Stoner touched the controls at his belt and felt the thrusters push against the small of his back, gently, for just a flash of a second, like the encouragement a schoolteacher gives a reluctant child. He glided toward the golden, pulsing light.
“Almost there…”
The glow seemed to be all around him for a moment, there was a brief sharp crack! in his earphones, and then he was clearly inside the screen. He twisted around for a view of the Soyuz.
“I’m through it! Can you hear me?”
“Da.”
“It’s like being inside a gold-tinted observation dome. I can see through it. Doesn’t obscure my vision much.”
“I see you also.” Federenko’s radio voice was as strong as ever, although a slight background hum now accompanied it.
Stoner could feel his heart pumping. “Okay,” he said. “I’m going to…going aboard it.”
“Be careful, Shtoner.”
The extra backpack, still drifting at the end of its tether, bumbped into the curved side of the spacecraft and bounced harmlessly off it.
“It’s cylindrical,” Stoner reported into his radio microphone, “with tapered ends. Sort of like a fat cigar. Light tan in color. Looks like metal. No protuberances, no antennas that I can see. Very smooth finish. About twenty, twenty-five meters long; five or six deep.”
He was coming close to it. The craft loomed before him, dominating his vision. Stoner’s lips felt dry. His innards burned.
“Kind of light brown in color…I said that already, didn’t I? Looks like metal. Definitely metal. Well machined. No sing of rivets. No seams. Like it was made whole, cast out of a mold or something. No markings. Hasn’t been pitted at all—like it’s brand new. That screen must eat up micrometeoroids and any other junk it’s encountered…”
As he reached the curving side of the massive spaceship, Stoner instinctively put his hand out. He touched it, rebounded slightly, and with his other hand pulsed the thrusters that gently pushed him against the craft’s hull again.
“Yeah, it’s got to be metal. Feels like metal.”
He planted his boots against the ship’s hull. They clung.
“Hey! I think it’s magnetized! My boots are sticking to it.” Stoner pulled one boot free; it took only a slight effort.
“Boots are non-magnetic,” Federenko said flatly.
“Well, something’s holding them,” Stoner answered.
He stood erect on the curving hull, a lone visitor on a world twenty-five meters long. He took one step, then another. It felt tacky, as if he were walking across a freshly painted surface that hadn’t quite dried.
“Going forward,” he said. “At least, I think it’s forward. Could be aft—this thing looks the same at both ends.”
Carefully, Stoner planted one booted foot in front of the other.
And felt the breath rush out of him.
A line of light suddenly glowed the length of the ship and his earphones gave out a low-frequency whining hum. Not loud enough to hurt, just loud enough to make certain that it could not be ignored.
The line of light flickered through every color of the spectrum. It was like watching a rainbow rippling under a stream of water.
“It’s color!” Stoner shouted, describing it. “Then it goes dark…I think it goes into the infrared and ultraviolet, beyond human vision.”
The whining in his earphones also wavered up and down in pitch and Stoner realized that he could only hear it during the few seconds when the line of light was off.
“It’s going through the whole electromagnetic spectrum! Visible light, radio frequencies…must be putting out pulses of x-rays and gamma rays, too. Can you hear me, Nikolai?”
The cosmonaut’s voice came through despite the background noise. “I hear you. The high-energy detectors on instrument panel are silent.”
Stoner watched the flickering light, fascinated, almost hypnotized. “It’s saying, ‘Welcome aboard,’ in all the colors of the rainbow.”
Federenko’s unruffled voice replied, “Switch to radio frequency two. Perhaps hum is not there.”
They went through all four channels on the suit radio. The whine persisted on all of them, running up and down the scale in contrapuntal rhythm with the line of light.
“Hold everything!” Stoner yelled. “It’s…something…”
Up at the nose of the craft the line of flickering light suddenly split into two parallel lines, then looped around to form a circle. The metal of the hull inside the circle seemed to brighten.
“Something up at the nose.” Stoner described the circle. “Maybe it’s a hatch.”
“Be careful, Shtoner.”
“I’m going up there.”
Trembling, throat dry, too excited to be afraid, Stoner stepped slowly toward the glowing circle.
He stood at its edge as the whine in his earphones worked its way up to a shrill screech and then cut off completely. The line of light cut off too. But the circle of metal continued to glow dully, almost as if heated from within.
“It’s glowing,” Stoner reported. “Could it be radioactive? A nuclear heat source? Maybe I’ve cooked myself.”
“No radiation counts from detectors here,” Federenko replied.
“Maybe the screen blocks it.”
Federenko said nothing.
But the glow was subsiding now and Stoner saw that the metal inside the circle was becoming milky, translucent. He strained his eyes at it.
“I think I can see something…”
Slowly he got down on his hands and knees and put the visor of his helmet against the hazy surface.
“You look like religious pilgrim,” Federenko called, “at prayer.”
Ignoring him, Stoner reported, “It’s clearing up. It’s becoming transparent. I can see inside…not much light down there, but…”
He peered through the glassy surface, forcing himself with sheer willpower to see what was inside. Then it hit him with the power of a physical blow.
“Oh, my god in heaven,” he whispered. “It’s a sarcophagus.”
Manhattan
Deep inside the windowless bowels of the ABC News building, the FCC official shook his head in wonder.
“A sarcophagus? What the hell’s he mean?”
The network vice-president, a bright, dazzlingly intense young black man wearing a maroon cashmere jacket, answered, “Whatever it is, we’ve got to get it on the air. Now.”
Hugh Downs was on the monitor screen, anchoring the ongoing coverage of the space mission. An image of the alien spacecraft as seen from the Soyuz’s cameras was displayed behind him.
“On the air? Live?” The FCC man blanched.
“Got to.”
“No! Too risky. Suppose he finds something…awful? The panic…”
The network VP jabbed a finger toward the monitor screen. “Half the country is already scared stiff of this thing and the other half don’t really believe it exists at all! We got to put it on live, man, let them see for themselves. Otherwise nobody’s going to believe it!”
“I’m not sure…”
“Well, I am.” He picked up the phone and gave the necessary orders.
The FCC man said gloomily, “If you do it, the other networks will go to live coverage too.”
“Good. Long as the Russians are feeding it to us live, we oughtta put it out on the air live. This delay crap is for the birds.”
“But I don’t have the authority to allow live broadcast! I shouldn’t be involved…”
“Listen,” the VP snapped. “Why do you think the network brass put me on this hot seat? Part of their affirmative action program? I get paid to make decisions, man! If this works, I’m a genius, I’m on my way to the top of the heap.”
“And if it doesn’t work? If there’s a panic or some kind of reaction from Washington?”