"What the hell?" Sparks tapped the gauge with his knuckle. The needle bounced and returned to the same position. "Now what could...?" He swore and flicked the power off, then back on. The needle swung back to its same position.
"What is it, Sparks?" The Chief came over to the communications console, walking with the cautious, graceful tread of a man long used to low gravity.
"Dunno, can't figure it out. Reception was clear as a bell a minute ago, now it's all shot to hell."
"Think the trouble's at our end?" the Chief suggested. "It could be tech problems or atmospheric interference back home."
Sparks frowned and shook his head. "I don't think so. It's on all the frequencies. I had the carrier wave as plain as a blind date, then bango, faint and fuzzy. And look at the incoming signal strength. It's gone all haywire."
The Chief glanced at the gauge without comprehension, then at the chronometer. "Hey, they're gonna be coming through in ten minutes."
"I know, I know, I had her all ready to go. Lemme dope this out a minute. Could be a bad capacitor in the tuner somewhere, or possibly something in the antenna system. I'll switch in the spare receiver and see what happens."
The Chief peered helplessly over the young radio operator's shoulder as Sparks flipped off the main set and began tuning in the spare equipment. Feeling useless, the Chief paced the compartment.
"C'mon, Sparks," he urged, "it's almost time."
Ignoring him, Sparks listened intently through his headset as his fingers made delicate adjustments to the tuning dial.
"Oh, no, the same thing again - it must be the dish." He ripped off his phones and began hurriedly removing the cover plate from a connection box.
The Chief, running his hands through his thinning hair, opened his mouth to speak, but realized he'd only distract the boy. Leaving Sparks rummaging frantically through a tool locker, he took two low bounds that carried him to the intercom by the door.
"Bridge. Chief here, in the radio shack."
An impatient ten seconds, then the lieutenant's bored voice.
"Bridge here. What is it, Chief?"
"Some kind of trouble with the radio, sir. Sparks thinks it may be the antenna."
"Yeah, well, tell him to - hey, there's a transmission coming up!" The slow drawl disappeared and the Chief could hear his feet hitting the floor.
"Yeah, that's why I called. Looks like we may miss this one."
The lieutenant's voice sat up and looked worried. "Why, can't he fix the bastard? What's the problem, does he know yet?"
"I dunno and he's too busy checking it out for me to ask him now."
Sparks had the cover off another component and was probing inside it with a pair of voltmeter leads. Never taking his eyes off the dial, he called over his shoulder.
"It's the damn dish, all right. Wouldn't you know it? It couldn't be something inside where I could get to it in a hurry. Couldn't happen in an hour when there's no transmission coming in. It's gotta jack up the one time a day we use it. Tell him I'll have to go over the side."
The Chief thumbed the mike switch. "Bridge? He says the trouble's outside. He's gonna have to go out."
"Damn! There's no time for that now. How bad is it? Can he hear them at all?"
Sparks tossed the voltmeter into the tool locker and pulled his phones on. "I'll try. Here they come now." He switched on the recorder and listened, pressing the phones hard against his ears. Beads of sweat glistened on his upper lip.
After a few minutes, he switched off and sat back. "Not good. Not good at all. I got some of it, I think, but I missed a lot too. What I could catch sounded routine." He swiveled his chair to the Chief, pulled a wry face, and shrugged as if to say, "I did what I could."
The intercom clicked. "Radio Shack? Bridge. Chief, you down there?"
The Chief noticed the new voice and switched on. "Skipper? Yeah, Sparks got most of it okay, he thinks. Missed some."
"No good, Chief. Let's hope that wasn't an emergency bulletin. Tell Sparks to get his butt over the side. That dish has got to be right by the next transmission. And get a copy of the message up here as soon as you can. Out."
A significant glance passed between the two, but Sparks held up his hands, palm out, to forestall the Chief's order. He sighed and heaved himself out of his chair as if he weighed twice his groundside weight instead of half. As he disappeared grumbling down the corridor, the Chief called after him.
"Ah, stop your bitching, at least it's a break from the routine. The exercise'll do you good."
"Yeah, nothing like a swim before lunch, eh?" called Sparks over his shoulder.
Chuckling, the Chief punched PRINTOUT on the recorder and watched the daily transmission from home extrude from the machine. He sucked his teeth as row after row of text was interrupted by long strings of dots. The Skipper wasn't going to be pleased. € € €
The airlock deck was on the far side, and Sparks had to walk almost a third of the circumference of the ship. And all uphill, he thought sourly. It was one of the oldest and tiredest jokes in space, since most corridors in a ship curve up in both directions.
He reached the lifeboat bays and took his suit out of his locker. When he had it on, he picked up the helmet and stepped to the intercom. "Bridge. Boat deck. Sparks here."
The lieutenant answered, promptly for once, Sparks noticed. "Yeah, Sparks. You ready now?"
"Just about. Damn things never go on easy, do they?"
"What's with the antenna, anyway?"
"I can't figure it. I don't think it's a micrometeorite hit. That'd just reduce the signal strength. This signal was just kind of blurry, y'know?"
"Maybe some birdie built his nest in the antenna."
"Yeah, that's what it seemed like. Okay, give me a minute, then switch over to the external circuit."
"Right. Be careful now. And don't forget to wear your hat."
Disdaining to answer, Sparks clipped on his helmet and stepped into the airlock, dogging the door behind him. His helmet said, "Can you hear me, Sparks?"
"Unfortunately. You?"
"Loud and clear. Have fun and don't leave the yard."
Sparks pulled the lever to drain the lock and twisted his head to watch the pressure gauge in his helmet. It was still steady when the light over the outer door turned green. He spun the wheel and swung it open. A thin fog of air drifted out with him, blurring the stars for a moment, then they froze into surreal clarity. He floated motionless and watched.
It was always the same, he thought. One starscape is just like any other. And yet he never tired of looking. He loved space and he loved being a spacer. The spirit of the explorer, the sailor, the adventurer, was in him. This was the frontier now, this was the scene of the struggle with nature. The dull monotony of the long passage fell away and he felt refreshed, exhilarated.
Then a loud voice crackled in his ear. "How's the weather out there, Sparks?"
With a hint of regret, he came back to himself, to the dry banter of a crew cooped up together in a ship. The same predictable little jokes.
"Real good, it's a beautiful night. The stars are out."
"No moon, though?"
"Nah. Must not have come up over the hills yet."
"Just as well. I don't want you getting all romantic way out here."
"Lieutenant, you got nothing to fear, believe me. Lemme see, which way's up?" He touched an attitude control and turned himself over to face the ship.
It looked, as someone had once unkindly remarked, like a barrel wearing a hoop skirt. The ship itself was a stubby cylinder. Lights glowed yellow from a few portholes in the living area up forward. The rest of the barrel, the cargo hold and engine room, was unlighted and almost featureless, black against black.
At the bow a huge spidery bowl, looking impossibly fragile, pointed back toward home. The great parabolic antenna was their only link with their families and friends and with the news of the world. Without it, they would have a hard time just finding their way back. And it was his job to get it working again.
His fingers tapped at the buttons on his wrist, and a compressed-air thruster on his back sent him floating toward the antenna. There was no major damage visible, as he had expected. Any rocks big enough to knock a hole in the dish would have been detected and avoided automatically. He circled out over the rim and headed for the wire cage at the focus of the parabola. The trouble had to be either there or in the antenna mounting circuitry, but both were as nearly foolproof as it was possible to build them. He had never heard of either failing on any ship.
As he neared the focus assembly, his eye caught a glint of light. There was something shiny in the black wire mesh.
"What the devil is that?" he murmured to himself.
"What's the devil?" asked the lieutenant.
"I don't know - something seems to be caught in the antenna focus."
"What did I tell you? It's a bird's nest."
"No, really, there's... well, I'll be...." A touch of his retros brought him to a halt a foot from the cage. He floated there motionless for a moment, staring. Lying crumpled in a corner of the mesh was a spacesuit glove.
The lieutenant's voice crackled in his ears again. "So what is it already?"
"You aren't going to believe this, lieutenant. It's some stupid bastard's suit glove," Sparks called back, irritated. "It's kinda stuck in the wire cage around the focus."
"A suit glove? You kidding?"
"No, really. Somehow it must have gotten adrift and just sailed into the antenna, I guess."
"Could that be the trouble, you think?"
"Hell, yes, it's covered in aluminum. Sitting where it is, it's probably blanketing reception from half the dish."
"Whose is it, can you tell?"
"Now how the hell can I tell that? Somebody who's about to get his ass into some hot water, you can count on that."
"Yeah. Well, c'mon back in. We can check to see who's missing a glove from his suit."
"Well, I got mine on. I always wear my mittens when I go out at night."
Sparks picked up the glove and backed away from the focus. Once clear, he rocketed quickly out around the lip of the dish and arced back in toward the lock, glowing red in the dark curve of the ship. Skillfully, his fingers playing over his thruster controls, he drifted straight into the open lock. He closed and sealed the outer door and threw the lever to pressurize the lock. When the light over the inner door turned green, he undogged the door and stepped into the ship. He flipped the catches on his helmet and pulled it off, blinking in the light. The lieutenant appeared from the corridor. Sparks tossed him the glove and started stripping off his suit.
"Y'know," he said, "I can't figure it. How could you lose a glove outside? Nobody out there is going to take his gloves off to pick his nose or something. So maybe he took it off while he was coming in through the lock and dropped it in there and it drifted out next time somebody went out, right? Wouldn't you think a guy would notice when he put his suit away that a glove was missing? It's not the kind of thing you'd miss."
Sparks yanked his locker door open and shoved his suit in. He laid his helmet and gloves on the top shelf, his boots on the bottom. He turned back to the lieutenant. "And another thing...," he began, and stopped. The lieutenant was holding the glove out at arm's length as if he thought it were about to explode. His eyes were as big as fried eggs.
"Ulp," said the lieutenant.
"What's the matter?" Sparks slammed the locker, smoothed back his hair. The lieutenant never took his eyes off the glove. He opened his mouth, shut it, opened it again, shut it again.
Sparks looked at him curiously. "What the hell are you staring at?"
The lieutenant looked at him with those wide eyes. "It's...it's not one of ours."
"Okay, so it's not one of ours. I wasn't accusing you. So it's somebody else's."
"No, no, I mean, it's not any of ours." His voice was an octave too high.
Sparks slapped his forehead in frustration. "Okay. I give up. Whose is it then? There's only the eight of us here."
The lieutenant suddenly dropped the glove on the deck and raced for the intercom, babbling for the skipper. Sparks noticed he hadn't flipped the mike switch on. He looked down at the glove. It had landed flat on the deck. He looked, then bent and looked closer. A chill ran up his back from his anus to his eyebrows. The glove didn't have enough fingers.
The crew had gathered in the mess. In the center of the table, watched by sixteen eyes, lay the glove. Conversation, at first spirited, had soon died. The lieutenant sat with his chin in his palms, biting his nails idly. Without looking up, he broke the long silence.
"Maybe it's from one of the other freighters. Maybe one of their guys is missing a finger."
The doctor was leaning back in his chair, his knees propped on the edge of the table. He took his pipe out of his mouth. "Not likely. One of us would have heard of a guy like that. There's just not that many spacers around."
Shorty, the engineer's mate, sat with his chin resting on the edge of the table, his arms hanging down. Without shifting from an apparently extremely uncomfortable position, he volunteered that he knew a cook on the Sunwind IV who didn't have a big toe. The doctor closed his eyes in silent acknowledgement of this intelligence and was searching for a suitable reply when Sparks spoke up.
"Yeah, I know him - a big fat guy from up north somewhere, always talking about the winters they used to get back home."
"That's him. Lost his toe when his old man ran over it with a sleigh."
"Yeah? He told me...."
"Hey, c'mon, you guys," the Chief broke in, "this ain't no cook's boot we got here. And besides, it just goes to show what Doc said: we'd know of a guy missing a finger. I say somebody on this boat is putting us all on."
"I don't see how though, Chief," said Miller, the engineer. "The glove must have been put there since we got the transmission yesterday, and we know nobody's been over the side since Shorty went out a week ago to check the rotational thrusters."
"Hey, now," put in Shorty defensively. "I didn't put the damn thing out there. I never went near the dish."
Sparks shook his head. "I say it got there right when the set went haywire. I had that carrier wave spot on, reception was perfect. Then bango, fuzzy as a carload of tennis balls. That's when it happened, right then. And none of us were outside then."
The skipper looked across at the radioman. "Sparks, could it have been floating around in the dish for a while before it affected your reception?"
"Yeah, maybe. It wouldn't be noticeable until it got onto the focus."
"Then it could have been floating along with us for weeks. Some clown could have dumped it out there a month ago."
Hill, the young cook, stared at the glove. "But how would he know it would catch on the focus? It should've just drifted away. And where would he get a weird glove, and why? That's a lot of trouble for a bad joke."
"I figure the lieutenant's right," said the Chief. "It must be from another boat. This is a pretty busy shipping lane. There must be six freighters a year that use this route; one of them must have dropped it. Maybe there's some new guy none of us know, who's short a finger."
"Yeah, some rich guy who has his spacesuit gloves tailor made, Miller replied sarcastically. "Look at it Chief, the finger isn't cut off or sewn shut. The glove was made for a guy with no little finger."
"And no place for his little finger to attach," added Doc. "See, it goes straight from the ring finger to the wrist. This guy never had a pinkie. Either somebody had that glove specially made for a joke or...." He stopped. There was a silence.
Then the Chief said in a quiet voice, "Or the guy that lost it wasn't human." Eight men stared at the glove as if they expected it to stand up and tap-dance.
Hill snorted in disbelief. "Ah, hell, it's gotta be a joke. It's a regular glove that somebody's cut up and put back together. It looks just like any company issue suit glove. If some little green men made it, it'd be all different-looking."
"Maybe not," the Skipper replied. "Some ways of doing something are the best way whether you're green or polka-dot. Our gloves are made out of aluminum because it reflects heat best. They've got a twist lock seal because it's the easiest and fastest way of closing a seam airtight. And they're lined with a fabric of synthetic fiber because it's strong, soft, and insulating. We've had time to work out the best kind of spacesuit glove. So would anybody else with space travel."
"You really think some alien ship might be around here somewhere?" asked Sparks, remembering the moments he had spent alone outside.
The Skipper shrugged. "Not nearby or we would have picked him up by now."
"Wouldn't have to be around now," said the doctor. "That thing might've been floating around for a long time. You couldn't tell from looking at it. It could be really old and it'd look just the same."
They looked at the glove in a new light. "Gee, d'you think so?" asked Hill. "How old do you reckon it might be, Doc?"
"No way of telling, Cookie. Maybe a week, maybe a thousand years. And maybe that glove was drifting around out here before our grand-daddies were swinging in the trees."
"Geez," said Hill.
Miller pulled at his beard. "Might not have been lost right here, either. It could've come a long way if it is old. It must have been going pretty fast. If it weren't, we would have hit it so hard that we'd have diced it in the antenna."
The lieutenant nodded. "That's right. For it to hit the focus it must have come up from behind us, going just a little faster than we are. That must be somewhere around seven hundred millilux. What speed are we making, Skipper?"
"About that. You know it exactly, Miller?"
"Yeah, well, mammy's putting out full standard thrust on retro and we've been braking for, let's see, seven weeks now, so -- hmm -- oh, about 680 or 685. I'd have to work it out to know exactly."
The lieutenant nodded again. "Close enough. Okay, so we know the glove was going about 700 millies. And on roughly the same course."
"And it just came up and slapped us on the ass," added Sparks. "But doesn't it all seem pretty unlikely? If it'd been going any other speed in any other direction at any other time and place, we'd never have seen it."
"Well, the speed's not too surprising when you think about it," said the Skipper. "Fisher showed years ago that the top speed for a ship is about 800 millies. The faster you want to go, the lower you've got to get your shipmass to fuelmass ratio. At around 80 percent of the speed of light, that ratio approaches zero. Faster than that even a matter-antimatter reactor can't push you. You've got to have such a big mammy it can't push its own fuel load. So unless these short-fingered guys know a better fuel than anti-matter, which seems unlikely, they probably cruise at around 700 millies too. So anything they drop would be going the same speed - there's nothing out here to slow it down."
"But still, Skipper," argued the Chief, " this is a big place up here. What are the chances of our not only encountering this glove, but of being on the same course? It's just too much to swallow. Even if we knew it was here and had its course and speed plotted, we couldn't find it. You couldn't see it visually or on radar if it was even a ship's length away. The only reason we found it at all was because it landed in the one place within a thousand cubic light-years where we'd notice it. It's too much."
"I know Chief, I know - but there it is in front of you. It's just as unlikely that it's from another of our boats. A thousand ships a day could use this lane, each one tossing out gloves as fast as they can, and it'd still be millions of years before we'd run into one, much less notice it, and much less one like that one. No, it's either one of you guys trying to be a comedian, or it's for real."
Hill spoke up, "But how could anybody do it, Skipper? The only way to put it there is to go over the side, and the only way out is through the lock, and nobody can go through the lock without lights going on up on the bridge. And the only one who's been out today is...." He stopped, blushing, and glanced at Sparks.
"Don't get any ideas, Cookie. That glove hit the antenna before I ever left the radio shack. Chief, you saw the transmission."
"He's right, Cookie. He had good reception, then it went all to hell, and it was fine again by the time we got back to the radio shack after he found it. Sparks couldn't have done it. None of us could have."
Shorty had been looking from face to face during the conversation. Now he looked back at the glove in front of him. "Then it must be for real. This glove must have belonged to some alien... some monster." He pushed himself back from the table as if he half expected the owner to come back to claim it.
The doctor chuckled. "I don't know how monstrous he was, Shorty. Maybe he looked just like you, only with eight fingers instead of ten."
Sparks laughed. "Hell, I hope they don't all look like Shorty. I'd sure hate to meet a whole shipload of them."
The Chief joined in the laughter. "I still don't know. It's just too unlikely. The probabilities are just too small."
The Skipper shrugged. "We don't know the odds. Pretty damn slim, we can be sure, but there might be a lot more traffic out here than we think. The scientists tell us the chances are good that at least a million planets in this galaxy alone support intelligent life. If only one in a thousand of those achieves space travel, that's still a thousand races building ships. And maybe some of them are a lot more advanced than we are and have thousands of ships, not just our hundred or so. Some of them could have been in the business a lot longer, too. A planet could build a hell of a lot of ships in a million years of space travel. For all we know, space could be crowded with boats. There could be a dozen of them within a light-month of us and we'd have no way of knowing. Space is just so big that the chances of ever running into one are, well, astronomical. But it looks like it just happened to us. Chances are, it'll never happen again. We'll probably never know who dropped that glove or where it came from."
"Couldn't we trace it?" suggested Hill. "We know its approximate course and speed. Couldn't we figure its track backwards and find at least what part of the galaxy it came from?"
The Skipper shook his head. "No, I'm afraid not. We only know its course very roughly and we have no idea when it was lost. If it was a year ago, it must have been somewhere near our sun, but it could have been on that course for a long time. This may not even be its first orbit of the galaxy."
They stared at the glove, imagining its lonely passage through space.
"What'll we do with it?" asked the lieutenant.
"Take it home with us. The scientists can take a look at it there and see what they can learn about it. Maybe they have ways of telling more about it, I don't know. I don't think they'll be able to tell us much about the people who made it. It'll probably wind up in a museum somewhere: ŒAlien Spacesuit Glove. Discovered in space by Interstellar Transport Constellation. Origin unknown'. We don't really know much more than we did before we found it."
"We know there's somebody else in space," put in the Chief. "Maybe someday we'll meet them."
"No, we don't even know that for sure. Maybe these guys were the only other spacers ever, and their whole race could have been dead since before the sun was born. We just don't know. We still could be the only spacers in the galaxy. All we really know is that somewhere, sometime, another race traveled in space. And they only had eight fingers."
After a time, Miller added, "If they learned to count with their fingers like we did they probably used a different base for their number system."
Shorty smiled. "We know one other thing about them. We've got better piano players than they did." There was a general laugh.
"Yeah, and faster typists, too," added Sparks. "But think how much they saved on rings and brass knuckles." He chuckled. "And their hands must not have been as good at holding onto things - see, one of them dropped his glove."
Most of the crew laughed, but the Chief's face was serious. "You know, I've been thinking about that. How did he come to lose it? Like with us, it's almost impossible to lose something off a ship, especially personal life support equipment like this. Know what I think? I think these guys hit something."
The smiles vanished and there was another long silence. The chill of the spacer's worst nightmare flowed into the compartment.
"Shipwreck?" said Hill. "Geez - the poor little bugger. I wonder how it happened?"
"No telling," said Doc, "but you can bet it happened fast. Everything happens fast when you're doing 700 millies. Maybe their sensors broke down, or they came up on something too big for the avoidance systems to handle. If they hit a good-sized rock, there'd just be a flash, then the ship would be in a million pieces. Pieces like this."
There was another long silence while each of them stared at the glove, lost in his own thoughts of the vast cold nothing beyond the ship's walls. Finally Sparks broke the silence. "Yeah - the poor guy. Whoever he was, he was a spacer, just like us." It sounded like an epitaph.
Hill stood up. "Gotta get some lunch started," he mumbled.
The Skipper looked up, then pushed his chair back with a sigh. "Yeah, most of you guys have something you should be doing. Let's get back to work."
The group got up from the mess table in a shuffle of feet and a scraping of chairs. They began moving off, up the curving corridors. The Doc was the last one out the door. He turned at the door and looked back once, still finding it hard to believe. But there on the scratched old mess table lay the shining silver glove. There could be no doubt about it. The glove had only four fingers. Plus the thumb, of course.
copyright 1996 by Brian K. Crawford