"ИЗВНЕ"

Summary:

Four men climb a small volcano, on the way back they hear a low flying plane. When the sound is gone they discover a man in a dirty shirt and stretched out pants, passed out on the ground. In the following chapters we learn that the man's name is Lozowskii, he was initially abducted by alien spider machines. The machines examine him and take his picture, and then ignore him. Lozowskii feels that he must at the very least make an attempt to investigate the space ship and maybe get in contact with the beings that built the machines. However, his plan goes awry. The space ship never goes to the home planet, but it does land inside a larger spaceship which seems to be the mother ship where the spider robots bring samples they collect.

Lozowskii spends days wondering the hallways of the ship, discovering a sort of intergalactic zoo, but he never comes in contact with anyone but the spider robots. He goes through his food and water supplies and fails to find anything more to sustain him, not counting what he could steal from the spiders feeding the zoo inhabitants. He becomes progressively more weak until he finally passes out, thinks he is hallucinating seeing the 'aliens', and is then taken back to Earth.

This story seems to be based on a small discussion between the team in the “Land of the Crimson Clouds”, the idea of the robots making it to distant stars long before humans. This story is just a sample of how it may have worked out.

Additionally this story speaks to the nature of us humans. Would you be willing to be treated like an animal if that means access to food and water? Lozowskii fights tooth and nail to makes the spider robots understand that he is not just some animal, he stands tall and proud. But at the cost of being proud, of being more spacial than animals, did he not lose the chance to meet the builders of the spider robots? Was his pride not at fault for getting him sent back to earth? If he had swallowed his pride and sat tight, maybe he would have made first contact.

How many opportunities we as humans passed up just because we think we are special?