"It's a good idea, Hugh," Jim commented. "We shouldn't stir things up while we've got a war to attend to."
"Let me get this straight," Hugh persisted. "You mean this is a temporary policy?"
"You could put it that way."
"Well, all right," Hugh conceded. "But wait -- Ertz and I need to train assistants at once."
"Very well. Nominate them to me and I'll pass on them. Whom do you have in mind?"
Hugh thought. He did not actually need assistance himself; although the Control Room contained acceleration chairs for half a dozen, one man, seated in the chief astrogator's chair, could pilot the Ship. The same applied to Ertz in the Main Drive station, save in one respect. "How about Ertz? He needs porters to move mass to the Main Drive."
"Let him. I'll sign the writing. See that he uses porters from the former muties; but no one goes to the Control Room save those who have been there before." Narby turned and left with an air of dismissal.
Hugh watched him leave, then said, "I don't like this, Joe-Jim."
"Why not?" Jim asked. "It's reasonable."
"Perhaps it is. But ... well, damn it! It seems to me, somehow, that truth ought to be free to anyone, any time!" He threw up his hands in a gesture of baffled exasperation.
Joe-Jim looked at him oddly. "What a curious idea," said Joe.
"Yeah, I know. It's not common sense, but it seems like it ought to be. Oh, well, forget it! That's not what I came to see you about."
"What's on your mind, Bud?"
"How do we ... Look, we finish the Trip, see? We've got the Ship touching a planet, like this--" He brought his two fists together.
"Yes. Go on."
"Well, when that's done, how do we get out of the Ship?"
The twins looked confused, started to argue between themselves. Finally Joe interrupted his brother. "Wait a bit, Jim. Let's be logical about this. It was intended for us to get out; that implies a door, doesn't it?"
"Yeah. Sure."
"There's no door up here. It must be down in high weight."
"But it isn't," objected Hugh. "All that country is known. There isn't any door. It has to be up in mutie country."
"In that case," Joe continued, "it should be either all the way forward, or all the way aft, otherwise it would not go anywhere. It isn't aft. There's nothing back of Main Drive but solid bulkheads. It would need to be forward."
"That's silly," Jim commented. "There's the Control Room and the Captain's veranda. That's all."
"Oh, yeah? How about the locked compartments?"
"Those aren't doors, not to the Outside anyway. Just bulkheads abaft the Control Room."
"No, stupid, but they might lead to doors."
"Stupid, eh? Even so, how are you going to open them; answer me that, bright boy?"
"What," demanded Hugh, "are the 'locked compartments'?"
"Don't you know? There are seven doors, spaced on the main shaft in the same bulkhead as the door to Main Control Room. We've never been able to open them."
"Well, maybe that's what we're looking for. Let's see!"
"It's a waste of time," Jim insisted. But they went.
Bobo was taken along to try his monstrous strength on the doors. But even his knotted swollen muscles couldn't budge the levers which appeared to be intended to actuate the doors. "Well?" Jim sneered to his brother. "You see?"
Joe shrugged. "O.K., you win. Let's go down."
"Wait a little," Hugh pleaded. "The second door back the handle seemed to turn a little. Let's try it again."
"I'm afraid it's useless," Jim commented. But Joe said, "Oh, all right, as long as we're here."
Bobo tried again, wedging his shoulder under the lever and pushing from his knees. The lever gave suddenly, but the door did not open. "He's broken it," Joe announced.
"Yeah," Hugh acknowledged. "I guess that's that." He placed his hand against the door. It swung open easily.
The door did not lead to outer space, which was well for the three, for nothing in their experience warned them against the peril of the outer vacuum. Instead a very short and narrow vestibule led them to another door which was just barely ajar. The door stuck on its hinges, but the fact that it was slightly ajar prevented it from binding anywhere else. Perhaps the last man to use it left it so as a precaution against the metal surfaces freezing together, but no one would ever know.
Bobo's uncouth strength opened it easily. Another door lay six feet beyond. "I don't understand this," complained Jim as Bobo strained at the third door. "What's the sense in an endless series of doors?"
"Wait and find out," advised his brother.
Beyond the third door lay, not another door, but an apartment, a group of compartments, odd ones, small, crowded together and of unusual shapes. Bobo shot on. ahead and explored the place, knife in teeth, his ugly body almost graceful in flight. Hugh and Joe-Jim proceeded more slowly, their eyes caught by the strangeness Of the place.
Bobo returned, killed his momentum skillfully against a bulkhead, took his blade from his teeth, and reported, "No door. No more door any place. Bobo look."
"There has to be," Hugh insisted, irritated at the dwarf for demolishing his hopes.
The moron shrugged. "Bobo look."
"We'll look." Hugh and the twins moved off in different directions, splitting the reconnaissance between them.
Hugh found no door, but what he did find interested him even more: an impossibility. He was about to shout for Joe-Jim, when he heard his own name called. "Hugh! Come here!"
Reluctantly he left his discovery, and sought out the twins. "Come see what I've found," he began.
"Nevermind," Joe cut him short. "Look at that."
Hugh looked. "That" was a Converter. Quite impossibly but indubitably a Converter. "It doesn't make sense," Jim protested. "An apartment this size doesn't need a Converter. That thing would supply power and light for half the Ship. What do you make of it, Hugh?"
Hugh examined it. "I don't know," he admitted, "but if you think this is strange, come see what I've found."
"What have you found?"
"Come see."
The twins followed him, and saw a small compartment, one wall of which appeared to be of glass, black as if the far side were obscured. Facing the wall were two acceleratlon chairs, side by side. The arms and the lap desks of the chairs were covered with patterns of little white lights of the same sort as the control lights on the chairs in the Main Control Room.
Joe-Jim made no comment at first, save for a low whistle from Jim. He sat down in one of the chairs and started experimenting cautiously with the controls. Hugh sat down beside him. Joe-Jim covered a group of white lights on the right-hand arm of his chair; the lights in the compartment went out. When he lifted his hand the tiny control lights were blue instead of white. Neither Joe-Jim nor Hugh was startled. When the lights went out; they had expected it, for the control involved corresponded to similar controls in the Control Room.
Joe-Jim fumbled around, trying to find controls which would produce a simulacrum of the heavens on the blank glass before him. There were no such controls and he had no way of knowing that the glass was an actual view port, obscured by the hull of the Ship proper, rather than a view screen.
But he did manage to actuate the controls that occupied the corresponding position. These controls were labeled LAUNCHING; Joe-Jim had disregarded the label because he did not understand it. Actuating them produced no very remarkable results, except that a red light blinked rapidly and a transparency below the label came into life. It read: AIR-LOCK OPEN.
Which was very lucky for Joe-Jim, Hugh, and Bobo. Had they closed the doors behind them and had the little Converter contained even a few grams of mass available for power, they would have found themselves launched suddenly into space, in a Ship's boat unequipped for a trip and whose controls they understood only by analogy with those in the Control Room. Perhaps they could have maneuvered the boat back into its cradle; more likely they would have crashed attempting it.