All Judgment Fled by James White Page B

said McCullough. To himself he added, A happy

afterthought . . .
     
     
     
     
chapter ten
     
     
As the only member of the expedition with both a spacesuit and firsthand

alien experience, McCullough was placed in charge of the second boarding

party. Those were the reasons given by Morrison and, without actually

saying so, the others gave McCullough the impression that they considered

it a sensible arrangement.
     
     
Five minutes after leaving the P-ships, however, Morrison was no longer

even pretending that McCullough was in charge.
     
     
The entry point chosen was a personnel lock about one hundred yards aft

of the first one. McCullough operated the seal mechanism and entered,

followed by the colonel, Berryman, Hollis and Drew. This time he did

not slam the door or test the hydraulic actuator to destruction. Inside

he demonstrated the working of the light switches. The chamber differed

only in detail from the previous one, but this time they were going to

examine the fine details.
     
     
There were no aliens in the lock chamber or in the corridor outside.
     
     
Morrison had brought a spotlight from P-One. Using the access doors on

four sides of the chamber and the large transparent panels set into them,

he mapped the space between the Ship's double hull while Drew kept watch

on the corridor and reported progress to Walters on P-Two. Berryman,

Hollis and McCullough scoured the place for identification numbers.
     
     
"I realize," said Berryman during the first few minutes of the examination,

"that robust construction, together with simplicity of design is supposed

to reduce the danger of component failure, but this angle bracket is so

simple it is downright crude!"
     
     
But the badly finished support bracket, like all the other small structural

members they were examining, possessed the expected symbols of

identification.
     
     
Their idea was simply that any piece of machinery beyond a certain degree

of complexity -- from a car or light aeroplane up to and including spaceships

half a mile long -- required an enormous amount of prior design work,

planning and tooling long before the first simple parts and subassemblies

became three-dimensional metal on someone's workbench. The number of

general assembly and detail drawings, material specification charts,

wiring diagrams and so on for a vessel of this size must have been

mind-staggering, and the purpose of all this paperwork was simply to

instruct people of average intelligence in the manufacture and

fitting together of the parts in this gigantic three-dimensional jigsaw

puzzle.
     
     
If normal human practice was observed -- and the aircraft engineers

who had lectured them on the trip out insisted that there was no easier

way short of waving a magic wand -- then these drawings together with

the components they described must include exact instructions for the

placing of these parts within the jigsaw.
     
     
It was possible that the aliens had some exotic method of identifying

components -- such as impressing each part with a telepathic identity tag,

or tactile coding systems instead of using visible printed symbols. But

considering the size of the project and the tremendous number of parts

to be identified, they were fairly sure that the aliens would do it the

easy way, which was to mark the surface material of the component with

symbols which could be read at a glance.
     
     
The system used on the Ship seemed to be some kind of vibro-etch technique.

It was nice to know that, in the philosophy of aircraft and spaceship

construction at least, the e-t's and humans thought alike.
     
     
"You notice there are no curved lines in these symbols," said Hollis

at one point. "The result of having pincers instead of fingers and an

opposable thumb, would you say, Doctor?"
     
     
"Not necessarily," said McCullough. "If we had continued to use Roman

instead of Arabic numerals . . ."
     
     
"Discuss your findings later,