It was bizarre. It was unreal and unearthly. Atomic generators powered it silently, pouring torrents of high power into its apparently senseless circuits. Great silvery crystals twisted and distorted slowly under piezoelectric stress, and sputtered-silver contacts carried off the impulses to other circuits.
Solid metal bars carried some sort of circulatory impulse from place to place—they were reminiscent of wave-guide plumbing but no microwave set-up could function in a system like this.
Then, slowly, the thing appeared to have pattern. Whatever it was, the output of the slowly-distorting crystals was fed in or out of phase through filters and transmission bars to the topmost crystal. It was multi-faceted and obviously not a natural formation. It scintillated and pulsed rapidly, and the facets gleamed against the lights as the crystal throbbed in tune with the feeding currents.
"This," said Thompson, "is going to be reproduced later if for no other reason than just sheer curiosity. Whoever built it is a little ahead of our time and I want to get caught up. Benign or malignant, it must be remade and studied."
Then for hours, Thompson's technicians went over the machine with a fine-tooth comb. Pictures—tridimensional shots, moving pictures, microtime film, and hand sketches. Technicians measured potentials, made pictures of wave shapes from the oscilloscope patterns, and drew endless schematic diagrams. Metallurgists took minute samples of the metals, of the dielectrics, of the crystals themselves, cutting bits out with microscopic modine beams.
Then, as they ran out of things to measure, Thompson took one last look at it. "O.K., fellows," he said, "can you rebuild it?"
"To the last decimal place."
"It's alien," warned Thompson.
"It's still made of metal and crystal."
"O.K." He turned to Toralen Ki and made suggestive motions. He turned off the main feed line, and the atomics thrummed to a stop. Then he suggested that now it was off, why didn't they just take it back to Terra and not bother reproducing it. Toralen Ki shook his head—No. He waved Thompson to come along, and they left the machine in the meteor forever.