Patrick, still looking up, added, “Maybe we should step out from under the ship first. I’d hate to have a gangplank come down on top of us.”

“Or we might accidentally retract the landing struts,” Nat added with a laugh.

Patrick got a frightened look. “Say, what if one of the buttons is a self-destruct? Or a force field, or death ray or something?”

“You’re kidding, right?” I replied. “First, no one’s going to design a gadget that can kill the wearer if they press the wrong button. That sounds like every badly designed piece of equipment in Star Trek that didn’t have a safety interlock. Second, we either do this or we give up right now and hand this over to the government. There is simply no way to mitigate the risk or sneak up on this. Do or do not. There is no try.”

“Wow, you just mixed a Star Trek and Star Wars reference in the same statement.” Nat mimed shooting me with a handgun. “If there’s any justice, you should be getting hit by lightning any second now.”

We’d moved away from the location of the invisible structure during this exchange. Now I laid the devices carefully on the ground, in a line.

“Do we want to try these in any particular order?” Nat asked.

“Patrick and I tentatively identified a gun and a communicator. Let’s try those last,” I said. “Two of them are touchscreen only—we think—so if we can’t get the screens to light up, we’re out of luck with those. That leaves this one.” I held up the device with the V and I buttons and the small display screen. “Either V and I are letters in the Bigfoot alphabet, or they’re symbols that maybe mean on and off.”

Nat examined all the items. “I’m betting they’re symbols. Arrows are pretty obviously symbols, and the shower or spray icon sorta feels like one too.”

“So which one is which, you think?”

Nat shrugged. “Flip a coin. You know what? Let’s just press buttons until something happens.”

I held my breath and pressed the V button. There was a vibration in the unit, and the small display screen lit up with what looked like alien text. After a few seconds, the screen dimmed, then went out. I pressed the V button again, and the same text came back, but without the vibration. I pressed the I button, and after a moment, the text vanished, this time without dimming.

“Looks like V is on and I is off. And this thing is telling us something, but … ” I shrugged. “Barring a Bigfoot/English dictionary, I think we’re S.O.L. as far as that’s concerned.”

Nat looked up. “And no reaction from the ship.”