"Stay here for the moment. It'll look for us in the vault first."
And it should go to the storage vault first where it had been guarding
Maulbow's machine, to hunt for them there. But it might not. Gefty eased
the gun from his pocket on the far side of Kerim. Across the dark
compartment was another door. They could retreat a little farther here
if it became necessary--but not very much farther.
They waited in a silence that was complete except for their unsteady
breathing and the distant, deep pulse of the _Queen's_ throttled-down
drives. He felt Kerim trembling against him. How did Maulbow's creature
move through the airseal locks? The operating mechanisms were simple--a
dog might have been taught to use them. But a dog had paws....
There came the soft hiss of the opening lock, the faintest shimmer of
light to the right of the passage mouth he was watching through the
door. A heavy thump on the floor below the locks followed, then a hard
click as the lock closed and complete darkness returned.
The silence resumed. Seconds dragged on. Gefty's imagination pictured
the thing waiting, its great, wedge-shaped head raised as its senses
probed the dark about it for a sign of the two human beings. Then a
vague rushing noise began, growing louder as it approached the passage
mouth, crossing it, receding rapidly again to the left.
Gefty let his breath out slowly, eased the door open and stood listening
again. Abruptly, there was reflected light in the lock passage, coming
now from the left. He said in a whisper, "It's moving around in the main
hall, Kerim. We can go on the other way now, but we'll have to be fast
and keep quiet. I've thought of how we can get rid of that thing."
* * *
The cargo lock on the storage deck had two inner doors. The one which
opened into the side of the vault hall was built to allow passage of the
largest chunks of freight the _Queen_ was likely to be burdened with; it
was almost thirty feet wide and twenty high. The second door was just
large enough to let a man in a spacesuit climb in and out of the side of
the lock without using the freight door. It opened on a tiny control
cubicle from which the lock's mechanisms were operated during loading
processes.
[Illustration]
Gefty let Kerim and himself into the cubicle from one of the passages,
steered the girl through the pitch blackness of the little room to the
chair before the control panel and told her to sit down. He groped for a
moment at the side of the panel, found a knob and twisted it. There was
a faint click. A scattering of pale lights appeared suddenly on the
panel, a dark viewscreen, set at a tilt above them, reflecting their
gleam.
Gefty explained in a low voice, "Left side of that screen covers the
lock. Right one covers the big hall outside. No lights in either at the
moment, so you don't see anything. Only way the cargo door to the hall
can be opened or closed is with these switches right here. What I want
to do is get the janandra into the lock, slam the door on it and lock
down the control switches. Then we've got it trapped."
"But how are you going to get it to go in there?"
"No real problem--I'll be three jumps ahead of it. Then I duck back up
into this cubicle, and lock both doors. And it'll be inside the lock.
You have the picture now?"