Two days later, the second-shift team was in a small, low-ceilinged room, preparing to try another door. Sulu 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 Sulu yelled, "Shit!"
A harsh expulsion of breath. The monitor was grayed out. Rubena Leppink fumbled with the console, switched over to Doyle's camera. Sulu 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?" Sophia Garcia asked. Presumably she was somewhere behind Mawk-Betzel.
Sulu nodded. With his gloved hand he brushed crystals from his helmet until he had most of it cleared. Garcia came around Doyle and helped Sulu to his feet.
"Thanks," he said. Then: "What the hell was that?"
"Must you curse so much?" Doyle asked.
Sulu turned to him. "Yes, I must." Then, to those of us watching, he asked. "Whose camera are we on?"
"Doyle's," I said.
"Then switch over to Sophia's so I don't have to keep looking at him." He turned to face Sophia Garcia.
Leppink 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. Sulu 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?"
Brightharp 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 Sulu's camera. The cabin looked a lot like the airlock 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 Sulu looked back at the open door, we could see another wheel on the inside beside it.577Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡtZ0EBElp2L
Brightharp spoke up. "I'm fairly sure you won't be able to open the next door before sealing this one. This has to be another airlock. But before you try it, I suggest someone go back and seal off the previous door as well. The chances are good that there's air beyond the next door, and we don't want to lose it. The airlock 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 airlock door being secure. So I suggest we seal another door as a backup, and hope for the best."
"Okay," said Sophia Garcia. "Makes sense, and it shouldn't take too long."
"I'll do it," Doyle said.
While Doyle was gone, there wasn't much talking. Sophia and Sulu explored the airlock. The walls had hooks and handles and panels that opened to reveal empty cabinets or lockers with more hooks.
"Someday," Sulu said, "we're going to open one of these cabinet doors and something will actually be inside." He laughed to himself. "And it'll probably lunge out and kill us."
Doyle 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 airlock.
"Who wants to open the door this time?" Sulu asked. "Who wants to fall on their ass?"
"I will," Sophia Garcia said. Then, looking at Sulu: "I'm not afraid."
She approached the wheel, but stood well to the side of the door.
"That's hardly fair," Sulu said. "You should be standing right in front of it, like I was."
Sophia 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!" Sulu exclaimed.
Jammer switched from camera to camera, but we couldn't see a thing through any of them.
"Sound off," I said.
"I'm okay," Sophia said. "I'm not moving."
"Yeah, I'm fine, too," Sulu added.
Nothing else for a few moments. The quiet was a barely audible hiss, disconcerting.
"Doyle?"
Another few moments of that silence, 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," Sulu said.
But something odd was happening. The image on the monitor---from Doyle'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. At last I realized what was happening: the ice crystals were melting, then dripping down the camera lenses.
"It's melting," Sophia said.
We had a spotted, distorted image for a while, even after Sophia went over and tried to wipe Doyle's camera lens clear. The suit gloves weren't much good at wiping away liquids.
"It's not only pressurized," Brightharp. "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, Sophia in the lead. As they approached the door, she stopped.
"Wait...wait a minute."
We were still with Doyle's camera, in the rear. He and Sulu stopped behind Sophia 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 Leppink, but she was aleady switching to Sophia's camera. The image darkened with the change, but it soon became clear that it wasn't totally dark beyond the doorway, though the light from the lanterns behind Sophia 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," Sophia said.
Two more were switched off, then Doyle or Sulu walked over to the one they had mounted on the airlock 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 hard 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 sip that it seemed almost solid, more substantial.
"I'm going in," Sophia 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. Sophia 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 seemed to be fairly smooth; the floor, as well, was smooth for several meters; then it sank with a series of circular steps to a flat circular section in the midle of the room about ten or twelve meters across.
I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned to see Father O'Heron, not looking at me but gazing at the monitor with fear and wonder.
"Pavel," 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 O'Heron. It wasn't easy.
Sophia finally resumed her progress. She started a circuit of the room, staying close to the wall; Leppink ran through the cameras to confirm that Sulu and Doyle had also entered the room, and were following Sophia. Nobody 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 just like the first.
When the circuit was complete, they walked in toward the steps. "Let me take them first," Sophia 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?" Brightharp when she'd 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 didn't notice. So I guess they do feel pretty natural. Normal steps."
She continued. When she was on the final step, she crouched, set her lantern on the floor, and slid it out toward the center. Nothing happened.
"It's one of those traps t hat doesn't activate until it detects a living creature," Sulu said.
"You come down and try it, then," Sophia 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 middle 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. Sophia turned on her hand torch and swept the beam across the ceiling. It was covered with faceted glass, or at least what seemed to be glass.
By this time her teammates had joined her, and Doyle 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 Sophia 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 quiet.
"There's not much here," Sulu 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."
"No way!" Sulu 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."577Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡlKJTi4yz2U
"I'm with Sulu," Sophia 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's 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," Sulu tried.
"Time's not an issue."
Doyle finally spoke. "Pavel's right," he said. "We should go back now."
There was a silence that went on so long I was starting to fear defiance from Sulu and Sophia. If that happened, we were going ot have serious problems. Don't do this to me, I silently said to Sulu. Don't do this to all of us.
"Okay," Sulu said at last. "Let's head back." Then, after a slight hesitation, he added, "You're no damn fun, Pavel."
Twelve hours later we had air samples headed back to the Enterprise 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.577Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡE2BkVJgv5w
Another two days, and we had the stunning news----the air was breathable for human beings.
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