Mobility device

He makes a few more adjustments to the device, puts his tools back in his bandolier, then says, “I am done.”

“What is it?”

“Device keeps me alive in small room.” He looks happy. I think. He’s holding his carapace just a little higher than usual. “Wait.”

He disappears back into his ship, leaving the device behind. He returns with several plates of transparent xenonite. Each plate is a pentagon about a centimeter thick and a foot across. I hate myself for thinking in hybrid units like that. But that’s what my brain came up with.

“I make room now,” he says.

He assembles the pentagons edge to edge, using some kind of thick liquid glue from a tube to hold them together. Soon, he has two halves of a dodecahedron assembled. He holds them toward me proudly and places them together. “Room.”

The “room” is a geodesic sphere made of pentagons. The total diameter is about a meter. Easily big enough to contain Rocky.

“What’s the purpose of that room?” I ask.

“Room and device keep me alive in you ship.”

I raise my eyebrows. “You’re coming into my ship?”

“Want to see human technology. Is allowed, question?”

“Yes! Allowed! What do you want to see?”

“Everything! Human science better than Eridian science.” He points to the laptop floating beside me. “Machine that think. Eridians no have that.” He points to my toolkit. “Many machines there Eridians no have.”

“Yes. Come look at anything you want!” I point to the small airlock drawer in the divider wall. “How will you get it through that?”

“You leave tunnel. I make new divider wall. Bigger airlock.”

He pulls the completed device—which I now realize is a life-support system—onto his carapace and straps it on. It covers the radiator slits at the top of his carapace.

“Is that blocking your radiator? Isn’t that dangerous?”

“No. This make hot air into cold air,” he says.

Air conditioning. Not what I think of when I see a species that lives comfortably at over 200 degrees Celsius. But we all have our tolerances.

He seals the globe around himself with glue. “I test.”

He just floats there for a minute. Then, he says, “Works! Happy!”

“Great!” I say. “How does it work, though? Where does the heat go?”

“Easy,” he says. He taps one small part of the device. “Astrophage here. Astrophage take all heat hotter than ninety-six degrees.”

Ah, right. To humans, Astrophage is hot. To Eridians, it’s quite cold. And it’s the perfect air-conditioning medium. All Rocky has to do is run the air over some Astrophage-filled cooling fins or something.

***

Chapter 14