“Sure,” responded Joe. “This is a kind of cave. Look at the floor. Perfectly smooth, like glass. Artificially shaped, of course, and sealed, but it is the substance of the asteroid—no manufactured flooring. We must be in the deepest part of the complex here. I feel almost as if we are on the bottom of an ocean.”
“Joe! Mark!” called Zip from the front of the procession. The men stopped walking and the two Starmen joined Zip. “Look at that,” said Zip, with a lift of his chin.
A computer screen about four feet square was set into the side of a huge, gray fabrication of metal, shaped like a cube at least fifteen feet on a side and made of thick plates held together with rivets. Dozens of pipes in a tremendous variety of sizes came into the cube and extended away, disappearing into the dark distance. Some were the diameter of soda straws and a few were large enough for a man to crawl through. Most were as thick as a man’s wrist.
Mark stepped up to the screen at once. Below it was a keyboard without markings. He pressed the button which was located in the same place on the board as the button he had seen the midnight visitors press to activate their screen. A few buttons lit up with tiny green lights, but the screen remained black. He tried a few more buttons, but there was no response.
“Nothing doing. If you’d like to take a break here, Zip, I’ll try a few more combinations. We’re so far away from the surface of the asteroid, I’m sure Zimbardo will never find us now.” When Mark said “Zimbardo,” the screen flashed briefly on each syllable.
“Hey!” exclaimed the Starman. The screen flashed again. “Zimbardo!” he said again, and the screen repeated its performance. “It’s voice activated! And it recognizes Zimbardo’s name!” Mark tried a series of standard commands for voice-activated computers, but got no response to any words other than “hey” and “Zimbardo.”
“Take your time, Mark; I don’t think we’re in a hurry down here,” said Zip. For half an hour, Mark tried voice commands and combinations of keyboard strokes, but made no progress.
“This place is oppressive,” said one of the miners, after a long silence. “I don’t like being closed in by darkness.”
“Right,” said another. “On the asteroids we can see for thousands of light years, but inside here it seems as if life is swallowed. I feel as if I’m in something’s stomach.”
“Starman Foster,” said George St. George. “I think we had better move on. We need to come to the end of this giant room and get back to light and living quarters of some kind. With all this excitement we’ve had, I think the men are just about completely exfluncted.”