The diagram of the ship shows the Hail Mary split in two pieces, the nose of the crew compartment pointed inward toward the other half. The two halves are comically far apart, and the entire system spins slowly. Well, actually pretty fast, but it looks slow at that scale.

I unstrap from the chair, walk to the airlock, and open the hatch. The smell of ammonia drifts into the cockpit again, but not nearly as bad as before. The alien artifact lies on the floor. I give it a quick touch with my finger to gauge temperature. It’s still pretty warm, but no longer scalding hot. Good. There’s no internal heater or weird stuff like that. It just started out really hot.

I pick it up. Time to see what this thing is made of. And what’s inside.

Before leaving the cockpit, I take one last look at the Telescope screen. I don’t know why—I guess I just like to keep track of what extraterrestrial ships in my vicinity are up to.

The Blip-A spins in space. It rotates end-over-end, probably at the exact same rate as the Hail Mary. I guess they saw me spin up the centrifuge and figured it was another communication thing.

Humanity’s first miscommunication with an intelligent alien race. Glad I could be a part of it.

I set the cylinder on the lab table. Where do I begin? Everywhere!

I check to see if it’s radioactive with a Geiger counter. It’s not. That’s nice.

I poke it with various things to get a feel for its hardness. It’s hard.

It looks like metal but doesn’t feel quite like metal. I use a multimeter to see if it’s conductive. It isn’t. Interesting.

I get a hammer and chisel. I want a small chip of the cylinder material for the gas chromatograph—that way I’ll know what elements it’s made of. After a few smacks with the hammer, the chisel chips. The cylinder isn’t even dented.

“Hm.”

The cylinder is too big to put in the gas chromatograph. But I find a handheld x-ray spectrometer. It looks like a UPC scanner gun. Easy enough to use, and it’ll give me some idea of what this thing is made of. It’s not as accurate as the chromatograph, but better than nothing.

After a quick scan, it tells me the cylinder is made of xenon.

“What…?”

I use the spectrometer on the steel lab table to make sure it’s working correctly. It reports iron, nickel, chromium, and so on. Just what it should say. So I check the cylinder again and get the same wacky results as with my first test. I test it four more times but keep getting the same answer.