The planet Gilver had obviously had little to recommend it even before the Foitani from Rof Golan attacked. Back in what on Earth was still the Pleistocene, the Foitani had done a much more thorough job on it during their Suicide Wars. They'd eliminated their own species from the planet, and come too bloody close to destroying the whole ecosystem. Life still clung to Gilver. It no longer thrived there.
Jennifer found depressing a landscape that showed more slagged desert than forest and grassland. When she looked east rather than west, though, she looked toward a landscape with no life at all: the precinct surrounding the Great Unknown was sterile as an operating theater. The column at the heart of the Great Unknown speared the sky, though the research facility of the Foitani from Odern was more than fifteen kilometers away. That seemed to be far enough to keep the big, blue aliens safe from the hideous insanity that plagued them closer to the gleaming white tower. Their instruments wandered the precinct of the Great Unknown and probed what they could; the Foitani themselves were barred.
"The instruments don't pick up any too much, either," Jennifer complained.
Aissur Aissur Rus said, "If instruments provided the data we need, we would not have been required to requisition your services."
She gave the Foitan reluctant credit for not being mealy-mouthed, but said, "If I'm going to do you any good at all"—and if I'm ever going to get out of here, she added mentally—"I'll have to examine your Great Unknown for myself."
"By all means," Aissur Aissur Rus said. "The human Bernard is already proficient with our ground vehicles. Before you enter the precinct of the Great Unknown, you would be wise to acquire a similar proficiency. Bear in mind that, should difficulty arise, you will have to effect your own rescue, as we shall be unable to come to your aid."
She had to admit that made sense. The ground vehicle proved simple to operate. It was a battery-powered sledge, tracked for good ground-crossing capability, and steered with a tiller. The size of the tiller was her only problem; she had to stand up to shift it from side to side.
She and Greenberg rode separate sledges into the area surrounding the tall, white pillar. The Foitani had not argued about that; they believed in redundancy, too. The vehicles purred forward side by side.
The radiation level had gone down in a hurry; the Foitani from Rof Golan had thrown neutron bombs, no doubt to make their own planned landing easier. Jennifer wasn't sorry it hadn't worked. One set of Foitani at a time was plenty.
After they'd gone four or five kilometers, she said, "We have more privacy here than we did on the Harold Meeker. Whatever we do, the Foitani aren't going to come after us to stop us."
"True enough," Greenberg said, "but what do you want to bet these chassis have explosives in them along with the motors?"
She thought it over. "You own a nasty, suspicious mind, and I've no doubt whatever that you're right."
They rode on. The sledges had one forward speed, slow, and one reverse speed, slower. Eventually they reached the beginning of one of the colonnaded paths that led inward to the Great Unknown's central column. The path, of gleaming gray stone, was as fresh as if it had been set in place the day before. Not even a speck of dust marred its surface. However the Great Ones had managed that, Jennifer wished her kitchen floor were equipped with a like effect.
The columns that supported the roof overhead gradually grew taller and thicker as they approached the central tower. The effect went from impressive to ponderous to overwhelming. Jennifer did not think that was merely because she was smaller than a Foitan. How any living creature could have felt anything but antlike on that journey was beyond her.
She said, "I don't like this. Why would the old-time Foitani want to make themselves into midgets? I've seen pictures of our own old monumental architecture—the pyramids of Egypt, the freeways of Los Angeles—but none of it, not even the pyramids, sets out to deliberately minimize observers the way this thing does."
"The stuff you're talking about was done in low-tech days," Greenberg said. "I suppose the effects were worked out empirically, too—on the order of, it's big, so it must be impressive. The thing to remember about the old-time Foitani is, they knew exactly what they were doing. They had all our modern building techniques and then some, and they were able to figure out just how they wanted this thing to look, too. And if it works on us, just think what it does to their descendants."
Jennifer thought about the tapes she'd seen, then quickly shook her head. She preferred not to recall the drooling, mindless Foitani who had come to the Great Unknown. She tried to imagine instead what the colonnade might have been used for, back in the days of the great Foitani empire. She pictured hundreds of thousands of big, blue aliens triumphantly marching toward the column, and hundreds of thousands more standing on either side of the path and cheering.
That wasn't so bad. Then, though, her imagination went another step, as the imagination has a habit of doing. She pictured the hundreds of thousands of triumphal Foitani herding along even more hundreds of thousands of dejected, conquered aliens of other races. She pictured those other aliens going into the base of that clean, gleaming, kilometer-high column and never coming out again.
She shook her head once more. From everything she knew about the Great Ones, that latter image had a horrifying feel of probability to it. She asked Greenberg, "Is there any way to get inside the column?"
"The Foitani have done magnetic resonance imaging studies that show it's not solid—there are chambers in there," he answered. "None of their machines found an entrance, though, and I didn't either, the last time I was here."
"Might be worthwhile blasting a hole in the side," Jennifer said.
"Might get us killed for desecration, too," he pointed out. "They've been studying this thing for a long time. If they wanted to try blasting their way in, they would have done it by now. Since they haven't, I've operated on the assumption that they don't want to."
"A shaped charge wouldn't do that much damage," Jennifer said, but then she let it go. She feared Greenberg was right. The Great Unknown was the principal monument the imperial Foitani had left behind, at least so far as their descendants on Odern knew. If they'd wanted to break into it by brute force, they probably would have done so for themselves.
Now the column was very close. Greenberg drove right up to it, halted his sledge. Jennifer stopped beside him. She craned her neck and looked up and up and up and up. The experience made for vertigo. Her eyes insisted the horizontal had shifted ninety degrees, that she was about to fall up the side of the tower and out into space.
She needed a distinct effort of will to wrench her gaze away and look back to Bernard Greenberg. He smiled a little. "I did just the same thing the first time I came here, only more so," he said. "The next time I looked at my watch, ten minutes had gotten away from me."
Jennifer found that she wanted to look up the side of the tower again. She ignored the impulse until it sparked a thought. "Do you suppose this is what sets the Foitani off? Maybe it just hits them a lot harder than it does us."
"I don't think it's anything so simple," he answered regretfully. "For one thing, it doesn't begin to explain why they're drawn here from ten kilometers away."
"No, it doesn't," she admitted with equal regret. She climbed down from her sledge. "I'm going to look around for a while."
Her shoes scuffed on the polished gray pavement. But for the faint whistle of wind between columns of the colonnade, that was the only sound for kilometers around. If Gilver boasted any flying creatures, they stayed away from the precinct of the Great Unknown. Jennifer found herself missing birdcalls, or even the unmusical yarps of the winged beasts native to Saugus.
She also found herself deliberately keeping her back to the white tower so she would not have to look up it. As deliberately, she turned round to face it. She refused to let the Foitani intimidate her.
She walked over to the tower and kicked it hard enough to hurt. Greenberg gave her a quizzical look, which she ignored. She'd booted the water-bottle the Foitani had given her all the way across her chamber. She wished the tower would fly through the air the way the water-bottle had. It stubbornly stayed in place.
"As if anything that has to do with the Foitani ever paid the least bit of attention to what I wish," she said, more to herself than to anyone else. With her pique at least blunted, she climbed back onto her sledge, turned it about, and headed back down the colonnade road toward the Foitani base outside the radius of insanity.
"What are you doing?" Greenberg called after her. "You just got here."
"I've seen all I need to see, for now," Jennifer answered, "Enough to make me certain I'm not going to turn the Great Unknown into the Great Known by walking around and peering as if I were Sherlock Holmes."
"That's the second time you've mentioned him to me. Who was he?"
"Never mind. An ancient fictional detective." Not everyone, she reminded herself, read Middle English—or even Middle English authors translated into Spanglish—for fun. She went on, "Anyway, the point is that I need more data than my eyes will give me. If the Foitani here at their base don't have those data, nobody does."
"What if nobody really does?" Greenberg asked. He was coming after her, though. The Great Unknown didn't drive humans crazy, but that didn't mean anyone enjoyed being around it, either, especially by himself.
"If they don't have the data we need, then maybe we ought to think about manufacturing some shaped charges and getting inside the column to see what's hiding there. If the Foitani want to call that blasphemy or desecration, too bad for them. They can't blame us for not coming up with answers if they won't let us ask the right questions."
"Who says they can't?" Greenberg said. Past that, though, he did not try to change her mind. She wondered if he agreed with her or if he was just waiting for her to find out for herself.
About one thing he'd been right: if the Foitani base on Gilver wasn't the dullest place in the galaxy, that place hadn't been built yet. The base was mostly underground, which had served it well when the attack from Rof Golan came. It only served to concentrate the boredom, though, because the Foitani didn't seem to care much about getting out and wandering around. There Jennifer had trouble blaming them. Gilver had not been a garden spot before the fleet from Rof Golan hit it. It was worse now.
Jennifer decided to beard Aissur Aissur Rus first. Of the Foitani with whom she'd dealt, his mind was most open. When she proposed blasting a hole in the tower, he studied her for a long time without saying anything. At last, he rumbled, "I have been urging this course on my colleagues for some time. Some say they fear the tower has defense facilities incorporated into its construction and so are afraid to damage it. Others tell me frankly they believe the demolition would be a desecration. I prefer the latter group. Its members are more honest."
"If you won't test, how do you propose to learn?" Jennifer asked.
"Exactly the point I have been trying to make," Aissur Aissur Rus said. "Now that I have your support for it, perhaps I can persuade some of my stodgier fellows to see that it is only plain sense."
"Or maybe they'll oppose you even more because you have a non-Foitan on your side," Jennifer said, thinking aloud.
"Yes, that is certainly a possibility. On the other hand, the Foitani of Rof Golan have also evinced a strong interest in the Great Unknown. I would sooner be associated with a non-Foitan than with those savage beings who style themselves Foitani. So, I think, would others."
That righteous anger, delivered in the translator's toneless voice, made Aissur Aissur Rus seem more nearly human to Jennifer. Preferring the out-and-out infidel to the heretic, to one's own gone bad, had roots that went back to Earth and were ancient there.
"Let us take this up with Pawasar Pawasar Ras," Aissur Aissur Rus said, apparently fired with enthusiasm. "He always declined my requests when he stayed on Odern. Now that he has at last seen the Great Unknown for himself—and seen that the Rof Golani covet it—perhaps he can be made to feel as certain we can unravel its mysteries as if he were to find himself just within the radius of doom."
Radius of insanity was Jennifer's term for it, but she had no trouble following Aissur Aissur Rus. She looked up at him. He was staring away from her, staring at an empty spot a meter or so in front of the end of his muzzle. His gaze held enough intensity to make her shiver. She used once more the standard question she'd learned as a trader. "May I speak without causing offense through ignorance of your customs?"
Aissur Aissur Rus needed a moment to return to himself. Then he said, "Speak."
"Just—a feeling I had. Were you ever on the fringes of the radius of doom?"
His big, rather ursine head swung quickly toward her. "It is so. How could you have deduced it?"
"You used the comparison you made as if you understood exactly what it entailed."
Getting a Foitan from Odern to show alarm was not easy. Jennifer had seen that. Now she saw one who was alarmed and did not try to hide it. Aissur Aissur Rus's plushy blue fur rose till he looked even bigger than he was. He bared his teeth in a way different from, and more frightening than, the usual Foitani frown-equivalent. His eyes opened so wide that Jennifer saw they really did have a pale rim.
He paced up and down the chamber, working hard to bring himself back under control. At last he turned back toward Jennifer and said, "May I never have such an experience again. I knew the danger, but proved to be unfortunate. Most of us may safely work at a distance within my personal radius of doom. I went to discuss some instrument readings with a technician and found myself—"
He stopped. His fur stood on end again. He waited until it had subsided before he went on, "I found myself filled with insight such as I'd never had before. I knew—I could feel that I knew—exactly how to comprehend the Great Unknown. I started to go toward it, to implement my knowledge. I went by the most direct route. I threw a desk and table out of the way, tried to batter down a wall at a place where no door existed in it, kicked and clawed the technician when he had the ill luck to stand in my way. It took four of his fellows at the installation to cart me back to a safe distance, and I fought them at every step until my mind was free of the Great Unknown's thrall."
The account of his episode of insanity was all the more chilling because it came out in the translator's flat tones. Jennifer shivered. She bore Aissur Aissur Rus no great goodwill, particularly as he'd evidently been the one who instigated her kidnapping. But she would not have wished on anyone what the Great Unknown did to Foitani.
She asked, "When you were safe again, did you recall the insight you'd had within your radius of doom?"
"No, and that may be the worst of it. I still feel that if I returned there, I would know again; I gather others of my kind have had a similar reaction. But none ever succeeded in communicating this knowledge, and I doubt I would prove the lone exception." He whispered something in his own language. The translator made it come out as emotionlessly as everything else, but Jennifer supplied the exclamation point: "Oh, to be wrong!"
They went to see Pawasar Pawasar Ras, who fixed Aissur Aissur Rus with a black ball-bearing stare. "You have been advocating this course for some time."
"Yes, honored kin-group leader, I have," Aissur Aissur Rus said.
Pawasar Pawasar Ras turned to Jennifer. "Why do you take his part?"
"Because if you really do want answers about the Great Unknown and nothing you've tried has worked, then you'd better try something else. If you're not serious about this project, then you can go on doing the same old things for the next twenty-eight thousand years." She threw in the number with malice aforethought. Beside her, Aissur Aissur Rus's ears twitched, but he kept quiet. She finished, "Honored kin-group leader, you were serious enough about what your people are doing here on Gilver to come here yourself. The Foitani from Rof Golan seem serious about this place, too. So why won't you do what plainly needs doing?"
Pawasar Pawasar Ras bared his teeth at her. She stood firm, as she had with Dargnil Dargnil Lin in the library. Finally Pawasar Pawasar Ras said, "Had the Great Ones encountered your species, human Jennifer, they would have made a point of exterminating it. I must say I feel a certain sympathy toward such an attitude myself."
"I'll take that for a compliment," Jennifer answered coolly. Aissur Aissur Rus's ears twitched again. Now it was Jennifer's turn to try to stare down Pawasar Pawasar Ras. "Are you going to do what needs doing, or is this whole project just a sham?"
"Honored kin-group leader, what the human means is that—" Aissur Aissur Rus began.
"Don't soften what I said," Jennifer interrupted. "I meant it. If your people were willing to invade human space to snatch me to investigate this thing, why aren't you willing to do a proper job?"
"As we have noted, you do not think kindly of our species," Pawasar Pawasar Ras said. "Tell me this, then: Why do you care whether our project succeeds or fails? Indeed, I would expect you to hope we fail, so that you might gain a measure of revenge thereby."
Jennifer looked at the big, blue alien with the same reluctant respect she'd had to give him after they first met at the Odern spaceport. "You know which questions to ask, I must say. When your people first kidnapped me, I did hope you'd fail," she answered honestly. "I've changed my mind, though, for two reasons. First, digging out the answers you need looks like the only way I'm going to get back to Saugus. And second, I just flat-out hate the idea of any job being done poorly when it could be done right."
"At last, human Jennifer, you have found a characteristic the two of us share," Pawasar Pawasar Ras said. "Very well, then, it shall be as you suggest. We shall undertake to open the tower that is the centerpiece of the Great Unknown. Should matters not go as you hope, however, remember that a share of the responsibility remains yours even if, as kin-group leader, I make the ultimate command decision here."
"You sound as if you expect the tower'll start spitting out warriors from the age of the Great Ones, or something like that," Jennifer said. "For heaven's sake, it's been sitting here ever since the Suicide Wars."
"As you did, I will give two reasons for my concern, human Jennifer," Pawasar Pawasar Ras said. "First, the Great Ones built to last, as witness the hyperdrive trap that nearly took us all on our journey here. And second, the Great Unknown remains active at least in some measure, as witness its state of preservation and the radius of doom that surrounds it. Opening the tower will be in the way of an experiment, and in a proper experiment one learns what one had not known before. I will not deny my fear at some of the things the Great Unknown may teach us."
Jennifer thought about that. A line from a Middle English fantasy writer—was it Lovecraft? Howard?—floated through her mind: do not call up that which you cannot put down. Maybe it was good advice.
She shook her head. If she didn't take the chance, she didn't think she'd ever see Saugus again. She was willing to take a lot of chances to get back to human space. No matter how big the tower in the middle of the Great Unknown was, she didn't think it could hold enough old-time Foitani to overrun the entire human section of the galaxy. After what Pawasar Pawasar Ras had said, she wasn't as sure of that, but she didn't think so.
"Let's go on with it," she said.
"We will need to consult with some of our soldiers," Pawasar Pawasar Ras said. "They will best be able to gauge the type and strength of explosive likely to penetrate the tower while doing the minimum amount of damage."
"Possibly Enfram Enfram Marf. He is a specialist in ordnance," Aissur Aissur Rus suggested.
"Whomever you say." Jennifer paused, wondering whether she should trot out her all-purpose question again. She decided to: "May I speak without causing offense through ignorance of your customs?"
Pawasar Pawasar Ras and Aissur Aissur Rus's translators answered together. "Speak."
"I've met a good many Foitani by now. As far as I can tell, all of you have been males. If I'm mistaken, I beg your pardon, but if I'm not, why haven't I met any of your females?"
"As this question steps along, the claws of its feet press against delicate flesh," Pawasar Pawasar Ras said.
"Shall I attempt an answer, honored kin-group leader?" Aissur Aissur Rus asked.
"Please do," his boss answered.
Aissur Aissur Rus turned to Jennifer. She was ready to hear anything—perhaps even that storks brought baby Foitani from the lettuce patch like so much airfreight. Aissur Aissur Rus said, "I know that in your species, human Jennifer, as in most, gender is fixed for the life of the individual. This is not so among us. During approximately our first thirty years of life, we are female; for the balance, we are male. Thus you will not see females in places of importance among us, as they, by their nature, cannot acquire sufficient experience to justify such placement."
"Oh," Jennifer said. That made a certain amount of sense. She decided to tweak the Foitani. "You are aware that I'm female."
"Indeed," Pawasar Pawasar Ras said, apparently relieved that someone else had done the talking about actual details. "You are, however, also of another species. The denigration implied by that far outweighs any relating to your gender."
"Oh," Jennifer said again, in a different tone of voice. The Foitani didn't need to look down their muzzles at her gender to keep her in her place.
Even Aissur Aissur Rus seemed relieved not to have to talk about gender any more. He quickly changed the subject. "Let us proceed to Enfram Enfram Marf, human Jennifer. He is our explosives expert here, as I said."
"All right." Jennifer smiled a little at finding the Foitani, for all their differences from mankind, so Victorian about the way their bodies worked. Had she not studied Middle English, she wouldn't have had a word to describe their attitude; the term had not come forward into Spanglish. Something occurred to her. "Did the Great Ones operate the same way you do, Aissur Aissur Rus?"
"Certainly." Aissur Aissur Rus drew himself up even taller than he was already, a paradigm of offended dignity. "They were Foitani and we are Foitani. How could disparity exist between us?"
"I didn't mean to make you angry," Jennifer said, on the whole sincerely—she liked Aissur Aissur Rus best of the Foitani she'd met. "I was just asking."
"Very well, I shall assume the slight was unintentional. Now let us proceed to Enfram Enfram Marf."
The Foitani explosives expert was taller but thinner than Aissur Aissur Rus. He had a scarred muzzle that made him easy to recognize. All the Foitani seemed predatory to Jennifer; Enfram Enfram Marf seemed predatory even for a Foitan. He all but salivated when Aissur Aissur Rus explained why they were there. "I do not believe it," he said several times. "How did you persuade Pawasar Pawasar Ras to let us use the power we have? I thought he would just let us sit here forever, doing nothing."
"The opinions and suggestions of the human Jennifer aided materially in getting him to modify his previous opinion," Aissur Aissur Rus said. That made Jennifer like him even better. Plenty of humans wouldn't have shared credit with a friend from their own species, let alone with an alien they'd hijacked.
Enfram Enfram Marf turned to stare at her. "This ugly little pink and white and yellow thing?" Jennifer heard through Aissur Aissur Rus's translator. "Pawasar Pawasar Ras listened to this sub-Foitani blob where he would not hear you? Our sphere's a strange place, and no mistake."
The contempt behind the colorless words made Jennifer realize she really had been dealing with what passed for interspecies diplomats among the Foitani. If Enfram Enfram Marf thought like the average Foitan in the street, no wonder the Great Ones hadn't worried about genocide.
She smiled sweetly at the ordnance officer—she knew the smile was wasted on him, but used it for her own satisfaction—and said, "I'm female, too. How do you like that?"
Had Enfram Enfram Marf been human, he would have turned purple. He drew back a leg, as if to kick Jennifer across the room. "Wait," Aissur Aissur Rus said before the leg could shoot forward. "The human is still of use to us."
"Why?" Enfram Enfram Marf retorted. "Now that we have Pawasar Pawasar Ras's permission to open up the Great Unknown, we don't need this thing to gather data for us. We can go back to using machines; they'll be able to bring artifacts out past the radius of doom so we can properly study them."
"If all goes well, yes," Aissur Aissur Rus said. "But all may not go well. Machines are less flexible than intelligent beings, even now. Moreover, we acquired the human Jennifer not so much to gather data as to interpret it. She is expert in a peculiar form of extrapolation by storytelling that humans developed long ago, which may give her unusual insight into the reasons the Great Ones created the Great Unknown as they did."
"How could this creature understand the Great Ones when we, their descendants, do not?" Enfram Enfram Marf demanded. But his leg returned to the floor. He bared his teeth, then went on, "Oh, very well, Aissur Aissur Rus, let it be as you say. I shall begin calculating the proper weight, shape, and composition of the charge, based on what we know of the thickness and material of the tower's outer wall."
"Excellent, Enfram Enfram Marf. That is what we require of you."
"Nice to know that I'm useful," Jennifer remarked as Aissur Aissur Rus led her down the corridor. "Otherwise you would have let him kick me into the middle of next week."
Aissur Aissur Rus paused and looked down at Jennifer. After a moment, he said, "I will assume my translator should not have rendered that idiom so literally."
"Well, no," Jennifer admitted.
"Good. We did not believe humans capable of time travel. We are not able to travel in time ourselves, either, though there are some poorly understood indications that the Great Ones had that ability."
It was Jennifer's turn to stare. She had thought about pulling Aissur Aissur Rus's leg over what was indeed merely an idiom the translator program had missed—there wasn't a program around that didn't have a few of those annoying blank spots in it. Now she wondered if he wasn't telling her a tall tale to get even. The only trouble was, she didn't think Foitani minds—even that of Aissur Aissur Rus, who was the loosest, most freewheeling thinker she'd met among the aliens—worked that way.
She called him on it. "Time travel is as impossible—"
"As a hyperdrive trap?" he interrupted. She opened her mouth, then closed it again as she realized she had no good comeback to make. She thought of herself as quicker-witted than the Foitani, but this time Aissur Aissur Rus unquestionably got the last word.
The tracked sledge delivered the explosive charge against the side of the polished white stone, then rolled off. The charge clung to the stone. The sledge stopped a couple of hundred meters away. Jennifer and Greenberg crouched behind it, on the side facing away from the stone. Greenberg spoke into his communicator. "We're under cover, Enfram Enfram Marf."
The Foitani ordnance office did not waste time replying. An instant later, a sharp, flat craaack rang out. It was much less dramatic than Jennifer had expected. She lifted her head. The stone panel had a neat, almost perfectly round hole in it, about a meter and a half across.
"He knows his stuff," she said, less than delighted about giving Enfram Enfram Marf any credit whatever.
"Explosives people tend to, at least the ones who live long enough to get a handle on what they're doing," Greenberg said. He spoke into the communicator again. "This was a good test, Enfram Enfram Marf. If your figures for the column are accurate, we won't have any trouble getting inside when we try this on the Great Unknown."
Again Enfram Enfram Marf did not reply. Jennifer said, "He doesn't think anyone who's not a Foitan is worth talking to."
"That's his problem. His bosses think I'm worth talking to, and they thought you were worth kidnapping so they could talk to you. I'm not going to lose a minute of sleep worrying about what the high-and-mighty Enfram Enfram Marf thinks of me."
Jennifer was sure he meant it. She admired his detachment and wished she could share it. She asked, "How do you keep from taking what aliens say personally?"
"The same way I do with humans: I try to gauge whether the person who's talking has any idea of what he's talking about. A lot of humans are damn fools, and so are a lot of aliens, Enfram Enfram Marf included. Just because he knows his explosives, he thinks he knows everything. I don't know much, but I know he's wrong."
Jennifer grinned and clapped her hands. Greenberg gave her a curious look. She wondered how she was supposed to explain to him that his line of reasoning went back thirty-five hundred years to the Apology of Socrates.
Before she had a chance to try, the sledge speaker spoke up again. "Humans Bernard and Jennifer, this is Thegun Thegun Nug speaking. We shall have a charge ready for placement tomorrow. You will then proceed to begin exploration of the tower of the Great Unknown, relaying to us such data as you uncover."
To Jennifer's way of thinking, Thegun Thegun Nug had an unpleasant habit of assuming that everything would be exactly as he wished just because he said so. Greenberg did not let that bother him. He said, "Yes, we'll start exploring for you, Thegun Thegun Nug. We'll all learn something."
"That is the desired outcome," Thegun Thegun Nug agreed.
"What I want to learn is how to get out of here," Jennifer said. For all she knew, the mike was still open. Thegun Thegun Nug didn't answer her. She hadn't expected him to. He'd known all along how she felt.
The two sledges purred away from the Foitani research base toward the Great Unknown. Enfram Enfram Marf's new shaped-charge device sat behind Bernard Greenberg. Jennifer was glad it didn't rest on her sledge. She didn't quite trust Enfram Enfram Marf not to touch a button and say it was an accident. A meter-and-a-half hole out of her middle wouldn't leave much. . . .
They'd only gone a couple of kilometers, barely even to the edge of the radius of doom, when a loud, warbling whistle began behind them. "What the devil is that?"
"It's a Foitani alarm," Greenberg answered.
"It sure alarms me."
Greenberg spoke into the communicator on the sledge. "Human Bernard to Foitani base: Why have you switched on your alarms?" He repeated himself several times.
For a long time—more than a minute—no answer came. Jennifer began to wonder if the Foitani had forgotten about them. Then the cool tones of the translator came over the speaker. "Humans Bernard and Jennifer, this is Pawasar Pawasar Ras. I suggest you take cover as expeditiously as possible. Gilver is once more under attack from the savages of Rof Golan. Vectors of incoming ships indicate that they may attempt to land ground forces on Gilver, most probably with a view to assaulting or capturing the Great Unknown."
"We'd better head back," Jennifer said. Fliers sprang into the sky from the Foitani base. Cloven air shouted far behind them. Missiles leaped off launchers.
Then, from nowhere, a flier shrieked overhead at treetop height. A string of what might have been finned eggs fell from its belly. Had it sought the two sledges, it would have blasted them to bits. But its target was a hardpoint a few hundred meters to the west, between the humans and the base. Explosions smote Jennifer's ears. With an instinct she didn't know she owned, she threw herself off her sledge and onto the roadway, flat on her belly.
More explosions came, some distant, some close enough to lift her off the ground and slam her back down. During one brief lull, she looked over and saw Greenberg beside her. She had no idea how or when he'd got there. Then more bombs fell. Shrapnel whispered overhead.
Greenberg put his mouth next to her ear. "We can't go back," he screamed through the din.
"We can't stay here, either," she screamed back. As if to underscore her words, a fragment of bomb casing went spaang! off the side of a sledge.
"Then we head for the Great Unknown," Greenberg said, still at the top of his lungs.
Jennifer thought it over, as well as she could think in the midst of chaos and terror. "Sounds good," she said. "Let's do it, if the bombing ever moves away from us. It's the one place on the planet where the Foitani can't come after us."
"The ones from Odern can't, anyhow," Greenberg said. "We just have to hope that holds for the ones from Rof Golan, too."
"I wish you hadn't said that," Jennifer told him. She glanced up at her sledge. "I also wish we had more kibbles and water along." They'd planned on staying at the Great Unknown for a couple of days if they succeeded in getting into the tower, so they weren't without supplies. She looked up at the plastic bag of kibbles again and fought back a laugh. She'd never imagined a day would come when she wanted more of them than she had. She'd never imagined most of the things that had happened to her since the day the Foitani walked into her class at Saugus Central University.
More bombs struck, so close that she felt the impact with her whole body much more than she heard it. She and Greenberg clutched each other, life clinging to life in the middle of mechanized death. He shouted something at her. She knew that, but she was too stunned and deafened to tell what it was. She looked at him and shook her head.
"I love you," he said again. She still could not hear him, but his lips were easy to read.
"Why are you telling me now?" she said, slowly and with exaggerated movements of her own lips so he could follow. "We're liable to get blown to bits any minute."
He nodded vehemently. "That's just why. I didn't want to die without letting you know."
"Oh." She supposed it was terribly romantic, but she needed to be able to think about it. Thought was impossible here; she was battered and deafened and more frightened than she'd ever been in her life. Holding on to him still seemed like a good idea, so she kept on doing it.
The explosions grew more distant. Jennifer detached herself from Greenberg, far enough to peer past the front of the sledge. Dirt rose in graceful fountains all around the research base. The base fought back; close-in guns chattered maniacally, blasting bombs and incoming missiles before they struck home.
"If we're ever going to move, this is probably the time to do it," she told Greenberg. "Nobody seems to be paying attention to us."
"Let's go, then," he said. "The farther inside the radius of insanity we are, the better I'll like it." They scrambled onto their sledges and sent them dashing ahead at their best—and only—forward speed. No healthy Foitan would have had the least trouble running them down.
Greenberg looked over his shoulder. "Good thing we didn't head back to the base," he said. Jennifer looked back, too. A troop-carrier had landed right about where they would have been if they'd tried to reverse their course. Foitani—presumably Foitani from Rof Golan—leaped out of it and scrambled for cover. They started firing with automatic weapons heavier than anything a human could have carried.
"I wouldn't have wanted to meet them up close, no," Jennifer admitted. Meet wasn't quite the right word, she thought. The Foitani didn't look like the sort who would have waited for formal introductions before they started shooting.
The sledges crawled along. The invaders seemed too busy trying to blast the research base off the face of Gilver to bother doing anything about them. Jennifer wondered if that was too good to last. A moment later, she wished she hadn't, because it was. Something cracked past her ear. Then another something smacked off the rear facing of the sledge, hard enough to make it shudder under her. It kept running, though.
She turned around again. A couple of big aliens were bounding after her and Greenberg. As she'd feared, they ran faster than the sledges. Nothing grew in the area of the Great Unknown. There was no place to hide, save possibly behind the massive columns of the colonnade. The only weapon she had was her stunner, which might make a Foitan scratch but assuredly would not stop him. In any case, the soldiers' hand weapons far outranged the feeble thing.
Greenberg had seen the Foitani, too. If he felt the same choking despair that cast its pall over her, he did not show it. In fact, he stood up on his sledge—it was slow enough and smooth enough to make that safe—and jumped up and down thumbing his nose at them. That only made them run harder—and all at once, Jennifer realized he wanted exactly that. "You're a genius, Bernard!" she shouted. She stood up on her sledge, too.
The Foitani from Rof Golan kept coming. All too soon, they were only a couple of hundred meters behind the sledges. The closer they drew, the more easily Jennifer could see they were not the same as Foitani from Odern. They were taller and leaner and nearer gray than blue. Their ears were larger. So were their muzzles—and their teeth. They had red marbles for eyes, not black ones. That made them seem all the fiercer as they bore down on the humans.
Their clawed feet slapped on the smooth stone of the pro-cessionway. Jennifer heard their harsh breathing closer, ever closer. She reached into her beltpouch for her stunner, though she knew a steak knife would have done more good. She put away the stunner. If these Foitani had decided to take them prisoner instead of slaying them out of hand, she would not try to change their minds.
The Foitani caught up with the sledges. They even smelled different from the Foitani of Odern—sharper, like ripe cheese, Jennifer thought as she waited to be seized. The Rof Golani Foitani ran past her and Greenberg, on either side of their sledges. They paid no attention whatever to the humans. Their red eyes were only on the tower ahead. Like two big machines, they pounded toward it.
Jennifer watched their backs recede ahead. "I think we may take it as proved that the Great Unknown affects more than one type of Foitani descendant," she said. She was proud of herself. The sentence came out as cleanly as if she were dictating an academic paper into the Middle English Scholars Association data net.
Greenberg gave her an odd look. "Yes, I think we may," he answered, half a beat late. "I think it's a good thing, too."
"So do I." Jennifer steered her sledge up next to his. She reached across and took his hand. Her own palm was cold and trembling. The vibration of the two sledges didn't let her tell if he also had the shakes, but he felt no warmer. After a moment, she added, "That was good thinking, luring them on into the zone of insanity. Now all they care about is the Great Unknown. Right now, they can keep it, as far as I'm concerned. I don't think I was made to be a soldier."
"Neither was I," Greenberg said. "I kept thinking about getting behind you and setting off Enfram Enfram Marf's shaped charge at the Foitani. By the time I decided it wasn't a good idea, they'd already gone by us."
"You still did better than I did," she said. "I forgot all about the stupid thing."
"That's not so good, Jennifer," he said seriously. "You should never forget about anything."
The sledges ground on toward the central tower. Jennifer kept looking back at the research base of the Foitani from Odern. The one good thing about the fighting that continued all around it was that the Foitani from Rof Golan weren't using nuclear weapons, as they had when they attacked from space. Maybe now, she thought, they were more interested in conquest than in annihilation. She hoped they would go on thinking that way; she had no confidence in the Great Unknown's ability to keep fallout from the local atmosphere.
Several other Foitani from Rof Golan strode the procession-way behind the first two. None passed the sledges, which by then were more than halfway from the outer edge of the radius of doom to the central tower. None shot at the sledges, either, for which Jennifer was duly grateful. A couple of kilometers from the tower, the sledges, slow but mechanically steady, repassed the first two Foitani soldiers. Their gray-blue fur was damp with sweat; their tongues lolled from their mouths. They did not glance at the machines or the humans aboard them, but kept trudging toward the tower at the best speed they could muster.
The tower grew closer and closer. The two sledges stopped a couple of meters away. Greenberg climbed down from his sledge, lifted the shaped charge Enfram Enfram Marf had given him, and carried it to the side of the immense white structure. He pressed it against the stone. Jennifer wondered if it would stick, as it had against the practice slab of stone. The material of the Great Unknown seemed much more than simple white marble. But stick the charge did.
Greenberg went back to the sledge and called the research base. "We have the entry charge in place. Please advise if we should proceed, under the circumstances." Only static came from the speaker. Either no one at the base was listening, or the Rof Golani were jamming the channel. Greenberg looked at Jennifer. "What do you think we ought to do?"
"I think we ought to blow it," she said without hesitation. "We're never going to have a better chance than this. I just hope it's not all for nothing anyway—if the Foitani from Rof Golan win, what's going to happen to the Harold Meeker?"
"That's such a good question, I've done my best not to think about it." Greenberg made a sour face. He ran wire from the charge back to the detonator. "We have a couple of hundred meters to retreat. Let's use them." The sledges went into reverse until the wire began to grow taut.
Greenberg dismounted again and got behind his sledge. Jennifer took cover, too. She said, "I'm just glad this thing doesn't have to be set off by radio from the base, the way the practice charge did."
He let out a wry chuckle. "That would rather ruin our day's work, wouldn't it?"
"You might say so, yes," she answered, trying to match him dry for dry. She heard the slap-slap-slap of Foitani feet on the processionway. The first two soldiers from Rof Golan were getting close again. "If you're going to do it, you'd better do it now."
Greenberg glanced back toward the Foitani. He nodded. "Right you are." He brought his thumb down on the blue firing button. He grunted—squeezing the contact closed took considerable effort. Not only were Foitani stronger than people to begin with, the firing button was rigged so it could not go off by accident.
After the bombardment she'd been through, Jennifer found the detonation of the shaped charge an anticlimax. Unlike munitions makers, blasting experts do not make their devices as strong as possible, only just strong enough to do a particular job. Even in quiet circumstances, the blast would hardly have made her jump.
She looked up over the top of the sledge. Just as in the practice run, Enfram Enfram Marf's charge had blown a neat, round hole in the white stone of the tower. Blackness lay beyond it.
Greenberg looked up, too, then grabbed the communicator. "Calling the research base. I don't know whether you can see it—for that matter, I don't know if you can hear me—but we have succeeded in making a breach in the base of the column at the center of the Great Unknown."
"This is Pawasar Pawasar Ras, human Bernard," the comm answered. Jennifer jumped—she hadn't expected a reply. Pawasar Pawasar Ras went on, "I regret that our project has been disrupted by the perfidious attack from the wretched pseudo-Foitani of Rof Golan. Nevertheless, we do continue to keep you and the Great Unknown under observation. We discern no evidence of damage to the column."
Jennifer looked up over the sledge again. So did Greenberg. "I see a hole," he said. "Do you see a hole?" She nodded. "Good," he told her, then spoke into the communicator once more. "Honored kin-group leader, both of us think there's a hole in the side of that building. We're going to test it experimentally. How much do you want to bet that we get inside?"
"As a matter of fact, we may not be the first ones to do the testing," Jennifer added. The two Foitani from Rof Golan, still paying no attention to the humans or their sledges, tramped past them toward the tower.
"If you are somehow correct and there is an opening I cannot perceive, you must not permit the Rof Golani to exploit it. Use whatever means necessary to prevent their gaining entry," Pawasar Pawasar Ras said. The translator didn't let him sound agitated, no matter how upset he really was.
"How are we supposed to stop them?" Jennifer asked.
"Use whatever means necessary," Pawasar Pawasar Ras repeated.
Jennifer looked at the Foitani. Each of them was more than a meter and a half taller than she was. Each of them carried a weapon that could kill her at five times the range she could even make him itch. She looked at Greenberg. He'd been looking at the Foitani, too. Now his gaze swung back to her. She said, "Bullshit."
He nodded. "You'd better believe it." He spoke into the communicator. "Honored kin-group leader, we didn't sign up with you to commit suicide. You ought to know, though, that the Foitani from Rof Golan seem to be suffering from the same thing your people do when they get too close to the Great Unknown. They don't seem to be in any shape to relay whatever they learn to anybody."
A long silence followed. At last Pawasar Pawasar Ras said, "There may be some truth to this comment. Nevertheless—"
"No," Greenberg broke in, adding, "It's too late anyhow, honored kin-group leader. The first two Rof Golani have reached the tower."
The big, blue-gray Foitani dropped their weapons to press themselves against the smooth white stone of the wall. They were only five or six meters from the hole in its side, but gave no sign of noticing it. For several minutes, they seemed content just to stand there. Then, not getting more than a meter or so away from the edge of the wall, they began walking parallel to it, one of them behind the other.
They walked right past the hole. Their feet scuffed through the pieces of stone the shaped charge had blasted loose. They took no notice of them, either; as far as they were concerned, the area was as perfectly smooth as any other part of the processionway.
Greenberg turned to Jennifer. "I will be damned. They can't see that it's there."
Spanglish failed her. She fell back into Middle English. "Curiouser and curiouser." Then she said, "It makes me wonder whether the hole really is there after all."
"I can tell you two things about that," he answered. "Thing number one is that we know the Great Unknown makes Foitani crazy and we don't think it does that to us. Thing number two is, we can go and find out, so let's go and find out."
He stood up and walked toward the hole. Jennifer followed him. She saw the chunks of white stone that lay in front of it. Pretty soon, she kicked one of them. She felt it as her boot collided with it and heard it rattle away. All the same, she had the feeling she was approaching one of those holes quickly painted on the side of a mountain in an ancient animated fantasy video, the sort that would let whoever painted them go through and then turn solid again so a pursuer smashed himself against hard, hard rock. She stretched a hand out in front of her so she wouldn't hurt herself if the opening ahead proved not to be an opening.
She kicked another fragment of stone out of the way. This one clicked off the side of the tower. The noise seemed no different to her from the one the first stone had made, but the Foitani from Rof Golan hadn't noticed that one. They noticed this time. They spun around. Their red eyes blazed. They'd let their weapons fall when they came up to the column, but they still had fangs and claws and bulk. Roaring like beasts of prey, they charged at the two humans.
"Uh-oh," Greenberg said, which summed things up well enough. Running away from the Foitani didn't seem as if it would help. Greenberg and Jennifer ran for the hole instead. He shoved her in ahead of him. The rough stone at the edge of the hole ripped the knees out of her coveralls as she scrambled through. Greenberg dove after her scant seconds later, just ahead of the Foitani.
By then she had a fist-sized rock in her hand, ready to fling in the face of one of the aliens. At such a close range, she thought, she might even hurt him. Greenberg scrabbled around in the darkness for a rock for himself.
The Foitani came up to the hole and stared at it. They said something in their own language. Even without the moderating effect of the translator, Foitani from Odern sounded calm whether they were or not. As Jennifer had heard over the Harold Meeker's radio, Foitani from Rof Golan yelled even when there was nothing worth yelling about. These two screamed back and forth at each other. Jennifer didn't need a translator to guess they were saying something like, "Where did the funny-looking critters go?"
Then she drew back her arm again to throw that rock, for a Foitan reached toward the hole. Those big, clawed hands came straight for her. If she waited any longer, she thought, the Foitan would pluck her straight out of her hiding place.
But his hands stopped, right where the surface of the wall had been before Enfram Enfram Marf's charge bit through it. Jennifer watched his palms flatten out against what to him was plainly still a solid surface. He turned to his comrade, gesturing as if to say, Come on; you try it.
The other Foitan tried it. His hands stopped where the wall should have been, too. He squawked something to his friend. Friend squawked back. They walked off, both of them shaking their heads.
Greenberg indulged in the luxury of a long, heartfelt, "Whew!" Then he said, "You don't know how glad I am that they'd put down their guns. I didn't care to find out whether bullets believed in hallucinations."
"Urk." Jennifer hadn't thought of that. After a moment, she added, "Who says I don't know how glad you are?"
Greenberg spoke into the communicator. "Research base, we are inside the central tower to the Great Unknown. I say again, we are inside." He repeated himself several times, but got no answer. He stuck the comm in his pocket. "Maybe the Foitani from Rof Golan are jamming again."
"Or maybe Pawasar Pawasar Ras and his friends can't hear you because you're calling from inside the tower and don't exist any more as far as they're concerned," Jennifer said.
He gave her a dirty look. "I was right after all when I first got to know you—reading all that ancient science fiction has twisted your mind."
"People used to say that about it then, too." Jennifer took out a hand torch and clicked it on. "As long as we're here, shall we see what here is like?"
Greenberg also got out a light." We don't want to shine these out through the hole," he told her. "If the effect that keeps the Foitani from seeing it is like a one-way mirror, bright light from this side could ruin it."
"All right," Jennifer said, "but if the effect is like a one-way mirror, how come the Foitani couldn't feel their way in, either?"
"I don't know. I'm just glad they couldn't. Aren't you?"
"Now that you mention it, yes." Jennifer turned around and played the torch on the far wall of the chamber. However disagreeable he was, Enfram Enfram Marf had been an artist with his shaped charge: that wall, only four or five meters from the blast, was hardly even scorched. The chamber itself was bare, but for the fragments of stone from the outer wall.
"We're lucky," Greenberg said. "Looks like we didn't damage anything much in here."
"We didn't, did we?" Jennifer looked around again. "This room is so bare, it's almost as if they emptied it out on purpose, knowing this was where we'd break in." The words hung in the air after she spoke them. She deliberately shook her head, "It couldn't be. The Suicide Wars happened twenty-eight thousand years ago."
"But what's been keeping the Great Unknown alive all that time?" Greenberg said, a note of doubt in his voice. "The Great Ones had a higher technology than ours."
"It couldn't be," Jennifer repeated.
What happened next made her think of the closing line of a classic Clarke story: "One by one, without any fuss, the stars were going out." This surprise was not on such a cosmic scale, but it more than sufficed for the occasion. One by one, without any fuss, the ceiling lights in the chamber came on.
"Oh, my," Jennifer whispered, and then, a moment later, "Oh, no." Nothing she'd seen about the empire of the Great Ones made her admire them or want them back. Much of what she'd seen had scared her spitless. And now an artifact—a big artifact—from the time of that empire was indubitably not just alive but awake. "Maybe if we leave, it'll go back to sleep," she said. "I think I'd rather face the Rof Golani than—this."
"You've got a point," said Greenberg, who had to have been thinking along with her. But when they turned around to scramble out through the hole the shaped charge had blasted, they discovered it was no longer there. The inner wall looked as if it had stayed undisturbed for twenty-eight thousand Foitani years.
Jennifer walked over to the wall, patted it much as the soldiers of Rof Golan had from the outside. It felt as solid as it looked. "Is it real?" she asked.
"What's 'real'?" Greenberg countered. People had been wondering that since long before the days of Pontius Pilate, Jennifer thought, and generally, like Pilate, washed their hands of the question. Before she could say that out loud, Greenberg went on, "It's real enough to keep us in here, which is what counts at the moment."
"I can't argue with you there," Jennifer said. None of the walls now, so far as she could tell, held any openings. But with the Foitani, that wasn't necessarily the way things were. If the Great Ones were as adept at memory-metal technology as their distant descendants from Odern, the chamber could have had a dozen doorways, or two dozen, or three.
Bernard Greenberg evidently reached the same conclusion at the same time. He went over to the wall opposite the reconstituted one that led to the outside, began rapping on it here and there, as the Foitani did when they used their unnerving entranceways. For all the rapping, though, nothing happened.
"Try higher up," Jennifer suggested. "They're bigger than we are, so the sensitive area should be farther off the ground than if we'd built this thing."
"If humans had built this thing, it would have come with holovid instructions," Greenberg said. All the same, he raised his hand most of a meter. That produced results. In fact, it produced them twice: two doors opened up, less than a meter apart. They led into different rooms, one into a chamber much like the one in which Jennifer and he stood, the other into a long hallway.
"The lady or the tiger," Jennifer murmured. One trouble with that was that Greenberg didn't know what she was talking about. Another was that the choice was more likely to be between two tigers. She turned to Greenberg. "Which way do you think we should go?"
He plucked at his graying beard. "That room looks like more of the same. The hall is something different. Let's try it and see what happens."
"Makes as much sense as anything," Jennifer said, "which isn't much. All right, let's do it."
They stepped into the hall together. Jennifer's hand was on her useless stunner. Years of reading Middle English SF left her ready for anything, from Niven-style matter transporters to an extravaganza of lights out of the classic video 2001. Human technology was as advanced as any in this part of the galaxy . . . except, evidently, that of the Great Ones. Not knowing what to expect left Jennifer more than a little uneasy. She reached out to Greenberg and was not surprised to find him also reaching out to her.
They didn't find themselves all at once in another part of the building. They weren't surrounded and overwhelmed by flashing lights. The hallway was just a hallway. But when Jennifer looked back over her shoulder, the door that had let them in was gone.
Every so often, Greenberg reached up to rap on the hallway wall. For more than fifty meters, nothing happened when he did; he must not have been picking the right spots. Then, with the unnerving suddenness of Foitani doors, a blank space appeared where only wall had been.
Greenberg and Jennifer both jumped. When she looked into the room that instant door revealed, Jennifer felt like jumping again. The chamber held an astonishingly realistic statue or holovid slide of a Foitan.
"He's not quite the same as the ones from Odern or from Rof Golan," Greenberg said.
"No," Jennifer agreed. The image of the Great One was a little taller than either of the descendant races she'd met. Its fur was green-blue, not the gray-blue of the Rof Golani or the plain, pure blue of the Foitani from Odern. The shape of the torso was also a little different. The legs were rather longer. The Great One might not have been of the same species as the modern Foitani; it definitely was of the same genus.
"Everything we're doing in here seems stage-managed somehow," Greenberg said. "We've known all along that this is a center for the Great Ones. What else are we supposed to learn from seeing one almost in the flesh?"
"I don't know," Jennifer answered. "Maybe that—" She stopped with a gurgle as the statue or holovid slide of the imperial Foitan turned its head and looked straight at her.