“In either case, fooling around here at this stage may do more harm than good,” pointed out McEachern. “We’ll have to wait until someone gets a machine identified, and see if tampering with it produces any results here.”
Grant’s helmet nodded agreement. “? never had much hope of actually starting the ship,” he said, “since it seems unlikely that anything but mechanical damage of a serious nature could have stranded it here; but I did have some hopes for the communicators. There must be some.”
“Maybe they didn’t talk,” remarked the navigator.
“If that’s your idea of humor, maybe you’d better not, yourself,” growled Grant. He vaulted back to the catwalk, and morosely led the way forward, to see if the engineers or freelance investigators had had any luck. McEachern followed, regretting the remark, which must have jarred the commander’s optimism at an unfortunate time. He tried to think of something helpful to say, but couldn’t, so he wisely kept quiet.
Halfway to the bow; they met Preble and Stevenson, who had satisfied themselves that the others could do better in the engine room and were continuing their own general examination of the ship. They gave the officers a brief report on events forward, showed them the metal rings found by the air lock, and went on aft to find some means of visiting the corridors which presumably existed above and below the main one. The control room seemed the logical place to look first, though neither had noticed any other openings from it when they were there the first time.
Perhaps the doors were closed, and less obvious.
But there were no other doors, apparently. Only two means of access and egress to and from the control room appeared to exist, and these were the points where the main corridor entered it.
“There’s a lot of room unaccounted for, just the same,” remarked Stevenson after the search, “and there must be some way into it. None of the rooms we investigated looking for that `key’ had any sign of a ramp or stairway or trapdoor; but we didn’t cover them all. I suggest we each take one side of the bow corridor, and look behind every door we can open. None of the others was locked, so there shouldn’t be much trouble.”
Preble agreed, and started along the left-hand wall of the passage, sweeping it with his light as he went. The chemist took the right side and did likewise. Each reached a door simultaneously, and pushed it open; and a simultaneous “Here it is” crackled from the suit radios. A spiral ramp, leading both up and down, was revealed on either side of the ship, behind the two doors.
“That’s more luck than we have a right to expect,” laughed Stevenson. “You take your side, I’ll take mine, and we’ll meet un above.”
Preble again agreed silently, and started up the ramp. It was not strictly accurate to call it a spiral; it was a curve evidently designed as a compromise to give some traction whether the ship were resting on its belly on a high-gravity planet, or accelerating on its longitudinal axis, and it did not make quite a complete turn in arriving at the next level above. Preble stepped onto it facing the port side, and stepped off facing sternward, with a door at his left side. This he confidently tried to push open, since like the others it lacked knob or handle; but unlike them, it refused to budge.
There was no mystery here. The most cursory of examinations disclosed the fact that the door had been welded to its frame all around — raggedly and crudely, as though the work had been done in frantic haste, but very effectively. Nothing short of a high explosive or a heavy-duty cutting arc could have opened that portal. Preble didn’t even try. He returned to the main level, meeting Stevenson at the foot of the ramp. One look at his face was enough for the chemist.
“Here, too?” he asked. “The door on my side will never open while this ship is whole. Someone wanted to keep something either outside or inside that section.”
“Probably in, since the welding was done from out-side,” replied Preble. “I’d like to know what it was. It would probably give us an idea of the reason for the desertion of this ship. Did you go down to the lower level?”
“Not yet. We might as well go together — if one side is sealed, the other probably will be, too.
Come on.”
They were still on the left-hand ramp, so it was on this side that they descended. A glance at the door here showed that, at least, it was not welded; the pressure of a hand showed it to be unlocked. The two men found themselves at the end of a corridor similar in all respects to the one above, except that it came to a dead end to the right of the door instead of continuing on into the central chamber. It was pitch-dark, except for the reflections of the hand lights on the.
polished metal walls and along either side were doors, perhaps a trifle larger than most of the others on the ship. Many of these were ajar, others closed tightly; and by common consent the men stepped to the nearest of the former.
The room behind it proved similar in size to those above, but it lacked the articles which the men had come to look upon as the furniture of the long-dead crew. It was simply a bare, empty cubicle.
The other chambers, quickly examined, showed no striking difference from the first. Several contained great stacks of metal ingots, whose inertia and color suggested platinum or iridium; all were thickly coated with dust, as was the floor of the corridor. Here, too, there must have been organic materials, whether crew or cargo none could tell, which had slowly rotted away while the amazingly tight hull held stubbornly to its air. The makers of the ship had certainly been superb machinists — no vessel made by man would have held atmosphere more than a few months, without constant renewal.
“Have you noticed that there is nothing suggestive of a lock on any of these doors?” asked Preble, as they reached the blank wall which shut them off from the engine room in front.
“That’s right,” agreed Stevenson. “The engine-room port was the only one which had any obvious means of fastening. You’d think there would be need to hold them against changes in acceleration, if nothing else.”
He went over to the nearest of the doors and with some care examined its edge, which would be hidden when it was closed; then be beckoned to Preble. Set in the edge, almost invisible, was a half-inch circle of metal slightly different in color from the rest of the door. Itseemed perfectly flush with the metal around it. Just above the circle was a little dot of copper.
Both, objects were matched in the jamb of the door — the copper spot by another precisely similar, the circle by a shallow, bowl-shaped indentation of equal size and perhaps a millimeter deep. No means of activating the lock, if it were one, were visible. Stevenson stared at the system for several minutes, Preble trying to see around the curve of his helmet.
“It’s crazy,” the chemist said at last. “If that circle marks a bolt, why isn’t it shaped to fit the hollow on the jamb? It couldn’t be moved forward a micron, the way it is. And the thing can’t be a magnetic lock — the hollow proves that, too. You’d want the poles to fit as snugly as possible, not to have the field weakened by an air gap. What is it?”
Preble blinked, and almost bared his head in reverence, but was stopped by his helmet. “You have it, friend,” he said gently. “It is a magnetic lock. I’d bet” — he glanced at the lung dial on his wrist — “my chance of living another hundred hours that’s the story. But it’s not based on magnetic attraction — it’s magnetostriction. A magnetic field will change the shape of a piece of metal — somewhat as a strong electric field does to a crystal. They must have developed alloys in which the effect is extreme. When the current is on, that `bolt’ of yours fits into the hollow in the jamb, without any complicated lever system to move it. This, apparently, is a cargo hold, and all the doors are probably locked by one master switch — perhaps on the control board, but more probably down here somewhere. So long as a current is flowing, the doors are locked. The current in any possible storage device must have been exhausted ages ago, even if these were left locked.”