Starblood

in the belly of the earth.
    And then he saw it…
    At the bottom of the long slope, a magnificent length of emerald-colored metal gleamed as if it had been buffed and waxed only moments before. It was a hundred feet long and seemed to disappear into the rock itself, as if it were a piece of cosmic pipe that had been capped here in case an extension was ever required. It tapered as it grew closer to him, unlike a pipe, and the end of it was not capped but open. As he drew closer, he realized that the huge tubes, each twenty feet across, that were recessed in the terminal aperture were vaguely reminiscent of rocket boosters, although of an altogether different type and size from anything he had seen before.
    As his sense of eeriness and fear began to blossom within him, he realized that he was looking upon what could be only a portion of an alien vessel, a starship which buried itself in the earth so long ago that no man could have existed to watch it. At that time, man was little more than a slimy thing newly crawled from the ocean and fighting desperately to grow legs fast enough to keep from being pushed into extinction by the irresistible natural forces of the world which had spawned it.
    He drifted along the hull, looking for a way inside, for he was now certain that the Brethren were getting the PBT from this artifact that could—despite the death of its crew—just possibly still be functioning in some areas. Perhaps the stuff came from the ship's medical supplies, drugs which were nothing more than antibiotics to the extraterrestrials but hallucinogenics to men. At last, he saw the circular port which stood open on the far side of the ship, giving view to impenetrable blackness.
    He hovered before it, trying to peer inside, but could not see anything. He searched for a light switch. There was none.
    He waited, listening, but could hear no noise within the great ship. He searched for the telltale sign of Brethren presence with his psionic abilities. There was no one here. Hesitantly, he went inside…

CHAPTER 13
    The corridor of the starship was more of a tube than a hallway, lacking any well-defined floor, the walls and ceiling merely curving together without benefit of a seam. As he floated warily into the alien structure, the walls themselves began to illuminate his way, glowing dully blue for twenty feet on either side of him. He tried to see how the lighting functioned, but his gaze met only the flat surface of the metal walls, and he could not focus well enough to see any way the light could possibly be shining through. He abandoned that pursuit when his eye began to water. He continued down the corridor, carefully studying every projection or recession along the way, waiting expectantly for something horrible to happen.
    Shortly, the entrance tube passed through the reinforced doorway, and it seemed as if his progress was to be halted by a thick door painted in spirals of green and gray. But as he approached, the spirals swirled, the door irised, and he passed through into the first room that he had seen since clambering through the exterior hatch.
    It was a small room, perhaps fifteen feet square—except that it was
not
square; it had no angles whatsoever. The room was perfectly round inside. There was a storage rack of what appeared to be space activity suits, though they were not suits so much as very small cars, hardly larger than a man, into which a man might slide like a foot into a boot.
    Timothy noticed with interest that there was no room for a man's legs in one of these capsules, though the vehicles were otherwise roughly tailored to humanoid dimensions and requirements. Perhaps even more mysteriously, there was no control console of any sort visible within the devices, no wheel or stick for guiding them and no instruments for monitoring conditions internally or externally. There was only a seat shaped like a shallow cup, a great deal of rolled padding. It was the most alien thing he had seen thus far, this total lack of toggles and switches and buttons which decorated all earthly devices.
    The next stretch of hallway led to a huge chamber forty feet across and easily eighty feet long. Timothy was aware that now he must be in that portion of the starship which was wedged into the rock, the part he had not been able to see from outside. He was amazed that the interior of the vessel showed no damage, and he suspected that the exterior might prove the same if it could be extricated from the