"I suppose so," Thomas answered without conviction.
Several days later Wilkie asked permission for Scheer and himself to go outside. Finding that they did not intend to go far, Ardmore gave permission, after impressing on them the need for extreme caution.
He encountered them some time later proceeding down the main passage toward the laboratories. They had an enormous granite boulder. Scheer was supporting it clear of walls and floor by means of tractors and pressors generated by a portable Ledbetter projector strapped as a pack on his shoulders. Wilkie had tied a line around the great chunk of rock and was leading it as if it were a cow. "Great Scott!" said Ardmore. "What y' got there?"
"Uh, a piece of mountain, sir."
"So I see. But why?"
Wilkie looked mysterious. "Major, could you spare some time later in the day? We might have something to show you."
"If you won't talk, you won't talk. Very well."
Wilkie phoned him later, much later, asked him to come and suggested that Thomas come, too. When they arrived in the designated shop room everyone was present except Calhoun. Wilkie greeted them and said, "With your permission, we'll start, Major."
"Don't be so formal. Aren't you going to wait for Colonel Calhoun?"
"I invited him, but he declined."
"Go ahead then."
"Yes, sir." Wilkie turned to the rest. "This piece of granite represents the mountain top above us. Go ahead, Scheer. "
Wilkie took position at a Ledbetter projector. Scheer was already at one; it had been specially fitted with sights and some other gadgetry that Ardmore could not identify. Scheer pressed a couple of studs; a pencil beam of light sprang out.
Using it as if it were a saw he sliced the top off the boulder. Wilkie caught the separated portion with a tractor-pressor combination and moved it aside. He set his controls and it hung in air; where it had been the stone was flat and of mirror polish. "That's the temple's base," said Wilkie.
Scheer continued carving with his pencil beam, trucking his projector around as necessary. The flat top had now been squared off; the square was the summit of a four-sided truncated pyramid. That done, he started carving steps down one side of the figure. "That's enough, Scheer," Wilkie commanded. "Let's make a wall. Prepare the surface."
Scheer did something with his projector. No beam could be seen, but the flat upper surface turned black. "Carbon," announced Wilkie. "Industrial diamonds probably. That's our work bench. O. K., Scheer. " Wilkie moved the detached chunk back over the "bench"; Scheer carved off apiece; it turned molten, dripped down on the flat surface, spread to the edges and stopped. It now had a white metallic sheen. As it doled Scheer nipped each corner, then, using one pressor as a vise to hold it firmly to the boulder and another as a moving wedge, he turned each corner up. It was now a shallow, open box, two feet square and an inch deep. Wilkie whisked it aside and hung it in air.
The process was repeated, but this time a single sheet rather than a box was formed. Wilkie put it out of the way and put the box back on the pedestal. "Let's stuff the turkey," announced Wilkie.
He transferred the chopped-off chunk back to a position over the open box. Scheer carved off a piece and lowered it into the box, then played a beam on it. It melted down and spread over the bottom. "Granite is practically glass," lectured Wilkie, "and what we want is foamed glass, so we use no transmutation in this step-except the least, little bit to make the gases to foam it. Let's have a shot of nitrogen, Scheer." The master sergeant nodded and irradiated the mess for a split second; it foamed up like boiling fudge, filling the shallow box to the rim, and froze.
Wilkie snagged the simple sheet out of the air and caused it to hover over the filled box, then to settle so that it lay, somewhat unevenly, as a cover. "Iron it down, Scheer."
The sheet glowed red and settled in place, pressed flat by an invisible hand. Scheer walked his projector around, welding the cover of the box to the box proper. When he had finished Wilkie set the filled box up on edge at one edge of the pedestal. Leaving the controls of his projector set to hold it there, he walked over to the far side of the room where a tarpaulin covered a pile of something on a bench.
"To save your time and for practice we made four others earlier," he explained and whipped off the tarpaulin. Disclosed were a stack of sandwich panels exactly like that one just created. He did not touch them; instead Scheer lifted them off by projector one at a time and built a cube, using the newly made panel as the first face and the pedestal as the bottom of the cube. Wilkie returned to his projector and held the structure rigid while Scheer welded each seam. "Scheer is much more accurate than I am," he explained. "I give him all the tough parts. O. K., Scheer -- how about a door?"
"How big?" grunted the sergeant, speaking for the first time.
"Use your judgment. Eight inches high would be all right."
Scheer grunted again and carved a rectangular opening in the side facing the slope on which he had begun earlier to carve steps. When he finished Wilkie announced, "There's your temple, boss."
No human hand had touched the boulder nor anything made from it, from start to finish.
The applause sounded like considerably more than five people. Wilkie turned pink; Scheer worked his jaw muscles: They crowded around it. "Is it 'hot'?" inquired Brooks.
"No," answered Mitsui, "I touched it."
"I didn't mean that."
"No, it's not 'hot'," Wilkie reassured him, "not with the Ledbetter process. Stable isotopes, all of them."
Ardmore straightened up from a close inspection. "I take it you intend to do the whole thing outdoors?"
"Is that all right, Major? Of course we could work down below and assemble it up above, from small panels -- but I'm sure that would take just as long as to work from scratch with big panels. And I'm not sure about assembling the roof from small units. Sandwich panels like these are the lightest, strongest, stiffest structure we can use. It was the problem of that big roof span you want that caused us to work out this system."
"Do it your way. I'm sure you know what you're doing. "
"Of course," admitted Wilkie, "we can't finish it in this short a time. This is just the shell. I don't know how long it will take to dress it up."
"Dress it up?" inquired Graham. "When you've got a fine, great simple shape why belittle it with decoration? The cube is one of the purest and most beautiful shapes possible. "
"I agree with Graham," Ardmore commented. "That's your temple, right there. Nothing makes a more effective display than great, unbroken masses. When you've got something simple and effective, don't louse it up."
Wilkie shrugged. "I wouldn't know. I thought you wanted something fancy."
"This is fancy. But see here, Bob, one thing puzzles me. Mind you, I'm not criticizing -- I'd as soon think of criticizing the Days of Creation -- but tell me this: why did you take a chance on going outside? Why didn't you just go into one of the unoccupied rooms, peel off the wall coating and use that magic knife to carve a chunk of granite right out of the heart of the mountain?"
Wilkie looked thunderstruck. "I never thought of that. "
CHAPTER FIVE
A patrol helicopter cruised slowly south from Denver. The PanAsian lieutenant commanding it consulted a recently constructed aerial mosaic map and indicated to the pilot that he was to hover. Yes, there it was, a great cubical building rising from the shoulder of a mountain. It had been picked up by the cartographical survey of the Heavenly Emperor's new Western Realm and he had been sent to investigate.