Infinity Beach - Jack McDevitt [129]
“Be careful.”
Solly waited to see whether anything else would happen. When it didn’t, he went back to trying to work the bar under the object. Kim’s view was poor: everything was a mix of shadows and bright lights and Solly’s arms. She wished they could bring it inside, look at it, but even that seemed dangerous.
Who would have believed it? They had obtained an apparently genuine extraterrestrial artifact, and they were going to throw it away.
She wanted desperately for this to be over and Solly to be back inside.
He worked the bar in and was grunting loudly as he pushed down. And suddenly the hull and the sensor mount, half-seen in the uncertain light, seemed to ripple.
The effect came and went so quickly that she wasn’t sure she’d really seen it.
The object came loose.
“Okay,” Solly said. He got his right hand under it and peeled it off like a man removing an orange skin. When it was clear, he lifted it high, held it for her to see and the imager to record, turned it a half dozen ways so they missed nothing. Then he flung it away. She watched it spin out into the dark.
“Good show, Solly.”
“Thanks.”
Solly pushed the bar into his belt and retreated into the air lock. He switched over to the AI’s channel. “Ham, where’s the object?”
“Still outbound, Solly. At three kilometers per hour. Showing no sign of internal power.”
She glanced up at the screen dedicated to Solly’s helmet imager and watched the lights come on in the air lock. The door swung shut and gravity returned throughout the ship. She could see the bench opposite the one he was sitting on. And part of the control panel, a blinking amber lamp, a hand rail, and one of Solly’s feet.
“Ham,” he said, “Track the object as long as you’re able. If there’s any change, let us know.”
“I’ll do that, Solly.”
The amber lamp would continue to blink until air pressure reached normal. Then it would turn green.
Kim was wrestling with the problem. It was possible the Hunter had blundered the first contact, and it might be that she was now doing the same thing. “We might wind up being a laughingstock for future historians, Solly,” she said.
“I just don’t like any of this, Kim. We’ve established there’s something here. Now I think we need to turn the whole thing over to a team that can come out here prepared to—”
The amber light dulled.
And brightened.
It wasn’t supposed to do that.
“—To do the thing systematically,” Solly concluded.
Behind the lamp, the wall and the control panel wrinkled. In the way of a strip of pavement on a hot day.
It was gone almost before the sensation had registered. “Solly,” she said, “are we having an imager problem?”
“No,” he said. “I saw it too.” The silence in the ship was overwhelming. She left the pilot’s room and was waiting by the air lock when it opened. Solly came out.
She put all the lights on in the entryway and looked into the air lock. Everything seemed normal.
“Ham,” she said. “Rerun the sequence from the helmet imager, beginning about four minutes ago. Put it on one of the entry windows.”
There were two large windows in the entryway. Both had carried images of the skies as they might have been seen from Greenway. Now one went dark and then lit up with Solly entering the air lock.
“Too recent,” she said. “Back it up another couple of minutes.”
“It was just a power dip,” said Solly.
“Maybe.”
She watched him moving rapidly backward, saw the saddle in reverse flight, watched it sail in toward him, saw him put it down on the hull. Use the bar.
Solly-in-the-window worked backward furiously on the saddle. The circular opening in the seat closed.
“Okay,” she said. “Stop, Ham. Run it forward.”
Solly laid his helmet down, peeled off the suit, and sat down to get out of the boots.
The sensor mount rippled again.
“Ham,” said Kim, “hold it.”
Solly’s brow creased. They ran it several times. Then she took him to the sequence in the air lock, and they watched the amber lamp fade and brighten and the control panel