Tuck started violently as the cry burst into his earphones, and his heart pounded in his throat.
“What’s the matter, Dave?”
And then there was an excited shout in the ’phones that Tuck couldn’t catch, and he heard the jog-jog-jog coming through of running feet in the other tunnel. He turned and rushed back down the tunnel toward the Y again, a thousand horrible phantoms welling up in his mind. His suit was clumsy; his feet slipped once, and he went crashing to the ground, a sharp pain wrenching at his shoulder, but he dragged himself up again, and rushed on. At the Y he ran into David head-on, frantic with excitement. “I’ve found it,” David choked between gasps. “Come on, I’ve found it—”
He started back up the left-hand tunnel, with Tuck hard on his heels. The tunnel curved, and then dipped down, running straight for a hundred feet or more. Then David slowed down, waving him to a halt. Up ahead was an opening into something with gloomy gray light filtering out. But David was pointing to the strip of dull gray material that ran across the tunnel, three strips that blended almost perfectly with the uneven ground, arranged just close enough together so that anyone not watching the path carefully would step on one of the strips, with the little shiny metal detonator caps that followed the strips—
“Murexide!”
David nodded. “I barely spotted it.” Gingerly he stepped between the strips, then across to the other side, and Tuck followed, his heart in his throat. A perfect booby trap for one who wasn’t watching closely for just such a thing. On the other side they hesitated for a moment; then David urged him on with a wave of a hand, and they hurried again toward the opening, and stopped short, almost teetering on the drop that lay before them. And they stood there and stared, peering dumbfounded at the incredible thing they saw there before them in the gloom—
It was not a vault, nor a battle station, nor even a stockade. It was a ship, standing upright on its jets in a tall, narrow crevice, with the open top camouflaged and sealed with gray plastic sheeting that blended perfectly into the rock. A pale gray light filtered down from above, and the huge ship stood like a ghost, tall and silent in the gloom—
Tuck stared at David, dumbfounded. “But—but a ship! But there’s no place to go with a ship! They’d be hunted down, if it took a thousand years. There’s no place in the Solar System they could hide—” His voice broke off with a gasp as the implication of his own words struck him.
There was only one place where a ship would be beyond pursuit. Completely and utterly beyond pursuit.
There was only one conclusion possible.
The ship was a star-ship.
Chapter 14
Trapped!
Tuck Benedict and David Torm stared at the ship in he gloomy crevice, stared speechless at the long, slender form as the implication sank in. And then they were both talking at once, forgetting where they were in their amazement at the ship in the crevice before them. A thousand questions roared through Tuck’s brain, a thousand pressing questions, questions that came out with incredible, staggering answers.
“But where could they have gotten it? There’s never been a ship like this on Titan for anything except regular cargo runs—and how could it be a star-ship? How could it take five hundred people—”
“I don’t know, but this is the plan—it must be.” David stared up at the long, slender, finger-like structure. “It must be the Earth ship that crashed. That was a troopship—built to carry three or four hundred men—”
“But that was lost clear around on the other side of the planet!”
“I know. But the Security Patrol never found it, did they?”
“No—it was an impossible task. Titan is almost half as big as Earth. What chance would a search party have? The ship may have fallen into one of those gorges, and covered over with frost so it was completely invisible from above.”
David Torm nodded. “But everyone knew a ship had crashed. There was no colony here then—but when the colonists first worked out the plan, they knew there was a ship—somewhere—”
“And they must have found it.” Tuck’s voice was filled with awe. “They must have torn it apart, bit by bit, hull plate by hull plate, tube by tube—and brought it here.”
David jumped up, excitedly. “That’s right! Just a few men, working in secret, dragging all that metal clear around from the other side. And then they found this crevice here to reassemble it—and it’s taken them a hundred years.”
Tuck shook his head, still incredulous. “And the tunnel?”
“They must have built it in secret, and then made up a story about a vein of radioactives to keep the other colonists—and the Earthmen—away.” He stared down the black hole where the jet tubes disappeared, and the fins on which the ship rested.
“It still doesn’t add up!” Tuck burst out. “Where did they get an interstellar drive for it? The greatest minds in the world have been working on Earth for two hundred years to find a drive that would take a ship to the stars. They’ve had laboratories, money, government support—and they’ve never found it. They say it’s theoretically impossible.” He turned to David, his eyes wide. “How could the colonists have found something that all Earth’s technology couldn’t find?”
David shrugged. “I couldn’t even guess.”
“Well, I’ll tell you one thing—I want to see those engines.”
“I don’t know if we should go on board her or not—” All of a sudden David was trembling. “I don’t like this, Tuck—I’m scared of what’ll happen if they find us—”
“If the colonists have developed an interstellar drive, it’s in that ship. You can stay here if you want. I’m going in.” Tuck started up the ramp toward the dark port in the ship’s side. David hesitated, then started up after him. “Look,” he said, pointing upward at the scaffolding. “They’re still finishing the hull plates. They must have built it from the inside out. And it looks almost finished—”
They stepped from the ramp into the ship, and Tuck felt a thrill unlike anything he had ever experienced. Here was the adventure he had dreamed of all his life; here was the ship that was built to go to the stars, built to leave Earth and Earth’s puny Solar System light-years behind, built to speed straight as an arrow—where? Alpha Centaurus? Cygni? Arcturus? Here was the greatest frontier of all, the frontier that had never been crossed—the frontier physicists on Earth had said could never be crossed—
Because there was no drive for an interstellar ship. The weeks and months in transit between Earth and Mars or Venus or Titan on fast Interplanetary Atomics were insignificant compared to the years—the centuries—that would be required to travel with them to the stars. Man’s life was too short to make such a trip possible without an interstellar drive.
And yet, in the bowels of this strange secret ship—was the drive there? Could the colonists, in their desperation, have discovered genius in their midst, genius to solve the immense mathematical and technical impossibilities of a space-warp, of faster-than-light motion? The boys made their way along the narrow dark corridor of the ship, moving downward, still downward to the rear of the ship. They passed a huge room, and stopped, peering through the hatch at the tier upon tier of soft, curved mattresses, set at 45° angles from the floor—the acceleration cots. This was the troop hold, the quarters that had been built to carry the Security Patrol troops, over a century ago—how many were there? The boys stopped, and counted the cots on the first row, and counted the number of tiers. Five hundred. The ship was to carry the entire colony. There was no doubt of it.