As the conversation with the ship died down for the moment, Ivan tried to control his breathing. His mind began spinning through a panicked recitation: No, no, I can’t die now, not when we’ve just hit it rich! The ironic commentator in his head noted that at least this was a coherent thought, which was an improvement.

He remembered reaching for the object. He remembered a snapping motion, and something grabbing his arm. He remembered screaming, and a jumbled collage of faces and spacesuits and rock and space…

His arm prickled and itched maddeningly, but a small, rational part of his mind wondered if that was psychological. The stuff, whatever it was, didn’t seem to add any weight to his arm—it could just be paint for all the difference it made.

Shadows and reflections flitted across his visor as other crew members moved around him. Voices sounded over the intercom, but he couldn’t make sense of them. His mind seemed to have shut down, leaving only a panicked, cornered animal, screaming and running in circles inside his skull.

Someone placed their helmet in his line of sight. Their lips moved, and words came over the suit speakers. He tried to concentrate, to make sense of the sounds.

“Are you in pain? Is the stuff doing anything to you?”

Ivan’s eyes opened wider as a circuit breaker snapped back on in his brain, and he recognized Tenn’s voice. He replayed the words, working to extract meaning.

“Ah, uh, no, I don’t think so.” He took a deep breath and tried again. “No pain. It doesn’t really seem to be doing anything to me. It doesn’t even weigh anything.”

Tenn nodded and grabbed Ivan’s shovel, which was floating nearby at the end of its tether. He flipped it around expertly, then used the blade to scrape the substance off Ivan’s arm.

Or tried to.

The grayish substance actually seemed to flow around the shovel blade, reforming behind it. It looked vaguely like running a paddle through water.

Tenn stopped, and the substance smoothed itself out.

More gabbling followed, more sounds that Ivan’s brain couldn’t process. The universe presented like a disconnected series of still-frames, similar in theme but not logically connected.

* * *

The conversations had resumed. Unable to form a thought, let alone any kind of strategy, Ivan simply allowed himself to float in place, ministered to by the other space suits swarming around, while the radio chatter flowed over and past him.

Duncan’s voice came over the channel. The chief engineer had a puzzled tone, but no sense of panic or urgency. “It doesn’t appear to be spreading, Captain. It’s not particularly showing up on infrared. It seems to be thermally non-conductive. There’s no radiation, no magnetic or electromagnetic activity. You’d think it was spray paint except for the tendency to flow around attempts to scrape it.”

“Any conclusions, Mr. MacNeil?”