The Sentinel - Arthur C. Clarke [63]
I know that some people think it must be very entertaining to walk around on an airless, low-gravity planet in space-suits. Well, it isn’t. There are so many points to think about, so many checks to make and precautions to observe, that the mental strain outweighs the glamor—at least as far as I’m concerned. But I must admit that this time, as we climbed out of the airlock, I was so excited that for once these things didn’t worry me.
The gravity of Five was so microscopic that walking was completely out of the question. We were all roped together like mountaineers and blew ourselves across the metal plain with gentle bursts from our recoil pistols. The experienced astronauts, Fulton and Groves, were at the two ends of the chain so that any unwise eagerness on the part of the people in the middle was restrained.
It took us only a few minutes to reach our objective, which we discovered to be a broad, low dome at least a kilometer in circumference. I wondered if it was a gigantic airlock, large enough to permit the entrance of whole spaceships. Unless we were very lucky, we might be unable to find a way in, since the controlling mechanisms would no longer be functioning, and even if they were, we would not know how to operate them. It would be difficult to imagine anything more tantalizing than being locked out, unable to get at the greatest archaeological find in all history.
We had made a quarter circuit of the dome when we found an opening in the metal shell. It was quite small—only about two meters across—and it was so nearly circular that for a moment we did not realize what it was. Then Tony’s voice came over the radio:
“That’s not artificial. We’ve got a meteor to thank for it.”
“Impossible!” protested Professor Forster. “It’s much too regular.”
Tony was stubborn.
“Big meteors always produce circular holes, unless they strike very glancing blows. And look at the edges; you can see there’s been an explosion of some kind. Probably the meteor and the shell were vaporized; we won’t find any fragments.”
“You’d expect this sort of thing to happen,” put in Kingsley. “How long has this been here? Five million years? I’m surprised we haven’t found any other craters.”
“Maybe you’re right,” said the Professor, too pleased to argue. “Anyway, I’m going in first.”
“Right,” said Kingsley, who as captain has the last say in all such matters. “I’ll give you twenty meters of rope and will sit in the hole so that we can keep radio contact. Otherwise this shell will blanket your signals.”
So Professor Forster was the first man to enter Five, as he deserved to be. We crowded close to Kingsley so that he could relay news of the Professor’s progress.
He didn’t get very far. There was another shell just inside the outer one, as we might have expected. The Professor had room to stand upright between them, and as far as his torch could throw its beam he could see avenues of supporting struts and girders, but that was about all.
It took us about twenty-four exasperating hours before we got any further. Near the end of that time I remember asking the Professor why he hadn’t thought of bringing any explosives. He gave me a very hurt look.
“There’s enough aboard the ship to blow us all to glory,” he said. “But I’m not going to risk doing any damage if I can find another way.”
That’s what I call patience, but I could see his point of view. After all, what was another few days in a search that had already taken him twenty years?
It was Bill Hawkins, of all people, who found the way in when we had abandoned our first line of approach. Near the North Pole of the little world he discovered a really giant meteor hole—about a hundred meters across and cutting through both the outer shells surrounding Five. It had revealed still another shell below those, and by one of those chances that must happen if one waits enough eons, a second, smaller, meteor had come down inside the crater and penetrated the innermost skin. The hole was