“Just a few hours more,” said Mac. “It took us a long time to figure out some of the things about it, but I’ve had the robots on it steady.”
“Rush it over soon as you get it done. We’ve tried to talk to some of the radon brains in the machines, but it’s no dice.”
“There’s just one thing bothers me,” said Mac.
“What is that?” Garrison asked sharply.
“Well, we didn’t figure out exactly all the angles on that jar. Some of the working parts are mighty complicated and delicate, you know. But we thought we’d get started at least and let the Institute stooge take over when he got here. But when those robots—”
“Yes?” said Garrison.
“When the robots got to the things we couldn’t understand, they tossed the blueprints to one side and went right ahead. So help me, they didn’t even fumble.”
The two men looked at one another, faces stolid.
“I don’t like it,” Mac declared.
“Neither do I,” said Garrison.
He turned and walked slowly toward the dome, while Mac went back to the pits.
In Garrison’s office, Doc had cornered Roger Chester, the new Institute observer.
“The Institute has mountains of reports,” Chester was saying. “I tried to go through them before I came out. Night and day almost. Ever since I knew I was going to replace Boone.”
Doc carefully halved a new cigar, tucked one piece in his pocket, the other in his mouth.
“What were you looking for?” he asked.
“A clue. You see, I knew Boone. For years. He wasn’t the kind of fellow who would break. It would have taken more than Venus. But I didn’t find a thing.”
“Boone himself might have furnished that clue,” Doc suggested quietly. “Did you look through his reports?”
“I read them over and over,” Chester admitted. “There was nothing there. Some of his reports were missing. The last few days—”
“Those last few days can be canceled out,” said Doc. “The lad wasn’t himself. I wouldn’t be surprised he didn’t write any report those last few days.”
Chester said: “That would have been unlike him.”
Doc wrangled the cigar viciously. “Find anything else?”
“Not much. Not much more than Masterson knew. Even now—after all these years, it’s hard to believe—that radon could be alive.”
“If any gas could live,” said Doc, “it would be radon. It’s heavy. Molecular weight of 222. One hundred eleven times as heavy as hydrogen, five times as heavy as carbon dioxide. Not complicated from a molecular standpoint, but atomically one of the most complicated known. Complicated enough for life. And if you’re looking for the unbalance necessary for life, it’s radioactive. Chemically inert, perhaps, but terrifically unstable physically—”
The door of the office opened and Garrison walked in.
“Still chewing the fat about Archie?” he asked.
He strode to his desk and took out a bottle and glasses.
“It’s been two weeks since Archie got away,” he said. “And nothing’s happened. We’re sitting on top of a volcano, waiting for it to go sky high. And nothing happens. What is Archie doing? What is he waiting for?”
“That’s a big order, Garrison,” declared Chester. “Let us try to envision a life which had no tools because it couldn’t make them, would be useless to it even if it did have them because it couldn’t use them. Man’s rise, you must remember, is largely, if not entirely, attributable to his use of tools. An accident that made his thumb opposing gave him a running start—”
The phone on the desk blared. Garrison snatched it up, and Mac’s voice shrieked at him.
“Chief, those damn robots are running away! So are the machines in the pit—”
Cold fingers seemed to clamp around the commander’s throat.
Mac’s voice was almost sobbing. “—hell for leather out here. But they left Archie’s jar. Must have forgotten that.”
“Mac,” yelled Garrison, “jump into a tractor and try to follow them. Find out where they’re going.”
“But, chief—”
“Follow them!” shouted Garrison.
He slammed down the hand piece, lifted it and dialed.
“Sparks, get hold of Earth!”
“No soap,” said Sparks laconically.
“Damn it, try to get them. It’s a matter of life and death!”
“I can’t,” wailed Sparks. “We’re around the Sun. We can’t get through.”
“Get the ship, then.”
“It won’t do any good,” yelped Sparks. “They’re hugging the Sun to cut down distance. It’ll be days before they can relay a message.”
“O.K.,” said Garrison wearily. “Forget it.”
He hung up and faced Chester.
“You don’t have to imagine Archie without tools any longer,” he said. “He has them now. He just stole them from us.”
Mac dragged in hours later.
“I didn’t find a thing,” he reported. “Not a single thing.”
Garrison studied him, red-eyed from worry. “That’s all right, Mac. I didn’t think you would. Five miles from here and you’re on unknown ground.”
“What are we going to do now, chief?”
Garrison shook his head. “I don’t know. Sparks finally got a message through. Managed to pick up Mercury, just coming around the Sun. Probably they’ll shoot it out to Mars to be relayed to Earth.”
Chester came out of the laboratory and sat down.
Doc swiveled his cigar.
“What has Archie to say?” he asked.
Chester’s face grew red. “I pumped the radon into the jar. But there was no response. Practically none, that is. Told me to go to hell.”
Doc chuckled at the man’s discomfiture. “Don’t let Archie get you down. That’s what he did to Boone. Got on his nerves. Drove him insane. Archie had to get out some way, you see. He couldn’t do anything while he was shut up in one place. So he forced Boone to let him out. Boone didn’t know what was going on, but Archie did—”
“But what is Archie doing now?” exploded Garrison.
“He’s playing a game of nerves,” said Doc. “He’s softening us up. We’ll be ready to meet his terms when he’s ready to make them.”
“But why terms? What could Archie want?”
Doc’s cigar swished back and forth. “How should I know? We might not even recognize what Archie is fighting for—and, again, we might. He might be fighting for his existence. His life depends upon those radium beds. No more radium, no more radon, no more Archie.”
“Nonsense,” Chester broke in. “We could have dug those beds for a million years and not made a dent in them.”
“A million years,” objected Doc, “might be only a minute or two for Archie.”
“Damn you, Doc,” snapped Garrison, “what are you grinning for? What is so funny about it?”
“It’s amusing,” Doc explained. “Something I’ve often wondered about—just what Earthmen would do it they ran up against something that had them licked forty ways from Sunday.”
“But he hasn’t got us licked,” yelled Mac. “Not yet.”
“Anything that can keep radium from Earth can lick us,” Doc declared. “And Archie can do that—don’t you ever kid yourself.”
“But he’ll ruin the Solar System,” shouted Garrison. “Machines will have to shut down. Mines and factories will be idle. Spaceships will stop running. Planets will have to be evacuated—”
“What you mean,” Doc pointed out, “is that he’ll ruin Radium, Inc. Not the Solar System. The System can get along without Radium, Inc. Probably even without radium. It did for thousands of years, you know. The only trouble now is that the System is keyed to radium. If there isn’t any radium, it means the economic framework that was built on radium must be swept away or some substitute must be found. And if no substitute is found, we must start over again and find some other way of life—perhaps a better way—”