Pendeen shut the valve decisively, saying, "That’s that. Is she all tight, Sonya?"
"All tight, Al," she replied.
"Good." With a greasy crayon he drew a circle roughly in the center of the airlock door, one large enough to admit a spacesuited body. He picked up the laser torch, directed its beam downwards, thumbed the firing button. The flare of vaporizing metal was painfully bright, outshining the helmet lights, reflected harshly from the white inner surface of the plastic igloo. There was the illusion of suffocating heat—or was it more than only an illusion? Pendeen switched off the torch and straightened, looking down at the annulus of still-glowing metal. With an effort he lifted his right foot, breaking the contact of the magnetized sole with the plating. He brought the heel down sharply. The clang, transmitted through the fabric of their armor, was felt rather than heard by the others.
And then the circular plate was falling slowly, into the darkness of the airlock chamber, and the rough manhole was open so that they could enter.
Grimes was first into the alien ship, followed by Sonya and then Pendeen. It was light enough in the little compartment once they were into it, the beams of their helmet lights reflected from the white-painted walls. On the inner door there was a set of manual controls that worked—once Grimes realized that the spindle of the wheel had a left handed thread. Beyond the inner door there was an alleyway, and standing there was a man.
The Commodore whipped the pistol from his holster, his reflexes more than compensating for the stiffness of the joints of his suit. Then, slowly, he returned the weapon to his belt. This man was dead. Radiation may have killed him, but it had not killed all the bacteria of decay present in his body. Some freak of inertial and centrifugal forces, coming into play when the derelict had been taken in tow, had flung him to a standing posture, and the magnetic soles of his rough sandals—Grimes could see the gleam of metal—had held him to the deck.
So he was dead, and he was decomposing, his skin taut and darkly purple, bulging over the waistband of the loincloth—it looked like sacking—that was his only clothing. He was dead—and Grimes was suddenly grateful for the sealed suit that he was wearing, the suit that earlier he had been cursing, that kept out the stench of him.
Gently, with pity and pointless tenderness, he put his gloved hands to the waist of the corpse, lifted it free of the deck, shifted it to one side.
"We must be just above engineroom level," said Sonya, her voice deliberately casual.
"Yes," agreed Grimes. "I wonder if this ship has an axial shaft. If she has, it will be the quickest way of getting to the control room."
"That will be the best place to start investigations," she said.
They moved on through the alleyway, using the Free Fall shuffle that was second nature to all of them, letting the homing instinct that is part of the nature of all spacemen guide them. They found more bodies, women as well as men, sprawled in untidy attitudes, hanging like monstrous mermen and merwomen in a submarine cave. They tried to ignore them, as they tried to ignore the smaller bodies, those of children, and came at last, at the end of a short, radial alleyway, to the stout pillar of the axial shaft.
There was a door in the pillar, and it was open, and one by one they passed through it and then began pulling themselves forward along the central guide rod, ignoring the spiral ramp that lined the tunnel. Finally they came to a conventional enough hatchway, but the valve sealing the end of the shaft was jammed. Grimes and Sonya fell back to let Pendeen use the laser torch. Then they followed him into the control room.
VII
There were more bodies in the control room. There were three dead men and three dead women, all of them strapped into acceleration chairs. Like all the others scattered throughout the ship they were clad only in rough, scanty rags, were swollen with decomposition.
Grimes forced himself to ignore them. He could do nothing for them. Perhaps, he thought, he might someday avenge them (somehow he did not feel that they had been criminals, pirates)—but that would not bring them back to life. He looked past the unsightly corpses to the instruments on the consoles before their chairs. These, at first glance, seemed to be familiar enough—white dials with the black calibrations marked with Arabic numerals; red, green, white and amber pilot lights, dead now, but ready to blossom with glowing life at the restoration of a power supply. Familiar enough they were, at first glance. But there were the odd differences, the placement of various controls in positions that did not tally with the construction and the articulation of the normal human frame. And there was the lettering: MINNSCHINN DRIVI, RIMITI CINTRIL. Who, he asked himself, were the builders of this ship, this vessel that was almost a standard Federation Survey Service cruiser? What human race had jettisoned every vowel in the alphabet but this absurdly fat "I?"
"John," Sonya was saying, "give me a hand, will you?"
He turned to see what she was doing. She was trying to unbuckle a seat belt that was deeply embedded in the distended flesh at the waist of one of the dead men.
He conquered his revulsion, swallowed the nausea that was rising in his throat. He pulled the sharp sheath knife from his belt, said, "This is quicker," and slashed through the tough fabric of the strap. He was careful not to touch the gleaming, purple skin. He knew that if he did so the dead man would… burst.
Carefully, Sonya lifted the body from its seat, set it down on the deck so that the magnetized sandal soles were in contact with the steel plating. Then she pointed to the back of the chair. "What do you make of that?" she asked.
That was a vertical slot, just over an inch in width, that was continued into the seat itself, half bisecting it.
It was Pendeen who broke the silence. He said simply, "They had tails."
"But they haven’t," objected Grimes. It was obvious that the minimal breech-clouts of the dead people could not conceal even a tiny caudal appendage.
"My dear John," Sonya told him in an annoyingly superior voice, "these hapless folk are neither the builders nor the original crew of this ship. Refugees? Could be. Escapees? A slave revolt? Once again—could be. Or must be. This is a big ship, and a fighting ship. You can’t run a vessel of this class without uniforms, without marks of rank so you can see at a glance who is supposed to be doing what. Furthermore, you don’t clutter up a man-o-war with children."
"She’s not necessarily a man-o'-war," demurred Grimes. "She could be a defensively armed merchantman…"
"With officers and first class passengers dressed in foul rags? With a name like DESTROYER?"
"We don’t know that that grouping of letters on the stern does spell DESTROYER."
"We don’t know that this other grouping of letters"—she pointed to the control panel that Grimes had been studying-"spells MANNSCHENN DRIVE, REMOTE CONTROL. But I’m willing to bet my gratuity that if you trace the leads you’ll wind up in a compartment full of dimension-twisting gyroscopes."
"All right," said Grimes. "I’ll go along with you. I’ll admit that we’re aboard a ship built by some humanoid—but possibly non-human race that, even so, uses a peculiar distortion of English as its written language. …"
"A humanoid race with tails," contributed Pendeen.
"A humanoid race with tails," agreed Sonya. "But what race? Look at this slot in the chair back. It’s designed for somebody—or something—with a thin tail, thin at the root as well as at the extremity. And the only tailed beings we know with any technology comparable to our own have thick tails—and, furthermore, have their own written languages. Just imagine one of our saurian friends trying to get out of that chair in a hurry, assuming that he’d ever been able to get into it in the first place. He’d be trapped."