Kurtzman shook his head. "Not at all. This isn't going to be solved by putting pieces together, like a puzzle. There's more evidence in those buildings than we can ever hope to digest. It's not a matter of adding up clues ... this is going to be a gestalt. One of these days, somebody's going to get a few thousand million of his brain cells turned the right way, and he'll say, "Ah-HAH!" Then we'll have it. Until then, it's our job to keep poking around, hoping to find the right piece of information to trigger the gestalt."
The first one spluttered. "But that ... that's non-scientific!"
"So?" Kurtzman asked, arching his eyebrows. "Do you see science making any great strides around here? We're in over our heads. Intuition is the only thing that can save us."
"If we're that bad off, we might as well quit," the first one said. "In fact, that might be the best idea of all. Forget it and go home. Let the damned machine run for another million years, if it wants to."
Lee could not keep quiet any longer. "That would be fine, wouldn't it?" he said, turning on the surprised engineer. "Give it up and forget about it, without knowing where it came from, or what it's doing, or why."
"I didn't mean...."
"Listen to me. It's not just that the thing could be a weapon. It may not be. But we don't know. And as long as we don't know, we've got to keep trying to find out. Understand?"
"Yes, but...."
"And there's more at stake here than just an intellectual puzzle," Lee insisted. "If we turn our backs on this machine, we've turned our backs on a basic premise of all scientific thought. If we admit that we can't understand this machine, then we admit that there's an absolute limit to our ability to understand the universe. We give in to the old witch-doctor's claim that there are some things in the world that man must not tamper with. Taboo!
"The basic nature of man and science is at stake here! We've got to understand that machine. Our claim to the stars is tied up in it."