As I glanced around, I felt suddenly sure: this is the place! In my mind I played for the millionth time the sequence of the globe, saw the plain on which the ship of the High Ones had come down, saw the low hills, the craters, everything. Everything matched. The only thing missing was the pink glow on the flanks of the hills, the pale light of the white-dwarf sun. That sun, much closer to death now, gave forth only a trickle of purple illumination; it didn’t help me much, nor did the cold glitter of the stars. I switched on my helmet lamp.
Jan’s pod had come down about a thousand meters away, much closer to the hills. She was out of it and waiting for me. I waved; she waved back; and I started toward her. My first quick bound covered twenty meters.
Nick Ludwig’s voice said in my suit speakers, “Remember the grav!”
So he was monitoring me. I looked up and saluted. But I walked more carefully. With gravity so low on this asteroid, a really good leap might be enough to send me a few thousand meters out into space. In a stately way I caught up with Jan, and we touched helmets by way of greeting.
Then we went together toward the hills.
She was carrying the portable sonar; I had the neutrino magnetometer. We halted in a cup-shaped depression in the plain, close to the hills, and set up our equipment. Turning on the sonar, we swung it slowly in an arc across the horizon, bouncing sound waves off the hills until the scope told us of the hollow place we were looking for. We carefully recorded the position.
We moved closer to the hollow place. I’ll spare you all the thundering heartbeats and tense exchanges of knowing glances; let’s just say that Jan and I were edgy and excited as we switched the neutrino magnetometer on and began to scan the face of the hill. As I brought the scanning beam over the area of hollowness, the needle shot way up into the blue end of the spectrum. Metal!
“This is it,” I radioed calmly up to the ship. “We’ve got the vault right here!”
“How do you know?” Dr. Schein asked.
“I’m getting two different densities for this patch of the hill,” I said. “They must have camouflaged the vault door with laminated rock. I pick up about a one-meter thickness of rock, with a huge slab of metal just behind it.”
“And what’s behind the door?”
“Just a minute,” I said, adjusting the field of the scanner. Now the neutrino beam penetrated more deeply into the vault. The needle stayed on the blue; and as I moved the beam, the printout supplied me with a picture, in shadow-images, of the contents of the vault. It showed me the rear walls — dark, full of alien machinery — and the side walls, following the six-sided pattern of the globe sequence; and it revealed a dark, massive metal object sitting in the middle of the floor.
The robot.
“My flesh began to crawl with amazement,” it always says in the old horror stories. Until that moment I was never able to understand how flesh could crawl, but now I knew, for my flesh was crawling in all directions. I had seen a billion-year-old film show me the construction of this vault; and I had seen the robot of the High Ones take up its position on the floor, a billion years ago, when trilobites and jellyfish ruled Earth; and here I stood, pumping a neutrino beam into that vault and seeing the robot still occupying the same place, and I tell you, Lorie, I was awed right out of my snuff.
I described the scanner readings to those in the ship. My suit radio dimly brought me sounds of shouts and celebrations from up there.
“Don’t go anywhere,” Dr. Schein said. “We’re coming down!”
The ship shortly broke out of its parking orbit and went into an entry approach. Ludwig made a picture landing. The ship floated nicely down and settled smoothly in the nearby plain. Then the hatches opened and people came pouring out, and we held another festival of foolishness, dancing madly around the neutrino magnetometer.
Now all we have to do is get the vault open. That’s all.
December -30
We’re still trying, as I dictate this three days later.
Removing the laminated slabs of stone covering the door was easy. Kelly cored through until she touched metal, and Mirrik tusked the debris away. It took the two of them almost six hours to lay bare the entire door, which is about seven meters high, four meters wide, and, according to our scans, a meter thick. The High Ones didn’t bother with a keyhole; and in any case we don’t have the key.
We don’t dare blast the door, not with all that High Ones machinery inside. And we aren’t carrying a laser powerful enough to slice through a one-meter thickness of metal. We do have a power winch aboard the ship, and we tried it this morning; we fastened magnetic grapples to the door, ran cables to the winch, and pulled, but the door didn’t budge and there was real danger that our cables would snap under the strain.
408b spent some time studying the hinge this afternoon. He thinks our best bet is to attack the door from that side: pull out the pin of the hinge, somehow, and swing the door open. But the hinge is about five meters long and the pin alone looks like it weighs a couple of tons. Furthermore, that thing hasn’t budged in a billion years, and even on an asteroid without atmosphere or water there’s bound to have been some degeneration of the metal, maybe even complete bonding of pin to hinge. In that case we’re in trouble. We’ll see in the morning.
December 31
A strange, grim, and busy day.
Unless we’ve lost track entirely, which is quite possible, this is the last day of 2375. But a New Year’s Eve celebration seems irrelevant tonight, after the day’s hectic events.
We went to work on the hinge first thing in the morning. Before making any attempt to remove it, we did a complete survey of it, with a tridim scan, measurements, holograms, the works, just as though it were a house beam or something that had to be destroyed in the course of an excavation. Not that the science of paleotechnology had much to learn from it, for it wasn’t a particularly alien kind of hinge; there is evidently only one efficient way to design a hinge for a door, and the High Ones had hit on the same scheme used on Earth and everywhere else, so that the main point of interest about this hinge was how uninteresting it was.
After this we got the most potent laser in the ship and started cutting. It took a couple of hours to slice the hinge the long way. At last we peeled it open and slipped the pin. Next we got the magnetic grapples out, cabled them to the power winch, and started tugging.
The cables went taut, and we cleared back, not wanting to be close at hand if they snapped. But the cables held. So did the door. Captain Ludwig threw the throttle of the winch wide open, so that it was pulling with its full fifty-ton force, but the tug-of-war remained a standoff. “What happens,” Steen Steen asked, “if the winch pulls the ship toward the door, instead of the door toward the ship?” And it was a sharp point, because the pull the winch was now exerting was nearly enough to handle the ship’s own mass and send it toppling forward.
The door yielded first.
It opened on the hinge side by about a centimeter. Ludwig changed a setting on the winch. The door slid reluctantly forward another centimeter. Another. Another.
What scared Ludwig — and the rest of us — was what might happen if the door suddenly gave up altogether and came flying out of its socket. The winch, to take up the tension, might very well haul the door toward the ship so fast there’d be a collision, and the ship would be demolished. Ludwig hovered over the controls of that winch like a virtuoso playing a chromosonic organ in a galactic music competition.
Slowly he peeled the door open.