“Sorry, Ross; but you’ve got to stay behind and stand guard over Stinky. He might know more about this ship than he admits. I would hate to come up that staircase and find the ship missing. Stand guard over him. Tell him that if he moves a muscle you’ll slug him. And mean it.”
“Okay. I hope he does move. How long will you be gone?”
“If we can’t find it in two hours we’ll come back.”
Cargraves searched the officers’ room first, as it seemed the most likely place. He did not find it, but he did find that some of the Nazis appeared to have some peculiar and unpleasant tastes in books and pictures. The barrack room he took next. It was as depressing a place as it had been earlier, but he was prepared for it. Art he had assigned to the radio and radar room and Morrie to the other spaces; there seemed to be no reason for any one but himself to have to touch the bloating corpses.
He drew a blank in the barrack room. Coming out, he heard Art’s voice in his phones. “Hey, Uncle, look what I’ve found!”
“What is it?,” he said, and Morrie’s voice cut in at once.
“Found the manual, Art?”
“No, but look!” They converged in the central hail. ‘It’ was a Graflex camera, complete with flash gun. “There is a complete darkroom off the radio room. I found it there. How about it, Uncle? Pictures?”
“Well, all right. Morrie, you go along — it may be your only chance to see the ruins. Thirty minutes. Don’t go very far, don’t bust your necks, don’t take any chances, and be back on time, or I’ll be after you with a Flit gun.” He watched them go regretfully, more than a little tempted to play hookey himself. If he had not been consumed with the urgency of his present responsibilities — But he was. He forced himself to resume the dreary search.
It was all to no good. If there was an instruction manual in existence he had to admit that he did not know how to find it. But he was still searching when the boys returned.
He glanced at his watch. “Forty minutes,” he said. “That’s more prompt than I thought you would be; I expected to have to go look for you. What did you find? Get any good pictures?”
“Pictures? Did we get pictures! Wait till you see!”
“I never saw anything like it, Doc,” Morrie stated impressively. “The place is a city. It goes down and down. Great big arched halls, hundreds of feet across, corridors running every which way, rooms, balconies — I can’t begin to describe it.”
“Then don’t try. Write up full notes on what you saw as soon as we get back.”
“Doc, this thing’s tremendous!”
“I realize it. But it’s so big I’m not even going to try to comprehend it, not yet. We’ve got our work cut out for us just to get out of here alive. Art, what did you find in the radio room? Anything you can use to raise earth?”
“Well, Uncle, that’s hard to say, but the stuff doesn’t look promising.”
“Are you sure? We know that they were in communication — at least according to our nasty-nice boy friend.”
Art shook his head. “I thought you said they received from earth. I found their equipment for that but I couldn’t test it out because I couldn’t get the earphones inside my suit. But I don’t see how they could send to earth.”
“Why not? They need two-way transmission.”
“Maybe they need it but they can’t afford to use it. Look, Uncle, they can beam towards the moon from their base on earth — that’s all right; nobody gets it but them. But if the Nazis on this end try to beam back, they can’t select some exact spot on earth. At that distance the beam would fan out until it covered too much territory — it would be like a broadcast.”
“Oh!” said Cargraves, “I begin to see. Chalk up one for yourself, Art; I should have thought of that. No matter what sort of a code they used, if people started picking up radio from the direction of the moon, the cat would be out of the bag.”