"I wouldn't call it exactly honest. Sometimes we're inside the law and sometimes outside it."
That was nonsense and Doc knew it. Mostly where we went, there wasn't any law.
"Back on Earth, in the early days," I snapped back, "it was folks like us who went into new lands and blazed the trails and found rivers and climbed the mountains and brought back word to those who stayed at home. And they went because they were looking for beaver or for gold or slaves or for anything else that wasn't nailed down tight. They didn't worry much about the law or the ethics of it and no one blamed them for it. They found it and they took it and that was the end of it. If they killed a native or two or burned a village or some other minor thing like that, why, it was just too bad."
Hutch said to Doc: "There ain't no sense in you going holy on us. Anything we done, you're in as deep as we are."
"Gentlemen," said Doc, in that hammy way of his, "I wasn't trying to stir up any ruckus. I was just pointing out that you needn't set your heart on getting any experts."
"We could get them," I said, "if we offered them enough. They got to live, just like anybody else."
"They have professional pride, too. That's something you've forgotten."
"We got you."
"Well, now," said Hutch, "I'm not too sure Doc is professional. That time he pulled the tooth for me…"
"Cut it out," I said. "The both of you."
This wasn't any time to bring up the matter of the tooth. Just a couple of months ago, I'd got it quieted down and I didn't want it breaking out again.
Frost picked up one of the sticks and turned it over and over, looking at it. "Maybe we could rig up some tests," he suggested.
"And take the chance of getting blown up?" asked Hutch.
"It might not go off. You have a better than fifty-fifty chance that it's not explosive."
"Not me," said Doe. "I'd rather just sit here and guess. It's less tiring and a good deal safer."
"You don't get anywhere by guessing," protested Frost.
"We might have a fortune right inside our mitts if we could only find out what these sticks are for. There must be tons of them stored in the building. And there's nothing in the world to stop us from taking them."
"The first thing", I said, "is to find out if it's explosive. I don't think it is. It looks like dynamite, but it could be almost anything. For instance, it might be food."
"We'll have Pancake cook us up a mess," said Doc. I paid no attention to him. He was just needling me. "Or it might be fuel," I said. "Pop a stick into a ship engine that was built to use it and it would keep it going for a year or two."
Pancake blew the chow horn and we all went in.
After we had eaten, we got to work.
We found a flat rock that looked like granite and above it we set up a tripod made out of poles that we had to walk a mile to cut and then had to carry back. We rigged up a pulley on the tripod and found another rock and tied it to the rope that went up to the pulley. Then we paid out the rope as far as it would go and there we dug a foxhole.
By this time, the sun was setting and we were tuckered out, but we decided to go ahead and make the test and set our minds at rest.
So I took one of the sticks that looked like dynamite and while the others back in the foxhole hauled up the rock tied to the rope, I put the stick on the first rock underneath the second and then I ran like hell. I tumbled into the foxhole and the others let go of the rope and the rock dropped down on the stick.
Nothing happened.
Just to make sure, we pulled up and dropped the rock two or three times more and there was no explosion.
We climbed out of the foxhole and went over to the tripod and rolled the rock off the stick, which wasn't even dented.
By this time, we were fairly well convinced that the stick couldn't be set off by concussion, although the test didn't rule out a dozen other ways it might blow us all up.
That night, we gave the sticks the works. We poured acid on them and the acid just ran off. We tried a cold chisel on them and we ruined two good chisels. We tried a saw and it stripped the teeth clean off.
We wanted Pancake to try to cook one of them, but Pancake refused.
"You aren't bringing that stuff into my galley," he said. "You do, you can cook for yourselves from now on. I keep a good clean galley and I try to keep you guys well fed and I ain't having you mess up the place."
"All right, Pancake," I said. "Even with you cooking it, it probably wouldn't be fit to eat."
We wound up sitting at a table, looking at the sticks piled the centre of it. Doc brought out a bottle and we all had a drink or two. Doc must have been considerably upset to share his liquor with us.
"It stands to reason", said Frost, "that the sticks are good for something. If the cost of that building is any indication their value, they're worth a fortune."
"Maybe the sticks aren't the only things in there," Hutch pointed out. "We just covered part of the first floor. The might be a lot of other stuff in there. And there are all those other floors. How many would you say there were?"
"Lord knows," said Frost. "When you're on the ground, you can't be sure you see to the top of it. It just sort of fades away when you look up at it."
"You notice what it was built of?" asked Doc.
"Stone," said Hutch.
"I thought so, too," said Doc. "But it isn't. You remember those big apartment mounds we ran into in that insect culture out on Suud?"
We all remembered them, of course. We'd spent days trying to break into them because we had found a handful of beautifully carved jade scattered around the entrance of one of them and we figured there might be a lot of it inside. Stuff like that brings money. Folks back in civilization are nuts about any kind of alien art and that jade sure enough was alien.
We'd tried every trick that we could think of and we got nowhere. Breaking into those mounds was like punching a feather pillow. You could dent the surface plenty, but you couldn't break it because the strength of the material built up as pressure compressed the atoms. The harder you hit, the tougher it became. It was the kind of building material that would last forever and never need repair and those insects must have known they were safe from us, for they went about their business and never noticed us. That's what made it so infuriating.
And material like that, I realized, would be just the ticket for a structure like the silo. You could build as big or as high as you had a mind to; the more pressure you put on the lower structure, the stronger it would be.
"It means," I said, "that the building out there could be much older than it seems to be. It could be a million years or older."
"If it's that old," said Hutch, "it could really be packed. You can store away a lot of loot in a million years."
Doc and Frost drifted off to bed and Hutch and I sat there alone, looking at the sticks.
I got to thinking about some of the things that Doc was always saying, about how we were just a bunch of cut-throats, and I wondered if he might be right. But think on it as hard and as honest as I could, I couldn't buy it.
On every expanding frontier, in all of history, there had been three kinds of men who went ahead and marked out the trails for other men to followthe traders and the missionaries and the hunters.
We were the hunters in this case, hunting not for gold or slaves or furs, but for whatever we could find. Sometimes we came back with empty hands and sometimes we made a haul.
Usually, in the long run, we evened out so we made nothing more than wages. But we kept on going out, hoping for that lucky break that would make us billionaires. It hadn't happened yet, and perhaps it never would. But someday it might. We touched the ghostly edge of hope just often enough to keep us thinking that it would. Although, I admitted to myself, perhaps we'd have kept going out even it there'd been no hope at all. Seeking for the unknown gets into your blood.