“That’s why you’ll have your big strong father with you,” he said. “I work for NASA, you know.”
We entered the tent. It was brightly lit, with shower stalls lining every wall.
“We’re taking showers?”
“When you come out of the ship,” he said. “Just a precaution. Decontamination.”
“What about our clothes?”
He walked to a row of shelves and pulled down bundles. “Hospital scrubs. Now, go change.”
After we changed, we climbed the ten stories to the top of the scaffolding, wearing bulky safety glasses, latex gloves, and hard hats with chin straps.
“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” Rachel said, her camera swinging around her neck on its strap.
“It’s going to be a short climb down once we get inside,” Dad said, shouting to be heard over the cold October wind. “You have to remember that the entire ship is curved in a big circle. When the ship was in motion, rotating, you could jog around the inside of the cylinder—all the way around the ship until you got back to the same place.”
“Just like 2001,” Rachel said.
Dad turned back to look at me. “Someone knows good culture.”
“Rachel’s one of those show-off kids,” I said, and she turned and grinned at me.
“The point is,” Dad continued, “we’re going to have to climb back down with ropes, to a place where it’s flatter. Don’t worry—it’s not that steep. I assume none of you are afraid of heights or you wouldn’t be standing up here on this scaffolding.”
“Dad?” I asked. “Are there aliens inside?”
“A few,” he said. “But we probably won’t see them. They’ve gone with some of the more technical teams to check out the engines.”
We reached the top of the scaffold, and the door that we knew so well from TV. I stopped and turned, looking out at the mass of tents and army vehicles. The sun was setting, leaving a few beautiful strands of orange and pink before it dropped behind the horizon. I tried to imagine what it looked like in the morning, or at night. This was the aliens’ first view of our world—their first view of what their new life would be like.
It looked scary.
“Here,” Dad said, shoving something into my hand. I took it and held it up. A breathing mask—not just a little flimsy paper one, like the kind they had handed out to the aliens on the ground, but a big one, like a gas mask. It was heavy, and I pulled it over my head awkwardly, watching Rachel and Brynne do the same with theirs. Dad helped us tighten the straps and get them in place.
“Okay,” he said. “This is it. Are you ready?”
I had butterflies in my stomach—giant, alien butterflies with extra wings and bad attitudes.
Rachel was already nodding, and I heard her muffled “Yes.” Brynne followed suit. So I pretended I was courageous, and I stepped forward and was glad I had a mask covering most of my face.
Dad led us to the door. There were large halogen lights set up, flooding the hallway with light.
I didn’t see any of the ship’s lights—maybe the walls glowed or something when the ship was running. This “door” was a hole in the floor of the corridor. The hull was more than a foot thick, and we could see the jagged marks of whatever cutting tool the aliens had used to get through.
It wasn’t as steep as I had expected, looking down the hall—maybe a ten-degree downward slope. There were several nylon ropes running from somewhere above us. Dad instructed us to grab a rope and start heading down, but I was too in awe of the spaceship, of crossing the threshold. The walls were all some kind of silvery plastic something. It appeared that they’d once been gleaming and shiny, but the handprints of fifty-five thousand people had turned them into a smudgy mess.
Fifty-five thousand aliens.
Dad led the way, holding on to one of the ropes at about waist height and walking down the slope. Rachel followed after, and then Brynne, and then me. It felt a little bit like the county fair funhouses that we went to when I was a little kid, where the floors weren’t straight and you couldn’t keep your balance without a hand on the wall the whole time. There were numbered stickers everywhere, sloppily applied by the first photographers who had taken pictures of this hallway.
“Is all the power off?” I tried to shout through my massive filter.
Dad looked back. “There is some power still on in other parts of the ship—there are still life-support systems running, heating and air flow. In some places the lights work, but not here. All of that is up toward the front of the ship. It’s one of the mysteries, because back here is where most of the people lived, as you’ll soon see.”
Before long, the curve of the ship got flatter, and we didn’t need the ropes to help us descend. I dropped mine and let my hand skim the wall. It was smooth, and my latex glove slid across it easily. Every twenty or thirty feet there was a thick ring protruding from the floor. They made convenient places to hang utility lights.
“What are these rings for?” I called to Dad.
“We don’t know,” he said with a shrug.
“Haven’t you asked the aliens?”
“Not a priority yet. Bigger fish to fry. But my guess is that they’re some kind of tether for when the ship is in zero gravity. When it’s not spinning. They’ve been really useful for our guys who are climbing into the hard-to-reach spots. The rings are all over the place. Every room, every hall.”
We reached a point where the ground was almost level, and a long hallway extended to our left, toward the front of the ship. Most of the electrical cables headed that way, and that was where we went.
“These marks,” Dad said, pointing to a big red sticker next to a door, “mean that a room has been photographed. We’ll keep going until we reach a room that hasn’t.”
All of the rooms with red dots were dark, no one bothering to light them now that pictures had been taken.
The spaceship definitely didn’t look like something out of Star Trek. It was too dirty, too cluttered. Too lived-in. There was debris scattered all along this corridor—blankets and wrappings and plastic containers and shreds of clothing. I couldn’t imagine what it must have been like down here for the last four or five days as fifty-five thousand aliens, many of whom were wounded, waited in the dark for their turn to leave.
But it wouldn’t have been dark, would it? They’d have had flashlights and glowing orbs and magic crazy alien lights. They were the Guides, after all. They were here to teach us a better way of life, and that meant that they couldn’t have suffered too much. They had to have taken care of themselves somehow.
We walked for what felt like half an hour until we finally reached a door that wasn’t marked.
“Here we go,” Dad said. He turned on a lantern and led us into the room.
It was wide and square, with rows of what looked like countertops—like it was a lab of some kind. On the far side was a long row of tall, thin cabinets.
“Okay,” he said. “Remember, long shots and close-ups. And make sure one of these number stickers is in every shot. This room is number . . .” —he pulled off the top sticker—“2139. So make sure the number 2139 is in every—”
His phone rang. (The Velvet Underground. I’d picked it out for him.) He talked for thirty seconds, but I could tell he was leaving.
“I’m sorry, girls, but I need to be elsewhere.” We all began to protest but he held up his phone. “Don’t worry. This is easy work: sticker, point, and click. You can do it. I’m not going far. If you need me for any reason, you can call me. This ship gets amazingly good reception. Like it was made for it or something.”
“Do we open doors?” Brynne asked, looking at the cabinets on the far wall, which suddenly seemed more ominous.
“Yeah,” he said, “but keep your bearings in mind. Everything on that wall is tilting in toward us slightly, so it might come falling out.”
“And NASA is cool with us letting stuff fall and break?” I asked.
“Ideally, you won’t let a
nything break,” he said. “But mistakes happen, and we’re severely understaffed and trying to get this ship inspected and documented ASAP. Open the cupboards slowly, and try not to let anything fall.”
“What if there are jars with alien life forms in there?” Brynne asked, and I couldn’t tell whether she was scared or hopeful. “What if we stumble onto a bug collection?”
“First,” he said, “everything in this ship has already crashed at six hundred miles an hour. So, anything fragile has already broken. Second, if there’s a bug collection, take a bunch of pictures before everything gets away.” He smiled at that.
“Are you sure you work for NASA?” Brynne said. “And you’re not just Alice’s big brother?”
“He’s my dad,” I said. “He’s always like this.”
“Seriously, girls,” he said. “We don’t know how long we’ll have access to this ship. We don’t know if the Guides are going to seize it back in negotiations and live in it, or what. And we don’t know whether the UN is going to send in its own inspectors and take the project over. I wouldn’t have asked you to come if we didn’t desperately need manpower.”
That answer seemed to pacify everyone, including me, although now I had the heebie-jeebies about alien bugs.
“How far do we go?” I asked, as he moved toward the door, leaving the lantern in the room for us.
“As far and as long as you’re willing to stay. Are you girls okay?”
We all nodded, our big gas masks bobbing heavily on our faces.
“Then I’m going to go,” he said. “Love you, Aly.”
“You, too.”
We spent half an hour in the first room and probably took a couple hundred pictures. For a room that looked like a lab, there was hardly anything in the drawers. We found that they opened in a rather high-tech fashion—with a little push, they’d pop out slowly, almost like they were automated. But there wasn’t power on in this room, so it must have been some kind of pneumatics. Rachel said she’d seen similar drawers before and they weren’t an example of amazing alien technology, but I was still impressed.
The tall, skinny cabinets had tools in them that looked like farm instruments. Long sticks with hooks, loops, or spikes on the ends. There didn’t seem to be anything special about them except that the sticks looked well worn, like they’d been used a lot over a long period of time. I couldn’t figure out what the aliens would have done with them, though.
Aside from that, the only other unusual thing in the room was that the ceiling was high—I’d noticed that in the hallway, too. If I were designing a spaceship, it would be more economic on space, with ceilings that barely fit me. But maybe this ship was like my BMW—all about comfort. Maybe that was why there were only fifty-five thousand aliens on board, instead of a hundred thirty thousand.
Rachel took the lantern and we left the room. Brynne turned and put a big red dot next to the door.
“I know this is totally off subject,” Brynne said as we walked to the next room, “but scrubs have got to be the most comfortable clothes ever.”
Rachel and I laughed.
“Seriously,” Brynne said, picking her way around debris on the floor. “These are way better than my pajamas. I’m going to get rid of flannel and stick with these.”
We turned a corner at the next doorway and shone the light in.
Rachel gasped.
It wasn’t hard to identify this room. There were five rows of beds between the floor and ceiling, with the thinnest mattresses I’d ever seen. There was maybe two feet of space between each bed and the bed above it—maybe. It was probably less.
I grabbed on to one of the hard metal rings next to the door and wondered what kind of smells would be assaulting us if we didn’t have our filters on. The room was a mess—like what I imagined the boys’ dorm to be like, but worse.
Brynne pulled out a sticker and slapped it on the nearest object—the end of a bed. It said 2140. She took a wide shot of the room, but couldn’t get a fair representation of the distance—this place seemed to stretch far down the length of the ship, running parallel to the main hallway. We knew there wouldn’t be enough stickers for this room, so we just folded our sticker tablets like A-frames, placing them on each bed and taking pictures. There were no drawers here and no sign of bathrooms. It made me wonder how this place worked, and why on Earth—why in the galaxy—these aliens thought they had a prayer of being our Guides.
We moved farther into the room, setting up our shots and clearing row after row of the beds. Rachel found a dark spot on the floor, which totally paralyzed her, and Brynne knelt down beside it and tilted the lantern close.
“Is it blood?” Rachel asked. Her face looked green even in the yellowish light from the lantern.
“I think so,” Brynne said. “I bet an alien was sleeping in bed when the ship crashed, and they split their head open.”
“So, guys,” I said, taking a deep breath. “My dad said that deep in the ship they found a room where a thousand of the Guides had committed mass suicide.”
There was a long pause. “Whoa. Why?” Brynne asked.
“He doesn’t know the answer. They all had been stabbed in the stomach, and then they’d slit their throats, or something like that.”
“We need to ask Suski what happened,” Rachel said firmly. “Even if they were injured, they must have good doctors. I mean, they mastered interstellar travel.”
“I’m not so sure I’d say ‘mastered,’” I replied. “If the Olympics have taught me nothing else, it’s that you’ve got to stick the landing. I’d say these Guide gymnasts fell right on their butts and started to cry in front of the judges.”
We moved past the blood stain and onto the next bank of beds. There was nothing out of the ordinary here, or so I thought.
“Uh, guys?” Brynne asked. “Does this fall under our jurisdiction?”
In between this bank of beds and the next was a ladder leading up through a hole in the ceiling.
Rachel and Brynne both looked at me, as though NASA authority was passed on through the genes. I stared up at the hole. It was completely dark up there, and it looked like a claustrophobic fit.
“Well,” I said, trying to gather my courage. “If we go up there and it connects to another hallway, then it’s that hallway’s problem. But if it only connects to this room, then it’s our problem.” I paused, then took a deep breath. “And I’m going to go first, because I’m frigging Wonder Woman.”
Brynne handed me the lantern, and I could see the smile in her eyes. “Here’s your lasso of truth.”
“Wonder Damn Woman,” I said, moving to the ladder and placing a foot on the rung. It was perfectly strong, and I took a deep breath.
“We’ll be sure to tell the boys,” Rachel said.
“At your funeral,” Brynne said. “Well, memorial service. I don’t think there will be a body.”
I climbed the ladder, and before long, even my face filter couldn’t block out the smell. I knew what this room was before I lifted the lantern through the hole and took a look.
“The good news,” I shouted down, “is that I don’t see any monsters. The bad news is that this is a very overused bathroom, and there are no doors leading to another hallway. So it’s all us.”
There were space toilets, not unlike the kind I’d seen on the space shuttle simulators in museums my dad had taken me to. They were designed to operate in zero gravity, using a very unpleasant suction technology. When the ship wasn’t working anymore and the power in this area was turned off, people continued to use the toilets, but nothing was sucking.
Well, it all sucked. It stunk, and I didn’t want to touch anything, not to affix stickers or to set down the lantern. The light wasn’t good enough to tell what was filthy and what wasn’t, but I assumed everything was.
The job got a little better as we moved past the long row of toilets and got to a long row of showers. These were a little different from the suction power of the toilets. It looked like water actually
poured down on people in sealed chambers.
I recoiled from one that appeared to have been turned into a toilet, but Brynne said it looked more like blood, and luckily she was happy to use her stickers in order to take a dozen shots of the bloody Psycho shower stall. After half an hour in the feces-filled room, we all were eager to make our escape back down the ladder and into the relative peace of the messy room below.
We continued through the room, photographing row after row of beds. By my count we passed more than two hundred fifty rows of them—maybe three hundred. The venture up the ladder had made me lose count.
There was some kind of writing on the wall, on each bed. Maybe it was art like Coya and Suski had claimed, but it looked like the kind of symbols I’d seen outside.
“I’m never going to get this smell out of my hair,” Brynne said. “I can tell.”
“I can’t smell much through the mask,” Rachel said.
“Neither can I,” Brynne said, “but I just know it. We’re all doomed to smell like alien poo for days.”
“You’re the one who got excited about the blood,” I said.
“Blood is . . . scientific,” Brynne said. “Blood is interesting. Blood doesn’t smell like an outhouse.”
“Hate to say it,” I said. “But we’ve got another one.”
“Another bathroom?”
“Nope,” I said, and moved between two banks of beds. There was a door that looked jammed, like it had been a powered entrance that had been forced open.
The lantern was shoved into my hand again. “Lasso of truth,” Brynne said.
“Wonder Woman isn’t the only superheroine,” I said. “You can be Supergirl. You’d be just like her—blond, big boobs, short skirt.”
“Flattery will get you nowhere.”
“What about you, Rachel?” I asked. “Black Widow had red hair. Supertight bodysuit. Got with Jeremy Renner.”
There was a smile in Rachel’s voice. “I’m going to decide that I’m offended you didn’t accuse me of having big boobs.”