Cliff leaned against the hangar wall and watched two men lower a cylindrical-shaped object about four feet long and one foot in diameter behind the side-by-side seats in the Snark. Once they had moved the hoist away and had the device securely strapped down, Cliff began his preflight inspection.
The Snark was a prototype aircraft designed by Powell Aeronautics, which held all the patents. David Powell and his wife Laura had been co-directors of Skyguard in years past; the Snark had been developed using alien technology. It was neither jet or rocket powered; in fact, it seemed to violate Newton's third law because it did not depend on a flaming trail of hot gas to propel itself. It could hover in midair and rotate along any of its three axes, or accelerate at up to 20 G's; much more once it rose above Earth's atmosphere. Its body was a forty-foot flattened ovoid with truncated wings. The wings were not for lift; they provided a place to stow the retractable landing skids and as carriers from which all sorts of weapons could be hung. At the distal end of each wing was a pulsed laser--the Snark's only built-in ordnance.
Cliff walked around the Snark, kicking the landing skid; a technician was just buttoning up the belly panel which provided access to the engine. Not that there was much reason for accessing it; it was completely sealed in a coffin-shaped container and contained no moving parts. Powell Aeronautics had warned screwdriver-happy individuals not to attempt opening the coffin; the two techs in Nevada who had ignored this warning were now vapor, along with the Snark and the hangar in which it had been parked.
According to the Powells, the Snark was the first of a series of air/space craft which would revolutionize the transportation industry and open the way for the colonization of Luna, Mars and beyond. The Snark that Cliff was now inspecting was one of only three, and he had felt honored to have been chosen as one of its pilots.
He slid into the Snark's pilot seat and ran through the last of his checklist. Giving the thumbs up to his crew chief; he lowered the canopy and started the engine start sequence. There was no sound, no vibration, simply a green light which indicated that the Snark was ready for flight. Taking the control sticks in hand, he applied lift; the Snark floated up from its skids and hovered, slowly rotating until its nose was pointed at the hangar door. The doors slid apart, Cliff applied forward thurst, and he was on his way.
In the situation room, Sam Brothers and Ruth Rutherford watched Cliff's departure on one of the room's large display screens. When the Snark was clear of the hangar, it rotated until it was pointing straight up and accelerated gradually, climbing into the sky; there was no roar, no pillar of flame, only a soft hissing as the Snark punched a hole in the air.
"I'm still not sure it was wise to intrust this to one man," said Ruth. "If he fails, we'll be sitting ducks."
"We're sitting ducks anyway," Sam replied. "We both know that there are forces out there that we are powerless against. Fortunately, this little planet has thus far escaped the attention of those forces."
"Until now," Ruth muttered.

When the Snark had risen above Earth's atmosphere, Cliff backed off the forward thrust control and engaged the navigational computer. The fighter hovered as it computed the point in space that would intercept the object--assuming it did not make another course change. His estimated time to contact was seven hours and six minutes, traveling full out. He connected the Snark's controls to the nav computer; the Snark instantly leapt forward.
Five hours later, a high-pitched alarm awakened him from a fitful sleep. He checked his instruments, noting that the Snark was decelerating; Shakti was still a few thousand miles away, heading across his course from left to right. He used the Snark's portable toilet facilities and ate the box lunch which he had been provided with. The Snark had been programmed to let Shakti pass, then swing around in an arc and follow it, matching speed and attitude.
Shakti was now observable on the fighter's Doppler radar. Most space objects tumbled, but Shakti was dead level relative to the stars, making his approach easier. The Snark had now completed its arc, following Shakti at a distance of seven miles and closing slowly; it was still too far away to be seen visually, but as the Snark closed the distance he soon saw it ahead as a tiny dot. As it grew, he began to see it in detail; it looked even stranger in person than in the fuzzy photograph. Now it reminded him of the gnarled and twisted root from some gigantic tree, painted by a bunch of drunken artists.
The distance closed to fifty feet and the nav computer disengaged; Cliff bumped the Snark's thrust, bringing him over the object. If Shakti were some kind of spacecraft, it failed to have any obvious kind of hatches or airlocks. There were, however, several "holes" which passed all the way through the structure; perhaps one of these presented a way inside.
Now his problem was to make contact with Shakti's convoluted surface. He had no idea how rigid the surface was; it reflected radar so it must have some density. The estimate of Shakti's length had been between 150 and 250 feet; Cliff guessed it to be on the long side of this range. The best place to "land" would be on the strange round area in the middle of Shakti's main body or fuselage. The Snark's landing skids were magnetic, but whether they would work would depend on the amount of ferrous content in Shakti's surface; Cliff doubted if it contained any appreciable amount of iron. The only other way of binding the two craft together would be to literally tie the Snark down; he had fifty yards of nylon rope for the purpose.
Very slowly, he jockied the Snark over to the round protuberance and extended the landing struts, letting his skids touch the surface gently. When his sensors indicated that all three skids were in contact, he shut down the engine and let Shakti and the Snark drift together.
Determining that there was no appreciable movement between them, he sealed his helmet visor and flooded his suit with oxygen, popped the canopy, and grabbed his coil of rope. Cliff had not done many zero-gravity maneuvers, so he clumsily made his way over the edge of the Snark, pushing himself down to the skid. To his surprise, he saw that Shakti's surface had somehow flowed over the ski-like skid, as though it had sunk several inches into a puddle of viscous mud. He put his gloved hand on the surface; it was quite solid--Shakti had effectively captured the Snark.
Cliff reentered the Snark and radioed his status to Alice, then he gathered his backpack and made his way down the landing strut, using his compressed CO2 jets to float along the surface. To say that Shakti was not your ordinary, everyday piece of space litter would be an understatement, but Cliff was beginning to doubt that it had been built by any intelligent race--unless it was a huge, fosselized piece of dog crap which had been run over by a Mack truck.
There were no seams, no rivets, no access panels, so he decided to inspect one of the large, oddly-shaped holes. The nearest and largest was about twenty feet away and was about five feet in diameter. The interior of the hole was dark so he switched on his helmet lamp and fired his jets, letting himself descend into the void. The body of Shakti was about twenty feet in diameter at this point.
Halfway through the hole Cliff's headlamp revealed a cavity or cave in the wall about three feet across and ten feet deep. At the end of the cave was a circular barrier made of curving pie-shaped segments similar to a camera iris. Finally something that makes sense, he thought to himself as he worked his way into the cavity.
The circular barrier was obviously some kind or door or hatchway, but Cliff could detect no means of opening, or dilating it. Nor was there a doorbell. Cliff's gloved hand confirmed that the iris was solid. He had just about decided to retrieve something from the Snark to pry it open when it silently rotated, the segments moving as the opening enlarged; perhaps his presence had been detected by whatever was inside--obviously, he was welcome. He waited five minutes in case Shakti's inhabitants decided to close the iris--it would not do to get stuck halfway. There being no further movement, he grabbed the edges of the iris and propelled himself through.
On the other side was a ten-foot cylindrical tube with another iris at the far end. As soon as his boots cleared the outside iris, it rotated shut, trapping him in the tube. He almost panicked, but five seconds later the inside iris opened--a typical airlock mechanism, he realized with relief.

"General Brothers," said an ethereal voice which seemed to come from thin air.
"Yes, Alice?"
"Clifford is now inside the object. He reports a series of compartments, each connected to the other by means of a circular hatchway similar to the airlock. The interior surface matches that of the exterior except for the deck and bulkheads which are planar. The two compartments nearest the airlock are occupied with machinery; its purpose unknown. Clifford is now passing through to the third compartment; he will report momentarily."
"Thanks, Alice," Sam replied. He turned to Ruth. "It is some sort of spacecraft."
"Yes, but unlike any we have encountered, nor have any of our 'associates.' This is something new, Sam. Nobody knows what it is or where it came from, but I've heard rumblings that its arrival is the fulfillment of an ancient prophesy."
Sam snorted. "Every time somebody flushes the toilet it's the fulfillment of some prophesy or other."
"Yes, I understand that, Sam, but this prophesy seems to be fairly widespread."
"Well," he sighed, "I don't know much about that kind of thing, but I do know that when prophesies are fulfilled, things change--at least they do here on Earth. And one thing we don't need is for things to change. What do you know about this prophesy?"
"Nothing at all, other than the arrival of Shakti is somehow connected."
"Then it would be to our advantage to find out."

Cliff had wandered through three compartments; so far they had all been filled with strange machinery. If the machines were doing anything, there was no indication; there were no dials, guages, control panels, instruments, switches--nothing which would suggest some kind of activity. One thing which wasn't working was the lights; Cliff's headlamp was the only source of illumination, and its glare produced strange shadows that seemed to drift around the bulkheads.
Another thing that was spooky was that Shakti seemed to be larger on the inside than it was on the outside; Cliff had estimated that it didn't exceed thirty feet in diameter--except for the circular protruberance--yet the width of the compartments seemed to be much wider. There was no sign of life--no bodies, of course, but also no clothing, no books, no candy bar wrappers, no sign of ventilation ducts, heating panels; perhaps Shakti was a drone and had not been designed to carry a crew or passengers. If so, there should be some kind of control system or computer which was guiding its actions, and the machines he had seen did not appear to be computers; they seemed to be more like...machines. Cliff also began to doubt that Shakti was some sort of weapon, unless the forward compartments were filled with some kind of virus or microorganism which could be released into Earth's atmosphere.
The fourth compartment was totally different than the three he had just inspected; this one was occupied by a single rectangular structure about eight feet long, three feet wide, and four feet high--a featureless slab of some silvery metal.
Cliff approached the structure; as the beam from his headlamp fell on it, he saw that it wasn't quite as featureless as he had first thought: there was a seam which ran horizontally around the structure, about six inches down from the top. Perhaps it was a box, the seam denoting a lid of some kind.
As he worked his way around, he finally saw some signs of intelligent control: on the rear of the box was some sort of control panel, surprisingly humanlike, with a small screen upon which was displayed some jiggling phosphorescent green lines. Surrounding the screen was an array of buttons and switches. Each was labled with some unrecognizable symbols; the whole thing reminded Cliff of the physiological monitors found in hospital rooms.
The more he watched the screen, the greater the similarity became; the green lines, of which there were eight, seemed to be physiological waveforms--heart rate, respiration, and so on. Although whatever it was monitoring possessed a metabolism which was far slower than a human's; he estimated the heart rate--if it was a heart rate--at about four beats per minute, the respiration was very slow as well.
Here we have a box, thought Cliff, that's just the right size to hold a body of some kind, with built-in physiological monitors. It didn't take a rocket scientist to determine that what he was looking at was a creature in some kind of stasis--he'd seen them often enough in science fiction movies. Cliff decided to wait until he had explored the rest of Shakti's interior before he reported this discovery to Alice; perhaps there were more boxes in other compartments.
He drifted from room to room; some of them were completely empty, some held more machinery. There were iris-style hatchways leading off to the sides of one large compartment; no doubt they led to compartments in Shakti's "arms." They failed to dilate at his approach so he had no idea of what lie behind them; he guessed they contained Shakti's fuel supply or propulsion system--or perhaps a weapon.
Within a half hour he had explored all the compartments he could get into; there were no more rectangular boxes, no control center or bridge, no living quarters, no restroom facilities. He reentered the compartment which contained the box and stared at the display monitor. If there were some kind of creature inside the box, it was critical that he determine its nature.
The box--he began to think of it more as a coffin or sarcophagus--was firmly attached to the deck; even if he could move it, there was nowhere to stow it on the Snark. Also, it received power from somewhere; to move it would probably interrupt this power and kill whatever was inside.
There was only one thing he could do: somehow he must open the coffin and take a peek inside. There was a problem with this, however: if the creature was an oxy-breather, whatever atmosphere Shakti contained might be hazardous to the creature's health. Cliff had not checked the air; he did so now, and to his surprise, it was breathable, with a pressure of ten PSI. This was less than Earth's but still capable of supporting life, assuming that there were no strange organic critters floating around. Air temperature was a comfortable twenty degrees Celsius--a little less than seventy degrees Fahrenheit.
Cautiously, Cliff unlatched his helmet visor and took a sniff; the air was clean and devoid of any odors. He had no intention of breathing Shakti's air, but at least whatver was inside the coffin wouldn't die of asphyxiation.
But how to open the coffin? He crouched down and inspected the control panel: besides the display screen there was a row of what looked to be rocker switches; some flipped up, some flipped down. Flipping switches at random could very well kill the creature; there must be some kind of automated sequence.
There were two rectangular depressions in the control panel which had labels beneath; probably buttons of some kind. Cliff was running out of time; he could study the control panel all day or take some kind of action. Shrugging, he put his gloved finger on the left depression and pushed; there was no obvious response--the lines on the display continued their rhythmic traces.
When he pushed the second depression, it glowed with a white light. He removed his finger and the light began blinking slowly. As he watched, the light blinked faster and the lines on the monitor began jiggling, the period between heart rate and respiration decreasing as the creature's metabolism increased.
The light blinked ever faster, then it turned a steady green. After a few seconds, the lid of the coffin began to rise, supported at all four corners by rods which rose from corresponding holes in the base of the coffin. In the movies, there would have been a cloud of colored fog or smoke accompanied by mysterious music, but there was nothing of the sort here--the lid simply rose.
When it had lifted three feet above the base, it stopped and a bright light in the lid flickered on, illuminating whatever was in the coffin. Cliff's eyes were below the rim of the box; he couldn't see inside, and wasn't sure he wanted to. He glanced at the wavy lines on the monitor; the top line was obviously heart rate, he counted about one beat per second. Very slowly, he let his head drift up past the edge of the coffin and he gazed at what lie within.
The creature appeared to be that of a girl in her mid-teens. She was completely naked; slender but not skinny, perfectly proportioned--at least in Cliff's judgement--with high, firm breasts and a very narrow waist which curved out smoothly around her hips. She was very small, almost a pixie, with long, wavy brown hair that was piled around her head. Her skin was very pale, but as Cliff watched it began taking on a rosy, pink hue; still pale, but no longer pallid.
Her face was oval, her features delicate. As far as Cliff could tell, with the exception of her hair, eyebrows and eyelashes, her body was completely hairless. Cliff considered himself an expert at evaluating female flesh; as his eyes scanned the girl in the coffin, he decided that she was the most beautiful thing he had ever laid eyes on; if Cliff were going to design a female, it would be the girl lying below him.
Her arms and small hands lie peacefully at her sides, her eyes closed, her lips slightly parted. As he gazed upon her, he could see her stomach gently rising and falling as she breathed; so far there had been no sign of consciousness.
Suddenly she jerked, her body quivering, her eyes flying open. She arched her back, her hands flying to her throat; she was having respiratory problems. Cliff unlatched his helmet, pulling it off, letting it drift in midair as he leaned into the coffin. He twisted his gloves off and opened the girl's mouth, holding her tongue down as he put his lips over hers and gave her CPR, watching her chest rise as he breathed air into her lungs. She squirmed beneath him; he backed off and she gasped, breathing on her own again.
Her enormous brown eyes searched his, her brow furrowed. A gurgling sound came from her mouth; Cliff put one hand behind her back, raising her to a sitting position as she coughed up some clear liquid which floated around her face. He had no handkerchief so he tried to move it away so she wouldn't breathe it in.
Gradually she quit heaving and relaxed, staring into his eyes. He lowered her back into the coffin; it contained a soft pad or mattress of some white foamlike material. Her wavy hair was covering her face; Cliff moved it aside and gazed down at her.
Slowly, she raised her arm, her fingertips touching his cheek, her skin cool against his. She moved her mouth as if she were trying to say something; he heard a faint whisper but couldn't make out what she said.
Her efforts had been too much for her; her arm floated down to her body and she closed her brown eyes, her lips in a faint smile--apparently she had fallen asleep. Cliff placed his fingers under her jaw; her pulse was strong and steady and her stomach rose and fell with a slow rhythmic motion. Her skin had taken on more of a tawny color as if she had a light tan, her cheeks rosy.
Now that the girl was functioning normally, Cliff pondered what to do next: leave her here, or take her with him in the Snark. It was obvious that she was not controlling the craft; it was being directed automatically or remotely from some other location. If it did contain some kind of weapon, he couldn't allow it to enter Earth orbit.
He decided to leave that decision to Skyguard, but he knew he had to get the girl away, at all costs--he was not about to destroy her along with this strange craft, nor would he let her remain on board as Shekti burned up in the atmosphere.
The Snark was built for two people, so there were two environmental suits. Cliff could tell that the extra suit would be far too large for the girl, but it would suffice until he could get her into the Snark. After he got her safely away, he would decide what to do next.
He checked her; she was still sleeping peacefully. Refastening his helmet, he made his way through Shakti's compartments, through the airlock and back to the Snark, retrieving the extra suit and tugging it behind him until it was floating in the air above the coffin. Being weightless, it was easy to slip the suit on over the girl's body; she didn't stir as he tucked her hair inside her helmet and started the oxygen flow, then he twisted it shut and watched the suit inflate.
Pushing her ahead of him, he guided her through the airlock and into the Snark's second seat, shutting the canopy and flooding the cockpit with air. He raised her visor and peered into the helmet; she was so small that her head barely made it past the suit's shoulders. She was still unconscious, so Cliff strapped the suit into the seat and initiated the engine start sequence. It was only then that he remembered that Shakti still had hold of the Snark's landing skids. He applied lift; the Snark shuddered as it tried to pull away from the surface, then it suddenly broke free and shot away.
When he had backed the Snark off a hundred yards, he switched his radio on. "Alice," he spoke. "Secure channel please, your ears only."
"Secure channel," she replied. "Go ahead, Clifford."
"I have a situation," he reported. He explained the coffin and the girl; his explanation was met with silence. "Alice?"
"One second, Clifford; I was conferring with Skyguard. Clifford, your instructions are as follows: bring the girl; do not land at Elmendorf. I will make arrangements for you to land elsewhere. Under no circumstances are you to communicate directly with Skyguard."
"I don't understand," said Cliff. "What's going on, Alice?"
"I will explain as soon as you are safely away. I must ask you to trust me, Clifford."
Trust a computer? Something was very strange, here: either Alice knew something that the rest of Skyguard didn't, or she was afraid their conversation was being monitored and decrypted by someone.
"Roger, Alice," Cliff said at last. "Where do I take her?"
"Enter a two hundred mile parking orbit; I will guide you in."
"Whatever you say, Alice. What about the nuclear device?"
"Keep it--you may need it." That didn't sound good.
The girl was still asleep; Cliff reclined her seat until its back was resting on the bomb; then he spun the Snark around and headed for Earth orbit, leaving Shakti floating alone in space.