"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.