by Hal Clement
The machinist nodded, and swept his light slowly over the bulkheads around the door. Nothing showed but smooth metal, and he extended the search to the corridor walls for several yards on both sides. The eye found nothing, but Sorrell was not satisfied. He returned to the edge of the door and began feeling over the metal, putting a good deal of pressure behind his hand.
It was a slow process, and took patience. The others watched, holding their lights to illuminate the operation. For several minutes the suit radios were silent, those of the more distant men cut off by the metal walls of the rooms they were searching and the three at the door prosecuting their investigation without speech. Sorrell was looking for a wall cabinet, which did credit to his imagination; such a thing seemed to him the last place to keep tools. He was doing his best to allow for the probably unorthodox ideas of the builders of the ship, reducing the problem as far as he could toward its practical roots, and hoping no physical or psychological traits of the being he never expected to meet would invalidate his answers. As Preble had said, a tool used for only one, specialized purpose logically would be kept near the place in which it was used.
The machinist turned out to be right, though not exactly as he had expected. He was still running his hands over the wall when Preble remembered a standard type of motor-control switch with which even he was familiar; and, almost without thinking, he reached out, inserted his fingers in the three holes of one of the disks, and pulled outward. A triangular block, indistinguishable in color from the rest of the disk, slid smoothly out into his hand.
The other two lights converged on it, and for a second or two there was silence; then Sorrell chuckled. “You win, Jack,” he admitted. “I didn’t carry my own reasoning far enough. Go ahead.”
Preble examined the block of metal. What had been the inner face was copper-colored, and bore three holes similar to those by which he had extracted it. There was only one other way to fit it into the disk again; he reserved it, with the copper face outward, and felt it slip snugly back into place. Sorrell and Stevenson did the same with the upper and lower disks, which proved to contain similar blocks. Then they stood back, wondering what happened next.
They were still waiting when Cray and Royden rejoined them. The former saw instantly what had been done to the door, and started to speak; then he took a second, and closer look, and, without saying a word, reached up, inserted three fingers in the holes in the coppery triangles of the block face, and began to unscrew the disk. It was about five inches thick, and finally came out in his hands. He stared doubtfully at it, and took a huge pair of vernier calipers from the engineer’s kit at his side and measured the plug along several diameters. It was perfectly circular, to within the limit of error of his instrument.
He looked at the others at length, and spoke with a note of bewilderment. “I could have sworn this thing was elliptical when we first examined it. The hole still is, if you’ll look.” He nodded toward the threaded opening from which the disk had come. “I saw the line where it joined the door seemed a good deal wider at the top and bottom; but I’m sure it fitted tightly all around, before.”
Sorrell and Royden nodded agreement. Evidently reversing the inset block had, in some fashion, changed the shape of the disk. Cray tried to pull the block out again, but it resisted his efforts, and he finally gave up with a shrug. The men quickly unscrewed the other disks, and Royden leaned against the heavy door. It swung silently inward; and four of the men instantly stepped through, to swing their lights about the new compartment. Cray alone remained at the door, puzzling over the hard-yet-plastic metal object. The simple is not always obvious.
Grant and McEachern, in the control room, were having trouble as well. They had approached the control cup along the catwalk, and the captain had vaulted into its center without difficulty. And he might just as well have remained outside.
The control buttons were obvious enough, though they did not project from the metal in which they were set. They occurred always in pairs—probably an “on” and “off” for each operation; and beside each pair were two little transparent disks that might have been monitor lights. All were dark. Sometimes the pairs of buttons were alone; sometimes they were in groups of any number up to eighteen or twenty. Each group was isolated from its neighbors; and they extended completely around the footwide rim of the cup, so that it was not possible to see them all at once.
But the thing that bothered Grant the most was the fact that not a single button, light, or group was accompanied by a written label of any sort. He would not have expected to be able to read any such writing; but there had been the vague hope that control labels might have been matched with similar labels on the machines or charts—if the other men found any of either. It was peculiar, for there were in all several hundred buttons; and many of the groups could easily have been mistaken for each other. He put this thought into words, and McEachern frowned behind his helmet mask before replying.
“According to Cray’s logic, why should they be labeled?” he remarked finally. “Do we allow anyone to pilot a ship if he doesn’t know the board blindfolded? We do label ours, of course, on the theory that an inexperienced man might have to handle them in an emergency; but that’s self-deception. I’ve never heard of any but a first-rank pilot bringing a ship through an emergency. Labeling controls is a carry-over from the family auto and airplane.”
“There’s something in that,” admitted the captain. “There’s also the possibility that this board is labeled, in a fashion we can’t make out. Suppose the letters or characters were etched very faintly into that metal, which isn’t polished, you’ll notice, and were meant to be read by, say, a delicate sense of touch. I don’t believe that myself, but it’s a possibility—one we can’t check, since we can’t remove our suits to feel. The fact that there are no obvious lights for this board lends it some support; they couldn’t have depended on sunlight all the time.”
“In either case, fooling around here at this stage may do more harm than good,” pointed out McEachern. “We’ll have to wait until someone gets a machine identified, and see if tampering with it produces any results here.”
Grant’s helmet nodded agreement. “I never had much hope of actually starting the ship,” he said, “since it seems unlikely that anything but mechanical damage of a serious nature could have stranded it here; but I did have some hopes for the communicators. There must be some.”
“Maybe they didn’t talk,” remarked the navigator.
“If that’s your idea of humor, maybe you’d better not, yourself,” growled Grant. He vaulted back to the catwalk, and morosely led the way forward, to see if the engineers or free-lance investigators had had any luck. McEachern followed, regretting the remark, which must have jarred the commander’s optimism at an unfortunate time. He tried to think of something helpful to say, but couldn’t, so he wisely kept quiet.
Halfway to the bow; they met Preble and Stevenson, who had satisfied themselves that the others could do better in the engine room and were continuing their own general examination of the ship. They gave the officers a brief report on events forward, showed them the metal rings found by the air lock, and went on aft to find some means of visiting the corridors which presumably existed above and below the main one. The control room seemed the logical place to look first, though neither had noticed any other openings from it when they were there the first time. Perhaps the doors were closed, and less obvious.
But there were no other doors, apparently. Only two means of access and egress to and from the control room appeared to exist, and these were the points where the main corridor entered it.
“There’s a lot of room unaccounted for, just the same,” remarked Stevenson after the search, “and there must be some way into it. None of the rooms we investigated looking for that `key’ had any sign of a ramp or stairway or trapdoor; but we didn’t cover them all. I suggest we each take one side of the bow corridor, and look behind every door we can open. None of the others was locked
, so there shouldn’t be much trouble.”
Preble agreed, and started along the left-hand wall of the passage, sweeping it with his light as he went. The chemist took the right side and did likewise. Each reached a door simultaneously, and pushed it open; and a simultaneous “Here it is” crackled from the suit radios. A spiral ramp, leading both up and down, was revealed on either side of the ship, behind the two doors.
“That’s more luck than we have a right to expect,” laughed Stevenson. “You take your side, I’ll take mine, and we’ll meet up above.”
Preble again agreed silently, and started up the ramp. It was not strictly accurate to call it a spiral; it was a curve evidently designed as a compromise to give some traction whether the ship were resting on its belly on a high-gravity planet, or accelerating on its longitudinal axis, and it did not make quite a complete turn in arriving at the next level above. Preble stepped onto it facing the port side, and stepped off facing sternward, with a door at his left side. This he confidently tried to push open, since like the others it lacked knob or handle; but unlike them, it refused to budge.
There was no mystery here. The most cursory of examinations disclosed the fact that the door had been welded to its frame all around—raggedly and crudely, as though the work had been done in frantic haste, but very effectively. Nothing short of a high explosive or a heavy-duty cutting arc could have opened that portal. Preble didn’t even try. He returned to the main level, meeting Stevenson at the foot of the ramp. One look at his face was enough for the chemist.
“Here, too?” he asked. “The door on my side will never open while this ship is whole. Someone wanted to keep something either outside or inside that section.”
“Probably in, since the welding was done from outside,” replied Preble. “I’d like to know what it was. It would probably give us an idea of the reason for the desertion of this ship. Did you go down to the lower level?”
“Not yet. We might as well go together—if one side is sealed, the other probably will be, too. Come on.”
They were still on the left-hand ramp, so it was on this side that they descended. A glance at the door here showed that, at least, it was not welded; the pressure of a hand showed it to be unlocked. The two men found themselves at the end of a corridor similar in all respects to the one above, except that it came to a dead end to the right of the door instead of continuing on into the central chamber. It was pitch-dark, except for the reflections of the hand lights on the polished metal walls and along either side were doors, perhaps a trifle larger than most of the others on the ship. Many of these were ajar, others closed tightly; and by common consent the men stepped to the nearest of the former.
The room behind it proved similar in size to those above, but it lacked the articles which the men had come to look upon as the furniture of the long-dead crew. It was simply a bare, empty cubicle.
The other chambers, quickly examined, showed no striking difference from the first. Several contained great stacks of metal ingots, whose inertia and color suggested platinum or iridium; all were thickly coated with dust, as was the floor of the corridor. Here, too, there must have been organic materials, whether crew or cargo none could tell, which had slowly rotted away while the amazingly tight hull held stubbornly to its air. The makers of the ship had certainly been superb machinists—no vessel made by man would have held atmosphere more than a few months, without constant renewal.
“Have you noticed that there is nothing suggestive of a lock on any of these doors?” asked Preble, as they reached the blank wall which shut them off from the engine room in front.
“That’s right,” agreed Stevenson. “The engine-room port was the only one which had any obvious means of fastening. You’d think there would be need to hold them against changes in acceleration, if nothing else.”
He went over to the nearest of the doors and with some care examined its edge, which would be hidden when it was closed; then be beckoned to Preble. Set in the edge, almost invisible, was a half-inch circle of metal slightly different in color from the rest of the door. It seemed perfectly flush with the metal around it. Just above the circle was a little dot of copper.
Both objects were matched in the jamb of the door—the copper spot by another precisely similar, the circle by a shallow, bowl-shaped indentation of equal size and perhaps a millimeter deep. No means of activating the lock, if it were one, were visible. Stevenson stared at the system for several minutes, Preble trying to see around the curve of his helmet.
“It’s crazy,” the chemist said at last. “If that circle marks a bolt, why isn’t it shaped to fit the hollow on the jamb? It couldn’t be moved forward a micron, the way it is. And the thing can’t be a magnetic lock—the hollow proves that, too. You’d want the poles to fit as snugly as possible, not to have the field weakened by an air gap. What is it?”
Preble blinked, and almost bared his head in reverence, but was stopped by his helmet. “You have it, friend,” he said gently. “It is a magnetic lock. I’d bet”—he glanced at the lung dial on his wrist—“my chance of living another hundred hours that’s the story. But it’s not based on magnetic attraction—it’s magnetostriction. A magnetic field will change the shape of a piece of metal—somewhat as a strong electric field does to a crystal. They must have developed alloys in which the effect is extreme. When the current is on, that `bolt’ of yours fits into the hollow in the jamb, without any complicated lever system to move it. This, apparently, is a cargo hold, and all the doors are probably locked by one master switch—perhaps on the control board, but more probably down here somewhere. So long as a current is flowing, the doors are locked. The current in any possible storage device must have been exhausted ages ago, even if these were left locked.”
“But what about the engine-room door?” asked Stevenson. “Could that have been of this type? It was locked, remember.” Preble thought for a moment.
“Could be. The removable block might have been a permanent magnet that opposed another when it was in one way, and reinforced it when it was reversed. Of course, it would be difficult to separate them once they were placed in the latter position; maybe the ship’s current was used to make that possible. Now that the current is off, it may be that there will be some difficulty in returning that block to its original position. Let’s go and see.” He led the way back along the corridor to the ramp.
Cray received the theory with mingled satisfaction and annoyance; he should, he felt, have seen it himself. He had already discovered that the triangular blocks had developed an attachment for heir new positions, and had even considered magnetism in that connection; but the full story had escaped him. He had had other things to worry about, anyway.
The free-lance seekers had met the engineer at the entrance to the engine room. Now the three moved inside, stepping out onto a catwalk similar to that in the control room. This chamber, however, was illuminated only by the hand torches of the men; and it was amazing to see bow well they lit up the whole place, reflecting again and again from polished metal surfaces.
When one had seen the tube arrangement from outside the ship, it was not difficult to identify most of the clustered machines. The tube breeches, with their heavy injectors and disintegrators, projected in a continuous ring around the walls and in a solid group from the forward bulkhead. Heavily insulated leads ran from the tubes to the supplementary cathode ejectors. It seemed evident that the ship had been driven and steered by reaction jets of heavy-metal ions, as were the vessels of human make. All the machines were incased in heavy shields, which suggested that their makers were not immune to nuclear radiation.
“Not a bad layout,” remarked Preble. “Found out whether they’ll run?”
Cray glared. “No!” he answered almost viciously. “Would you mind taking a look at their innards for us?”
Preble raised his eyebrows, and stepped across the twenty-foot space between the catwalk and the nearest tube breech. It was fully six feet across, though the bore was probably n
ot more than thirty inches—the walls had to contain the windings for the field which kept the ion stream from actual contact with the metal. The rig which was presumably the injector-distintegrator unit was a three-foot bulge in the center, and the insulated feed tube led from it to a nearby fuel container. The fuel was probably either mercury or some other easily vaporized heavy metal, such as lead. All this seemed obvious and simple enough, and was similar in basic design to engines with which even Preble was familiar; but there was a slight departure from convention in that the entire assembly, from fuel line to the inner hull, appeared to be one seamless surface of metal. Preble examined it closely all over, and found no trace of a joint.
“I see what you mean,” he said at last, looking up. “Are they all the same?” Cray nodded.
“They seem to be. We haven’t been able to get into any one of them—even the tanks are tight. They look like decent, honest atomics, but we’ll never prove it by looking at the outside.”
“But how did they service them?” asked Stevenson. “Surely they didn’t weld the cases on and hope their machines were good enough to run without attention. That’s asking too much, even from a race that built a hull that could hold air as long as this must have.”
“How could I possibly know?” growled Cray. “Maybe they went outside and crawled in through the jets to service ‘em—only I imagine it’s some trick seal like the door of this room. After all, that was common sense, if you look at it right. The fewer moving parts, the less wear. Can anyone think of a way in which this breech mechanism could be fastened on, with an invisible joint, working from the same sort of common sense?”