An Unpleasant Sight
The Never Ending Quest - Episode 20788
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I picked the correct door the first time, and immediately wished that I
hadn't, since the remains of the Ib were splattered all over the walls.
With the door open, a gale blew past me towards the small breach in the
outer wall. I quickly shut the cabin door again, and fought a battle to
hold onto my lunch. Luckily I succeeded; vomiting inside a pressure suit
is worse even than doing so in ordinary circumstances.
From how thoroughly its body had been blown apart, it had probably been holding the bomb when it went off. I tried to make sense of what had happened. If it had committed suicide, why wait till now to do so? I could understand someone adrift in a lifeboat becoming very depressed, but the Ib had known that it was on the point of being rescued. Unless its people were taught that humans were barbaric warmongers, and it had feared being captured and tortured? But I'd never heard any stories about the Iborites that would lend credence to anything like that. Could it have been murder? A quick search confirmed that there was no- one else aboard. Explosives strapped to its body, detonated by remote control from some distant ship or by a timer? That seemed highly unlikely, and anyway why go to so much trouble? If it was murder, it could only have been committed by whoever had put the Ib in the lifeboat, and there were far easier ways to have killed the poor wretch. There was another possibility that occurred to me, highly implausible but a little less so than the others. Was the Ib supposed to have been rendezvousing with someone, way out here in the middle of nowhere? Then I turned up instead. Could it have been carrying a secret so important and so dangerous that it would sacrifice its life to ensure that it didn't get into what it would see as the wrong hands? Even so, surely there were better ways to commit suicide than with a bomb? But maybe it had been an accident? Perhaps it had been holding a grenade of some sort, intending to throw it at me, and it had gone off prematurely? Though throwing a grenade in a small lifeboat sounded pretty crazy to me. Or could it have been holding an advanced machine of some sort, which had catastropically failed, with the explosion being the result? It seemed highly unlikely that I would ever find out what had really happened.
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JH
10/15/2002 1:34:16 PM
Extending Enabled
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