He had re-entered. Turekian took his place on the balcony and squinted upward. More winged shapes had joined the first several; and more came into view each second. They dipped, soared, circled through the wind, which made surf noises in the forest.
Unease crawled along the pilot’s spine. “I don’t like this half a bit,” he said. “They don’t act like plain beasts.”
“Conceivably the dwellers plan to use them in an assault,” Webner said. “If so, we may have to teach the dwellers about the cost of unreasoning hostility.” His tone was less cool than the words, and sweat beaded his countenance.
Sparks in the magnifier field hurt Turekian’s eyes. “I swear they’re carrying metal,” he said. “Listen, if they are intelligent—and out to get us, after you nearly killed one of ‘em—the house is no place for us. Let’s scramble. We may not have many more minutes.”
“Yes, I believe we’d better, Vaughn,” Yukiko urged. “We can’t risk…being forced to burn down conscious beings…on their own land.”
Maybe his irritation with the pilot spoke for Webner: “How often must I explain there is no such risk, yet? Instead, here’s a chance to learn. What happens next could give us invaluable clues to understanding the whole ethos. We stay.” To Turekian: “Forget about that alleged metal. Could be protective collars, I suppose. But take the supercharger off your imagination.”
The other man froze where he stood.
“Aram.” Yukiko seized his arm. He stared beyond her. “What’s wrong?”
He shook himself. “Supercharger,” he mumbled. “By God, yes.”
Abruptly, in a bellow: “We’re leaving! This second! They are the dwellers, and they’ve gathered the whole countryside against us!”
“Hold your tongue,” Webner said, “or I’ll charge insubordination.”
Laughter rattled in Turekian’s breast. “Uh-uh. Mutiny,”
He crouched and lunged. His fist rocketed before him. Yukiko’s cry joined the thick smack as knuckles hit—not the chin, which is too hazardous, the solar plexus. Air whoofed from Webner. His eyes glazed. He folded over, partly conscious but unable to stand while his diaphragm spasmed. Turekian gathered him in his arms. “To the boat!” the pilot shouted. “Hurry, girl!”
His grav unit wouldn’t carry two, simply gentled his fall when he leaped from the balcony. He dared not stop to adjust the controls on Webner’s. Bearing his chief, he pounded across the flagstones. Yukiko came above. “Go ahead!” Turekian bawled. “Get into shelter, for God’s sake!”
“Not till you can,” she answered. “I’ll cover you.” He was helpless to prevent her.
The scores above had formed themselves into a vast revolving wheel. It tilted. The first flyers peeled off and roared downward. The rest came after.
Arrows whistled ahead of them. A trumpet sounded. Turekian dodged, zigzag over the meadow. Yukiko’s gun clapped. She shot to miss, but belike the flashes put those archers—and, now, spearthrowers—off their aim. Shafts sang wickedly around. One edge grazed Webner’s neck. He screamed.
Yukiko darted to open the boat’s airlock. While she did, Turekian dropped Webner and straddled him, blaster drawn. The leading flyer hurtled close. Talons of the right foot, which was not a foot at all but a hand, gripped a sword curved like a scimitar. For an instant, Turekian looked squarely into the golden eyes, knew a brave male defending his home, and also shot to miss.
In a brawl of air, the native sheered off. The valve swung wide. Yukiko flitted through. Turekian dragged Webner, then stood in the lock chamber till the entry was shut.
Missiles clanged on the hull. None would pierce. Turekian let himself join Webner for a moment of shuddering in each other’s embrace, before he went forward to Yukiko and the raising of his vessel.
When you know what to expect, a little, you can lay plans. We next sought the folk of Ythri, as the planet is called by its most advanced culture, a thousand kilometers from the triumph which surely prevailed in the mountains. Approached with patience, caution, and symbolisms appropriate to their psyches, they welcomed us rapturously. Before we left, they’d thought of sufficient inducements to trade that I’m sure they’ll have spacecraft of their own in a few generations.
Still, they are as fundamentally territorial as man is fundamentally sexual, and we’d better bear that in mind.
The reason lies in their evolution. It does for every drive in every animal everywhere. The Ythrian is carnivorous, aside from various sweet fruits. Carnivores require larger regions per individual than herbivores or omnivores do, in spite of the fact that meat has more calories per kilo than most vegetable matter. Consider how each antelope needs a certain amount of space, and how many antelope are needed to maintain a pride of lions. Xenologists have written thousands of papers on the correlations between diet and genotypical personality in sophonts.
I have my doubts about the value of those papers. At least, they missed the possibility of a race like the Ythrians, whose extreme territoriality and individualism—with the consequences to governments, mores, arts, faiths, and souls—come from the extreme appetite of the body.
They mass as high as thirty kilos; yet they can lift an equal weight into the air or, unhampered, fly like demons. Hence they maintain civilization without the need to crowd together in cities. Their townspeople are mostly wing-clipped criminals and slaves. Today their wiser heads hope robots will end the need for that.
Hands? The original talons, modified for manipulating. Feet? Those claws on the wings, a juvenile feature which persisted and developed, just as man’s large head and sparse hair derive from the juvenile or fetal ape. The forepart of the wing skeleton consists of humerus, radius, and ulnar, much as in true birds. These lock together in flight. Aground, when the wing is folded downward, they produce a “knee” joint. Bones grow from their base to make the claw-foot. Three fused digits, immensely lengthened, sweep backward to be the alatan which braces the rest of that tremendous wing and can, when desired, give additional support on the surface. To rise, the Ythrians usually do a handstand during the initial upstroke. It takes less than a second.
Oh, yes, they are slow and awkward afoot. They manage, though. Big and beweaponed, instantly ready to mount the wind, they need fear no beast of prey.
You ask where the power comes from to swing this hugeness through the sky. The oxidation of food, what else? Hence the demand of each household for a great hunting or ranching demesne. The limiting factor is the oxygen supply. A molecule in the blood can carry more than hemoglobin does, but the gas must be furnished. Turekian first realized how that happens. The Ythrian has lungs, a passive system resembling ours. In addition he has his supercharger, evolved from the gills of an amphibianlike ancestor. Worked in bellows fashion by the flight muscles, connecting directly with the bloodstream, those air-intake organs let him burn his fuel as fast as necessary.
I wonder how it feels to be so alive.
I remember how Yukiko Sachansky stood in the curve of Aram Turekian’s arm, under a dawn heaven, and watched the farewell dance the Ythrians gave for us, and cried through tears: “To fly like that! To fly like that!”
Definitions from the school-abridged Webster-Hamlin Dictionary 1998 edition:
wavery (WA-ver-i) n. a vader-slang
vader (VA-der) n. inorgan of the class Radio
inorgan (in-OR-gan) n. noncorporeal ens, vader
radio(RA-di-o) n.
1. class of inorgans
2. etheric frequency between light and electricity
3. (obsolete) method of communication used up to 1977
The opening guns of invasion were not at all loud, although they were heard by millions of people. George Bailey was one of the millions. I choose George Bailey because he was the only one who came within a googol of light-years of guessing what they were.
George Bailey was drunk and under the circumstances one can’t blame him for being so. He was listening to radio advertisements of the most nauseous kind. Not because he wanted to lis
ten to them, I hardly need say, but because he’d been told to listen to them by his boss, J. R. McGee of the MID network.
George Bailey wrote advertising for the radio. The only thing he hated worse than advertising was radio. And here on his own time he was listening to fulsome and disgusting commercials on a rival network.
“Bailey,” J. R. McGee had said, “you should be more familiar with what others are doing. Particularly, you should be informed about those of our own accounts who use several networks. I strongly suggest …”
One doesn’t quarrel with an employer’s strong suggestions and keep a five hundred dollar a week job.
But one can drink whisky sours while listening. George Bailey did.
Also, between commercials, he was playing gin rummy with Maisie Hetterman, a cute little redheaded typist from the studio. It was Maisie’s apartment and Maisie’s radio (George himself, on principle, owned neither a radio nor a TV set) but George had brought the liquor.
“-only the very finest tobaccos,” said the radio, “go dit-dit-dit nation’s favorite cigarette-“
George glanced at the radio. “Marconi,” he said.
He meant Morse, naturally, but the whisky sours had muddled him a bit so his first guess was more nearly right than anyone else’s. It was Marconi, in a way. In a very peculiar way.
“Marconi?” asked Maisie.
George, who hated to talk against a radio, leaned over and switched it off.
“I meant Morse,” he said. “Morse, as in Boy Scouts or the Signal Corps. I used to be a Boy Scout once.”
“You’ve sure changed,” Maisie said.
George sighed. “Somebody’s going to catch hell, broadcasting code on that wave length.”
“What did it mean?”
“Mean? Oh, you mean what did it mean. Uh- S, the letter S. Dit-dit-dit is S. SOS is did-dit-dit dah-dah-dah dit-dit-dit.”
“O is dah-dah-dah?”
George grinned. “Say that again, Maisie. I like it. And I think you are dah-dah-dah too.”
“George, maybe it’s really an SOS message. Turn it back on.”
George turned it back on. The tobacco ad was still going. “-gentlemen of the most dit-dit-dit-ing taste prefer the finer taste of dit-dit-dit arettes. In the new package that keeps them dit-dit-dit and ultra fresh-“
“It’s not SOS. It’s just S’s.”
“Like a teakettle or-say, George, maybe it’s just some advertising gag.”
George shook his head. “Not when it can blank out the name of the product. Just a minute till I-“
He reached over and turned the dial of the radio a bit to the right and then a bit to the left, and an incredulous look came into his face. He turned the dial to the extreme left, as far as it would go. There wasn’t any station there, not even the hum of a carrier wave. But:
“Dit-dit-dit,” said the radio, “dit-dit-dit.”
He turned the dial to the extreme right. “Dit-dit-dit.” George switched it off and stared at Maisie without seeing her, which was hard to do.
“Something wrong, George?”
“I hope so,” said George Bailey. “I certainly hope so.” He started to reach for another drink and changed his mind. He had a sudden hunch that something big was happening and he wanted to sober up to appreciate it. He didn’t have the faintest idea how big it was. “George, what do you mean?”
“I don’t know what I mean. But Maisie, let’s take a run down the studio, huh? There ought to be some excitement.”
April 5, 1977; that was the night the waveries came.
It had started like an ordinary evening. It wasn’t one, now.
George and Maisie waited for a cab but none came so they took the subway instead. Oh yes, the subways were still running in those days. It took them within a block of the MID Network Building.
The building was a madhouse. George, grinning, strolled through the lobby with Maisie on his arm, took the elevator to the fifth floor and for no reason at all gave the elevator boy a dollar. He’d never before in his life tipped an elevator operator.
The boy thanked him. “Better stay away from the big shots, Mr. Bailey,” he said. “They’re ready to chew the ears off anybody who even looks at ‘em.”
“Wonderful,” said George.
From the elevator he headed straight for the office of J. R. McGee himself.
There were strident voices behind the glass door. George reached for the knob and Maisie tried to stop him. “But George,” she whispered, “you’ll be fired!”
“There comes a time,” said George. “Stand back away from the door, honey.”
Gently but firmly he moved her to a safe position. “But George, what are you-?”
“Watch,” he said.
The frantic voices stopped as he opened the door a foot. All eyes turned toward him as he stuck his head around the corner of the doorway into the room.
“Dit-dit-dit,” he said. “Dit-dit-dit.”
He ducked back and to the side just in time to escape the flying glass as a paperweight and an inkwell came through the pane of the door.
He grabbed Maisie and ran for the stairs.
“Now we get a drink,” he told her.
The bar across the street from the network building was crowded but it was a strangely silent crowd. In deference to the fact that most of its customers were radio people it didn’t have a TV set but there was a big cabinet radio and most of the people were bunched around it.
“Dit,” said the radio. “Dit-dah-d’dah-dit-danditdah dit-“
“Isn’t it beautiful?” George whispered to Maisie.
Somebody fiddled with the dial. Somebody asked, “What band is that?” and somebody said, “Police.” Somebody said, “Try the foreign band,” and somebody did. “This ought to be Buenos Aires,” somebody said. “Dit-d’dah-dit-” said the radio.
Somebody ran fingers through his hair and said, “Shut that damn thing off.” Somebody else turned it back on.
George grinned and led the way to a back booth where he’d spotted Pete Mulvaney sitting alone with a bottle in front of him. He and Maisie sat across from Pete.
“Hello,” he said gravely.
“Hell,” said Pete, who was head of the technical research staff of MID.
“A beautiful night, Mulvaney,” George said. “Did you see the moon riding the fleecy clouds like a golden galleon tossed upon silver-crested whitecaps in a stormy-“
“Shut up,” said Pete. “I’m thinking.”
“Whisky sours,” George told the waiter. He turned back to the man across the table. “Think out loud, so we can hear. But first, how did you escape the booby hatch across the street?”
“I’m bounced, fired, discharged.”
“Shake hands. And then explain. Did you say dit-dit-dit to them?”
Pete looked at him with sudden admiration. “Did you?”
“I’ve a witness. What did you do?”
“Told ‘em what I thought it was and they think I’m crazy.”
“Are you?”
“Yes.”
“Good,” said George. “Then we want to hear-” He snapped his fingers. “What about TV?”
“Same thing. Same sound on audio and the pictures flicker and dim with every dot or dash. Just a blur by now.”
“Wonderful. And now tell me what’s wrong. I don’t care what it is, as long as it’s nothing trivial, but I want to know.”
“I think it’s space. Space is warped.”
“Good old space,” George Bailey said.
“George,” said Maisie, “please shut up. I want to hear this.”
“Space,” said Pete, “is also finite.” He poured himself another drink. “You go far enough in any direction and get back where you started. Like an ant crawling around an apple.”
“Make it an orange,” George said.
“All right, an orange. Now suppose the first radio waves ever sent out have just made the round trip. In seventy-six years.”
“Seventy-six y
ears? But I thought radio waves traveled at the same speed as light. If that’s right, then in seventy-six years they could go only seventy-six light-years, and that can’t be around the universe because there are galaxies known to be millions or maybe billions of light-years away. I don’t remember the figures, Pete, but our own galaxy alone is a hell of a lot bigger than seventy-six light-years.”
Pete Mulvaney sighed. “That’s why I say space must be warped. There’s a short cut somewhere.”
“That short a short cut? Couldn’t be.”
“But George, listen to that stuff that’s coming in. Can you read code?”
“Not any more. Not that fast, anyway.”
“Well, I can,” Pete said. “That’s early American ham. Lingo and all. That’s the kind of stuff the air was full of before regular broadcasting. It’s the lingo, the abbreviations, the barnyard to attic chitchat of amateurs with keys, with Marconi coherers or Fessenden barreters-and you can listen for a violin solo pretty soon now. I’ll tell you what it’ll be.”
“What?”
“Handel’s Largo. The first phonograph record ever broadcast. Sent out by Fessenden from Brant Rock in late 1906. You’ll hear his CQ-CQ any minute now. Bet you a drink.”
“Okay, but what was the dit-dit-dit that started this?”
Mulvaney grinned. “Marconi, George. What was the most powerful signal ever broadcast and by whom and when?”
“Marconi? Dit-dit-dit? Seventy-six years ago?”
“Head of the class. The first transatlantic signal on December 12, 1901. For three hours Marconi’s big station at Poldhu, with two-hundred-foot masts, sent out an intermittent S, dit-dit-dit, while Marconi and two assistants at St. Johns in Newfoundland got a kite-born aerial four hundred feet in the air and finally got the signal. Across the Atlantic, George, with sparks jumping from the big LeYden jars at Poldhu and 20,000-volt juice jumping off the tremendous aerials-“
“Wait a minute, Pete, you’re off the beam. If that was in 1901 and the first broadcast was about 1906 it’ll be five years before the Fessenden stuff gets here on the same route. Even if there’s a seventy-six light-year short cut across space and even if those signals didn’t get so weak en route that we couldn’t hear them-it’s crazy.”
Aliens from Analog Page 31
