Summersby stretched as tall as he could and put his mouth to the crack,
trying to breathe only what air came through from the nursery. He saw
the enormous child pass on its way to the door, and shortly the sound of
its heavy feet stopped. He felt drowsy, his eyelids flickered. He beat
his hands together, sucking in air from the opening. Villa started to
snore.
Watkins said, "I'm about done, Summersby." He was kneeling at the crack
below Summersby, and his voice was sluggish. In a few seconds he rolled
over on the straw.
When did the adults come in to clean up? Summersby didn't dare wait much
longer. He was fighting sleep with all his vigor. Possibly they wouldn't
come till morning.
He had to chance it. He forced his fingers into the gap and heaved. The
wall didn't move. Holding his breath, he propped one foot against the
adjoining wall, dug his hands as far into the breach as possible, and
hurled himself backward. The big door jolted an inch, hung, then slid
back a couple of feet. He swung around and jammed himself through the
aperture and the wall moved silently back into place; this time the
dowel was not there, and when the wall stopped, there was no crack at
the corner. Summersby must have kicked the dowel aside when he slid
through. Watkins was inside, asleep.
He breathed deeply, and the effects of the sleep gas died, so that he
was wide awake and felt very excited and eager. To analyze the reasons
for his eagerness would have killed it, and besides he was in a hurry.
He ran to the great door of the playroom, whose lintel towered twenty
feet from the floor. Hastily he tossed apparatus, boxes, toy blocks,
until he had made a pile five feet high.
Scrambling up this, the things sliding under his feet, he waved an arm
above his head in the place where he believed the electric eye beam to
be. Then the pile collapsed, and he fell into it, giving one knee a
terrific crack and skinning his knuckles. The door glided open.
The next room was deserted, and the soft bluish light was dimmer here
than in the nursery. This place was far less cluttered, containing no
more than a big yellow machine, a gigantic table, and two six-legged
chairs. There was a picture on the wall, the size of a barn's side,
which he did not stop to look at.
The opposite door was open. The third room was a dining hall, with two
tables and a number of chairs, these of metal with eight legs each.
Luckily, there was no one in it.
In the next room--all four were in a straight line, and he thought,
Either it's a long narrow house, or else it's as big as Rockefeller
Center--there were a number of gadgets, colorful and complex like the
children's toys, but of different construction. He glanced at them but
did not pause until he came to the next door.
It was closed. He presumed its opener beam would be in the same place as
that of the playroom, and looked around for something to stand on.
There seemed to be nothing small enough to move. He shoved at a couple
of things, but they wouldn't budge. The only slim possibility was a big
square brown box, set twelve feet off the floor on one of their mammoth
tables. It was of a size to accommodate half a dozen cows, but looked as
though it might be of flimsy enough materials, plastic probably, to push
off the edge, from which it would fall exactly where he needed it.
He dragged a chair over, climbed up on its seat and then onto the table.
He saw at once that the box would be immovable. There was an affair that
might be a dynamotor attached to one side, various objects sticking out
of the other, and four stacks of thick coils on top. He was turning
away, hoping to find another door in one of the first rooms, when his
eye was attracted to a square plate among the things on the right side
of the box. The plate was glass, for its surface shone under the blue
light, and he thought he saw the pin-point twinkling of stars in it.
On a hunch, he walked over to it. He knew quite a lot of astronomy and
if this happened to be a telescope, he might be able to determine their
location.
The field of the plate was full of stars, but in patterns he had never
seen. He could not understand it. It was not a painting, for the stars
twinkled. Where the blazes was the thing focused?
A huge dial beside the plate had a pointer and scores of notches, each
labeled with a couple of squiggly characters. He turned the pointer
experimentally. The screen blurred, showed a planet with rings: Saturn.
"Neat," he said to himself, and turned the pointer another notch. He got
a view of a landscape, trees of olive green and crimson, seen from
above. He tried other notches.
Finally, just as he had reminded himself that he had to hurry, he saw a
familiar globe swim onto the glass. It was Earth, with the two Americas
clearly defined.
What in hell...?
He pushed the pointer on, and was given another landscape, this time of
prosaic hue, a meadow with a cow in it. He clicked the thing another
notch and got a constellation pattern again. He pushed it back to the
cow.
He felt his heart thudding fast, too fast; and he hoped with all his
faculties that he wouldn't conk out before he had solved this riddle.
There were other dials, other pointers, a little behind the first. He
turned one slowly.
The cow grew larger until it almost filled the screen. Only when he
could see nothing but its broad placid back did he realize that he was
looking at this scene, as at the others, from _above_.
He tried a third pointer. The land whipped by beneath his gaze. He came
to a city, the buildings reaching up to him in a wonderful illusion of
depth.
Then it dawned on him what the machine was, and he gasped.
There was no use in looking for the outer door. He had found the answer
to their last problem, and he had to get back to the box with that
answer and thrash it out with all of them. There might be a salvation
for them and there might not.
Leaving the screen showing the city, he jumped down off the table, raced
back through the room and into the next, the dining hall. Still there
were no signs of any of the giants. He had crossed the threshold of the
third room when he heard a door open on his right. There was no time to
gape around; he covered thirty feet in five strides, dodged under the
hanging shelf of the strange yellow machine, like a low desk covered
with cogwheels, and ran along beneath it till he came to the extreme end
of the contrivance.
A pair of feet, either of which would have outweighed a draft horse,
went past him; he dared not lean forward to see the rest of the brute,
but it was undoubtedly an adult. It went into the playroom.
After twenty or twenty-five minutes, during which Summersby thought over
the problem and agreed with himself that he couldn't find the solution
alone, the giant came out of the playroom, crossed near his hiding
place, and went out through a door beside the huge picture. It was not
in a hurry, so he decided it had not noticed his absence from the box.
He dragged an easy chair over to the nursery door. It was just four
times the size of Summersby's Morris chair at home, and about eight
times as heavy. As he was crawling up the leg to the seat, he recalled
that he had a bad heart. If he hadn't been clinging to the plastic with
both arms, he would have shrugged.
He intercepted the beam and opened the door. Having no more than half a
minute to get through before it shut, he had to leave the chair where it
was. He hoped none of the adults would realize that its position had
changed.
The playroom was clean and neat. Likely it would remain unvisited
through the night. He went to the box and only then remembered it was
shut tight. What did the kids do when they opened it during the day? He
had seen them at it twice. They laid their hands on top of the box,
there on the left.
Hauling over enough junk to make a pair of steps, he got onto the roof
of the box. There was a bar, set into the coaming. He pressed it, leaned
over, and saw the wall slide back. A second push returned it to its shut
position. He opened it again, swung his legs over the edge, pressed the
bar once more and dropped. Snatching up a green dowel from the floor, he
jumped into the box as the door was closing. He had just time to lay the
rod across the threshold, as Adam had done, before the wall reached it
and was held.
Trying not to breathe, Summersby picked up Watkins and slung him over
his shoulder. He forced his fingers into the crack and heaved. Again he
threw his weight against the wall.
Then he was buckling at the knees, trying desperately to bring his mouth
next to the opening, but not quite making it.
* * * * *
"Describe it again," said Watkins. "Give me all the details you can
think of."
As Summersby went over what he remembered of the brown machine, Watkins
tried to envisage it. A tough job, and he might not be able to handle
it. To reverse a thing like that--when there'd be at least one or two
principles he'd never heard of--well, that would be the job of a
lifetime.
"How do you know that it's the instrument that brought us here?" he
asked.
"It must be." Summersby looked intent, almost eager. "It has those dials
that focus it almost pin-point on any planet they want; at least, I saw
quite a few planets, from a distance and close up. I saw a cow and a
city on Earth. Then there's the big brown box. It's hollow--the door was
half open. If they bring things, living things, from other planets, they
need a receiving station large enough to take 'em. The box. It's
logical."
"It sure is." Adam whistled. "So we're on another planet. That was
plain, if we'd thought about it seriously. No place on Earth could hide
a race like this. Not with all the factories they must have to produce
the toys and what you saw out there."
"Why couldn't we be inside the Earth?" asked Mrs. Full stridently.