Excerpt: A Still More Glorious Dawn

"Spirit, come in, this is Moon Base Alpha."

"Spirit here. This is John. Go ahead Commander."

"I'm setting up a video signal on channel A. You receiving?"

John turned in his pilot's chair to check another panel. A video screen came to life, displaying a test pattern.

"Yup, I'm getting a pattern."

"Good. Cutting to full video feed now." The screen flickered for a moment, then displayed a shaky image beamed from the moon base. John forwarded the radio signal to the display's speakers so all three of the crew aboard the Spirit could hear. Commander Skolnick aimed the handheld camera at his own face. "This is Commander Ryan Skolnick of the Spirit of Humanity." He read off some details from a clipboard that he held in his other hand--a security clearance notification as well as the time and date and location. Then some report numbers, and finally pointed the camera back at the room he was standing in.

The room seemed to be a control room overlooking a garage where a robotic lunar rover was parked. On the cargo bed of the rover was the oblong metallic object it had retrieved; the four panels had opened like the petals of a flower just as Ashton had described. Inside the control room were the two air force officers, Sergei, and another man huddled in a chair under several blankets. Sergei had got him a hot drink, but the cosmonaut simply sat there with a blank look on his face.

"We will now commence questioning of the subject," Skolnick's voice came from behind the camera. Sergei nodded and knelt beside his fellow countryman. The camera moved in to get better sound, and the thing that struck John was that this man wasn't old at all. In fact, he looked almost younger than Sergei! The Soviet mission had disappeared, what, fifty years ago? This man didn't look out of his thirties.

Sergei was talking to the cosmonaut now. The man didn't reply at first, but then mumbled something in Russian.

"He says," Sergei translated, "That he is falling. He is falling for a long time. The lights are moving." More mumbled Russian. "He says the sky has opened up, and the light is taking him inside." The cosmonaut stopped talking. Sergei prompted him, but there was no response. Finally, the Russian translated, "I see everything."

"Is that it?" Skolnick asked.

Sergei tried again, but the cosmonaut simply sat where he was.

"I am sorry, Commander, that seems to be all he will say," Sergei said as he stood up.

Michelle spoke up, "Sir, his symptoms seem to indicate severe mental trauma. It would be best not to push him too far right now. In fact, the best thing we could do for him would be to leave him alone and get him to professional psychologists as soon as possible."

"All right," Skolnick conceded, "we'll leave him alone for now. Sergei, stay with him in case he starts talking again. The rest of us will go have a look at that weird metal thing he arrived in."

The camera shook as Skolnick carried it through the hatch and into the small garage area. It was pressurized now, so the three of them simply wore their jumpsuits as they gathered around the lunar rover's cargo bed. The metal object took up a large amount of space with its doors unfolded, so it was hard to really get a good perspective on the thing. Finally, Skolnick simply stood on the front of the vehicle and held the camera up so it was looking down into the pod.

The exterior skin of the thing was about an inch thick, but the inner layers seemed to be much thicker--whether to conceal machinery or some other purpose was unclear. The glow of the overhead lights reflected off the interior surfaces and made it hard for the camera to make out the shape of the hollowed-out cavity in the middle.

"In case you can't see," Skolnick narrated, "the interior of the object has a person-shaped depression obviously molded around the subject we just interviewed. There are no controls or visible machinery--only this shiny, translucent-whitish material. It looks like plastic, but when you strike or scratch it," he demonstrated with his left hand, "it feels, sounds, and reacts like metal."

There was a muffled shout somewhere off-screen, and the image blurred as Skolnick spun to face the source. The auto-focus on the camera adjusted to show Sergei holding his hands over his face. The Soviet cosmonaut raised the mug that had held his hot drink and brought it down on the back of Sergei's head, sending the Russian sprawling. The cosmonaut turned to the window with a wild look on his face. There was a heartbeat moment when nobody moved, and then the two air force officers made a break for the hatchway to the control room. The cosmonaut was there first, slamming the door, latching it, and jamming something into the mechanism on the other side. He moved to the control board and randomly flipped switches and pressed buttons until the sound of the air pumps signalled the start of the decompression process.

The mad Russian shouted something on the other side of the glass, but the sound did not get through the thick window. Skolnick and the other officers frantically looked around for pressure suits or oxygen masks, or some way of stopping the decompression, but there wasn't enough time. Over the video feed John heard Skolnick mutter under his breath, "Never thought it would be like this."

Commander Skolnick was holding the video camera at his side. The image was upside-down, but John could see the control room. The cosmonaut seemed to be laughing and shouting at the window, when all of a sudden Sergei staggered to his feet and lunged at the crazy man. One of the air force officers shouted, and Skolnick whirled around again. The image blurred, then faltered, and John saw that the camera had been dropped on the ground next to the lunar rover. There were shouts off camera, the sound of clanking metal, and then the door opening. More shouts, and then quiet.

John hardly dared to breathe as the sound of footsteps approached the camera and someone picked it up. The glare of an overhead light saturated the image for a second, and then Skolnick's face came into focus.

"He's dead."