The Unorthodox Engineers Read online

  Nevill saw the cat drawing across the rouge desert, and came to the edge of the workings to await Fritz’s arrival.

  “How’re things going, Philip?”

  “Just great! We knew we had a major find, but this—this is paradise! We’re going straight down on a major city by the look of it, and the stuff on the lower levels where the sand is dry is in a perfect state of preservation. Some of the three-storied buildings are so sound that we’ll be able to use them for our own purposes. I tell you, Fritz, Tazoo looks like paying off about two million per cent interest. The complete analysis of the stuff found here will occupy generations.”

  Fritz gazed down into the broad quarry which was the site of the workings. On every hand the feverish activity of the archaeological teams pointed a measure of the excitement and enthusiasm which infected everyone concerned. The shifts had been voluntarily lengthened, but even so, the end of the shift period had to be declared a compulsory cessation of work. Even then it was difficult to actually get some folk off the site and into their beds.

  Here and there alien towers were already exposed above the sand, unimaginable obelisks of incomprehensible architecture, curiously distorted and decayed by time and the ravages of wind and sand. Some, the sand shored back to greater depths, were firmer on the lower levels, and the architecture was even more marvellously apparent. Occasionally, vertical pits descended at points where logic had decreed there lay something more Intriguing or exciting or simply yielding greater bounty for the effort it entailed.

  Fritz was fascinated beyond measure. The sheer otherworldliness drew his imagination on with an inescapable lure. As an engineer he fought to tame the logic of the structures which were being uncovered before him, but something in his soul trapped him in the wonder of the whole. He was the technologist who came for a dispassionate analysis and stayed to gawp.

  Nevill watched him in amusement. “I know, it takes us all like that. It’s both wonderful and sad to be uncovering the remains of so great a culture: wonderful because the culture was so great, and sad because we find their city empty of the creatures who created it.”

  “What the hell happened to them?” asked Fritz. “After they’d got all this way? They had mastered their environment to a degree comparable to ourselves, then in the space of a few short centuries they faded and died away—and then the sand moved in and covered all their marvels. But what happened? It’s something we must discover in case one day we’re faced with it ourselves.”

  Four

  By sundown the last hut had been transferred to its new position near the workings. The day had been one of great activity intermixed with frustration. As Fritz had expected the huts had proved themselves capable of being moved bodily across the sand, but the condition of the cats and tractors was such that the path of the move was plainly marked with a trail of abandoned vehicles spread broadly across the sandy steppes. Indeed, by the end of the day only five cats remained in operation.

  After organizing a team to recover any repairable machinery, Jacko went to look for Fritz and found him in the workshop idly strumming the Tazoon harp with the air of a man evoking the muses as an aid to inspiration.

  “You know, Jacko, I wish I could work out what happened to the Tazoons. I simply can’t understand why such a highly advanced and organized culture should suddenly fall to pieces. Planetary war—or assault from outside—would have left obvious traces, recognisable even after this long. It’s a highly disturbing thought that a catastrophe which could destroy a race with significant levels of technology could leave so little trace. It’s as though they suddenly closed the doors and walked out to die on a mass trek to the equator.”

  “What about famine?” asked Jacko.

  “Possibly. That’s virtually what Nevill suggested—widespread soil erosion. For some reason the major forests in this zone died suddenly. That rather suggests a prolonged drought—but you’d think a major technology fighting for survival could cope with that. The sea is an atrocious mineral stew, but I’m willing to bet you could desalinate enough water to maintain a pretty fair agricultural belt if the need arose.”

  “But without nuclear energy where would you get that sort of power?” asked Jacko. “Distillation of sea-water on that scale would take a great deal of energy. And we’ve seen nothing that might suggest the remains of fusion plants.”

  “Even the more primitive sort of fission reactor would have left pretty obvious traces. I know.”

  Fritz sat up. “That’s the crux of the problem! Come to think of it, where did they get their power from anyway? Let’s put a few facts together. We know that at a certain stage in the history of Tazoo something happened—something which in the span of a couple of centuries destroyed the civilized inhabitants of the planet.

  “Curiously, the wildlife forms survived for a considerable time afterwards, and some are still to be found in the forest belts. Now the basic difference between civilized and wild-life forms is that the former are power dependent animals while the latter are not. Jacko, you’ve hit upon the heart of the matter, and no mistake.”

  “It’s just a gift,” said Jacko modestly.

  “Then seeing it didn’t cost you anything, see if you can stretch it a little further. Let’s play for a moment with the assumption that the Tazoons had become power-dependent creatures—as we have ourselves. What would their basic source of energy have been, and why did it fail so suddenly and disastrously?”

  “Oil or natural gas, perhaps,” said Jacko.

  “Not very convincing. By all appearances the Tazoons were great power users. From what Nevill’s uncovered recently I’d say the power consumption in this area alone must have been quite enormous even by Terran standards. Now, you don’t develop a heavy power-consuming technology without creating the resources to maintain it. To do otherwise would be technological suicide.”

  “That’s assuming they thought about the problem in the same way that a human being would.”

  “I wouldn’t know about human beings,” said Fritz drily, “but engineers I do know about, and their thought processes must be essentially similar whether they have one head or six. There are an infinite number of ways of solving any engineering problem, but the simpler answers will always look familiar. It’s just the nature of the beast.

  “Give a ten-armed Dingbat a head of steam and tell him to convert it into electrical energy. I don’t care what the influence of his racial characteristics, training or personal geometry, he’s going to produce something that any engineer would recognise as a turbine generator. So, I don’t think we can go far wrong if we tackle this problem from our own standpoint, and currently we are assuming they had a power supply which appeared infallible yet failed. Now we need to know what was the source of that energy. If we knew that maybe we could work out why it stopped.”

  The portable radio squawked and Fritz picked it up.

  Nevill. “I’d like to see you first thing in the morning, Fritz. There’s something I want you to take a look at.”

  “Okay. Something promising?”

  “Oh yes. The team has just uncovered something which looks like the entrance to a mine of some sort. Perhaps you’d like to look it over.”

  “We’ll be there first thing,” said Fritz, and dropped the handset back on the desk.

  “What’s up?” asked Jacko.

  “Nevill’s team have discovered what he thinks may be the entrance to a mine.”

  “In the centre of a city?”

  “Yes, that’s what I thought, too,” said Fritz. “I don’t think that a mine as such is particularly likely, though it might just be connected with our lost energy source—or he may have stumbled on something I’ve been looking for myself.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Jacko, in a city as large and as complex as this one appears to be, where’s the logical place to put the bulk passenger transport system?”

  “Underground,” said Jacko, “same as always.”

  “Precisely, and that�
��s what I’m hoping Nevill’s hit upon.”

  “God!” said Jacko. “An alien subway scarcely bears thinking about.”

  Fritz van Noon stood in the glare of floodlights, watching Jacko Hines pack spare torch batteries into his belt pouches. Then they moved cautiously through the doorway.

  Further in from the door they had to use the flashlights. Here the sand had not penetrated so deeply, and by the time they had reached the head of the shaft only a brief dusting covered the floor.

  The shaft was equipped with the normal Tazoon-type stairway—a central pole with round horizontal bars set in a helix, but on a broader pattern than they had encountered hitherto and with a deeper pitch.

  Such a stairway was not adapted to human physiology, but it was traversable—just— by those with climbing experience or suicidal tendencies. Jacko had neither.

  “Down?” he enquired, his torch failing to probe the darkness of the alien depths.

  “Down,” confirmed Fritz. “Where’s your sense of adventure?”

  “It remained firmly embedded in my childhood,” said Jacko, “along with the sense necessary not to get into situations like this.”

  “Down!” said Fritz firmly, and led the way.

  Together they climbed down perhaps one hundred metres. Since it was impossible both to climb and hold a flashlight, this was accomplished in total darkness, and the steady rhythm of the climb from bar to bar exercised its own almost hypnotic fascination. Both had to stand for many seconds at the bottom to re-orientate their senses.

  The preservation of the passageways at that level was remarkable and probably complete, and the air was cooler and less aggressive than above. Remarkable also was the dryness of the connecting tunnels which had lain for so long at such a depth, indicating the complete lack of a water table above the level of the deep-welled seas of Tazoo. The walls here were of metal, curiously wrought in a manner which might have been functional or might have been symbolic; and the alien strangeness of a completely artificial Tazoon environment gripped at their hearts with a half fear which had nothing to do with selfpreservation.

  For the first time they felt the full impact of standing in the presence of the unimaginable achievements of a culture which had no common roots with their own. They could vaguely comprehend but never predict the unfolding of the unearthly technology which surrounded them.

  Machine or effigies, they had no means of knowing which, stood like dark, mute sentries in the uncertain, shifting shadows of the torch’s beam: the tortuous walls and fluted ceilings were channelled and moulded with a thousand metal mouths connected to unguessable throats for unfathomable reasons— only the floor approximated its Terran counterpart, having a common engineering function of providing an unimpeded pedestrian passageway.

  They turned another corner and stopped abruptly when torchlight soared into empty darkness and encountered nothing. Their consternation was relieved by the realization that they were now looking along the length of a vastly greater tunnel. Vaguely they could trace the complex vaulted roof rising to its apex in a series of panels shaped more like sculpture than supporting structure. At their feet the floor continued unchanged as far as torchlight could reveal, while to their right the level dropped abruptly perhaps two metres to form a channel of about seven metres width. Beyond the channel the walls rose again, arching upwards.

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” asked Fritz.

  “Uh!” said Jacko. “No matter how you build it, a subway station is a subway station is a subway station, and this is one such.”

  “I agree,” said Fritz. “Let’s have a look at the rails.”

  “No lines,” said Jacko at last, his voice tinged with disappointment. “It could be that we’re wrong about this place. Perhaps a sewer…”

  “I’m not wrong,” said Fritz. “I’d know a subway when I found one even if I was deaf, blind and locked in a box. It’s part of the chemistry of whatever genes conspire to make an engineer. Here, help me down, I want to explore.”

  “Don’t you think we’d better go back and get some reinforcements?” said Jacko. Fritz had started along the channel to where it entered a somewhat smaller tunnel undeniably reminiscent of a Terran subway. “For Heaven’s sake, Fritz, you don’t know what you might find in there!”

  “What’s eating you, Jacko? Not losing your nerve all of a sudden?”

  “No, it’s just that walking down a tunnel that might contain an emergent subway train goes against my finer sensibilities—even if it is thousands of years behind schedule.”

  Fritz took fifteen paces into the tunnel and let out a whoop which paralysed Jacko with fright.

  “Jacko, get down here quick! I’ve found one.”

  “Found one what?” asked Jacko when he had regained control of his vocal cords.

  “A train, you idiot. I’ve found a bloody train! Bring your torch in here.”

  Against his better judgment Jacko dropped into the channel and followed Fritz into the tunnel. Then with a churning stomach and racing brain he examined the artifact which barred their further entry.

  “That,” he asked finally, “is a train?”

  “It can’t be anything else,” said Fritz, not very happily. “It doesn’t appear to be a signal box and there’s not much point in having a wrought-iron summer house this far underground. It appears to be the right shape to fit the tunnel so it’s probably either a highly ornate tunnelling machine or else it’s a train.”

  “Alien!” said Jacko in awe. “The connotations of that word get lost by common usage. It doesn’t begin to convey the mind-twisting sense that everything you know and believe has been scrunched up and re-sorted by a different kind of logic. These beings had different values and different basics, and it makes the mind squirm even trying to re-adjust.”

  “They didn’t have different basics,” said Fritz, “they merely had a different emphasis on the relative values of the same old basics. We can’t yet try to comprehend the culture, but when it comes to unravelling their engineering I think we’ll find we have a great deal in common.”

  “Like an iron-lace potting-shed without wheels or tracks which we presume to be a train simply because it doesn’t appear to be anything else?”

  “Just so,” said Fritz. “We have to separate the mechanics from the culture. So far we’ve found very few Tazoon applications of principles of which we were completely ignorant. Of course, they were streets ahead of us in some fields and curiously lacking in others—they had no organic chemistry, for instance. But failing the practical application of black magic, that’s a train. And it’s only a matter of time before we find out what made it go.”

  Cautiously they squeezed down between the curious vehicle and the tunnel wall, the better to examine the odd-looking thing.

  “It’s a crazy, twisted birdcage,” said Jacko finally. “An appliance for containing crazy, twisted birds.”

  Fritz looked up from the complex of curiously wrought mechanisms. “We’d better get some more lights down here, and muster some of the squad. I want this insane tin can taken to pieces, and put together again when I’ve had a chance to examine the bits.”

  “Cannibalization I can understand,” said Jacko, “but why the resurrection?”

  “Because,” said Fritz van Noon, “if it’s the last thing I do I’m going to put the subways of Tazoo back in operation. We obviously can’t build a transportation system on the surface, that’s a lost cause. But here we have a ready-made nucleus which already goes halfway to meet the problem.”

  “I demand to be invalided out of the Service on the grounds of insanity,” said Jacko, “your insanity. I thought we’d had enough of railways on Cannis IV.”

  “That was different,” said Fritz. “There, we were merely up against physical obstacles such as errant volcanoes. This is specifically an exercise in matching technologies. All we have to do is to determine which part of the railway system moves and which part is intended to stay still. That shouldn’t be too d
ifficult, now should it?”

  “Not when reduced to such basic terms,” Jacko agreed dourly. “But I know you. You never know when you’re beaten,”

  “I’ve told you before,” said Fritz sternly, “there’s no such thing as a physical impossibility. A limitation is a state of mind, not a question of fact. Here we are faced with the work of a completely alien race who nevertheless had a technological and scientific level roughly comparable to our own. Providing we hold that one fact paramount we ought to be able to unscramble any device this planet has to offer— and make it function for our own service if we wish.”

  “Providing one thing holds good,” said Jacko. “We have first to be able to recognize an artifact for what it actually is. It’s no good dismantling a Tazoon milk-strainer if we’re under the impression that it ought to be a microphone—or vice-versa, come to think of it.”

  Five

  Fritz reported back to Philip Nevill. The latter listened to the details of the find with the air of suppressed jubilation which was rapidly becoming his permanent expression. Then he ran his fingers through his untidy hair and searched for his pipe with a distracted grin.

  “Fritz, this is perfectly marvellous. What a day we’ve had! We’ve opened up so many promising new lines of research that the whole damned thing is getting out of hand. We could do with a hundred trained archaeologists to digest the meat in this lot, and even then we couldn’t do more than scratch the surface. The impact of building techniques alone on Terra is going to be extensive.

  “If you really want to make your mark on this project, then take over this subway completely, because I shan’t be able to get round to it for five years at least. Do a complete technical run-down on it, as detailed as you like. Do anything you like with it which won’t impair its archaeological value. All I ask is a comprehensive progress report in time for each data shipment to Terra.”

  “Fair enough.” said Fritz. “Later, I want to open up the buildings directly above the station to look for ancillaries.”