Chapter 6

There was a tiny shock; in a minute, trivial contact of the ship with something outside it. Drifting within the now brightly lighted bore, it had touched the wall. There was no force to the impact.

Keller made an interested noise. When eyes turned to him, he pointed to a dial. A needle on that dial pointed just past the figure “30.” Burke grunted.

“The devil! We’ve been waiting for things to happen, and they already have! It’s our move.”

“According to that needle,” agreed Holmes, “somebody has kindly put thirty point seven mercury inches of air-pressure around the ship outside. We can walk out and breathe, now.”

“If,” said Burke, “it’s air. It could be something else. I’ll have to check it.”

He got out the self-contained diving apparatus that had been brought along to serve as a strictly temporary space suit.

“I’ll try a cigarette-lighter. Maybe it will burn naturally. Maybe it will go out. It could make an explosion. But I doubt that very much.”

“We’ll hope,” said Holmes, “that the lighter burns.”

Burke climbed into the diving suit, which had been designed for amateurs of undersea fishing to use in chilly waters. On Earth it would have been intolerably heavy, for a man moving about out of the ocean. But there was no weight here. If M-387 had a gravitational field at all, which in theory it had to have, it would be on the order of millionths of the pull of Earth.

Keller sat in the control-chair, watching the instruments and the outside television screens which showed the bore now reduced to fifty feet. Somehow the more distant parts of the tunnel looked hazy, as if there were a slight mist in whatever gas had been released in it. Sandy watched Burke pull on the helmet and close the face-plate. She grasped a hand-hold, her knuckles turning white. Pam nestled comfortably in a corner of the ceiling of the control-room. Holmes frowned as Burke went into the air-lock and closed the inner door.

His voice came immediately out of a speaker at the control-desk.

“I’m breathing canned air from the suit,” he said curtly.

There were scrapings. The outer lock-door made noises. There was what seemed to be a horribly long wait. Then they heard Burke’s voice again.

“I’ve tried it,” he reported. “The lighter burns when it’s next to the slightly opened door. I’m opening wide now.”

More noises from the air-lock.

“It still burns. Repeat. The lighter burns all right. The tunnel is filled with air. I’m going to crack my face-plate and see how it smells.”

Silence, while Sandy went white. But a moment later Burke said crisply, “It smells all right. It’s lifeless and stuffy, but there’s nothing in it with an odor. Hold on--I hear something!”

A long minute, while the little ship floated eerily almost in contact with the walls about it. It turned slowly. Then there came brisk, brief fluting noises. They were familiar in kind. But this was a short message, of some fifteen or twenty seconds length, no more. It ended, was repeated, ended, was repeated, and went on with an effect of mechanical and parrot-like repetition.

“It’s good air,” reported Burke. “I’m breathing normally. But it might have been stored for ages. It’s stale. Do you hear what I do?”

“Yes,” said Sandy in a whisper to the control-room. “It’s a call. It’s telling us to do something. Come back inside, Joe!”

They heard the outer air-lock door closing and its locking-dogs engaging. The fluting noises ceased to be audible. The inner door swung wide. Burke came into the control-room, his helmet face-plate open. He wriggled out of the diving suit.

“Something picked up the fact that we’d entered. It closed a door behind us. Then it turned on lights for us. Then it let air into the entrance-lock. Now it’s telling us to do something.”

The ship surged, ever so gently. Keller had turned on an infinitesimal trace of drive. The walls of the bore floated past on the television screens. There was mist in the air outside. It seemed to clear as the ship moved.

Keller made a gratified small sound. They could see the end of the tunnel. There was a platform there. Stairs went to it from the side of the bore. There was a door with rounded corners in the end wall. That wall was metal.

Keller carefully turned the ship until the stairway was in proper position for a landing, if there had been gravitation to make the stairs usable. Very, very gently, he lowered the ship upon the platform.

There was a singular tugging sensation which ceased, came again, ceased, and gradually built up to a perfectly normal feeling of weight. They stood upon the floor of the control-room with every physical sensation they’d felt during one-gravity acceleration on the way out here, and which they’d have felt if the ship were aground on Earth.

“Artificial gravity! Whoever made this knew something!” Burke said.

Pam swallowed and spoke with an apparent attempt at nonchalance.

“Now what do we do?”

“We--look for the people,” said Sandy in a queer tone.

“There’s nobody here, Sandy!” Burke said irritably. “Can’t you see? There can’t be anybody here! They’d have signaled us what to do if there had been! This is machinery working. We do something and it operates. But then it waits for us to do something else. It’s like--like a self-service elevator!”

“We didn’t come here for an elevator ride,” said Sandy.

“I came to find out what’s here,” said Burke, “and why it’s signaling to Earth. Holmes, you stay here with the girls and I’ll take a look outside.”

“I’d like to mention,” said Holmes drily, “that we haven’t a weapon on this ship. When they shot rockets at us back on Earth, we didn’t have even a pea-shooter to shoot back with. We haven’t now. I think the girls are as safe exploring as they are here. And besides, we’ll all feel better if we’re together.”

“I’m going!” said Sandy defiantly.

Burke hesitated, then shrugged. He unlatched the devices which kept both doors to the air-lock from being open at the same time. It was not a completely cautious thing to do, but caution was impractical. The ship was imprisoned. It was incapable of defense. There was simply nothing sensible about precautions that couldn’t prevent anything.

Burke threw open the outer lock door. One by one, the five of them climbed down to the platform so plainly designed for a ship of space--a small one--to land upon. Nothing happened. Their surroundings were completely uninformative. This landing-platform might have been built by any race on Earth or anywhere else, provided only that it used stairs.

“Here goes,” said Burke.

He went to the door with rounded corners. There was something like a handle at one side, about waist-high. He put his hand to it, tugged and twisted, and the door gave. It was not rusty, but it badly needed lubrication. Burke pulled it wide and stared unbelievingly beyond.

Before him there stretched a corridor which was not less than twenty feet high and just as wide. The long, glowing tubes of light that illuminated the ship-tunnel were here, too, fixed in the ceiling. The corridor reached away, straight and unbroken, until its end seemed a mere point in the distance. It looked about a full mile long. There were doorways in both its side walls, and they dwindled in the distance with a monotonous regularity until they, too, were mere vertical specks. One could not speak of the length of this corridor in feet or yards. It was a mile.

It was incredible. It was overwhelming. And it was empty. It shone in the glare of the light tubes which made a river of brilliance overhead. It seemed preposterous that so vast a construction should have no living thing in it. But it was absolutely vacant.

They stared down its length for long seconds. Then Burke seemed to shake himself.

“Here’s the parlor. Let’s walk in, even if there’s no welcoming committee.”

His voice echoed. It rolled and reverberated and then diminished very slowly to nothing.

Burke strode forward with Sandy close to him. Pam stared blankly, and instinctively moved up to Holmes. Once they were through the door, the sensation was not that of adventure in a remote part of space, but of being in some strange and impossible monument on Earth. The feeling of weight, if not completely normal, was so near it as not to be noticed. They could have been in some previously unknown structure made by men, at home.

This corridor, though, was not built. It was excavated. Some process had been used which did not fracture the stone to be removed. The surface of the rock about them was smooth. In places it glittered. The doorways had been cut out, not constructed. They were of a size which made them seem designed for the use of men. The compartments to which they gave admission were similarly matter-of-fact. They were windowless, of course, but their strangeness lay in the fact that they were empty, as if to insist that all this ingenuity and labor had been abandoned thousands of years before. Yet from somewhere in the asteroid a call still went out urgently, filling the solar system with plaintive fluting sounds, begging whoever heard to come and do something which was direly necessary.

A long, long way down the gallery there were two specks. A quarter-mile from the entrance, they saw that one of the rooms contained a pile of metal ingots, neatly stacked and bound in place by still-glistening wire. At half a mile they came upon the things in the gallery itself. One was plainly a table with a single leg, made of metal. It was unrusted, but showed signs of use. The other was an object with a hollow top. In the hollow there were twisted, shriveled shreds of something unguessable.

“If men had built this,” said Burke, and again his voice echoed and rolled, “that hollow thing would be a stool with a vanished cushion, and the table would be a desk.”

Sandy said thoughtfully, “If men had built this, there’d be signs somewhere marking things. At least there’d be some sort of numbers on these doorways!”

Burke said nothing. They went on.

The gallery branched. A metal door closed off the divergent branch. Burke tugged at an apparent handle. It did not yield. They continued along the straight, open way.

They came to a larger-than-usual opening in the side wall. Inside it there were rows and rows and rows of metal spheres some ten feet in diameter. There must have been hundreds of them. Beside the door there was a tiny shelf, with a tinier box fastened to it. A long way farther, they came to what had appeared to be the end of this corridor. But it did not end. It slanted upward and turned and they found themselves in the same corridor on a different level, headed back in the direction from which they had come. Their footsteps echoed hollowly in the still-enormous emptiness. There were other closed doors. Burke tried some. Holmes tried others. They did not open. Keller moved raptly, gazing at this and that.

Everything was strange, but not strange enough to be frightening. One could have believed this place the work of men, except that this was beyond the ability of men to make. There must be miles of vacant rooms carved out of solid rock. They came upon some hundreds of yards of doorways, and in every room on which they opened, there were metal frames about the walls. Holmes said suddenly, “If men had built this place, those could be bunks.”

They came to another place where there was dust, and a group of six huge rooms communicating not only with the corridor but with each other. They found hollow metal things like cook pans. They found a hollow small object which could have been a drinking vessel. It was broken. It was of a size suitable for men.

“If men built this,” said Holmes again, “these could be mess-halls. But I agree with Sandy that there should be signs.”

Yet another closed door. It resisted their efforts to open it, just like the others. Keller put out his hand and thoughtfully touched the stone beside it. He looked astonished.

“What?” asked Burke. He touched the stone as Keller had. It was bitterly, bitterly cold. “The air’s warm and the stone’s cold! What’s this?”

Keller wetted the tip of his finger and rubbed it on the rocky side wall. Instantly, frost appeared. But the air remained warm.

The gallery turned again, and again rose. The third-level passageway was shorter; barely half a mile in length. Here they passed door after door, all open, with each compartment containing a huge and somehow malevolent shape of metal. And beside each doorway there was a little shelf with a small box fastened to it.

“These,” said Holmes, “could be guns, if there were any way for them to shoot anything. Just by the look of them I’d say they were weapons.”

Burke said abruptly, “Keller, the stone being freezing cold while the air’s warm means that this place has been heated up lately. Heat’s been poured into it. Within hours!”

Keller considered. Then he shook his head.

“Not heat. Warmed air.”

Burke went scowling onward. He followed, actually, the only route that was open. Other ways were cut off by doors which refused to open. Sandy, beside him, noted the floor. It was stone like the walls and ceiling. But it was worn. There were slight inequalities in it, beginning a foot or so from the walls. Sandy envisioned thousands of feet moving about these resonant corridors for hundreds or thousands of years in order to wear away the solid stone in this fashion. She felt age about her--incredible age reaching back to time past imagining, while the occupants of this hollow world swarmed about its interior. Doing what?

Burke considered other things. There were the ten-foot metal spheres, ranged by hundreds in what might be a magazine below. There were the squat and ugly metal monsters which seemed definitely menacing to somebody or something. There were the metal frameworks like bunks. There was no rust, here, which could be accounted for if Keller happened to be right and warmed air had been released lately in corridors which before--for ten thousand years or more--had contained only the vacuum of space. And there were those rooms which could be mess-halls.

These items were subject matter for thought. But if what they hinted at was true, there must be other specialized compartments elsewhere. There must be storerooms for food for those who managed the guns--if they were guns--and the spheres, and lived in the bunk-rooms and ate in the mess-halls. There’d be storerooms for equipment and supplies of all sorts. And again, if Keller were right about the air, there must be enormous pressure-tanks which had held the asteroid’s atmosphere under high pressure for millennia, only to warm it and release it within the hour so that those who came by ship could use it.

An old phrase occurred to Burke. “A mystery wrapped in an enigma.” It applied to these discoveries. Plainly the release of air had been done without the command of any living creature. There could be none here! As plainly, the signals from space had been begun without the interposition of life. The transmitter which still senselessly flung its message to Earth was a robot. The operation of the ship-lock, the warming of air, the lighting of the ship-lock and the corridors--all had been accomplished by machinery, obeying orders given to the transmitter first by some unguessable stimulus.

But why? Other mysteries aside, there had plainly been meticulous preparation for the welcoming of a ship from space. No, not welcoming. Acceptance of a ship from space. Somebody had been expected to respond to those plaintive fluting noises which went wailing through the solar system. Who were those waited-for visitors expected to be? What were they expected to do? For that matter, what was the purpose of the asteroid itself? What had it been built for? At some time or another it must have contained thousands of inhabitants. What were they here for? What became of them? And when the asteroid was left--abandoned--what conceivable situation was to trigger the transmitter to send out urgent calls, and then a directional guiding-signal the instant the call was answered? When Burke’s ship came, the asteroid accepted it without question and carried out mechanical operations to make it possible for that ship’s crew to roam at will through it. What activated this mechanism of so many eons ago?