Why did I run the test so many times? Because those results make no sense at all. Xenon is a noble gas. It doesn’t react with anything. It doesn’t form bonds with anything. And it’s a gas at room temperature. But somehow it’s part of this solid material?

And no, it’s not a cylinder filled with xenon or anything like that. A spectrometer is not a deep, penetrating scan. It can only tell you what’s on the surface. If I pointed it at gold-plated nickel, it would say “100% gold,” because that’s all it can see. It can only tell me what the molecules on the surface of the cylinder are made of. Apparently, they’re made of xenon.

This handheld spectrometer can’t detect elements lower than aluminum. So there could be carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, whatever is lurking in there too. But as for elements within the detector’s range… I’m looking at pure xenon.

“How?!”

I plop down onto a stool and stare at the cylinder. What a strange artifact. What do I even call noble gases that react with things? Ignobles?

But being flummoxed has one good side effect. It makes me stop my frenzied attack on the cylinder and just look at it. For the first time, I see that there is a thin line running around the circumference about an inch from the top. I feel it with my fingernail. It’s definitely an indentation of some kind. Is that a lid? Maybe it just opens.

I pick up the cylinder and try to pull off the top. It doesn’t budge. On a whim, I try to unscrew it. It also doesn’t budge.

But there’s no reason aliens would follow the righty-tighty-lefty-loosey rule, is there?

I turn the lid to the right and it rotates. My heart skips a beat!

I keep turning. After 90 degrees I feel it release. I pull the two chunks apart.

Both halves have complicated stuff going on inside. They look like… models of some kind? They both feature whisker-thin poles sticking up from their bases, leading to spheres of various sizes. I don’t see any moving parts, and everything appears to be made out of the same weird material as the case.

I check out the bottom half first. Have to start somewhere.

A single whisker holds up… an abstract sculpture? It’s a marble-sized sphere and a BB-sized sphere each held in place by thinner whiskers branching off the main vertical “trunk.” There’s also an oddly parabolic shape connecting the tops of the two spheres. This whole thing looks familiar to me… why…?

“Petrova line!” I blurt out.

I’ve seen that arc shape enough times to know it by heart. My heart races.

I point to the large sphere. “So you must be a star. And the little guy must be a planet.”