The wait, even after the alien ship had docked, seemed eternal. If I were solely dependent on my own recollections, I would swear that it had to be ninety minutes from the time the ship planted its last grapple until the hatch on the forward segment opened. Ebbie assures me that it was only seventeen minutes though.
“We’ll have to operate the airlock from in here,” Angie said, moving toward the controls.
“We don’t know if our visitor or visitors breathe oxygen,” Clay said. “Or if any of the other components of our air might be poisonous to them.”
“We can still open the door,” I said. “If they’re not certain about our air, they can stay in their pressure suits.”
Pronouns had been a bit of a problem. We didn’t know the number or sex of whoever was in that ship. It was enough larger than our candles so that the front segment could hold two beings roughly the size of humans, even for a long voyage. The hatch, at least, appeared suitable for human-sized bipeds.
Obviously, none of us were prepared for what did emerge from that hatch.
My first impression was that any of us could have worn the alien pressure suit. The proportions of arms and legs to the torso and to each other weren’t quite right. Both sets of limbs appeared equal in size, and the feet seemed to be radically different from human feet. Judging solely from the suit, the alien might have had a horse’s hooves.
But there was one much more glaring difference. There was a large spherical protrusion from the chest of the alien. From the scaled-down view we had on the monitor, it looked as if he or she was wearing a second helmet there.
The alien came down one of the cables holding his/her ship to the berg, using only the upper limbs to maneuver. The pressure suit’s gauntlets had two segments for digits, like mittens but with both portions equal and opposite each other. He or she made directly for the airlock door.
Angie had already pumped the air out of the airlock. Now she opened the outer door. The alien entered without hesitation. Angie closed the door and started to pump air back in.
“Now we find out,” I said. I would have given almost anything to be anywhere else in the Solar System, even on Earth—the one place I had always sworn I would never visit.
Clay and I moved farther from the door. Angie couldn’t move until she hit the button to open the interior door. She hesitated, but not pushing the button would not give us any safety. There was a large button on the other side of the door so that it could be opened from inside the airlock. Even an alien would probably deduce that in seconds.
“Go ahead,” I whispered.
She pushed the button.
My heart thumped wildly. Fear was not a new companion, but he was a lot closer, more overpowering, than in a long time. While we waited for the alien to cycle through the airlock I had a flashback to the first time my father had taken me out of the pressure dome back on Mars, my first time out on the surface. I knew that people frequently went outside the dome. Some people worked out there every day. There were accidents, but not often. It was safe or my father wouldn’t have taken me. He told me that. I believed it. Still…
This time I didn’t have anyone’s assurance that what we were doing was safe. There were no statistics, no precedents.
The door opened. The alien stepped into the room, staggered, then caught his balance, reaching out to put a hand against the wall. With feet spread wide, he looked not at any of us but at a gauge on the left sleeve of his pressure suit. Then he reached up, twisted his helmet, yanked it off, and dropped it.
Then he collapsed.
As dramatic entrances go, that one would be hard to top. It was worthy of the professionals at the Bradbury Theater in Lowell Port. It was also a terrific ice-breaker. Our tension, fear, gave way to instinctive concern. Even Clay took a step toward the fallen alien before he thought better of it. Angie and I kept moving. One of us knelt at each side of the alien, wanting to help even before we realized that we didn’t have the faintest idea where to start, or what might be wrong with our visitor.
Our first close look at the alien’s face did bring us to a complete stop though. The contours of the face were… lumpy. If you’ve ever seen a picture of the surface of a human brain with all of its convolutions, that was about how the alien’s face looked. The color was yellow ochre, various shades from the dark of the folds to the lights of the high points. There was no protruding nose, but what I took to be a pair of wide, angular nostrils between and only slightly below eyes that were set widely apart. The eyes were closed. Lips were more pronounced folds in the skin, and the same color. The mouth was a twelve-centimeter-wide gash across the bottom of the face. There was no hair or fur to cover the skin.
Ugly as sin, I thought. OK, that was a xenophobic, insensitive reaction, but I did feel a real physical revulsion. My stomach announced its displeasure in a sudden cramp. I fought the urge to turn away, to look anywhere but at that face. Still, I wasn’t prepared for when Angie gave a terrified scream.
I looked at her. The color had completely drained from her face. She was pointing down at the protrusion from the alien’s chest. I had almost forgotten that. I turned and looked.
Even with the warning of Angie’s reaction, I almost screamed as well. It was a second helmet, and there was a second face, a second head, looking out of it. Dark brown, almost black, eyes, shaped like a cat’s, were staring at me, but the eyes seemed not to be seeing anything.
I lurched to my feet and took a step, almost a jump, back. When I looked around I saw that Clay had moved closer. He had been standing behind me, looking over my shoulder, and he had to move in a hurry when I leaped to my feet and backpedaled.
“That doesn’t make sense,” he said, looking at the alien’s second head. “No sense at all. It can’t be.” He sounded offended by the extra head.
“Write a nasty letter to Darwin,” I said, choking back the urge to vomit. Logic be damned, the sight outraged my instincts.
“What do we do?” Angie asked, looking up. She hadn’t moved from the alien’s side, other than to lean back on her haunches. “He’s still breathing. This head is, at least,” she added, pointing at the one that was in the proper position.
“What the hell can we do?” I asked. “We don’t know anything about his physiology.” I was staring at the extra head. “We couldn’t know if we were doing the right thing or not.”
“We’ve got to try something,” Angie insisted. “At least help me get him out of this pressure suit. Maybe that’ll give us a better idea what to do.”
And maybe it would bring more revolting surprises.
“Perhaps pure oxygen will bring him around,” Clay suggested.
I turned and gave him a glance, moderately surprised that he had actually come up with a suggestion that sounded good. But maybe I also resented the fact that he had been able to think more clearly about the situation than I could.
“Get an oxygen bottle then,” Angie said. “Tim, help me get this suit off of him.”
I got back down, steeling myself for whatever we might find. Getting the alien out of the suit was a larger task than it sounded. The fittings were different, and not all that obvious. The secondary head complicated matters. We didn’t know the why of that until we finally did have the pressure suit off.
The second head had been coarsely sutured to the alien’s chest. The extra helmet had been glued over a hole cut in the pressure suit. There was a lot of what we assumed was blood staining the alien’s clothing.
I had to stop and take my own helmet off in a major hurry. Vomit is one hell of a mess inside a pressure suit, and the smell remains almost indefinitely afterward. I barely made it. Angie had even less time to spare.