Captain Future 27 - Birthplace of Creation (May 1951) by Edmond Hamilton Page A

defenses they had left behind them.
    “They can be beaten,” he told himself, sweating. “I’ve got to beat them.”
    He studied his map again. He knew exactly how far he had come from the ship. Leaving himself a wide margin of safety he activated the detector-mechanism on the sledge. The helmet of his pressure-suit was fitted with ultra-sensitive hearing devices that had nothing to do with sonic waves but translated sub-electronic impulses from the detector into audible sound-signals.
    He stood still, listening intently. But the detector said nothing and he went on, very slowly now and cautiously, across the dead waste until his footsteps in the dust approached the line of that outer circle on the map. Then the detector spoke with a faint small clicking.
    Garrand stopped. He bent over the panel of the mechanism, a jumble of dials, sorters, frequency-indicators and pattern-indicators. Above them a red pip burned in a ground-glass field. His heart hammered hard and he reached hastily for a black oblong bulk beside the detector.
    He thought, “I’m still far enough away so that the blast won’t be lethal if this doesn’t work.”
    The thought was comforting but unconvincing. He forced his hand to steady, to pick up the four-pronged plugs and insert them, one by one in the proper order, into the side of the detector. Then he dropped behind the sledge and waited.
    The black oblong hummed. He could feel it humming where his shoulder touched the metal of the sledge. It was designed to pick up its readings from the detector, to formulate them, adjust itself automatically to the indicated pattern and frequency, to broadcast an electronic barrier that would blank out the impulse-receptivity of the hidden trap’s sensor-unit. That was its purpose. It should work. But if it did not...
    He waited, the muscles of his belly knotted tight. There was no flash or tremor of a blast. After he had counted slowly to a hundred he got up again and looked. The red pip had faded from the ground-glass screen. There was a white one in place of it.
    Garrand watched that white pip as though it were the face of his patron saint, hauling the sledge on slowly through that outer circle and through the ones beyond it that were only guessed at. Three times more the urgent clicking sounded in his ears and the dials and pointers changed — and three times the pip faded from red to white and Garrand was still alive when he reached the metal valve door set into the floor of the crater.
    The controls of that door were plainly in sight but he did not touch them. Instead he hauled a portable scanner off the sledge and used it to examine the intimate molecular structure of the metal and all its control connections. By this means he found the particular bolt-head that was a switch and turned it, immobilizing a certain device set to catch an unknowing intruder as soon as he opened the valve.
    Within minutes after that Garrand had the door open and was standing at the head of a steep flight of steps, going down. His heart was still thudding away and he felt weak in the knees — but he was filled with exultation and a great pride. Few other men, he thought, perhaps none, could have penetrated safely to the very threshold of this most impregnable of all places in the Solar System.
    He did not relax his caution. A large mass of equipment went with him down the dark stairway, including the scanner. The valve closed automatically behind him and below in a small chamber he waited until pressure had build up and another door automatically opened. He found nothing more of menace except a system of alarm bells, which he put out of commission — not because there was anyone to hear them but because he knew there would be recorders and he wanted no signs, audible or visible, of his visit.
     
    THE recorders themselves were relatively easy to detect. With an instrument brought for the purpose he blanked off their relay systems and went on across the great circular central