"A vibrokey," she said matter of factly. "Something father devised. You can find anything with it, once you know the object's vibration pattern. And you can open anything with it. It experiments with all possible combinations of magnitudes and speeds of vibrations, until it simply hits the particular pattern needed. Without it I would never have found the burns I left, and without it we wouldn't get in. Father said it could shake a whole building down...."
Within seconds a panel less than a meter square slid back, and he and the girl were beneath it. Then it was closing. There was a passageway of some sort with a totally invisible source of illumination. Almost like what he'd run across beneath the abandoned gold mines on Venus, except....
"Now we have to move quickly," Lin interrupted his thoughts. "We have very little time. They know we're here."
"I didn't hear—"
"They know. Down this way." There was another burn, this time on the wall of the long, gently twisting tube. It hurt his eyes; it was like walking down a huge, brightly-polished gun barrel, except that it was not quite straight, and it was hard to tell just when it turned.
"Can you do what your father failed to do?" Cragin said. He asked only to hear his own voice; it gave him at least a finger-hold on reality.
"Perhaps, if there is time. I did not waste those weeks in the hospital."
A panel telescoped silently into itself. It opened on a cylindrical chamber that had seemingly been made of a single sheet of metal, so flawlessly had the banks of control boards which it contained been built into it. The soft green-blue glow with which the chamber was suffused was generated by an ingredient of the metal itself.
Circling the room at about shoulder height was a continuous row of what were obviously telescreens; below and above them were the banks of machines which were constructed according to an electro-mechanical concept with which Cragin was totally unfamiliar. According to Earth standards, it was so much junk, a distorted caricature of scientific equipment.