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being could not survive long in such environment without a suit.
Mechanically, they checked intercom equipment with each other and read
off meter indications of air temperatures and pressures. Then they marched out
to the apron in front of the shop.
Nancy was back against the wall of the building with the group of
mechanics, technicians and engineers. Glenn wished he had insisted on her
leaving. But it was too late now and he couldn't have made her go anyway.
Sometimes there were accidents, Glenn reflected. His head bent back,
looking up at that great glistening piston sliding carefully out of the sky.
Sometimes a tractor slipped and a hull toppled. Sometimes a power plant...
There was the force of hydrogen bombs locked within that alien hull.
But it didn't do any good to think of these things. Ordinarily he didn't. It
was just that he wished Nancy was home.
He could see the great landing vanes oscillating slowly. Their lower
edges were less than twenty meters above the field now and the tractor
operators were jockeying carefully over that target of light. The gunmetal
sheen of the vessel seemed to swell in frightening proportions as it inched
downward. Glenn considered the landing apron. There was six feet of reinforced
concrete overlaying a massive rock foundation but the entire mass of the ship
would be focused upon the three points where the landing vanes touched.
The thing was at least five hundred meters high, he thought, and a
fifth that in diameter. So slowly was it descending that there was a moment's
illusion of its hanging suspended and drawing the Earth up to it by the great
gravity of its mass.
Then abruptly there came a subdued sound in the Earth like the far-off
whoom of an immense bomb. The stranger had touched.
--------
*CHAPTER III*
Said Glenn, "Let's go." His voice sounded harsh to his own ears as if
he had broken a spell.
He shouldered the pack straps of the cyberlogue equipment and led the
way toward the ship. There was no sign yet of an entrance but he knew where it
would be found. He had glimpsed a ladder against the expanse of one of the
vanes. Its rungs looked as small as matchwood from a distance but as the men
approached, it was seen that the span of the rungs was almost right for a man.
That was good. It meant beings that climbed and walked like humans. It
could have been much different. Some strangers were so grotesquely
proportioned that it was virtually impossible for a man to work within their
ships.
Glenn put a gloved hand to the first rung which was at head height. The
cyberlogue heavy on his back, he swung himself up, hand over hand, then
started climbing. One by one Prentiss, Gibbs, and Martin followed. The
searchlight caught their transparent helmets and set them glowing. To the
hundreds of watchers it looked as if a crazily disjointed glowworm were
inching its way up that massive vane.
Glenn paused for breath when he reached the level of the shop roof
twenty meters above the floor. The vane had scarcely begun to taper and the
reaction ports between the junction of the three vanes was that much farther
above him.
He climbed again at a breath-conserving pace. His eyes scanned the
surface of the meteor-pocked metal. None of the pocks was more than a
millimeter deep. The stuff was good, he thought in admiration. As good as any
in the Galaxies of the Council.
The end of the ladder appeared and there a deeper shadow yawned in the
dark metal. The door of the airlock had been swung inward.
His heart beat faster. He couldn't help it. It was like when he was a
kid and his father took him down to the Navy yard for the first time to see a
ship from outside the home Galaxy. The scope of vast distance separating the
creatures of the universe, the power of their minds to bridge such space...
Every time it was the same. It made his throat ache with awe.
How far had this ship come? The light of its star, now reaching Earth,
had started across space before sentient man appeared on this planet. But the
stranger had outstripped the light of its own sun several millionfold.
Now they were here and dependent upon man for succor. Sick, they had
said, and their ship in disrepair..
Glenn hoisted himself into the lock with the assistance of handrails.
He turned and helped his companions as they appeared above the level of the
lock floor. Lights glowed in the ceiling of the chamber.
They turned and surveyed the surrounding walls in silence. Glenn
wondered how they felt at such a moment as this. Prentiss, he knew, regarded
the ship as an entity by itself. He admired or criticized a mechanism without
regard to the minds of the creators. For him there existed only
science-without the scientist.
Martin was a gadgeteer-a very good one or he would not be heading up
the Analysis crew. He was fascinated by mechanisms, absorbed in their
cleverness. It mattered not at all whether they were the optimum or what kind
of mind devised them.
Gibbs was of wholly different cast. He came closest to understanding
the things Glenn felt as he walked the deck of this stranger. But Gibbs had no [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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