The finger swung to the control board. “Point two.” He said nothing further, but all could see what he meant.
The center of the control room was occupied by a thick-walled hemisphere — a cup, if you like — swung in gimbals which permitted its flat side always to the uppermost with respect to the ship’s line of net accelera-tion. The control board occupied the inner surface and upper edge of this cup, all around the circumference; andin the center of the assembly was the pilot’s seat — if it could be called a seat.
It was a ‘dome-shaped structure protruding from the floor about two feet; five broad, deep grooves were spaced equally about its sides, but did not quite reach the top. It looked somewhat like a jelly mold; and the one thing that could be stated definitely about its history was that no human being had ever sat in it. Cray absorbed this evident fact with a gulp, as though he had not chewed it sufficiently.
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 imagi-nations 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 correspond-ing 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, McEachem 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 McEachem 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 which-ever 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 air lock 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 air lock.
At first, nothing else was noticeable; but after a moment, they saw that the chemist’s foot, just beforestriking the ring, had escaped a groove in a layer of dus much thicker than that over the rest of the floor. It wa; piled almost ‘to the low sill of the valve, and covered al area two or three feet in radius. Curiously, the mer looked at the outer side of the sill, and found a similai 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 air lock 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 an 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?”
“:’hey look like the ends of big bolts, to me,” sug-gested 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 unchal-lenged.
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 con-tained drawers, which opened easily and soundlessly, and was topped by a circular, yardwide, aluminum-faced mirror. The drawers themselves contained a variety of objects, perhaps toilet articles, of which not one sufficient-ly resembled anything familiar to provide a clue to its original use.