“Then I’m on my way back to Philadelphia, with my death certificate in my hand.”
Chapter 44
“I can see right through the metal,” Stoner said into his helmet microphone. “The metal’s become transparent.”
“He is dead?” Federenko asked.
“Must be. Or frozen. Maybe he’s just preserved…you know, cryonically.”
Stoner’s pulse was racing and he felt sweat trickling along his skin, inside the pressure suit. It was difficult to make out details of the alien’s form—he saw a long, very solid-looking body stretched out on a bed or bier of some sort. There was a head, shoulders, two arms. He couldn’t see the lower end of the body.
“Speak!” Federenko commanded. “What do you see? Your words go straight to Tyuratam.”
“Okay, okay…”
Stoner pressed his visor close to the transparent hatch again, to get a clearer view. And there was no hatch. His helmeted head sunk an inch or two below the rim of metal that framed the circular hatch.
“Oh no…” He pulled back, then ran his gloved fingers around the rim of the circle. It was open, as if the metal that had been there moments earlier had dissolved.
“Nikolai,” he called, fighting to keep his voice from climbing too high. “The hatch—first it went transparent, now it’s disappeared altogether.”
“Disappeared?”
“Gone. Vanished. Just an open hole where solid metal was a minute and a half ago.”
Federenko asked unbelievingly, “It is open?”
“Yes. I’m going inside.”
“Wait. I check with ground control first.”
Stoner shook his head inside the fishbowl helmet. At their distance from Earth it was taking nearly six seconds for Federenko’s messages to reach Tyuratam, and another six for their responses to get back to the Soyuz. Plus the time in between while they screw around trying to make up their minds, Stoner thought.
“I’m going in,” he said.
“Wait, Shtoner.”
But he already had his hands on the hatch’s rim and started gingerly lowering his legs through the opening.
“I’m halfway through. No problem.”
“Shtoner, it could be dangerous.”
“I don’t think so.”
He floated down inside the craft and touched his boots to the soft flooring. They stuck gently, just as they had on the outside of the hull.
He turned slowly in a full circle, taking in the interior of the alien spacecraft.
“I’m inside,” he said, his voice unconsciously hushed. “Can you hear me?”
“I hear you.” Federenko’s voice in his earphones was weaker, streaked with sizzling static, but clear enough to understand easily.
“It’s a lot smaller in here than the ship’s exterior dimensions. This must be just one compartment. All the machinery’s hidden behind bulkheads.” He shivered. “And it’s cold in here. Colder than outside. How can that be?”
“What do you see?”
Stoner turned to the elevated bier and the creature resting on it. He took a step toward it, then stopped.
The curved walls of the compartment were starting to glow. Not like molten metal, but like the soft radiance of a moonlit sky. As Stoner watched, slack-jawed, the hull turned milky white, then translucent, and finally as clear as glass.
“Shtoner! Answer!” Federenko was bellowing. “Can you hear me?”
“I can see you, Nikolai,” he answered, awed. “The whole damned hull has turned transparent. Just like the hatch did. I can see right through it!”
A pause. Then Federenko grumbled, “It is the same as always from here. Dark metal. Not transparent.”
“A one-way window,” Stoner mused. “Christ, what’d that be worth to Corning?”
“Who?”
Stoner giggled as he stood beside the bier and looked across the hundred or so meters of vacuum to the Soyuz. It looked squat and ugly to him now, a primitive artifact from a primitive world.
“They have one helluva grasp on materials sciences, I’ll say that for them.”
“Describe, Shtoner. All is being transmitted.”
He swallowed hard and looked down at his gloved hands. They were trembling.
“Shtoner, talk.”
“This whole section of the interior is about four meters long—say, twenty-five feet. Almost the full five meters wide, but only two and a half, three meters high. The floor is solid and opaque. So’s the back wall of the compartment. But the nose and side walls are perfectly transparent. As if there weren’t any hull there at all. I can see right through it.”
He stepped to the edge of the floor and put his hand out, timidly. The gloved fingers touched the invisible hull; it felt spongy, giving.
“Hull’s still there, though. Hasn’t vanished completely, the way the hatch did. And it’s very cold in here, as if energy can go out through the hull, but none can get in. This thing must’ve been designed by Maxwell’s demon.”
Turning back to the alien, Stoner took a long look in the dim starlight. Then he remembered the lamp hooked to his belt and turned it on.
He leaned over the alien’s body. It was very long, but thin, emaciated, desiccated.
“He’s more than two meters tall, I’d say. No clothing. Very slim, plenty of ribs showing. Body’s covered with some kind of orange-brown fuzz. Not hair, really. Looks more like a nap on velvet. Almost.”
“The figure is human?” Federenko asked.
“Sort of. Two arms, one head. Body’s much longer than ours…legs start where our knees would be. And there are four of ’em, four legs. Little knobby ones with round hoof-like pads at the ends.”
“Wait…” Federenko said. “Tyuratam reports, your words being broadcast all across Soviet Union, Europe, America, Asia, many other places.”
“I’m on live, Nikolai? In Russia?”
Federenko hesitated, then replied, “In U.S.S.R., broadcast is delayed fifteen minutes so censors can make certain nothing harmful is let out.”
“And in the States?”
“Live, I think.”
“I’d better watch my language.”
Federenko said nothing.
Stoner turned back to the alien. “Arms are longer than ours. The hands have only two fingers each and the ends of the fingers look like suction cups—suckers, like on an octopus.”
“The head? The face?”
“Seems to have two eyes, but they’re closed. I don’t see a nose of any sort, but there’s a mouth—lips, at least. Wide and thin.” Stoner couldn’t bring himself to touch the creature, although he badly wanted to see what was behind those lips, those closed eyelids. “Same kind of nappy fur covers the whole face, even the eyelids. The head is rounded, large-domed, very smooth. I don’t see what he breathed with.”
“Is it breathing?”
“No,” Stoner said. “He’s dead. I can feel it. There’s no atmosphere in here. This chamber’s been in vacuum for millennia. Cold, too. Frost is forming on my visor.”
“Turn up suit heater.”
“Right. I’m doing that.” The miniaturized fan in the helmet’s collar hummed a bit louder.
As the tendrils of frost cleared from the edges of his visor, Stoner saw that there was writing on the bier alongside the alien’s body. And artifacts: a metal cup, a translucent sphere the size of a child’s ball, a rod of something that looked like wood. He tried to pick up the rod but it stuck fast to the surface of the bier. As he described it all into his microphone he tried to dislodge the other objects. None of them would move.
“This is a sarcophagus, Nikolai. A tomb. I know it is. This guy died a million years ago and had his body sent into space—like an Egyptain pharaoh. He had himself sent out in a sarcophagus.”