There are some… controls?…on the pipe near the box. Buttons, maybe? A wire coming from the control box snakes along the pipe, disappearing into the hull where the pipe does.

Meanwhile, on my side of the cube is a crank, roughly the same shape as my own airlock door’s crank. And that’s attached to a square panel like the one on Rocky’s side and—

“It’s an airlock!” I said. “You made an airlock in our airlock tunnel!”

Brilliant. Simply brilliant. Rocky and I can both access it. He can control the air in that little chamber by means of the mystery pipe, which presumably leads back to some pumps or something in the Blip-A. And those buttons or whatever are the controls. Just like that, we have a way to transfer stuff back and forth.

I do jazz hands. He does them back.

Hmm. Again with the square, flat panels. Who makes a square airlock? Especially one designed to handle Eridian atmospheric pressure. Even the pipe that runs the mini-airlock is square. I know they can make round xenonite—the cylinders he sent me when we first met were round. This tunnel is round.

Maybe I’m overthinking this. Xenonite is so strong you don’t have to carefully shape it into pressure vessels. Flat panels are probably easier to make.

This is awesome. I hold up a finger—he returns the gesture. I fly down to the lab and grab a tape measure. He showed me a unit of time, so I’ll show him a unit of length. The tape measure is metric, thank God. It’s going to be confusing enough using base-6 Eridian seconds. The last thing I want to throw in there is imperial units—even if they are natural to me.

Back in the tunnel, I hold up the tape measure. I pull it out a bit, then release it to let it retract. I repeat the process a few times. He does jazz hands. I point to the “squarelock” (well, what else should I call it?) and he does jazz hands again.

I hope that means there isn’t 29 atmospheres of ammonia in there at the moment. I guess we’ll see….

I turn the crank and open my door. It swings outward toward me easily.

Nothing explodes. In fact, I don’t even smell ammonia. And it wasn’t a vacuum in there either. I wouldn’t have been able to pull the door open at all if it had been. Rocky set that up to be exactly my atmosphere. Considerate of him.

I put the tape measure in the approximate center of the box and let it float there. I close the door and turn the crank.