Carpet

            “Alright, you can go out to the surface now,” I murmured into the microphone, watching to make sure the scanners didn’t detect anything poisonous as the rest of the crew disembarked. From the cockpit, I could see as two spacesuits hurried out from beneath the relatively small starship and begin their search for the prize at the end of the hunt.

            The coms screeched and Til came on, his voice excited, “We found a cave with footprints all over the place. This has to be it, Porla.” All I could hear after he’d spoken were the ragged breaths he was taking. I was starting to wish we’d splurged on spacesuits with cameras, but that would have been a waste; other than this contest, we were very rarely out on missions like this, so we didn’t need to see what our colleagues were doing. Actually, the last five missions we’d been on were top secret and they wouldn’t even allow us to hear one another. That had been a challenge.

            After a few minutes, Galili came on and asked, “Did they say what the box is supposed to look like? There are, like, eighty sitting here.”

            I brought up the list of clues to the contest and read through each in my head twice searching for a way to tell the boxes apart. “Uh, are there any emblems or big differences between them?” I asked with a shrug no one could see.

            “They’re all completely different and have all sorts of stuff on them,” Til replied.

            Sighing, I read through the list again. Glaring at the unhelpful notes, I explained, “One of the only notes we haven’t used is that the box contains something from Earth. Other than that, the clues are ones we may have used already.” Somehow, we’d managed to skip over three steps and arrived too early to a clue; unfortunately, that meant we couldn’t tell which of the eighteen clues we had or hadn’t used.

            “Did you say Earth?” Galili asked, breathing hard.

            Before I could reply, he was sprinting for the hull and I lowered the ladder for him. Hurrying into the cockpit, he grabbed a scanner used specifically to detect radioactivity. I was about to ask what he was using it for when Galili ran out and back to the cave.

            “So, one of the things we learned about Earth was that about fifteen-thousand cycles ago, the whole planet was saturated with radiation. Which would mean that it’s very likely that the items in the box are radioactive,” he explained as the pair did some searching. Because the device was connected to the ship, I could hear when it picked up something really hot.

            “Yes! Got back a few seconds, that set it off,” I exclaimed.

            After a few seconds, Til asked, “If it’s radioactive, should we be touching it?” That clearly stopped them.

            Reading the gauge, I replied, “You’re fine in the suits. The levels are really low, lower than what the suits will shield you from.” If we could send people to the surface now, we should be able to touch items brought back.

            “It’s a piece of, uh, of carpet?” Galili chuckled as they walked out of the cave. He was waving the strip of putrid orange material high above his head and laughing at Earth’s past civilizations.