The passage became almost unbearably tight. She began to doubt that she had ever made it through this space before. The air seemed impossibly foul. The ship was a bruising presence, a massive vise squeezing the life from her. She stopped, thinking to rest, but she could not seem to get her breath. She knew there was only a little way further to go, and yet—
Something struck her boot. “Go. Go on.” Sanges’s muffled voice was very close. There was a thread of panic in it.
“Easy, easy,” Nikka said. If Sanges lost his nerve, they would be in a pretty fix. “We have to take our time.”
“Hurry!”
Nikka braced her feet against the walls and pushed. Her arms were above her head and with one more lunge she found the edge of the passageway above. She pulled slowly up the incline and in a moment was free of the constriction.
Here it was almost possible to stand. The open bay was an ellipsoid with most space taken up by dark oval forms. They were seamless, apparently storage compartments of some kind with no obvious way of opening them. A short path marked off by tape wound between them. No one was to venture beyond that tape or try to investigate the dead alien machinery that lay further on. That would come later when men knew more of the ship and how it worked. Only the white phosphors in the plastiform illuminated this room; they cast long shadows near the walls that gave the room an oddly ominous cast. Though it was almost possible to stand upright, the shadowed mass of the ship seemed to close on her from every direction.
Sanges struggled up out of the tube and slowly got to his feet. “Why did you slow down back there?” he asked sharply.
“I didn’t. You have to pace yourself.”
“What does that mean?” he said quickly.
“Nothing.” She looked at him appraisingly. “Claustrophobia is a funny thing and you have to keep your wits about you. You should try it some time the way I first went through—in an s-suit with oxygen gear and a helmet.”
“It’s a Godforsaken way to—”
“Precisely. God didn’t make this ship and men didn’t either. We have to learn to adapt to it. If strange things bother you that much, why did you volunteer for this job?”
Sanges clamped his lips together firmly and nodded. After a moment Nikka turned and led the way down the narrow path to an immense black panel set into one wall. There were two man-made chairs in front of it. She indicated one for Sanges and sat in the other. Sanges looked at the imposing board, with its multiple layers of switches laid out before him. He turned his head and studied the dark forms further away. “How can we be sure the pressure is good here?” he said.
“The plastiform is tight,” Nikka said as she turned on some extra phosphors. “The alien superstructure seems to be intact. The whole ship is modular, as far as we can tell. When it crashed, most of the other components were pulverized, but this one and two others—about forty percent of a hemisphere—remained intact. Some things in the other passages were thrown around, but otherwise this section is still in one piece.”
Sanges studied the room and tapped nervously with his fingers on the console board.
“Careful of that! I’m turning on the console now and I don’t want you hitting any of the switches.” She pressed something like a vertically mounted paper clip and two blue lights flickered on the board before them. In a moment the black screen above the board changed subtly to a shade of light green.
“Where does the power come from?” Sanges said. “We don’t know. The generators must be in one of the other modules but the engineers don’t want to go too deeply into there until we understand more. The power is AC, about 370 hertz—though that varies, for some reason. We took this panel off and tried to trace the circuitry but it’s extremely complicated. In another passageway the engineers found a huge vault of micro-sized electronic parts, apparently part of a memory bank. Most of the vault is thin films of magnetic materials on a substrate. The whole vault is at very low temperature, far colder than the surrounding ship.”
“Superconducting memory elements?”
“We think so. That’s not quite my line, so I haven’t had much to do with it. There are small-scale oscillations in magnetic fields among the circuitry, so probably the fields switch the superconducting elements on and off. Makes a great switching circuit, as long as it operates in vacuum. The trouble is, we don’t know where the cooling comes from. There is no circulating fluid; the walls are just cold.”
Sanges nodded and studied the array of hundreds of switches before him. “So this computer is alive, or at least its memory is. After all this time. With most of the ship knocked out. Remarkable.”
“That’s why we are taking so much care with it. It’s a direct link into whatever the aliens thought worth storing.” She tried a few of the switches experimentally. “It appears the power is on. More often than not this board is dead. The ship’s power is unstable. Okay, I am going to call Nigel Walmsley and start work. Watch what I do, but don’t touch the board. Most of the procedure for starting is written up; I’ll give you a copy at the end of this shift.”
She took a throat microphone and yoke and fitted it over her head. “Nikka here.”
“Walmsley, madam,” a voice came from the speaker mounted on the wall. “If world security were at stake, would you spend the night with a man whose name you didn’t even know?”
Nikka smiled. “But I know yours.”
“True, true. Still, I could have it changed.”
“Victor Sanges is here with me,” Nikka murmured officially, before Nigel could say anything more. “He’s the inside man for Team One.”
“Charmed, I’m sure. See you in the mess later, Mr. Sanges. Nikka, I’m picking up the screen quite well but I’m getting bored with that same green haze all the time.”
Sanges turned and looked at the television camera mounted over their heads. “Why don’t you simply pick the signal up from the circuits that feed the screen?” he asked Nikka.
“We don’t want to fool with the circuitry. Watch this, it’s the same opening sequence I always use just to see if the memory array is unchanged.”
Each switch had ten separate positions available; she altered several, glancing at the notebook at her elbow. A swirl of color formed and suddenly condensed into a pattern of symbols; curls, flashes, marks tantalizingly close to something like Persian script. In the middle of the display was a diagram involving triangles locked together in a confusing pattern.
“This was the first readout we ever got. Most sequences available don’t seem to give any image at all. Maybe they are vacant or the readout goes to some other console. This picture by itself is useless, because we don’t know what the writing means.”
“Is there much of it?”
“No, and I don’t think we could decipher very much even if we had a lot of printed symbols. The first Egyptologists couldn’t unravel a human language even though they had thousands of tablets, until the Rosetta Stone was discovered. That’s why we’re concentrating on the pictures, not the script. Eventually maybe Team Three can make some sense out of the words, but for the moment we are stuck with looking at pictures and figuring out what they mean.”
Nikka touched some of the switches and another image formed on the screen. This was also familiar. It showed two circles overlapping and a line bisecting the chord of one. An apparent caption ran down the side. “Lewis has tentatively identified one of those captioned squiggles as the word line. He compared with six or seven other figures in this sequence and so far that’s the only guess he’s been able to make. It’s a painful process.”
She ran quickly through a number of other punching sequences and stopped to admire the last. It was a magnificent shot of Earth as seen from somewhere further out from the sun. A thin crescent moon peeked around it; whorls and streaks of cloud obscured most of the dark land.
“The colors are wrong,” Sanges said. “It’s too red.” “It wasn’t made for human eyes,” Nikka said. “Nigel, I’m trying a new sequence. Alter 707B to 707C.”
She said casually to Sanges, “If this setting is in some way fatal, if it fries me to this chair, at least somebody will know which sequence to avoid next time.”
Sanges looked at her in surprise. She punched the sequence and got a few lines of symbols. “No help. Log, Nigel.” The next was an array of dots. Then came a slightly altered array. As they watched, the groupings changed smoothly, rotating clockwise.
“Nigel, measure this. How fast is the rotation?” There was a pause. “I make it a little over seven hours.”
Nikka nodded. “Half the 14.3 hours that the lights in the Bowl Room take to cycle. Put that on special log.”
