Collected short fiction, p.667
Collected Short Fiction, page 667
THAT night, in Carolina’s lab, we had a long discussion of those games and the grit. Marko argued for some unknown sort of cognition or memory expressed in the games. For evidence he brought up those unexplained hallucinations that captured the seeker crew on the moon.
“The space terminal I thought I saw was too much like Nick’s toy terminal,” he insisted. “It can’t be just coincidental. Through some medium too subtle for us, the grit communicates ideas.”
“But your terminal on the moon wasn’t really there,” Carolina objected, “No more than Thorsen’s spacefort or Hood’s gold meteor. The grit has been tested very elaborately for psionic effects, with negative results.”
“Then how do you explain the game?”
“Nick says he made it up. Perhaps he did. Other gifted children have invented remarkable imaginary worlds. The Brontes, for instance. Nobody claims theirs was real.”
We talked on, reviewing all our data and a hundred published theories until my head throbbed from the blue glow of the sterile walls and the musty scent of the bubbling beta cultures, but we came to no conclusions.
“Let’s not fret about it,” Carolina said, as we were leaving. “The grit shaped the children. Its meaning is for them, not for us. If it can help them find themselves, our real obligation is only to keep ourselves out of the way.”
Next day Marko tried again to question Nick and Kyrie. Still awake and still elated with the black grit, they seemed to understand it no better than we did. Asked about the games, Kyrie confessed a wistful half-belief that she and Nick and Guy were actual spacefolk, but Nick glibly quoted sources in books and films to prove that he had borrowed everything.
Carolina had seated them on the edge of Marko’s desk to bring them closer to our level. Kyrie kept eyeing her precious sample of the grit, reluctant to think of anything else. Nick sat impatiently drumming the front of the desk with his bare heels.
“We aren’t bugs!” His bored annoyance flashed into abrupt resentment. “You can’t cut us up to see what makes us tick—like the seeker crews want to butcher the space snakes they’re hunting out around Jupiter. Why can’t you leave us alone?”
“Nicky!” Kyrie caught his brown arm. “Don’t!”
But Carolina nodded soberly. “To a lot of people you are specimens, fascinating exobiological specimens. We hope to protect you from such cruel people until you learn why you were born. Trust us, please.”
“Of course we trust you,” Kyrie whispered. “Don’t we, Nick?”
His grin was almost sardonic. “We have to trust you.”
“One more thing,” Marko said. “In those games, what was Guy?” The teasing malice died from Nick’s black eyes. He frowned as if he meant to speak, shook his head, finally turned unhappily to Kyrie. Her golden face lost color as she raised it from the bits of grit, until she looked pale and almost piteous.
“That’s the bad part.” We had to lean to catch her stricken whisper. “Because Guy never liked the games. He didn’t want to play. He said he was no kin to the spacefolk and he didn’t want their ship to come and carry us away. He wouldn’t help us build the tachyon terminal. Once he kicked it and scattered all the blocks.”
“Is that so bad?”
Her big eyes were a tragic black and tears glittered on her cheeks. She glanced anxiously at Nick. He made a face and shoved her shoulder as if to remind her that it was all a game, but the gestures failed to break her gloom.
“The bad part was more what I thought,” she quavered miserably. “I thought Guy wouldn’t play because he loved me and hated Nick. I thought he was afraid the spacefolk would take us both away and leave him all alone. I was terribly afraid—afraid he might hurt Nick.”
“Don’t cry about it.” Nick pushed her again. “It was all just baby play.”
Kyrie turned slowly to look at him.
“But Guy really does love me,” she whispered. “And he really doesn’t like it when I do anything with you, Nicky. That’s why I’m so afraid. Afraid!”
VIII
BAD news came from space that year. COSMOS had reached no friendly worlds and the cheerful assumption that the planets were oysters waiting to be opened was fading into fear that Earth herself might somehow become the oyster of some other biocosm.
The Pizarros of space had found no new Perus to loot. Though the flight mechanism of the Jovian delta-life had promised to be a richer treasure than all the Incan gold—or even the nugget fields of Mercury—those elusive creatures still kept their secret.
Agile as shadows, they evaded every effort to capture or even to destroy them. No ship was swift enough to overtake them. No human weapon could reach or damage them. Nearhits with nuclear missiles left them neither hurt nor offended.
As if reciprocating human curiosity, they kept darting close to the orbital station. Companionably they escorted the seekers in flight around the planet’s moons. They began flying out to meet arriving rockets. Finally they followed a returning ship all the way to the Earth platform.
Even though the delta-form beings had never tried to take any human specimens the news of that visit spread consternation. To head off panic we released a theory of Carolina’s that the Jovians had been to Earth before.
“They’re at home in space,” she said. “The evidence suggests that they can tolerate dry air at high elevations, at least for brief periods. They seem to look somewhat like the flying serpents of native Mexican art and to move like certain UFOs.”
To support the theory she showed us the data that had come to her lab for analysis. Taken from the orbital station, one photograph had caught a snakeshaped thing in silhouette against the brightly streaked face of Jupiter.
The thick serpentine form was darkly transparent, a twisted shadow across the great Red Spot.
It had an opaque nucleus—a dark jagged mass like an irregular crystal. From that mass spread two wide luminous rays or plumes, which to some primitive Aztec might have looked like wings.
“Everything suggests they’ve been making casual calls for centuries,” Carolina said. “Without hurting anybody. I doubt that they can metabolize the products of our biocosm. Except for short visits to the highest, dryest mountains, Earth is not for them.”
“Then why,” I asked, “would they be interested in us?”
Her faint smile looked wry. “Perhaps because we’re interested in them.”
The news from Mercury was more disturbing. Computer analysis of the tapes from the seeker survey had revealed no life or motion on the surface of that hot planet. Now the COSMOS command on the orbital platform sent a landing group to test a notion that the tunnel diggers were either dead or departed. The notion turned out to be unfortunate.
The group reported a safe landing at their selected site on the rugged highlands, near the tunnel cluster they were to investigate. As the orbital platform moved out of contact, they had just begun blasting, to level the site and excavate a shelter tunnel of their own.
Two hours later, with contact restored, they reported evidence that Mercury was still alive. During a pause in the blasting, their seismographs had picked up a series of rhythmic tremors from the direction of the tunnel cluster.
By the time the platform came overhead, some kind of smoke or vapor was pouring out of the tunnels. It rapidly obscured the sixty-mile plain and began to spill over.
Because of the small planet’s close horizons, this cloud was not yet visible to the surface group, but the platform commander ordered it to halt drilling and to prepare for take-off. What happened next was never discovered.
A narrow tongue of that bright fog was pushing toward the landing site as the platform moved out of range again. The commander tried to order an immediate takeoff, but laser contact was already broken. The landing group was gone when the platform came back over the site and the last wisps of fog were disappearing from the crater basin, draining like a liquid back into the tunnels.
The commander decided not to risk another surface expedition, but photographs of the site showed a few small scattered scraps of wreckage, indicating that the landing craft had crashed or exploded soon after takeoff. The bodies of the men, along with most of the wreckage, had been somehow removed.
RELAYED to the COSMOS directorate at Skygate, the reports of that incident set off a new debate. One fraction wanted to withdraw all missions from Mercury. Another wanted to bombard the tunnels with nuclear missiles. As a compromise, orders were relayed for the platform commander to climb into a higher orbit and prepare to defend himself. What proved to be the last transmission from the platform had already been received. It was a routine signal that communication would be blacked out again while the platform passed behind the planet. Nothing else came through.
After another hot debate, the directorate canceled plans to send a rescue expedition. The exploration of Mercury ceased, the nature of the tunnel-diggers still unknown.
In the wake of this disquieting disaster, COSMOS budgets were slashed again. The uncompleted orbital stations around Saturn and Neptune had to be abandoned and plans were canceled for a series of transplutonian probes.
At Skygate our difficulties multiplied. In spite of all our publicity efforts, people tended to identify the children with the enigmatic beings of those other biocosms. We ourselves were suspect. The security force received secret orders, as we later discovered, to watch us as well as our charges.
Nick was begging for permission to study a larger sample of the moon grit, but the joint research committee disapproved Marko’s requisition for it. Some members doubted that a child could accomplish anything significant. Others feared that Nick might do too much.
Waiting fretfully, he spent most of his time in his mother’s laboratory. He learned to culture the beta-life. He skimmed through all her reference books and her filed data on the other biocosms. He studied new closeups of the Jovian delta-forms, made from the Earth platform.
One of those photographs had caught the snake-shape of a delta creature in outline against the cloud-swirled Earth. With sharper eyes or perhaps a sharper mind than anybody else, Nick discovered a puzzling structure of fine black lines that branched from the jagged nuclear crystal out into the serpentine shadow.
He spent two days mapping those barely visible lines, recording each with a microscopic exactness. For another sleepless night he sat cross-legged on the nursery floor, scarcely moving, “just thinking.” Finally he approached his mother with a question.
“Do the COSMOS people still want to know how the delta things propel themselves?”
Carolina said they did.
“I’ll show them,” he promised. “In return for freedom to study the moon grit.”
She took that innocent offer to Marko. He carried it to the joint research committee. They referred it to the directorate. Nick slept while he waited, but wake instantly when Marko came back to accept his proposition.
WE ARRANGED the demonstration that same afternoon. Two engineers came from the research committee to observe it. They were not impressed with his preparations.
Clever enough with tools, Nick cut a round hole the size of a beer can in the center of a short pine board. He hammered a worn silver dime into a slot near one end of the board and a copper cent into a slot near the other.
Marko and Carolina came along for the demonstration. Two security cars carried us out on the open mesa, a mile beyond the spaceport. I still recall the sardonic impatience of the engineers as they watched Nick completing his device.
A thin, grave-eyed child, he looked too small for his seven years. His naked skin had been pale in the car—out here the hot sun washed him with instant bronze. Squatting in the dust, he carefully fitted a can of warm beer into the hole in the board. With a soft graphite pencil he began to draw an intricate system of lines that branched from the two coins toward the can.
His task took time. Less impervious than he was to heat, we watched and sweated. I had brought no hat and my head began to throb. The engineers scowled impatiently through dark glasses. A security man snickered when Nick broke his pencil point.
Ignoring everything, Nick chewed his tongue and drew more lines until something happened. Though the gray horizon still shimmered all around us, I felt a sudden piercing chill. My mouth had a sharp metallic taste. Nick dropped his pencil and held his device up triumphantly.
“Watch!” he shrilled. “Watch it fly!”
White frost filmed and feathered the beer can. It burst with a muffled thump and brown ice jutted out. A strange, edgeless dimness spread around the ice, veined with fine black lines that seemed to branch from Nick’s pencil marks. Through that spreading darkness I saw the board tugging upward. Nick clung to it, pale with alarm. Flakes of frost swirled and crackled around him in that condensing shadow. Clinging to the ends of the board, Nick was lifted off the ground.
Carolina screamed. Nick let go. The board whistled out of sight. The sun blazed back, its heat strangely welcome. The sky rumbled for endless seconds. Silence came like a thunder clap. A dazed security man stood pointing at a puff of yellow dust on the hot horizon. I tasted that puzzling bitterness still in my mouth.
Nick gathered himself out of the dust and the shivering engineers herded us into the cars. We jolted two miles across the mesa, to a shallow crater where the device had come down in a juniper clump. The engineers picked up a few pine splinters and a shred of twisted aluminum. Finally they began asking what the gadget was.
“A sort of circuit,” Nick said. “It picks up certain forms of energy. From light or heat or even gravitation. It changes them to kinetic energy.” While the engineers muttered and stared he added innocently: “The effect was stronger than I wanted. The broken pencil made the primary conductor marks too thick.”
The whole affair left the engineers frustrated and, I think, apprehensive. They failed to translate Nick’s description of the propulsion circuit or his drawings of the structured shadow-shapes of the delta creatures into any terms they could understand. Their own copies of his device failed to fly.
Their reports, however, must have impressed the directors. The research committee approved a requisition. An armored security truck brought Nick half a kilogram of the precious grit in a thick canister of yellow-painted lead.
NICK eagerly attacked the tetrahedrons. He now had access to the big computer and searched its data banks for every recorded fact about the grit. He repeated old experiments and invented new ones. Most of them failed. As weeks and months went by, his confidence shrank to grim desperation.
Searching for help, he had us bring a series of scholars to Skygate. The first was Dr. Platon Papanek, an old colleague of Carolina’s, recently back from Uranus. Nick bombarded him with anxious questions about the possibilities of intelligence in other biocosms.
“What’s intelligence?” Still used to low gravity, Papanek shuffled laboriously to a chair and wheezed a garbled mixture of French and Czech that Nick translated for the rest of us. “A tool for survival. A sharper fang, a quicker claw. Each biocosm plays the survival game according to rules of its own. The successful adaptations—the beta and delta and gamma spheres—can’t be compared on our alpha scale. You don’t measure poetry by the pound or wisdom by the yard.”
“Is survival all?” Nick’s thin face turned bleak. “I mean, sir, couldn’t intelligence become a bridge? Couldn’t it build a way for one biocosm to reach and understand and maybe help another?”
“I was once an idealist.” Papanek shook his flaccid bulk and gasped for his breath. “I’ve been to five biocosms to look for cosmic altruism. I detected none. I conclude that benevolence is a negative factor for survival.”
“Somewhere else?” Urgency quivered in Nick’s voice. “Somewhere in the galaxy—couldn’t universal friendship become a positive factor?”
“Who knows?” The heavy gravity of Earth damped Papanek’s Slavic shrug. “The farther out we go, the queerer things we find.”
He stayed three days. Listening to the questions Nick and Kyrie asked, I felt a sharper sense of the urgency of their desperate search for the makers of the moon grit, but I’m afraid they got no help from Papanek.
Nick sent next for an exiled Sino-Soviet geneticist, who turned out to be as ignorant as we were about what the grit could have done to the sperm cells of the seeker’s crew. He called in a professor of astronautics who cheerfully promised that intelligible signals could be sent to other stars within only two or three centuries if space technology continued to advance. He invited a team of solid-state physicists, who disagreed scornfully with all his theories about the structure and the function of the grit.
His last quest was a mathematician, a big jovial Finn. They spent two days and nights in the nursery classroom, trading symbols in a haze of chalk-dust. The Finn came out coffee-logged and reeling with fatigue.
“Was I expected to instruct that infant?” He blinked at me in redeyed wonder. “In thirty minutes he destroyed the work of my life—my model of the universe. I never met such power of mind. Yet I pity him.” The Finn rubbed in a dazed way at his chalky jaw. “He doesn’t know how to laugh.”
NICK refused to send for anybody else. His feverish bouts of study and experiment almost ceased. He used to sit for hours in despondent thought or slip away from security to roam the moonlit mesa alone. Though he and Kyrie had always been immune to germs and viruses, Carolina thought he was falling ill of sheer frustration.
“Goodness, child, don’t fret so hard,” I heard her urge him one morning in the nursery kitchen. “You’ll only kill yourself. No doubt you and Kyrie have tremendous things to do, but they had better wait till you are older.”
“We can’t wait.” He pushed his untouched breakfast tray aside and stared at her from blue-rimmed eyes. “All the planets are on fire with danger for us. Earth worst of all. Our only hope is the message I think is in the grit, but time is running out for us to break the code. Mother, I’m afraid—” His faint voice cracked. “I’m afraid we’ll die before we ever learn why we were born.”
