Sanges frowned. “But—a room, perfectly spherical. Nothing else on the wall. What could they use it for?”

“A free-fall handball court, that’s my theory. Or a drying room for underwear. Maybe it’s a shower, only we don’t know how to turn on the water. There’s a patch over there that looks odd”—she pointed to a burnished splotch above her head—“but with that plastiform over it I can’t guess what it is.”

“This room is so small. How could anyone—” “Small for who? You and I are both here because we’re practically midgets compared to the rest of the human race. Alphonsus imported you especially for the occasion, didn’t they? I mean, you were on Earth when we found this. They shipped you up because you know electronics and you can wriggle through these tubes.”

“Yes.” The man nodded. “The first time I ever thought being small was an advantage.”

Nikka pointed to a hole halfway up the wall. “This next part is the worst squeeze in the whole trip to the computer link. Come on.”

She worked her way into the hole and down into a comparatively open length. Abruptly the passage narrowed. Nikka braced herself and got through by expelling her breath and pushing hard with her heels. There was an open space that temporarily eased the pressure, and then ahead she saw the walls narrowing again. She pushed and turned, trying to wedge herself flat on the tilted floor of the passage. Not only was it contracted here, but the tube was tilted at an awkward forty-five degrees.

She could hear the soft sounds of Sanges’s struggles behind her. The tunnel seemed to press at her and she gave herself over to an endless series of pushes and wriggles, rhythmically turning forward against the steady hand of gravity and the clutching of the walls.

The passage became almost unbearably tight. She began to doubt that she had ever made it through this space before. The air seemed impossibly foul. The ship was a bruising presence, a massive vise squeezing the life from her. She stopped, thinking to rest, but she could not seem to get her breath. She knew there was only a little way further to go, and yet—

Something struck her boot. “Go. Go on.” Sanges’s muffled voice was very close. There was a thread of panic in it.

“Easy, easy,” Nikka said. If Sanges lost his nerve, they would be in a pretty fix. “We have to take our time.”

“Hurry!”

Nikka braced her feet against the walls and pushed. Her arms were above her head and with one more lunge she found the edge of the passageway above. She pulled slowly up the incline and in a moment was free of the constriction.

Here it was almost possible to stand. The open bay was an ellipsoid with most space taken up by dark oval forms. They were seamless, apparently storage compartments of some kind with no obvious way of opening them. A short path marked off by tape wound between them. No one was to venture beyond that tape or try to investigate the dead alien machinery that lay further on. That would come later when men knew more of the ship and how it worked. Only the white phosphors in the plastiform illuminated this room; they cast long shadows near the walls that gave the room an oddly ominous cast. Though it was almost possible to stand upright, the shadowed mass of the ship seemed to close on her from every direction.

Sanges struggled up out of the tube and slowly got to his feet. “Why did you slow down back there?” he asked sharply.

“I didn’t. You have to pace yourself.”

“What does that mean?” he said quickly.

“Nothing.” She looked at him appraisingly. “Claustrophobia is a funny thing and you have to keep your wits about you. You should try it some time the way I first went through—in an s-suit with oxygen gear and a helmet.”

“It’s a Godforsaken way to—”

“Precisely. God didn’t make this ship and men didn’t either. We have to learn to adapt to it. If strange things bother you that much, why did you volunteer for this job?”

Sanges clamped his lips together firmly and nodded. After a moment Nikka turned and led the way down the narrow path to an immense black panel set into one wall. There were two man-made chairs in front of it. She indicated one for Sanges and sat in the other. Sanges looked at the imposing board, with its multiple layers of switches laid out before him. He turned his head and studied the dark forms further away. “How can we be sure the pressure is good here?” he said.

“The plastiform is tight,” Nikka said as she turned on some extra phosphors. “The alien superstructure seems to be intact. The whole ship is modular, as far as we can tell. When it crashed, most of the other components were pulverized, but this one and two others—about forty percent of a hemisphere—remained intact. Some things in the other passages were thrown around, but otherwise this section is still in one piece.”

Sanges studied the room and tapped nervously with his fingers on the console board.

“Careful of that! I’m turning on the console now and I don’t want you hitting any of the switches.” She pressed something like a vertically mounted paper clip and two blue lights flickered on the board before them. In a moment the black screen above the board changed subtly to a shade of light green.

“Where does the power come from?” Sanges said. “We don’t know. The generators must be in one of the other modules but the engineers don’t want to go too deeply into there until we understand more. The power is AC, about 370 hertz—though that varies, for some reason. We took this panel off and tried to trace the circuitry but it’s extremely complicated. In another passageway the engineers found a huge vault of micro-sized electronic parts, apparently part of a memory bank. Most of the vault is thin films of magnetic materials on a substrate. The whole vault is at very low temperature, far colder than the surrounding ship.”

“Superconducting memory elements?”

“We think so. That’s not quite my line, so I haven’t had much to do with it. There are small-scale oscillations in magnetic fields among the circuitry, so probably the fields switch the superconducting elements on and off. Makes a great switching circuit, as long as it operates in vacuum. The trouble is, we don’t know where the cooling comes from. There is no circulating fluid; the walls are just cold.”

Sanges nodded and studied the array of hundreds of switches before him. “So this computer is alive, or at least its memory is. After all this time. With most of the ship knocked out. Remarkable.”

“That’s why we are taking so much care with it. It’s a direct link into whatever the aliens thought worth storing.” She tried a few of the switches experimentally. “It appears the power is on. More often than not this board is dead. The ship’s power is unstable. Okay, I am going to call Nigel Walmsley and start work. Watch what I do, but don’t touch the board. Most of the procedure for starting is written up; I’ll give you a copy at the end of this shift.”

She took a throat microphone and yoke and fitted it over her head. “Nikka here.”

“Walmsley, madam,” a voice came from the speaker mounted on the wall. “If world security were at stake, would you spend the night with a man whose name you didn’t even know?”

Nikka smiled. “But I know yours.”

“True, true. Still, I could have it changed.”

“Victor Sanges is here with me,” Nikka murmured officially, before Nigel could say anything more. “He’s the inside man for Team One.”

“Charmed, I’m sure. See you in the mess later, Mr. Sanges. Nikka, I’m picking up the screen quite well but I’m getting bored with that same green haze all the time.”

Sanges turned and looked at the television camera mounted over their heads. “Why don’t you simply pick the signal up from the circuits that feed the screen?” he asked Nikka.

“We don’t want to fool with the circuitry. Watch this, it’s the same opening sequence I always use just to see if the memory array is unchanged.”