Irons described the way from the point where Jeff and Joanne had met Mac and Shorty. Jeff signed off and they headed back the way they had come.
“What kind of gate do you think it is?” Joanne asked. Her voice was tense.
“No idea. Maybe the men just found a door and are exaggerating again.”
“If it’s a gate, what’s behind it?”
Jeff shrugged. Until they got there, all they could do was speculate.
A few minutes later they reached the junction where they’d been ambushed by Mac and Shorty. Jeff glanced down at his handheld, but he remembered that on the way here, they had come straight. So now they had to turn left if they wanted to follow Mac and Shorty’s route.
After about half a mile they reached another intersection. A corridor led to the right. That must be the way back to their quarters. Another corridor went off to the left and in the beam of Joanne’s flashlight, they could see another junction about eighty feet further on. Jeff glanced down at his handheld to double check, then turned into the corridor. Joanne followed him.
After the first junction, another one appeared after about six hundred feet. Beyond it, the corridor started to go down at an angle of approximately twenty degrees.
Silently, they followed it further down into the depths of the ship. Without the handheld, they would have lost their way completely. It would have been impossible to sketch this three-dimensional labyrinth with a pen and paper.
A short while later, when they reached the next junction, they were in for a surprise. At first, Jeff thought they had stepped into a room, but it was a corridor, much wider than the ones they were used to. In fact it was so wide, they could have fit the Charon inside it. There was one corridor branching off to the right, and two more branching off to the left, each of them as wide as the one they had just come out of. Jeff looked up at the ceiling, which was arched like the nave of a cathedral. Then he spotted Mac and Shorty. The two mechanics were standing about six hundred feet away in front of a dark gray wall. The beam from their flashlight flickered in different directions. As Jeff and Joanne approached them, Jeff realized that what he had thought was the back wall of this hangar-sized corridor was in fact a gate.
The gate!
It bulged a little in middle, and to its left and right were shimmering silver rails, or runners, along which the gigantic gate could presumably slide up and disappear into the ceiling. Huge white and yellow characters were painted in the middle of the door. In front of it, on the ground, there were more strange white and yellow markings. A blue area directly at the foot of the metal gate probably indicated the danger zone.
When they reached Mac and Shorty, the two of them were sounding out the walls. Jeff guessed they were looking for some kind of operating system with which to open the gate, but there was nothing there. Like everything else on this ship, the gate was presumably controlled by the computer, too.
“Interesting.” At that moment, Jeff couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“You could say,” Mac responded. His jovial mood seemed to have died away in face of this colossal gate, beside which the two men looked like dwarves.
“Looks to me like the door to an airlock,” Shorty said. The mechanic punched the metal with his fist. “The way it bulges out, I’d say it’s at least fifteen inches thick. You’d need an atomic bomb to get that open.”
“No controls?” Joanne asked.
“We didn’t find anything. We’ve searched the whole corridor,” Mac said.
“And the little room, too,” Shorty added.
“What little room?” Joanne asked.
Only now did Jeff notice the door in the wall of the corridor, about forty feet away from the gate. It was open. Next to it was a square window through which he could look inside.
“It’s only about thirty by thirty feet. And completely empty, like everywhere on this ship,” Shorty said.
“How the hell are we supposed to open this thing?” Mac was clearly frustrated.
Jeff wondered if they should even try. Who could say what was behind it? Suddenly, a wave of fear washed over him again. As if something utterly evil was just waiting to be let out behind that gate.
“We can’t,” Shorty replied. “There are no controls—again.”
“I’d love to know what’s behind there,” Joanne said. “Maybe Irons was right, and the interior of the ship is divided into lots of individual areas. Probably a new area starts behind that gate.”
“I reckon the corridor on the other side is just as wide. Could be a kind of highway to the center of the ship,” Mac mused. “Maybe it used to be a transport route. It’s sure wide enough.”
“We could ask the ship’s computer to open it for us,” Joanne suggested.
Before we do anything, we should speak to Irons,” Jeff said. “He has to decide our next move.”
“And what do we do now?” Joanne asked.
“We’ll do another thorough search of the area around the gate, to be absolutely sure we didn’t miss something. And I’m going to take a few pictures of the gate and the funny letters on it for the major.”
“And then?” Mac asked.
“Then we’ll go back.”
10.
“There were no controls?” Irons asked. “No knobs, switches, or anything else?” His spoon lay untouched next to his plate of stew.
“No,” Jeff shook his head. They had spent an hour searching before heading back to their quarters in the early afternoon.
“The gate is probably controlled by the computer,” Joanne said. “We could ask it to open it for us.”
Irons nodded. “Let’s hear what it has to say.”
“Maybe we should just stay away from it,” Green said. It was the first time he had joined them to eat since being knocked out by the flu, or whatever it was. The engineer was still pale. His eyes were bloodshot and, like Irons, he hadn’t touched anything on his plate.
“Why?” Castle asked derisively. “Are you scared there might be a monster on the other side?”
Green turned very slowly to look at his shipmate. Like Mac and Shorty, Green and Castle were buddies. “I’m not afraid of anything,” he answered evenly.
“Knock it off!” Irons said. “We’ll ask the computer to open the gate the next time it contacts us.” He glanced at his watch. “It’s been a while, actually. Then we’ll decide what to do. Until then, we’ll check out the two remaining unexplored corridors.”
“I think I heard that my presence was required,” the emotionless voice of the computer suddenly echoed through the room. Jeff wondered how long it had been listening in on their conversation.
“Yes,” Irons replied. “Thank you for contacting us. Everything OK with you and the ship?”
“Thank you, yes. Some irregularities with one of the power plants, but repairs are already in progress. You will be pleased to hear that the capacitors are charging for the next hyperjump. This will take place in two days.”
“Great. Thanks again,” Irons said. “I have a question.”
“Go ahead.”
“On a… er… walk around the ship, we came across a big gate. It’s about a mile from our quarters in a big corridor. It’s locked.”
There was no answer. Irons looked over at Jeff with raised eyebrows.
“What’s behind it? Can it be opened?” Irons asked.
“The gate leads to another sector of the ship,” the computer answered promptly. Apparently it needed explicit questions in order to reply. “The gate cannot be opened because the sector behind it is no longer under my control due to a defect that occurred a long time ago.”
“Oh.”
Jeff bit his lip. True, the computer had confirmed Irons’ assumption that the ship was divided into different areas. But Jeff hadn’t expected to hear that there were areas which weren’t under the computer’s control. If that were the case, then they would only be able to explore the corridors on this side of the gate. Maybe they would come across another gate leading to another sector, which was still accessible.