Control room vision-plate unlocked.
Amazed, he read the line again, hardly believing what he read. But there it
was. That single line, written with a single purpose. Simple directions for
gaining entrance.
Crouched upon the steel plating, he felt a shiver run through his body.
Someone had etched that line in hope that someone would come. But perhaps
he was too late. The ship had an old look about it. The lines of it, the
way the ports were set into the hull, all were marks of spaceship designing
that had become obsolete centuries before.
He felt the cold chill of mystery and the utter bleakness of outer space
closing in about him. He gazed up over the bulged outline of the shell and
saw the steely glare of remote stars. Stars secure in the depth of many
light-years, jeering at him, jeering at men who held dreams of stellar
conquest.
He shook himself, trying to shake off the probing fingers of half-fear,
glanced around to locate the Space Pup, saw it slowly moving off to his
right.
Swiftly, but carefully, he made his way over the nose of the ship and up to
the vision plate.
Squatting in front of the plate, he peered down into the control cabin. But
it wasn’t a control cabin. It was a laboratory. In the tiny room which at
one time must have housed the instruments of navigation, there was now no
trace of control panel or calculator or telescopic screen. Rather, there
were work tables, piled with scientific apparatus, banks and rows of
chemical containers. All the paraphernalia of the scientist’s workshop.
The door into the living quarters, where he had seen the large oblong box
was closed. All the apparatus and the bottles in the laboratory were
carefully arranged, neatly put away, as if someone had tidied up before
they walked off and left the place.
He puzzled for a moment. That lack of rocket tubes, the indications that
the ship was centuries old, the scrawled acid-etched line by the lock, the
laboratory in the control room… what did it all add up to? He shook his
head. It didn’t make much sense.
Bracing himself against the curving steel hide of the shell, he pushed at
the vision-plate. But he could exert little effort. Lack of gravity,
inability to brace himself securely, made the task a hard one. Rising to
his feet, he stamped his heavy boots against the glass, but the plate
refused to budge.
As a last desperate effort, he might use his guns, blast his way into the
shell. But that would be long, tedious work… and there would be a certain
danger. There should be, he told himself, an easier and a safer way.
Suddenly the way came to him, but he hesitated, for there lay danger, too.
He could lie down on the plate, turn on the rocket tubes of his suit and
use his body as a battering ram, as a lever, to force the stubborn hinges.
But it would be an easy matter to turn on too much power, so much power
that his body would be pounded to a pulp against the heavy quartz.
Shrugging at the thought, he stretched flat on the plate, hands folded
under him with fingers on the tube controls. Slowly he turned the buttons.
The rockets thrust at his body, jamming him against the quartz. He snapped
the studs shut. It had seemed, for a moment, that the plate had given just
a little.
Drawing in a deep breath, he twisted the studs again. Once more his body
slammed against the plate, driven by the flaming tubes.
Suddenly the plate gave way, swung in and plunged him down into the
laboratory. Savagely he snapped the studs shut. He struck hard against the
floor, cracked his helmet soundly.
Groggily he groped his way to his feet. The thin whine of escaping
atmosphere came to his ears and unsteadily he made his way forward. Leaping
at the plate, he slammed it back into place again. It closed with a thud,
driven deep into its frame by the force of rushing air.
A chair stood beside a table and he swung around, sat down in it, still
dizzy from the fall. He shook his head to clear away the cobwebs.
There was atmosphere here. That meant that an atmosphere generator still
was operating, that the ship had developed no leaks and was still airtight.
He raised his helmet slightly. Fresh pure air swirled into his nostrils,
better air than he had inside his suit. A little highly oxygenated,
perhaps, but that was all. If the atmosphere machine had run for a long
time unattended, it might have gotten out of adjustment slightly, might be
mixing a bit too much oxygen with the air output.
He swung the helmet back and let it dangle on the hinge at the back of the
neck, gulped in great mouthfuls of the atmosphere. His head cleared
rapidly.
He looked around the room. There was little that he had not already seen. A
practical, well-equipped laboratory, but much of the equipment, he now
realized, was old.
Some of it was obsolete and that fitted in with all the rest of it.
A framed document hung above a cabinet and getting to his feet, he walked
across the room to look at it. Bending close, he read it. It was a diploma
from the College of Science at Alkatoon, Mars, one of the most outstanding
of several universities on the Red Planet. The diploma had been issued to
one Caroline Martin.
Gary read the name a second time. It seemed that he should know it. It
raised some memory in his brain, but just what it was he couldn’t say, an
elusive recognition that eluded him by the faintest margin.
He looked around the room.
Caroline Martin.
A girl who had left a diploma in this cabin, a pitiful reminder of many
years ago. He bent again and looked at the date upon the sheep-skin. It was
5976. He whistled softly. A thousand years ago!
A thousand years. And if Caroline Martin had left this diploma here a
thousand years ago, where was Caroline Martin now? What had happened to
her? Dead in what strange corner of the solar system? Dead in this very
ship?
He swung about and strode toward the door that led into the living
quarters. His hand reached out and seized the door and pushed it open. He
took one step across the threshold and then he stopped, halted in his
stride.
In the center of the room was the oblong box that he had seen from the
port. But instead of a box, it was a tank, bolted securely to the floor by
heavy steel brackets.
The tank was filled with a greenish fluid and in the fluid lay a woman, a
woman dressed in metallic robes that sparkled in the light from the single
radium bulb in the ceiling just above the tank.
Breathlessly, Gary moved closer, peered over the edge of the tank, down
through the clear green liquid into the face of the woman. Her eyes were
closed and long, curling black lashes lay against the whiteness of her
cheeks. Her forehead was high and long braids of raven hair were bound
about her head. Slim black eyebrows arched to almost meet above the
delicately modeled nose. Her mouth was a thought too large, a trace of the
patrician in the thin, red lips. Her arms were laid straight along her
sides and the metallic gown swept in flowing curves from chin to ankles.
Beside her right hand, lying in the bottom of the tank, was a hypodermic
syringe, bright and shining despite the green fluid which covered it.
Gary’s breath caught in his throat.
She looked alive and yet she couldn’t be alive. Still there was a flush of
youth and beauty in her cheeks, as if she merely slept.
Laid out as if for death and still with the lie to death in her very look.
Her face was calm, serene… and something else. Expectancy, perhaps. As if
she only waited for a thing she hoped to happen.
Caroline Martin was the name on the diploma out in the laboratory. Could
this be Caroline Martin? Could this be the girl who had graduated from the
college of science at Alkatoon ten centuries ago?
Gary shook his head uneasily.
He stepped back from the tank and as he did he saw the copper plate affixed
to its metal side. He stooped to read.
Another simple message, etched in copper… a message from the girl who lay
inside the tank.
I am not dead. I am in suspended animation. Drain the tank by opening the
valve. Use the syringe you find in the medicine cabinet.
Gary glanced across the room, saw a medicine chest on the wall above a
washbowl. He looked back at the tank and mopped his brow with his coat