Chapter 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.’”