by Hal Clement
None of them even thought of a sister ship. The Giansar had none. Spaceships are not mass production articles; only a few hundred exist as yet, and each of those is a specialized, designed-to-order machine. A spaceman of any standing can recognize at a glance, by shape alone, any ship built on Earth—and no other intelligent race than man inhabits Sol’s system.
Grant was the first to throw off the spell. He glanced up at the stars overhead, and figured; then he shook his head.
“We haven’t circled, I’ll swear,” he said after a moment. “We’re a quarter of the way around this world from where we left the ship, if I have allowed right for rotation. Besides, it wasn’t in a valley.”
The tension vanished as though someone had snapped a switch. “That’s right,” grunted Cray, the stocky engine man. “The place was practically flat, except for a lot of spiky rocks. And anyway, no one but a nut could think that was the Giansar, after leaving her the way we did. I wonder who left this buggy here.”
“Why do you assume it has been left?” The query came, in a quiet voice, from Jack Preble, the youngest person present. “It appears uninjured. I see no reason to suppose that the crew is not waiting for us to enter at this moment, if they have seen us.”
Grant shook his head. “That ship might have been here for years—probably has, since none of us can place it. The crew may be there, but, I fear, not alive. It seems unlikely that this craft has been registered in the lifetime of any of us. I doubt that it would have remained here unless it were disabled; but you must all have realized by now that it holds probably our only chance of life. Even if it won’t fly, there may be a transmitter in repair. We had better investigate.”
The men followed the captain as he took a long, slow leap down the slope. Little enthusiasm showed in the faces behind the helmet masks; even young Preble had accepted the fact that death was almost inevitable. At another time, they might have been eager and curious, even in the face of a spectacle as depressing as a derelict usually is; now they merely followed silently. Here, probably, a similar group of men had, no one knew how long ago, faced a fate identical to theirs; and they were about to see what had befallen those others. No one saw humor in the situation, but a wry smile was twisting more than one face as the group stopped beneath the circular entrance port. More than one thought of the possible irony of their being taken for a rescue crew.
Grant looked at the port, twenty-five feet above their heads. Any of them could easily have jumped to it; but even that effort was not necessary, for a row of niches, eight inches square and two deep, provided a ladder to the rim. It was possible to cling to them even on the lower curve of the hull, for they were deeply grooved around the inside edges. The captain found that his gauntlets could grip easily, and he made his way up the wall of metal, the others watching from below. Arriving at the port, he found that the niches formed a circle around it, and other rows of them extended over the hull in different directions. It was at the entrance, however, that he met the first of the many irregularities.
The others saw him reach the port, and stop as though looking around. Then he traveled entirely around it, stopped again, and began feeling the mirrorlike metal with his gloved hands. Finally he called out:
“Cray, could you come up here, please? If anyone can find the opening mechanism, you should.”
The engineer remained exactly where he was.
“Why should there be any?” he asked. “The only reason we use it on our ships is habit; if the door opens inward, atmospheric pressure will hold it better than any lock. Try pushing; if the inner door is sealed, you shouldn’t have much trouble—the lock chamber will be exhausted, probably.”
Grant got a grip near the edge of the door, and pushed.
There was no result. He moved part way around the rim and tried again, with the same lack of success. After testing at several more points, he spoke again:
“No luck. I can’t even tell which side the hinge is on, or even if there is a hinge. Cray, you and a couple of others had better come up and give a hand at pushing; maybe there’s a trace of air in the inner chamber.”
Cray grunted, “If there’s anywhere near an atmosphere’s pressure, it’ll take tons to budge the door—it’s twelve feet across.” But this time he began to climb the bull. Royden, probably the most powerful one present, and a chemist named Stevenson followed him. The four men grouped themselves about the forward edge of the port, their feet braced on the door itself and hands firmly gripping the climbing niches; and all four tensed their bodies and heaved. The door still refused to budge. They rested a moment, and followed Grant to the opposite side of the metal disk.
This time their efforts produced results. The pressure on the other side of the valve must have been only a few millimeters of mercury; enough to give four or five hundred pounds’ resistance to an outside thrust at the edge opposite the hinge. When the door opened a crack, that pressure vanished almost instantly, and the four men shot feet first through the suddenly yawning opening. Grant and Stevenson checked the plunge by catching the edge of the port frame; the other two disappeared into the inner darkness, and an instant later the shock of their impact upon some hard surface was felt by those touching the hull.
The captain and the chemist dropped to the floor of the lock and entered; Preble leaped for the open door, followed by Sorrell and McEachern. All three judged accurately, sailing through the opening, checking their flight against the ceiling, and landing feet down on the floor, where they found the others standing with belt lights in their hands. The sun was on the far side of the ship, and the chamber was lighted dimly by reflection from the rocks outside; but the corridors of the vessel themselves must be dark.
The inner valve of the air lock was open—and had apparently been so from the beginning. Cray and Royden had shot through it, and been brought up against the farther wall of a corridor running parallel to the ship’s long axis. They were both visible, standing back to back, sweeping the corridor in both directions with their lights. Grant took a step that carried him over to them, motioning the others to remain where they were, and added his light to those already in action.
To the right, as one entered it, the corridor extended almost to the near end of the ship—the bow, as the men thought of it for no good reason, in another direction, it ran about ten yards and opened into a large chamber which, if this craft resembled the Giansar as closely within as it did without, was probably the control room. At least, it was just about amidships. Smaller doors opened at intervals along the hallway; some were open, the majority were closed. Nothing moved anywhere.
“Come on,” said Grant finally. He walked toward the central room, and paused on the threshold, the others at his heels. The floor they were walking on continued in the form of a catwalk; the chamber they were entering occupied the full interior of the hull at this point. It was brightly lighted, for it was this compartment that possessed the six great view ports, equally spaced around its walls, and the sun shone brightly through these. The men extinguished their own lights. Cray looked about him, and shook his head slowly.
“I still think I must be dreaming, and about to wake up on our own ship,” he remarked. “This looks more and more like home, sweet home.”
Grant frowned. “Not to me,” he replied. “This control layout is the first serious difference I’ve seen. You wouldn’t notice that, of course, spending all your life with the engines. It might be a good idea for you to see if the drive on this ship is enough like ours for you to puzzle out, and whether there’s a chance of repairing it. I’ll look over this board for signs of a transmitter—after all, the Mizar shouldn’t be too far away.”
“Why shouldn’t I be able to understand the drive?” retorted Cray. “It should be like ours, only a little more primitive—depending on how long this boat’s been here.”
Grant shot him an amazed glance. “Do you still think this is a Terrestrial ship, and has been here only a few decades?” he asked.
“Sure. An
y evidence otherwise?”
Grant pointed to the floor beneath their feet. All looked down, and for the first time noticed that they left footprints in a thin, even layer of dust that coated the corridor floor.
“That means that the ship held its air for a longer time than I care to think about—long enough not only to reduce the various organic substances on board to dust, but at random currents to distribute it through the open spaces. Yet when we came the air was almost gone—leaked out through the joints and valves, good as they were, so that there was not enough left to resist us when we pushed a twelve-foot piston against its pressure. Point one.”
The finger swung to the control board. “Point two.” He said nothing further, but all could see what he meant.
The center of the control room was occupied by a thick-walled hemisphere—a cup, if you like—swung in gimbals which permitted its flat side always to the uppermost with respect to the ship’s line of net acceleration. The control board occupied the inner surface and upper edge of this cup, all around the circumference; and in the center of the assembly was the pilot’s seat—if it could be called a seat.
It was a dome-shaped structure protruding from the floor about two feet; five broad, deep grooves were spaced equally about its sides, but did not quite reach the top. It looked somewhat like a jelly mold; and the one thing that could be stated definitely about its history was that no human being had ever sat in it. Cray absorbed this evident fact with a gulp, as though he had not chewed it sufficiently.
The rest of the men stared silently at the seat. It was as though the ghost of the long-dead pilot had materialized there and held their frozen attention; overwrought imaginations pictured him, or strove to picture him, as he might have looked. And they also tried to picture what emergency, what unexpected menace, had called upon him to leave the place where he had held sway—to leave it forever. All those men were intelligent and highly trained; but more than one pair of eyes explored the corridor the human invaders had just used, and its mate stretching on from the other side of the control room.
Cray swallowed again, and broke the silence. “I should be able to figure out the engines, anyway,” he said, “if they’re atomics at all like ours. After all, they have to do the same things ours did, and they must have corresponding operations and parts.”
“I hope you’re right.” Grant shrugged invisibly in the bulky suit. “I don’t expect to solve that board until you fix something and the pilot lights start signaling—if they have pilot lights. We’d all better get to work. Cray’s regular assistants can help him, McEachem had better stay with me and help on the board, and Preble and Stevenson can look over the ship in general. Their fields of specialty won’t help much at our jobs. Hop to it.” He started across the catwalk toward the control board, with McEachem trailing behind him.
Stevenson and Preble looked at each other. The younger man spoke. “Together, or should we split up?”
“Together,” decided the chemist. “That way, one of us will probably see anything the other misses. It won’t take much longer; and I doubt that there’s much hurry for our job, anyway. We’ll follow Cray and company to whichever engine room they go to, and then work from that end to the other. All right?”
Preble nodded, and the two left the control room. The engineers had gone toward the bow—so called because the main entrance port was nearer that end—and the two general explorers followed. The others were not far ahead, and their lights were visible, so the two did not bother to use their own. Stevenson kept one hand on the right-hand wall, and they strode confidently along in the semidarkness.
After a short distance, the chemist’s hand encountered the inner door of the air lock by which they had entered. It had been swung by the men all the way back against the wall, leaving both doors open, so that the light was a little better here. In spite of this, he did not see the object on the floor until his foot struck it, sending it sliding along the corridor with a metallic scraping sound that was easily transmitted through the metal of the floor and their suits.
He found it a few feet away, and, near it, two more exactly similar objects. He picked them up, and the two men examined them curiously. They were thick, oval rings, apparently of steel, with an inch or so of steel cable welded to one side of each. The free end of the cable seemed to have been sheared off by some sharp tool. Stevenson and Preble looked at each other, and both directed their lights on the floor about the inner portal of the air lock.
At first, nothing else was noticeable; but after a moment, they saw that the chemist’s foot, just before striking the ring, had escaped a groove in a layer of dust much thicker than that over the rest of the floor. It was piled almost to the low sill of the valve, and covered an area two or three feet in radius. Curiously, the men looked at the outer side of the sill, and found a similar flat pile of dust, covering even more of the floor; and near the edges of this layer were five more rings.
These, examined closely, proved larger than the first ones, which had been just a little too small for an average human wrist; but like them, each had a short length of wire cable fused to one side, and cut off a short distance out. There was nothing else solid on the floor of the lock or the corridor, and no mark in the dust except that made by Stevenson’s toe. Even the dust and rings were not very noticeable—the seven men had entered the ship through this lock without seeing them. Both men were sure they had some meaning, perhaps held a clue to the nature of the ship’s former owners; but neither could decipher it. Preble dropped the rings into a pocket of his spacesuit, and they headed down the corridor again on the track of the engineers.
They caught up with them about a hundred and fifty feet from the control room. The three were standing in front of a heavy-looking, circular door set in a bulkhead which blocked off the passage at this point. It was not featureless, as the air lock doors had been, but had three four-inch disks of darker metal set into it near the top, the bottom, and the left side. Each disk had three holes, half an inch in diameter and of uncertain depth, arranged in the form of an isosceles triangle. The men facing it bore a baffled air, as though they had already tackled the problem of opening it.
“Is this your engine room?” asked Preble, as he and Stevenson stopped beside the others. “It looks more like a pressure lock to me.”
“You may be right,” returned Cray gloomily. “But there’s nowhere else in this end of the ship where an engine room could be, and you remember there were jets at both ends. For some reason they seem to keep the room locked tight—and we don’t even know whether the locks are key or combination. If it’s combination, we might as well quit now; and if it’s key, where is it?”
“They look like the ends of big bolts, to me,” suggested Stevenson. “Have you tried unscrewing them?”
Cray nodded. “Royden got that idea, too. Take a closer look at them before you try turning the things, though. If you still feel ambitious, Royden will show you the best way to stick your fingers into the holes.”
Preble and the chemist accepted the suggestion, and examined the little disks at close range. Cray’s meaning was evident. They were not circular, as they had seemed at first glance; they presented a slightly elliptical cross section, and obviously could never be made to turn in their sockets. The lock theory seemed to remain unchallenged.
That being granted, it behooved them to look for a key. There was no sense toying with the combination idea—there was no hope whatever of solving even a simple combination without specialized knowledge which is seldom acquired legally. They resolutely ignored the probability that the key, if any, was only to be found in the company of the original engineer, and set to work.
Each of them took one of the nearby rooms, and commenced going over it. All the room doors proved to be unlocked, which helped some. Furniture varied but little; each chamber had two seats similar to that in the control room, and two articles which might at one time have been beds; any mattress or other padding they had ever contained was now fine dus
t, and nothing save metal troughs, large enough to hold a man lying at full length, were left. There was also a desklike affair, which contained drawers, which opened easily and soundlessly, and was topped by a circular, yardwide, aluminum-faced mirror. The drawers themselves contained a variety of objects, perhaps toilet articles, of which not one sufficiently resembled anything familiar to provide a clue to its original use.
A dozen rooms were ransacked fruitlessly before the men reassembled in the corridor to exchange reports. One or two of them, hearing of the others’ failure, returned to the search; Preble, Stevenson, and Sorrell strolled back to the door which was barring their way. They looked at it silently for several moments; then Sorrell began to speak.
“It doesn’t make sense,” he said slowly. “Why should you lock an engine-room door? If the motors have to be supervised all the time, as ours do, it’s a waste of time. If you grant that these creatures had their motors well enough designed to run without more than an occasional inspection, it might be worth while to seal the door against an accidental blowoff; but I still wouldn’t lock it. Of course we don’t know anything about their ideas of what was common sense.
“But I’d say that that door either isn’t fastened at all, and is putting up a bluff like the outer air-lock valve, or else it’s really sealed, and would be opened by tools rather than keys. You may think that’s quibbling, but it isn’t. Keys, you carry around with you, in your pocket or on your belt. Tools have a place where you leave ‘em, and are supposed to stay there. Kid, if you were an engineer, in the practice of unsealing this door every few days, perhaps, and needed something like a monkey wrench to do it with, where would you keep the monkey wrench.”
Preble ignored the appellation, and thought for a moment. Finally he said, “If I were fastening the door against intentional snooping, I’d keep the tool in my own quarters, locked up. If, as you suggested, it were merely a precaution against accident, I’d have a place for it near the door here. Wouldn’t you say so?”