THERE was a breeze. A very light breeze, a mere breath. Mark could feel
it on his cheek, just a slight chill that was pleasant. He had not felt
air moving since he had been on Mars.
“Surely, the air cannot move in here,” he thought to himself. He lifted
his eyes upward. As he expected, the lights failed before they revealed
the ceiling immensely far above. “How far?” he wondered. “A half a mile?
A mile? More?” The lights looked almost like stars, placed in the
strategic joints and balconied work areas of the monstrous iron
latticework.
The refugees from Lurton Zimbardo’s prison had been walking through the
power plant for some time--long enough to have covered at least a mile,
and probably closer to two. Though the surroundings were obviously
nothing more than the power station of the asteroid, the men were as
hushed as if they were in a cathedral. They were small figures in an
enormous place, reminded of their smallness and overwhelmed with a sense
of the numinous.
Mark sifted through his memories to a time when he was a child of about
six, and his parents had brought him to Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico.
He had stood in an immense room below ground, large enough to contain
several football fields. He had exulted then, identifying for the first
time his restlessness inside, his search for something larger than
himself, something that could fill a universe.
He spoke aloud to no one in particular. “When I was in Carlsbad Caverns
about a dozen years ago, the ranger told us that the temperature inside
the caverns was constant. This is like that.”
“Sure,” responded Joe. “This is a kind of cave. Look at the floor.
Perfectly smooth, like glass. Artificially shaped, of course, and
sealed, but it is the substance of the asteroid--no manufactured
flooring. We must be in the deepest part of the complex here. I feel
almost as if we are on the bottom of an ocean.”
“Joe! Mark!” called Zip from the front of the procession. The men
stopped walking and the two Starmen joined Zip. “Look at that,” said
Zip, with a lift of his chin.
A computer screen about four feet square was set into the side of a
huge, gray fabrication of metal, shaped like a cube at least fifteen
feet on a side and made of thick plates held together with rivets.
Dozens of pipes in a tremendous variety of sizes came into the cube and
extended away, disappearing into the dark distance. Some were the
diameter of soda straws and a few were large enough for a man to crawl
through. Most were as thick as a man’s wrist.
Mark stepped up to the screen at once. Below it was a keyboard without
markings. He pressed the button which was located in the same place on
the board as the button he had seen the midnight visitors press to
activate their screen. A few buttons lit up with tiny green lights, but
the screen remained black. He tried a few more buttons, but there was no
response.
“Nothing doing. If you’d like to take a break here, Zip, I’ll try a few
more combinations. We’re so far away from the surface of the asteroid,
I’m sure Zimbardo will never find us now.” When Mark said “Zimbardo,”
the screen flashed briefly on each syllable.
“Hey!” exclaimed the Starman. The screen flashed again. “Zimbardo!” he
said again, and the screen repeated its performance. “It’s voice
activated! And it recognizes Zimbardo’s name!” Mark tried a series of
standard commands for voice-activated computers, but got no response to
any words other than “hey” and “Zimbardo.”
“Take your time, Mark; I don’t think we’re in a hurry down here,” said
Zip. For half an hour, Mark tried voice commands and combinations of
keyboard strokes, but made no progress.
“This place is oppressive,” said one of the miners, after a long
silence. “I don’t like being closed in by darkness.”
“Right,” said another. “On the asteroids we can see for thousands of
light years, but inside here it seems as if life is swallowed. I feel as
if I’m in something’s stomach.”
“Starman Foster,” said George St. George. “I think we had better move
on. We need to come to the end of this giant room and get back to light
and living quarters of some kind. With all this excitement we’ve had, I
think the men are just about completely exfluncted.”
Zip paused a moment and looked into the distance, then nodded. “Okay,”
he agreed. “This room can’t go on forever. Let’s find the end of it.”
* * * * *
Lurton Zimbardo was in the control center of the asteroid. A small group
of his most trusted assistants stood silently by. Through the wall of
glass on his right he could see the cavern where the pirates’ spaceships
were anchored to the landing field. Five of them were out on assignment
in the Belt. As the work crew on the asteroid was able to produce
sufficient sheathing, power, and propulsion units, a space crew was
assigned the task of outfitting the asteroids that Lurton had previously
chosen.
The first, under the leadership of Crass, had returned that morning.
Another had gone out almost immediately afterward and one more would
depart the next morning. By the end of the following day, the last two
crews would be launched.
Crass’ assignment had included the destruction of the sats while he
performed his task. Now that the pirates knew how easy and fast it was
to complete the work, they did not bother to destroy the sats in the
remaining four sites. Zimbardo knew that the destruction of the sats
would alert Space Command, but the authorities would not be able to stop
the project before his ships returned. Once they learned what he was
doing they would expect that he had only one asteroid to command. The
remaining four would be a shock to them and give him, Zimbardo, a
powerful psychological edge. He would need it for his last demand. Even
his most trusted lieutenants had no inkling of the enormity of his last
ploy.
“Now in contact with G670,” uttered Zimbardo, referring to the asteroid
that Crass and his crew had rigged. The screen was lit up before him.
“Two minutes and four seconds to go from right...now!” A countdown clock
was set at his left. The pirate captain checked his figures one more
time. He had plotted the orbit of Mars, the thrust and direction of the
power units on G670, the speed of the red planet in its course and its
rotation, the anticipated acceleration of the asteroid, and the time
delay involved in making adjustments to its course. He had checked his
computations half a dozen times and then commanded three others to do
so.
Three, two, one... read the countdown clock. Zero. Zimbardo pressed the
button. He remained motionless for at least ten seconds. Then he sat
back and exhaled loudly. He had not noticed that he hadn’t been
breathing. Then he turned and smiled broadly to his audience.
“Five and a half days from now, everyone in the Earth-Moon-Mars system
will know who we are!”
* * * * *
Oritz Konig was making another report to Richard Starlight. “The Space
Command ships came onto the site and found no sign of human presence.
They quickly replaced the sats, got them activated, and then checked
data. I don’t know how to explain it, Richard, but an asteroid is
missing. Other than that, there is nothing different in the area of the
Belt that had gone dark, but obviously the pirates have done something
with an asteroid. It’s not a very big one--only about 100 yards in
diameter, maybe a little more--but it’s vanished.”
* * * * *
The Starmen and miners had been walking more than three hours, and
covered a distance of about ten miles.
“A wall,” announced Zip. “We’ve come to the end of it at last.”
“You’d think that a race that can make elevators go sideways could have
come up with a way to traverse this gymnasium quicker and easier than
walking,” grumbled Joe.
“Didn’t I hear you say that this place is great?” inquired Zip.
“It is. Back then, I meant ‘great’ like ‘magnificent’; but now it just
feels like ‘great’ as in ‘really big.’”
The company came up to the wall. There was a bank of elevators in front
of them and several sets of doors to their right. In a large open
gathering place, there were many platforms like flat beds, with rods
coming out of one end and sticking up perpendicular to the beds.
“Joe,” said Mark, investigating one of the beds. “Here’s your easier way
to travel. These things must be some sort of dolly or truck. I saw a lot
of them where we first came out of the elevator, but I didn’t recognize
them.”
“And we didn’t know how big the room is, either, so we didn’t look for
means of transportation,” added Zip.
“No wheels,” said Joe, peering at the apparatus, “and doesn’t need them.
Magnetic, probably, with this iron floor. Man,” he said with exaggerated
disgust, “we could have floated in comfort the whole length of the
place.”
“We’re here now,” said Zip, matter-of-factly. “What happens next? We’ll
see if our friends are still with us.”
The men waited for some sign of guidance, but there was only silence. No
lights were activated over an elevator. Minutes dragged on. “Try the
doors,” said Zip at last, and walked to the nearest elevator. He pressed
buttons, but nothing happened. “Go on, try the other ones,” he called
out with a wave of his hand. Some of the men went to the other elevators
and pressed buttons. Others went to the standard doors adjacent to the
elevators, but they did not open.
“Well, I guess we have to go back,” said Joe. No one laughed.
“This one’s open,” called one of St. George’s men. They all turned and
saw an open door--the tenth in a row of identical, unmarked doors along
the wall. The man didn’t go through it but waited for Zip. The leader of
the Starmen went through the portal onto a metal deck. Stairs went
upward. He began to climb, with the others following after.
Three flights up he came to another door, which opened as he set foot on
the landing. He went through it into a room outfitted as a small hangar.
Five spaceships of alien design were clamped to the floor. At the far
end of the hangar was an airlock.
Walking gingerly, Zip stepped out a little farther into the hangar. The
airlock was enormous and perfectly clear, revealing thousands of stars.
Though it had been only a few days since he had seen a starscape, now it
almost seemed as if he were perceiving the heavens for the first time. A
feeling of awe coursed through him.
“We’re almost free,” he whispered.