There seemed to be nothing small enough to move. He shoved at a couple of things, but they wouldn't budge. The only slim possibility was a big square brown box, set twelve feet off the floor on one of their mammoth tables. It was of a size to accommodate half a dozen cows, but looked as though it might be of flimsy enough materials, plastic probably, to push off the edge, from which it would fall exactly where he needed it.
He dragged a chair over, climbed up on its seat and then onto the table. He saw at once that the box would be immovable. There was an affair that might be a dynamotor attached to one side, various objects sticking out of the other, and four stacks of thick coils on top. He was turning away, hoping to find another door in one of the first rooms, when his eye was attracted to a square plate among the things on the right side of the box. The plate was glass, for its surface shone under the blue light, and he thought he saw the pin-point twinkling of stars in it.
On a hunch, he walked over to it. He knew quite a lot of astronomy and if this happened to be a telescope, he might be able to determine their location.
The field of the plate was full of stars, but in patterns he had never seen. He could not understand it. It was not a painting, for the stars twinkled. Where the blazes was the thing focused?
A huge dial beside the plate had a pointer and scores of notches, each labeled with a couple of squiggly characters. He turned the pointer experimentally. The screen blurred, showed a planet with rings: Saturn.
"Neat," he said to himself, and turned the pointer another notch. He got a view of a landscape, trees of olive green and crimson, seen from above. He tried other notches.
Finally, just as he had reminded himself that he had to hurry, he saw a familiar globe swim onto the glass. It was Earth, with the two Americas clearly defined.
What in hell...?
He pushed the pointer on, and was given another landscape, this time of prosaic hue, a meadow with a cow in it. He clicked the thing another notch and got a constellation pattern again. He pushed it back to the cow.
He felt his heart thudding fast, too fast; and he hoped with all his faculties that he wouldn't conk out before he had solved this riddle. There were other dials, other pointers, a little behind the first. He turned one slowly.