By ten a.m. they had eaten breakfast, and Carlsen had chosen the three men who would accompany him into the derelict. He was taking Craigie, Ives and Murchison, the second engineer. Murchison was a man of immense physique; somehow it gave Carlsen a sense of comfort to know he would be along.
Dabrowsky loaded the mini-camera with film for two hours’ shooting. He filmed the men climbing into their spacesuits, then asked each of them to describe his feelings; he was already thinking in terms of television newsreels.
Steinberg, a tall young Jew from Brooklyn, looked ill and melancholy. Carlsen wondered if he was upset at not being included in the boarding party. He said: “How you feeling, Dave?”
“Okay,” Steinberg said. When Carlsen raised his eyebrows, he said: “I’ve got a creepy feeling. I don’t like this. There’s something creepy about that wreck.”
Carlsen’s heart sank; he recalled that Steinberg had experienced a similar premonition just before the Hermes almost came to disaster on the asteroid Hidalgo; on that occasion, an apparently solid surface had collapsed, damaging the ship’s landing gear and injuring Dixon, the geologist. Dixon had died two days later. Carlsen suppressed the misgiving.
“We all feel that way. Look at the damn thing. Frankenstein’s castle. . .”
Dabrowsky said: “Olof, you want to say a few words?”
Carlsen shrugged. He disliked the public relations aspect of exploration, but he knew it was part of the job. He sat on the stool in front of the camera. His mind immediately filled with commonplaces; he knew they were clichés, but could think of nothing else. To encourage him, Dabrowsky said: “How’s it feel to. . . er –”
“Well. . . ah. . . we don’t know what we’re going to find in there. We don’t know a damn thing about it. Apparently. . . Professor Skeat at Mount Palomar points out that — that it’s strange no one ever saw this thing before. After all, it’s pretty big, fifty miles long. Astronomers have detected asteroid fragments two miles long by photo-comparators. The explanation may be its — colour. It’s an exceptionally dull sort of grey that doesn’t seem to reflect much light. So. . . er. . .” He lost the thread.
Dabrowsky prompted: “Do you feel excited?”
“Well, yes, of course I feel excited.” It was untrue; he was always calm and matter-of-fact when faced with action. “This could be our first real contact with life in other galaxies. On the other hand, this craft could be old, very old, and it’s –”
“How old?”
“How the hell do I know? But to judge by the condition of the hull, it could be anything from ten thousand to. . . I dunno, ten million.”
“Ten million?”
Carlsen said irritably: “For Christ’s sake, turn that thing off. This isn’t a fucking film studio.”
“Sorry, Skip.”
Carlsen patted his shoulder. “It’s not your fault, Joe. It’s just that I hate all this. . . posing.” He turned to the others. “Come on. Let’s move.”
He was the first into the airlock; for the sake of safety they would go one by one. The powerful magnets in the soles of his shoes produced an illusion of gravity. When he looked down at the chasm below he felt dizzy. He pushed himself very gently out of the hatch, then slammed it behind him. In the vacuum, it made no sound. With a push of his hand, he propelled himself across the five-foot gap and in through the jagged hole. The camera was slung across his shoulder. The searchlight he carried was no bigger than a large torch, but its atom-powered batteries could send a beam for several miles.
The floor was about fifteen feet below him. It was made of metal; but when he landed on it, he bounced six feet into the air. Clearly, it was nonmagnetic. He floated down gently, head-first, and landed as lightly as a balloon. He sat on the floor and shone the torch towards the opening, as a signal that all was well. Then he looked around.
For a moment he had an illusion that he was in London or New York. Then he saw that the vast, towering structures that had reminded him of skyscrapers were in fact giant columns that stretched from floor to ceiling. The scale was breathtaking. The nearest column, a hundred yards away, could have been the size of the Empire State Building; he guessed its height at well over a thousand feet. It was circular in shape, and fluted; the top, he could see, spread out like the branches of a tree. He shone the beam along the hall. It was like looking down the aisles of a giant cathedral, or into some enchanted forest. The floor and the columns were the colour of frosted silver, with a hint of green. The wall beside him stretched up without any visible curve for a quarter of a mile. It was covered with strange coloured shapes and patterns. He backed up gently towards the nearest column — in spite of his lightness, violent collisions could damage the spacesuit — then propelled himself into the air. He widened the beam of light so that it covered an area of twenty or thirty yards. His mind had become numb to astonishment, or he might have called out.
Craigie’s voice said: “Everything all right, Skip?”
“Yes. This is a fantastic place. Like a huge cathedral, with great columns. And the wall’s covered with pictures.”
“What kind of pictures?”
Yes, what kind of pictures? How could he describe them? They were not abstract; they were of something; that was clear. But what? He was reminded of lying in a wood as a child, surrounded by bluebells, and the long whitish-green stems of the bluebells vanishing into the brown earth. These pictures could have been of some kind of tropical forest with strange vegetation, or perhaps of an underwater forest of weeds and tendrils. The colours were blues, greens, white and silver. There was a haunting complexity about it. Carlsen had no doubt he was looking at great art.
Other torches stabbed the darkness. The other three floated down gently, propelling themselves as if swimming under water. Murchison floated up to him, and drove him fifty feet further along with his weight.
“What do you make of it, Skip? Do you think they were giants?”
He shook his head, then remembered that Murchison could not see his face. “I don’t even want to guess, at this stage.” He spoke to the others. “Let’s keep together. I want to investigate the far end.” With the camera running, he moved gently down the hall. To the right, between the columns, he could see something that looked like a huge staircase. He kept up a running commentary for the benefit of those back in the Hermes, at the same time aware that his words conveyed nothing of this mind-staggering scale of construction.
A quarter of a mile further on, they passed an immense corridor leading off towards the centre of the ship; its roof was vaulted like a mediaeval arch. Everything about these surroundings was at once alien and curiously familiar. He heard himself telling Craigie: “If earthmen had built this, they’d have made it all look mechanical — square columns with rivets. Whatever creatures built this had a sense of beauty.” Far in the air, on the left-hand wall, there was a circular grid that reminded him of a stained-glass window. He floated towards it. At close quarters, he could see that it was functional. It was a hundred feet high and five feet thick, and the holes in the grid were several yards wide. Carlsen alighted in one of these and shone the searchlight beyond. The camera, strapped to his chest now, was working automatically, recording everything he saw.
He said: “Christ.”
“What is it?”
The space beyond had the appearance of a dream landscape. Monstrous flights of stairs stretched up into the darkness and down into the depths of the ship. There were catwalks between, and curved galleries whose architecture made him think of swallows’ wings. Beyond these, stretching upwards and farther into the blackness, more stairs and galleries and catwalks. When Craigie’s voice said: “Are you all right?” he realised he had not spoken for several minutes. He felt dazed and overpowered, and in some way deeply disturbed. The place had the quality of a nightmare.
“I’m all right, but I can’t describe it. You’ll have to see it for yourself.” He launched himself outward, but the immensity made him feel weary.
Ives said: “But what purpose could it serve?”
“I don’t know that it serves a purpose.”
“What?”
“I mean a practical purpose. Perhaps it’s like a painting or a symphony — intended to produce an effect on the emotions. Or perhaps it’s a map of some kind.”
“A what?” Dabrowsky sounded incredulous.
“A map. . . of the inside of the mind. You’d have to see it to understand.”