“Opening locks,” he muttered absently, “is largely a matter of point of view.
To any of you, a lock is something to prevent the opening of a door—and it does prevent it.
But old Giles sees a lock as a means of opening the door—and it is.”
He groaned, and spat.
“Or at least,” he amended, “it should be.
But old Giles never met such a lock as this.”
Kay Nymidee had seized Jay Kalam’s arm, to whisper frantically.
“Hasten, Giles,” he pleaded.
“Kay says they’ll surely find us soon.
Our invisibility, remember, is a trick of their own.
It can’t baffle them long.”
The old man looked up again, his small red eyes round with unexpected anger.
“For life’s sake,” he burst out, “have you no patience?
“Here is Giles Habibula, a feeble old soldier, faint and retching in his last illness, dying far from home.
Ah, so, a dying man, taxing his genius to the last precious ounce, to solve a riddle that would baffle all the scientists and mathematicians and doddering philosophers in the System for the next thousand years!
“In the name of precious life, can’t you let him work in peace, without screaming in his ear—”
“Forgive me, Giles,” the commander begged hastily.
“I’m sorry.
Go on.”
The old man shook his head, muttering, and bent again to the triple circle of projecting rods.
His deft hands paused at last, and a faint vibration whispered through the faintly glowing metal.
The floor of the pit began to slip aside, and Giles Habibula scrambled hastily for the flange at the edge.
“A desperate trial!” he gasped. “But the door is open—”
Bob Star crept forward to watch the widening slit, which revealed a deep, square well, walled with coldly shining metal.
The way was open, to the weapon that could kill Stephen Oreo!
That triumphant thought swept him forward eagerly—and then halted him, with smashing agony.
For he couldn’t kill Stephen Oreo.
He couldn’t kill anybody.
He had been trying to think that he was slowly conquering that crippling obsession—until the battle to take the prison-ship, when the organic ray from that cone-shaped creature stabbed into his head.
But its merciless thrust had brought back all the torture of the Iron Confessor—he wondered dully now if that orange-colored ray had carried an ultrasonic component .that acted on the same pain centers of the brain.
Whatever the effect, it had speeded the merciless beat of that old pain, and reinforced that imperative injunction.
He couldn’t kill—
“Come on,” Jay Kalam was urging.
“We’ve no time to spare.”
They pushed themselves into the square pit.
Hundreds of feet they dropped, aided now by the feeble gravitation of the metal sphere, and struck another door, studded with three more ckcles of projecting rods.
“Another lock,” muttered Giles Habibula.
“But now I know the principle.”
He touched something, and the first door closed ponderously behind them.
He bent to the second lock.
“Never,” he wheezed abstractedly, “was my genius so fearfully tried.
And never fired by such dire emergency!
Ah, me! this day will mark the death of Giles Habibula!
This monstrous safe may well become his tomb.”
The shining metal murmured again, and the enormous mass of the inner door slipped aside.
They followed the square passage on beyond, into a small, square room which must have been near the center of the sphere.
It was flooded with the greenish radiation of the walls, and the passage behind them was the only entrance.
The little chamber was empty, save for a massive, rectangular box of the scarlet metal, three feet long, fixed to the inner wall.
Its sides were covered with intricate hieroglyphic designs in silver and black.
Upon the top of it was another triple circle of projecting rods.