A door.
“Should we go inside?” asked Tina.
Raji looked up at the sky. Still no sign of the air ambulance. He thought for a moment, then nodded: “First, though, please get the camcorder from the helicopter.”
The woman nodded, hustled off to the chopper, and returned a moment later. She turned on the camera, and Raji leaned in to examine the door’s handle. It was round, about twenty centimeters across. A raised bar with fluted edges crossed its equator. Raji thought perhaps the fluting was designed to allow fingers to grip it—but, if so, it had been built for a six-fingered hand.
He grasped the bar, and began to rotate it. After he’d turned it through 180 degrees, there was a sound like four gunshots. Raji’s heart jumped in his chest, but it must have been restraining bolts popping aside; the door panel—shorter and wider than a human door—was suddenly free, and falling forward toward Raji. Tina surged in to help Raji lift it aside and set it on the ground. The circular handle was likely an emergency way of opening the panel. Normally, it probably slid aside into the ship’s hull; Raji could see a gap on the right side of the opening that looked like it would have accommodated the door.
Raji and Tina stepped inside. Although the outer hull was opaque, the inner hull seemed transparent—Raji could see the gray-blue sky vaulting overhead. Doubtless there were all kinds of equipment in between the outer and inner hulls, so the image was perhaps conveyed inside via bundles of fibre optics, mapping points on the exterior to points on the interior. There was plenty of light; Raji and Tina followed the short corridor from the door into the ship’s main habitat, where—
Tina gasped.
Raji felt his eyes go wide.
There was an alien being, dead or unconscious, slumped over in a bowl-shaped chair in the bow of the ship. The fissure Raji had seen outside came right through here as a wide gap in the hull; a cool breeze was blowing in from outside.
Raji rushed over to the strange creature. There was, at once, no doubt in his mind that this creature had come from another world. It was clearly a vertebrate—it had rigid limbs, covered over with a flexible greenish-gray hide. But every vertebrate on Earth had evolved from the same basic body plan, an ancestral creature with sensory organs clustered around the head, and four limbs. Oh, there were creatures that had subsequently dispensed with some or all of the limbs, but there were no terrestrial vertebrates with more than four.
But this creature had six limbs, in three pairs. Raji immediately thought of the ones at the top of the tubular torso as arms, and the much thicker ones at the bottom as legs. But he wasn’t sure what the ones in the middle, protruding halfway between hips and shoulders, should be called. They were long enough that if the creature bent over, they could serve as additional legs, but they ended in digits complex and supple enough that it seemed they could also be used as hands.
Raji counted the digits—there were indeed six at the end of each limb. Earth’s ancestral vertebrate had five digits, not six, and no Earthly animal had ever evolved with more than five. The alien’s digits were arranged as four fingers flanked on either side by an opposable thumb.
The alien also had a head protruding above the shoulders— at least that much anatomy it shared with terrestrial forms. But the head seemed ridiculously small for an intelligent creature. Overall, the alien had about the same bulk as Raji himself did, but its head was only the size of a grapefruit. There were two things that might have been eyes covered over by lids that closed from either side, instead of from the top and bottom. There were two ears, as well, but they were located on top of the head, and were triangular in shape, like the ears of a fox.
The head had been badly banged up. Although the alien was strapped into its seat, a large hunk of hull material had apparently hit it, cutting into one side of its head; the debris that had likely done the damage was now lying on the floor behind the being’s chair. Interestingly, though, the head wound showed no signs of bleeding: the edges of it were jagged but dry.
At first Raji could sec nothing that might be a mouth, but then he looked more closely at the middle limbs. In the center of each circular palm was a large opening—perhaps food was drawn in through these. In place of peristalsis, perhaps the creature flexed its arms to move its meals down into the torso.
Assuming, of course, that the alien was still alive. So far, it hadn’t moved or reacted to the presence of the two humans in any way.
Raji placed his hand over one of the medial palms, to see if he could detect breath being expelled. Nothing. If the creature still breathed, it wasn’t through its mouths. Still, the creature’s flesh was warmer than the surrounding air—meaning it was probably warm blooded, and, if dead, hadn’t been dead very long.
A thought occurred to Raji. If the breathing orifices weren’t on the middle hands, maybe they were on the upper hands. He looked at one of the upper hands, spreading the semi-clenched fingers. The fingers seemed to be jointed in many more places than human fingers were.
Once he’d spread the fingers, he could see that there were holes about a centimeter in diameter in the center of each palm. Air was indeed alternately being drawn in and expelled through these—Raji could feel that with his own hand.
“It’s alive,” he said excitedly. As he looked up, he saw the air ambulance hoverjet through the transparent hull, coming in for a landing.
The ambulance attendants were a white man named Bancroft: and a Native Canadian woman named Cardinal. Raji met them at the entrance to the downed ship.
Bancroft looked absolutely stunned. “Is this—is this what I think it is?”
Raji was grinning from ear to ear. “It is indeed.”
“Who’s injured?” asked Cardinal.
“The alien pilot,” said Raji.
Bancroft’s jaw dropped, but Cardinal grinned. “Sounds fascinating.” She hustled over to the hoverjet and got a medical kit.
The three of them went inside. Raji led them to the alien; Tina had remained with it. She had the palm of her hand held about five centimeters in front of one of the alien’s breathing holes. “Its respiration is quite irregular,” she said, “and it’s getting more shallow.”
Raji looked anxiously at the two ambulance attendants.
“We could give it oxygen…” suggested Bancroft tentatively.
Raji considered. Oxygen only accounted for 21% of Earth’s atmosphere. Nitrogen, which makes up 78%, was almost inert— it was highly unlikely that N2 was the gas the alien required. Then again, plants took in carbon dioxide and gave off oxygen—perhaps giving it oxygen would be a mistake.
No, thought Raji. No energetic life forms had ever appeared on Earth that breathed carbon dioxide; oxygen was simply a much better gas for animal physiology. It seemed a safe bet that if the alien were indeed gasping, it was O2 that it was gasping for. He motioned for the ambulance attendants to proceed.
Cardinal got a cylinder of oxygen, and Bancroft moved in to stand near the alien. He held the face mask over one of the alien’s palms, and Cardinal opened the valve on the tank.
Raji had been afraid the creature’s palm orifices would start spasming, as if coughing at poisonous gas, but they continued to open and close rhythmically. The oxygen, at least, didn’t seem to be hurting the being.
“Do you suppose it’s cold?” asked Tina.
The creature had naked skin. Raji nodded, and Tina hustled off to get a blanket from her helicopter.
Raji bent over the creature’s small head and gendy pried one of its pairs of eyelids apart at their vertical join. The eye was yellow-gold, shot through with reddish orange veins. It was a relief seeing those—the red color implied that the blood did indeed transport oxygen using hemoglobin, or a similar iron-containing pigment.