The rap of the Scorpian robot interrupted him. "Desist!" bis Pmal rattled. "I have not instructed you to record."
Babylon looked up at the shining hulk of the robot, which had flashed back toward him and hovered ominously overhead. "I'm doing my job," he said.
"Correction! Language specimens of second priority! First priority assigned to technological data, emphasis weapons systems!"
Babylon felt a sudden rush of fury. "You idiot," he snapped, "language is why I'm here! I know nothing about weapons!" He stopped as Ben Pertin touched his arm.
"Let me handle this, Jen," the other man said, and confronted the robot. "Buzz off," he ordered. "We have an assigned mission and you're only a hitchhiker. We're looking for records of some sort, not weapons."
The robot hovered silently, its thoughts unguessable; then, without responding, it flashed away. "Oh, how I loathe that thing!" Doc Chimp chattered. "Come on, Dr. Babylon. Do what you have to do, so we can get out of here!"
How far all this was from the orderly acquisition of knowledge in some library or among some distant tribe! Jen Babylon could not believe that he was. here, in this ancient vessel, on this incredible world. Yet his reflexes worked as well as in Cambridge or on Moorea. He found himself involved in the puzzle of what, for these long-dead people, had constituted a language. The more personal puzzle of what was going to happen to him next remained outside his focus of thought. They sailed through immense black corridors, dived into pits of black mystery, emerged along the bridge that widened to form a disk. All this Jen recorded on his instruments and fed into the emerging pattern in his brain: the language, then, was not wholly unlike human, in that it used graphic representations (the markings on the instruments) and sound modulation (the challenge at the entrance) to convey information. That was pure profit! It could have been much harder.
Somewhere in the shadows they saw the robot's hot blue arc, cutting into something or carving something away; Babylon shuddered at the thought of what forces it might be releasing, but did not hesitate. He reached out and touched the devices before him . . .
They were still alive! A dial glowed. Shadows began to flicker across the dark curve before him. "Oh, Dr. Babylon," whispered the chimp beside him in awe, "we're looking outside! Those are the towers!"
They were; the picture shook and then firmed itself. Babylon could make out the angular outlines of the crystal mountains—or crystal beings—around the wreck, and the vast swath it had cut when it fell. Squinting upward, he caught a pale shimmer of color, clearly the luminous sky of Cuckoo; but beneath them was only darkness shot with brief flares of scarlet and gold. "It's the control room, all right," he said. "The walls are a screen to show everything around—damaged now, I would guess, so that only part of it works. Help me find a readout or tape speaker—some sort of records!"
"I don't know what to look for, Dr. Babylon," the chimp complained.
"Neither do I! Use your brain!" The chimp turned away dolefully; Pertin was already touching, peering at, even smelling every object in sight. It was not even physically easy. Babylon decided that the operators of the ship must have been twice human height, and their hands must have had no human shape; everything was uncomfortable and unfamiliar. From the doorway Doc Chimp chattered:
"Look here, Dr. Babylon! There's stuff missing!" There was a thing that might have been a cabinet, but its shelves were empty. "Somebody else got here ahead of us! Oh, Dr. Babylon, what do we do if they come back?"
"Oh, come off it, Doc," Babylon snapped. "It was probably ten thousand years ago—anyway, what do you suppose these things are?"
It was a rack of slim black hexagonal rods, neatly stacked on spindles on a massive block of something slick and black. Each hexagon was patterned along one face with markings that could be nothing but writing. Babylon gently pulled one off its spike. It was light enough to be plastic, strong enough to be steel, and apart from its markings totally featureless.
It was Doc Chimp who found the answer to the puzzle. "That slot," he chattered. "Wouldn't one of them fit into it?"
They clustered around, peering at the six-sided slot in the corner of the block. They did not have to speak; Babylon knew the same thoughts were in all their minds: tape recorder of sorts? Or weapons-arming system? Or self- destruct commands? Or something wholly unguessable?
There was only one way to find out. Babylon slid one of the hexagons into the slot before either of the others could object.
There was a soft chime, and the block became semitransparent. Swirling plumes of colored light moved within it.
Babylon bent to his instruments, and the Pmal monitor beeped instantly. "Receiving apparent signal," it whirred. "Wave shapes indicate high-order complexity. No apparent match in database."
Babylon pulled the hexagonal rod out of the slot, and the colors died. "I think this is what we came for," he said. "I don't know what it is—ship's log, maybe; maybe porn shows for the crew—who knows? But it's some sort of corpus, in some sort of context. If we can get it back to farlink I think I might be able to reconstruct it."
"Get what back?" Pertin demanded. "Those sticks?"
"All of them—and the block, too."
"Jen! That's got to weigh hundreds of kilos!"
"Do you have a better idea?" Babylon demanded.
Pertin stared glumly at the block. At last he sighed. "Guess we'd better get that damned Scorpian back with his torch; that thing's never going to come loose any other way." He tugged at the block experimentally. "Nope. Part of the structure. And how do we know that cutting it free won't ruin it? And even if we did—"
But while Pertin was talking, Doc Chimp was tugging and poking and prying; down at the base of it he was poking his long fingers into unfamiliar recesses, and something clicked. The chimp shoved at it with his skinny arms, and the whole block came ponderously free.
Babylon exhaled a sigh of relief. "Thank God for small favors," he breathed. "Now we just—"
A dull explosion stopped him.
For a moment he thought the recording device had been booby-trapped, but Pertin snarled: "That crazy Scorpian! He must've bit into something that bit back! I'd better find out what he's up to—and then we'd better get the hell out of here!"
The block would have weighed half a metric ton on Earth, but here its weight was only a few kilograms. Nevertheless, it had its half-ton of mass. When Babylon and the chimp pulled it out of place, it moved slowly at first, like a half-ton ice floe afloat in still water; but then it kept coming with inertia that would not be denied. They managed to get it moving back in the direction from which they had come, just as Pertin returned with the Scorpian's bright light visible far behind. "He found his damn weapons!" Pertin yelled, half sobbing and half laughing, "and much good it did him! The idiot blew himself up. He's going to be damn little use getting back with this stuff!"
Babylon cut his thruster, panting, as the massive block for a moment seemed willing to go in the right direction. "He can't help us?" he asked in dismay.
"He can barely help himself—and he's got a thousand kilos of bits and pieces that he's pulling along. Come on! Let's get this thing back to the ship if we can—the Scorpian'll have to take care of himself!"
If we can . . . The outcome was in doubt. The three of them attacked the block like pilot fish nudging a shark, and slowly, slowly they made their way back through the ship, back out the entrance port, with the distant howling of the crippled Scorpian always behind; and then the trouble had only begun. Moving the mass was easier out in the gloomy canyons walled with those broken pillars of pale and shifting light, but the towers were not wholly quiescent now. They woke more quickly, fired their Jovian bolts more accurately. A dozen times before they were clear of the towers the lightnings struck close enough to leave them gasping and tingling.