"That's all," he said. "Now, what have we got?"
"I don't know," answered Jeff, bewilderment in his voice. "It looks like nothing I've ever seen."
Peter stepped up to the table and squinted at the shadowy films with eyes practiced in reading rock formations. He shook his head.
"Do you see what I see?" demanded Jeff. "There's no real crew space. There's this one spot--up front--" he indicated it with his finger--"that's about as big as a good sized closet. And nothing more than that--except corridors about twenty inches in diameter running from it to points all over the ship. She must be flown by a crew of midgets."
"Midgets," echoed the older man, thoughtfully. "I never heard of an intelligent race that small."
"Then they're something new," said Jeff, with a shrug of his shoulders.
"No," said his father, slowly. "I don't remember when or where I heard it, but there's some reason why you couldn't have an intelligent race much smaller than a good sized dog. It has something to do with the fact that they grow in size as their developing intelligence gives them an increasing advantage over their environment."
"Here's the evidence," Jeff answered, tapping the film with one finger.
"No," Pete was bending over the picture fragments again. "Look at these things in the corridor. They're obviously controls."
"I see what you mean," he said at last. "If there's any similarity between their mechanical system and ours, these controls are built for somebody pretty big. But look how they're scattered all over the ship. There's a good fifteen or twenty different groups of instruments and other things. That means a number of crew members; and you simply can't put a number of large crew members in those little corridors."
"There's a large amount of total space," Pete began. Then, suddenly a faint tremor ran through the ship. Jeff leaped for the screen and his father moved over to stand behind him.
The other ship shook suddenly and rolled slightly to one side. Some unseen center of gravity pulled her back to her original position. She hesitated a moment, and then tried again, with the same results. She lay quiescent.
Jeff pounced on his radiation drum graph.
Jeff shook his head in astonishment. "Nothing," he answered, "just nothing at all."
