Chapter 3

Phyfe was exuberant. He not only gave permission to construct the generator, he demanded that all work aboard the lab ship give priority to the new project.

The design of the machine was no easy task, for Underwood was a physicist and not an engineer. However, he had two men, Moody and Hansen, in his staff who were first rate engineers. On them fell the chief burden of design after Underwood worked out the rough specifications.

One of the main laboratories with nearly ten thousand square feet of floor space was cleared for the project. As the specifications flowed from Underwood’s desk, they passed over to Moody and Hansen, and from there out to the lab where the mass of equipment was gathered from all parts of the fleet.

An atomic power supply sufficient to give the large amount of energy required by the generator was obtained by robbing the headquarters ship of its auxiliary supply. Converter units were available in the Lavoisier itself, but the main radiator tubes had to be cannibalized from the 150 A equipment aboard.

Slowly the mass of improvised equipment grew. It would have been a difficult task on Earth with all facilities available for such a project, but with these makeshift arrangements it was a miracle that the generator continued to develop. A score of times Underwood had to make compromises that he hoped would not alter the characteristics of the wave which, two weeks before, he would have declared impossible to generate.

When the equipment was completed and ready for a trial check, the huge lab was a mass of hay-wiring into which no one but Moody and Hansen dared go.

The completion was an anti-climax. The great project that had almost halted all other field work was finished--and no one knew what to expect when Hansen threw the switch that fed power from the converters into the giant tubes.

As a matter of fact, nothing happened. Only the faint whine of the converters and the swinging needles of meters strung all over the room showed that the beam was in operation.

On the nose of the Lavoisier was the great, ungainly radiator a hundred feet in diameter, which was spraying the unknown depths of space with the newly created power.

Underwood and Terry were outside the ship, behind the huge radiator, with a mass of equipment designed to observe the effects of the beam.

In space it was totally invisible, creating no detectable field. It seemed as inactive as a beam of ultraviolet piercing the starlit darkness.

Underwood picked up the interphone that connected them with the interior of the ship. “Swing around, please, Captain Dawson. Let the beam rotate through a one hundred and eighty degree arc.”

The Captain ordered the ship around and the great Lavoisier swung on its own axis--but not in the direction Underwood had had in mind. He failed to indicate the direction, and Dawson had assumed it didn’t matter.

Ponderously, the great radiator swung about before Underwood could shout a warning. And the beam came directly in line with the mysterious gem of the universe which they had found in the heart of the asteroid.

At once, the heavens were filled with intolerable light. Terry and Underwood flung themselves down upon the hull of the ship and the physicist screamed into the phones for Dawson to swing the other way.

But his warnings were in vain, for those within the ship were blinded by the great flare of light that penetrated even the protective ports of the ship. Irresistibly, the Lavoisier continued to swing, spraying the great gem with its mysterious radiation.

Then it was past and the beam cut into space once more.

On top of the ship, Underwood and Terry found their sight slowly returning. They had been saved the full blast of the light from the gem by the curve of the ship’s hull which cut it off.

Underwood stumbled to his feet, followed by Terry. The two men stood in open-mouthed un-belief at the vision that met their eyes. Where the gem had drifted in space, there was now a blistered, boiling mass of amorphous matter that surged and steamed in the void. All semblance to the glistening, faceted, ebon gem was gone as the repulsive mass heaved within itself.

“It’s destroyed!” Terry exclaimed hoarsely. “The greatest archeological find of all time and we destroy it before we find out anything about it--”

“Shut up!” Underwood commanded harshly. He tried to concentrate on the happenings before him, but he could find no meaning in it. He bemoaned the fact that he had no camera, and only prayed that someone inside would have the wit to turn one on.

As the ship continued its slow swing like a senseless animal, the pulsing of the amorphous mass that had been the jewel slowly ceased. And out of the gray murkiness of it came a new quality. It began to regain rigidity--and transparency!

Underwood gasped. At the boundary lines of the facets, heavy ribs showed the tremendously reinforced structure that formed the skeleton. And each cell between the ribs was filled with thick substance that partially revealed the unknown world within.

But more than that, between one set of ribs he glimpsed what he was sure was an emptiness, a doorway to the interior!

“Come on,” he called to Terry. “Look at that opening!”

They leaped astride the scooters clamped to the surface of the lab ship and sped into space between the two objects. It required only an instant to confirm his first hasty glimpse.

They navigated the scooters close to the opening and clamped them to the surface. For a moment, Underwood thought the gem might be some strange ship from far out of the Universe, for it seemed filled with mechanism of undescribable characteristics and unknown purposes. It was so filled that it was impossible to see very far into the interior even with the help of the powerful lamps on the scooters.

“The beam was the key to get into the thing,” said Terry. “It was intended all along that the beam be turned on it. The beam had to be connected with the gem in some way.”

“And what a way!”

The triangular opening was large enough to admit a man. Underwood and Terry knelt at the edge of it, peering down, flashing their lights about the revealed interior. The opening seemed to drop into the center of a small room that was bare.

“Come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly,” quoted Terry. “I don’t see anything down there, do you?”

“No. Why the spider recitation?”

“I don’t know. Everything is too pat. I feel as if someone is watching behind us, practically breathing down our necks and urging us on the way he wants us to go. And when we get there we aren’t going to like it.”

“I suppose that is strictly a scientific hunch which we ignorant physicists wouldn’t understand.”

But Terry was serious. The whole aspect of the Stroid device was unnerving in the way it led along from step to step, as if unseen powers were guiding them, rather than using their own initiative in their work.

Underwood gave a final grunt and dropped into the hole, flashing his light rapidly about. Terry followed immediately. They found themselves in the center of a circular room twenty feet in diameter. The walls and the floor seemed to be of the same ebony-black material that had composed the outer shell of the gem before its transmutation.

The walls were literally covered from the floor to the ten-foot ceiling with inscriptions that glowed faintly in the darkness when the flashlights were not turned on them.

“Recognize any of this stuff?” asked Underwood.

“Stroid III,” said Terry in awe. “The most beautiful collection of engravings that have ever been found. We’ve never obtained a consecutive piece even a fraction this size before. Dreyer has got to come now.”

“I’ve got a hunch about this,” said Underwood slowly. “I don’t know a thing about the procedures used in deciphering an unknown lingo, but I’ll bet you find that this is an instruction primer to their language, just as the inscriptions outside gave the key to their math before detailing the wave equations.”

“You might be right!” Terry’s eyes glowed with enthusiasm as he looked about the polished walls with the faintly glowing characters inlaid in them. “If that’s the case, Papa Phyfe and I ought to be able to do the job without Dreyer.”

They returned to the ship for photographic equipment and to report their finding to Phyfe. It was a little difficult for him to adjust to the view that something had been gained in the transformation of the gem. The sight of that boiling, amorphous mass in space had been to him like helplessly standing on the bank of a stream and watching a loved one drown.

But with Terry’s report on the characters in Stroid III which lined the walls of the antechamber which they had penetrated, he was ready to admit that their position had improved.

Underwood was merely a by-stander as they returned to the gem. Two photographers, Carson and Enright, accompanied them along with Nichols, assistant semanticist.

Underwood stood by, in the depths of speculation, as the photographers set up their equipment and Phyfe bent down to examine the characters at close range.

Terry continued to be dogged by the feeling that they were being led by the nose into something that would end unpleasantly. He didn’t know why, except that the fact of immense and meticulous preparation was evidenced on all sides. It was the reason for that preparation which made him wonder.

Phyfe said to Underwood, “Doctor Bernard tells me your opinion is that this room is a key to Stroid III. You may be right, but I fail to find any indication of it at present. What gives you that idea?”

“The whole setup,” said Underwood. “First, there was the impenetrable shell. Nothing like it exists in Solarian culture today. Then there was the means by which we were able to read the inscriptions on the outside. Obviously, if heat and fission reactions as well as chemical reactions could not touch the stuff, the only remaining means of analysis was radiative. And the only peoples who could discover the inscriptions were those capable of building a generator of 150 A. radiations. We have there two highly technical requirements of anyone attempting to solve the secret of this cache--ability to generate the proper radiation, and the ability to understand their mathematics and build a second generator from their wave equations.

“Now that we’re in here, there is nothing more we can do until we can understand their printed language. Obviously, they must teach it to us. This would be the place.”

“You may be right,” said Phyfe, “But we archeologists work with facts, not guesses. We’ll know soon enough if it’s true.”

Underwood felt content to speculate while the others worked. There was nothing else for him to do. No way out of the anteroom was apparent, but he was confident that a way to the interior would be found when the inscriptions were deciphered.

He went out to the surface and walked slowly about, peering into the transparent depths with his light. What lay within this repository left by an ancient race that had obviously equaled or surpassed man in scientific attainments? Would it be some vast store of knowledge that would come to bless mankind with greater abundance? Or would it, rather, be a new Pandora’s box, which would pour out upon the world new ills to add to its already staggering burden?

The world had about all it could stand now, Underwood reflected. For a century, Earth’s scientific production had boomed. Her factories had roared with the throb of incessant production, and the utopia of all the planners of history was gradually coming to pass. Man’s capacities for production had steadily increased for five hundred years, and at last the capacities for consumption were rising equally, with correspondingly less time spent in production and greater time spent in consumption.

But the utopia wasn’t coming off just as the Utopians had dreamed of it. The ever present curse of enforced leisure was not respecting the new age any more than it had past ages. Men were literally being driven crazy with their super-abundance of luxury.

Only a year before, the so-called Howling Craze had swept cities and nations. It was a wave of hysteria that broke out in epidemic proportions. Thousands of people within a city would be stricken at a time by insensate weeping and despair. One member of a household would be afflicted and quickly it would spread from that man to the family, and from that family it would race the length and breadth of the streets, up and down the city, until one vast cry as of a stricken animal would assault the heavens.