the vampires rise from their graves.
somebody get the cat.
feast your eyes.
this is deep space commercial vessel snark, registration number e180246, calling antarctica air traffic control. do you read me? over.
out here?
first contact.
what's the frequency?
i've got it. it's coming from ascension 6 minutes 32 seconds, declination -39 degrees 2 seconds.
it's tiny!
if it's an s.o.s., we're morally obligated to investigate.
men have waited centuries to contact another form of intelligent life in the universe. this is an opportunity which may never come again.
my god, it's stormy for a piece of rock that size!
well.  this rock rotates every two hours. the sun should be coming up in about 20 minutes.
sorry. nothing but that same damn transmission, every 32 seconds. i've tried every frequency on the spectrum.
source of transmission is to the northeast.  about 300 meters.
no problem.
receiving.
that way.
my signal's fading.
it's the dust, it's interfering.
 hold it, i've got it again. it's over that way.
it's close, real close.
we should be almost on top of it. i just can't quite.
air lock?
look at these holes. this place looks like swiss cheese.
holy christ.
look out, it moved!
that's where the transmission is coming from.
and bring back as much physical evidence as possible, too. the rest of the skeleton. some of the machinery. written records, if there are any.
and there sits man's first contact with intelligent life in the universe.
that creature sure must have considered it important.  using his last strength to draw it.
it wasn't necessarily built by them.
this looks ancient.
maybe the entrance is buried. could be under our feet.
i couldn't make it out -- too much interference.
sun will be down in a minute.
it'll yank him right off his feet if he's not expecting it. the line could get tangled in something.
maybe we should just wait a few more minutes.
is it still coming up, or is it hooked on something?
can you see anything?
what is it?
oh god, oh god no.
what is it?
it's not coming off -- not without his whole face coming off too.
he wouldn't open the lock; he was going to leave us out there.
he's the only one that knows that.
blood's thoroughly oxygenated.
we can't expect to understand a life form like this. we're out of our back yard. things are different here.
we don't know what might happen if we tried to kill it. at least right now it's keeping him alive.
god, that smoke's poisonous!
jesus, what can we put under it?
christ, that stinks.
i never saw anything like that in my life.  except molecular acid.
hell of a defense mechanism. you don't dare kill it.
yes, thank heaven.
reminded me of when i was a kid and the roof leaked -- everybody running for the pots and pans.
is it still dripping?
isn't there some way we can get it off him?
it appears to be a heavy fluid of some sort.  it blocks the x-rays.
could be some kind of venom, or poison.
at first i thought they were jars too, or artifacts anyway. but they're not. they're eggs, or spore casings. let's go back to the heiroglyphics.
it's a crude symbolic language -- looks primitive.
primitive pictorial languages are based on common objects in the environment, and this can be used as a starting point for translation.
more likely that organ -- the tube- like thing -- fits up in there.
these day and night cycles are totally disorienting. i feel like we've been here for days, but it's only been how long?
we do know that.
they never made it off the planet. the parasites won.
no. it's just too small to support fauna as big as the parasites. if there were a native ecology, it would have to be microscopic.
they're from a dead civilization; they're spores from a tomb. god knows how long they've been here.
i feel like an escapee from hell.
we're going into the freezers now.
i'm going to write a book about this expedition. i'm going to call it "the snark log."
maybe we could write it together.
what's the matter, you don't like this stuff?
it was growing in him the whole time and he didn't even know it!
we can't go into hypersleep with that thing running around loose.
well, i kind of hate to point it out, but all our supplies are based on us spending a strictly limited amount of time out of suspended animation.  and as you know, we used up most of that time in harvesting.
how?
and what do we do when we find it?
i was thinking of a line from an old poem: "water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink." all that space out there, and we're trapped in this ship.
we can't even radio for help; the carrier wave wouldn't reach its destination till long after we'd died and turned to dust. we are utterly, absolutely alone. can anybody really visualize such a scale of distances? halfway across creation.
time and space have no meaning out here. we're living in einsteinian equation.
we're the new pioneers, chaz. we even have our own special diseases.
is it malfunctioning?
we're making fools of ourselves!
so one of us goes into the airshaft and drives the thing along --
i've got hunter.  and something else as well, in front of him.
they're on the next level up.
they're getting pretty close now.
okay.