Richard Russo

by Ship of Fools

  I shook my head. “I don’t care about any of that. No, I do care, but there are other considerations. We’ve reached an area in the alien ship with Earth-normal gravity. That’s significant. Long passages, rooms, all with gravity. We have no idea how much more is like this. And we’ve found things. Like the box.” I paused, reluctant to say aloud what I had thought for some time. “None of us has said it, but I know that many of us believe that box was made by human hands.” I let that sit. In the edges of my sight I could see some slow nodding of heads.

  “We’re close to something important,” I continued. “We all feel it. There is evidence that human beings have been on this ship. Maybe not anymore, but at one time. We can’t stop now.” I started to say more, but stopped myself. I didn’t really need any more arguments. It was there, simple and clear and compelling. If they were not persuaded, nothing more I could say would help. “We can’t stop now,” I repeated.

  Surprisingly, it was Casterman who spoke. “I believe Bartolomeo is right, Eminence.”

  “You believe he’s right,” the bishop said.

  “Yes. Unless you are here, I don’t think you can understand what is happening. You have to feel it. There’s something in that ship, Eminence. I don’t know how long it will take us to find it, but it’s there.”

  “Perhaps we don’t want to find it.” The bishop leaned forward again. “Perhaps what is in that ship . . . is Evil.”

  Casterman shook his head, but said no more.

  “I will add my voice to theirs,” Dr. G. said. Another surprise. “There is a change in the spirits of these people, and it is still here despite what has happened with Leona. You asked me to become a part of this mission so I could observe, assess, recommend. Well, I recommend we be allowed to continue. I think it would be devastating to all of us, as well as to many others on the Argonos, to suspend the exploration now, permanently or otherwise. In fact, although I want to accompany Leona back to the Argonos, and stay with her for a few days, eventually I will want to rejoin this group of people. I’ll want to rejoin this mission as soon as I can.”

  “And if there is some contagion?” Nikos asked.

  Dr. G. frowned. “How likely is that, Captain? Not very, I think, and it’s a risk I believe we are all prepared to take.”

  “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.

  31

  TWO 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.”

  THE 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. T
he 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.”

  TWELVE 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.

  32

  WE 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.