“What?”
“Pants. With the…” I was already whispering, but I lowered my voice even more for the last part, “the dick.”
“You think the alien’s going to wear pants?” she asked, grinning.
Oh, God, what if he was just naked? What if the screening software fails and he’snaked. I’ll have about half a second to look at the dick, then I’ll have to look away. I might have a half second to take it all in.
“If men wore pants,” I said, “do you think there’d be like a sock type thing hanging out between the legs, like built into the pants?”
“You think there’s be a special compartment in the pants for the dick to hang into?”
I nodded, “what is the alternative?”
“I don’t know,” she said, “maybe it’s not that big?”
“I have to assume it’s about as big as we are…deep.”
We both blushed at that, but Life Support Athena just kept putting the suit onto me piece by piece, not saying anything. Finally she stopped and looked back up at me. “Maybe they could move it to one side?”
We both laughed. That sounded ridiculous. More ridiculous than the special compartment. Why would a patriarchal society where men ruled tyrannically over women make pants that forced them to shove their plug thing off to the side? It sounded very uncomfortable, and not like something people with absolute power would make themselves do.
“They could wear skirts,” Life Support said, holding the helmet up. “Are you ready?”
I nodded, and she put the helmet over the suit, lowering it slowly and gently. I heard it click, then a hiss of air told me it was pressurized. Life Support turned the helmet until it clicked again and locked. The glass lit up with all kinds of indicators, gauges, and welcome messages. The screening software would cover my vision of the alien man and replace it with something else, sparing me from having to be tainted by the sight of male anatomy. Unless it failed, of course.
“Test, test,” Life Support said.
Her voice barely made it through the glass, but mics picked her voice up and played it inside my helmet.
“Loud and clear,” I said.
She leaned in closer to the visor, and she whispered with her lips just near the glass. “What did Chief tell you, Airlock?”
I bit my lip and hesitated. This was more delicate than usual, because it was potentially my exile on the line. High Command was trying to give me a break, and if I went around flaunting that, they may decide to be less lenient.
“I can’t say,” I whispered. “Trust me, I want to, but there’s a good reason I can’t. I’ll pay you back with some top-shelf gossip when we’re back on Eden. I promise.”
She smiled. “I accept.”
“Gossip,” was a euphemism. Some women did make stuff up when they gossipped about men, but most of the time, gossip was coming from something that High Command had let slip. For instance, letting a lowly engineer see an alien dick. My promise to Life Support Athena meant that if I did see the dick—or anything else of the alien man—that I’d “gossip” with her about what Ithoughtthe aliens might look like, but she’d know that I had actually seen one. She’d go on and tell others the same thing I told her, but since they wouldn’t know that it had come from me, they’d be a lot less sure about how accurate the gossip was. More importantly, High Command couldn’t trace the leak, because gossip spread way too fast to be traced or contained.
Life Support would get the gossip from the horse’s mouth though, and even if she never got to see a dick herself, she’d know for sure what one looked like since she’d heard it from me. Now I just hoped I’d actually get to see something to pay her back with.
The crew—save for Emissary Eve, Crew Chief Athena, and the pilots—gathered together by the windows to watch our ship dock with the alien men’s ship. We weren’t sure how it was going to happen, and there wasn’t even any juicy gossip about how we even knew that the alienswoulddock with us. It was just assumed that High Command had made contact over comms, and that the aliens had agreed. Otherwise, why were we doing this?
The alien ship was smooth and featureless. It wasn’t quite perfectly black, but even with our floodlights hitting it, it was hard to see much beyond the shape of it. The alien men’s ship was at least ten times the size of our shuttle. That hadn’t been obvious until we’d pulled in this close. I felt nervous. Everyone did. The tension was thick in the air, because one look at this ship told us that they were technologically very far beyond anything we could do. There were no visible windows, airlocks, weapons, engines, thrusters, or anything, and yet this ship had entered Eden’s orbit without being detected. Probably it had been in orbit for some time, and only just decided to make itself visible to our inferior technology.
We were at the mercy of these men. And I was going to be the first human they saw. What if I accidentally angered them? What if something I did made them decide to blow up our whole planet?
A gasp moved through the crew, and I looked up. The alien ship was doing something.
We all moved closer to the window. A lump was forming near where our airlock was pointed. The lump grew and grew, until it was a long, thick protrusion. Like a plug for the hole of our airlock. Like…
There were whispers. Everyone was whispering. I was blushing.
“It keeps getting longer,” someone said.
“It’s just thick enough for our airlock. It’s going to make an airtight plug.” I said. Ttheir ship looks like solid metal, but it can reform itself as if it were liquid.”