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  “This stuff smells,” Strem complained as Jeanie rubbed her closed-eyed boyfriend’s face with golden oil. Eric had already been oiled and had been pleased to see it was an improvement. He looked like a well-tanned tourist who had just returned from a month on an exotic beach in the center of a globular cluster. The white of his painted eyebrows and eyelashes didn’t look that bad either, though he had yet to try on the curly wig as the white dye on it was still drying.

  “Hush, don’t move,” Jeanie said. “The smell goes away when it dries.”

  “Then it starts to itch,” Eric muttered.

  “Two minutes,” Sammy said. “Start tidying up our loose ends.”

  “These lenses are going to look wicked on you guys!” Cleo said, sitting squat on the floor, coloring the contacts. Eric knelt beside her and began collecting pieces of clothing, scissors, tape, brushes – putting them back in Cleo’s suitcase.

  “Have you decided where to attach Excalibur?” he asked Sammy.

  “Yes.” Besides navigating the ship, Sammy was studying a perimeter Kaulikan craft on screen under extreme magnification. “We are going to tuck in the rear wheel. There is a lip along the edge where we should be able to hide.”

  “Be sure to put us down with our heads toward the axis,” Eric said. As soon as they were locked onto the rotating structure, they would be under the influence of the Kaulikans’ pseudo gravity, and would hit the ceiling if they didn’t orient themselves properly. Sammy knew that, of course.

  “Enough!” Jeanie told Strem, putting down her oil-cloth. She laughed. “You look so cute!”

  Strem opened his eyes and immediately strode to his sleeping quarters and a mirror, reappearing a minute later. “Not bad, not bad, probably wouldn’t even get me expelled from school. Where’s the jacket I’m supposed to wear?”

  The opants, when turned off, resembled the plain clothes the average Kaulikans appeared to wear while on duty. Yet, Eric was as much concerned about the flaws in their dress as the discrepancies in their voices and skin color. ‘Resembled’ and ‘identical’ were two words with plenty of room in between where suspicions could be raised. What were they going to say if they got caught? Well, you see Mr. Kaulikan, we really did have green eyes but they changed color when we stared at the nova too long...

  “Say, ‘I’m from one of the farm worlds,’” Eric told Strem. To the aliens, their ships were worlds. As they had to spend the rest of their lives inside them, it was easy to understand why.

  Strem glanced out the window at the purple nebula, which was steadily revolving into tiny individual candle-lights. “Les kau tee mick.”

  “No, that’s ‘I must be on my way.’”

  “It doesn’t matter, Sammy can tell me what to say. Hey, why don’t we just learn the line: ‘I’m deaf, thank you, good-bye.’”

  “Because then someone would want to take us to one of their doctors,” Eric said, putting the last of Cleo’s paraphernalia away. “Finished with our eyes?” he asked her.

  Cleo held two of the green contacts up to the light. “Perfect.”

  “Buckle down, everybody,” Sammy said. “Time to put on the brakes.”

  Sammy wisely did not add: And see if we don’t kill ourselves.

  Eric suspected neither of the girls fully realized how dangerous the deceleration would be; they had been far more tense before Jeret’s customs check.

  Eric stowed Cleo’s case and took a seat between Strem and Sammy, fastening a crisscrossed elastic belt over his chest. He glanced at Strem and received a golden thumbs up – Jeanie had also oiled their hands – and it seemed somehow extra lucky.

  Sammy rolled Excalibur until the ship’s nose was pointed toward the nova, then activated the graviton drive. Besides slowing them drastically, the drive would also, theoretically, repel the energy of the Kaulikans’ wide ion train. As the low hum began to shake the ship, changing swiftly into the brief high-pitched whine, Eric noticed nothing different than during their acceleration out of Earth’s orbit. A glance at the control console, however, revealed several additional indicators creeping into the danger zone.

  They were now approximately twice the orbit of Pluto from the nova and were able to look at it through unfiltered windows. With added distance, the layers of expelled gas appeared denser, and it was pleasant to imagine they were watching the cooling birth of a super being’s central planet, and not the remains of a mortal’s dead solar system. How often, Eric wondered, were the eyes of the remaining Kaulikans drawn to their own windows, to see what had driven them from home?

  Suddenly, a red haze began to blur the nova as a deep but soft drone filled the cabin. Eric did not know if the haze and noise was due to the overloading graviton drive or the impact of the changed particles on the ship’s force field. He hesitated to ask Sammy, who was, to put it mildly, very busy, staring without blinking at the information being fed to him by Excalibur’s computers, his two hands instinctively adjusting the controls.

  Eric was surprised at himself. He was afraid, but the emotion seemed somehow removed from him perhaps because, if the end came, he would not have a chance to know it. The drone reminded him of the sound of water flushing the hull of a plowing mini-sub, and he thought of the evening he had chased sharks with Strem in the warm sea of Baja, only hours after hearing of Strem’s wild vacation plans. It seemed as though it were years ago.

  “How are we doing?” Strem asked quickly.

  “If I can answer that question in a moment,” Sammy said, “we’re doing very well indeed.”

  A nerve-taunting bell went off, and Cleo and Jeanie let out a cry. Sammy quieted it with the flip of a switch. They were committed. The drone thickened and got louder, becoming harsher, sounding more like the thunder of an approaching storm on an open prairie. The red haze changed to a yellow glare, hurting their eyes. Sammy lowered the shields, but the enforced blindness was dubious comfort. Eric’s chair began to shake violently, and he could feel the vertebrae in his spine rattling. He took a deep breath and didn’t bother to let it go.

  “Is the drive overheating?” Strem shouted over the roar.

  “No!” Sammy shouted back, “It’s melting!”

  Eric heard the crack of sparks and smelled ozone. He wondered for a moment, if it were to end now, what he would miss the most.

  There was a horrendous bump, followed by two more murderous blows. They could have been ramming walls of stone. Then the bottom seemed to drop out of Excalibur, the computer had automatically given up maintaining the ship’s gravity, no doubt trying to preserve every last morsel of energy.

  A tornado swept Eric’s sense of balance, and he felt nauseous. The white wig he was supposed to wear swiped the side of his head. Another bell began to yell, and this time Sammy was unable to reach the switch to turn it off. The thunder swelled to the roar of a volcano, Eric tasted blood in his mouth. He had bitten his tongue, or his lip, or both.

  Then the lights went out. Someone screamed.

  Then there was nothing. No movement, no sound. Nothing.

  The lights came back on.

  Eric looked at his friends. They looked at him. Naturally, Strem was the first one to relocate his mouth. His words came out as muffled whispers. Their eardrums were throbbing.

  “So I guess we’re still alive,” he said.

  Eric smiled and nodded and felt his neck crack. Cleo’s suitcase floated by his head. They were in free fall, and a part of him wanted to fly. Smoke wafted from a minor electrical discharge in the ceiling. The control console was a blanket of red lights. It did not matter. Strem’s guess was right.

  Sammy lifted the shields from the windows. All sense of perspective turned inside out. A long curving silver wall now hung above Excalibur, which his intellect could only tenuously connect with the tiny objects he had been studying in the holographic cube minutes before. This was the edge of one of the Kaulikans’ ships’ three rotating wheels. A sparkling purple jet fanned out behind them and he felt its warmth in his chest.

&n
bsp; “They’re really here,” Jeanie whispered in awe.

  Sammy took a quick inspection of the Kaulikan ship and began to turn Excalibur on her tail. The colossal wheel floated closer. Its white hull was virtually seamless, and Eric wondered if entry would be as easy as it had sounded from millions of miles away. He did spot, however, a small antenna dish – which in all possibility was bigger than their own ship – and watched as it drifted along a sweeping arc as the wheel spun. Then the antenna appeared to halt as Sammy synchronized their drift with that of the huge hub. They glided inwards toward a shadow cast by the curled rim of the bright metal walls.

  “Think they know we’re here?” Strem breathed.

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” Sammy replied. Then he abruptly leaned forward, repeatedly pressing a single button.

  “What is it?” Eric asked.

  “One second,” Sammy said.

  The curve of the wheel’s rim opened into a dim hollow. Excalibur had been constructed in space and was not designed to land. Technically, this was a docking and not a landing, but as they were going under the influence of external gravity, it would have been nice to have shock pads. If they didn’t touch down gently, the bang would reverberate throughout the Kaulikan craft.

  “We have a problem,” Sammy said finally. “Our dampers are fused in place.”

  “Does that mean we can’t keep the drive on?” Strem asked.

  “It means we can’t turn it off,” Sammy said. “Not and restart it. I can idle the graviton flux and hold us in place but we’ll just keep heating.”

  “For how long?” Cleo asked.

  “Until we blow up,” Sammy said.

  “How much time do we have?” Eric asked.

  “If we can keep a minimum idle,” Sammy said, “maybe six hours, maybe less. I was really hoping to turn most of our systems off.”

  Eric hardly felt the touchdown on the inside rim of the rotating wheel. The hovering wigs and clothes settled to the floor. Looking straight up, through a gape cut by the shadowed rim and the reflecting hull, he saw a dozen nearby Kaulikan ships, much more widely spaced than he could have imagined from his earlier examination of the fleet. Excalibur was only a needle in a spread-out haystack, and it gave him reason to hope they had not been spotted.

  They undid their belts, stood and stretched – even Sammy, who they had been beginning to believe had grown into his seat. Their relief at having survived the deceleration was cooled by the new deadline the fused damper had given them. Plus, there was the not so minor consideration, at least from Eric’s side, that within minutes they would be coming face-to-face with aliens. He was anxious to get going.

  “I didn’t see any air locks when we were coming down,” Strem said, squeezing one of the drying white hairpieces over his head, ignoring Cleo’s and Jeanie’s snickers.

  Sammy pointed out the window at the dark artificial valley in which Excalibur was nestled. “From sensor readings, there appear to be several placed along this rim. Walk in either direction long enough and you will come to one.”

  “Should be interesting trying to open it,” Eric said. He pulled on his opant coat and glanced down at his gray slippers, realizing none of them had thought to note what type of shoes the Kaulikans wore. It was too late to worry about that now.

  “We’ll bring lasers,” Strem said. “We can always cut it.”

  “No.” Eric shook his head. “Absolutely not.”

  “You could set off an alarm that way,” Sammy agreed. “There will be a remote eye on your pressure suits and opant belts. When you get to an air lock, I’ll be able to study it with you, and we’ll figure something out.”

  “I’m bringing a laser, anyway,” Strem said. “I’m not going in there unarmed.”

  Eric was annoyed. “And do what with it? If we get caught, we can’t fight our way back to Excalibur.”

  “Why not?” Strem asked.

  “You could just stun them,” Cleo said. “You wouldn’t have to kill anybody.”

  “Listen to yourselves,” Eric said. “Here we’re about to make the most incredible contact and you’re talking about confrontations. Can’t you see, if we get caught we can’t give these people the impression we’re a hostile race?”

  “Suit yourself,” Strem said. “I’m bringing a gun. I’ll hide it under my coat, and no one will know I have it. I won’t use it unless I’m forced to.”

  “If we do get caught,” Eric said as patiently as he could, “the fact that you have a weapon will be bad enough. It won’t matter if you use it or not. Remember, we are the ones who are trespassing.”

  Strem looked puzzled. “Why is it that at times like this, you always start worrying about the implications of every blessed thing we’re going to do?”

  “For the life of me,” Eric grumbled. “I can’t remember another time like this.”

  “I agree with Strem,” Cleo said.

  “I agree with Eric,” Jeanie said.

  Sammy due to his uninvolved nature, didn’t vote either way. In the end, Strem took a gun from the weapon cabinet, but before he tucked it away, Eric made sure it was locked in the stun position.

  Sammy fitted the implants in their ears, and they turned on a Kaulikan TV program to give themselves a trial run. They quickly discovered that when an alien was speaking, they had to subconsciously block out what was being said in order to catch the whispered mechanical voice in their ears. The translation, however, was the easy part. Though remaining on the bridge, Sammy would be able, by virtue of the implants, to hear everything that was said. They had previously decided that when he’d received a Kaulikan’s spoken words, and had them translated, he would give an appropriate response in English to the ship’s computer which would then relay it to them in Basic Kaulikan. It sounded good in theory but when they tried simulating an anticipated conversation, they decided they would be lucky if they were mistaken for stuttering morons.

  The contacts were comfortable and hard to see through. Cleo defended herself by saying that she had had to use several layers of the green dye to get the proper shade. Blind stuttering morons.

  There was no sense in waiting. Cleo blow-dried their wigs, and Jeanie touched up their face color. They climbed into their pressure suits and headed for Excalibur’s air lock. Eric very much enjoyed the girls’ good-bye kisses, especially Jeanie’s tearful ‘Come back soon.’ He was beginning to feel scared, but it was the kind of scared that made him feel extraordinarily alive. They slipped their inflatable containers through the collars of the opant coats and donned their helmets. Sammy took their gloved hands.

  “Be careful,” he said.

  Of course, it was too late for advice like that.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The first thing Eric did when he stepped outside was turn on his helmet lamp. The light came out green on a green metallic ground. With the contacts he was going to miss out on whatever colors the Kaulikan universe had to offer.

  He moved straight out of the air lock toward the nearest wall and looked ‘up’ toward the end of the gray central shaft and black domes that encircled the shimmering ionic trail. What the alien technology lacked in sophistication, it made up for in magnitude. He stood, unable to stop staring, until he started to feel dizzy and had to put a hand out to steady himself. The rotation of the wheel was disorientating.

  “Are you okay?” Strem asked, putting his hand on his shoulder, shinning his helmet lamp directly in his eyes.

  “Yes.” Eric straightened. Excalibur blocked one side of the dark tunnel formed by the rim of the spinning wheel, a silent black cylinder whose outline could be seen only as a silhouette against the star field. But the other direction curved upwards without obstruction toward an inverted horizon that would bring them back to where they had started if they followed it long enough. Eric pointed to the Kaulikans’ glowing purple tail, which seemed to disappear into infinity. “Quite a view, huh?” he said.

  “I’ve got to admit, it is,” Strem said. “I just can’t understand
how they could work so long building these ships and not invent the graviton or hyper drives. They mustn’t be as intelligent as we are.”

  “If I remember correctly, Dr. Pernel discovered the principles of the graviton flux entirely by accident, which led to the discovery of hyper relays. We were lucky; they weren’t.”

  “Ah, maybe.”

  They started away from Excalibur, plodding under the weight of the pressure suits, which had been designed for free fall. Eric estimated their gravity at eighty percent Earth’s. The side force or acceleration generated by the Kaulikan drive was barely noticeable. Then again, he wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that their drive had been on continuously for the last five years.

  The first part of their slow walk was uneventful. The hull floor was flat, devoid of equipment. Eric repeatedly found his eyes drawn to the central shaft, soundlessly spinning its massive plates on what must have been the largest ball bearings in this quadrant of the galaxy. He suspected that was where engineering would be located, which was where they’d probably find their forty gallons of ethylene glycol.

  Two hundred yards from Excalibur they came to a circular hatch on the ground with a light in the center and a handle at either end. There were no buttons to push, no knobs to spin. They stared at it for a while before Sammy came over the line.

  (“Pull on it. Turn it. Play with it. Open it.”)

  They tried to turn it clockwise and counterclockwise, but it didn’t budge. Yanking on the handles didn’t help matters. Eric thought it would be fitting to travel hundred of light years, survive a nova and a mad deceleration, and then not be able to get past the door. Finally, frustrated, Strem kicked the light, and lo and behold, that worked. The hatch eased up a couple of inches and they were able to turn it a half revolution clockwise until it stopped and swung open. They peered inside. It was awfully dark.