hands over the walls around me. No doorknob. No lever. “Howard? I’m stuck in here!”
Not even static came back. The Projectile hull was not only tough, it was radioproof .
The rucksack lay a foot away, separated from me by a sealed hatch. In the sack lay a flashlight, a gun, food and water that could be taken through a helmet nipple, and all the equipment that was supposed to let me gather intelligence and bring it back. Those things might as well have been back on Earth.
This was like waking blind in a coffin. Another sound joined the Projectile’s familiar whoop. More rapid, wheezing.
It was me, panting and buried alive. I couldn’t move, and I couldn’t see. Claustrophobic panic boiled up in my brain.
I forced myself to think. The visor. The mirrored sunglass layer could be slid up. I moved it and could see again. My breathing slowed.
The tube I lay in wasn’t completely dark.
It was circular and crenellated like a drainage culvert. I could see, barely, because it was suffused in purple light that glowed from the walls. The light pulsed in time to the whooping. I twisted to look over my shoulder. My purple sewer pipe corkscrewed out of sight fifty feet ahead, but it was no wider than the air lock.
I had two options. Wait here and hope Howard or fate would open the hatch. Until my oxygen generator quit or I died of thirst or starved. Option two was I could wriggle, feetfirst, deeper into the Projectile. I might find wide spaces, useful information and a way out. Or I might blunder into something that would kill me.
I never could sit still.
The tube’s featureless walls were cut every fifty feet or so with slots maybe three feet tall and two fingers wide. Ventilation ducts? Ventilating what? There must be atmosphere in here. After all, there was an air lock. That meant something had been alive in here to breathe it. Or was still breathing. I wanted that pistol from the rucksack.
The second set of ventilating ducts caught my thigh for the second time. I worked my hand down to my thigh and felt a lump in my suit. The thigh pocket. I peeled back the Velcro flap and felt the object inside. The flare pistol! My heart leapt. I was armed, sort of.
I worked my hand up alongside my body until I held the flare gun in front of me. This meant I could shoot anything that tried to sneak up behind me, but anything ahead of me could slink up and bite my feet off before I knew it.
I backed another hundred feet down the tube, keeping my fingers out of the air-conditioning vents.
My feet seemed suddenly freer. I wriggled onward. Six feet later, my torso entered a right-angle intersection with a larger-diameter tube. The intersection allowed me room to turn headfirst. And to realize that I could crawl or duckwalk along the bigger tube.
I sat up in the intersection while purple light pulsed in time to the incessant whooping. I took stock. I was stranded in a labyrinth. The old suits had been retrofitted with up-to-date oxygen generators so I could breathe, indefinitely. I had no food. I had no water. That last wasn’t all bad, as my bladder kept reminding me. My only weapon was a seventy-year-old flare pistol with one big, fat, slow bullet. My mission depended on measuring things, but my measuring equipment sat back outside the hatch that had trapped me in here. This vessel was as big as Dubuque. It surely had more than one door. I’d just keep crawling until I found another one, or I figured out how to open the one where I came in.
As I traveled, if I couldn’t measure what was in here, maybe I could take samples. I reversed the flare gun in my gloved hand like a geologist’s pick and hammered the curved wall.
The gun butt bounced back like a tennis ball off concrete.
I shrugged. I’d just have to remember what I saw.
The wide tube was more likely to lead somewhere important, so I changed course.
I made better time in the big tube, which I thought of as Broadway. Twenty minutes of crawling and griping to myself about the state of my bladder later, Broadway widened into an oval room as tall and wide as a garage. Times Square. Its walls were studded with glowing ovals, green, not purple, and twiggy lumps that could be controls.
Hair stood on my neck. Somehow, I felt that I wasn’t the only living thing in here.
I froze in the doorway and squinted as my eyes adjusted. Doorway was as good a word as any.
Across the room a shadow twitched.
I should have been terrified. But the enormity of this moment of contact overwhelmed me. My skin tingled.
The shape was a banana, colored like a new one, green. But five feet long and maybe two feet across the middle. It was as featureless as a banana. No eyes, just white bulges on its head end, no mouth.
It squirmed, twisted into a question mark, on an oval pedestal that rose out of the floor. Its skin rippled, from the elevated end of its question-mark body to the tail end, like a toothpaste tube squeezing itself. Black goo oozed from the tail into the pedestal.
For a thousand millennia humankind had wondered whether we were alone in the universe. For countless generations we had imagined and longed. Now, at this moment, the first representatives of intelligent species made physical contact across the cosmos.
And one of us was on the crapper.
Inside my helmet, I cleared my throat.
Chapter Twenty
I pointed the flare pistol. “Hands up!” Well, what was I supposed to say? Maybe it would get the message from my tone.
Sluggo—just one look named him for me—curled his head end my way.
We both froze while my heart pounded.
A row of the green wall lights flashed. His head end wagged slowly, like a cobra coiling up out of a basket.
He could be saying hello. He could be hypnotizing me.
I thumbed back the flare pistol’s hammer.
He slid off his toilet and circled to my left. He squirmed along, just like a garden snail, but fast. I circled, too, the pistol quivering in my hand.
I was on his turf. For all I knew, my next step could put me on top of a trapdoor that he could open and flush me into boiling oil.
Thup.
I flicked my eyes down. My foot drum-thumped a black, shiny hollow thing as big as Sluggo and shaped like him. It rocked on the floor.
He jumped at me, I dodged backward, and we ended up ten feet apart.
“So you don’t like me near your clothes.”
A bulge grew sideways from his midriff, became an octopus tentacle, and slunk toward a curved, metallic rod lying on the floor next to his outerwear. A gun?
I poked my gun at Sluggo and tightened my finger on the trigger. “Hold it!”
He stopped.
“Good boy.” I nodded.
His tentacle shot out toward the rod.
I dived for it. My glove got there first, and the rod skidded beyond Sluggo’s reach.
Dragging myself off the floor, I planted my body between him and his weapon. I trained the flare pistol on him, then stepped toward him. He retreated. Another step, another backward squirm. The room had no corners, really, but one rounded end narrowed. I herded him back there and trapped him.
He weaved back and forth. I had him, and he knew it.
Sluggo collapsed like a punctured balloon.
I counted ten heartbeats.
