Chapter 8

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.