It was hard to watch the happiness that her face directed toward Kelburn. Halden turned away.
"Just press the button," he said.
Emmer noticed his expression. "It's such a big button," he objected. "It's going to be hard to know when we find it."
"There's an inscription of some sort," said Kelburn loftily. "This thing was left for a purpose. Somewhere there must be operating instructions."
"From here, it looks like a complex wave-form," a voice crinkled in their radio—Taphetta from the spaceship. "All we have to do is to find the right base in the electromagnetic spectrum and duplicate it on a beam broadcast and the door should open. You're too close to see it as clearly as I can."
Perhaps they were too close to the big ancestor, decided Halden moodily as they went back. It had overshadowed much of their thinking, and who really knew what the ancestor was like and what had motivated him?
But the Ribboneer was right about the signal, though it took several days to locate it. And then the huge door swung open and air whistled out.
Inside was another disappointment, a bare hall with a ramp leading upward, closed off at the ceiling. They could have forced through, but they had no desire to risk using a torch to penetrate the barrier—in view of the number of precautions they'd already encountered, it was logical to assume that there were more waiting for them.