From the log of the Blue Yonder.
“Clean first, investigate later,” I always say, and do. If you don’t clean first, it never gets done, and with a coating of phosphorus oxide on all my stuff this time, it was doubly important.
It’s been hard to stay at the cleaning, those samples are beckoning, but cleaning off exotic dirt is something too skill-based to leave entirely to the computers. I’ve watched cleaners, and done delicate work they can’t handle, but I can’t help my mind racing ahead. Honey is already preparing samples and running the routine analysis of weighing, photographing, and noninvasive measuring.
Temporary end of entry.
Log entry resumes.
The first alien in a spacesuit was … really just an alien in a space suit! The two creatures were, it turns out, just one. It had been split apart by the force of whatever had killed it, and one part had shriveled up much more than the other. It has tissues and organs, but Honey says they’re so different that our biologic analysis equipment can’t handle it, so I’ve told her to just do organic and inorganic chemical analysis, to get what we can.
I suspect we’re going to bring boom times to the exobiology industry with our little fella as their first actual subject.
The creature is organic, carbon-based, but the tissues aren’t built from Earth-style proteins, and there’s no sign of DNA or RNA. It does have proteins, as well as fats and carbohydrates, and even amino acid building blocks, about half of them common with ours. A very strange mix of the familiar and unfamiliar.
As for the second suit and body, my first guess that it was different from the first proves to be a wild understatement. Based on first analysis, it’s as different from the first as the first is from us. The first alien was dog-size and insectoid. This alien is human-size and … it’s hard to say what … a bear … a plastic-fleshed bear. The bear’s suit is a lot more robust than the insectoid suit, and made of totally different materials.
And naturally, reviewing the videos of the storage room, it appears that those aliens were yet another kind!
End of entry.
From the log of the Blue Yonder.
My mind is reeling. It has been for days. I’ve seen so much new that I’ve stopped thinking about it for now. All I do is look for “new” and catalog it when I find it. There’s so much.
I’ve half-filled the hold with physical specimens. I filled the computer memory with video a couple days ago, but made some more space by purging some routine logs.
I’ve been here only a week, but I’m done. I can find out more, but I can’t find a place to put it, and I’m so shell-shocked that I can’t add to my own knowledge. Sadly, I’m done.
Captain. Honey, time to head home.
Computer. There’s a lot more here to explore—
Captain. Yes, but we’ve found more than enough to finance the second expedition. It’s time to head back and digest.
Computer. As you wish.
End of entry.