The screens showed a pair of standard-issue heavy-duty UNSA boots, standing on a metal panel in the middle of a pool of light. The boots shuffled to one side to reveal a black gap, about twelve inches wide, running down one side of the panel. They then stepped off the panel and onto the surrounding area as their owner evidently inspected the situation.

"You're right," Joe's voice announced at last. "Let's see if it'll budge."

There then followed a jumbled sequence of arms, legs, walls, ceilings, lightness, and darkness as TV cameras and lamps exchanged hands and were waved about. When a stable picture resulted, it showed two heavily clad arms braced across the gap. Eventually:

"No dice. Stuck solid."

"How about the jack?"

"Yeah, maybe. Pass it down, willya?"

A long dialogue followed during which the jack was maneuvered into place and expanded. It slipped off. Muttered curses. Another try. And then:

"It's moving! Come on, baby . . . let's have a bit more light . . . I think it'll go easy now . . . See if you can get a foot against it . . ."

On the monitors the gray slab graunched gradually out of the picture. A black, bottomless pit fell away beneath.

"The door is about two-thirds open," a breathless voice resumed. "It's gummed up there and won't go any further. We're gonna have a quick looksee around from up here, then we'll have to come back to get another ladder. Can somebody have one ready at the door that leads up into this corridor?"

The camera closed in on the pitch-black oblong. A few seconds later a circle of light appeared in the scene, picking out part of the far wall. The light began moving around inside and the camera followed. Banks of what appeared to be electronic equipment . . . corners of cubicles . . . legs of furniture . . . sections of bulkhead . . . moved through the circle.

"There's a lot of loose junk down at the end . . . Move the light around a bit . . ." Several colored cylinders in a heap, about the size of jelly jars . . . something like a braided belt, lying in a tangle . . . a small gray box with buttons on one face . . .

"What was that? Go over a bit, Jerry . . . No, a bit more to the left."

Something white. A bar of white.

"Jeez! Look at that! Jerry, will you look at that?" The skull, grinning up out of the pool of eerie white light, startled even the watchers out in the tunnel. But it was the size of the skeleton that stunned them; no man had ever boasted a chest that compared with those massive hoops of bone. But besides that, even the most inexpert among the observers could see that whatever the occupants of this craft had been, they bore no resemblance to man.