One and Wonder Read Online Free PDF Page A

he expected us to encounter unearthly monsters lurking down in the pits and tunnels.
    Beside the bright spire of the life-craft, we set up a portable radiation counter and a neutron detector. The counter started flashing rapidly, and I couldn't stop an apprehensive gesture toward the valves.
    “Dangerous intensity!” My voice rang loud and strange in the spherical helmet. “The residue, maybe, from atomic weapons—though I don't see any craters.”
    But Cameron was shaking his head, which looked queerly magnified inside the thick, laminated bubble of his helmet. “Just the normal secondary activity, excited by our own ion-blast.” His voice came on the microwave phone, dulled and distorted. “I think it's safe for us to go on.”
    Moving clumsily with all our equipment, we moved a hundred yards to try again. Now the counter showed only the normal bombardment of solar and cosmic rays.
    “Come along!” Doyle's deep voice roared in my phones. “Have a look—here's a whole row of wrecks. The mutineers must have caught them sitting. They're blown all to scrap.” Beside a huge deserted dock of gray pumice-concrete, he had discovered the dismembered remnants of half a dozen vessels. We approached cautiously, and paused again to test for dangerous radiations. There were none—for these skeletons of space-craft had been stripped by something other than mutiny.
    This had been a repair-dock. Suddenly sheepish, Doyle pointed at abandoned cranes and empty jet-pits. The apparent wrecks had merely been cannibalized—their plates and valves and jets ripped out to repair other vessels.
    “No mutiny!” Doyle made a disgusted sound. “Let's look below.”
    For the actual fort was far beneath the crater. A vast web of tunnels, sheltered hangars, shops, barracks, magazines. The launching tubes, trained forever on the earth, were hidden in deep pits. Somewhere in that sublunar labyrinth, we could hope to find our riddle answered.
    The nearest entrance shaft was topped with a low dome of concrete,piled with pumice boulders by way of camouflage. The great armored valve was closed, unrusted, quite intact. Doyle spun a bright little wheel, outside.
    “I was stationed here, before they picked me for the task force,” he said. “A robot-missiles officer—used to know my way around.”
    The massive steel wedge failed to move, and Doyle turned to another, larger wheel. It resisted, and I came to help. Stubbornly, it yielded. The great wedge sank slowly.
    “Power’s off.” Doyle was breathless with effort. “Manual emergency control!”
    We shuffled at last into the huge dark chamber of the lock. Our battery lights cast flickering, fantastic shadows. Peering at a row of dials and gauges on the curved steel wall, Doyle punched a series of buttons.
    Suddenly I felt a faint vibration. The huge wedge lifted behind us, shutting out the dark and harsh-lit moonscape. The chamber was a steel-jawed trap. I felt a tense unease, and the sudden boom of Doyle's voice startled me.
    “The main power lines are dead. That's an emergency generator, with a chemical engine—there's one at each valve, to work the controls and energize the instruments.” He scanned the dials again. “Air inside—seven pounds. Better test it.”
    When he turned another wheel, air screamed into the chamber. It brought back sound—the clink of our equipment, the clatter of our armored boots, the throb of the emergency engine beneath the metal deck.
    We tested it. The counter gave only an occasional click and flash. I broke the glass nipple off a regulation testing tube, and Cameron leaned clumsily beside me to study the reaction of the colored paper indicators. “Okay,” he said. “Safe.”
    We took off our armor. The air was fresh, but icy cold—we exhaled white mist. Hopefully, Doyle tried the telephone in the box beneath the dials. Dead silence answered him. Shivering—perhaps to a sense of something colder than the freezing air—he hung it up and opened the