Rocky presses a button on the controls and I hear a muffled fwump followed by a steady hiss. A foggy gas rushes in from the pipe. Ammonia, presumably. The tape measure bounces inside—pushed around like a leaf in the wind. Soon, the hiss dulls to a trickle.

And then I realize my mistake.

The tape measure is one of those solid, construction-site kinds that are made of metal with tool-grade rubber grip pads. Thing is, Eridians like it hot. How hot? I can’t say for sure, but I now know it’s hotter than the melting point of the rubber on the tape measure.

The blob of liquid rubber undulates on the tape measure, sticking to the tool via surface tension. Rocky opens his door and carefully grabs my faulty present by the metal. At least that’s still solid. I think it’s made of aluminum. It’s nice to know Eridian air isn’t hot enough to melt that too.

As Rocky pulls the tape measure toward him, the rubber blob separates from it and floats off in his side of the tube.

He pokes the rubber blob and it sticks to his claw. He shakes it off without much trouble. Obviously the temperature doesn’t bother him. I guess it’s no different from a human shaking water off his hand.

In my atmosphere, rubber that hot would burn. There’d be all these nasty, noxious gases coming off of it too. But there’s no oxygen on Rocky’s side of the wall. So the rubber just kind of… stays a liquid. It floats off to the tunnel wall and sticks there.

I shrug at him. Maybe he’ll know that means “I’m sorry.”

He sort of shrugs back. But he does it with all five shoulders. Looks weird and I don’t know if he caught my meaning.

He pulls the tape out a bit, then lets it snap back. He’s clearly surprised, even though he must have known it was coming. He releases it entirely and lets it spin in front of him. He grabs it and does it again. Then again.

And again.

“Yeah, it’s fun,” I say. “But look at the markings. Those are centimeters. CEN-TI-ME-TERS.”

The next time he pulls the tape out, I point to the tape. “Look!”

He just keeps pulling it out and back again. I don’t see any indication that he cares about what’s written there.

“Ugh!” I hold up a finger. I go back to the lab and get another tape measure. It’s a well-stocked lab and no space mission would be complete without redundancy. I come back to the tunnel.