The Second Murray Leinster Megapack

by Murray Leinster

  But nothing really exciting happened aboard the spaceship. It was Burke’s guess that they could go directly through the asteroid belt along the plane of the ecliptic, and not get nearer than ten thousand miles to any bit of shattered stone or metal in orbit out there. He was almost right. There was only one occasion when his optimism came into doubt.

  It was on the ninth day out from Earth. Experimentally, the ship coasted on attained momentum, using no drive. There was, then, no substitute for gravity and everyone and everything in the ship was weightless. The power obtainable from the sun as heat had dwindled to one-ninth of that at the Earth’s distance. But what was received could be stored, and was. Meanwhile the ship plunged onward at very nearly four hundred miles per second, Burke, Keller, and Holmes together labored over a self-contained diving suit which they hoped could be used as a space suit in dire emergency and for brief periods. They wanted to get the feel of using it with internal pressure and weightlessness as conditions. Sandy sat at the transmitter, working at code which by now she heartily loathed. Pam sat in the control-chair, watching the instruments.

  There was a buzz. Burke snapped his head around to see the radar screen. A line of light appeared on it. It aimed directly at the center of the screen, which meant that whatever had been picked up was on a collision course with the ship. Burke plunged toward the control-chair to take over. But he’d forgotten the condition of no-gravity. He went floating off in mid-air, far wide of the chair.

  He barked orders to Pam, who was least qualified of anybody aboard to meet an emergency of this sort. She panicked. She did nothing. Holmes took precious seconds to drag himself to the controls by what hand-holds could be had. The glowing white line on the radar screen lengthened swiftly. It neared the center. It reached the center. Burke and Holmes froze.

  There was a curious flashing change in a vision-screen. An image flashed into view. It was a jagged, tortured, irregularly-shaped mass of stone or metal, distorted in its representation by the speed at which it passed the television lens. It was perhaps a hundred yards in diameter. It could never have been seen from Earth. It might circle the sun in its lonely orbit for a hundred million years and never be seen again.

  It went away to nothing. It had missed by yards or fathoms, and Burke found himself sweating profusely. Holmes was deathly white. Keller very carefully took a deep breath, swallowed, and went back to his work on the diving-suit-qua-space-suit. Sandy hadn’t noticed anything at all. But Pam burst into abrupt, belated tears, and Holmes comforted her clumsily. She was bitterly ashamed that she’d done nothing to meet the emergency which came while she was at the control-board, and which was the only emergency they’d encountered since the ship’s departure from Earth.

  After that, they put on the drive and used reserve fuel. It was necessary to check their speed, anyhow. They were very near the source of the beeping signal they’d steered by for so long. The directional receiver pointed to it had long since been turned dawn to its lowest possible volume, and still the beepings were loud.

  On the eleventh day after their take-off, they sighted Asteroid M-387. They had traveled two hundred seventy million miles at an averaged-out speed of very close to three hundred miles per second. Despite muting, the beepings from the loud-speakers were monstrous noises.

  “Try a call, Holmes,” said Burke. “But they ought to know we’re here.”

  He felt strange. He’d brought the ship to a stop about four or five miles from M-387. The asteroid was a mass of dark stuff with white outcroppings at one place and another. The ship seemed to edge itself toward it. The floating mass of stone and metal had no particular shape. It was longer than it was wide, but its form fitted no description. A mountain which had been torn from solidity with its roots of stone attached might look like Scull’s Object as it turned slowly against a background of myriads of unblinking stars.

  There was no change in the beeping that came from the singular thing. It did rotate, but so slowly that one had to watch for long minutes to be sure of it. There was no outward sign of any reaction to the ship’s presence. Holmes took the microphone.

  “Hello! Hello!” he said absurdly. “We have come from Earth to find out what you want.”

  No answer. No change in the beeping calls. The asteroid turned with enormous deliberation.

  Sandy said suddenly, “Look there! A stick! No, it’s a mast! See, where the patch of white is?”

  Burke very, very gingerly drew closer to the monstrous thing which hung in space. It was true. There was a mast of some sort sticking up out of white stone. The direction-indicators pointed to it. The beeping stopped and a broadcast began. It was the standard broadcast Earth heard every seventy-nine minutes.

  There was no reply to Holmes’ call. There was no indication that the ship’s arrival had been noted. On Earth the ignoring of human broadcasts to M-387 had seemed arrogance, indifference, a superior and menacing contempt for man and all his works; somehow, here the effect was different. This irregular mass was a fragment of something that once had been much greater. It suddenly ceased to seem menacing because it seemed oblivious. It acted blindly, by rote, like some mechanism set to operate in a certain way and unable to act in any other.

  It did not seem alive. It had signaled like a robot beacon. Now it felt like one. It was one.

  “Look, coming around toward us,” said Holmes very quietly. “There’s something that looks like a tunnel. It’s not a crevasse. It was cut.”

  Burke nodded.

  “Yes,” he said thoughtfully. “I think we’ll explore it. But I don’t really expect we’ll find any life here. There’s nothing outside to see but a single metal mast. We’ve got some signal lights on our hull. If we’re careful—”

  No one objected. The appearance of the asteroid was utterly disappointing. Its lifelessness and its obliviousness to their coming and their calls were worse than disappointing. There was nothing to be seen but a metal stick from which signals went out to nowhere.

  Burke jockeyed the little ship to the tunnel-mouth. It was fully a hundred feet in diameter. He turned on the ship’s signal lights. Gently, cautiously, he worked down the very center of the very large bore.

  It was perfectly straight. They went in for what seemed an indefinite distance. Presently the signal lights showed that the wall was smoothed. The bore grew smaller still. They went on and on.

  Suddenly Keller grunted. He pointed to one of the six television screens which aimed out the length of the tunnel and showed the stars beyond.

  Those stars were being blotted out. Something vast moved slowly and deliberately across the shaft they navigated. It closed the opening. Their retreat was blocked. The ship was shut in, in the center of a mountain of stone which floated perpetually in emptiness. Burke checked the ship’s forward motion, judging their speed by the side walls shown by the ship’s outside lights.

  Very, very slowly, faint illumination appeared outside. In seconds they could see that the light came from long tubes of faint bluish light. The light changed. It grew stronger. It turned green and then yellowish and then became very bright, indeed.

  Then nothing more took place. Nothing whatever. The five inside the ship waited more than an hour for some other development, but absolutely nothing happened.

  CHAPTER 6

  There was a tiny shock; in a minute, trivial contact of the ship with something outside it. Drifting within the now brightly lighted bore, it had touched the wall. There was no force to the impact.

  Keller made an interested noise. When eyes turned to him, he pointed to a dial. A needle on that dial pointed just past the figure “30.” Burke grunted.

  “The devil! We’ve been waiting for things to happen, and they already have! It’s our move.”

  “According to that needle,” agreed Holmes, “somebody has kindly put thirty point seven mercury inches of air-pressure around the ship outside. We can walk out and breathe, now.”

  “If,” said Burke, “it’s air. It could be something e
lse. I’ll have to check it.”

  He got out the self-contained diving apparatus that had been brought along to serve as a strictly temporary space suit.

  “I’ll try a cigarette-lighter. Maybe it will burn naturally. Maybe it will go out. It could make an explosion. But I doubt that very much.”

  “We’ll hope,” said Holmes, “that the lighter burns.”

  Burke climbed into the diving suit, which had been designed for amateurs of undersea fishing to use in chilly waters. On Earth it would have been intolerably heavy, for a man moving about out of the ocean. But there was no weight here. If M-387 had a gravitational field at all, which in theory it had to have, it would be on the order of millionths of the pull of Earth.

  Keller sat in the control-chair, watching the instruments and the outside television screens which showed the bore now reduced to fifty feet. Somehow the more distant parts of the tunnel looked hazy, as if there were a slight mist in whatever gas had been released in it. Sandy watched Burke pull on the helmet and close the face-plate. She grasped a hand-hold, her knuckles turning white. Pam nestled comfortably in a corner of the ceiling of the control-room. Holmes frowned as Burke went into the airlock and closed the inner door.

  His voice came immediately out of a speaker at the control-desk.

  “I’m breathing canned air from the suit,” he said curtly.

  There were scrapings. The outer lock-door made noises. There was what seemed to be a horribly long wait. Then they heard Burke’s voice again.

  “I’ve tried it,” he reported. “The lighter burns when it’s next to the slightly opened door. I’m opening wide now.”

  More noises from the airlock.

  “It still burns. Repeat. The lighter burns all right. The tunnel is filled with air. I’m going to crack my face-plate and see how it smells.”

  Silence, while Sandy went white. But a moment later Burke said crisply, “It smells all right. It’s lifeless and stuffy, but there’s nothing in it with an odor. Hold on—I hear something!”

  A long minute, while the little ship floated eerily almost in contact with the walls about it. It turned slowly. Then there came brisk, brief fluting noises. They were familiar in kind. But this was a short message, of some fifteen or twenty seconds length, no more. It ended, was repeated, ended, was repeated, and went on with an effect of mechanical and parrot-like repetition.

  “It’s good air,” reported Burke. “I’m breathing normally. But it might have been stored for ages. It’s stale. Do you hear what I do?”

  “Yes,” said Sandy in a whisper to the control-room. “It’s a call. It’s telling us to do something. Come back inside, Joe!”

  They heard the outer airlock door closing and its locking-dogs engaging. The fluting noises ceased to be audible. The inner door swung wide. Burke came into the control-room, his helmet face-plate open. He wriggled out of the diving suit.

  “Something picked up the fact that we’d entered. It closed a door behind us. Then it turned on lights for us. Then it let air into the entrance lock. Now it’s telling us to do something.”

  The ship surged, ever so gently. Keller had turned on an infinitesimal trace of drive. The walls of the bore floated past on the television screens. There was mist in the air outside. It seemed to clear as the ship moved.

  Keller made a gratified small sound. They could see the end of the tunnel. There was a platform there. Stairs went to it from the side of the bore. There was a door with rounded corners in the end wall. That wall was metal.

  Keller carefully turned the ship until the stairway was in proper position for a landing, if there had been gravitation to make the stairs usable. Very, very gently, he lowered the ship upon the platform.

  There was a singular tugging sensation which ceased, came again, ceased, and gradually built up to a perfectly normal feeling of weight. They stood upon the floor of the control-room with every physical sensation they’d felt during one-gravity acceleration on the way out here, and which they’d have felt if the ship were aground on Earth.

  “Artificial gravity! Whoever made this knew something!” Burke said.

  Pam swallowed and spoke with an apparent attempt at nonchalance.

  “Now what do we do?”

  “We—look for the people,” said Sandy in a queer tone.

  “There’s nobody here, Sandy!” Burke said irritably. “Can’t you see? There can’t be anybody here! They’d have signaled us what to do if there had been! This is machinery working. We do something and it operates. But then it waits for us to do something else. It’s like—like a self-service elevator!”

  “We didn’t come here for an elevator ride,” said Sandy.

  “I came to find out what’s here,” said Burke, “and why it’s signaling to Earth. Holmes, you stay here with the girls and I’ll take a look outside.”

  “I’d like to mention,” said Holmes drily, “that we haven’t a weapon on this ship. When they shot rockets at us back on Earth, we didn’t have even a pea-shooter to shoot back with. We haven’t now. I think the girls are as safe exploring as they are here. And besides, we’ll all feel better if we’re together.”

  “I’m going!” said Sandy defiantly.

  Burke hesitated, then shrugged. He unlatched the devices which kept both doors to the airlock from being open at the same time. It was not a completely cautious thing to do, but caution was impractical. The ship was imprisoned. It was incapable of defense. There was simply nothing sensible about precautions that couldn’t prevent anything.

  Burke threw open the outer lock door. One by one, the five of them climbed down to the platform so plainly designed for a ship of space—a small one—to land upon. Nothing happened. Their surroundings were completely uninformative. This landing-platform might have been built by any race on Earth or anywhere else, provided only that it used stairs.

  “Here goes,” said Burke.

  He went to the door with rounded corners. There was something like a handle at one side, about waist-high. He put his hand to it, tugged and twisted, and the door gave. It was not rusty, but it badly needed lubrication. Burke pulled it wide and stared unbelievingly beyond.

  Before him there stretched a corridor which was not less than twenty feet high and just as wide. The long, glowing tubes of light that illuminated the ship-tunnel were here, too, fixed in the ceiling. The corridor reached away, straight and unbroken, until its end seemed a mere point in the distance. It looked about a full mile long. There were doorways in both its side walls, and they dwindled in the distance with a monotonous regularity until they, too, were mere vertical specks. One could not speak of the length of this corridor in feet or yards. It was a mile.

  It was incredible. It was overwhelming. And it was empty. It shone in the glare of the light tubes which made a river of brilliance overhead. It seemed preposterous that so vast a construction should have no living thing in it. But it was absolutely vacant.

  They stared down its length for long seconds. Then Burke seemed to shake himself.

  “Here’s the parlor. Let’s walk in, even if there’s no welcoming committee;”

  His voice echoed. It rolled and reverberated and then diminished very slowly to nothing.

  Burke strode forward with Sandy close to him. Pam stared blankly, and instinctively moved up to Holmes. Once they were through the door, the sensation was not that of adventure in a remote part of space, but of being in some strange and impossible monument on Earth. The feeling of weight, if not completely normal, was so near it as not to be noticed. They could have been in some previously unknown structure made by men, at home.

  This corridor, though, was not built. It was excavated. Some process had been used which did not fracture the stone to be removed. The surface of the rock about them was smooth. In places it glittered. The doorways had been cut out, not constructed. They were of a size which made them seem designed for the use of men. The compartments to which they gave admission were similarly matter-of-fact. They were windowless, of course
, but their strangeness lay in the fact that they were empty, as if to insist that all this ingenuity and labor had been abandoned thousands of years before. Yet from somewhere in the asteroid a call still went out urgently, filling the solar system with plaintive fluting sounds, begging whoever heard to come and do something which was direly necessary.

  A long, long way down the gallery there were two specks. A quarter-mile from the entrance, they saw that one of the rooms contained a pile of metal ingots, neatly stacked and bound in place by still-glistening wire. At half a mile they came upon the things in the gallery itself. One was plainly a table with a single leg, made of metal. It was unrusted, but showed signs of use. The other was an object with a hollow top. In the hollow there were twisted, shriveled shreds of something unguessable.

  “If men had built this,” said Burke, and again his voice echoed and rolled, “that hollow thing would be a stool with a vanished cushion, and the table would be a desk.”

  Sandy said thoughtfully, “If men had built this, there’d be signs somewhere marking things. At least there’d be some sort of numbers on these doorways!”

  Burke said nothing. They went on.

  The gallery branched. A metal door closed off the divergent branch. Burke tugged at an apparent handle. It did not yield. They continued along the straight, open way.

  They came to a larger-than-usual opening in the side wall. Inside it there were rows and rows and rows of metal spheres some ten feet in diameter. There must have been hundreds of them. Beside the door there was a tiny shelf, with a tinier box fastened to it. A long way farther, they came to what had appeared to be the end of this corridor. But it did not end. It slanted upward and turned and they found themselves in the same corridor on a different level, headed back in the direction from which they had come. Their footsteps echoed hollowly in the still-enormous emptiness. There were other closed doors. Burke tried some. Holmes tried others. They did not open. Keller moved raptly, gazing at this and that.