Ben Bova - Voyagers

“I’ll be in touch over the suit radio,” Stoner said.

“Da. And when I say to come back, you will say, ‘Not yet. One more photograph.’ ”

Stoner chuckled. Satisfied that the suit was sealed, Federenko handed him the helmet. Stoner pulled it on, locked it in place, slid down the visor and sealed it.

“I’ll come back when you tell me they’ve got us a new trajectory that’ll get us home,” Stoner said, his voice muffled inside the helmet.

Federenko looked unconvinced. He held up one finger, then squeezed back through the hatch into the command module and swung the hatch shut.

Stoner was alone now.

“Radio check,” the cosmonaut’s voice rumbled in his earphones. “Can you hear me?”

“Loud and clear.”

“Very good.”

Stoner glided over to the controls that pumped the air out of the orbital module. Nikolai’s giving me his backpack for this, he thought. If his rescue depends on going EVA, he’s just thrown his life away.

“Shtoner.”

“Yes?”

“Good luck, Shtoner.”

“Thanks, Nikolai. I appreciate…everything you’ve done.”

“Say hello to alien for me.”

Stoner laughed. “I will.”

He cycled the air out of the ovoid chamber and opened the outer hatch. Pushing the extra backpack out ahead of him, Stoner stepped out into nothingness. He drifted free of the Soyuz, then turned and surveyed the situation.

The Earth was far away. No longer a huge smear of awesome girth, it was now a crescent of blue and white hanging in the star-scattered dark. Stoner put out a gloved hand and covered the planet of his birth with an upraised thumb.

He could see the Moon, too, a smaller crescent. The Sun’s fierce blaze was over his left shoulder; he had no intention of looking in that direction, but he could see at the corner of his vision the glowing disk of the Sun’s zodiacal light: cosmic dust, rubble and debris left over from the formation of the planets, eons ago.

A slight soundless puff from the thrusters at his waist and he squarely faced the alien spacecraft. It floated serene and aloof inside its golden, pulsing aura of energy.

Slowly, tugging the spare backpack on its tether, Stoner approached the alien spacecraft.

“Nikolai, do you suppose that energy screen could do damage to a slow-moving object, like an astronaut?”

“Could be,” Federenko’s voice responded. “Keep talking…everything is relayed to Tyuratam automatically.”

“Okay.”

Describing what he was doing as he did it, Stoner pulled up the tether that held the extra backpack, reeled it up until the pack was in his grasp, then pushed it out ahead of him. The effort slowed his approach to the alien spacecraft as the backpack sailed out ahead of him, the long tether gradually, slowly unwinding.

“The tether’s insulated,” he said. “If the screen causes an electrical discharge it won’t run back up the line and zap me. I hope.”

He held his breath as the backpack glided into the glow of energy, then passed through it with no discernible effect.

“Did you see that, Nikolai?”

“Nothing happened.”

“Right. Good.” Stoner licked his lips. “Now it’s my turn.”

“Cameras are recording. Television transmission is working.”

Stoner touched the controls at his belt and felt the thrusters push against the small of his back, gently, for just a flash of a second, like the encouragement a schoolteacher gives a reluctant child. He glided toward the golden, pulsing light.

“Almost there…”

The glow seemed to be all around him for a moment, there was a brief sharp crack! in his earphones, and then he was clearly inside the screen. He twisted around for a view of the Soyuz.

“I’m through it! Can you hear me?”

“Da.”

“It’s like being inside a gold-tinted observation dome. I can see through it. Doesn’t obscure my vision much.”

“I see you also.” Federenko’s radio voice was as strong as ever, although a slight background hum now accompanied it.

Stoner could feel his heart pumping. “Okay,” he said. “I’m going to…going aboard it.”

“Be careful, Shtoner.”

The extra backpack, still drifting at the end of its tether, bumbped into the curved side of the spacecraft and bounced harmlessly off it.

“It’s cylindrical,” Stoner reported into his radio microphone, “with tapered ends. Sort of like a fat cigar. Light tan in color. Looks like metal. No protuberances, no antennas that I can see. Very smooth finish. About twenty, twenty-five meters long; five or six deep.”

He was coming close to it. The craft loomed before him, dominating his vision. Stoner’s lips felt dry. His innards burned.

“Kind of light brown in color…I said that already, didn’t I? Looks like metal. Definitely metal. Well machined. No sing of rivets. No seams. Like it was made whole, cast out of a mold or something. No markings. Hasn’t been pitted at all— like it’s brand new. That screen must eat up micrometeoroids and any other junk it’s encountered…”

As he reached the curving side of the massive spaceship, Stoner instinctively put his hand out. He touched it, rebounded slightly, and with his other hand pulsed the thrusters that gently pushed him against the craft’s hull again.

“Yeah, it’s got to be metal. Feels like metal.”

He planted his boots against the ship’s hull. They clung.

“Hey! I think it’s magnetized! My boots are sticking to it.” Stoner pulled one boot free; it took only a slight effort.

“Boots are non-magnetic,” Federenko said flatly.

“Well, something’s holding them,” Stoner answered.

He stood erect on the curving hull, a lone visitor on a world twenty-five meters long. He took one step, then another. It felt tacky, as if he were walking across a freshly painted surface that hadn’t quite dried.

“Going forward,” he said. “At least, I think it’s forward. Could be aft—this thing looks the same at both ends.”

Carefully, Stoner planted one booted foot in front of the other.

And felt the breath rush out of him.

A line of light suddenly glowed the length of the ship and his earphones gave out a low-frequency whining hum. Not loud enough to hurt, just loud enough to make certain that it could not be ignored.

The line of light flickered through every color of the spectrum. It was like watching a rainbow rippling under a stream of water.

“It’s color!” Stoner shouted, describing it. “Then it goes dark…I think it goes into the infrared and ultraviolet, beyond human vision.”

The whining in his earphones also wavered up and down in pitch and Stoner realized that he could only hear it during the few seconds when the line of light was off.

“It’s going through the whole electromagnetic spectrum! Visible light, radio frequencies…must be putting out pulses of x-rays and gamma rays, too. Can you hear me, Nikolai?”

The cosmonaut’s voice came through despite the background noise. “I hear you. The high-energy detectors on instrument panel are silent.”

Stoner watched the flickering light, fascinated, almost hypnotized. “It’s saying, ‘Welcome aboard,’ in all the colors of the rainbow.”

Federenko’s unruffled voice replied, “Switch to radio frequency two. Perhaps hum is not there.”

They went through all four channels on the suit radio. The whine persisted on all of them, running up and down the scale in contrapuntal rhythm with the line of light.

“Hold everything!” Stoner yelled. “It’s…something…”

Up at the nose of the craft the line of flickering light suddenly split into two parallel lines, then looped around to form a circle. The metal of the hull inside the circle seemed to brighten.