by J. Blanes
For easier identification, they decided to call the ship rooms by more meaningful names. The one they were in now they called the kitchen, instead of the room with the table and chairs. The room next to it, the one with the beds, was now the bedroom, and the one with the seats, was the secure room. The empty rooms, the one at the back and the one with the window, presented a problem, and they discussed several possible names before Dylan’s propositions won the day. From now on, they would refer the little room at the back as the walk-in closet and the one in the front as the control room.
Another pressing matter was the lack of bathroom facilities. Albert was sure they were hidden somewhere in the ship, probably in a hidden chamber. They just had to figure out where. They decided to split up and look for them, each one in a different room. Dylan went to the walk-in closet, Keira to the bedroom next to it, and as they had already looked in the kitchen, Albert went to the control room.
They had barely started the search when they heard Dylan’s screams coming from the back of the ship. “Help! Let me go, you stupid ship! Help!”
Keira and Albert rushed to him. Their initial alarm soon faded away, and Keira looked at Dylan with surprise and amusement. She suppressed a laugh, covering her mouth with her hands, trying not to hurt Dylan’s pride.
“What are you laughing at?” Dylan snapped. “Help me get out of here!”
He was at the back corner of the soon-to-be-renamed walk-in closet. It was raining down over his body from a square foot of ceiling above him, and he was completely wet. His right foot was stuck in a hole on the floor, and he was struggling crazily to get it free.
“Nice job!” Albert said mockingly. “You’ve found the shower and the toilet.”
“What do you mean the toilet? What, this hole?” His face turned white. “Oh, my God! This is full of alien shit!” He couldn’t believe his luck. “Get me out of here!” he screamed more loudly, with renewed efforts for breaking himself free.
Albert and Keira helped him, still smiling.
“What happened?” Keira asked after Dylan’s foot finally got out of the hole.
“I just touched the wall there, on the left,” Dylan pointed at a section of the wall. “Suddenly, water came down on me from the ceiling. I tried to dodge the water and took a step back, but the floor opened, swallowing my foot. Do you really think this hole is the toilet?” he asked, troubled at the thought of it.
“No doubt about it,” Albert said confidently. “We should rename this room, don’t you think?”
In no time, they discovered other items related to the bathroom, all of them hidden inside the walls: a pile of soft tissues that Albert thought was the toilet paper, a bar of soap, a hairbrush, toothbrushes, a liquid gel for the hair or a toothpaste—they were still undecided—and even feminine-hygiene products. However, the discovery Dylan liked the most was the dryer, a whole-body dryer that blew a pleasant, warm air from the shower walls.
They all used the bathroom and took a shower in turns. It was uncomfortable to have to wear the same clothes after their showers, so they went to the bedroom looking for a change of clothes. If the aliens had been so thorough with the bathroom, they must have included some clean clothes and a way to clean the dirty ones.
Keira found bedclothes and Albert found pillows. What Dylan found puzzled them. It was a thick, dark-gray sheet with a hole the size of a head in the middle.
“Maybe it’s for wearing, like a Mexican poncho,” Dylan guessed after examining it. He passed his head through the hole and let the sheet drop over his body. “Well, not practical and not very fashionable.”
“Look, it has one of those small buttons here, just below the neck,” Keira said as she pushed the button.
As soon as she did so, the sheet shrank abruptly, stretched, and enveloped Dylan’s body like a glove from neck to toes, including his hands. “Wow!” he said.
He was now wearing a full bodysuit, like the ones used by thieves at night. “Cool!” he exclaimed, excited with his new suit. “This time I must admit the aliens have impressed me.”
Albert looked at the suit’s wrinkles and bumps in disapproval. “I think one must wear this suit without any clothes underneath,” he remarked.
Dylan pushed the button again, and the suit loosened back into a sheet over his body. He went to the bathroom and returned wearing the full bodysuit, this time without any clothes underneath.
Albert noticed the suit was tightly stuck to Dylan’s body. “Is it comfortable?” he asked, shaking his head doubtfully.
“Extremely,” Dylan replied, visibly enjoying his cool new outfit. “It’s not as tight as it seems. Really, it’s like wearing a T-shirt, and it has more than meets the eyes. Look”—he raised his foot—“it has shoe soles, and you can uncover the hands by pushing these buttons on top of the wrists.” He demonstrated, pushing the button. The suit retreated from his hands, leaving them exposed up to his wrists. Dylan pushed the buttons again, and the suit responded by stretching and covering his hands again, like leather gloves.
After more searching, they found other sheet-suits, a burgundy red that Keira chose for herself and a navy blue for Albert, who had no problems fitting into one, even with his big size. After playing for a while with their new suits, they discovered another feature. With two buttons on the suit’s belly, they could loosen down or tighten the suit, adjusting it comfortably to any size they desired. Their suits were great, and there were plenty of them on the ship.
“What time is it?” Dylan asked finally. He was hungry again. The chicken cylinder had not lasted long.
“It’s almost six p.m.” Albert replied. “I wonder if the ship will help us with this.”
“Help us with what?”
“Keeping track of time is going to be very important because, in space, we won’t have the sun rising every twenty-four hours, telling us when it’s daytime or nighttime.”
“We can understand that,” Keira replied, “but we have our watches. Mine has solar cells, and they recharge with any kind of light. We shouldn’t worry about time. I believe this base is well covered.”
“I was thinking about the lights, not the time,” Albert corrected her. “Do you think you’ll be able to sleep under these bright lights?” He pointed at the ceiling. “I don’t know about you, but I need darkness to be able to sleep.”
Keira looked at the lights on the ceiling. Albert was right; they were bright and intense, and it would be difficult to fall asleep with them on.
Albert added, “I’m saying this because one thing we’ve not been able to find is a light switch.”
They made another search for the light switches all around the ship. They found more food, suits, and some weird rubber tubes, but not the switches. Albert was right; there was no way to turn off the lights.
“As I said, I hope the ship will help us with this,” Albert said. “And there’s another thing that worries me,” he went on. “I’m easily bored, and the prospect of spending many hours with nothing to do really scares me.”
Keira smiled and made Albert a surprising offer. “What about a chess game to spend the time?”
“What? How?” Albert was speechless.
“Let me borrow your pen.” Albert gave it to her, and she went to the kitchen’s table. She drew a small chessboard in a page of her notebook. Then, she drew the different chess pieces on other pages and carefully clipped them. She colored the black pieces and left the others blank. “Ta-da!” she exclaimed. “A chessboard with a full set of pieces ready to play!” She showed them her artwork, smiling proudly.
Albert was impressed, not a common occurrence for him. For a moment, he was selfishly glad that she was there with them, but he soon felt ashamed of himself. She should be with their own kind, on Earth, not here.
“And we can also draw other games,” she added. “Like backgammon, checkers, and many others, as long as we’re car
eful not to waste the sheets of paper.”
“I know checkers!” Dylan blurted out. He was relieved that he could also participate in the games.
“When the aliens don’t provide, there’s always Keira to salvage the situation,” Albert commented, rather out of character, as he sat in front of her. “Let’s play!”
They played many games, switching from one game to the other so Dylan could also join them. Albert found himself impressed for the second time in a day when he suffered loss after loss at Dylan’s master checkers hand. To their complete astonishment, he won all checkers games, letting Albert and Keira wondering where in the world he’d hidden all that talent during his daily average behavior.
“Aha! Now you’re mine!” Dylan exclaimed again, making the move that would destroy Keira’s defenses. “A dame for me, you’ll be dead in no time.”
“Where did you learn to play like this?” she asked. His checkers skills were amazing.
“I played a lot with Mom,” Dylan replied. “She learned to play from Granddad. She told me many stories about him, you know. He was a member of military intelligence during the Vietnam War, very smart and brave. He won several medals during that war. Every trick I know for this game I know from her, and she from him.”
At that instant, all lights went out, except for a row of the blue luminescent lights on the floor that marked the boundaries for each wall. The lights looked the same as those they had seen on the seats when they entered the ship.
“And now what?” Dylan snapped, frustrated because of the interruption.
“Now it’s time to sleep,” Albert replied. “It seems the ship is going to help us after all.”
Keira looked at her watch; it was 10:00 p.m. “I agree,” she said. “It’s time to sleep.”
They all went to bed, but only Albert fell asleep. Keira’s thoughts were lost in the many unanswered questions that came to her mind. Why them? What did the aliens want? How much time would they have to spend on this ship? Where were they going? She also thought about her parents, how terrified they’d feel when they’d find out that their only daughter had vanished from the face of Earth. She wished she could send them a message of hope, that she was alive and determined to go back to them. She felt sad and turned to the other side of the bed, trying to force herself not to think about it, but no matter how hard she tried, all those thoughts came back to her mind.
Dylan’s main problem was entirely different. His battle was against the silence, a deafening silence that screamed into his ears more loudly than a cruise horn on a foggy night. He was used to the sounds from the city streets and needed them, or in their absence, any sounds whatsoever. Even at the quiet countryside farm, he’d had no problem falling asleep like a baby. The crickets, the wind, the creaking of the wood, the animals at the barn, and many other sounds served their purpose. Any sound would do, but not the complete silence that was driving him crazy.
None of them knew when they finally managed to fell asleep, but they did, and the next day witnessed one of the strangest periods of Albert’s behavior they had ever witnessed since they had known him.
It all started as normally as one could expect given the circumstances. Albert got up just after the lights turned on. He showered and ate his breakfast, which consisted of a small yellowish stick with an orange scent, a white one that tasted like cinnamon oatmeal, and finally, the best one, a red jelly-textured cube that, surprisingly, tasted like jelly. Then, he told the others that he would spend the morning examining the ship, and he would appreciate if they would leave him alone until he had finished his study. That was when the weirdness started.
During that morning, Keira and Dylan watched, amused and amazed at the same time, how Albert jumped many times in each room, as if he were jumping rope. After that, he cut the ship walls in several places with Dylan’s knife, lay on the floor looking down and doing absolutely nothing but staring at it, and crawled to another stretch of floor, staring at it again. Then, he purposely spilled water in the kitchen several times, and finally, he spent more than two hours staring motionless at the front window, notebook and pen in hand, writing something on it from time to time.
Keira and Dylan left him alone, as he wanted, but they could only assume that they had lost him during the night. They wanted to stop and ask him what was going on, but they didn’t dare to interrupt, just in case he was really doing something useful instead of crazy. What he was doing was beyond their wildest guesses, but in the end, they respected his request, and nobody bothered him until he finished. Even so, Keira and Dylan never let him out of their sight.
To add to their frustration, when Albert finished his weird routines, he behaved as if nothing had happened. “I’m hungry” were his only words before sitting at the table and starting to eat. Keira and Dylan sat next to him, demanding an explanation with their eyes. Either he didn’t realize his friends’ requests or he ignored them, because he didn’t speak at all.
“Are you going to tell us or what?” Dylan snapped finally, slamming the table with his hand.
Albert frowned, as if awakened from a trance, looking disoriented. “What do you mean? Tell you what?”
“Are you kidding me?” Dylan couldn’t believe his friend. “You’ve behaved like a monkey in a cage all morning, and you’re asking what do I mean?”
Albert sat back on his chair, thinking about it. Then, he quickly leaned forward again. “OK, what do you want to know?”
“The jumping, the cutting, the crawling, everything,” Dylan enumerated all the strange behaviors Albert had shown during the day.
“The jumping is easy,” Albert said plainly. “I was just trying to figure out if the artificial gravity generated by this ship is the same as on Earth.”
“Artificial gravity?” Dylan asked in surprise.
“Yes. Haven’t you wondered why we’re not floating around? I mean, we’re in space, and there’s no gravity in space.”
“Well, I just assumed…” Dylan said. “I’ve seen many movies, and they never talk about it.”
“I know, but this is not a movie, and we’re stuck to the floor, so the ship must be creating some kind of gravity field. It’s some piece of technology that I wouldn’t even try to understand, of course, but I wondered if the gravity force was similar to Earth’s. The fact that we didn’t notice it and that I could jump to the same height as I do on Earth prove to me that it is the same.”
“And why is that important?” Keira interjected.
“It’s not; it’s a simple curiosity,” Albert confessed. “And it also indicates that our hosts probably hadn’t mastered that technology or it’s too complicated to fit into this ship completely.”
“Do you mean the opposite, right?” Dylan asked. It was clear that the aliens had mastered the technology and that was why they weren’t flying like mosquitoes all around the ship.
“No, I meant what I said,” Albert insisted.
“And how would you know that?” Dylan was completely skeptical this time. It was one thing to jump and compare heights, but it was another thing entirely to say anything about the aliens’ ability with a technology, and much less a technology that they had clearly mastered.
“As you’ve noticed,” Albert started explaining, “everything in here has been designed for our comfort and well-being, except for one thing: the unpleasant acceleration we suffered when the ship took off. With gravity, you can counteract the effects of acceleration, and the fact that they didn’t do this could only mean one of two things: either they don’t know how to or it’s too complicated to fit into a small ship like this and not worth their trouble. I’m inclined toward the latter. Of course, this is all speculation.”
“No, it’s fascinating!” Keira exclaimed in admiration. “You’ve inferred something about the aliens just by jumping and thinking.”
Albert was flattered. “Well, not only this,” he went on. “We
can safely assume that they’re bigger than us or at least taller and that they can see in colors and have a grasp of human fashion.”
“Come on, Sherlock Holmes,” Dylan said sarcastically. “How would you know that, and more important, what’s new about anyone seeing in colors?”
“Easy,” Albert replied with food in his mouth. “I gathered that our aliens can see in colors and have a grasp of human fashion by looking at the colors on the bodysuits. It’s obvious that our hosts know we like colors on our clothes; if not, why don’t just make them all gray, or black? And the fact that they made the bodysuits in different colors means they can perceive them, or at least detect them, not a common thing even on Earth, where most animals can only see a few colors or none at all. Then again, this is all speculation from my part.”
He paused and drank some water. He was not used to speaking for so long, and his throat got sore.
“I’m more confident about their height,” he went on, “simply because of the ship and ramp heights. They’re clearly too high for us, and a waste of material and energy for a ship like this. It makes no sense, unless this was a reconditioned ship, not a ship made specifically for us. A hypothesis I tested by examining the floor—and by the way, that’s why I did all the crawling. I found several places on this ship, especially in the control room, with unused anchors, footprints from heavy things, and other clues about previously installed equipment. None of those things are here, so I’m pretty sure that this ship was used by the aliens and reconditioned for human living.”
He drank again while Keira and Dylan looked at each other. They couldn’t believe there was a logical explanation behind his bizarre behavior after all.
“The back wall is not the end of the ship,” Albert continued. “I measured the rooms’ lengths. Then I measured the ramp width, and by comparing their relative sizes with the pictures Keira took of the ship on Earth, I figured out there’s a portion of the ship that we’re not allowed to see. It’s not big, and it’s at the back of the ship behind the last wall. I believe it holds the ship’s engine and other machinery. Anything else? I’m really tired of talking.”
