All Judgment Fled by James White Page B

interior and the P-ships."
     
     
A few minutes later the pilot entered the lock chamber and closed the

seal behind him. From inside he could not make himself heard or receive

the colonel's signal until he brought his antenna into contact with the

metal of the hull, when two-way communication was possible although with

a greatly diminished signal strength.
     
     
Walter reopened the seal and when McCullough joined him inside, he closed

it again.
     
     
Morrison did not sound happy over what they were doing. At the risk

of disappointing the countless millions of eager listeners at home,

he stated several times that his men needed rest -- the next stage of

the investigation was crucial and he wanted them to be fully alert. It

had been almost thirty-two hours since any of them had had a proper

rest period. He suspected that the two men on the Ship were becoming

too tired even to talk . . .
     
     
"Sarcastic so-and-so," said Walters, momentarily breaking antenna contact

with the nearby bulkhead. A tremendous, eye-watering, jaw-wrenching yawn

put a great dark hole in his face and he went on, "I wasn't even tired

until he reminded me! But you had better talk to him. I want to trace

this cable loom running along the inside face of the chamber. The wiring

seems too fine to carry much juice so it may be part of the internal

communications or lighting system.
     
     
"Tell the colonel what I'm doing, along with anything else which occurs

to you . . ."
     
     
McCullough did so, beginning with a minutely detailed description of the

chamber and the view through its five internal windows and going on to make

the first, tentative conclusions regarding the Ship and its builders.
     
     
The cable looms, conduits and plumbing were color coded in a garish variety

of shades, some of them bearing permutations of other colored spots,

bands or stripes. A human electronics engineer would have felt almost

at home here, McCullough thought.
     
     
Fore, aft and on the floor and ceiling the chamber's transparent panels,

so far as it was possible to see with a flashlight, showed a similar

arrangement in the adjacent compartments. Apparently the chamber was set

between the ship's outer and inner hull, in the space which contained

the vessel's power, control and sensory equipment. The lock chamber,

which must be one of many, would give access to the inter-hull space for

purposes of repair or maintenance. The inboard-facing window gave a view

which contained least of all to see -- merely a section of corridor,

eight feet square and of unknown length, whose four sides were covered

with large- mesh netting pulled taut.
     
     
The visible mechanical and structural features gave an overall impression of

crudeness. There was no sign of lightening holes or cut-outs in any of the

support brackets or structural members, no indication that considerations

of weight or power-mass ratios had entered into the designers' calculations

. . .
     
     
. . . It is too soon to make any hard and fast assumptions about them,"

McCullough went on. "We know that they do not have fingers, and

may have a two-digit pincer arrangement. Probably their visual range

and sensitivity is similar to ours, judging by the color intensities

used on cable identification. The, to us, crude and unnecessarily robust

construction of minor structural details indicates a lack of concern over

weight and the power required to get it moving. The corridor netting

suggests that they are not advanced enough to possess an artificial

gravity system, and the total absence of light and movement shows that

the Ship is orbiting in a power-down condition . . . Walters! "
     
     
In the corridor outside the chamber, the lights had come on.
     
     
"Sorry, that was me," said Walters sheepishly. "I've discovered what a

light switch looks like -- but I must have guessed wrong." The light in

the corridor went off and on several times, then suddenly the lock