When you came right down to it, we probably didn't do a bit more harm than the traders or the missionaries. What we took, we took; we didn't settle down and change or destroy the civilizations of people we pretended we were helping. I said as much to Hutch. He agreed with me.
"The missionaries are the worst," he said. "I wouldn't be a missionary no matter what they paid me."
We weren't doing any good just sitting there, so I got up to start for bed. "Maybe tomorrow we'll find something else," I said.
Hutch yawned. "I sure hope we do. We have been wasting our time on these sticks of dynamite." He picked them up and on our way up to bed, he heaved them out the port.
The next day, we did find something else.
We went much deeper into the silo than we had been before, following the corridors for what must have been two miles or more.
We came to a big room that probably covered ten or fifteen acres aud it was filled from wall to wall with rows of machines, all of them alike.
They weren't much to look at. They resembled to some extent a rather ornate washing machine, with a bucket seat attached and a dome on top. They weren't bolted down and you could push them around and when we tipped one of them up to look for hidden wheels, we found instead a pair of runners fixed on a swivel so they'd track in any direction that one pushed. The runners were made of metal that was greasy to the touch, but when you rubbed your fingers on them, no grease came off.
There was no power connection.
"Maybe it's a self-powered unit," said Frost. "Come to think of it, I haven't noticed any power outlets in the entire building."
We hunted for some place where we could turn on the power and there wasn't any place. That whole machine was the smoothest, slickest hunk of metal you ever saw. We looked for a way to get into its innards, so we could have a look at them, but there wasn't any way. The jacket that covered the works seemed to be one solid piece without an apparent seam or a sign of a bolt or rivet.
The dome looked as though it ought to come off and we tried to get it off, but it remained stubbornly in place.
The bucket seat, however, was something else again. It was lousy with all sorts of attachments to accommodate the sitting surface of almost any conceivable kind of being. We had a lot of fun adjusting it in different ways and trying to figure out what kind of animal could have a seat like that. We got a bit obscene about it, I remember, and Hutch was doubled up laughing.
But we weren't getting anywhere and we were fairly sure we wouldn't until we could get a cutting tool and open up one of the machines to find out what made it tick.
We picked out one of them and we skidded it down the corridors. When we got to the entrance, we figured we would have to carry it, but we were mistaken. It skidded along over the ground and even loose sand almost as well as it did in the corridors.
After supper, Hutch went down to the engine room and came back with a cutting tool. The metal was tough, but we finally got at least some of the jacket peeled away.
The innards of that machine were enough to drive you crazy.
It was a solid mass of tiny parts all hooked together in the damnedest jumble. There was no beginning and no end. It was like one of those puzzle mazes that go on and on forever and get no place.
Hutch got into it with both hands and tried to figure out how to start taking it apart.
After a while, he sat back on his heels and growled a little at it. "There's nothing holding them together. Not a bolt or rivet, not even so much as a cotter pin. But they hang together somehow."
"Just pure cussedness," I said.
He looked at me kind of funny. "You might be right, at that."
He went at it again and bashed a couple of knuckles and sat there sucking at them. "If I didn't know that I was wrong," he said, "I'd say that it was friction."
"Magnetism," Doc offered.
"I tell you what Doc," said Hutch. "You stick to what little medicine you know and let me handle the mechanics."
Frost dived in quick to head off an argument. "That frictional idea might not be a bad one. But it would call for perfect machining and surface polish. Theoretically, if you place two perfectly polished surfaces together, the molecules will attract one another and you'll have permanent cohesion."
I don't know where Frost got all that stuff. Mostly he seemed to be just like the rest of us, but occasionally he'd come out with something that would catch you by surprise. I never asked him anything about himself; questions like that were just plain bad manners.
We messed around some more and Hutch bashed another knuckle and I sat there thinking how we'd found two items in the silo and both of them had stopped us in our tracks. But that's the way it is. Some days you can't make a dime.
Frost moved around and pushed Hutch out of the way. "Let me see what I can do."
Hutch didn't protest any. He was licked.
Frost started pushing and pulling and twisting and fiddling away at that mess of parts and all at once there was a kind of whooshing sound, like someone had let out their breath sort of slow and easy, and all the parts fell in upon themselves. They came unstuck, in a kind of slow-motion manner, and they made a metallic thump along with tinkling sounds and they were just a heap inside the jacket that had protected them. "Now see what you done!" howled Hutch.
"I didn't do a thing," said Frost. "I was just seeing if I could bust one loose and one did and the whole shebang caved in." He held up his fingers to show us the piece that had come loose.
"You know what I think?" asked Pancake. "I think whoever made that machine made it so it would fall apart if anyone tried to tinker with it. They didn't want no one to find out how it was put together."
"That makes sense," said Doc. "No use getting peeved at it. After all, it was their machine."
"Doc," I said, "you got a funny attitude. I never noticed you turning down your share of anything we find."
"I don't mind when we confine ourselves to what you might call, in all politeness, natural resources. I can even stomach the pillaging of artforms. But when it comes to stealing brainsand this machine is brains…"
Frost let out a whoop.
He was hunkered down, with his head inside the jacket of the machine, and I thought at first he'd got caught and that we'd have to cut him out, but he could get out, all right.
"I see now how to get that dome off the top," he said.
It was a complicated business, almost like a combination on a safe. The dome was locked in place by a lot of grooves and you had to know just how to turn it to lift it out of place.
Frost kept his head inside the jacket and called out directions to Hutch, who twisted the dome first this way and then that, sometimes having to pull up on it and other times press down to engage the slotted mechanism that held it locked in place.
Pancake wrote down the combinations as Frost called them off and finally the dome came loose in Hutch's hands.
Once it was off, there was no mystery to it. It was a helmet, all rigged out with adjustable features so it could be made to fit any type of head, just as the seat was adjustable to fit any sitting apparatus.
The helmet was attached to the machine with a retractable cable that reeled out far enough to reach someone sitting in the seat.
And that was fine, of course. But what was it? A portable electric chair? A permanent-wave machine? Or what?
So Frost and Hutch poked around some more and in the top of the machine, just under where the dome had nested, they found a swivel trap door and underneath it a hollow tube extending down into the mass of innardsonly the innards weren't a mass any more, but just a basket of loose parts.