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?"