“I assure you, Mr. Zimbardo, there was nothing wrong with the airbot,” asserted a large man, standing before the pirate leader with a half dozen of his partners. “I don’t know what threw it back into the elevator shaft and I don’t know what made it explode—but there was nothing wrong with it. The prisoners must have done something to it.”
“These prisoners are more than asteroid miners! None of St. George’s men has the capability of knocking out two armed men the way those two were knocked out. None of them has the know-how to disable a airbot!” Zimbardo turned to his chief control officer. “Gene! Get me Lather right away. Tell him to bring up all information he has on the prisoners he brought in from Z25. Tell him to bring especially the video-record of the prisoners.” He turned back to the others. “You’re dismissed!”
Soon Lather appeared with a handful of records.
“Let’s see the video-record first,” said Zimbardo, and pushed his computer a little closer to his lieutenant. The man inserted the disk. In seconds, a view of the prisoners appeared on the screen, each one shuffling by as they entered the Silver Cloud.
When all the prisoners had passed by, Zimbardo turned his head down in disgust. Lather opened a file and brought out another disk. “I’ve got—” he began.
“You fool!!” spat out Zimbardo through gritted teeth. “I don’t need to see any more! I know who we’ve got now! How could you miss seeing that the three Starmen who completely destroyed our plans on Mars were your passengers for three days! How could you miss it??” He was shouting now. “They’ve been on the news for two weeks! How—” Zimbardo paused and tried hard to get control of himself. “They were our prisoners! —and now they’ve escaped! They’re loose inside this asteroid, and we don’t know where!”
“But sir,” inserted Lather when Zimbardo paused to take a breath and clutch the air. “There aren’t many places they can hide. There’s not much to the inside of the complex—only five floors.”
Zimbardo turned to the ship captain. With words that smoldered, he said, “The complex of this asteroid is far larger than you think! I have barely begun to explore, and St. George knows more than I do!”
Back in control now, Zimbardo punched his desk communicator. “Gene! Get a search party together and have them scour every part of the asteroid they can find.” He filled in the details about the Starmen. But he knew that neither the miners nor the Starmen would be found. With George St. George leading them, they could be anywhere—anywhere but where his men would be able to search.
Mark came out of a deep sleep into a light doze. He knew he was sleeping, but he was also mindful of his surroundings. It gradually washed through him that he was hearing voices. Two voices were conversing in very low tones, far away. He had a feeling that the air was thick and the sound had to struggle to get to him. He became aware of his eyelids, and they fluttered. Fully conscious but deeply relaxed now, he slowly opened his eyes. He saw only darkness, but it was not absolute.
He turned his head slowly to the left. Through an open door, about twenty feet away along a corridor were two tall, vaguely humanoid beings wrapped in shadows. Mark’s heart leaped and began to race, but outwardly he showed no trace that he was alert. His eyes narrowed in an attempt to see more clearly. He knew instinctively that the creatures were alien. They walked in utter silence and stepped into the room. Mark lay frozen. They looked around for a few seconds, then went back into the corridor to the place where he had first seen them. They manifested no ill intent toward the sleepers.
The figures began conversing in low voices. Mark sensed a deep sadness in their tone. He strained to hear what they were saying, what their words sounded like.
Suddenly he heard something that sounded familiar. “A coincidence,” he thought to himself. They couldn’t have said “Zimbardo.” After several more exchanges, one of the figures pressed a series of buttons on the wall, next to a blank screen. It came alive with a dull silver glow. Bright green lines appeared in the configuration of a map or blueprint. Mark strove to see as well as to hear. Slender fingers pointed to one part of the screen or another as the conversation continued.
Then he heard it again, this time clearly. “Zimbardo.” Mark lifted his head a little and turned so he could observe the screen better. “A plan of the surface control center,” he thought. He recognized the floor plan by its telltale great doors through which the prisoners had been marched.
The scene changed as one of the figures pressed a button. A series of diagrams appeared, diagrams that indistinctly suggested a power plant to Mark. One of the tall figures began talking animatedly, pointing to various locations and repeating the word “Zimbardo” frequently.
Suddenly Mark understood what was going on: the aliens were talking about shutting down the power plant! Mark strained to get a closer look at the diagram they were examining. “The aliens!” His mind raced. “They must be the builders of this base! Shutting down the power plant—why, they must want to stop Zimbardo! They’re on our side!”
Then the other figure spoke up. He seemed to agree with the animated one, but his voice had a sorrowful tone to it. He pressed a few buttons on the screen and a picture of a warship appeared. As the alien pointed to the ship and talked, all the life seemed to drain out of his companion and he began looking hopeless and despondent. He turned the screen off.
Mark didn’t understand—what was that ship? Why did it bring such hopelessness?
As the panel went dark, Mark realized with a crushed heart that, for some reason, the aliens were not going to deactivate the power plant after all. He buried his face in his hands. Something was stopping them, something having to do with the spaceship that had appeared on the screen last.
Mark looked up and saw that the figures had vanished!
10: Both Sides Move
THE GREAT AIRLOCK on the pirates’ asteroid opened. From the depths of the abyss five ships came forth. Emerging from the stone tunnel, they moved into formation and then headed for the Asteroid Belt. Lurton Zimbardo’s lieutenant Crass held the authority over the small fleet. Each ship was sheathed with the radar bender, making it invisible to the normal means of detection used by Starlight Enterprise, Space Command, and other Earth-based entities.
As the ships came into the Belt, Crass gave the command to the other four pilots. “The target asteroid has been located. Proceed with the destruction of the sats.” The sats were small, unmanned electronic satellite observers, distributed throughout the Asteroid Belt to aid in research and navigation. They monitored movement in the Belt and provided constantly updated information on the location, speed, and direction of major asteroids.
The four ships moved into pre-determined areas in the quadrants around a small, heavy, black, iron asteroid that was speeding smoothly along on its course.
Crass stood on the deck of his ship and gazed out at the small asteroid. He spoke as if to himself. “There it is, the first of five surprise packages for our beloved Mars.” The pirate leader waited patiently for the pilots of the four companion ships to report back. He expected that their assignment would take about 45 minutes—maybe as long as an hour. The first report came in 42 minutes later.
“Mr. Crass, this is Slant. We located three sats in quadrant two and destroyed them all.” The other reports came in only moments later. A total of fourteen sats had been located within 600 miles of the asteroid where Crass was waiting, and all had been destroyed. Crass opened the intercom on his own ship.
“We’re clear. Go to it.”
Over a dozen space-suited men spilled out of the airlock. They had been waiting for the order from Crass. Each carried a large crate, nearly weightless in the Asteroid Belt. They maneuvered easily through space and floated gently to the surface of the asteroid—a dark 100-yard wide clump of dirty rock. Immediately the men began to distribute the crates evenly over the surface of the rock.
The grim, forbidding, pocked asteroid became the site of frenzied work. The crewmen removed sheet after sheet of dark metal from the crates and fastened them to the floating chunk of iron. Tiny flames showed where the irregular metal of the asteroid was being shaped to fit the plates the pirates were anchoring to its surface.
In one hemisphere three other men were attaching power and propulsion units. They sank holes several feet deep and inserted tubes, fuel tanks, and a control mechanism. At one place near the asteroid’s equator a technician was installing a communications unit.
The four companion ships had returned and remained on guard less than a quarter mile from the asteroid. In less than two hours the work on the asteroid was completed and the crewmen reentered their ship.
“Take us home,” ordered Crass. The five ships left the Belt and began the quick journey back to their port. Crass smiled most of the way back.
On Mars in the communications tower of Eagle City, technician Mel Golden was puzzled. Some of his data had just dried up. Mel was responsible for monitoring the sats in a large segment of the Asteroid Belt, and a section over a thousand miles in diameter had gone dark. He called to his superior.
“Will, I’ve got something curious here.” A slender, middle-aged man with long gray hair walked over to the console.
“What is it, Mel?”
“Look at this. You asked us to report anything out of the ordinary. Well, occasionally one sat will malfunction, but it looks as if at least a dozen have stopped reporting all at once. I haven’t plotted out the details yet, but there’s an entire section of the Belt where nothing’s happening.”
“When did it start?”
“Just a moment ago. So whatever occurred out there happened about...”—he thought for a second—“about eleven minutes ago.”
“Thanks, Mel. This could be the surprise we’ve been waiting for. I’ll report this immediately.” Will went over to the master communicator in the tower and sent a top priority message to Space Command’s headquarters on Mars, describing the situation. Space Command headquarters forwarded the information to its centers on Earth and the Moon, as well as to Oritz Konig, SE’s Head of Security in Mars Base.
Konig’s report to Richard Starlight included these words: “It looks probable that the pirates have taken some sort of action in the Belt. There are no population centers of any size within 10,000 miles of the place, and no known solitary miners. It’s a completely dead spot, and sats are spaced very thinly there. Yet fourteen sats in a sphere at least a thousand miles in diameter were put out within a ten-minute period. No natural phenomenon can explain that. Space Command has the closest ship, but it won’t get to the site for a little more than 22 hours. The nearest backup ship is more than three hours after that. SE doesn’t have a ship of any kind at all within four days of the site, so we’ll have to depend on Space Command for the first reports.”
“Wake up! Everybody wake up!” Starman Joe Taylor was shouting.
“What is it? What’s wrong?” Voices came from several men, jerked awake by Joe’s outburst.
“Food! There’s food here!” he burst out. “And water! Someone brought us food and water! Lots of it!”
Within seconds everyone was up and crowding around Joe. Now that he had roused his companions, he was bent over a half dozen large boxes, one of which was partially open. He reached in and took out a container filled with fruit. He handed it to one of George St. George’s men, reached into the box again, and withdrew a vessel with water in it. It had a spigot on it as if it were made for traveling. The men began passing it around, drinking deeply. Joe dug in again and brought out another box. He opened it and held it up so that others could see. It contained several layers of items like large crackers.
“Where did it come from, Joe?” Zip asked.
“I don’t know, Zip! I woke up before anyone else and noticed these crates. I jumped up, looked around but didn’t see anybody. I opened the first one and saw the fruit. That’s the whole story.”
“You don’t know it’s safe! You took a chance, Joe!”
“What kind of chance, David? Where were we going to find water, much less food? We were done for without this.”
“Not too much of a chance, I think, Zip,” whispered Mark to the red-haired Starman. Zip turned his head and looked at Mark curiously. “The food’s okay. Let the men distribute it and I’ll tell you what I know.”
“Okay,” Zip nodded. He turned to George. “Let the men take the crates apart and see what we’ve got here. We’ll eat and then we’ll make plans.” George took over operations while the three Starmen stepped aside.
“What do you know, Mark?” asked Zip. Mark told the other Starmen what he had seen in the middle of the night.
“Hmmm. Hard to credit it, that the original builders of this wonder are still here,” mused Zip. “Why would they let Earthmen come in and take over? I gather from what we’ve learned and what we’ve overheard that the pirates have been active here for over a dozen years, and George found this place over fifteen years ago.”
“The pirates haven’t really taken over, Zip,” said Joe. “It looks as if they haven’t gone beyond the first few levels! Something’s kept them out. Only George was able to get beyond the floor where the warehouse is. Maybe that’s why Zimbardo wanted to find him and keep him alive. George doesn’t know too much about this, this, I don’t know what to call this place, but he knows more than any human living.”
“Whatever the truth is, we have some friends,” contributed Mark. “They don’t want to be seen, but they’ll help us. I’ll bet a golden asteroid that they’re the ones who destroyed the airbot. I think we need to be ready to see what happens next.”
“You’re right, Mark,” said Zip. “We’ll have to be prepared to move.” The Starmen went back to the group. Everyone was seated on the floor or on chairs, eating a welcome and refreshing breakfast. The four men who had been rendered unconscious by the airbot had benefited from a good night’s sleep and were back to normal.
Mark reached into one of the crates and took out one of the items that looked like a large cracker. He saw that several of the miners were eating them. Zip had also taken a bite out of one and was chewing thoughtfully.
“What do you think of these crackers?” Mark asked.
“Survival food,” opined Zip. “The fruit is delicious, though.”
When everyone had finished breakfast, George St. George asked, “What should we do now, Mr. Foster?”
“I was just going to ask you the same question, George,” answered Zip. “Let’s get the men together and make some plans.” George called the miners together. Zip delivered a short speech, informing them that he, Joe, and Mark were Starmen and gave a brief summary of their assignment. With a nod, Zip asked Mark to tell what he had seen during the night. Then a number of men began to ask questions.
All at once the room dimmed. The voices stopped suddenly. After a few seconds, one of the corridors lit up with a soft, pleasant light. “That’s the way we go, I think,” said Zip. “Pack up the food.” The contents of the remaining cartons were distributed among the men and Zip led the way. He felt more hopeful than he had since the Starmen had landed on Z25.
The corridor extended for several hundred yards in a straight line. Many doors and other passages led off in different directions, each marked with one or more figures, none of which was familiar. The passageway was plain and utilitarian. After more than five minutes of walking, the men came to an intersection of passages in a large, faintly illuminated room. The lights in the corridor faded behind them. Across the room was a row of elevator doors. A row of lights lit up over one of them. Zip strode boldly across the floor to the elevator that had been indicated, and the others followed without a word. When he was within twenty feet of the door, it opened. After the men entered the compartment and laid down their burdens, the door closed.
On a control panel, one light gleamed and Zip pressed it. When he had done so, another light went on. He pressed that one. After he had pressed six lights, no more came on, and the elevator began to descend. After about a minute, the movement stopped and a door behind the men slid open, opposite to that through which they had entered. The men turned and inhaled sharply.
“Oh my! Oh my!” exclaimed Zip, but no one heard him.
In front of the men was a power plant of impossibly immense size, in dusky darkness. There were low murmurs as of engines pulsing far away or of winds passing through trees, but they were quiet sounds. The ceiling was out of view, lost in blackness above them. A seamless iron floor, perfectly level, stretched out before the men as far as they could see. The left wall was beyond their vision; the right wall was about thirty yards away. Lights were located sparsely throughout the facility.
Gargantuan tubes, gleaming silver in the lights and ribbed like a torso of a dragon, snaked through a heavy latticework of girders. Iron pipes a foot in diameter ran by the dozens through the open spaces. There were catwalks, elevators, and enclosed spiral staircases in strategic places. Great metal containers bearing dials and lights of various colors took up much of the space.
“Go,” said Zip. His voice came out as a whisper, which he had not intended. He swallowed and said it again, a little louder this time. “Go on, move out. It’s okay.” The men stumbled forward, filled with awe so overwhelming that it paralyzed their vocal cords.
Finally Joe caught his voice. “This is great! Wow! This is GREAT! FANTASTIC!!” He pushed through the miners in front of him and ran forward about twenty feet. He shouted as loudly as he could. “HEYYY!!”
There was no echo. His yell disappeared as if it had been damped. He suddenly felt chilled and afraid. He turned back to the others and rejoined the crowd. He sidled over to Mark. “This place is great,” he whispered with a smile. Mark’s eyes were upturned and shining with appreciative wonder.
Zip moved to the front of the company. In a quiet but determined voice he said, “Let’s go. We’ll just follow the main aisle, straight in front of us.” He began to walk and the others followed. “Don’t forget the food,” he threw over his shoulder. Two men turned back to retrieve their supplies and then ran to join the others.
Joe moved up to the front and walked next to Zip. The Starman leader was setting a brisk pace.
“Isn’t this place fantastic, Zip? Just think of the people who can build a thing like this!”
“I am thinking of them,” answered Zip. His brow wore the characteristic furrow that showed he was not completely at ease.
“What’s wrong?” asked Joe, as if he hadn’t a care.
“Something bothers me. Our unseen friends, if they are the ones who built and maintain this asteroid, are highly advanced technologically—far in advance of anything we’re likely to achieve for centuries. But from what Mark told us, it’s obvious that they’re afraid of something. I can’t see that they’d be afraid of Zimbardo and his cronies. They’re afraid of something else, something we don’t know about yet—and that makes me afraid.”
He continued his fast pace and Joe kept up with him, but Joe’s eyes glanced into the shadows as they walked.
11: An Asteroid is Missing
THERE was a breeze. A very light breeze, a mere breath. Mark could feel it on his cheek, just a slight chill that was pleasant. He had not felt air moving since he had been on Mars.
“Surely, the air cannot move in here,” he thought to himself. He lifted his eyes upward. As he expected, the lights failed before they revealed the ceiling immensely far above. “How far?” he wondered. “A half a mile? A mile? More?” The lights looked almost like stars, placed in the strategic joints and balconied work areas of the monstrous iron latticework.
The refugees from Lurton Zimbardo’s prison had been walking through the power plant for some time—long enough to have covered at least a mile, and probably closer to two. Though the surroundings were obviously nothing more than the power station of the asteroid, the men were as hushed as if they were in a cathedral. They were small figures in an enormous place, reminded of their smallness and overwhelmed with a sense of the numinous.
Mark sifted through his memories to a time when he was a child of about six, and his parents had brought him to Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico. He had stood in an immense room below ground, large enough to contain several football fields. He had exulted then, identifying for the first time his restlessness inside, his search for something larger than himself, something that could fill a universe.
He spoke aloud to no one in particular. “When I was in Carlsbad Caverns about a dozen years ago, the ranger told us that the temperature inside the caverns was constant. This is like that.”
“Sure,” responded Joe. “This is a kind of cave. Look at the floor. Perfectly smooth, like glass. Artificially shaped, of course, and sealed, but it is the substance of the asteroid—no manufactured flooring. We must be in the deepest part of the complex here. I feel almost as if we are on the bottom of an ocean.”
“Joe! Mark!” called Zip from the front of the procession. The men stopped walking and the two Starmen joined Zip. “Look at that,” said Zip, with a lift of his chin.
A computer screen about four feet square was set into the side of a huge, gray fabrication of metal, shaped like a cube at least fifteen feet on a side and made of thick plates held together with rivets. Dozens of pipes in a tremendous variety of sizes came into the cube and extended away, disappearing into the dark distance. Some were the diameter of soda straws and a few were large enough for a man to crawl through. Most were as thick as a man’s wrist.
Mark stepped up to the screen at once. Below it was a keyboard without markings. He pressed the button which was located in the same place on the board as the button he had seen the midnight visitors press to activate their screen. A few buttons lit up with tiny green lights, but the screen remained black. He tried a few more buttons, but there was no response.
“Nothing doing. If you’d like to take a break here, Zip, I’ll try a few more combinations. We’re so far away from the surface of the asteroid, I’m sure Zimbardo will never find us now.” When Mark said “Zimbardo,” the screen flashed briefly on each syllable.
“Hey!” exclaimed the Starman. The screen flashed again. “Zimbardo!” he said again, and the screen repeated its performance. “It’s voice activated! And it recognizes Zimbardo’s name!” Mark tried a series of standard commands for voice-activated computers, but got no response to any words other than “hey” and “Zimbardo.”
“Take your time, Mark; I don’t think we’re in a hurry down here,” said Zip. For half an hour, Mark tried voice commands and combinations of keyboard strokes, but made no progress.
“This place is oppressive,” said one of the miners, after a long silence. “I don’t like being closed in by darkness.”
“Right,” said another. “On the asteroids we can see for thousands of light years, but inside here it seems as if life is swallowed. I feel as if I’m in something’s stomach.”
“Starman Foster,” said George St. George. “I think we had better move on. We need to come to the end of this giant room and get back to light and living quarters of some kind. With all this excitement we’ve had, I think the men are just about completely exfluncted.”
Zip paused a moment and looked into the distance, then nodded. “Okay,” he agreed. “This room can’t go on forever. Let’s find the end of it.”
Lurton Zimbardo was in the control center of the asteroid. A small group of his most trusted assistants stood silently by. Through the wall of glass on his right he could see the cavern where the pirates’ spaceships were anchored to the landing field. Five of them were out on assignment in the Belt. As the work crew on the asteroid was able to produce sufficient sheathing, power, and propulsion units, a space crew was assigned the task of outfitting the asteroids that Lurton had previously chosen.
The first, under the leadership of Crass, had returned that morning. Another had gone out almost immediately afterward and one more would depart the next morning. By the end of the following day, the last two crews would be launched.
Crass’ assignment had included the destruction of the sats while he performed his task. Now that the pirates knew how easy and fast it was to complete the work, they did not bother to destroy the sats in the remaining four sites. Zimbardo knew that the destruction of the sats would alert Space Command, but the authorities would not be able to stop the project before his ships returned. Once they learned what he was doing they would expect that he had only one asteroid to command. The remaining four would be a shock to them and give him, Zimbardo, a powerful psychological edge. He would need it for his last demand. Even his most trusted lieutenants had no inkling of the enormity of his last ploy.
“Now in contact with G670,” uttered Zimbardo, referring to the asteroid that Crass and his crew had rigged. The screen was lit up before him. “Two minutes and four seconds to go from right...now!” A countdown clock was set at his left. The pirate captain checked his figures one more time. He had plotted the orbit of Mars, the thrust and direction of the power units on G670, the speed of the red planet in its course and its rotation, the anticipated acceleration of the asteroid, and the time delay involved in making adjustments to its course. He had checked his computations half a dozen times and then commanded three others to do so.
Three, two, one... read the countdown clock. Zero. Zimbardo pressed the button. He remained motionless for at least ten seconds. Then he sat back and exhaled loudly. He had not noticed that he hadn’t been breathing. Then he turned and smiled broadly to his audience.
“Five and a half days from now, everyone in the Earth-Moon-Mars system will know who we are!”
Oritz Konig was making another report to Richard Starlight. “The Space Command ships came onto the site and found no sign of human presence. They quickly replaced the sats, got them activated, and then checked data. I don’t know how to explain it, Richard, but an asteroid is missing. Other than that, there is nothing different in the area of the Belt that had gone dark, but obviously the pirates have done something with an asteroid. It’s not a very big one—only about 100 yards in diameter, maybe a little more—but it’s vanished.”
The Starmen and miners had been walking more than three hours, and covered a distance of about ten miles.
“A wall,” announced Zip. “We’ve come to the end of it at last.”
“You’d think that a race that can make elevators go sideways could have come up with a way to traverse this gymnasium quicker and easier than walking,” grumbled Joe.
“Didn’t I hear you say that this place is great?” inquired Zip.
“It is. Back then, I meant ‘great’ like ‘magnificent’; but now it just feels like ‘great’ as in ‘really big.’”
The company came up to the wall. There was a bank of elevators in front of them and several sets of doors to their right. In a large open gathering place, there were many platforms like flat beds, with rods coming out of one end and sticking up perpendicular to the beds.
“Joe,” said Mark, investigating one of the beds. “Here’s your easier way to travel. These things must be some sort of dolly or truck. I saw a lot of them where we first came out of the elevator, but I didn’t recognize them.”
“And we didn’t know how big the room is, either, so we didn’t look for means of transportation,” added Zip.
“No wheels,” said Joe, peering at the apparatus, “and doesn’t need them. Magnetic, probably, with this iron floor. Man,” he said with exaggerated disgust, “we could have floated in comfort the whole length of the place.”
“We’re here now,” said Zip, matter-of-factly. “What happens next? We’ll see if our friends are still with us.”
The men waited for some sign of guidance, but there was only silence. No lights were activated over an elevator. Minutes dragged on. “Try the doors,” said Zip at last, and walked to the nearest elevator. He pressed buttons, but nothing happened. “Go on, try the other ones,” he called out with a wave of his hand. Some of the men went to the other elevators and pressed buttons. Others went to the standard doors adjacent to the elevators, but they did not open.
“Well, I guess we have to go back,” said Joe. No one laughed.
“This one’s open,” called one of St. George’s men. They all turned and saw an open door—the tenth in a row of identical, unmarked doors along the wall. The man didn’t go through it but waited for Zip. The leader of the Starmen went through the portal onto a metal deck. Stairs went upward. He began to climb, with the others following after.
Three flights up he came to another door, which opened as he set foot on the landing. He went through it into a room outfitted as a small hangar. Five spaceships of alien design were clamped to the floor. At the far end of the hangar was an airlock.
Walking gingerly, Zip stepped out a little farther into the hangar. The airlock was enormous and perfectly clear, revealing thousands of stars. Though it had been only a few days since he had seen a starscape, now it almost seemed as if he were perceiving the heavens for the first time. A feeling of awe coursed through him.
“We’re almost free,” he whispered.
12: First Impact
“ALIEN SPACECRAFT!” murmured Joe, slowly. “Magnificent!”
He and Mark had followed Zip into the hangar. George St. George and his men came after them. They huddled close together and remained at the door while the Starmen strode across the floor of the hangar toward the spacecraft.
The five ships were sleek craft with a highly swept delta wing design. The hulls were a startlingly reflective deep forest green color. The craft looked identical to each other, each about 75 feet long with a wingspan of about 45 feet. The windshields were black and opaque. They lay horizontally on the floor of the hangar, all pointed toward the airlock.
“Beautiful! Just gorgeous!” exclaimed Mark. As he approached the alien craft he noted that the hull was not merely colored, but patterned. “Oh my! Look at this!”
Joe and Zip were right behind Mark and came over to see what the big Starman was showing them. The hulls were not only beautifully colored, but showed evidence of leaf patterns. Subtle gradations in color gave the impression that the ships were almost camouflaged—that they could land in a deep forest and become almost invisible.
“This is a work of art, a work of genius!” exclaimed Joe.
“How do you get in?” asked Zip, looking for a door. He was running his hands over the surface. There was no sign of a doorway, no seal or join anywhere he could see or feel. He could see his reflection in the side of the spacecraft as if he were looking into a still pool in a forest.
“So close, yet so far,” said Mark. “Here are ships, there is an airlock, but we’re not any closer to escaping than we were before.”
“This’ll take some time,” said Joe, with a grimace. “It’s probably voice-activated, like the computer screens below.” The company had passed large computer screens regularly on their trek through the power plant. “All we need to do is learn the language of an alien race we don’t know, have never met, and whose language we can’t read. Then we can break free of here.”
“Let’s get busy,” said Zip. “I like a challenge. We were led here by our hosts. There has to be a way.”
Zip went back to George St. George and his men. “We’ll be working on getting into one of the spacecraft and learning how to use it. You can help by exploring this place and finding out what’s here. George, would you please take an inventory of what we’ve got in the way of food and drink and make a plan for making it last as long as you can. We’ll also need spacesuits. We can probably fly without them if we have to, but it’s a bad risk.”
“Okay, Zip. We’ll do our part,” responded George. His men scattered throughout the hangar. There was a lot to investigate. It was only about 200 yards long and 50 yards wide, but was lined with cabinets. There were shelves and racks with equipment of various kinds, some recognizable and some decidedly not. More than a dozen doors opened into the hangar. Zip went back to the spacecraft the Starmen had chosen for their escape vehicle.
Joe and Mark were at the closest work station, where there were tools of curious manufacture.
“What can you guess about the alien race that built this place?” asked Joe as he ran his hands across a set of tools, picking one up and putting it back down. “What do we know about them?”
“They’re humanoid, definitely,” replied Mark as he gazed at a rack of instruments. “We’ve already agreed on that. I assume that the two figures I saw last night are from the people who constructed this amazing facility. Can’t guess why they’re not out in force here, unless there are only a few of them aboard. Can’t guess why they don’t show themselves. Don’t know how old this asteroid is or what it is for. But they’re definitely humanoid. Even if I hadn’t seen them, we could tell that by the shape of the tools and everything else we’ve seen.”
“And the food they gave us is not too different from what we’re used to. And think about this: they put fresh fruit in those food packages. They must have a hydroponic orchard somewhere in this asteroid. There must be a huge portion of this complex that no human has ever seen—and maybe can’t get into! This place is big enough to house an entire city. Maybe there are thousands of them here! George said that he only explored a tiny part of the inhabitable region when he was here. Everything we’ve seen tells me that they’re a lot like us.”
“That might tell us something about the nature of the universe, Joe. I like to wonder about things like that.”
“And look, these spacecraft have wings. They’re not just for travel in the void; they’re made for flight on a planet with an atmosphere.”
Zip came over the joined the conversation. “If they helped us get from the warehouse area to this hangar, why aren’t they helping us get into the spaceships?”
“Maybe there’re only two of them—the two I saw last night,” suggested Mark. “Maybe they’re caretakers or something like that, and not spacemen. Maybe they don’t know much more than we do how to get into these beauties.”
“Well, whatever the reason, I guess we’re on our own, at least for the time being.”
“Looks like some sort of laser here,” said Joe, picking up an object that resembled a flashlight. It had two dials on it with signs of calibration, and a button that was probably intended to activate it. “If it is a laser, and if these dials move the power from low to high, who knows which end is which?”
“Take it into the power plant and aim it at the floor. An instrument that small can’t have too much power and won’t hurt a half mile of solid iron. See what happens,” suggested Mark.
Joe shrugged. “Okay.” He went over to the door through which they had come a half hour before. He was back in a few minutes.
“It’s a laser, all right. This dial here changes the intensity of the beam from low to high, and this one—well, watch. There’s a barrel of powder over here. Talcum or something.” He reached in, took a handful of the dust, and dropped it back into the barrel. A cloud of dust rose up. He activated the laser through it. A bright blue beam appeared. He turned a dial and the beam became a brilliant green.
“Lasers of different frequencies, all in one tool!” Mark exclaimed.
“Yeah, and it’s got red too!”
“Lots of possibilities with this,” said Zip. “I’ll bet it can be used to open the spacecraft. The doors can’t be only voice-activated, or they couldn’t open the door in a vacuum. What else is there? Heat, magnetism, light? They used heat, body heat, on the panel back in the room where we were kept prisoner. Heat won’t work in deep space. Let’s try light. We’ve got the tool here.”
The Starmen went back over to the spacecraft. Joe set the laser for blue light and ran the beam over the surface of the ship. For several minutes he tried various colors and intensities. When he set the laser for yellow light, there was a change in the surface of the ship.
“Ah!” said all three Starmen at once. The outline of a door appeared, with markings in several places. Joe experimented a little more, placing different intensities on the markings. In a moment he was rewarded. The door recessed a few inches into the ship, and slid aside with quiet efficiency. Joe immediately stepped through the portal.
The furnishings of the alien spacecraft were similar to what the Starmen were familiar with, but the control panel was more challenging. Some controls were obvious, since they were necessary for any spacecraft; others were completely unfamiliar.
After about an hour of looking around, Joe sighed, “Gonna need more time, Zip.”
“I know. We’ll just have to dedicate ourselves to it until we feel confident enough to take the ship into space.”
“I’m making some progress here,” announced Mark. He was at a side panel near the navigation station. As he worked the keyboard, various schemata appeared in quick sequence. “I can’t read anything, but it’s obvious that these are engines. I can’t recognize everything that’s coming up, but most of it I can. See, here is a circuit diagram, and this part here can only be a reaction chamber. I think this ship might use cold fusion for power, but I can’t know for sure until I can read this stuff, or see it in action.”
“You figure it out, Mark, and I’ll fly it,” said Joe confidently.
“Well, this stuff is you boys’ specialty,” said Zip. “I’ve got to think ahead to the next problem. Assuming we can get this rig to fly, and assuming we can open the airlock, we’ve still got to escape the pirates. I doubt this ship is one of the invisible ones, and they’ll have us spotted and speared in less then three minutes if we just fly out of here, saying, ‘Thanks for the hospitality, sorry we have to leave so soon.’”
“You can figure it out, Zip! We’ll get this grand machine ready!” Joe was enjoying the challenge. It was hard to keep him down.
After eight hours of work on the spacecraft and with dinner behind them, Joe said to Mark, “Let’s go back into the power plant and see if we can’t find some way to sabotage the system so that the pirates can’t find us when we take off. You can bring up some files on those huge screens. Maybe we can even find some way to close down their whole operation.”
“Sounds good to me,” said Mark, picking up a glass of water. He took a sip and swished his mouth with it, then swallowed. “Best we can do without toothbrushes, I guess.”
“If it were that easy,” said Zip, “our hosts would probably have shut down the pirates long before this. After all, it’s their plant and they know it better than anyone.”
“You’ve got to be right, Zip, but I don’t like sitting around. We’ve been in this room all day and I’m ready for a break. I really do like that huge plant. Man! Imagine a room ten miles long!”
The three Starmen descended the metal stairs and exited into the enormous plant. A few yards away was one of the large computer terminals. Mark went over to it and activated it.
“I can recognize a few things, now that I’ve been through so many of the files upstairs,” he informed his partners. “This, I think, is the lighting system.” He pressed a button. There was a loud “chunk” sound and the plant lit up brightly.
“Ow!” said the three Starmen and covered their eyes. They were not prepared for the sudden brightness. When they could tolerate the light, they looked above them. Without a word, Mark lay down on his back and just stared upward. Rank after rank of lights went up on the iron framework for nearly a mile. A ceiling the color of charcoal was barely visible, with what looked like rectangular viewports imbedded in it.
Joe and Zip remained standing and looked to their left. The lights blazed for about half a mile. Beyond that point was darkness.
“It will take a lifetime to learn everything there is to know about this place,” said Mark dreamily.
“I think we’ll be back someday,” replied Zip. “What else can you do, Mark?”
Mark got up and turned the lights off. It took nearly a minute for their eyes to adjust to the dimness. While Mark looked through file after file, Joe and Zip wandered through some of the iron latticework. They climbed spiral staircases for a level or two before descending again, and examined the connections of tubes, pipes, and circuits.
“I’ve got something!” called out Mark. The others ran to him. He pointed at the screen. “See, this is the main power generator. I can tell because of the coils over here and the way the circuits are connected. There are about eight of these; they must be spaced in a row a little over a mile apart. They can operate singly or in combination. But look! They don’t just power the life-support systems—in fact, I haven’t found that part at all yet. But these are thrust systems! Do you know what that means? This asteroid is a spacecraft! It’s made to travel!”
“Can’t be!” said Joe, flabbergasted
“It is. Look.” Mark flipped past a few more files, pointing out the connections and the diagrams of chambers, coils, and energy field generators. “I’m just barely getting a glance at this stuff, of course, and I don’t understand it all, but I have no doubt about what I’ve seen so far.”
“Why don’t you look for that life-support file and see if you can turn off the pirates’ energy or something?” Joe suggested.
“No, Joe,” said Zip. “As I said before, if it were a good idea, our hosts would probably have done it already. I think that whatever they’re not doing, we shouldn’t try to do. Remember, even St. George didn’t want to fiddle with something he didn’t understand.”
“George is a real nice guy, Zip,” said Joe, “but I still think he’s breathed a little too much vacuum for his own good. You have to experiment in life, sometimes.”
“I want to learn more about this power system! This is amazing!” rhapsodized Mark. “If I’m right, this button here will...” He pressed it. Almost at once a stream of paper began to feed out of a slot to the right of the terminal and fell down, sheet by sheet, into a gathering tray. Mark picked up the first sheet.
“It’s printing out the diagrams of the thrust system. just like that. You’re right, Joe—this place is great!”