“My God!” Angie said once she was again able to speak without retching. “What went on here?”
The alien’s tunic had been ripped open down the front. The neck of the second head had, as far as we could see, then simply been sewn to the chest, assuming that the area corresponded to the same area on a human.
“We’ll never know if we can’t keep this alien alive,” Clay said. He had brought over a portable oxygen canister, complete with face mask, tubing, and a pump-bag. He got down next to the alien and started the oxygen—placing the mask over the head that was where it belonged.
“Why don’t you see if you can get inside his ship?” Angie said, looking at me. “Maybe you’ll find something to tell us What’s going on.”
“You mean like the rest of him?” I pointed at the second head. My hand shook so badly that I pulled it back in a hurry.
“Whatever,” Angie said. “Anything.”
I nodded. I just hope there aren’t any more of them, I thought. It didn’t seem likely that there would be another whole alien in the ship. If this one had had help from another of his own kind, would he have left his ship and come to us?
I didn’t think so. I hoped not.
There was a definite sense of relief to stepping inside the airlock and sealing the inner door, shutting me away from the peculiar alien with two heads. Clay had been right. That made no sense at all. It looked crazy—insane crazy. I checked to make sure that I had air flowing inside my suit, and no leaks, then cycled the lock and waited while air was pumped out. Watching the pressure gauge over the outer door gave me something to think about—something to focus on—that did make sense, something normal, proper. I tried to shut out everything else until I had to think about those other things again.
My sense of balance (like everything else) was a little shaky, like having an inner ear infection. When I stepped outside, I moved very cautiously, keeping one hand against the side of the habitat. I stood there, breathing deeply, trying to get my mind functioning at something approaching normal speed before I shut the outer door. In the fractional gravity of that berg, there was no room for mistakes. And I was going to have to shinny up a rope and try to break into that alien spacecraft. I thought about the difficulty getting the alien’s pressure suit off and wondered if I would be able to figure out how to get into his ship. I wasn’t certain that I wanted to.
I took a grip on one of the cables and looked at the ship overhead. I could see the outline of the hatchway thirty meters over my head. It might have been five minutes before I put the second hand on the cable and started pulling myself up the line.
There wasn’t enough gravity to make the climb difficult. I always kept one hand tightly on the cable and worked my way up cautiously. I didn’t want to build up any speed since I was-n’t tethered to the cable by a safety line. If I did get separated from that wire, I would be able to maneuver back with my suit’s small cold gas thrusters, but I would have hated to do that, the state my mind was in. I figured that I could clip on a safety line when I got to the top, while I tried to figure out how to open the hatch. Once I had a tether clipped to the cable, I could also take another moment to decide whether or not I really wanted to be able to open that door.
It was almost too easy. The latch was under a sliding panel. Pull the panel down. A large knob with a ridge running across the face was easy to grip. I turned it counterclockwise, the way it would work to open if the ship were human. That didn’t work so I tried the other direction. When that also didn’t work, I had to pause. Then I pushed in on the knob. When I felt give, I tried turning to the left again. This time the knob rotated and the hatch opened.
I hesitated for several minutes after the door stopped moving. I looked through the hatchway. There were lights on in the airlock, but very dim, bluish in color. I had my helmet lights on though, so I could see without difficulty. The airlock was barely large enough to squeeze into. That was similar to the design of our candles. Anything bigger than the minimum acceptable would be a luxury, deadweight.
I took a deep breath, used that as the excuse for extending my hesitation. Finally, though, I did pull myself through the hatchway into the airlock, then cycled through into the interior of the alien ship.
There was no way I could know what I might be looking for. The one thing I was almost certain of finding was in a bunk at the rear of the cabin—a headless body, strapped in place. The bed covering was stained with the same rust-color that had been on the tunic of the other alien. I had been prepared for finding a body, so I didn’t have the same gag reaction as before. I sucked in a deep breath, held it until I was certain that there would be no flood of nausea, then went to investigate.
With its head in place, the body might have massed sixty kilograms. The undulating surface of the alien heads was continued over the entire body. The effect was still disturbing, almost as if the entire body were covered with large pustules the same color as the skin. The hands had four digits, two opposed to two, all about the same size with one less joint per than human fingers. There were no nails or claws, but the ends of the digits were almost as rough as the gripping surfaces of pliers or wrenches. The feet were very like horse hooves.
Despite my revulsion, I investigated that headless body very closely, and I was recording what I saw. There are two camera lenses in my helmet, one at each side, giving true three-dimensional video. This might be the only opportunity we, mankind, got for this sort of observation.
I removed the alien’s clothes—tunic and trousers, no underwear. Not having the equivalent of Gray’s Anatomy for this species, I could only make guesses about what I saw, but if the alien anatomy was anything like human, I was looking at a female… judging from the lower plumbing. There were no apparent breasts or nipples, nothing that I could point to and guess that it might serve the same function.
After I had turned the body over and given the cameras a chance to record everything—including a shot directly over the neck—I started looking around the rest of the cabin. There was only one room, not two like in my candle. The control panels didn’t look like ours, but there were screens, gauges, and controls. I couldn’t read the legends or calibrations. The interior of the cabin did show considerable damage. There were panels that had been deformed by whatever had hit the ship, controls that had been popped out of place. There was considerable loose debris, and one chunk of twisted metal about four kilos in mass showed the same sort of stains, the stuff we assumed was alien blood.
There were no books of instructions, no alien-to-human dictionaries, nothing that I could make any sense of other than in a general fashion.
I spent about forty-five minutes searching without learning anything that might help us help the alien lying on the floor of the habitat. The one left in the ship was beyond help. Nor had I learned anything that might tell us where the aliens had come from, or why one had decapitated the other, sewed the head to his own chest, and come into our shipwreck station to pass out. I didn’t know if the head was a trophy, or just some bizarre memorial rite.
I passed along what I was seeing. Angie gave me updates on what was happening inside the station. The alien seemed to respond to pure oxygen. His color got darker, he started to breathe more freely on his own, and after more than thirty minutes he started to show a little movement in his fingers and hands. There was no change apparent in the condition of the second head.