The good new stuff, p.48
The Good New Stuff, page 48
“Marry me and find out.”
“In a humpy outside Alice Springs?”
“I’ve a bloody expensive home in Brisbane.”
“And I’ve a fiancé in Waterloo, Iowa.”
“The hell you say!”
“So watch it, Buster!” She planted a kiss on the tip of his ear. “That’s it. Everything else is off limits.”
“In Australia we say out of bounds.”
“In Australia you also say sheila when you mean pushover.”
Not quite right but near enough and she certainly made better viewing than the mess on the screen.
In another part of the cavern system the Base Commander S & R held a meeting in an office not designed to hold thirteen people at once—himself and the twelve managers of the moonlet’s private research companies. Commander Ali Musad’s mother was Italian, his father Iraqi and himself a citizen of Switzerland; S & R took pride in being the least racially oriented of all the service arms.
He had set the office internal g at one-fifth, enough to keep them all on the floor, however crowded; it is difficult to dominate a meeting whose units sit on walls and ceiling and float away at a careless gesture.
He said, “I have a problem and I need your help. As Station senior executive I can give orders to service groups and enforce them; of you ladies and gentlemen representing civilian projects I can only ask.”
They resented his overall authority. They remained silent, letting him wriggle on his own hook, whatever it was. Then they might help, cautiously, if advantage offered.
“Some of you will have heard of a … presence … in space. A foolish boy talked too loudly in a mess room and no doubt the whisper of what he said has gone the rounds.”
That should have produced a murmur but did not. Only Harrison of Ultra-Micro asked, “Something about a green man in a sort of lifeboat?”
“Something like that.”
“I didn’t pay attention. Another comedian at work or has someone picked up a phantom image from a dramacast?”
“Neither. He’s real.”
Someone jeered softly, someone laughed, most preferred a skeptical lift of eyebrows. Chan of Null-G Germinants suggested that managers had low priority on the rumor chain. “Ask the maintenance staff; they’re the slush bearers.”
Musad told them, “It isn’t silly season slush; it’s real; I’ve seen it. Talk has to be stopped.”
Still they did not take him too seriously. “Can’t stop gossip, Commander.”
“I mean: Stop it getting off Phobos.”
“Too late, Commander. If it’s a little green men story it’s gone out on a dozen private corns by now.”
He said stiffly, “It hasn’t. I’ve activated the censor network.” The shocked silence was everything he could have desired. “Every com going out is being scanned for key words; anything containing them is being held for my decision.”
He waited while anger ran its course of outrage and vituperation. They didn’t give a damn about little green men but censorship was an arbitrary interference guaranteed to rouse fury anywhere across the System. The noise simmered down in predictable protests: “ … abuse of power … justifiable only in war emergency … legally doubtful on international Phobos …”
Melanie Duchamp, the Beautiful Battleaxe of Fillette Bonded Aromatics, produced the growling English that browbeat boardrooms: “You will need a vairy good reason for this.”
No honorific, he noted; Melanie was psyching herself for battle. “It was a necessary move. Now I am asking you to ratify it among your company personnel.”
“Fat chance,” said one, and another, “We’d have mutiny on our hands.”
He had expected as much. “In that case I shall order it as a service necessity and take whatever blame comes.” And leave them to accept blame if events proved his action the right one. “I can promise worse than mutiny if the news is not controlled.”
At that at least they listened. He told them what he knew of the intruding ship, its contents and the speculation about its origin, and then: “Let this news loose on Earth and Luna and we’ll have every whining, powergrabbing, politicking ratbag in the System here within days. I don’t mean just the service arms and intelligence wood-beetles and scientists and powerbrokers; I mean the churches and cults and fringe pseudo-sciences and rich brats with nothing better to do. I also mean your own company executives and research specialists and the same from your merchant rivals—to say nothing of the print and electronic media nosing at your secrets. How do you feel about it?”
It was Melanie who surrendered savagely. “I will support you—under protest.”
“You don’t have to cover your arse, Melanie. I’ll take the flack.”
“So? There will be lawsuits, class actions that will cost the companies millions.”
“No! I will declare a Defense Emergency.”
“Then God or Allah help you, Commander.”
Harrison said, “You can’t do it. You say the thing seems to be unarmed; how can you invoke defense?”
“Possible espionage by an alien intruder. If that won’t do, the Legal Section will think up something else.”
In the end they agreed if only because he left them no choice. Satisfied that they would keep the lid on civilian protest, he threw them a bone: He would call on them to supply experts in various fields not immediately available among the service personnel on Phobos, because he intended to bring the thing inside and mount as complete an examination as possible before allowing a squeak out of Phobos Communications.
They brightened behind impassive agreement. With their own men at the center of action they would be first with the news as history was made in their particular corners … with profit perhaps … and Wily Musad was welcome to the lawsuits.
When they had gone he summoned his secretary. “All on record?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Am I covered?”
“I think so. They will cooperate in case you retaliate by leaving them out of the selection of expert assistance. Which means that you must take at least one from each firm, however useless.”
“Yes. Many messages intercepted?”
“Seven for your attention. Three to media outlets. It seems we have some unofficial stringers aboard.”
“The buggers are everywhere. I don’t want media complaints when they find out that their lines were stopped. They stir up too much shit.” He recalled too late that Miss Merritt was a Clean Thinker. “Sorry.”
She was unforgiving. “Nevertheless there will be complaints.” Her tone added, And serve you right. Clean Thinkers held that censorship was unnecessary in a right-minded community—and so was crude language.
“I think the courts will uphold me.”
“No doubt, sir. Will that be all?”
“Yes, Miss Merritt.” And to hell with you, Miss Merritt, but you are too efficient to be returned to the pool.
The Number Three scow drifted down through darkness to hover over the moonlet’s docking intake, a square hole like a mineshaft, that came suddenly alive with light.
The docking computer took control, edged the huge scow, precisely centered, through the intake and closed the entry behind it.
A backup computer waited, ready to take over in the event of malfunction, and a human operator waited with finger on override, prepared to assume manual control at an unpredictable, unprogrammable happening. This was a first in the history of the human race and almost anything, including the inconceivable, might occur.
Nothing did.
The computer took the scow evenly through the second lock, closed it, moved the vessel sideways through the Repair and Maintenance Cavern to the largest dock and set it smoothly belly-down on the floor. Then, because nobody had thought to tell it otherwise, it followed normal procedure and switched on one-eighth g in the floor area covered by the vessel, sufficient to ensure cargo stability.
Watching in his office screen, Musad cursed somebody’s thoughtlessness—his own, where the buck stopped—and opened his mouth for a countermanding order. Then he thought that any damage was already done. Anyway, why should there be damage? No world with an eighth g would have produced a life form requiring an atmosphere, and the probe had certainly reported an atmosphere of sorts. Whatever lived inside the … lifeboat? … should be comfortable enough.
He shut his mouth and called Analysis. “Full scan, inside and out. There is a living being inside; take care.”
Analysis knew more than he about taking care and had prepared accordingly. The first necessity was to establish the precise position of the thing inside—being, entity, e-t, what you would—and ascertain that it was or was not alone. So: a very delicate selection of penetrating radiation in irreducibly small doses, just enough to get a readable shadow and keep it in view.
Analysis had far better instrumentation than the comparatively crude probe and established at once that the thing was alive and moving its … limbs? … While remaining in seated position facing the nose of the vessel. Able now to work safely around the thing, visitor, whatever, Analysis unleashed its full battery of probe, camera, resolution and dissection.
The results were interesting, exciting, even breathtaking, but no scrap of evidence suggested where the little ship might have come from.
Musad was an administrator, not a scientist; Analysis gave him a very condensed version of its immensely detailed preliminary report—blocked out, scripted, eviscerated, rendered down and printed for him in under three hours—highlighting the facts he had called for most urgently:
The living entity in the captive vessel would be, when it stood, approximately one and a half meters tall. It showed the basic pentagonal structure—head and four limbs—which might well represent an evolutionary optimum design for surface dwellers in a low-g Terrene range. There was a rudimentary skeletal structure, more in the nature of supportive surface plates than armatures of bone, and the limbs appeared tentacular rather than jointed. This raised problems of push-pull capability with no answers immediately available.
Spectroscopic reading was complicated by the chemical structure of the vessel’s hull, but chlorophyll was definitely present in the entity as well as in the hull, and the bulky “cape” on its shoulders showed the visual characteristics of a huge leaf. It was certainly a carbon-based form and seemed to be about ninety per cent water; there was no sign of hemoglobin or any related molecule.
The atmosphere was some forty per cent denser than Terrene air at sea level, a little light in oxygen but heavy with water vapor and carbon dioxide.
Tentative description: Highly intelligent, highly evolved, motile plant species.
We always wondered about aliens and now we’ve got one. What does he eat? Fertilizer? Or does that snout work like a Venus fly trap?
The small amounts of iron in the vessel—tank linings and a few hand tools—argued a metal-poor environment, ruling out any Sol-system planet as a world of origin.
As if they needed ruling out!
The ceramic lining of the jet would require longer evaluation but appeared to be of an unfamiliar crystalline macro-structure. All the other parts of the vessel, including the hull, were timber. There was nothing unusual about the composition of the various woods but a great deal unusual about about the treatments they had undergone, presumably for hardening and strengthening; no description of these could be hazarded without closer examination. (There followed a dissertation on the possible technology of a timber-based culture. Musad skipped over it.)
Dating procedures were at best tentative on materials whose isotopic balance might not match Terrene counterparts, but guesstimates gave a pro tem figure of between seven and ten thousand Terrene years. The signatories declined to draw any conclusions as to the age of the vegetal pilot or where he might have originated.
And all it does is sit there, sit there, sit there, occasionally moving a tentacle in some unguessable activity. So: What next?
He was taken by an idea so absurd that it would not go away, an idea which might, just might stir the creature into some action. It was a sort of “welcome home” idea—rather, an introduction …
He called the Projection Library.
Fernix slept and woke while the deceleration held him comfortably in his seat. He slept again and woke, nerves alert, when deceleration ceased.
He opened a tiny vision hole but saw only his prison still closed around him.
Shortly there was a perceptible forward motion and the slightest of centrifugal effects as the direction changed several times. Then his captor ship settled, gently for so large a transport. His pod shook momentarily and was still.
Suddenly there was gravity, not much of it but enough to aid balance and movement.
Not that he had any intention of moving; he could not afford movement. He needed energy. Food alone was not enough; his thousands of chloroplasts needed sunlight for the miracle of conversion to maintain body temperature, muscle tone, even the capacity to think effectively. There was a spectrum lamp aboard but its batteries would operate for only a limited time; a pod was not intended for pan-galactic voyaging.
Yet full alertness could be demanded of him at any moment; he must pump his body resources to a reasonable ability for sustained effort. He used a third of the lamp’s reserve, switched it off and continued at rest in the pilot seat.
There was little assessment he could make of his position. His captors had demonstrated no technological expertise (beyond a squandering of metal) which could not have been duplicated on the Home World, nor had they attempted to harm him. So they were civilized beings, reasonably of a cultural status with which he could relate.
On the panel, radiation detectors flickered at low power. He was, he guessed, being investigated. So, this race was able to operate its instruments through the metal hull outside. That proved little; a race evolving on a metal-rich world would naturally develop along different lines of scientific interest from one grown from the forests of Home. Different need not mean better.
It was an exciting thought, that on another world a people had emerged from the nurturing trees to conquer the void of space.
The thought was followed by another, more like a dream, in which his people had traversed the unimaginable distance between stars to colonize this faraway system, facing and overcoming the challenges of worlds utterly variant from their own, inventing whole new sciences to maintain their foothold on the universe.
The open-minded intelligence can contemplate the unfamiliar, the never conceived, and adapt it to new modes of survival.
He had arrived by freakish accident; could not his people have made the crossing during the eons while he crept through space in free fall? The idea of using Transformation for survival while a ship traversed the years and miles had been mooted often.
His reverie was broken by a squealing hiss from outside the pod.
Outside. They were supplying his prison with an atmosphere.
Chemist Megan Ryan was the first to curse Musad for mishandling the approach to the alien ship. Suited up and ready to examine the hull, she heard someone at the closed-circuit screen ask, “What the hell’s going on? They’ve let air into the scow.”
She clawed the man out of the way and punched Musad’s number to scream at him, “What do you think you’re bloddy well doing?”
“And who do you think you’re talking to, Captain-Specialist?”
She took a deep, furious breath. “To you … sir. Who ordered air into the scow?”
“I did.” His tone said that if she objected, her reason had better be foolproof.
“But why, why, why?” She was close to stuttering with rage.
His administrative mind groped uneasily at the likelihood of an error of unscientific judgment and decided that this was not a moment for discipline. “To provide air and temperature for the investigating teams to work in. What else?”
She swallowed, conscious of a red face and tears of frustration. “Sir, that ship has been in space for God only knows how long, in the interstellar deep. Its timber hull will have collected impact evidence of space-borne elements and zero-temperature molecules. That evidence will by now have been negated by temperature change and highly reactive gases. Knowledge has been destroyed.”
She was right and he would hear about it later from higher echelons; he simply had not thought from a laboratory standpoint. “I’m sorry, Meg, but my first priority for investigation is the traveller rather than the ship. He represents more urgent science than a little basic chemistry.”
The wriggling was shameful and he knew it; he had forgotten everything outside the focus of his own excitement, the alien.
She was glaring still as he cut her off.
He spoke to the Library: “Have you got much?”
“A good representative selection, sir. Vegetable environments from different climates. As you requested, no human beings.”
“Good. I don’t want humans presented to him in stances and occupations he—it—won’t understand. Get a computer mockup ready—a naked man, good physique, in a space suit. Set it up so that the suit can be dissolved from around him. I want a laboratory effect, emotionally distancing, to reduce any ‘monster’ reaction.”
“Yes, sir,” the screen murmured.
“He’s put out a probe of some sort,” said another screen. “Sampling the air maybe.”
Musad turned to screen 3 and the alien ship. The temperature in the hold had risen to minus thirty Celsius and vapor was clearing rapidly from the warming air. Visibility was already good.
When the air reached normal temperature and pressure for their planet, Fernix reasoned, they would come for him.
They did not come, though temperature and pressure levelled off. He was disappointed but accepted that there would be circumstances which he could not at present comprehend.
He extended a hull probe for atmosphere analysis, to find the outside pressure very low while the water vapor content hovered at the “dry” end of the scale and the carbon dioxide reading was disturbingly light. He could exist in such an atmosphere only with difficulty and constant re-energizing. Acclimatization would take time.
