The others were close behind him. Their belt lamps cut hard slashes of light across the airless dark. They passed through the lock chamber and came into a corridor running fore and aft. It was utterly still. The heavy drag of their boots on the metal deck made not the slightest sound. It was like walking in a fever-dream, and the deadness of the ship, the black, inert, unstirring deadness, was more oppressive than the desolation in which it lay. The rocks and cliffs had never moved, they had never been built by the hands of men, no thought or hope had ever entered into them. Trehearne's skin crept in little waves of cold. He could hear the beating of his own blood in his ears, the dull throbbing of his own heart. He moved with the others, lonely figures in a tomb, and he started like a child at every shape the light picked out.
The whole after section of the ship was a laboratory. Much of the delicate equipment was shattered, either by speed-vibration or a hard landing. Trehearne could make nothing of the tortured mass of metal and splintered crystal, but Quorn said, very softly, "He was studying interstellar radiation. Most of that stuff is beyond me, but I can see that much."
One section of the laboratory contained a complicated mass of coils and prisms and intricate banks of reflectors arranged around what must have been a great central tube. There was a small platform at the focal point of the mechanism, fitted with straps. Along one bulkhead was a stack of metal cages for experimental animals. Several of the little creatures were still there. They had died, the quick death of airlessness and cold, but their bodies were still perfect. They had, then, survived the voyage. The ultra-speeds of interstellar flight had not harmed them.
The men searched for a time among the wreckage, and then Edri said, "There's nothing for us here. No good trying to figure out the apparatus. They couldn't do that in all the years they had the ship impounded, when it was all in shape. Most of it Orthis designed and built himself."
Trehearne looked again at the small furry bodies in the cages, lying as though in sleep. Somehow they made the betrayal of Orthis doubly cruel—that even beasts could be given the freedom of the stars, that so many generations of the races of so many worlds had been denied.
They went into the corridor, retracing their steps, and passed on forward. They found the living quarters, small and spare and monastically neat. The coverings of the bunk were rumpled and the pillow still retained the hollow where a man's head had lain. Trehearne shivered. Presently they went on, to the bridge.
Trehearne realized then what an act of heroism it had been to push this antique ship to the limits of the Galaxy and beyond. The instruments were so few and rudimentary, the system of controls so crude. There was a locking device, a primitive Iron Mike that could keep the ship on its course without human attention, and he thought that only that had made Orthis' lonely flight possible. But the science of star-craft had come a long way since then.
Quorn's voice, held to a whisper as one speaks in a church, reached him on the helmet phone. "It's incredible. This ship wasn't even built for voyaging, it was a spatial laboratory. It's a wonder it survived at all."
Edri drew a long breath, with a quiver in it like a sob. "We still haven't found what we're looking for. Do you suppose it isn't here? Do you suppose that after all...." He didn't finish.
They began to search again. It was Trehearne who found the door in the after bulkhead of the bridge. He pushed it open and looked through into the cabin beyond. The beam of his belt-lamp speared brightly into the immemorial dark.