Their basic instinct was to turn and run, but Moss held them back from their intended headlong rush to things more familiar.
‘It’s only a light,’ he yelled, ‘like Kel’s light pot, but different. Let’s see what happens next.’
Nothing did. They stood there in the now brightly lit tunnel, facing a huge shiny metal door, baring their further progress.
‘It’s like the meetel barrier we found in the tunnel from the Great Water, but this one is made of a different meetel, like the bot we used, as it hasn’t rotted like the one in the tunnel.’ Moss felt quite confident in his appraisal of the situation.
Kel moved forward to give the door a thump with his clenched fist, and the deep boom which followed didn’t frighten them as much as what happened next.
The door sensor mechanism circuit had partly corroded, disabling the recognition system, so that it now ‘recognized’ any warm bodied creature within its sensor field, and that included the three.
A soft click followed by a quiet whirring sound, and the door glided back to reveal the continuance of the brightly lit passage even further into the mountain.
‘Do we go in?’ asked a rather nervous Kel.
‘Why not? we’ve come this far, and we want to find out what the giants have left behind.’
‘What if we go in, and can’t get out again?’ Kel was only being cautious.
‘All right, let’s play it as safely as possible. One of us goes in, and if the barrier shuts and won’t open from the inside, we can still open it from out here.’ Moss was getting a little impatient, and wanted to get on with the exploration of the mysterious tunnel.
Moss bravely passed through the inviting open doorway and into the tunnel beyond, Kel and Jay, without really knowing why, stepped back a few paces, and the door hissed shut.
Kel was about to move towards the door when Jay’s restraining hand held him back.
‘Let Moss have a chance to open it from inside.’ she said quietly.
They stood there for what seemed like ages, and then the door opened again, a grinning Moss standing just inside.
‘There you are, just as I thought, we can go in and out quite safely. Come on, lets see where this tunnel goes.’ and he turned and strode off down the passage, a noticeable swagger in his footsteps.
By the time Kel and Jay had plucked up enough courage to follow Moss, he had disappeared from sight around a bend in the tunnel, and they had to run to catch him up.
As they progressed down the passageway, the lights behind them went out, other lights coming on ahead of them to illuminate their way. Before long, they were taking it in their stride as they went ever further into the deeply buried Radio Telescope complex.
For a very long time the complex had been seeking out any sign of radio activity in deep space, and whenever the circuits considered a signal had been located, it sent out its own signal in the same direction.
The whole system had been set up to work automatically, powered by the lightning converters, and had done so faultlessly since it had been first constructed.
There was no way of knowing if the signals sent out had been received by anyone, until a reply came in, nor did the complex really care, it just did what it had been set up to do, and kept doing it.
The Contact
Something, somewhere, deep in the Milky Way galaxy, had picked up the signals from earth, decided they were not just random transmissions from a pulsar and relayed the data forward for evaluation. A reply was sent, and the long wait began as the series of electromagnetic pulses sped across the intervening space to Earth.
The Radio Telescope received the reply, recognized it as being a response to its original message, and sent back an acknowledgement. It didn’t understand one electron of the message it had received, it didn’t need to.
Messages flashed back and forth to the planetary base, decisions were taken, the great ship turned on its axis and began its long journey to a faint star on the rim of the galaxy.
* * *
The tunnel down which the three had gone terminated in a large hall. From this, many doors lead to other passageways and in turn to many other rooms.
The first few doors Moss tried to open, wouldn’t. Some had restricted access, not recognizing Moss or the others as approved entrants, or the selection mechanisms had broken down over the intervening years, and would admit no one.
One door did open to Moss’s endeavours, and they all passed through its portal to gasp in amazement at the room’s contents.
Pictures around the walls showed the giants at work and play, huge constructions in glittering steel and stone adorned the otherwise tranquil scenes of the countryside, but a countryside totally unfamiliar to the three.
A series of bench tops jutted out from the walls, and these displayed various pieces of equipment in varying stages of decay, corrosion and general breakdown of materials not designed for extreme longevity.
Few were recognizable to them, let alone the uses to which they would have been put, but at long last there was irrefutable proof that the giants had existed, and built many wonderful things as the legends had stated.
A few tools in a crumbling toolbox had survived, and Moss gathered these up not knowing what they were for, but convinced that he could put them to good use one day.
Returning to the main hall, they found two more doors which yielded to their efforts, one led down to the power room, but a strange smell assailed their nostrils as they were about to enter the enormous cavern. Jay didn’t recognize the odour of ozone, but pleaded with Moss and Kel not to go any further into the place,
‘It dangerous here, I feel it.’ was all she would say, and they retreated back up the stairs to the hall.
Moss was keen to explore until he dropped from
