"Did you bring a torch?" Lee asked. Elaine shook her head. "Don't need one anymore. We installed lights inside. They're tripped by a photocell as we cross through a doorway." He could feel it coming on as they approached the buildings--the tenseness, the prickling along the spine, as if a deeply-buried memory was writhing within his mind. Even before they entered the doorway he could sense the throbbing, beating _purposefulness_ of the machines. And then they were inside, surrounded by them, row on row, tier on tier, inhuman untiring infallible machines humming, growling, whining, filling the vast building with the rumbling power of their work. Driving, constantly driving at their unknown tasks. Along catwalks that snaked through the maze of machines, automatic maintenance vehicles scurried along, stopping here for a quick adjustment, there for replacement of a faulty part. No matter where the two invading humans went along the twining catwalks, the maintenance vehicles avoided them. If they stopped before a machine that was to be serviced, the maintenance vehicle would hover nearby, glowering at them, waiting for them to get out of the way. * * * * * He could feel it again--the alienness, the lurking presence of an intelligence that scorned the intruders from Earth. Every nerve in his body screamed the same message: get out, get away, this thing is evil, hostile, a weapon against all mankind. In the conference room, telling them of his theory, he had inwardly wondered how much of it he himself really believed. But here, in the midst of these implacably efficient machines--he _knew_. This is the product of a cosmic hatred, the work of those who seek to destroy man, our ancient enemy, the unknown, the nameless Others. "Are you all right?" Elaine's voice in his earphones snapped him back to reality. "Why, do I look green?" She came up close enough so that their helmets nearly touched. "A little green," she said, smiling. "It gives me the creeps, too. Want to go?" "No," he answered. "Let's see the work that's going on." He took a firm grip on himself and went through it all, from the combined crews of archeologists and engineers tracing wiring circuits, to the handful of physicists conducting further tests on the power generator buried deep in the central building's foundation. "It goes awfully slowly," Elaine said as they trudged back to the center. "We're on the outside looking in," Lee said. "If we could only determine the _purpose_ of the machinery, then the rest of it would come pretty easily." They returned to the surface bubble and took off their pressure suits. "Nearly dinner time," Elaine said, as they descended to the living area. "How about eating in my quarters?" she asked. "Can you cook?" "You'll find out." * * * * *