Hal Clement - Natives of Space

Cray’s meaning was evident. They were not circular, as they had seemed at first glance; they presented a slightly elliptical cross section, and obviously could never be made to turn in their sockets. The lock theory seemed to remain unchal-lenged.

That being granted, it behooved them to look for a key. There was no sense toying with the combination idea — there was no hope whatever of solving even a simple combination without specialized knowledge which is seldom acquired legally. They resolutely ignored the probability that the key, if any, was only to be found in the company of the original engineer, and set to work.

Each of them took one of the nearby rooms, and commenced going over it. All the room doors proved to be unlocked, which helped some. Furniture varied but little; each chamber had two seats similar to that in the control room, and two articles which might at one time have been beds; any mattress or other padding they had ever contained was now fine dust, and nothing save metal troughs, large enough to hold a man lying at full length, were left. There was also a desklike affair, which con-tained drawers, which opened easily and soundlessly, and was topped by a circular, yardwide, aluminum-faced mirror. The drawers themselves contained a variety of objects, perhaps toilet articles, of which not one sufficient-ly resembled anything familiar to provide a clue to its original use.

A dozen rooms were ransacked fruitlessly before the men reassembled in the corridor to exchange reports. One or two of them, hearing of the others’ failure, returned to the search; Preble, Stevenson, and Sorrell strolled back to the door which was barring their way. They looked at it silently for several moments; then Sorrell began to speak.

“It doesn’t make sense,” he said slowly. “Why should you lock an engine-room door? If the motors have to be supervised all the time, as ours do, it’s a waste of time. If you grant that these creatures had their motors well enough designed to run without more than an occasional inspection, it might be worth while to seal the door against an accidental blowoff; but I still wouldn’t lock it. Of course we don’t know anything about their ideas of what was common sense.

“But I’d say that that door either isn’t fastened at all, and is putting up a bluff like the outer airlock valve, or else it’s really sealed, and would be opened by tools rather than keys. You may think that’s quibbling, but it isn’t. Keys, you carry around with you, in your pocket or on your belt. Tools have a place where you leave ‘em, and are supposed to stay there. Kid, if you were an engineer, in the practice of unsealing this door every few days, perhaps, and needed something like a monkey wrench to do it with, where would you keep the monkey wrench.”

Preble ignored the appellation, and thought for a moment. Finally he said, “If I were fastening the door against intentional snooping, I’d keep the tool in my own quarters, locked up. If, as you suggested, it. were merely a precaution against accident, I’d have a place for it near the door here. Wouldn’t you say so?”

The machinist nodded, and swept his light slowly over the bulkheads around the door. Nothing showed but smooth metal, and he extended the search to the corridor walls for several yards on both sides. The eye found nothing, but Sorrell was not satisfied. He returned to the edge of the door and began feeling over the metal, putting a good deal of pressure behind his hand.

It was a slow process, and took patience. The others watched, holding their lights to illuminate the operation. For several minutes the suit radios were silent, those of the more distant men cut off by the metal walls of the rooms they were searching and the three at the door prosecuting their investigation without speech. Sorrell was looking for a wall cabinet, which did credit to his imagination; such a thing seemed to him the last place to keep tools. He was doing his best to allow for the probably unorthodox ideas of the builders of the ship, reducing the problem as far as he could toward its practical roots, and hoping no physical or psychological traits of the being he never expected to meet would invalidate his answers. As Preble had said, a tool used for only one, specialized purpose logically would be kept near the place in which it was used.

The machinist turned out to be right, though not exactly as he had expected. He was still running his hands over the wall when Preble remembered a standard type of motor-control switch with which even he was familiar; and, almost without thinking, he reached out, inserted his fingers in the three holes of one of the disks, and pulled outward. A triangular block, indistinguishable in color from the rest of the disk, slid smoothly out into his hand.

The other two lights converged on it, and for a secondor two there was silence; then Sorrell chuckled. “You win, Jack,” he admitted. “I didn’t carry my own reason-ing far enough. Go ahead.”

Preble examined the block of metal. What had been the inner face was copper-colored, and bore three holes similar to those by which he had extracted it. There was only one other way to fit it into the disk again; he reserved it, with the copper face outward, and felt it slip snugly back into place. Sorrell and Stevenson did the same with the upper and lower disks, which proved to contain similar blocks. Then they stood back, wondering what happened next.

They were still waiting when Cray and Royden re-joined them. The former saw instantly what had been done to the door, and started to speak; then he took a second, and closer look, and, without saying a word, reached up, inserted three fingers in the holes in the coppery triangles of the block face, and began to unscrew the disk. It was about five inches thick, and finally came out in his hands. He stared doubtfully at it, and took a huge pair of vernier calipers from the engineer’s kit at his side and measured the plug along several diameters. It was perfectly circular, to within the limit of error of his instrument.

He looked at the others at length, and spoke with a note of bewilderment. “I could have sworn this thing was elliptical when we first examined it. The hole still is, if you’ll look.” He nodded toward the threaded opening from which the disk had come. “I saw the line where it joined the door seemed a good deal wider at the top and bottom; but I’m sure it fitted tightly all around, before.”

Sorrell and Royden nodded agreement. Evidently re-versing the inset block had, in some fashion, changed the shape of the disk. Cray tried to pull the block out again, but it resisted his efforts, and he finally gave up with a shrug. The men quickly unscrewed the other disks, and Royden leaned against the heavy door. It swung silently inward; and four of the men instantly stepped through, to swing their lights about the new compartment. Cray alone remained at the door, ‘puzzling over the hard-yet-plastic metal object. The simple is not always obvious.

Grant and McEachern, in the control room, were having trouble as well. They had approached the control cup along the catwalk, and the captain had vaulted into its center without difficulty. And he might just as well have remained outside.

The control buttons were obvious enough, though they did not project from the metal in which they were set. They occurred always in pairs — probably an “on” and “off” for each operation; and beside each pair were two little transparent disks that might have been monitor lights. All were dark. Sometimes the pairs of buttons were alone; sometimes they were in groups of any number up to eighteen or twenty. Each group was isolated from its neighbors; and they extended completely around the footwide rim of the cup, so that it was not possible to see them all at once.