at all. No pattern, no rhyme, no reason."

"I don't know," Lee said. "There's something ... well, something strange about these waves. They don't follow a regular pattern, and yet...."

"What?"

He frowned. "They're just too damned irregular to be really random. That doesn't make much sense, does it? Well, anyway, I've got the feeling that I've seen this pattern—or lack of pattern—before. Somewhere I've seen something that looks a lot like this ... but I can't remember where."

Elaine looked at the graph again, at the multiple curves swinging back and forth across the paper, intertwining in seeming confusion. "It looks like some of the graphs I drew when I was an undergrad."

He laughed. "Maybe that's where I saw it."

There was an awkward silence. Lee got up from his seat and walked around the desk. He pulled up another chair and sat beside Elaine. "Now, what's the trouble?"

"I've been thinking," she said slowly. "I ... I've decided to transfer off Titan."

"Leave? But why?"

"For us, Sid. For both of us. Before we get so wrapped up in each other that we won't be able to break it up without really getting hurt...."

"I don't understand," he said.

She spoke calmly and softly, no tears, no hysterics. She had thought it all out very carefully. "Sid, take a look around you. We're like two castaways on a desert world. We love each other—here and now. But we won't always be here. What happens when we leave Titan? What happens when we're not faced with the loneliness and that ... that thing out there? Suppose we find that we don't really need each other? What then?"

"But I do need you, Elaine. I love you."

"You do now," she answered. "But how long will it last? Sid, I have to get away, at least for a little while. I need a sense of perspective."

"I see," he said, shifting his gaze away from her. "That doesn't leave me much to say, does it? All right, Elaine. Make out a transfer request and I'll sign it."

"Thanks. I ... I hope you understand." She got up and started slowly toward the door.

"I'm not so sure that you understand this yourself," he replied. "But I know this—I don't want to lose you, Elaine. If you haven't worked this out within a month or so after you leave Titan, I'll come looking for you."

She turned and, without a word, went over and kissed him. Then she quickly left the office.

Lee returned to his desk. He sat down and stared at Childe's graph again. After a few minutes, he angrily slapped it in a drawer, slammed the thing shut, and stamped out of the room.

---

Personal matters were soon buried in the excitement of another discovery, this time an important one. It looked promising.

Kurtzman and Kulaki finally discovered what form of energy the antennas were beaming out.

After years of trial-and-error experimentation, the engineer and electronicist asked Richards and Childe to lend a hand. With a firm theoretical and mathematical background to bolster their work, Kurtzman and Kulaki started out on a process of elimination.

They soon proved that the antennas were not broadcasting any known form of electromagnetic energy, from gamma to long-radio waves. They investigated one possibility after another, turning up a steady succession of negative answers. Negative, but answers all the same. It was time-consuming, but at least they were definitely determining which avenues were blind alleys.

Then Childe started tinkering with a hunch, and showed his paperwork to Richards. The two of them made a few suggestions to Kurtzman and Kulaki. Their problem was that their detection instruments were drawing blanks, when applied to the antennas' output. But the power input to the antennas showed they were working continuously.

Childe showed, mathematically, that their output must be an extremely weak, low-frequency form of energy. Richards agreed, and pointed out that there was only one known form of energy that fulfilled these conditions: gravity.

"Gravity waves?" Kurtzman asked, incredulously, when they told him about it.

Kulaki's mind reacted faster. "Knowing it's gravity waves, on paper, and proving it experimentally are two different things."

But they were up to the test. They had to scavenge equipment from the center's grav screen machinery, and the whole underground community was without its Earth-normal grav field for two and a half days, but when the field was returned to normal (and people stopped hopping and bouncing all through the center) Kurtzman and Kulaki had proved that the antennas were indeed beaming out gravity waves.

It's all here, Lee thought, as he read their combined report. Now we know what the machine is doing. But to what purpose? What influence does this have on Earth?

Then he put down the report and turned to another bit of paperwork that lay on his desk: Elaine's official request for a transfer. He looked through it automatically. There was a place marked Justification for Request. Elaine had typed simply, "Personal." Lee flipped to the last page and signed.

He leaned back in his chair and tried to let his mind float free; forget about her, forget about the buildings out there, forget about everything ... at least for a few moments. Just drift and let your mind wander where it pleases....

---

The automatic secretary on his desk hummed into life and announced, "Department heads' meeting starts in five minutes."

To hell with the department heads. To hell with Titan. A world of cold and dark and ice. Like Dante's Inferno. Titan is hell. A place where sinning scientists are sent. Their punishment is to stand out in the cold and try to solve the unanswerable. Forever. Stand in the icy darkness and try to understand the unknown. Once in a while you make a discovery that excites you; but when you look again, your discovery is meaningless, you know as little about the real answer as you knew before. The discoveries are just part of the punishment, part of the eternal torment, they just keep you going after the carrot on the stick, but the carrot is always out of reach....

"Department heads' meeting beginning now," the automatic voice said.

Lee cocked an eye at the tiny device. "All right," he said, getting up, "I'm going."

The meeting was strictly routine. The reaction had set in. A week ago they had all been agog with the gravity-waves discovery. Now it had become apparent that the discovery had not opened the door they were trying to get through. We're like children, Lee thought, trying to put together a stereo transceiver from an assembly kit; all the pieces are there, but we can't get them together in the proper way.

It was a short meeting. As they broke up, Lee saw Richards walk over to Elaine.

"I hear you're leaving us," the young physicist said. "Going Earthside?"

"Yes," Elaine answered. "For a while, at least."

Richards broke into his feline grin again. "Good. I'll be vacationing on Earth in a few weeks. Do you like to ski?"

"I haven't skied in years...."

"There's a lodge I go to in Switzerland. Really fine. And the skiing is marvelous. Even if you don't want to ski, there are mountains to climb ... and glaciers...."

Lee started toward them, thought better of it, and walked sullenly out of the room. He went to his office, sat fidgeting at his desk for a while, then called her on the intercom. She was not at her office or her quarters, so the equipment automatically paged her. When her face finally showed on the viewscreen, Lee could see that she was still in the conference room, which was now empty, except for her and Richards.

"What is it, Sid?"

"Uh ... can you come down to my office for a minute? Right now?"

She quickly covered her surprise. "Of course. I'll be right down."

---

Within a few minutes, she was entering his office. "What's the matter?"

"Nothing," he said, gesturing her to a chair. "I just wanted to get you out of the grips of that All-American physicist."

"What? Why, you jealous old goat!"

"Never mind. If you want to listen to propositions, please make sure I'm out of earshot."

She laughed. "Is that what you brought me down here for?"

"Yes."

"I'm flattered."

"Don't be cute."

"He's a very nice boy."

He frowned. "All right, so I'm foolish and juvenile...."

"And he's so interesting," she went on, paying no attention. "He was telling me all about glaciers. In Switzerland. Near this ski lodge. Seems the glaciers have been growing during the past few years. Something I should really be sure to see."

"Sounds fascinating," Lee grumbled.

"Oh, it is. The glaciers, that is. They were retreating, you know, until a few years ago. Now they're growing again. Goes in cycles, it seems...."

Lee suddenly stiffened. "Great God of our forefathers!"

"What now?"

Instead of answering, he scrambled out of his chair and went to the floor-to-ceiling bookcase that lined one wall of the office.

"Sid, what's the matter? Did I say something...."

But he was not listening to her. "That's it," he was muttering, "That must be it."

Elaine watched him paw through the shelves of books, desperately searching for something.

"Can I help?" she asked.

"No. I think ..." he snatched at a book and riffled through it. "Yes! Look at it!"

He wheeled and shoved the open book at her. She nearly dropped it as he ducked back around his desk and rummaged through a pile of papers.

"Here it is. Look at them!" he shouted, handing her a sheet of paper. "Put them side by side and look at them."

The book was opened to a graph, Elaine saw, that showed the advance and retreat of the Ice Age glaciers over the past million years on Earth. The sheet of paper was Childe's graph of the wave patterns of the machine's antennas.

Her face went pale as she looked at the two graphs, side by side. "They ... they're the same ... almost identical."

"It all fits together now," Lee said, drumming his fingers on the desktop in a restless tattoo. "The machine beams gravity waves into the interplanetary plasma between the Sun and Mercury. The effect is infinitesimal, by our short-term standards, but over a hundred thousand years or so, the cumulative effect must be enough to block off a small fraction of the Sun's radiation. The Earth goes into a deep freeze for a few millennia!"

"But why?" Elaine asked. "Why did the Others build it?"

---

Lee paced nervously across the room. "Think a minute. They had beaten the Earthmen in a bitter interstellar war. They had done their best to wipe out the human race. What better way to insure their victory than by subjecting our homeworld to violent climate changes? They probably thought they were guaranteeing the complete extinction of mankind."

"But the Ice Ages didn't destroy man," Elaine said.

"No. They reduced him to the level of a beast, though. Those few survivors of the interstellar war were robbed of their civilization. They had to go back to living in caves, to fighting the other animals for sheer survival. They made it, though, and re-learned what was lost, and built a new civilization."

"Then the machine failed its purpose."

"Right," Lee said. "But remember, it's only an automatic machine. Those who made it, the Others, they're still out there among the stars somewhere. They're going to be mighty upset when they find out that we're not dead."

"It's ... terrifying ... in a way."

"The important thing is that we understand. Now we can face them, wherever they are. They're no more intelligent than we are. We've proved that by learning what the machine is all about. They may be older, and they certainly know more tricks, but they're not on a completely higher plain of mental development."

Elaine leaned back in her seat. "Well, it's over. At last it's ended. We can leave Titan for good now."

"Leave? Not likely. Now we can finally start to tear the machinery apart and see how it works. We've just been sniffing around it so far, treating it like a museum exhibit. Now we can shut the damned thing off and start dissecting it. There's a lot to be done, a whole new technology to be learned. How does it work? Who are the Others and where did they come from? There are more questions to answer now than ever."

"That means that you won't be leaving Titan?" she asked.

"Not for a while. How about you?"

She thought for a moment, then answered, "If you're right about all this, then there should be a lot of archeological evidence awaiting discovery on the Moon. Maybe I should organize a team...."

"Then you're leaving anyway," he said.

"For a while, Sid. I'll be back in time."

"Stay off the ski slopes."

She grinned and got up from her chair. Lee kissed her, and she turned away and went to the door. She looked back to say a final word, but he was already at his desk, punching buttons on the automatic secretary:

"All right, you mechanical marvel, call the department heads to the conference room for a meeting in five minutes. And take a message for the Terran Council Science Committee—Gentlemen: It is my belief that the question of the alien machinery on Titan is now essentially solved...."

THE END

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