Squatting beside the machine, John Carnovan shifted his weight from one foot to the other, hoping he would be more comfortable that way. He wasn’t. As if they had a will of their own, his eyes kept turning in their sockets toward the metal blade resting on its point on the stone floor within a foot of him. The blade was made of the ancient tough metal of Mars, the secret of which had been long lost. Carnovan’s eyes followed up the blade to the face of old Mallar, who stood leaning on the sword and looking down. The human hastily took his eyes away from Mallar’s face.

He did not like what he saw there.

Tiernden, his Martian friend and fellow worker here, squatted beside him. The witch doctor, Kelgar, squatted on the other side of Tiernden, asking questions. The witch doctor looked like a crow, yellow eyes and all, an impression that was heightened by the black robe that he wore. The yellow crow eyes rarely left the crystal ball which Kelgar cuddled in both hands. The witch doctor seemed to be drawing information from the crystal, or to be pretending that he was, but whatever was the source of his information, the questions that he asked were shrewd.

Too shrewd, Carnovan thought, too calculating, too far-reaching in their implications.

Carnovan decided that maybe he detested Mallar and Mallar’s six-foot sword less than he detested Kelgar and the witch doctor’s crystal ball. He knew he hated both of them, but maybe he hated Kelgar the most, because the witch doctor was shrewder, and therefore more dangerous.

“You and the earth man have been here twice ten-times-ten-suns,” Kelgar said accusingly.

“Two hundred days,” Tiernden answered. The little Martian shivered as he spoke and his skin shifted its hue, taking on the color of old copper.

A sort of Brownian movement seemed to be visible on the surface of the skin cells. “Yes, Holy One. That is about right.”

“You and the earth man have made progress?”

“Certainly, Holy One.” With the machine there in front of his eyes, Tiernden could not deny that they had made progress. “But—” A growl sounded from Mallar. “Get to the point. Is the machine finished?”

Tiernden started to speak. As if he wanted to make certain that all reports passed through him, the witch doctor spoke first. “It is not yet decided, Great One.”

Listening, Carnovan thought: “They call Kelgar Holy One and Mallar Great One. Yet Kelgar is what we would call a witch doctor and Mallar is the head man of a tribe of nomadic desert dwellers. There is no holiness in the witch doctor and no greatness in the chieftain.”

Once there had been greatness on Mars. From this ruined citadel, from this very room, from this machine, that greatness had flowed outward.

Mars had been ruled from here, ruled wisely and benevolently. Now a desert chieftain and his medicine man were asking questions of the two scientists who sought to revive that ancient rule, that long-lost benevolence.

Unease came up inside Carnovan as he sensed the reason for the sudden appearance here of Mallar and his tribe, and of Kelgar.

“What does your magic ball say?” Mallar asked Kelgar.

“It does not answer yet, Great One.”

“What does he say?” The sword blade came up to point at Tiernden.

“I have been trying to say,” Tiernden said, dignity in his voice, “that progress has assuredly been made. But we do not have the whole answer yet, nor the whole machine. A piece, a part, is missing.”

“Um. What part?”

“It is hard to say exactly, Great One.”

“Huh!” Mallar’s eyes came to Carnovan. There was no liking of this earth man in them, or of any Terrestrial. The eyes said that Terrestrials were a race that had come across space, disturbing the old Martian ways, and that it would be better for all concerned if they returned into space from which they had come. “What does the earth man say about the great machine, and the great power, and about progress?”

Carnovan rose to his feet. Even if he was willing to answer this question, he wondered how he could possibly answer it in terms that Mallar could understand. His grasp of Martian was adequate, but neither in Martian nor in English were there any words to describe this machine and the way it operated. In fact, Carnovan always hesitated before calling this device a machine—it had no mechanical moving parts. Inside of it, in a complex of crystal filters and tiny force fields, changes took place, energy was generated and flowed—elsewhere. Any device which generated or moved energy could be called a machine. But the energy generated here was of a most subtle kind. What kind it was, neither Carnovan nor Tiernden had been able to establish. The great power, the old records called it. Perhaps the best that could be said in words was that the machine generated electricity plus. Plus what? This was one of the unanswered questions.

How could he explain this machine to a barbarian when he did not fully understand it himself?

But if Mallar really wanted to know if they had made progress, the machine itself was certainly evidence of that. At least, it was evidence of uncounted hours of patient toil. Once a machine like this had existed on this spot. When Carnovan and Tiernden had started work, only the foundation of the machine had been there, the hole in the rock where it had rested. The parts of the original machine had been scavenged by metal-hungry desert nomads generations ago.

Tiernden and he had translated the ancient records of the builders of the machine, puzzling out the hieroglyphics on the walls, following the directions of the long-gone engineers. Thus they had slowly rebuilt the machine ... all but one part of it.

All of this passed through Carnovan’s mind in a split second. His eyes went to the walls of the room. The hieroglyphics they had translated covered most of these walls, carved there by a race that had once lived on this planet, had known greatness, and had gone to dust.

Carnovan’s mind flicked back to Earth, to drawings he had once seen on the wall of a cave in southern France, deer, horses, aurochs. Long centuries in the past, dawn men on Earth had carved those pictures on that cave wall, thinking that thus they exercised some control over the animals themselves, hoping that because they drew the picture of an aurochs on the wall of a cave, a live aurochs might be thus lured into the traps laid by the hunters.

This magic had been a dream of dawn men. It had failed. Dawn oxen had not walked into the traps laid by the hunters because artists—or were they early scientists?—had sketched a picture of the animal on the wall of a cave. No doubt the dawn magicians had found excuses for their failure. Perhaps the incantations had not been exactly right, perhaps some witch had interfered.

Carnovan’s eyes went to the last wall in the big room. This wall was of smooth black stone, a natural blackboard. A scrawl of chalk marks showed handiwork, mathematical equations, the symbol of summation, Greek letters, the square root of minus one. These chalk marks were actually a mathematical development that went beyond Riemann, and described a non-Euclidean, non-Riemann universe. The equations went forward, then backtracked upon themselves, describing an involved concurrent relationship of matter and force, a progressing unity that seemed to create itself as it advanced.

Carnovan’s handiwork! A glow came up in him at the thought. Actually, the equations were a translation into human mathematics of the Martian wall hieroglyphics. They were a mathematical description of the recreated machine.

Were they also animals scratched on a cave wall?

Carnovan did not know, as yet. He suspected, or hoped, they were more than that. The glow in him grew stronger. He thought: This is the record of my passage through the Laboratory. I, man! Here on this wall I have scrawled the notes of my discoveries made during my passage through this matrix of suns, stars, and men, mathematical equations, the laws of resonance, some of the laws of that strange configuration of energy called matter. I have dug them out of the Laboratory as I passed through it and I have written them on this cave wall so that your knowledge shall be greater and your passage through the Laboratory shall be facilitated, made more easy.

What is the Laboratory? Yonder Earth, these planets, this solar system, this galaxy, this universe!

This dream of facilitating the passage of men—and Martians—through what he called the Laboratory had brought Carnovan to Mars, to this ruined, rocky citadel.

The growl in Mallar’s voice jerked Carnovan back to the present.

Carnovan pointed to the hieroglyphics. “We have translated these. This one accomplishment is a monumental achievement.”

Carnovan pointed to his own figures on the wall. Because of the job he had done here, both Terrestrials and Martians might in the long run find life a little finer, a little fuller, a little better.