Chapter II

He awoke at dawn, stiff from the unnatural position of his sleep, momentarily confused as to his whereabouts. Then he caught sight of the cylinder, and memory came sweeping back.

_Had something come out of it?_

Descending from the car, he approached a group of men standing near the object. A short, heavy-set major general who appeared to be in command turned sharp, suspicious eyes toward him.

"What are you doing here?"

Winthrop introduced himself. The general's suspicion vanished and he clasped the younger man's hand warmly.

"I'm Bert Hill, Winthrop. I heard of your work from Benton Allan. He's a close personal friend."

"Of mine, too," Winthrop nodded. "Haven't seen him since Nevada."

"He's flying up from Los Alamos," Hill said. "Many of your colleagues are coming--everyone who might conceivably be useful."

"Any sign of life?" Winthrop asked, gesturing toward the cylinder.

"No. There's a port amidships, and some small apertures forward. But it might as well be a coffin! Why don't you look it over? But perhaps you'd like to get comfortable and have breakfast first. We've set up a temporary mess kitchen in the City Building."

"Thanks, General Hill."

"Call me Bert."

When George Winthrop returned he found that a sizable group of tired-looking civilians had joined the military. Most of them were men with whom he had been associated. Greetings were brief, detailed personal reminiscences sternly contraindicated.

They examined the cylinder. With a great deal of effort an engineer succeeded in unfastening the port lugs. Signal Corps movie cameras whirred as the port opened, but nothing emerged.

"Carry on, George," General Hill said. "You've priority."

"Hadn't we better wait?" the other protested. "Who knows what an alien might consider trespass?"

"We've got to risk it," the general said. "Perhaps they need our help. Perhaps they're ill or injured."

Hill and Winthrop peered into the interior.

Vacuum tubes shone dully through an indistinct maze of ductwork, circuitry, relay banks. And directly before them, facing the port--

"It's a fission bomb!" Bert's nervousness was suddenly wild within Winthrop. He fought it. "Amazingly like ours!" He grasped the port tightly, fighting trembling unease with taut muscles.

"I must look at it more closely," he went on. "It may not be fully armed, but I'd better disarm the detonating device if I can. If it's anything like ours, it wouldn't take much tinkering to set it off. There's probably enough explosive in the detonator alone to ruin the interior completely. We could be trapped inside, and blown apart." He paused, then added courageously, "I'll need light to get the plugs out quickly."

"That looks like a button switch," the general volunteered, reaching into the port.

Winthrop slapped his hand away. "Don't be a fool. The slightest touch might detonate it."

"Guess you're right," the general conceded, turning away. "Montemur, run an extension over here."

Winthrop crawled into the ship, arose, and stared in bitter indecision.

He remembered a blockhouse at Bikini, another at Frenchman's Flat, voices harsh on loudspeakers counting the seconds away to zero. He remembered armed bombs on ghastly, towering frameworks of steel vibrating beneath his touch with the furious kiss of atomic death awaiting the slightest slipping of his fingers.

_Get on with it!_

He did. The plugs were out. He was faint, drenched with perspiration.

The general was peering intently through the port.

"It's okay now, Bert."

Cautiously the general entered, then turned back with an abrupt gesture. "Montemur," he cried to the Signal Corps major, "the equipment in here is still energized. Take shots of everything. We mustn't chance accidentally disarranging a single circuit. We've perhaps acquired a means of conquering space. We mustn't ruin it through carelessness."

Major Montemur joined them with a camera.

"The electronics boys will love this," Winthrop said, pointing sternward.

Catwalks crisscrossed the complicated cluster of machinery. Everything was amazingly accessible, the ductwork transparent.

"Strange, George," the general mused. "The science that constructed this must closely parallel ours. Can't you see the similarities?"

Winthrop nodded. "I think so. Not that I'm qualified to judge--"

Behind the bomb was a bulkhead shutting off the ship's forward portion in the middle of which was a great round door. Set securely in the door was a complicated instrument. The symbols on the dials and controls were utterly alien.

Among the dials was what was apparently a timing device with twenty-eight subdivisions, a slowly sweeping hand. It was silent but Winthrop heard whispering in his mind the pounding time of the spinning planet of some other sun, and the urgency and great import of time returned to torment him. He had fought it while working on the bomb, and now he fought it again.

"Bert," he said, "this part of the ship wasn't designed for entrance during space flight. In a pressure suit, maybe, yes. Otherwise we can only assume that the crew doesn't require an atmosphere. Life may have evolved quite differently _elsewhere_."

"I don't believe it. I doubt that there's a thinking being of our equal anywhere that isn't human or humanoid. Take your own comments about the machinery. And what about the books?"

"_Books?_" Winthrop followed the general's gaze.

Protruding from beneath the bomb's afterbody was a thick, finely-bound volume lying upon a thinner, very tattered one. Picking both books up with trepidation, he examined the larger volume first. Its hard covers were marked with alien characters similar to those on the bulkhead instrument. He skimmed the pages, finding sections of either printed language or mathematics, still others of detailed schematics and precise drawings.

"The electronics engineers and linguists can work on this," he said. "Association of the schematics with the equipment, and the equipment's physical measurements and functionings with the printing may allow us to crack both math and language!"

The other volume was more puzzling. "No cover," the general said. "Pages missing. Bert, it looks like a _comic book_!"

They thumbed through that second book, sickened by the abysmal thought that somewhere some alien artist had perverted an obviously great talent to please and amuse the immature. Their hasty perusal revealed an obviously imaginative tale of a pastoral world's invasion by the rapacious, plundering vanguard of a humanoid race with many-digited, strangely-jointed hands.

"The psych boys can have this," Winthrop said, apprehensively searching the shadows about them.

They looked at the bulkhead door, then simultaneously at each other.

"Do you think there may be something alive in there?" the general asked.

"Perhaps. It's pointless to try to open the door now, though. The occupants may be in suspended animation. It might be tricky to bring them out of it without harming them. We've thought of suspended animation as one solution to survival in the big jump once we've found a means of propulsion plus suspended animation."

"The propulsion's arrived, George. Maybe we'll find the other. We'll let the electronics men in here now. They should be able to shed some light on this equipment."

As General Hill assembled the electronics men, Winthrop walked away. Associates addressed him curiously, but he merely nodded in absent-minded fashion. He was several yards from the ship when he suddenly became aware that someone was challenging him--the lieutenant he had met the night before.

"Just walking," Winthrop explained.

He saw a gnarled, forlorn apple tree just beyond the perimeter of the guard posts. Almost pleadingly he said, "I'd like to go over there if you don't mind."

"Hell, I don't mind," the lieutenant said, "but don't go any farther!"

Winthrop still clutched the picture book. _A warning?_ A chill swept him. Was the ship indeed a coffin for the corpses of the survivors of a pastoral race who had sought to escape, but whose knowledge of time and space had not been adequate?

The lieutenant was surveying him quizzically.

"Thanks," Winthrop said, and walked to the tree.

He sat down, and opened the book again. He thumbed through it repeatedly, the pictures creating a sickness in him.

"Hello," a little girl's voice said.

* * * * *

Winthrop looked up. Six? Seven? He could only be sure that she was blond and blue-eyed, and had apparently come from the direction of the botanical gardens. She clutched roller skates in her arms.

"Hello," Winthrop said. "Where are _you_ going?"

"To the skating rinks."

"Oh, you can't. They're closed."

Her face grew solemn. "But Mommy and Daddy said I could." She was about to cry.

He felt a bachelor's inadequacy. "Where are they?" he asked.

"Over in the bot--bot--" She struggled valiantly and then said, "the flower gardens!" She eyed the book eagerly. "May I see the comics?"

Comics? Oh, the book!

He handed it to her wordlessly, saw her eyes show immediate, outright horror. He stared aghast as she threw it down and ran wildly away, her skates forgotten on the grass, her broken sobs and screams echoing back.

He called after her uselessly. Stunned, he watched the little scurrying figure vanish along the broken road toward the botanical gardens, wishing that he could follow her and solace her, cursing himself for ever having thought of showing her the book.