Quiet Invasion(8)

“Would they fly out, under pressure?” asked Helen. “Or would they just sort of pop and bounce?”

“That’s one for Ned and the atmospherics people.” Michael’s hands moved restlessly, tapping against his thighs to some internal rhythm.

There seemed to be nothing else to say. Each of them lapsed into silence, thinking their own thoughts, making their own calculations or dreaming of their own futures. It took about fifteen minutes to pressurize the airlock. Right now, it felt like hours.

But finally the gauges all blinked green. Ben worked the levers on the outer hatch and swung it open.

“Good luck, Team Fourteen,” came Adrian’s voice.

One by one the governing board stepped out onto the glowing Venusian surface. Helen had never been so aware of being watched—monitored by her suit, overseen by Adrian and all Scarab Fourteen’s cameras, followed by her colleagues, tracked by Derek’s drones, which sat dormant on their own little treads, a short distance from the target object.

She took refuge in chatter. She activated the general intercom icon.

“Failia to Scarab Fourteen,” she said. “Are you receiving?”

“Receiving loud and clear, Dr. Failia,” answered Adrian. “Our readings say all suits green and go.”

“All green and go out here,” she returned. “Except Dr. Godwin forgot the marshmallows.”

“That was on your to-do list, Helen,” shot back Ben. Helen smiled. That had been an early experiment. The marshmallow exposed to the Venusian atmosphere had not roasted, however. It had scrunched up and vaporized. The egg they’d attempted to fry on the rock had exploded.

The memory spread a smile across Helen’s face and made it easier to concentrate on the way in front of her. The cracks in the crust could be wide enough to catch a toe in, sending a person tumbling down in a most undignified fashion and wasting time while they were helped back to their feet—if their suit held up to the fall. If it didn’t, there’d be nothing left to help up.

Helen dismissed that thought but held her pace in check with difficulty. She did not want to waste any more time. She wanted to sprint on ahead, but she had to settle for a slow march.

Still, they got steadily closer to the target. The closer they got, the more obvious it became that the object had to be artificial. It was indeed perfectly circular. The smooth sides rose about a half meter out of the rock. A series of smaller spheres protruded from it. For a moment, the three of them all lined up in front of the thing, examining it in reverent silence.

“Okay.” The word came out of Michael like a sigh. “What’s the procedure? Measure it first?”

“Measure it first,” said Helen.

Slowly, Helen, Michael, and Ben circled the target in a strange, clumsy dance, recording everything yet again and measuring all of it. Yes, the drones had technically done all of this, but that was the machine record. This was the human record, and they needed it to help prove that this object was not just the result of some computer graphics and hocus-pocus.

The shaft was exactly forty-four centimeters in height and one and a half meters in diameter. A second, apparently separate section rested on or was attached to the top. That section was also one and a half meters in diameter but was only ten centimeters thick. Small, spherical protrusions, each appearing to be ten centimeters across, were attached to the sides of the upper section (like somebody’d stuck a half-dozen oranges there, Ben noted), equally spaced at sixty-degree intervals and attached by some undetermined means. A small circle, eight point three centimeters in diameter, had been inscribed three point six-four centimeters from the outer edge of the top section.

“Well, you’re the expert, Ben,” said Helen. “Is it or is it not naturally occurring?”

Ben’s helmet turned toward her. “You’re kidding, right, Helen?”

“No, I’m not.” Helen remained immobile. “I want this all for the record.”

“Okay, then.” There came a brief shuffling noise that might have been Ben shrugging inside his suit. “In my opinion, based on the observations of the previous robotic investigation and my own two eyes, this is not a naturally occurring formation.”

“To my knowledge, no one on Venera Base has ever authorized construction of such an object,” added Helen.

“Are you going to open it, Helen, or can I go ahead?” Michael asked mildly.

Helen bit her lip. Part of her wanted to call down a whole team to swarm over the thing, analyzing every molecule before they did anything else. She told herself that was the good scientist part of herself. The truth was somewhat less flattering.