“I suppose so.”
“Those are orders, Morrie.”
“I understand them.”
“Morrie!”
“Aye aye, Captain!”
“Very well, sir — that’s better. Art, Morrie is in charge. Come on, Ross.”
Nothing moved on the rocket field. The dust of the bombing, with no air to hold it up, had dissipated completely. The broken air lock showed dark and still across the field; near them the sleek and mighty Wotan crouched silent and untended.
Cargraves made a circuit of the craft, pistol ready in his gloved fist, while Ross tailed him, armed with one of the Garands. Ross kept well back, according to plan.
Like the Galileo, the Wotan had but one door, on the port side just aft the conning compartment. He motioned Ross to stay back, then climbed a little metal ladder or staircase and tried the latch. To his surprise the ship was not locked — then he wondered why he was surprised. Locks were for cities.
While the pressure in the air chamber equalized, he unsnapped from his belt a flashlight he had confiscated from the Nazi jeep rocket and prepared to face whatever lay beyond the door. When the door sighed open, he dropped low and to one side, then shot his light around the compartment. Nothing . . . nobody.
The ship was empty of men from stem to stern. It was almost too much luck. Even if it had been a rest period, or even if there had been no work to do in the ship, he had expected at least a guard on watch.
However a guard on watch would mean one less pair of hands for work . . . and this was the moon, where every pair of hands counted for a hundred or a thousand on earth. Men were at a premium here; it was more likely, he concluded, that their watch was a radar, automatic and unsleeping.
Probably with a broad-band radio alarm as well, he thought, remembering how promptly their own call had been answered the very first time they had ever sent anything over the rim of their crater.
He went through a passenger compartment equipped with dozens of acceleration bunks, through a hold, and farther aft. He was looking for the power plant.
He did not find it. Instead he found a welded steel bulkhead with no door of any sort. Puzzled, he went back to the control station. What he found there puzzled him still more. The acceleration chairs were conventional enough; some of the navigational instruments were common types and all of them not too difficult to figure out; but the controls simply did not make sense.
Although this bewildered him, one point was very clear. The Nazis had not performed the nearly impossible task of building a giant space ship in a secret hide-out, any more than he and the boys had built the Galileo single-handed. In each case it had been a job of conversion plus the installation of minor equipment.
For the Wotan was one of the finest, newest, biggest ships ever to come out of Detroit!
The time was getting away from him. He had used up seven minutes in his prowl through the ship. He hurried out and rejoined Ross. “Empty,” he reported, saving the details for later; “let’s try their rat hole.” He started loping across the plain.
They had to pick their way carefully through the rubble at the mouth of the hole. Since the bomb had not been an atom bomb but simply ordinary high explosive, they were in no danger of contamination, but they were in danger of slipping, sliding, falling, into the darkness.
Presently the rubble gave way to an excellent flight of stairs leading deep into the moon. Ross flashed his torch around.
The walls, steps, and ceiling were covered with some tough lacquer, sprayed on to seal the place. The material was transparent, or nearly so, and they could see that it covered carefully fitted stonework.
“Went to a lot of trouble, didn’t they?” Ross remarked.
“Keep quiet!” answered Cargraves.
More than two hundred feet down the steep passageway ended, and they came to another door, not an air lock, but intended apparently as an air-tight safety door. It had not kept the owners safe; the blast followed by a sudden letting up of normal pressure had been too much for it. It was jammed in place but so bulged and distorted that there was room for them to squeeze through.