Ed nodded. “I agree. Just because we’re being accommodated here, doesn’t mean it will be true everywhere. Better safe than suffocated.”
Rico made a perplexed expression. “Is that surprising?” He asked, his voice coming through the speaker in each party member’s helmet.
“It is to me,” Spratt admitted. “The instruments were registering a vacuum when we came in.”
“What kind of atmosphere is it?” Clifford asked.
“Our kind of Atmosphere!” Abigail exclaimed. “Chemical composition and pressure are precisely identical to what we have here in the asteroid pod.”
“What are the odds,” Ed asked no one in particular, “That whoever built this place came from a planet with an atmosphere like Earth’s?”
Rosemary shrugged, her slender shoulders momentarily lifting the entirety of her helmet an inch higher over her head. “More than zero. The Martians lived in an atmosphere similar to ours, as do the natives of Epiphany Rex...”
Lamont detected a catch in her voice as she mentioned the last planet they had visited. He mentally kicked himself once again for the irritated jab he had made toward her not long ago about their experiences on that world.
“Similar,” Abigail conceded, “but not identical. It’s as if the tower analyzed the atmosphere inside the pod and exactly replicated it, down to trace elements.”
“Let’s assume that’s just what it did, then,” Ed said.
“Does that mean we can take our helmets off?” Rico asked.
“I wouldn’t,” Rosemary warned.
Ed nodded. “I agree. Just because we’re being accommodated here, doesn’t mean it will be true everywhere. Better safe than suffocated. But the good news is that there won’t be any decompression when I open this door. You don’t have to hold onto anything.”
Lamont couldn’t recall that Ed had warned them of any such necessity in the first place.
“Are we settled then?” Chief Wellington’s voice came through the speaker. “Let’s just get this over with.”
Ed shrugged and turned back to the control panel. “Here we go,” he said.
A quiet mechanical whirr and the hiss of the ramp’s pneumatic supports, slightly muffled as they came through the microphone on Lamont’s suit, were all he heard as the ramp lowered toward the floor of the alien structure. It was no different than if they had landed in the storage bay of Westward, except that the uniform white glow emanating from outside was rather odd in its soft ubiquity.
Rosemary was the first to walk down the ramp, beginning her descent before it had been entirely lowered. Rico was close behind her, and the others followed in a loose group. Lamont and Abigail both walked slowly, each holding before them a contraption that was strapped over their suits. Lamont’s device was his usual recorder, encased in black faux leather, which he was clumsily manipulating with his gloved fingers to take photographs of the scene outside the pod. Bishop carried a metal box roughly the size and shape of a dictionary, with two antennae protruding from the end that was pointed outward. This was plugged into a port on her cowl, no doubt connected to her audio. For some moments, the members of the party all turned in slow circles, their eyes darting around the space in which they had landed.
Finally, Clifford Ashton’s voice broke the silence. “I don’t know what I was expecting when we came out here,” He admitted, his voice strangely disconnected from his location relative to Lamont. “But I didn’t imagine anything like this.”