by Jerry Oltion
"We got here on our own power," Judy said. "They've got to respect that."
"But look what we got here in!"
"Like they're going to know what it's supposed to be used for?" The moment she said that she wondered how stupid that was. Anybody who could build structures like this in space—and this many of them at that—could probably figure out in an instant not only what their spaceship was made of, and what the tank's intended purpose was, but where it came from and what it carried as well. She kept her eyes on the monitors. Hers showed the entire space station, or colony, or whatever it was. Its spiky protrusions cast stark shadows across the irregular core, giving it a sharp-edged, technological look, but Allen's monitor still showed the close-up image, and that displayed a much more organic aspect. The ductwork or transport tubes or whatever they were really did look like vines, complete with a rough green surface that resembled bark much more than it did metal. The lumpy habitat modules they enclosed had a more pebbly coating, like lizard skin.
There was no answer to their radio call. Allen switched the receiver to scan mode and let it cycle through all the frequencies it could pick up, but there were no transmissions on any band. He picked a frequency at random and tried transmitting again. "Hello, this is the Earth vessel Getaway Special calling. Do you copy?"
No response. He tried at least a dozen more times, picking a new frequency for each attempt, but if anyone heard him, they showed no sign.
It looked like they weren't going to hit the station after all. Their motion was going to take them close, but they would pass under it by a few thousand feet. Judy held her breath as they approached, half expecting a missile or a laser beam or some alien death ray to lance out and blow them to smithereens, but the station showed no sign that anyone on board even noticed they were there. She supposed it was possible that she and Allen had slipped in under their radar, so to speak, but that thought only scared her all the more. She knew what humans would do in a similar situation once they did detect an intruder; in fact she had experienced it firsthand less than a week ago.
"Get ready to jump," she whispered.
"Where?"
"Anywhere. We don't know they're friendly."
"We don't know they're they," Allen pointed out.
"What do you mean by that? This thing's big enough to hold a couple of million people. I don't care how big the guys who built it are; there's more than one of 'em on board." He clipped the microphone back onto the radio and keyed in a set of jump coordinates. "I don't know. I don't see any evidence of habitation here. No windows, no handholds, no airlocks, no docking ports—nothing like that. If it's a space station, it's not run by beings who think like us. And if they don't think like us, they may not be like us, not even on a fundamental level. This could be a big blob of bacteria living off the solar wind for all we know."
Judy had to swivel the camera all the way to its upper limit to keep it aimed at the station as they swept past. It was no blob of bacteria, of that she was certain. But Allen had a point: it didn't look like anything humans would build, either. It was too organic. It had hard edges, but they were the kind of edges you would find on a thorn bush or a seashell.
The camera couldn't zoom out enough to keep the whole thing on the monitor anymore. It was so big, size became an abstract concept. Watching it pass on the screen felt just like scanning a soil sample with an electron microscope. The pipes could be fungal mycelia; the spiky things could be diatoms; the irregular lumps could be cells.
It was growing cold in the tank. They were too far from the star, and radiating too much heat. The plastic walls would grow brittle if they lost much more. Judy's sense of adventure felt like it was already close to cracking. It was fine to imagine meeting aliens when your mental picture of them came from watching E.T. as a child, but when she was actually there, floating closer to a city-sized space station—
maybe—she didn't feel nearly so enthusiastic about it.
She looked to the lumpy sleeping bag at her feet. Had she put Trent's gun in there? Could she get to it in time to defend herself if she needed it? She was appalled at herself for even thinking that, but it was an involuntary reaction.
A pistol would be useless here anyway. The thing was huge. Their entire spaceship, such as it was, could smack into it at orbital velocity and still not do more than superficial damage. She and Allen watched it slide past, its irregular surface growing more and more filled with shadow as they moved away from the sunlit side. There could be anything waiting in those pools of darkness. Weapons, predators, antibodies ...
Or nothing at all. The artifact swept past, then receded into the distance, becoming just a ragged line of backlit extrusions outlining a black oblong that blotted out the sun. Judy breathed again, but at the same time she felt more disappointed than she had since she'd been the ugly girl at a high school dance. "They . . . 'it' . . . whatever . . . just ignored us."
"Looks like it," Allen said. He consulted the navigation program again and typed in another set of coordinates.
"Where are we going now?"
"I want to have a look at another one. Maybe we'll have better luck there." Judy looked at the dark mass again. "Yeah, like maybe this one was just asleep or something," she said facetiously, but the moment she said it, she realized she meant it. The second one looked exactly like the first. They had to make two jumps to get as close to it as they had come by accident before, but it paid them no more attention than its twin. And the more Judy stared at it, the more convinced she became that it wasn't a space station. She wasn't quite ready to believe that it was a living organism, either, but whatever it was, it paid no more attention to them than she would to a dust mite.
They tried a third one with no more success. Judy had relaxed by then, at least as much as possible when she was fifty light-years from home in a spaceship the size of a closet. Her pressure suit was starting to chafe, and her bladder was giving her the one-hour warning. She was normally good for four or five hours, but she hadn't had a chance to pee since she'd gotten up that morning. And they were already a third of the way through their air supply. That was the critical factor. She could urinate in the suit if she had to, but once she and Allen got down to the end of their air, they would have to go back to Earth and try it again.
As they watched the unresponsive whatever-it-was recede into the distance, she said, "I don't think we're going to learn much more unless we actually match velocities with one and go over for a closer look in our suits. And that would take time we don't have."
Allen reluctantly agreed. "Yeah, matching velocities would be a real trick. We'd have to calculate the vector we need, then go find a planet we could use as a gravity well, then pop back here. We don't have radar, so we'd probably have to fine-tune it with three or four jumps." He looked from the monitor to Judy. "But we can't just leave without figuring out what they are, can we?"
"Do we have a choice?"
He grimaced. "No. Damn it, no, we don't. Shit!" He whacked his hand against the tank. The hollow bong sounded like a church bell tolling the death of his dream.
"I'm sorry," Judy said. "We could try again later. Come back with a real spaceship that we can maneuver. But for now, we've either got to find someplace where we can breathe the air, or go back home in about four hours and hope we can avoid the authorities long enough to recharge our oxygen tank."
Allen's angry outburst had propelled him sideways against the hyperdrive. He pushed himself back down onto his beanbag chair and cinched the strap around his waist to hold himself in place. "You're right" he said. "Damn it. This isn't what we came for." He called up the starmap program, got the coordinates for the next star in the cluster of nearby sunlike ones, and keyed them in. A moment later, they were there. It only took two jumps this time; there had been no need to escape a planet's gravity well.
Judy wished they could escape the aura of gloom that had settled over her, too. She knew she wasn't being logical—she had just come over fifty light-years from hom
e!—but she hadn't bargained on finding incomprehensible artifacts that might or might not have even been artifacts. Their size, rather than filling her with awe, had merely made her feel insignificant. And that on top of finding Alpha Centauri's perfect planet not only discovered already, but in the process of being colonized—it was too much to bear in one day.
But the day wasn't over yet. They went through the same routine of checking for planets that they had done at both previous stops. Judy braced herself for disappointment, but she allowed herself to hope when the comparator came up with a good prospect about 3 AU out from the star, which was itself almost as good a prospect as Alpha Centauri. It was brighter than the Sun, but it had no close stellar companions to perturb planetary orbits, so the extra brightness just put its habitable zone farther out.
"Third time's a charm," she said when she saw it, then she searched frantically for something made out of wood to knock on before she jinxed it. She rapped the plywood-reinforced hatch overhead, her gloved hands making a soft thud.
Allen calculated the jump and took them closer, but the moment she saw the planet, her heart fell again. The atmosphere looked good—swirls of white cloud swept through it just like on Earth—but the surface was all one color: blue. It looked like one huge ocean, even at the poles, which were only evident by the weather patterns.
She zoomed in with as high a magnification as she could get and searched for any sign of land, but if there was any, it was on the night side. This planet could be water all the way to the core for all she knew.
Allen helped search for a few minutes, but then he turned his attention to the comparator reading again. "Hey, there's a moon," he said cheerily.
"So?"
He narrowed his eyes. "So . . . maybe we should go have a look."
"What's the point?"
"To see what it looks like?"
"It's just going to be an airless rock. Or another one of those piles of crap that doesn't give a shit about us one way or the other."
He lowered his voice the way he might speak to a petulant child. "We don't know that. It could be anything. Maybe this is a double planet, and the other one didn't get quite so much water."
"And maybe it's made of green cheese. That would be good."
They stared at one another, Allen obviously unsure what to do with this stranger who had taken over Judy's body, and Judy past caring. She clenched her fists, but the spacesuit gloves resisted even that little bit of comfort.
"Damn it. Damn it all! This isn't the way it's supposed to work. Space is supposed to be full of habitable planets. Enough for everyone, including left-handed theremin players. Where the hell are they?"
"We've only tried three stars," Allen said reasonably. "And we did hit one. It's too small a sample to be statistically significant, but even if it were, that's not such a bad average."
"Yeah, right." Judy took a couple of deep breaths, trying to wash the anger out of her system. When she could trust herself to speak again, she said, "Look, I know it's not your fault, but this isn't working out quite the way I'd hoped. I don't want to spend all our time looking at astronomical curiosities; I want to find another planet we can actually land on."
"Me too." Allen typed in another set of coordinates. "One quick jump to the moon just to see if it's a candidate, and if it's not, on we go."
She took another deep breath. "All right."
The water planet winked out like a burst soap bubble, but nothing else took its place. They weren't rotating nearly as fast as they had been before, so it took a couple of minutes to confirm what Judy already suspected: there was nothing in sight in any direction.
"Where the heck did it go?" Allen asked, but he was already running the comparator program again to find out. It only took a few seconds to come up with the answer: they had overshot, and now it was nearly hidden in the glare of the sun.
"Hmm. Must be smaller than I'd hoped," he said. "Not enough mass to create much of a gravity well. Let me calculate the right correction . . . and here we go." This time something popped into view when they jumped. It was half in light and half in shadow, giving them a high-contrast view of every bump and groove as they zoomed in on it. Judy didn't know whether to laugh or cry. It was another artifact, but this one, at least, was recognizable. It was a long cylinder with a rounded nose on one end and four smaller cylinders spaced evenly around the circumference at the other. The nose was peppered with evenly spaced dimples that could only be portholes, and there were more of them along the side. The cylinder grew thicker toward the back, where the four smaller pods were mounted. Those had to be engines, and while it was no design Judy had ever seen, the whole thing had to be a spaceship.
23
"Once more into the breach," she muttered.
They were moving past it at a pretty good clip. At nearest approach they were still a couple of kilometers away, but that was close enough. The thing was huge. It filled the monitors even at the cameras' lowest magnification, and at full zoom they could see the outlines of thousands of airlocks and cargo bay doors and various other less definitive lumps and projections. Everything had a rounded look to it, as if it had partially melted or was made of something soft right from the beginning. There was no writing on it, unless the subtle variations in its brownish color conveyed meaning in some alien script. It was not human built; that much was obvious. For one thing, the race that was still struggling to keep Fred in orbit couldn't build something like that in a decade, much less the week they had had since Allen had dropped the hyperdrive plans in their laps. And the Onnescus of the world notwithstanding, nobody just happened to have one lying around in their back yard, either.
"Try the radio," Judy said, with no trace left of the hesitation she had felt the first time.
"Right." Allen called, listened, called again and listened while the two ships drew apart, but nobody answered. "I'm beginning to think that radio isn't the best way to get someone's attention," he said.
"Have you got a better idea?"
He nodded. "Let's shed some velocity and see if we can actually come up on 'em slowly enough to be seen by naked eye."
Judy didn't really want to waste the time it would take to do that, but she couldn't see any way around it, short of going back for another pass, depressurizing the tank completely, standing in the open hatch, and simply throwing a can of beans at the ship as they swept past. Considering what even a modestly speeding can of beans could do to a spaceship—even one that size—she didn't suppose that would be a good idea.
"All right, let's see if we can slow down," she said. They needed to see if this "tangential vector translation maneuver" of Allen's would work anyway, preferably before they tried using it to land somewhere. This would be as good a test as any.
He spent a couple minutes at the keyboard, keying in his best estimate of the relative velocity between the two ships and getting an exact distance to the center of the planet, based on triangulation from their current position and the point where they had first showed up next to it. He entered the data into the "TVTM" program, pressed the "Enter" key, and said, "According to this, we've got about twelve minutes to fall, provided I got all the bugs out."
"We can always hope," Judy said as the program shifted them to a point above the planet where its gravity would pull them into just the right vector. She wasn't really that worried about this part; she had great faith in Allen's programming. His planet-finding routine had worked without a hitch, even if the planets themselves had been disappointments.
They fell freely in their new position, examining the planet as they rose away from it, but there was really not much to see. Judy would never have imagined that she could grow bored in so short a time looking at an extra-solar planet, but when all there was to see were storm systems that looked exactly like the ones she'd seen from Earth orbit, there really wasn't much to hold her interest. She refreshed their air again, lowering the pressure another pound now that they were breathing almost pure oxygen. They used both valv
es this time, carefully keeping their rotation rate slow enough to allow them to pan the cameras without struggling. When they were done repressurizing, their oxygen supply stood at just over fifty percent.
Her legs were cramping from being bent so long. She wanted desperately to stretch out, but there simply wasn't room with all the stuff wedged in around her. At least she didn't have gravity to contend with; if she were packed this tightly into place on Earth, half her body would be in agony by now. At last the program beeped to warn them that their velocity change was complete, then it automatically took them back to their starting point. Allen had to find the alien ship again from there, but when the comparator did its thing and he took them close to it, they could hardly detect any relative motion.
Now that they had a chance to examine it at leisure, they could see that the other ship was tumbling end-for-end. The motion was almost too slow to see, about like the minute hand on a watch, but the effect was apparent immediately: the ship's nose had been pointing toward the sun before, but now the tail faced about sixty degrees into the light.
"Jesus, look at those rocket nozzles," Judy said. The entire backside looked like one cavernous exhaust port. The opening looked like it extended inward at least a third of the length of the ship, too.
"It's all engine," she said, but the moment she said it she realized that didn't make any sense. A rocket with a nozzle that size would accelerate at dozens of gees if the engine was at all efficient, but even if the passengers could take that kind of punishment, there was no point in it. Rocket engines were most effective when they burned small amounts of fuel over long periods of time, not the other way around, and anybody who could build something like this ship would understand that principle just as well as she did.
And besides, she had seen portholes and airlocks all along the flank during their first pass. The way things looked from here, they would open directly into the nozzle—for about a millisecond until their seals burned through and the exhaust flame ripped the ship apart from the inside out. But there were the hatches. They were tiny compared to the size of the ship, but she could see them quite clearly down inside. Far more clearly, in fact, than from the outside. They didn't have any of that melted look she had seen before.
