“Roger, Rubberneck, use your own discretion.”
“Rubberneck, Roger out.” He slapped the switch viciously over to intercom. “O.K., Mac, you’ll have to con me in. I can’t see well enough to judge distances. I’m not going to fire, going to blow off fuel and let the pump pressure drive us in. Line us up on her now.”
The engineer clutched the flywheels in and the ship swung until its nose bore on the sphere. There were manual controls for emergency. Goodrich cut out the autopilot and punched the fuel switch, leaving the ignition off. The ship began to drift toward the sphere.
“O.K.,” McKay said. “Cut her now till I turn over.”
He swung the ship again until the stem view screen centered on the sphere. His own eyes were giving him trouble now, but they were much closer, he could see the target well enough to center it.
“O.K.,” he said. “Now blow again.”
Bertha had rotated twice while they were maneuvering, and the hatch was almost directly beneath them. McKay could make out Brown’s figure scrambling back inside to get in the clear. The sphere swelled slowly until it filled the whole view screen.
“Cut her!” McKay said. There was a grinding jar as the rocket and the sphere collided. Goodrich and McKay unbuckled and started to climb out the hatch. They looked up toward the sphere and saw Brown, blue in the face and with blood running from his nose, slithering down over the skin of the rocket. He motioned them violently back and scrambled inside, fumbling to plug into the intercom. McKay helped him.
“Let’s get some pressure on this can!” he said through chattering teeth. “Don’t worry about the ship, I’ve got her tied down.”
McKay dogged the hatch and the pressure began to come up. “O.K.,” Goodrich said. “I guess we can get these helmets off now.” McKay helped Brown with his.
“Boy, that was rough,” the second officer said. “Next time; somebody else can have it.” He lay back on his acceleration couch. “No rash now,” he said presently. “Bertha’s abandoned, and I’ve got the ship made fast. There was a tiedown cable fast to a ring by the hatch. I hooked it into one of the second-stage couplings.” He stripped off his gloves and stared curiously at his hands. They were a puffy white, mottled by dark blotches where capillaries had broken. Blood oozed from under the fingernails. “I’ll bet I’m like that all over,” he said.
“I suppose so,” Goodrich said. His vision was clearing now, but he felt as if he had been beaten all over his body, very carefully, with a rubber hose. His own fingernails felt as if they had been drown out with pincers.
“What makes you think it’s abandoned?” he asked.
“Well, I went in through that hatch, it must be an air lock, there’s another hatch just inside, and that’s open, too. It gives out onto a sort of corridor. I couldn’t see very well in there, there’s no fight, but I think that corridor runs around the hull like a belt. I felt along it a way, and as near as I could make out it goes on at least halfway around, with doors opening on it. Some of those were open too, the whole thing’s wide open, no air. And it just feels dead. I came back to the hatch then and banged on the deck a couple of times with that oxygen bottle, didn’t get any sign of fife at all.”
Goodrich frowned. “I don’t see it,” he said. “Why would anyone put this thing up here, go to all that trouble, and then leave it?”
“I don’t think anyone put it up here,” Brown said earnestly. “What I mean is, I think it came from another planet. Listen, there were controls in that air lock, I could see pretty well in there, but they were different. You know, you climb in a Jap plane, or a German plane, or a Russian plane, things are different but a wheel is a wheel, a handle is a handle, and a dial has pointers on it and figures, even if they’re different figures. This thing, everything is different. You take that tiedown cable by the hatch; it’s a tiedown cable all right, you can see that; but it’s not laid like a rope, and it’s not braided either, it’s got scales. Now who ever heard of a steel cable with scales like a snake?”
“You might be right about it being extraterrestrial,” Goodrich said. “Myself, I’ve had that feeling too, ever since we first spotted it.” He hesitated. “The trouble is, it still doesn’t figure. If it came from another planet, why bring it all that way, and then leave it?”
“Maybe they just finished with it,” McKay said. “Maybe they finished whatever work they needed it for, an observation post, say; and just figured it was easier to leave it than to take it back. Or maybe they died. We don’t know, that thing might have been here just like that for a couple thousand years, there’s nothing here, no weather or anything, to change it.”
“I suppose so,” Goodrich said. “The thing is, though, we have to try and find out.” He glanced at his watch. “We’ll have to wait till we get around and contact Control on it, and report. Way it looks to me, though, we’ll have to look it over better, we can’t just leave it like this.”
Brown shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know if I can take any more in that pressure suit.”
“Well, with a little rest we should be good for another ten minutes or so. You can stay here and take it easy, there’s a flashlight in the survival kit, I’ll take that and take a quick look around myself.”
“I hate to chicken out on you, captain,” Brown said. “I just don’t think I could do much good, I’ve just about shot my wad, and that’s it. For a while there, jumping across, I didn’t know if I’d make it or not. Five hundred yards is a long way to jump, with a thousand miles to fall if you miss.”
“That’s O.K.,” Goodrich said. “You’ve done your share, you sit here and take it easy.”
They swung around within radio range of the ground station again.
“Thumbtack, this is Rubberneck,” Goodrich said. “Bertha condition Zebra. Apparently derelict. I say again, apparently derelict. We are now tied up to Bertha. There is an open hatch. Do you wish us to investigate the interior? Over.”
There was the usual acknowledgment and pause. “Another committee meeting,” McKay said. Goodrich grunted.
“Bartell here again,” the radio said. “How are those pressure suits doing, can you stand any more? Tell you what, Goodrich, you know the situation, just use your own discretion. Get what you can, but don’t endanger the rocket or your crew.”
“Rubberneck, Roger. We will investigate further and advise in fifteen minutes. Out.”
“We’re getting valuable now,” McKay said judiciously.
“O.K., boys,” Goodrich said. “Let’s go.”
They bled off the air and opened the hatch. The rocket had taken up the rotation of the sphere, so that it appeared to hang nose-down under the slight pseudogravity of centrifugal force. Goodrich went first and McKay and Brown followed, hopping up from the hatch and catching the line from the sphere. They went hand over hand along the line and pulled themselves into the airlock. At most, Goodrich estimated they had fifteen minutes in the pressure suits to work with. He motioned McKay off in one direction along the corridor and pulled himself along a life line attached to the inner wall in the other direction, with Brown following him. The outer wall was corrugated, apparently a walkway, and there were doors set in the sidewalls. This ship was meant to spin, he thought, so that the outer skin would be the deck. The rotation it had now was just enough to give him orientation, not enough to walk under.
One of the doors was ajar. He pulled it open and flashed his light around. It gave the impression of being living quarters of some kind, what seemed to be a bunk frame was folded against the bulkhead, and there were panels that hinted at lockers. He tried one of these panels but could not make out how it opened, if it did.
He hurried on along the corridor, trying doors at random, flashing his light around inside, feeling a growing uneasiness.
The place had an empty but well-swept feel about it. It did not fit with the hatches swinging ajar and the dead dark airlessness.
They came to a passageway intersecting at right angles. Goodrich paused
and oriented himself. Using the axis of rotation as a reference, the hatch and the main corridor were on the equator of the sphere. At the north polar axis, he remembered, there was a bulge and a cluster of external gear, hinting at a concentration of navigational gear within.
Remembering something he had once read, he grasped Brown’s arm and pushed his helmet against the other man’s.
“Can you hear me?” he asked.
The answer was thin and reedy, they were under only partial pressure in the helmets, but understandable.
“O.K.,” Goodrich said. “I’m going to leave you here. You keep your helmet shoved up against the wall of this passage. If you hear three bangs, get back and get out of the lock, cut the cable and stand off about five hundred yards in the rocket. If I don’t signal in thirty minutes, fire up and go home.
I don’t like the feel of this, it feels fishy, I’m going to look around a little more, but I don’t want to take a chance losing the rocket.”
He found the flight deck at the end of the cross passage, a circular compartment about ten feet across. There were recognizable seats surrounded by clusters of completely unfamiliar equipment, but no acceleration couches. He flashed the light around, studying the equipment. The same air of unused readiness characterized this place. A bank of small, round, oblong, and tubular gray glass surfaces caught his eye. Above two of them, greenish-tinted cards were neatly pasted. Tangled purple symbols fluoresced softly on the cards as his flashlight caught them. Correction cards, Goodrich thought, for instrument calibration.
He bent closer to study a row of tiny beads. There seemed to be an amber glint deep inside one of them. He turned the flashlight off. The light, just a bare glint, was still there.
Why should an abandoned ship have power?
A sudden flash of reflected light off the panel startled him. He glanced back over his shoulder and saw the passage behind him outlined in a glow of light and he had a sudden sick feeling that this was it, the trap had sprung. Then he saw that the glow was the reflection of a light being carried along the corridor, and still hidden from him by the curve. A moment later McKay came into view.
“Looks dead,” he said. “I followed that corridor all the way around.”
“I want you to see something.” Goodrich moved back to where he had seen the panel light. It was now purple. He shoved his helmet against McKay’s. “What color is that light?” he asked.
“Looks purple to me,” McKay said. “What do you think it is?”
“I don’t know, but I don’t like it. It was amber a minute ago.” He pulled himself over to a wall and banged three times on it with the metal flashlight. “Come on, let’s get out of here.” He started to move toward the passage.
Lights flashed on in the passage and flight deck.
He stopped, bewildered by the sudden glare, and glanced back at the control position. There was another light beside the first now, also purple. As he watched, another winked on, and a thin red line began to climb up one of the tubes.
Bertha was coming alive.
“Listen!” McKay said. “Do you hear something?”
A thin sound, just on the edge of audibility, built up quickly to a heavy boom. It was a voice.
“Ihj bkirac,” it said. “Nqaroq!”
“Pressure!” Goodrich said. “We’re getting pressure in here!” There were six purple lights on the panel, and green dots and red lines were crawling on the glass surfaces he had thought of as indicating instruments.
The hatch, he thought suddenly, if we’ve got pressure, the hatch must be closed—
“Get below and see if Brown made it out the hatch,” he told McKay. “If he didn’t, see if you can get it open and get out with him, he knows what to do.”
“How about you?”
“Never mind me. We’re committed now, I’ll stay here and meet these people, whoever they are; hut I want that rocket in the dear. Now move!”
“Uirq-sebusa!” the strange voice said. “Uirq-sebusa!”
McKay jumped and flew down the passage clumsily, shoving himself off the curve with his hands.
The voice spoke again: “Uirq-sebusa! Uirq-sebusa!” This time, Goodrich localized the sound as coming from what might have been a speaker in the overhead. He started to move back to the control position, looking for something that might be a microphone, and found he could not.
“Bimsqik erikusic!” the voice warned. “Uirq-sebusa!”
He could not move. He kicked out involuntarily, startled at the resistance, and flew back against the bulkhead. He found he could not push himself away from it again.
“Bimsqik erikusic!” the voice repeated.
He still could move sidewise along the wall. He pushed himself along carefully until he reached the passage and found it clear. He could not move back inside the compartment, but he could move about freely in the passage.
They don’t want me in there, he thought. He waited, just inside the passage, watching. The green dots and red lines and purple lights were steady now.
There was a scuffling sound in the passage behind him. It was McKay and Brown, coming back up.
“The hatch was closed when I got there, captain,” Brown said. “Mac came along and we tried to get it open. There seems to be some sort of controls there, but they don’t answer. I think they’re disabled, maybe on a safety interlock of some kind.”
“It might not be a safety interlock,” Goodrich said. “The hatch might be locked, to keep us in.” He told them about the barrier to the flight deck.
McKay tried it and was impressed. “This is pretty hot stuff,” he said thoughtfully. “You know what that is? That’s one of those force screens you read about, only they’re not supposed to be possible. You ask me, we’ve run into something really big here.”
“Bigger than we are, anyway,” Goodrich agreed. “Brown, suppose you get back below to that hatch and keep an eye on it. Mac, take another scout around and see if anybody or anything has come out in the open yet. I’ll stay here and watch these instruments, if anything else is going to happen it might show on them.”
For half an hour, nothing did happen. McKay returned and reported no sign of life in any of the open compartments. “I did find the galley though, I think,” he said. “I looked in one compartment and it shot a kind of cookie and a bottle at me.” He showed Goodrich a round brownish cake and a flexible transparent container filled with colorless fluid.
“Might be,” Goodrich said. “On the other hand, maybe you just found the janitor’s locker. That might be soap and window cleaner.”
McKay looked at the objects doubtfully. “They could be,” he agreed. “Anything happen up here?”
“Not a thing.”
“You know, I don’t like this. Maybe we could break that hatch open. You think we ought to give it a try?”
Goodrich shook his head. “Let’s wait a few minutes longer. Whoever’s running this show knows we’re here. Let them show their hand first.”
Their oxygen was running low, and it occurred to them to test the”air for breathability. They took off their helmets.
McKay nibbled at the cake. “Tastes O.K.,” he said. There was a nipple in one end of the flexible container. He put it in his mouth and squeezed out a few drops, rolling them around his tongue. “Water,’” he said. “Just plain water.” He frowned. “Water, food, air, power; but nobody at home, this whole thing just sitting here waiting for us—I don’t get it. You think we might have just happened in while they were out for a little stroll?”
Goodrich frowned thoughtfully. “I don’t know what to think, Mac.”
“It doesn’t add up.” McKay agreed. “I’ll swear to one thing, though, this ship wasn’t built on Earth, at least not present-day Earth.” He thought for a moment. “Hey, how about that, you think there might be something to this Atlantis business? This thing could have been up here for twenty thousand years, it wouldn’t show any change. What do you think?”
Goodrich shook his head. “That do
esn’t fit either. People who could build a thing like this wouldn’t just vanish off the Earth and not leave anything but chipped flint arrowheads. There is one possibility—” he broke off. “Look at that!” he said sharply.
A new red line had begun to slide up one of the tubes on the instrument panel.
There was a slight lurch.
“Uk bkauq,” the speaker boomed. “C’queta!”
Outside, the line holding the rocket had suddenly uncoupled itself and snaked up to coil about two bitts. The rocket drifted slowly away. A rosy glow sprang out all around Bertha, deepened. She swung out of her orbit, slowly at first, then faster, catapulting outward from the Earth and the Sun, rising at an angle to the plane of the ecliptic.
Inside, the men felt only the first lurch. They waited tensely, but it was not repeated.
“The rocket,” McKay said. “That was the rocket! The line must have parted.”
Goodrich nodded. “We’re stuck now, even if we do get out the hatch.”
“Well,” McKay said. “At least Bertha can’t go very far, I looked her over pretty good and I didn’t see any sign of rocket or jet tubes. Sooner or later, somebody will get up here and get us out. If the three bears don’t come home first, that is.”
“Maybe Bertha doesn’t need rockets,” Goodrich said. “How about that force-field thing? That’s pretty advanced, it wouldn’t fit with just rockets.”
“Yeah, that’s right,” McKay said thoughtfully. “They might even have acceleration whipped. If they have, we wouldn’t even know if we were moving. I wish whoever is running this show would come on out and let us get a look at them.”
“Well, I’ll tell you,” Goodrich said. “I don’t think anybody is running it. I think it’s all automatic. I think maybe Bertha was put here just for us to find.
“Suppose that somewhere in the universe, there’s a race that has space travel, maybe even faster than light. They get around and explore hundreds of suns, thousands of planets, and now and then they find one with intelligent life. Now there’s a chance that any planet with intelligent life may develop space travel also, and naturally our galactic spacemen want to know about it if they do. At the same time, there’s an awful lot of planets in the universe, they can’t establish a regular watch over all of them.
Adventures in the Far Future Page 19