vault doors, listening to the purr of the _Queen's_ idling
engines in the next compartment. The familiar sound was somehow
reassuring. He inserted the first key, turned it over twice, drew it out
again and pressed one of the buttons in the control panel beside the
door. The heavy slab of steel moved sideways with a soft, hissing sound,
vanished into the wall. Gefty slid the other key into the lock of the
inner door. A few seconds later, the vault entrance lay open before him.

He stood still again, wrinkling his nose. The area ahead was only dimly
illuminated--the shaking-up the _Queen_ had undergone had disturbed the
lighting system here. And what was that odor? Rather sharp, unpleasant;
it might have been spilled ammonia. Gefty stepped through the door into
the wide, short entrance passage beyond it, turned to the right and
peered about in the semidarkness of the vault.

Two great steel cases--the ones Maulbow had taken down to an airless
moon surface, loaded up with something and brought back to the
_Queen_--were jammed awkwardly into a corner, in a manner which
suggested they'd slid into it when the ship was being knocked around.
One of them was open and appeared to be empty. Gefty wasn't sure of the
other. In the dimness beside them lay the loose coils of some very
thick, dark cable--And standing near the center of the floor was a thing
that at once riveted his attention on it completely. He sucked his
breath in softly, feeling chilled.

He realized he hadn't really believed his own hunch. But, of course, if
it hadn't been an unheard-of outside force that plucked the _Queen_ out
of normspace and threw her into this elsewhere, then it must be
something Maulbow had put on board. And that something had to be a
machine of some kind--

It was.

About it he could make out a thin gleaming of wires--a jury-rigged
safety field. Within the flimsy-looking protective cage was a double
bank of instruments, some of them alive with the flicker and glow of
lights. Those must be the very expensive and difficult-to-build items
Maulbow had brought out from the Hub. Beside them stood the machine,
squat and ponderous. In the vague light, it looked misshaped and
discolored. A piece of equipment that had taken a bad beating of some
kind. But it was functioning. As he stared, intermittent bursts of
clicking noises rose from it, like the staccato of irregular gunfire.

For a moment, questions raced in disorder through his mind. What