Victor had walked to yet another obstructing doorway and raised his palm to activate the door sensor.

But the door had anticipated his touch and begun to open before he had even placed his palm against the membrane.

Victor looked back at his friends. Someone or something was definitely beckoning them deeper into the ship.

"An invitation?" Helena wondered.

"Further down the rabbit hole, as it were," Victor murmured.

The door was much the same in dimension as the one they had just passed through, and the Alphans advanced cautiously into a pit of darkness.

As they entered the most interior chamber of the craft yet, light flooded into the hexagonal room, and they bore witness to another nightmare.

Helena stifled her gasp of dismay.

Koenig felt a shiver of disgust.

It was a scene from the worst of a sick mind's imaginings of the tomb. It was worse than the riven, charred and fungus-coated alien chamber they had just passed through.

The fungus was on every surface here.

It hung, sinister and grey-green, with an underlying luminescence that hinted at a malevolent wariness in every spore.

Yet it was the contents of the chamber that drew them forward, however repulsed they might be by the shroud of grey-green fungus.

The walls of this much-larger chamber revealed its function, for on each side stretching in long, even rows, were recessed spaces, each filled by bulbous containers that resembled sarcophaga.

"Bell-jars?" Koenig attempted.

"Receptacles of some kind, I agree," said Helena Russell. "Large enough to house a member of a species much the size of our own."

"They're disgusting." Tony sneered.

"They're life support pods," suggested Victor Bergman.

The Alphans approached the nearest wall of containers and came to realize that their speculation had been absolutely correct.

They stared at the first container they came across. It held a still, murky liquid in which hung a recognizable form, a humanoid form.

But the dead man inside wasn't fully human.

His skin was strangely discolored, a deep bronze hue. Terribly, his eyes were wide open and of a color that the Alphans had never seen in their own kind.

Silver. Nearly chrome.

Koenig looked along the row of identical pods, and absorbed what he saw: the gruesome appearance of each separate container, each containing the remains of one person after another.

Some were whole.

Others had rotted.

Helena was the first to speak. "Let me do the analysis."

Her tone was cold and somber, as it often was when she was confronted with something horrible or daunting. It was the safe harbor, the fall-back of every good doctor she'd ever met.

Clinical detachment.

Observe, get the data, calculate, analyze, decide...

She went to work promptly, opening up her medical pack and getting started.

Bergman watched Russell go about her grim duty. He could only guess at the nature of the entities, pickled like vegetables, inside the bulbous, chrome-yellow pods. And what material the containers had been formed from.

And why they had failed in their function, clearly that of preserving life. It invoked an intense feeling of pity somewhere deep inside him.

These men and women - the crew? They went to sleep thinking everything was fine.

But they'll never awaken...