SEN. LARCH: A wise decision indeed. And now, colonel, will you tell us what you did and what you found after boarding Spaceship X?
LT. COL. GREAVES: As I mentioned earlier, the boat-bay lock had been improperly sealed. Consequently I had no trouble opening it. The inner boat-bay lock proved to have been improperly sealed also, and I concluded from this that the action in both cases had been deliberate—that Spaceship X had not only been abandoned, but that it had been abandoned in such a way as to make future use of it impossible. After entering the ship proper, I found myself in a short passageway. I floated along it, pulling myself forward by means of this protuberance and that and propelling myself, whenever possible, by pushing against the bulkheads with my feet. There was no light save for an occasional ray of starlight seeping through the meteor perforations, and my only effective means of illumination was the electric torch I had brought with me from the Camaraderie 17. It left much to be desired. Presently the passageway gave into a large chamber which, judging from its rows of bolted-down benches and its centrally located dais, was a meeting hall of some kind. I did not linger there—Perk and I had estimated that at most I had only fifteen minutes to carry out my explorations—but turned, and proceeded aft, entering another passageway, this one much higher and longer than the first. On either side, compartments were arranged in tiers, and each of the tiers above deck-level was fronted by a catwalk. I entered several of the compartments and looked around, but I saw nothing in each case but a bunk-like bed and a small chest. The beds were bare, and the chests were empty. Continuing on down the passageway, I came to another chamber, this one, judging from its bolted-down tables and benches, and the utensils drifting about, a combination dining room and galley. Again, I did not linger. My primary interest was the power source that had once propelled, illuminated and heated the ship, and had provided it with artificial gravity, and I reasoned that I would find this source in the stern. I was right, but before I located it I came to still another chamber. This one was huge, and it was filled with cages. All of them were empty, but they set me to thinking. For one thing, there were hundreds of them. For another, they ranged in size from tiny to titanic. For another, each of them struck me as having been built to accommodate not one animal, but two or more. I remembered the innumerable meteor penetrations, and the great age they implied. I remembered that in the vacuum and in the absolute zero of space, corrosion and decay are unknown and that under such conditions objects can be preserved for millennia. I remembered the dimensions of the ship. It couldn't be, and yet—
SEN. LARCH: Please confine your account to what you saw and what you did, Colonel Greaves.
LT. COL. GREAVES: Very well. The chamber housing the power source, when I finally located it, proved to be quite small. The source itself was an ion motor. It had been thoroughly and deliberately smashed, and both its condition and its advanced design prevented me from being able to tell very much about it, but I could tell, nevertheless, that while it had been capable of powering the ship in space, it could never have launched the ship from a planet, assuming that said planet's gravity approximated Earth's. Launching a ship the size of that one took some doing, and I take off my hat to the technicians who accomplished it.
SEN. LARCH: They just might have built the ship in space, you know.
LT. COL. GREAVES: I have reason to believe otherwise, but if they had, I'd still take my hat off to them.