But there was no such lock.
He replaced the plate, got on to the platform and looked at the controls. From this point on it was a matter of calculated risk. There was no way of telling what in the way of guards or protective devices waited for him at the bottom of the shaft. He had had his choice of trying to find out with collectors previously and running the risk of alerting the natives—or of taking his chances now. And he had chosen to take his chances now.
He pressed the button. The platform dropped beneath him, and the darkness of the shaft closed over his head.
The platform fell with a rapidity that frightened him. He had a flashing mental picture of it being designed for only nonhuman materials—and then thought of the damageable fruits and vegetables among its food cargo came to mind and reassured him. Sure enough—after what seemed like a much longer drop than the burrowing scanners had reported the shaft to have—the platform slowed quickly but evenly to a gentle halt and emerged into light from an opening in one side of the shaft.
Kator was off the platform the second it emerged, and racing for the nearest cover—behind the door of the small room into which he had been discharged. And no sooner than necessary. A lacework of blue beams lanced across the space where he had been standing a tiny part of a second before.
The beams winked out. The smell of ozone filled the room. For a moment Kator stood frozen and poised, gun in hand. But no living creature showed itself. The beams had evidently been fired automatically from apertures in the wall. And, thought Kator with a cold feeling about his liver, the spot he had chosen to duck into was about the only spot in the room they had not covered.
He came out from behind the door, slipped through the entrance to which it belonged—and checked suddenly, catching his breath.
He stood in an underground area of unbelievable dimensions, suddenly a pygmy. No, less than a pygmy, an ant among giants, dimlit from half a mile overhead.
He was at one end of what was no less than an underground spacefield. Towering away from him, too huge to count, were the brobdingnagian shapes of great spaceships. He had found it—the secret gathering place of the strength of the Muffled People.
From up ahead came the sound of metal on other metal and concrete, sound of feet and voices. Like a hunting animal, Kator slipped from the shadow of one great shape to the next until he came to a spot from which he could see what was going on.
He peered out from behind the roundness of a great, barrel-thick supporting jack and saw that he was at the edge of the field of ships. Beyond stretched immense emptiness, and in a separate corner of this, not fifty feet from where Kator stood, a crew of five natives in green one-piece mufflings were dismounting the governor of a phase-shift drive from one of the ships, which had been taken out of the ship and lowered to the floor here, apparently for servicing. A single native in blue with a weapons harness and handgun stood by them.
As Kator stopped, another native in blue with weapons harness came through the ranked ships from another direction. Kator shrank back behind the supporting jack. The second guard came up to the first.
"Nothing," he said. "May have been a short up in the powerhouse. Anyway, nothing came down the shaft."
"A rat, maybe?" said the first guard.
"No. I looked. The room was empty. It would've got caught by the beams. They're checking upstairs, though."
Kator slipped back among the ships.
The natives were alerted now, even if they did not seriously suspect an intruder like himself. Nonetheless, a great exultation was welling up inside him. He had prepared to break into one of the ships to discover the nature of its internal machinery. Now—thanks to the dismantled unit he had seen being worked on, that was no longer necessary. His high hopes, his long gamble, were about to pay off. His kingdom was before him.
Only two things were still to be done. The first was to make a visual record of the place to take Home, and the other was to get himself safely out of here and back to his small ship.
He took a hand recorder from his weapons belt and adjusted it. This device had been in operation recording his immediate vicinity ever since he had set foot outside his small ship. But adjustments were necessary to allow it to record the vast shapes and spaces about him. Kator made the necessary adjustments and for about half an hour flitted about like an entertainment-maker, taking records not only of the huge ships, and their number, but of everything else about this secret underground field. It was a pity, he thought, that he could not get up to also record the structure of the ceiling lost overhead in the brightness of the half-mile-distant light sources. But it went without saying that the Muffled People would have some means of letting the ships out through the apparently solid ground and buildings overhead.
Finished at last, Kator worked his way back to the room containing the elevator shaft. Almost, in the vast maze of ships and jacks, he had forgotten where it was, but the sense of direction which had been part of his scoutship training paid off. He found it and came at last back to its entrance.
He halted there, peering at the platform sitting innocuously waiting at the shaft bottom. To cross the room to it would undoubtedly fire the automatic mechanism of the blue beams again—which, aside from the danger that posed, would this time fully alert the blue-clad natives with the weapons harnesses.
For a long second Kator stood, thinking with a rapidity he had hardly matched before in his life. Then a farfetched scheme occurred to him. He knew that the area behind the door was safe. From there, two long leaps would carry him to the platform. If he, with his different Ruml muscles, could avoid that single touching of the floor, he might be able to reach the platform without triggering off the defensive mechanism. There was a way but it was a stake-everything sort of proposition. If he missed, there would be no hope of avoiding the beams.
The door opened inward, and it was about six feet in height, three and a half feet in width. From its most inward point of swing it was about twenty-two feet from the platform. Reaching in, Kator swung it at right angles to the entrance, so that it projected into the room. Then he backed up and took off his foot coverings, tucking them into pouches of his mufflings.
He got down on hands and feet and arched his back. His claws extended themselves from fingers and toes, clicking on the concrete floor. For a moment he felt a wave of despair that the clumsy mufflings hampering him would make the feat impossible. But he resolutely shoved that thought from his mind. He backed up further until he was a good thirty feet from the door.
He thought of his kingdom and launched himself forward.
He was a young adult Ruml in top shape. By the time he had covered the thirty feet he was moving at close to twenty miles an hour. He launched himself from a dozen feet out for the entrance and flew to the inmost top edge of the door.
He seemed barely to touch the door in passing. But four sets of claws clamped on the door, making the all-important change in direction and adding additional impetus to his flying body. Then the platform and the shaft seemed to fly to meet him and he slammed down on the flat surface with an impact that struck the breath from his body.
The beams did not fly. Half-dazed, but mindful of the noise he had made in landing, Kator fumbled around the edge of the shaft for the button he had marked from the doorway, punched it, and felt the platform thrust him upward.
On the ride up he recovered his breath. He made no attempt to replace the clumsy foot-coverings and drew his handgun, keeping it ready in his hand. The second the platform stopped at the top of the shaft he was off it and running noiselessly back along the conveyor belt at a speed which no native would have been able to maintain in the crouched position in which Kator was holding himself.
There were sounds of natives moving all about the factory building in which he was—but for all that he was half-persuaded that he still might make his escape unobserved, when a shout erupted only about a dozen feet away within the maze of machinery off to his left.
"Stop there! You!"
Without hesitation, Kator fired in the direction of the voice and dived off the conveyor belt into a tangle of gears at his right. Behind him came a groan and the sound of a falling body and a blue beam lanced from another direction through the spot where he had stood a second before.
A dozen feet back in the mechanical maze, Kator clung to a piece of ductwork and listened. His first impression had been that there were a large number of the natives searching the building. Now he heard only three voices, converging on the spot where the first voice had hailed him.
"What happened?"
"I thought I saw something—" the voice that had hailed Kator groaned. "I tried to get a clear shot and I slipped down in between the drums, here."
"You jammed in there?"
"I think my leg's broke."
"You say you saw something?"
"I thought I saw something. I don't know. I guess that alarm had me seeing things—there's nothing on the belt now. Help me out of here, will you!"
"Give me a hand, Corry."
"Easy—take it
easy!
"
"All right . . . All right. We'll get you in to the doctor."
Kator clung, listening, as the two who had come up later lifted their hurt companion out of wherever he had fallen, and carried him out of the building. Then there was nothing but silence; and in that silence, Kator drew a deep breath. It was hardly believable; but for this, too, the Morahnpa had had a saying—
Perfection attracts the Random Factor—favorably as well as unfavorably.
Quietly, Kator began to climb back toward the conveyor belt. Now that he could move with less urgency, he saw a clearer route to it. He clambered along and spotted a straight climb along a sideways-sloping, three-foot-wide strip of metal filling the gap between what seemed to be the high side of a turbine and a narrow strip of darkness a foot wide alongside more ductwork. The strip led straight as a road to the open area where the conveyor belt began, and there was the door where Kator had originally entered.
Perfection attracts the Random Factor. . . .
Kator slipped out on the strip of metal and began to scuttle along it. His claws scratched and slipped. It was slicker than he had thought. He felt himself sliding. Grimly, in silence, he tried to hold himself back from the edge of darkness. Still blunting his claws ineffectually on the polished surface, he slid over the edge and fell—
To crashing darkness and oblivion.
When he woke, he could not at first remember where he was. It seemed that he had been unconscious for some time but far above him the light still streamed through the high windows of the building at the same angle, almost, as when he had emerged from the platform on his way out. He was lying in a narrow gap between two vertical surfaces of metal. Voices suddenly struck strongly on his ear—the voices of two natives standing in the open space up ahead between Kator and the door.
"Not possible," one of the voices was saying. "We've looked everywhere."
"But you left the place to carry Rogers to the infirmary?"
"Yes, sir. But I took him in myself. Corry stood guard outside the door there. Then, when I came back we searched the whole place. There's no one here."
"Sort of a funny day," said the second voice. "First, that short or whatever it was, downstairs, and then Rogers thinking he saw someone and breaking his leg." The voice moved off toward the door. "Well, forget it, then. I'll write it up in my report and we'll lock the building behind us until an inspector can look it over."
There was the sound of the small door in the big truck door opening.
"What's anybody going to steal, anyway?" said the first voice, following the other through the door. "Put a half million tons of spaceship under one arm and carry it out?"
"Regulations . . ." the second voice faded away into the outdoors as the door closed.
Kator stirred in his darkness.
For a moment he was afraid he had broken a limb himself. But his leg appeared to be bruised, rather than broken. He wriggled his way forward between the two surfaces until some other object blocked his way. He climbed up and over this—more ductwork yet, it seemed—and emerged a second later into the open area.
The local sun was well up in the center of the sky as he slipped out of the building. No one was in sight. At a half-speed, limping run, Kator dodged along in the shade of an adjoining building; and a couple of minutes later he was safely through the gate of the complex and into the safe shelter of the trees paralleling the dirt road—headed back toward his ship.
The native fisherman was no longer beside the creek. No one at all seemed to be in sight in the warm day. Kator made it back to his ship; and, only when he was safely inside its camouflaged entrance, did he allow himself the luxury of a feeling of safety. For—at that—he was not yet completely safe. He simply had a ship in which to make a run for it, if he was discovered now. He throttled the feeling of safety down. It would be nightfall before he could risk taking off. And that meant that it must be nightfall before he took the final step in securing his kingdom.
He got rid of the loathsome mufflings he had been forced to wear and tended to his wrenched leg. It was painful, but it would be all right in a week at most. And he could use it now for any normal purpose. The recorder he had been carrying was smashed—that must have happened when he had the fall in the building. However, the record of everything he had done up to that moment would be still available within the recording element. No more was needed back Home. Now, if only night would fall!
Kator limped restlessly back and forth in the restricted space of the small ship as the shadows lengthened. At last, the yellow sun touched the horizon and darkness began to flood in long shadows across the land. Kator sat down at the communications board of his small ship and keyed in voice communication alone with the Expedition Headquarters on the moon.