Kator lowered his head and crept past like a shadow on the belt. The voices faded a little behind him and in a little distance, he came to the shaft and the elevator platform on to which the conveyor belt discharged its cargo.
Kator examined the platform with an eye already briefed on its probable construction. It was evidently remotely controlled from below, but there should be some kind of controls for operating it from above—if only emergency controls.
Kator searched around the edge of the shaft, and discovered controls set under a plate at the end of the conveyor belt. Using a small magnetic power tool, he removed the plate covering the connections to the switches and spent a moment or two studying the wiring. It was not hard to figure it out from this end—but he had hoped to find some kind of locking device, such as would be standard on a Ruml apparatus of this sort, which would allow him to prevent the elevator being used after he himself had gone down.
But there was no such lock.
He replaced the plate, got on to the platform and looked at the controls. From this point on it was a matter of calculated risk. There was no way of telling what in the way of guards or protective devices waited for him at the bottom of the shaft. He had had his choice of trying to find out with collectors previously and running the risk of alerting the natives—or of taking his chances now. And he had chosen to take his chances now.
He pressed the button. The platform dropped beneath him, and the darkness of the shaft closed over his head.
The platform fell with a rapidity that frightened him. He had a flashing mental picture of it being designed for only nonhuman materials—and then thought of the damageable fruits and vegetables among its food cargo came to mind and reassured him. Sure enough—after what seemed like a much longer drop than the burrowing scanners had reported the shaft to have—the platform slowed quickly but evenly to a gentle halt and emerged into light from an opening in one side of the shaft.
Kator was off the platform the second it emerged, and racing for the nearest cover—behind the door of the small room into which he had been discharged. And no sooner than necessary. A lacework of blue beams lanced across the space where he had been standing a tiny part of a second before.
The beams winked out. The smell of ozone filled the room. For a moment Kator stood frozen and poised, gun in hand. But no living creature showed itself. The beams had evidently been fired automatically from apertures in the wall. And, thought Kator with a cold feeling about his liver, the spot he had chosen to duck into was about the only spot in the room they had not covered.
He came out from behind the door, slipped through the entrance to which it belonged—and checked suddenly, catching his breath.
He stood in an underground area of unbelievable dimensions, suddenly a pygmy. No, less than a pygmy, an ant among giants, dimlit from half a mile overhead.
He was at one end of what was no less than an underground spacefield. Towering away from him, too huge to count, were the brobdingnagian shapes of great spaceships. He had found it—the secret gathering place of the strength of the Muffled People.
From up ahead came the sound of metal on other metal and concrete, sound of feet and voices. Like a hunting animal, Kator slipped from the shadow of one great shape to the next until he came to a spot from which he could see what was going on.
He peered out from behind the roundness of a great, barrel-thick supporting jack and saw that he was at the edge of the field of ships. Beyond stretched immense emptiness, and in a separate corner of this, not fifty feet from where Kator stood, a crew of five natives in green one-piece mufflings were dismounting the governor of a phase-shift drive from one of the ships, which had been taken out of the ship and lowered to the floor here, apparently for servicing. A single native in blue with a weapons harness and handgun stood by them.
As Kator stopped, another native in blue with weapons harness came through the ranked ships from another direction. Kator shrank back behind the supporting jack. The second guard came up to the first.
“Nothing,” he said. “May have been a short up in the powerhouse. Anyway, nothing came down the shaft.”
“A rat, maybe?” said the first guard.
“No. I looked. The room was empty. It would’ve got caught by the beams. They’re checking upstairs, though.”
Kator slipped back among the ships.
The natives were alerted now, even if they did not seriously suspect an intruder like himself. Nonetheless, a great exultation was welling up inside him. He had prepared to break into one of the ships to discover the nature of its internal machinery. Now—thanks to the dismantled unit he had seen being worked on, that was no longer necessary. His high hopes, his long gamble, were about to pay off. His kingdom was before him.
Only two things were still to be done. The first was to make a visual record of the place to take Home, and the other was to get himself safely out of here and back to his small ship.
He took a hand recorder from his weapons belt and adjusted it. This device had been in operation recording his immediate vicinity ever since he had set foot outside his small ship. But adjustments were necessary to allow it to record the vast shapes and spaces about him. Kator made the necessary adjustments and for about half an hour flitted about like an entertainment-maker, taking records not only of the huge ships, and their number, but of everything else about this secret underground field. It was a pity, he thought, that he could not get up to also record the structure of the ceiling lost overhead in the brightness of the half-mile-distant light sources. But it went without saying that the Muffled People would have some means of letting the ships out through the apparently solid ground and buildings overhead.
Finished at last, Kator worked his way back to the room containing the elevator shaft. Almost, in the vast maze of ships and jacks, he had forgotten where it was, but the sense of direction which had been part of his scoutship training paid off. He found it and came at last back to its entrance.
He halted there, peering at the platform sitting innocuously waiting at the shaft bottom. To cross the room to it would undoubtedly fire the automatic mechanism of the blue beams again—which, aside from the danger that posed, would this time fully alert the blue-clad natives with the weapons harnesses.
For a long second Kator stood, thinking with a rapidity he had hardly matched before in his life. Then a farfetched scheme occurred to him. He knew that the area behind the door was safe. From there, two long leaps would carry him to the platform. If he, with his different Ruml muscles, could avoid that single touching of the floor, he might be able to reach the platform without triggering off the defensive mechanism. There was a way but it was a stake-everything sort of proposition. If he missed, there would be no hope of avoiding the beams.
The door opened inward, and it was about six feet in height, three and a half feet in width. From its most inward point of swing it was about twenty-two feet from the platform. Reaching in, Kator swung it at right angles to the entrance, so that it projected into the room. Then he backed up and took off his foot coverings, tucking them into pouches of his mufflings.
He got down on hands and feet and arched his back. His claws extended themselves from fingers and toes, clicking on the concrete floor. For a moment he felt a wave of despair that the clumsy mufflings hampering him would make the feat impossible. But he resolutely shoved that thought from his mind. He backed up further until he was a good thirty feet from the door.