The COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works, page 111
"Unless this gadget belongs to things small enough to use a lock of any size down to that of a penny."
"That's a chance we'll consider when all else fails." Lighting his pipe, Bradley puffed at it energetically. "We'll get inside this thing somehow—providing nobody stops us."
"They'll stop us, maybe." Bradley pointed his pipe-stem at the ship. "If they're alive— which I seriously doubt—they may be determined not to come out and equally determined not to let us in. Terrestrial atmosphere may be poisonous to them, or we may be unbearably repulsive to their alien minds. Or perhaps they're not even interested in us—they've landed for peculiar reasons of their own and are quietly biding their time to take off again."
"You think up the damnedest things," said Hume.
"I can do better if you enjoy having your back hairs raised." Bradley calmly sucked his pipe, spurted a thin stream of smoke. "This object gives me the same feeling you get when you knock at the door of an empty house. A small voice within you whispers, 'There's nobody here.' Somehow, you know you won't get an answer."
"Yes, I've experienced that feeling."
"So," Bradley continued, "we must also consider the possibility that the crew got out. They beat us to the draw, vanished on the very night of their arrival, and are now proceeding with whatever alien plan first brought them here."
"Hell's bells!" said Hume. "Let's get some help and get in by brute force." He made for the car, his companion following. "I don't like all these lurid possibilities. It's high time we got wise to whatever's going on!"
A HIGH sun poured its rays over the vessel which still lay motionless on the sward of Douglas Head. Around it, under Bradley's direction, half a dozen workers poked and prodded. A microphone was attached to the ship's side; its amplifier stood on the grass beneath, and from it a thin cord ran to the earphones clamped over Bradley's ears.
Squawking querulously, a seagull alighted on the vessel, looked around with sharp, beady eyes, preened itself, squawked again and flew off as a man appeared at the head of a ladder and hoisted himself to the top. A couple of hundred feet below, the sea lapped and gurgled its amusement at this excitement over a mystery younger and pettier than some its own waters concealed. Its laughter boosted foamy sprays, and its salty smell was strong in the air.
After a while Ronald Hume came over and said, "How's progress?"
"Rotten!" Bradley told him. "The skin is lousy with points."
"Bang goes that theory," sighed Hume.
"Oh, we're not beaten yet. The door, if any, may be on the bottom, or what happens to be the bottom at present. We've no reason to suppose the vessel landed right way up. We'll have to roll it over to expose its other part."
"What umpteen tons of it? And with no grips on its surfaces."
"We'll make grips. We'll ram some steel pegs into some of those holes in the tail. We'll borrow a steam-wagon, hitch it to the pegs and to a loop over the nose, get a dozen men on the farthest side with the longest bars we can find. They'll lever as the wagon pulls, and although their weight won't be much, it'll do if we can turn the ship the few degrees necessary to expose the underside."
The most time-wasting item in this procedure proved to be the making of the loop, which had to be of heavy steel cable and had also to be spliced. But it was impossible to dispense with it—without it their efforts might do no more than to turn the vessel on its vertical axis, leaving the bottom still out of reach.
Five notes boomed from the Jubilee Clock across the Lake, and as if it were a signal the steam-wagon puffed and took the strain. The wagon faced directly downhill at a steep angle, with the cliff-edge uncomfortably near and the jeering sea two hundred feet below. If the cables snapped it would take the driver all he knew to avoid disaster. If they held, but he heaved a little too far, the vessel might roll completely out of its furrow taking wagon and cables with it to the ocean bed. It was a ticklish job. Driver and spectators alike exuded beads of perspiration.
"Now!" yelled Bradley.
The wagon went whoosh. Cables creaked as they strained, levers prised at the vessel's opposite side. The great bulk shuddered, climbed ponderously side-wise a full foot up the wall of its furrow, then slipped back. But as it slipped, it turned a couple of degrees.
"Again!" shouted Bradley.
Another whoosh came from the wagon and sent frightened gulls wheeling towards the clouds. Without mounting its furrow this time, the ship turned another couple of degrees and two top pegs sprang from their holes in the tail. Men picked up the pegs, hammered them into fresh holes angled farther back, hooked on the cable-eyes again. Whoosh! The ship reeled, turned, hesitated, turned again. Four more pegs sprang out and were hammered back.
"Once more and we'll do it."
Another cautious but powerful heave. The whole vessel edged around, and a cable attached to one of the pegs snapped with a loud twang. The broken end whipped outward, its strands splayed like a sweep's brush. More dew damped the driver's forehead.
"That's enough," said Bradley.
Many hands unhitched the cables, piled them on to the wagon. Dexterously, the driver swung his machine in a swift left-hand turn which made it tilt precariously on the slope. In the same rush he got it off the slope and on to the road, reaching the level with unconcealed relief. As he made off, he pondered the futility of anti-litter laws as applied to Douglas Head.
Bradley donned the earphones, while Hume tested the newly revealed portion of the ship's hull. Due to the short arc of turn, this part was in deep shadow and Hume had to check it with a torch. With the beam focussed on the worn, scratched metal, he went to and fro while Bradley listened to the responding clicks. He finished, returned to the listener.
"Does she still click, Phil?"
"Yes."
"Ah, well, we can kiss that idea goodbye. What we really need is a crack cracksman—though I suppose he'd want knobs and dials to twiddle, and there just aren't any." He sniffed his disgust. "What'll we try next, oxy-acetylene or nitroglycerine."
"THERE WAS something different about those clicks, Ron," said Bradley slowly. "You did four trips along that portion and the effect was the same each time." He paused, mused a moment. "The count was irregular."
"In what way?"
"Look," pursued Bradley. "Each time we've checked those points the resulting clicks have sounded with monotonous regularity, which denotes even spacing. But this time there was a limp in the middle. I counted like this: fourteen, fifteen, sixteen-seventeen, eighteen-nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, and so on."
Hume grasped it immediately. "I don't think my pace varied, and in any event it's not credible that an unwitting variation would occur four times in precisely the same spot. Was there an abnormal gap between seventeen and eighteen? Yes. Then that shows they've been staggered with respect to corresponding points around the rest of the vessel. They've been spaced farther away from each other and nearer to their adjacent numbers."
"You've hit it." Bradley was smiling.
"A gap!" exclaimed Hume, his voice rising with excitement. "The promised land!" He turned to a moody little man who stood nearby, his lever still in his hand, his mouth agape. "We've found it, Sadface. Prepare to welcome the pythons from Pluto!"
Blinking, Sadface dropped his lever, shuffled backward. He spoke in a dull monotone.
"I'm not interested, see? I've got a wife and kids, see? Besides I'm late for work already." His backward shuffle speeded up; he turned, walked slowly, then rapidly. "I've got to get home."
Grinning, they let him go. Hume did two more trips along the ship's side while Bradley listened. They chalkmarked the points at which clicks number seventeen and eighteen responded. Then they stood away from the side and studied the result. The chalk marks made two lines about thirty inches apart running for three feet around the ship's circumference. Above and below these points the clicks sounded evenly, but in between they were staggered to the limits of the chalk.
"Obviously it's somewhere within those markings," said Bradley. "And the microphone detects a hollowness in that area." He picked up a torch.
"We'll have a look."
Following the torch's bright beam, his keen eyes examined the rough metal surface while his eyebrows drew together in concentration. The very corrosion of the metal made its surface difficult to analyze; it was badly scored to varying depths in straight lines running fore and aft. Small flaky patches and some minute pitting added to the difficulty of examination. The fitment of the door was so masterly, and the surrounding surface so worn and spoiled, that Bradley still felt some scepticism when eventually his eyes discovered what appeared to be a thin straight line, as fine as a spider's thread, running along the circumference just inside the right-hand line of chalk.
Whatever had caused the longitudinal wear and tear upon the metal fabric had also driven thin slivers of metal across the line, breaking it at frequent intervals and, in two places, obscuring it for several inches. So fine and elusive was the line that neither man felt certain of its actuality. On a highly polished surface it would have been none too easy to perceive; amid this wear and corrosion its existence became fragmentary.
"Looks as if there's a line," confirmed Hume, when the other drew his attention to it. "Or is it just my fancy?" He stared hard. "Can't be certain. You know how easy it is to imagine lines when you're looking for them—hence all the arguments about canals on Mars."
"I'm pretty sure it's there," asserted Bradley. "We'll try exposing it by grinding the surface and clearing away the obliterations. A fine carborundum cutter would get rid of the smudges. Let's nip into town and see what we can dig up."
Using the car, they were back within an hour with the necessary equipment, and settled down to the task. The dull lead shell proved hard and tough; the electrically-driven cutter spun against it with a shrill, nerve-tightening scream. A couple of guards hung about and watched progress.
"Truth," commented Hume, as he relieved Bradley by taking a turn at the cutter, "is said to be stranger than fiction." He sounded slightly bitter. "In all such events as this, fiction's spacecraft opens their own doors, and people walk out of them and into them as easily as they go to church. But here we are with a real, genuine space-ship on our hands, and after several weeks we still know nothing about it and we're still sweating ourselves dry trying to get into it."
"We are getting into it, even if gradually," Bradley pointed out.
"High time, too!" The note of the spinning carborundum sank a little. Hume drew the cutter farther up and its tone rose to its original pitch. "It strikes me that this object is a cosmic Marie Celeste. I'm not even sure it came out of space. What if it came out of time? Mightn't it have emerged from unknown centuries with a full crew still in a state of suspended animation, still waiting for us to wake them up?"
"Oh, undoubtedly," Bradley responded gravely. "And its captain will prove to be Ann Sheridan reclining peacefully on a purple couch. You can be Prince Charming."
"Shut up!" snapped Hume. Then: "That's about the end." He removed the whirling carborundum, switched off its motor.
BOTH MEN gazed at the clear, sharp line now running down the ship's side. The line was an eighth of an inch wide, trough-shaped but shallow, and there almost in its center ran that other more elusive line they had been seeking. Their gaze followed it upward and downward, discovered where its ends right-angled and vanished into the all-concealing scores.
Switching on once more, they ran the wheel along the horizontal plane, found the line again right-angling at a point near the opposite chalk-marks. The wheel followed along a track parallel with the first, thus completing a large rectangle in the vessel's side. The thread of the door could now be followed all the way round the oblong rut.
"Rectangular," Bradley mused. "That simplifies matters."
"How?"
"I'd expected it to be circular. In that case we'd have been faced with something that might be hinged at any point around its perimeter, or might be an external plug locked in position, or an internal plug similarly locked, or an internal or external screw with a right-hand or left-hand thread. And that would mean that we wouldn't know whether the door hinged inward or outward, whether it pushed in or pulled straight out, whether it screwed inward or outward, or which way it revolved along its worm. Being rectangular, the screw problem is eliminated."
"Whichever way it's fixed, it's certain to be fastened on the inside." Hume looked half hopefully, half despondently at the oblong, somewhat as Alice must have surveyed the door to Wonderland. "If it's as thick and strong as the shell certainly is, we've got a deuce of a job on our hands. It'll be like trying to bust into one of the vaults of the Bank of England."
Turning his back to the ship, Bradley put his broad shoulders against the top of the rectangle, dug his heels into the turf and heaved mightily. He heaved again, the veins swelling in his neck with the intensity of his effort. Nothing happened. Shifting his shoulders to one side of the lock, he tried anew. No result.
"Do you expect to open it that way?" Hume was incredulous.
"No! I'm trying to feel where it gives."
Joining Bradley, with his shoulders against the opposite side of the oblong, Hume went red in the face as he strove to thrust the ship clean of its furrow. The door resisted. Both men settled lower, got their backs to the bottom rim, their heads bent forward under the vessel's curve. Together they shoved. Something emitted a faint squeak.
The sound was very low and brief, but neither had any doubt that it had come from the door. They exchanged a glance, thrust violently again at the bottom rim, and again the squeak sounded. Scrambling outward, they persuaded two of the guards to take their places and heave. The guards got into position, took a good heel-purchase in the turf and thrust energetically. Bradley watched the small section of line visible between their shoulders.
"Damn it!" he said. "The thing's so fine that you can't tell whether it widens or not. The amount of give is microscopic."
"I am reminded of the burglar who spent six hours trying to pick a safe," Hume observed. "Then, as he was about to give it up in disgust, he discovered that it had never been locked." He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "I think that door is not so much locked as stuck or jammed. A good bash in the right place might do the trick. And if it isn't locked it'll suit one of your theories, Phil."
"Which one?"
"That the crew had already skedaddled, leaving the ship empty."
"We'll see." Bradley motioned the guard to get away from the door. He studied the defiant oblong while he pondered the problem. "The thing'll open all right, providing we can bring enough pressure to bear along the line of its lowest rim. A tree-trunk as a battering-ram might do it, but it's impossible to land the blows at that low angle."
"We could get the wagon and cables on the job again. We could turn the ship until the door is upright and then wallop it to our heart's content."
"No; we don't want to take a further risk of rolling it into the sea." He looked lugubriously down the grassy slope. "They could have picked a thousand better places for a landing. It's as bad as the crest of Snowden. But look, Ron, it's a million to one that the door will give under the pressure of the vessel's own weight, eh."
"Pretty certain," agreed Hume.
"All right. Then we'll dig a notch in the ground just in front of the door, with the farther side of it at an angle to face the lower rim. We'll bed a heavy steel sheet in that side and use it as a base for some powerful jacks—ship's jacks or lorry jacks or whatever we can borrow. If we run the jacks between the steel plate and that bottom rim, and screw them up with a tommy-bar, something'll just have to give. If the jacks don't crack up they'll either bury the steel plate, lift the entire ship or force open that door—and the door is the weakest spot."
THE CAR soon brought the extra equipment. By now the sun lay low over the horizon. The sea was calm and a darker blue save for a wide, soapy wake left by an outbound steamer. Sightseeing families with their querulous children had gone long since; in their place approaching twilight enticed courting couples who paused momentarily and stared idly at the ship.
Bored by inactivity, two of the guards volunteered to do the spadework, and under Bradley's direction set to with considerable vim. A V-shaped trench was dug and a steel plate embedded on one side of it. Four large jacks were positioned with their bases on the plate and their thrust-caps jammed against the bottom of the door of the vessel. Again the door squeaked as the jacks turned and built up pressure on the rim. Turn-squeak, turn-squeak, turn-squeak.
Pausing a moment, Bradley stood with tommy-bar in hand and examined the bottom crack. "It's widening, Ron!" He resumed his task at the jacks.
Gradually the door opened, protesting with every fraction of an inch it was compelled to move. A fever of excitement gripped the men as the gap in the shell widened, and they drove the jacks with eager haste. Eventually the rim had sunk a full four inches, revealing the complete thickness of the vessel's hull. Slowly it moved into the darkness of the interior, then emitted a harsh grinding sound as of strained and breaking mechanism. The grinding ended in a loud metallic crack, the door swung loose and the jacks fell over.
Nobody bothered to pick up the jacks, but all waited a moment. Hume stood, with tommy-bar firmly held, wondering what uncouth thing might emerge from the vessel's bowels roaring vengeance for the disturbing of its privacy. But nothing came out; not even a strange-smelling waft of alien atmosphere. Behind them, the sea slobbered and chuckled.
Bradley pushed at the freely swinging door, got it open, put his head and shoulders inside. Then he came out, looked at his watch and at the darkening sky.
"It's as black as the Pit in there, and pretty soon it'll be dark up here too. But I don't feel inclined to give up just because night is falling."
"Not on your life!" agreed Hume.
"O.K. Yet I doubt if our torches will last out, so we'll get a couple of inspection lamps and have a good look inside this thing."
Without any difficulty they obtained a pair of caged-in bulbs fed by cables running back to the hotel. It was now nightfall, and the sea had merged itself into the general gloom, but the lights of Douglas made a great crescent of glowing color sweeping to Onchan three miles to the north. Somehow, the news that the space-vessel was open had spread around already. Cars made a procession of light around the Lake and up the road to the Head. They parked in the hotel's drive, their headlamps focussed on the nearby ship.
