A LITTLE BIT MORE FROM THE PAGES OF 'REACH FOR MARS' :

An hour and a half later, I set Albatross down gently in the crater alongside the wreck and got on the intercom.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we have just landed alongside the alien wreck. Now get the hell off my ship!”

I sat and watched their space-suited figures walking over to the wreck. Then I rested my feet on top of the flight console, stared out the windows, and reflected on how easily I had always been manipulated by just about everybody I had ever met in my life—especially Nick. My reflections were interrupted by Dick’s squawk from the two-way radio,

“Hey Drew, you might want to suit up and come over to look at this!”

I grabbed the microphone and pushed the transmit button,

“Yeah, OK. I’ll be there shortly.”

I climbed to my feet and headed toward the cargo deck airlock, thinking, Well, I guess it didn’t work out too badly for me after all, ’cause here I am on Mars and still alive because of it.

As I entered the alien ship via the airlock, I turned right and headed toward the stern. I was sure that Dick would be in the engine room, and I was proved correct when I arrived there. The place looked a lot different than it had looked the last time I was there. Some of the monitors were flickering with differing sets of readouts, while others scrolled various numerical readouts one after another in continuous streams—all the monitors were busily doing many things. The sphere in the center of the cylinder was firing a continuous array of electrical beams of many different colors all around its enclosure walls, but I noticed that most of the energy from the sphere was emitted from the top of the sphere, at which point it circled the donut-shaped sphere and reentered from below. The overall effect was almost blinding; you could actually feel the energy being produced in that flashing electrical light show.

Dick materialized out of the brilliant light-filled engine room and joined me in the cargo hold, which was as close as I dared to get to that throbbing, humming electrical field.

“Aren’t you afraid of overexposure to the electromagnetic fields being produced in there? Even from this distance the hairs on the back of my neck are standing up; actually, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if every hair on my head was standing up.”

“No,” he replied.

“OK…so what did you want me to come over and look at then, Dick?”

He led me back down the corridor to the flight deck, where Courtney was fiddling around with the flight-control consoles, which were also lit up and flashing, scrolling, and blinking.

“As you can see, we’ve got the ship up and working. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you could take her up for a flight.”