I slammed on the brakes and glared over at her as the buggy screeched to a
halt.
“So Nick has told you two about it?”
“No, darling, he hasn’t said a word about anything like that. I of all
people know that you sleep in the nude. God knows I am made aware of it during
the night at times, especially in the early mornings, and I know that you don’t
always put something on if you have to go to the head in the middle of the
night. Of course, it is the middle of the night, and the likelihood of seeing
anybody else is so slim. Still, if I am awake when you do it I can’t help lying
in bed and expecting to hear a scream from Sammy or a ‘What the Fuck?!’ from
Nick. Therefore, it’s not too difficult for me to figure out that when you and
Nick returned to the ship this morning, he would find out one way or another
when it came time for you to remove your suit.”
I drove on toward our abode while Mel continued chuckling very loudly to
herself. I certainly was not sharing her mirth.
When we entered the Terminal Café ( I had decided to name it that but had
not told the rest of the crew yet) three hours later, we
found Nick and Sammy finishing their meals while Dick and Courtney were busily
poring over the photos of the crashed alien spacecraft on his laptop. They were
so engrossed in the photos that they barely acknowledged our presence as we sat
down with our coffees.
Dick enquired, “Is the surface of the hull actually this shiny, or did you
fuck around with it in Photoshop?”
Nick and I looked at each other and then at Dick.
“We’re fighter jocks, what do we know about Photoshop?” I replied. “What
you see is what was there.”
“It’s just that the hull looks so unbelievably shiny, which is strange
because the Albatross doesn’t look at
all shiny,” Dick replied,
“Albatross has been through a
hell of a lot of very trying and damaging times,” I said in defense of my baby.
Dick turned the laptop around to face me and pointed to one of the photos
on display. I looked at it and saw that it was a front-on shot of the crashed
alien craft clearly showing the starboard side of the craft buried in the rock
wall.
“So has that ship!” Dick stated. “My point is this: you and Nicholas
couldn’t understand how the ship had power to operate the lights and airlocks
and everything while the primary power source appeared to be switched off. Have
you ever seen solar panels?”
“Of course we have,” I snapped back. “Military used solar power arrays all
the time and we…oh, I see what you’re saying. The outside of the hull could be
covered in solar panels that provide standby power to the ship when its primary
engines are shut down.”
“Very good, Drew! I am impressed. But I suspect that it is actually more
than that—I suspect that it might be one continuous solar panel that sheathes
the hull. The solar power that it would collect and store in the banks of
batteries would be immense. I really need to investigate that ship.”
“No you don’t—you’ve got all these photographs you can look at.”
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