Clifford D. Simak - Jackpot

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Jackpot

There was not a thing or anyone to stop us walking in.

It was quiet and solemn inside--and unspectacular. It

reminded me of a monstrous office building.

It was all cut up with corridors, with openings off the

corridors leading into rooms. The rooms were lined with what

looked like filing cases.

We walked for quite a while, leaving paint markers along the

walls to lead us back to the entrance. Get lost inside a place like

that and one could wander maybe a lifetime finding his way out.

We were looking for something--almost anything--but we

didn't find a thing except those filing cases.

So we went into one of the rooms to have a look inside the files.

Pancake was disgusted. "There won't be nothing but records

in those files. Probably in a lingo we can't even read."

"There couM be anything inside those files," said Frost.

"They don't have to be records."

Pancake had a sledge and he lifted it to smash one of the

files, but I stopped him. There wasn't any use doing it messy if

there was a better way.

We fooled around a while and we found the place where you

had to wave your hand to make a drawer roll out.

The drawer was packed with what looked like sticks of

dynamite. They were about two inches in diameter and a foot,

or maybe a little more, in length, and they were heavy.

"Gold," said Hutch.

"I never saw black gold," Pancake said.

"It isn't gold," I told them.

I was just as glad it wasn't. If it had been, we'd have broken

our backs hauling it away. Gold's all right, but you can't get

rich on it. It doesn't much more than pay wages.

We dumped out a pile of the sticks and squatted on the floor,

looking them over.

"Maybe it's valuable," said Frost, "but I wouldn't know.

What do you think it is ?"

None of us had the least idea.

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We found some sort of symbols on each end of the sticks and

;he symbols on each stick seemed to be different, but it didn't

aelp us any because the symbols made no sense.

We kicked the sticks out of the way and opened some more

drawers. Every single drawer was filled with the sticks.

When we came out of the silo, the day had turned into a

scorcher. Pancake climbed the ladder to stack us up some grub

and the rest of us sat down in the shade of the ship and laid

several of the sticks out in front of us and sat there looking at

them, wondering what we had.

"That's where we're at a big disadvantage," said Hutch. "If a

regular survey crew stumbled onto this, they'd have all sorts of

experts to figure out the stuff. They'd test it a dozen different

ways and they'd skin it alive almost and they'd have all sorts of

ideas and they'd come up with some educated guesses. And

pretty soon, one way or another, they'd know just what it was

and if it was any use."

"Someday," I told them, "if we ever strike it rich, we'll have

to hire us some experts. The kind of loot we're always turning

up, we could make good use of them."

"You won't find any", said Doc, "that would team up with a

bunch like us."

"Where do you get 'bunch like us' stuff?" I asked him, a little

sore. "Sure, we ain't got much education and the ship is just sort

of glued together and we don't use any fancy words to cover up

the fact that we're in this for all we can get out of it. But we're

doing an honest job."

"I wouldn't call it exactly honest. Sometimes we're inside the

law and sometimes outside it."

That was nonsense and Doc knew it. Mostly where we went,

there wasn't any law.

"Back on Earth, in the early days," I snapped back, "it was

folks like us who went into new lands and ~lazed the trails and

found rivers and climbed the mountains and brought back

word to those who stayed at home. And they went because they

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Jackpot

were looking for beaver or for gold or slaves or for anything

else that wasn't nailed down tight. They didn't worry much

about the law or the ethics of it and no one blamed them for it.

They found it and they took it and that was the end of it. If they

killed a native or two or burned a village or some other minor

thing like that, why, it was just too bad."

Hutch said to Doc: "There ain't no sense in you going holy

on us. Anything we done, you're in as deep as we are."

"Gentlemen," said Doe, in that hammy way of his, "I wasn't

trying to stir up any ruckus. I was just pointing out that you

needn't set your heart on getting any experts."

"We could get them," I said, "if we offered them enough.

They got to live, just like anybody else."

"They have professional pride, too. That's something you've

forgotten."

"We got you."

"We//, now," said Hutch, "I'm not too sure Doc is pro-

fessional. That time he pulled the tooth for me .... "

"Cut it out," I said. "The both of you."

This wasn't any time to bring up the matter of the tooth. Just

a couple of months ago, I'd got it quieted down and I didn't

want it breaking out again.

Frost picked up one of the sticks and turned it over and over,

looking at it.

"Maybe we could rig up some tests," he suggested.

"And take the chance of getting blown up ?" asked Hutch.

"It might not go off. You have a better than fifty-fifty chance

that it's not explosive."

"Not me," said Doe. "I'd rather just sit here and guess. It's

less tiring and a good deal safer."

"You don't get anywhere by guessing," protested Frost.

"We might have a fortune right inside our mitts if we could only

find out what these sticks are for. There must be tons of them

stored in the building. And there's nothing in the world to stop

us from taking them."

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"The first thing", I said, "is to find out if it's explosive. I

don't think it is. It looks like dynamite, but it could be almost

anything. For instance, it might be food."

"We'll have Pancake cook us up a mess," said Doe.

I paid no attention to him. He was just needling me.

"Or it might be fuel," I said. "Pop a stick into a ship engine

that was built to use it and it would keep it going for a year or

two."

Pancake blew the chow horn and we all went in.

After we had eaten, we got to work.

We found a flat rock that looked like granite and above it we

set up a tripod made out of poles that we had to walk a mile to

cut and then had to carry back. We rigged up a pulley on the

tripod and found another rock and tied it to the rope that went

up to the pulley. Then we paid out the rope as far as it would go

and there we dug a foxhole.

By this time, the sun was setting and we were tuckered out,

but we decided to go ahead and make the test and set our minds

at rest.

So I took one of the sticks that looked like dynamite and

while the others back in the foxhole hauled up the rock tied to

the rope, I put the stick on the first rock underneath the second

and then I ran like hell. I tumbled into the foxhole and the

others let go of the rope and the rock dropped down on the

stick.

Nothing happened.

Just to make sure, we pulled up and dropped the rock two or

three times more and there was no explosion.

We climbed out of the foxhole and went over to the tripod

and rolled the rock off the stick, which wasn't even dented.

By this time, we were fairly well convinced that the stick

couldn't be set off by concussion, although the test didn't rule

out a dozen other ways it might blow us all up.

That night, we gave the sticks the works. We poured acid on

them and the acid just ran off. We tried a cold chisel on them

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and we ruined two good chisels. We tried a saw and t~

stripped the teeth clean off.

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We wanted Pancake to try to cook one of them, but Panc~

refused.

"You aren't bringing that stuff into my galley," he said.

you do, you can cook for yourselves from now on. I keel

good clean galley and I try to keep you guys well fed and I aij

having you mess up the place."

"All right, Pancake," I said. "Even with you cooking it,

probably wouldn't be fit to eat."

We wound up sitting at a table, looking at the sticks piled

the centre of it. Doc brought out a bottle and we all had a dri

or two. Doc must have been considerably upset to share k

liquor with us.

"It stands to reason", said Frost, "that the sticks are go~

for something. If the cost of that building is any indication

their value, they're worth a fortune."

"Maybe the sticks aren't the only things in there," Hut,

pointed out. "We just covered part of the first floor. The

might be a lot of other stuff in there. And there are all tho~

other floors. How many would you say there were ?"

"Lord knows,~' said Frost. "When you're on the ground, yr

can't be sure you see to the top of it. It just sort of fades aw~

when you look up at it."

"You notice what it was built of?" asked Doc.

"Stone," said Hutch.

"I thought so, too," said Doc. "But it isn't. You rememb{

those big apartment mounds we ran into in that insect cultm

out on Suud ?"

We all remembered them, of course. We'd spent days tryi~

to break into them because we had found a handful of beaut

fully carved jade scattered around the entrance of one of the~

and we figured there might be a lot of it inside. Stuff like th~

brings money. Folks back in civilization are nuts about an

kind of alien art and that jade sure enough was alien.

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We'd tried every trick that we could think of and we got

nowhere. Breaking into those mounds was like punching a

feather pillow. You could dent the surface plenty, but you

couldn't break it because the strength of the material built up as

pressure compressed the atoms. The harder you hit, the

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tougher it became. It was the kind of building material that

would last forever and never need repair and those insects

must have known they were safe from us, for they went about

their business and never noticed us. That's what made it so

unfuriating.

And material like that, I realized, would be just the ticket for

a structure like the silo. You could build as big or as high as

you had a mind to; the more pressure you put on the lower

structure, the stronger it would be.

"It means", I said, "that the building out there could be much

older than it seems to be. It could be a million years or older."

"If it's that old," said Hutch, "it could really be packed. You

can store away a lot of loot in a million years."

Doc and Frost drifted off to bed and Hutch and I sat there

alone, looking at the sticks.

I got to thinking about some of the things that Doc was

always saying, about how we were just a bunch of cut-throats,

and I wondered if he might be right. But think on it as hard and

as honest as I could, I couldn't buy it.

On every expanding frontier, in all of history, there had been

three kinds of men who went ahead and marked out the trails

for other men to follow--the traders and the missionaries and

the hunters.

We were the hunters in this case, hunting not for gold or

slaves or furs, but for whatever we could find. Sometimes we

came back with empty hands and sometimes we made a haul.

Usually, in the long run, we evened out so we made nothing

more than wages. But we kept on going out, hoping for that

lucky break that would make us billionaires.

It hadn't happened yet, and perhaps it never would. But

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someday it might. We touched the ghostly edge of hope just

often enough to keep us thinking that it would. Although, 1

admitted to myself, perhaps we'd have kept going out even it

there'd been no hope at all. Seeking for the unknown gets intc

your blood.

When you came right down to it, we probably didn't do a bil

more harm than the traders or the missionaries. What we took,

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we took; we didn't settle down and change or destroy the

civilizations of people we pretended we were helping. I said as much to Hutch. He agreed with me.

"The missionaries are the worst," he said. "I wouldn't be a

missionary no matter what they paid me."

We weren't doing any good just sitting there, so I got up to

start for bed.

"Maybe tomorrow we'll find something else," I said.

Hutch yawned. "I sure hope we do. We have been wasting our

time on these sticks of dynamite."

He picked them up and on our way up to bed, he heaved them

out the port.

The next day, we did find something else.

We went much deeper into the silo than we had been before,

following the corridors for what must have been two miles or

more.

We came to a big room that probably covered ten or fifteen

acres aud it was filled from wall to wall with rows of machines,

all of them alike.

They weren't much to look at. They resembled to some

extent a rather ornate washing machine, with a bucket seat

attached and a dome on top. They weren't bolted down and

you could push them around and when we tipped one of them

up to look for hidden wheels, we found instead a pair of runners

fixed on a swivel so they'd track in any direction that one

pushed. The runners were made of metal that was greasy to the

touch, but when you rubbed your fingers on them, no grease

came off.

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There was no power connection.

"Maybe it's a self-powered unit," said Frost. "Come to think

of it, I haven't noticed any power outlets in the entire building."

We hunted for some place where we could turn on the power

and there wasn't any place. That whole machine was the

smoothest, slickest hunk of metal you ever saw. We looked for

a way to get into its innards, so we could have a look at them,

but there wasn't any way. The jacket that covered the works

seemed to be one solid piece without an apparent seam or a

sign of a bolt or rivet.

The dome looked as though it ought to come off and we tried

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to get it off, but it remained stubbornly in place.

The bucket seat, however, was something else again. It was

lousy with all sorts of attachments to accommodate the sitting

surface of almost any conceivable kind of being. We had a lot

of fun adjusting it in different ways and trying to figure out

what kind of animal could have a seat hke that. We got a bit

obscene about it, I remember, and Hutch was doubled up

laughing.

But we weren't getting anywhere and we were fairly sure we

wouldn't until we could get a cutting tool and open up one of

the machines to find out what made it tick.

We picked out one of them and we skidded it down the

corridors. When we got to the entrance, we figured we would

have to carry it, but we were mistaken. It skidded along over

the ground and even loose sand almost as well as it did in the

corridors.

After supper, Hutch went down to the engine room and came

back with a cutting tool. The metal was tough, but we finally

got at least some of the jacket peeled away.

The innards of that machine were enough to drive you crazy.

It was a solid mass of tiny parts all hooked together in the

damnedest jumble. There was no beginning and no end. It was

like one of those puzzle mazes that go on and on forever and

get no place.

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Hutch got into it with both hands and tried to figure out how

to start taking it apart.

After a while, he sat back on his heels and growled a little at

it. "There's nothing holding them together. Not a bolt or rivet,

not even so much as a cotter pin. But they hang together

somehow."

"Just pure cussedness," I said.

He looked at me kind of funny. "You might be right, at

that."

He went at it again and bashed a couple of knuckles and sat

there sucking at them.

"If I didn't know that I was wrong," he said, "I'd say that it

was friction."

"Magnetism," Doc offered.

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"I tell you what Doe," said Hutch. "You stick to what little

medicine you know and let me handle the mechanics."

Frost dived in quick to head offan argument. "That frictional

idea might not be a bad one. But it would call for perfect

machining and surface polish. Theoretically, if you place two

perfectly polished surfaces together, the molecules will attract

one another and you'll have permanent cohesion."

I don't know where Frost got all that stuff. Mostly he seemed

to be just like the rest of us, but occasionally he'd come out

with something that would catch you by surprise. I never asked

him anything about himself; questions like that were just plain

bad manners.

We messed around some more and Hutch bashed another

knuckle and I sat there thinking how we'd found two items in

the silo and both of them had stopped us in our tracks. But

that's the way it is. Some days you can't make a dime.

Frost moved around and pushed Hutch out of the way. "Let

me see what I can do."

Hutch didn't protest any. He was licked.

Frost started pushing and pulling and twisting and fiddling

away at that mess of parts and all at once there was a kind of

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whooshing sound, like someone had let out their breath sort of

slow and easy, and all the parts fell in upon themselves. They

came unstuck, in a kind of slow-motion manner, and they made

a metallic thump along with tinkling sounds and they were just

a heap inside the jacket that had protected them. "Now see what you done !" howled Hutch.

"I didn't do a thing," said Frost. "I was just seeing if I could

bust one loose and one did and the whole shebang caved in."

He held up his fingers to show us the piece that had come loose.

"You know what I think ?" asked Pancake. "I think whoever

made that machine made it so it would fall apart if anyone tried

to tinker with it. They didn't want no one to find out how it was

put together."

"That makes sense," said Doc. "No use getting peeved at it.

After all, it was their machine."

"Doc," I said, "you got a funny attitude. I never noticed you

turning down your share of anything we find."

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"I don't mind when we confine ourselves to what you might

call, in all politeness, natural resources. I can even stomach the

pillaging of art-forms. But when it comes to stealing brains--

and this machine is brains .... "

Frost let out a whoop.

He was hunkered down, with his head inside the jacket of the

machine, and I thought at first he'd got caught and that we'd

have to cut him out, but he could get out, all right.

"I see now how to get that dome off the top," he said.

It was a complicated business, almost like a combination on a

safe. The dome was locked in place by a lot of grooves and you

had to know just how to turn it to lift it out of place.

Frost kept his head inside the jacket and called out directions

to Hutch, who twisted the dome first this way and then that,

sometimes having to pull up on it and other times press down to

engage the slotted mechanism that held it locked in place.

Pancake wrote down the combinations as Frost called them off

and finally the dome came loose in Hutch's hands.

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Once it was off, there was no mystery to it. It was a helmet,

all rigged out with adjustable features so it could be made to fit

any type of head, just as the seat was adjustable to fit any

sitting apparatus.

The helmet was attached to the machine with a retractable

cable that reeled out far enough to reach someone sitting in the

seat.

And that was fine, of course. But what was it ? A portable

electric chair ? A permanent-wave machine ? Or what ?

So Frost and Hutch poked around some more and in the top

of the machine, just under where the dome had nested, they

found a swivel trap door and underneath it a hollow tube

extending down into the mass of innards--only the innards

weren't a mass any more, but just a basket of loose parts.

It didn't take any imagination to figure what that hollow tube

was for. It was just the size to take one of the sticks of dynamite.

Doc went and got a bottle and passed it around as a sort of

celebration and after a drink or two, he and Hutch shook hands

and said there were no hard feelings. But I didn't pay much

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