It was almost funny—the ineffectual, confused protest of those two men. They were like children too lost in their new environment to know what was dangerous and what was not.
Misty, lavender tentacles reached out and grasped them carefully. They were lifted from the floor of the cage like babes. Once Harwich's great freckled arms tautened, as though he was going to battle the monstrous miracle that held him. But futility checked the urge. Where was there anything to win by struggling, now? And how could a mere man win anyway, against soft-moving mechanical power, that should belong to the far future? Oddly the tentacles were warm and tingling, not cold like you'd think metal should be.
And so Arnold and Harwich submitted to a paternal, mechanical dominance, regretfully, because there was nothing else to do. It hurt their sense of freedom, but where was there any alternative?
Still floating a little off the tile pavement of the cage, the machine carried the two men easily to the opening in the floor, and glided down into a crystal-roofed tunnel. There it began to accelerate swiftly, flying with bullet-like speed, a foot or so above the glass bottom of the passage.
The tunnel's roof was transparent as air. Through it, Harwich and Arnold could see that they were nearing the Tower rapidly. After only a moment of whizzing, breath-taking flight, they had arrived within that great, enigmatic edifice, for the passage entered its base.
There, in an eerie half-twilight, the flat little machine released the two humans whom it had brought here, to the Tower.
Mute with an even greater wonder than before, Harwich and Arnold stared around them. The room was gigantic, soaring up in a huge, metal-ribbed dome. Scores of crystal-walled passages led into this colossal chamber of secrets. The whole immense Tower building was transparent, except that some darkening pigment had been added to the material that composed it, 'till it was like bluish glass. Through it the desolate surrounding hills of Io could be seen, and the cages, filled with those aimless, pathetic, sluglike creatures.
But the attention of the two men was drawn inevitably to the center of the room. Rearing up there, under the rotunda of the dome, was a massive, lavender-sheened pyramid. It gave a steady, throbbing sound, as of countless tiny wheels and shafts whirling inside it, working cams and rods, and who knew what else?
"Dammit!" Evan Harwich kept muttering under his breath in dim confusion. "Dammit."
He was used to machinery, yes. He was used to the roar of rockets, and to the delicate instruments used in space flight. But this was machinery of a far higher order. That busy, vibrating pyramid, squatting there like some huge idol, somehow seemed to possess a definite personality of its own!