The Best of Hal Clement

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The Best of Hal Clement Page 8

by Hal Clement


  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, McEachern 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 McEachern 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 airlock 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 airlock.

  At first, nothing else was noticeable; but after a moment, they saw that the chemist’s foot, just before striking the ring, had scraped 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 airlock 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 isosceles triangles. 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 dust, 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, yard-wide, 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 other’s 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 worthwhile 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 airlock 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 w
ere 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?”

  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 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 reversed 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 foot-wide 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 carryover 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 from 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 airlock, 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, appare
ntly. 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.

 

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