"I'm not at all sure I like it here," Harwich growled. "We were fixed up, revived, made new men again, so to speak; but still I don't like it here."
"Somehow I've got the same idea," Paul Arnold agreed with a quizzical smile.
A little clinking noise behind the two men made them turn about. After that, awe kept them spellbound. They didn't speak. What was there to say? They didn't try to retreat, either. What was the use? If what they saw was danger, they could do nothing to avert it. Hypnotized with wonder, they only stared, feeling as helpless as the larvae in an ant-hill, tended and cared for by the workers.
A section of the cage-bottom had raised, like a trapdoor. A bulk was creeping through the opening. It was a machine, so marvelous, so refined in its functioning, that it seemed far more than alive. It was flat, like a small tractor; but there were no treads for it to move on. It seemed, rather, to glide on a cushioning, grayish mist. The thing purred softly, like a great cat, and tiny lights twinkled in crystalline parts of it—batteries to deliver fearful atomic or cosmic power, perhaps. The mechanism had many flexible tentacular arms of metal that glinted with a lavendar luster.
But even the substance of those arms, the metal itself, looked indefinite and eye-hurting at the edges, as though it was partly fourth-dimensional, or something.
Both men grasped the truth. Here was that million-year advancement of science that they'd talked about with such thrilled fascination, in the stuffy bar of the Spacemen's Haven, back in Ganymede City. But Ganymede City, with all its human crudeness and inefficiency, seemed like a lost, happy legend, now, to Arnold and Harwich. Far, far away, and dim. For here was dread wonder to eclipse it. Futurian fact! Physical principles of such a miraculous order that mankind had scarcely dreamed of their outer fringes yet, were functioning here.
The flat machine advanced. But it was only instinct working, when the two men crouched away from it a little. It was useless to fight; it was useless to run.
"Get away, you!" Paul Arnold grumbled dully to the mechanism. "Beat it! Scram."
And Harwich was reacting in a similar manner. "What the hell!" he stammered. "What are you trying to do with us."