My gut instinct is to close the suit again. But that would just trap me in a small volume with the ammonia that’s already in here. Better to let the cylinder air out in the larger volume of the ship.

Ammonia isn’t toxic—at least, not in small quantities. And the fact that I can still breathe at all tells me it’s a small quantity. If it weren’t, my lungs would have caustic burns and I’d be unconscious or dead now.

As it is, there’s just a bad smell. I can handle a bad smell.

I climb out the back of the suit while the cylinder floats in the middle of the console room. Now that it’s not a shock anymore, I can handle the ammonia. It’s no worse than using a bunch of Windex in a small room. Unpleasant but not dangerous.

I grab the cylinder—and it’s hot as heck!

I yelp and pull my hands away. I blow on them for a moment and check for burns. It wasn’t too bad. Not stovetop hot. But hot.

Grabbing it with my bare hands was stupid. Flawed logic. I assumed that since I’d been holding it earlier it was okay to do now. But earlier I had very thick spacesuit gloves protecting my hands.

“You’ve been a bad alien cylinder,” I say to it. “You need a time-out.”

I pull my arm into my sleeve and wrap my hand in the cuff. I use my now-protected knuckles to nudge the cylinder into the airlock. Once it’s in, I close the door.

I’ll let it be for now. It’ll cool down to ambient air temperature eventually. And while it does, I don’t want it floating randomly around my ship. I don’t think there’s anything in the airlock that can get hurt by some heat.

How hot was it?

Well, I had both hands on it (like an idiot) for a fraction of a second. My own reaction time was enough to keep me from getting burned. So it’s probably less than 100 degrees Celsius.

I open and close my hands a few times. They don’t hurt anymore, but the memory of the pain lingers.

“Where’d the heat come from?” I mumbled.

The cylinder was out in space for a good forty minutes. Over that time it should have radiated heat via blackbody radiation. It should be cold, not hot. I’m about 1 AU from Tau Ceti, and Tau Ceti has half the luminosity of the sun. So I don’t think the Taulight could have heated the cylinder up much. Definitely not more than blackbody radiation would cool it down.