Deductions

Okay, now what? Rocky told me to go back into my ship. So I did.

I feel kind of stupid. There’s a whole bunch of science I should be doing, right?

I peek through the airlock porthole. My lamps are still taped to the walls in the tunnel and I can see there have been some…changes.

The hex wall is gone. Just plain gone. I can see all the way to the Blip-A’s hull. And there’s a hull robot attached to it reaching out and doing stuff with its little robot hands.

And yeah, its hands look like Rocky’s hands, broadly speaking. Three fingers. About the same size as Rocky’s hands. Probably controlled with a Nintendo Power Glove kind of thing inside the ship.

Man, I’m old.

The robot takes a particular interest in my lamps. Heck, I’d take an interest too. Those are alien artifacts with alien technology. Sure, they’re just lights, but they’re alien lights to my Eridian friends over there. Probably the most exciting scientific find of their history. The robot arm puts them in a little cubby on the Blip-A hull and a latch closes. I bet those are going to be the most heavily studied lamps in the history of lamps.

I’m glad they got to have that moment of discovery and all, but they took my light source away. I can hear the occasional clunk but it’s pitch-dark in there.

That’s interesting in and of itself. I’m not an alien from 40 Eridani, but if I were working with a remote-controlled robot, I’d have a camera on it somewhere and a light source to see what I was doing. But they don’t need that. They don’t need light.

Well, hold on. Their visible spectrum might be completely different from ours. Humans only see a tiny fraction of all the wavelengths of light out there. We evolved to see the wavelengths that are most plentiful on Earth. Maybe Eridians evolved to see different wavelengths. The room could be well illuminated with infrared or ultraviolet light and I wouldn’t see a thing.

Hmm. A robot. Why a robot? They had a living being there a few minutes ago—my boy Rocky. Why replace him with a robot?

Vacuum.

They probably took all the air out of the tunnel. They have a sample of my hull—they know it’s made of aluminum and roughly how thick it is. Maybe they aren’t sure if my ship can handle outside pressure. Or maybe their atmosphere reacts badly with aluminum.

So they keep the tunnel a vacuum, which means they have to do work with a robot.

I feel like Sherlock Holmes. All I saw was “nothing,” and I drew a bunch of conclusions! Conclusions that are wildly speculative and with nothing to prove them, but conclusions!

***

Chapter 10