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."