He'd examined the box before. He'd brought along a tool suited to the job of opening it. He set to work, then stopped.
"Sandy," he said abruptly, "I think the gravity-generator's a couple of corridors in that direction. Will you look and see if there are any tools there that might be better than this? Just look for a place where tools might be stored. If you find something, call me."
She went obediently down the lighted, excavated corridor. She reached the vast cavern. Here there were myriad tube-lights glowing in the ceiling—and the gravity machine. It was gigantic. It was six storeys high and completely mysterious.
She looked with careful intentness for a place where tools might have been kept by the machine's attendants.
She saw movement out of the corner of her eye, but when she turned there was nothing. There could be no movement in the fortress unless by machinery or one of the five humans who'd come so recently. The asteroid had been airless for ten thousand years. It was unthinkable that anything alive, even a microbe, could have survived. So Sandy did not think of a living thing as having made the movement. But movement there had been.
She stared. There were totally motionless machines all about. None of them showed any sign of stirring. Sandy swallowed the ache in her throat and it returned instantly. She moved, to look where the movement had been. She glanced at each machine in turn. One might have made some automatic adjustment. She'd tell Burke.
She passed a fifteen-foot-high assembly of insulators and bright metal, connected overhead to other cryptic things by heavy silvery bars. She passed a cylinder with dials in its sides.
She saw movement again. In a different place. She spun around to look.
Something half the height of a man, with bird-legs and feet and swollen plumage and a head with an oversized beak which was pure caricature—something alive and frightened fled from her. It waddled in ridiculous, panicky haste. It flapped useless stumps of wings. It fled in terrified silence. It vanished.
The first thing that occurred to Sandy was that Burke wouldn't believe her if she told him.