Free Selected Stories by Theodore Sturgeon

quarry, its familiar food, and there need be no experimenting with the five soft containers of new rich juices standing awestruck with their backs to their intrusive shelter.
    Then slowly they met one another’s eyes. They cared enough for each other so that there was a gladness of sharing. They cared enough for themselves so that there was also a sheepishness, a troubled self-analysis: What did I do while I was out of my mind?
    They drew together before the door and watched the chase and slaughter around them as it subsided toward its usual balance of hunting and killing, eating and dying. Their hands began to remember the weapons they held, their minds began to reach for reality.
    “They were angels,” April said, so softly that no one but Tod heard her. Tod watched her lips tremble and part, and knew that she was about to speak the thing he had almost grasped, but then Teague spoke again, and Tod could see the comprehension fade from her and be gone. “Look! Look there!” said Teague, and moved down the wall to the corner.
    What had been an inner compartment of their ship was now an isolated cube, and from its back corner, out of sight until now, stretched another long wall. At regular intervals were doors, each fastened by a simple outside latch of parametal.
    Teague stepped to the first door, the others crowding close. Teague listened intently, then stepped back and threw the door open.
    Inside was a windowless room, blazing with light. Around the sides, machines were set. Tod instantly recognized their air-cracker, the water-purifiers, the protein-converter and one of the auxiliary power-plants. In the center was a generator coupled to a light-metal fusion motor. The output buses were neatly insulated, coupled through fuseboxes and resistance controls to a “Christmas tree” multiple outlet. Cables ran through the wall to the Coffin compartment and to the line of unexplored rooms to their left.
    “They’ve left us power, at any rate,” said Teague. “Let’s look down the line.”
    Fish, Tod snarled silently. Dead man! After what you’ve just seen you should be on your knees with the weight of it, you should put out your eyes to remember better. But all you can do is take inventory of your nuts and bolts.
    Tod looked at the others, at their strained faces and their continual upward glances, as if the bright memory had magnetism for them. He could see the dream fading under Teague’s untimely urgency. You couldn’t let us live with it quietly, even for a moment. Then another inward voice explained to him, But you see, they killed Alma.
    Resentfully he followed Teague.
    Their ship had been dismantled, strung out along the hilltop like a row of shacks. They were interconnected, wired up, restacked, ready and reeking with efficiency—the lab, the library, six chambers full of mixed cargo, then—then the noise Teague made was as near to a shout of glee as Tod had ever heard from the man. The door he had just opened showed their instruments inside, all the reference tapes and tools and manuals. There was even a dome in the roof, and the refractor was mounted and waiting.
    “April?” Tod looked, looked again. She was gone. “April!”
    She emerged from the library, three doors back. “Teague!”
    Teague pulled himself away from the array of instruments and went to her. “Teague,” she said, “every one of the reels has been read.”
    “How do you know?”
    “None of them are rewound.”
    Teague looked up and down the row of doors. “That doesn’t sound like the way they—” The unfinished sentence was enough. Whoever had built this from their ship’s substance worked according to function and with a fine efficiency.
    Teague entered the library and picked a tape-reel from its rack. He inserted the free end of film into a slot and pressed a button. The reel spun and the film disappeared inside the cabinet.
    Teague looked up and back. Every single reel was inside out on the clips. “They could have