"To stay in the party," Sandy said suddenly, with something like defiance, "I tried a cube, too. And I was a sort of supply-officer. I had the experience of being responsible for supply and being short of everything and improvising this and that and the other to keep things up to fighting standard. It wasn't easy. The men grumbled, and we lacked everything. There was no fighting in my time, and there hadn't been for centuries. But we knew the Enemy hadn't given up and we had to be ready, generation after generation, even when nothing happened. And we knew that any minute the Enemy might throw something unexpected, some new weapon, at us."
"History-cubes," said Keller interestedly. "Different periods. Right?"
"Dammit, yes!" said Burke. "We've got accounts of past times and finished battles, but we need to know who's coming and what to do about it! Maybe the rocket-dream was earliest in time. But how could a race with nothing better than rockets ever get here? And how could they supply the building of a place like this?"
There was no answer. Facts ought to fit together. When they don't, they are useless.
"We've got snatches of information," said Burke. "But we don't know who built this fort, or why, except that there was a war that lasted thousands of years, with pauses for centuries between battles." He waved a hand irritably. "The Enemy tries to think up new weapons. They do. They try them. So far, they've been countered. But we're not prepared to fight a new weapon. Maybe the fort is set to battle old ones, but we don't know how to use it even for that! We've got to—"
"I think—" began Keller.
"I'd give plenty for a service manual on the probably useless weapons we do have," said Burke angrily. "Incidentally, Keller just found what may be an explanation of how and why this place was abandoned."
Keller said suddenly, "Where would service manuals be?"
He moved, almost running, toward the air-lock. Burke started to swear, and stopped.
"A service-and-repair manual," he snapped, "would be near the equipment it described. How many little shelves with boxes on them have we seen? They're just the right size to hold cubes! And where are they? Next to those fighting machines next to the door of the room where the ten-foot globes are! There's a shelf of them in the instrument-room! Let's find out how to fight with this misbegotten shell of a space-fort! There'll be no help coming to us, but if the Enemy's held off for thousands of years while this civilization fell apart, we might as well try to hold it together for a few minutes or seconds longer! Let's go get some real instruction-cubes!"