Ship of Fools (17 page)

“Is there anyone who doesn’t want to stay there?” Nikos asked. “Is there anyone there who thinks exploration should be suspended, if only for a short time?”

The only response was a number of shaking heads.

“Aiyana?”

She, too, shook her head. “I’m with them. We should stay. We should keep going. Something’s going to happen soon.”

Nikos sighed. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”

After more argument, the Executive Council voted. The vote was close, but we won. We would stay here and continue exploring.

I did not like what I saw in the bishop’s face, however. There was no real acceptance in his expression. Rather, I detected a smoldering anger, and a disturbing sense that he
was merely biding his time. I realized that I feared the bishop more than the dangers of the alien ship. I thought again of the bishop’s three excursions, wondering what he had found and what he planned. Wait, and watch our backs, Cardenas had said. I was afraid that wouldn’t be enough.

T
WO
days later, the second-shift team was in a small, low-ceilinged room, preparing to try another door. Pär was on point, and his video was displayed on the shuttle monitor. He stood in front of a narrow door with a simple wheel mechanism set into the wall beside it. “It can’t be this easy,” he said.

He took hold of the wheel with both hands, turned it, and the door slid open. A shower of ice crystals poured out of the opening; the picture frosted over, and Pär yelled, “Shit!”

A harsh expulsion of breath. The monitor was grayed out. Rita Hollings fumbled with the console, switched over to Casterman’s camera. Pär was sitting on the floor, his helmet covered with ice crystals. More crystals were on his suit, the floor, the wall beside him.

“Shit,” he said again. “I can’t see a damn thing!”

“Are you all right?” Maria Vegas asked. Presumably she was somewhere behind Casterman.

Pär nodded. With his gloved hand he brushed crystals from his helmet until he had most of it cleared. Vegas came around Casterman and helped Pär to his feet.

“Thanks,” he said. Then: “What the hell was that?”

“Must you curse so much?” Casterman asked.

Pär turned to him. “Yes, I must.” Then, to those of us watching, he asked, “Whose camera we on?”

“Casterman’s,” I said.

“Then switch over to Maria’s so I don’t have to keep looking at him.” He turned to face Maria Vegas.

Hollings turned and looked questioningly at me. I saw I would have to make another change in the teams. I shrugged and nodded, and she switched over. Pär now appeared to be looking out at us.

“Okay,” I said. “What happened?”

“I don’t know. All these ice crystals came flying out, startled me, and I fell on my ass.”

“Anyone got any brilliant ideas about it?”

Rogers was beside me, and he nodded. “I would guess that it was pressurized atmosphere.”

T
HE
three of them moved into the next room. Now we were on Pär’s camera. The cabin looked a lot like the air lock in the outer hull. In the wall directly opposite the door through which they’d entered was an identical door. Next to it was an identical wheel, and when Pär looked back at the open door, we could see another wheel on the inside beside it.

Rogers spoke up. “I’m fairly certain you won’t be able to open the next door before sealing this one. This has to be another air lock. But before you try it, I suggest someone go back and seal off the previous door as well. The chances are good that there is air beyond the next door, and we don’t want to lose it. The air lock
should
take care of that, but we don’t know how old this ship is, or how long it’s been abandoned, and I don’t think we should count on the air lock door being secure. So I suggest we seal another door as a backup, and hope for the best.”

“Okay,” said Maria Vegas. “Makes sense, and it shouldn’t take too long.”

“I’ll do it,” Casterman said.

While Casterman was gone, there wasn’t much talking.
Maria and Pär explored the air lock. The walls had hooks and handles and panels that opened to reveal empty cabinets or lockers with more hooks.

“Someday,” Pär said, “we’re going to open one of these cabinet doors and something will actually be inside.” He laughed to himself. “And it will probably lunge out and kill us.”

Casterman finally returned. “I went back two doors,” he said, “and sealed them both. We’re ready.”

He then turned the inner wheel of the open doorway, and the door slid shut. They were sealed inside the air lock.

“Who wants to open the door this time?” Pär asked. “Who wants to fall on their ass?”

“I will,” Maria Vegas said. Then, looking at Pär: “I’m not afraid.”

She approached the wheel, but stood well to the side of the door.

“That’s hardly fair,” Pär said. “You should be standing right in front of it, like I was.”

Maria didn’t bother to answer him. She took hold of the wheel with both hands, and turned it. The door slid open.

Not surprisingly, a shower of ice crystals seemed to pour in through the door. What
was
surprising, although we should have expected it, was that the shower kept coming. It blossomed, became a rushing cloud that filled the room, frosting over everyone and everything, including the cameras.

“Damn!” Pär exclaimed.

Cardenas switched from camera to camera, but we couldn’t see a thing through any of them.

“Sound off,” I said.

“I’m okay,” Maria said. “I’m not moving.”

“Yeah, I’m fine, too,” Pär added.

Nothing else for a few moments. The quiet was a barely audible hiss, disconcerting.

“Casterman?”

Another few moments of that quiet, then, “Oh . . . yes . . . I’m sorry, I’m all right. I was just . . . overwhelmed for a minute.”

We still couldn’t see anything. “Get your visors clear,” I said, “then try to get the cameras clear.”

“Aye, aye,” Pär said.

But something odd was happening. The image on the monitor—from Casterman’s camera—was already transforming. The frosty gray congealed into discrete droplets, leaving tiny areas of clearing around them. Then the droplets began to stretch and run, sliding downward. Finally I realized what was happening: the ice crystals were melting, then dripping down the camera lenses.

“It’s melting,” Maria said.

We had a spotted, distorted image for a while, even after Maria went over and tried to wipe Casterman’s camera lens clear. The suit gloves weren’t much good at wiping away liquids.

“It’s not only pressurized,” said Rogers. “It’s heated. Should have realized.” He was excited, watching and thinking about what was happening in there.

When visors and cameras were relatively clear, the three of them prepared to go through the now open doorway, Maria in the lead. As they approached the door, she stopped.

“Wait . . . wait a minute.”

We were still with Casterman’s camera, in the rear. He and Pär stopped behind Maria and waited. She was just a step from the doorway, looking through it.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Light, I think.” She switched off the lantern she was carrying.

I turned to Cardenas, but she was already switching to Maria’s camera. The image darkened with the change, but it soon became clear that it wasn’t completely dark beyond the doorway, though the light from the lanterns behind Maria made recognizing that difficult. There was a dim, bluish illumination, so faint that it was impossible to gauge the shape or dimensions of the space.

“Turn off all the lanterns,” Maria said.

Two more were switched off, then Casterman or Pär walked over to the one they had mounted on the air lock wall and switched it off.

The blue illumination was more distinct now, although it was still terribly faint. There was a vague sense of shadow or form farther in. A feeling of deep blue smoke or mist, or even suspended water. It’s difficult to describe. The combination of illumination and atmosphere, perhaps, gave everything an appearance so different from what we had all been seeing on the alien ship that it seemed almost solid, more substantial.

“I’m going in,” Maria said.

She turned on her hand torch and aimed the beam down at the floor on the other side of the doorway. As she stepped through the opening, the deep blue light brightened perceptibly. Maria stopped. She turned off the hand torch.

The light was still dim, but it was bright enough now to generally make out the shape and extent of the room. It was circular and quite large, twenty-five or thirty meters across. The walls appeared to be fairly smooth; the floor, too, was smooth for several meters; then it sank with a series of circular steps to a flat circular section in the center of the room about ten or twelve meters across.

I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned to see Father Veronica, not looking at me but gazing at the monitor with fear and wonder.

“Bartolomeo,” she whispered.

“I know,” I said. I knew what she was thinking. The room resembled the central chamber of the star-shaped building on Antioch. There were differences, of course—there were no banks of instruments circling the central section, for example—but the resemblance was close enough to trigger those memories.

“It’s not the same,” I said. “It’s just a circular room.” I think I was trying to convince myself as much as reassure Father Veronica. It wasn’t easy.

Maria finally resumed her progress. She began a circuit of the room, staying close to the wall; Cardenas ran through the cameras to confirm that Pär and Casterman had also entered the room, and were following Maria. No one spoke much, because there wasn’t much to talk about. A third of the way around the room they came across a door with a
simple metal handle; two-thirds of the way around was another door exactly like the first.

When the circuit was complete, they walked in toward the steps. “Let me take them first,” Maria said. “You two wait until I’m on the lower floor. And if it opens up . . . well, just don’t leave me here.”

She started down the steps. She took them slowly, pausing on each one for a few moments before taking the next.

“How does it feel?” Rogers asked when she had gone down four, and had three to go.

“What do you mean?”

“The height of the steps. Are they comfortable to walk down? Do they feel like a natural height?”

“I hadn’t noticed. So I guess they
do
feel pretty natural. Normal steps.”

She continued. When she was on the last step, she crouched, set her lantern on the floor, and slid it out toward the center. Nothing happened.

“It’s one of those traps that doesn’t activate until it detects a living creature,” Pär said.

“You come down and try it, then,” Maria replied. “You’ll be safe enough.” She waited a few moments longer, then stepped onto the floor.

Still nothing. She took a few more cautious steps, then finally walked with normal strides to the center and picked up the lantern. “It’s just a floor,” she said.

Then she tilted her head back and looked up at the ceiling. The central section was stepped up in the same way the floor was stepped down, and the blue light was so dim that we couldn’t make out any detail. Maria turned on her hand torch and swept the beam across the ceiling. It was covered with faceted glass, or at least what appeared to be glass.

By this time her teammates had joined her, and Casterman said, “Maybe that’s the source of the light.”

That didn’t seem likely—the blue glow seemed too diffuse to be coming from a single source like that, and before Maria had aimed the torch beam at the ceiling, it hadn’t
seemed to be glowing or emitting any illumination. But I didn’t have a better idea, so I kept silent.

“There’s not much here,” Pär said. “I’d say it’s time to try one of the other two doors.”

“No,” I said. “It’s time for the three of you to come back to the shuttle.”

“Not a chance!” Pär threw up his hands in disbelief. “We’re in new territory here,” he continued. “Heat and air, light, who knows what else. Everything’s changed. We’ve got to keep going.”

“Yes,” I replied, “everything’s changed. That’s why you’ve got to come back now. You’re almost at the end of your shift, anyway. We’ve got to be even more careful now with how we proceed. Before we go any further, I want to get some air samples to analyze, measure the temperature and pressure in here, see if we can determine the light source, anything else. We need to take it slowly.”

“I’m with Pär,” Maria put in. “I want to keep going. At least let us go through one of the other doors and see what’s beyond it.”

“No,” I insisted. “If there isn’t anything of interest, it won’t matter anyway. And if there is, you won’t want to come back before doing a thorough examination.”

“Just an hour,” Pär tried.

“Time is not the issue.”

Casterman finally spoke. “Bartolomeo is right,” he said. “We should go back now.”

There was a silence that went on so long I was beginning to fear defiance from Pär and Maria. If that happened, we were going to have serious problems.
Don’t do this to me
, I silently said to Pär.
Don’t do this to all of us.

“All right,” Pär finally said. “Let’s head back.” Then, after a slight hesitation, he added, “You’re no damn fun, Bartolomeo.”

T
WELVE
hours later we had air samples headed back to the
Argonos
for analysis, and we had some preliminary findings of our own. The air pressure was slightly
higher than Earth normal, but nothing that would be harmful to us. The temperature was surprisingly warm—-26 degrees Celsius; 79 degrees Fahrenheit. But we still couldn’t determine the light source.

Another two days, and we had the stunning news—the air was breathable for human beings.

W
E
did not, however, take off our helmets in that room to breathe the air. The lab analysis did not pick up any obvious toxins, but there were tiny, unidentifiable particulates in the samples, some organic; it wasn’t worth the risk.

We could deny it no longer—this region of the alien ship was almost certainly built or adapted for human habitation. Proper gravity, atmosphere, temperature. Far too much for coincidence. At the same time, we still did not doubt that the starship itself was alien, and had been constructed by alien “hands.” The driving question now—one we feared would never be answered—was how this section had come to be built this way. When, by whom, and to what purpose? None of us had any ideas.

I
was inside the alien ship with Hollings and Cardenas. As I stepped into the circular chamber with its diffuse blue light, I was again reminded of the circular room on Antioch, gateway to nightmare. I struggled to dispel the resurgent tremors of memory, the fleeting but horrifying images of metal hooks and gleaming bones.

Cardenas and Hollings both took a circuitous route down
the steps, across the lower level, then back up the steps again. I stayed on the upper level, followed the perimeter to the left, and met them at the first door. No one had yet gone through it.

The mechanism seemed straightforward—a metal handle in the door itself long enough to be gripped with two hands. I tried pulling up; then, when it wouldn’t budge, I pushed down. It moved a quarter turn and stopped.

I had been expecting an automated movement since nearly every other door in the ship worked that way, but there was nothing.

“Try pulling it open,” Hollings suggested.

I did. The door swung slowly, haltingly toward me, as if its hinges had become rusted stuck; although it sounded faint and distant, I could just hear a muted squealing with each scraping movement, which surprised me until I remembered we were now in an atmosphere, where sound would propagate. Light angled out of the new opening, a brighter yellowish light cutting through the blue. I kept tugging at the door, jerking it until it was completely open; a high, wide shaft of light sliced across the circular room, spreading and diffusing as it reached down to the lower level, up the steps and washed across the opposite wall. Beyond the door was a short passage that angled off to the right.

The light frightened me. For weeks we had been exploring what appeared to be a dead, abandoned alien starship. No signs of life, no signs of machinery still functioning. Nothing. Then we reached a section with Earth-normal gravity. Soon after that we had pressurized atmosphere; more than that, it was being maintained, somehow, at a habitable temperature; then some strange, blue light; and finally this—full, day-like illumination. Too much.

I looked at my companions and noticed that all three of us, consciously or not, had moved out of the path of the light and were well back into the shadows.

“I don’t like this,” I whispered.

“I don’t either,” Cardenas replied.

“Why are you whispering?” Hollings asked, although she, too, whispered.

“Sound carries,” Cardenas answered. “Didn’t you hear that when Bartolomeo was pulling the door open?”

“I wasn’t sure what it was. I forgot about sound. You think our voices would carry through the helmets?”

“Probably not,” I said, “but I’m not taking any chances.”

“You think somebody, or something, is in there?” Hollings asked.

“It’s not too damn likely,” Cardenas said, “but I’m with Bartolomeo on this. We can’t take chances.” She unstrapped her hand stunner and gripped it. “Didn’t think I’d ever need this. Still hope we don’t.”

I backed farther away from the door, still keeping to shadow but gaining a greater view into the short passage. Nothing moved, nor were there shadows of any kind. Now I could see that the wall was off-white streaked with soot, or paint the color of soot. Down low on the wall, near the floor, was a raised brown smear. The first real signs of imperfection we’d seen.

“I’ll go in,” I eventually said. “Both of you stay out here until I clear it.”

Neither protested. This was no time for phony heroics.

I set the lantern on the floor beside me. I wasn’t going to carry my stunner, either; I wanted both hands free. I stepped into the swath of light.

The sounds of my companions’ breathing seemed terribly loud, and I was struck by the irrational fear that they would drown out any warning sounds. I hesitated, then stepped through the doorway.

I stopped for a few moments when I was completely inside, waiting, then continued. As I passed the streaks on the walls, I looked more closely at them, but couldn’t determine whether they were soot or burn marks or simply paint. I knelt beside the brown smear—which, frankly, looked like dried excrement—but again, it was impossible to know what it was.

The passage took a 90-degree angle to the right, then opened out into a large room or wide passage, but I had no idea yet
how
large. Once again I hesitated, keeping back so
that I could not be seen, which also meant that I could not see much either.

I took a step into the short, angled section of passage and stopped. In the far left corner—the only corner I could see, and which was ten or twelve meters away—was a pile of torn and rumpled cloth. In the wall nearby was a darker area that might have been an opening or doorway; my angle was too severe to tell.

Two more steps, and I was around the corner, fully inside the room.

A wild, flailing dark form lunged at me. It struck me at chest height, knocking me off my feet and onto my back with a jolt; my head slammed against the floor. Darkness covered my helmet and I cried out, some sound without words. I tried to grab the thing on top of me. I couldn’t see what it was. It squirmed and fought at my arms and hands, pounded at my suit without much effect. I tried rolling to the side and a slice of light came through for a moment. I thought I heard a faint cry or screech; the pounding shifted to my helmet, jarring my head. The darkness over my helmet shifted away for a second, but all I saw were jerking flashes of what seemed to be limbs and claws and fur before the darkness returned.

“Cardenas!” I yelled. “Hollings!”

The creature was long and heavy, and I couldn’t get a grip on it, couldn’t roll it off of me. I felt like an insect stuck on my back with a weight holding me down, my legs fluttering helplessly above me.

“It’s a woman!” Cardenas’s voice cut through her harsh breathing—she’d been running. “Help me, Rita.”

The darkness and the weight both lifted from me. I wasn’t sure what was happening. My helmet was clear, but my vision wasn’t right—silver glitter drifted in front of my eyes, and everything else was blurry. I tried to sit up, saw a tangle of pressure suits, long, whipping hair, layers of fabric, naked feet and hands, but everything began to spin around me and I lay back down.

“God damn it, she’s . . . strong!” Hollings hissed between ragged breaths.

I thought I could hear Cardenas grunting; in the middle of it she managed to ask me if I was all right.

“I think so,” I said. I closed my eyes, but the spinning only increased. “If I don’t puke all over myself.” Eyes open again, I tried to focus on the ceiling above me. There was another dark smear almost directly overhead, and I concentrated on it, keeping my head and body still. The smear functioned as an anchor, and my vision slowly stabilized; I tried to ignore the movement in the corner of my sight—Cardenas and Hollings struggling with the woman.

As my vision settled down, so did the struggle, and Hollings’s cursing slowed to a trickle.

I finally managed to sit up, shifting around so I could lean back against the wall. Cardenas and Hollings had their arms wrapped around the woman, who was in turn wrapped in layers of cloaks or robes, and all three of them were on their knees, like one big tangled knot. The woman’s hair was gray and long and stringy, and her head was bent so I couldn’t see her face. For the moment, at least, she was resting.

“Who’s on the monitor?” I asked. “Is anyone watching this?”

“We’re all here,” said Casterman. “We’re on your camera, Bartolomeo. Pär and Maria are already suiting up. They should be in the ship in a matter of minutes. We figure an hour to reach you if they push it.”

“Taggart, are you there?”

“Yes.”

“I want you to go with them. We’re probably going to have to sedate her to get her out of here.”

“On my way.”

“One more thing, in case you’ve forgotten. We’ll need a suit for her.”

There was a long pause, then Casterman said, “We
hadn’t
thought of it. I guess we didn’t think about bringing her out.”

“We’re not going to leave her in here.”

“No. Okay, we’ll send a suit with them.”

The woman quieted down and kept her head bowed so
her face couldn’t be seen. I was still shaky, and my heartbeat hadn’t slowed much; my throat burned with each breath.

I looked around the room, which was nearly twenty meters long. In the far right corner, on the floor, was a thick pad piled high with blankets, clothes, some metal bowls, a box, scraps of paper, and other things too lost in folds of material to identify. In the other far corner was another, smaller pile of clothes. Beside the pile was a tall cubicle with a round canister set in the floor. In the middle of the wall between the two piles was an open doorway leading into a long corridor.

“What next?” Cardenas finally asked.

“I wish we could talk to her,” I said. “Maybe if she heard a human voice . . . Maybe I should just take off my helmet and risk it.
She’s
been breathing this air, and she’s still alive.”

“You
can
talk to her, Bartolomeo.” It was Rogers. “We forget because we never need it, but there’s an external speaker you can activate. It’ll also activate a mike so you can hear her.”

I
had
forgotten. The speaker was small, built into the helmet collar. I fumbled around until I found the stud that activated it. I started to get to my feet, but still feeling a little dizzy, I worked my way toward the others on my hands and knees. The woman still wasn’t moving. Not wanting to frighten her any further, I stopped before I got too close.

“Can you understand me?” I said.

The old woman went crazy again. She screeched and lunged forward, and I could see her face now—lined and gaunt—and her maddened eyes glared deep into my own. She lunged again, then sprang straight upward, breaking free of Cardenas and Hollings. I didn’t have time to brace myself before she struck, again knocking me over.

“Stop!” I said, trying to hold onto her. “We don’t mean you any harm.”

The old woman didn’t stay on me. She scrambled to her feet just as Cardenas and Hollings got to theirs, then she
ran past me, hit the wall, rebounded and swung around the corner and down the short passage toward the circular room.

“Damn,” Hollings said.

“She can’t really hurt us much—” Cardenas began.

“Speak for yourself,” I broke in.

“Sorry. You know what I mean. But I’m afraid we’re going to have to hurt her to bring her back to the shuttle.”

“Shit, maybe we should just leave her here,” Hollings said.

I was fairly certain she was kidding. The two of them helped me to my feet. All that remained of the vertigo was a vague sense of imbalance, but it wasn’t too bad.

“Let’s go find her,” I said.

T
HAT
turned out to be more difficult than I would have thought. When we entered the circular room, she was nowhere in sight. I checked behind the door, but she wasn’t there. We crossed the room (I still felt uneasy descending the steps to the lower, center level, and was relieved when we climbed back up), then entered the air lock.

“Where the hell did she go?” Hollings said. “Not out of the air lock.”

“No,” Cardenas agreed. “First, I’m certain the other door wouldn’t open unless this one was sealed first, and we would have noticed the air rushing out even if it did.”

“Then where? There
is
nowhere else.”

“The other door,” I said. “In the blue room. The door we haven’t opened yet.”

Back into the circular room, following the wall to the right this time until we reached the door. This one, too, had a long metal handle. But after we pushed the handle down a quarter turn, we could not get the door to open. We tried it with two of us on the handle, Hollings pushing off the wall with one leg, her boot planted firmly against it right next to the door. Finally it budged, but with far more resistance than the other door. With the external mike activated, I could hear the loud squealing it made with each pull.

After we’d managed to get it open a few centimeters, it
wouldn’t go any further. Bright light slashed through the opening, but we couldn’t see very far beyond the door—just enough to see that there was a similar passage.

“She’s strong,” Cardenas said, “but not that strong.” She shook her head. “She couldn’t have opened this door.”

Cardenas was right, unless the door had been easy to open at first and the old woman had jammed something into it after she’d gone through. We all agreed it was unlikely.

“Then where is she?” Hollings asked.

Father Veronica spoke over the open channel. “There are cabinets in the air lock,” she said. “For suits or something. From what I remember, some of them might have been big enough to hide in.”

We headed back to the air lock. When we were all inside, we sealed the door; we weren’t going to give her anyplace to go.

The old woman was in the second cabinet we checked. She came flying out at us, screeching again, but this time we were prepared. She was still strong and wild, but there were three of us and it wasn’t long before we subdued her. I held her from behind, pinning her arms to her side, my hands gripping one another tightly; my artificial arms would not tire, although my shoulders eventually would.

“We mean you no harm,” I said softly. “Do you understand me?”

Her only response was a pained, high keening, which gradually faded and she let her head hang, as though she was unconscious. As before, she had ceased to struggle.