A Matter for Men watc-1

by David Gerrold

  Ted turned onto a ramp and pulled up at a convenient side entrance. "I'll see you later, okay?"

  "Sure. Uh, nice meeting you, Dinnie." I stepped back as they rolled away. Spiralism?

  I shoved my hands into my jacket pockets and headed into the hotel-huh? What was this? Oh, Dr. Obama's lockbox. I'd almost forgotten I was carrying it.

  I found a row of terminals and slid into a booth. It took only a moment to register with CORDCOM. My card disappeared into the slot, then rolled out again, overprinted with a yellow stripe. A large C in a red box had also been printed in the upper right corner. Was that it?

  I cleared and punched for Directory, Lieutenant Colonel Ira Wallachstein.

  The screen flashed: SORRY, NOT FOUND. Huh?

  Maybe I had miskeyed. I typed it again.

  SORRY, NOT FOUND.

  Well, that was ... weird. I called up PROJECT JEFFERSON next, tried to list its personnel.

  SORRY, NOT AVAILABLE.

  Tried the Denver Area Military Directory. He wasn't listed there either.

  I sat puzzled for a moment, wondering what to do next. I scratched my head. Why would Dr. Obama give me a package for somebody who wasn't here? Or maybe this Colonel Wallachstein had moved on and hadn't let Obama know? Maybe I should call Dr. Obama and ask. No, something told me not to.

  I took the box out of my pocket and looked at it. There was nothing extraordinary about it, just a one-piece lightweight unit. Rounded corners. No markings, other than the printed keyboard and the lock. Not much rattle to it either. I had to think about this. I didn't want to destroy it. Not yet. That would feel like failure.

  I slid it back into my pocket. Maybe tonight, back at the barracks. Maybe I'd missed something obvious.

  I cleared the board and called up the day's conference schedule. The general session on Chtorran biology and behavior began at ten o'clock. Apparently it was a weekly session. I scanned the rest of the calendar, hard-copied it, logged off and went in search of breakfast.

  I had bagels and lox and strawberries and cream. I ate alone, and I was still in better company than Ted.

  TWENTY

  THE MAN at the podium looked unhappy.

  There were too many empty seats. The auditorium was only a third full.

  I hesitated at the back of the room. The audience had already begun to segregate themselves into sections.

  The military attendees were seated up close, but on the sides. I hadn't realized it was possible to sit at attention. The funnylooking types were all in the first five rows. Of course, I'd never been to a convention where it hadn't been so. The serious types scattered themselves in the center of the room. The turbans and the burnooses-and there were an awful lot of them-were milling in the aisles, chattering away at each other as fast as they could, ignoring the frowning man on the dais.

  The room roared with the noise of a thousand separate conversations-a babbling torrent of words. Didn't they realize how loud they all were? Each one was shouting to be heard above all the rest, and as each one raised his or her voice, all the rest became correspondingly louder too. It wasn't hard to see why the man at the podium was so unhappy.

  I found an empty row halfway to the front and took a seat near the center. I put a fresh clip into my recorder and slipped it back into my pocket.

  The unhappy man stepped to the edge of the stage and whispered something to an aide, the aide shrugged, the man looked unhappier. He checked his watch, I checked mine-the session was already fifteen minutes late. He stepped back to the podium and tapped the microphone. "Gentlemen? Ladies?" He cleared his throat. "If you would please find seats, we can begin-?"

  It didn't work. The noise of the conversations only increased as each speaker shouted to make himself heard over the public address system. I could see that this was going to take a while.

  "Delegates? If you please-?" He tried again. "I'd like to call this session to order."

  No one paid attention. Each and every one of them had something so important to say that it superseded every other event in the auditorium.

  The unhappy man tried one more time, then picked up a tiny mallet and started striking an old-style ship's bell that was perched on top of the podium. He hit it four quick times, then four times more, then again and again. He kept on striking it, over and over, a steady rhythmic dinging that could not be ignored. I saw him looking at his watch while he did it. Apparently he'd been through this before.

  The groups began to break up. The various conversations splintered and broke off-they couldn't compete any longer-and the participants began drifting into their separate seats. The only conversation still going full bore was one between three deaf women--or maybe they were interpreters-in Ameslan.

  "Thank you!" the unhappy man said at last. He touched some buttons on the podium in front of him and the screen behind him lit up with an official-looking announcement. It repeated itself every fifteen seconds, each time shifting to a different language: French, Russian, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Swahili, Arabic-I couldn't identify the rest. The English version said: "English interpretations of foreign language speakers may be heard on channel fifteen. Thank you."

  He waited while the various delegates inserted earpieces or put on headphones. They rustled and gobbled among themselves, each one taking an impossibly long time.

  Something on the right caught my eye-Lizard! Major Tirelli! She was on the arm of a tall black colonel; they were laughing and chatting together as they found seats three rows forward. I wondered if I should call hello, then decided against it. It would probably only annoy her, and besides the auditorium was filling up now and it would be conspicuous, and probably embarrassing. I wondered if I should save a couple of seats for Ted and Dinnie-except I didn't want to-until finally the question was answered for me when a dark, handsome woman sat down on my right, and a second later, a pair of lieutenants took two of the three seats on my left. The handsome woman was in a lab coat and was carrying a clipboard. She switched it on while she waited and began reading through some notes.

  I took my recorder out of my pocket to turn it on, and she touched my arm. "Not a good idea," she said. "Some of this may be classified."

  "Oh," I said. "Thanks." And dropped it back into my pocket, thumbing it on anyway as I did so. I don't think she saw.

  The unhappy man began banging his bell again. "I think we can begin now. For those of you who don't know, I'm Dr. Olmstead, Dr. Edward K. Olmstead, and I am the acting director of the Extraterrestrial Studies Group of the National Science Center here in Denver. I'd like to take this opportunity to welcome all of you to this special session of the Continuing International Conference on Extraterrestrial Affairs.

  "I am required by the rules of this conference to remind you that much of the material that we will be presenting here is generally classified on a need-to-know basis. While that includes all of our registered attendees and their respective staffs, we still want to stress that the material is for your use only and should be treated as confidential. We are not yet prepared to release some of this information to the general public. The reasons for this will be discussed in tomorrow's session on culture shock. Your cooperation is greatly appreciated. Thank you.

  "This special Saturday session is being held for the convenience of those delegates who will not be here for the full conference schedule. As always, this session is going out live on channel two. If you need more information on any specific subject, that access is available through the project network, of course. Please feel free to tap in. If you don't already have a clearance number, check with the desk.

  "As you can see by your schedules, we're going to try to present all of the scientific material in the first two and a half hours, and follow up with the more important questions of contact and containment procedures this afternoon-after a reasonable break for lunch, of course. As I'm sure most of you have already discovered, the hotel here has an excellent buffet. Tomorrow we will spend the morning session on the cultural and psychological q
uestions, and the afternoon meeting will deal with the economic sphere. We do apologize for presuming on so much of your time, and we thank you in advance for your cooperation. This is, of course, a working weekend, so at this time I'd like to turn the microphone over to our conference chairperson, Dr. Moyra Zymph."

  There was a spattering of polite applause as Dr. Zymph came up to the dais. She was a stout woman, slightly disheveled, and she moved like a truck driver. When she spoke, it was with a gravelly, I-mean-business voice. "All right, let's get to it." She slapped her clipboard down onto the podium. "I know that most of you are more interested in finding out the answers than in listening to the questions. Unfortunately, all we have right now are questions. We have lots of questions . . ." She paused for effect . . . "and a few educated guesses, which I will share with you.

  "I want you to think of a jigsaw puzzle-with most of the pieces missing and no picture on the cover of the box to guide you. Now think of a warehouse full of similar incomplete jigsaw puzzles. Now mix them all up. Now find someone who's never seen a jigsaw puzzle before in his life, and put him in the middle of this pile of mixed-up pieces and ask him to figure out what's going on here. At the point he realizes what a jigsaw puzzle is, he's won the game. He's solved the hardest part of the problem. "I want you to hold that picture in mind, because that's what we're up to here. We've got a warehouse full of pieces. We know what individual pieces look like, but we don't know what the pictures look like-we do know for sure that this is a warehouse full of incomplete puzzles. We've solved the hard part. And we'll tell you about that.

  "Now, some of you are not going to like what you hear. You are especially not going to like the implications. Some of you may be so disturbed by the material presented that you'll want to question its validity. You'll want to dismiss our conclusions because you can't accept the facts. Please do not make that mistake.

  "I want you to know that it's all right to be uncomfortable with the material. We certainly are ... and we've been living with it for a while. Just don't use that discomfort as an excuse to hide from the urgency of the situation." She paused long enough to let that sink in, looking around the auditorium as if daring anyone to object.

  No one did. Not yet. Dr. Zymph nodded and continued. "Good. So what we're going to do here today is show you some of the pieces that we are certain about and then go from there to the larger pattern. I will not be showing you all of our puzzle pieces-we don't have the time-but I will be showing you those items which you most need to know about."

  She switched her clipboard on and began referring to it. "First off, we can tell you this. The Earth, this planet that we live on, is experiencing an ecological infestation. The source of the infestation is presumed to be extraterrestrial." She touched a hidden control on the podium and the screen behind her came back to life, showing two views of the Earth, front and back. There were red splotches blinking across the larger land areas. It looked like a case of measles. She continued:

  "The infestation has appeared on all five major continents: Asia, Africa, both of the Americas and to a lesser extent-although we don't know why yetEurope. We have not yet confirmed any signs of infestation in Australia or Antarctica. So far, the evidence suggests that it is generally limited to the temperate zones of the planet, the same areas in which the bulk of our human population is established. That is, the remaining human population." She stopped and looked out at the room. "The-uh, population crisis will be discussed at tomorrow's session. I urge all of you to be there. We do have some specific recommendations, but they have to be implemented immediately. And I want to point out that our primary concern is not just saving our human resources, but putting them to work in ways that contribute to the larger effort." She looked uncomfortable. She bent back to the security of the notes on her clipboard.

  "The infestation has manifested itself in several distinct forms that we are aware of-and probably quite a few more that we have not yet discovered." She stopped, touched a control, looked behind her to see that the screen was showing the appropriate slide-some kind of red sludge floating on a lake-and continued. "While most of the attention has been focused on the more, ah, dramatic aspects of this infestation, I want to make you aware that that there is considerable ecological impact in other areas as well. We are experiencing events in the microbial and botanical spheres, for instance, that are every bit as serious, though perhaps not as noticeable.

  "I'm going to give you only a few examples to demonstrate the scope of the problem. Please be assured that it is far worse than these examples suggest. This first one is a kind of algae. It breeds fast, it floats on the surface of the ocean and it's moderately toxic. It tends to occur primarily in the offshore regions, but it can also be found on still lakes and backwaters. Once it establishes itself, it tends to choke out most other plant life. It does not use chlorophyll for photosynthesis, which explains its red to red-purple color." Behind her, the screen showed muddy crimson breakers crashing on a long stretch of shore. The pink sand was stained with dirty streaks that looked like clotted blood.

  "As I said, it is moderately toxic, and I want to take a moment to expand on this. The sludge exudes a particularly nasty set of byproducts, including some interesting long-chain molecules that seem intended for use by the next creature in line in the ecology; but whatever that creature is, it hasn't manifested itself yet. And I don't know whether to be thankful or not.

  "Sludge-infested water usually feels oily-and the oil is particularly difficult to clean off. But if you do get the oil on you, it's essential to get it off as quickly as you can, because it very effectively clogs human pores and reduces the skin's ability to breathe. For the record, it also smells bad-so at least you have that much warning.

  "If you are unlucky enough to swallow sludge-infested water, you will definitely regret it. You'll experience nausea, diarrhea, vomiting and fever. If you're strong, you'll survive. If not, you won't.

  "Now, I want you to think about the fish and the plants in that same water-unlike you, they can't get out to go lie down for a while. Prolonged exposure to the sludge is always fatal to them. The smaller the creature, the quicker it dies.

  "Wherever the red sludge appears, the plankton disappearsfollowed by the fish that feed on the plankton and the predators that feed on them, all the way up the food chain. The red sludge turns ocean into desert. This is going to have a disastrous effect on the global food chain if it is not controlled. If the seas die, we die. And already the red sludge has infected three-tenths of a percent of the world's farmable waters, and that figure is climbing at an alarming rate. Now, I know that three-tenths of a percent doesn't sound like a lot, but when you consider that two-thirds of the Earth is covered by water, then you have to realize that we are already talking about several hundred thousand square miles-and it may be in the millions already; we don't know for sure. But you can extrapolate from that." The screen showed the map of the world again. There were red streaks off the coast of China, California, Brazil and parts of Africa. "These are the areas of primary infestation," she said. "At the present rate of spread, within two to five years most of the world's richest sea farms will be lost.

  "I do wish to alarm you about this-because this may be the single most threatening aspect of the infestation. So far, the sludge has resisted most of our attempts to control it. It does not seem to be temperature sensitive, and it can survive a wide range of water conditions. We've had some success at inhibiting the growth of the sludge with tailored bacteria, but it is a limited success. To date, our best results have been obtained by pouring crude oil on the water and setting it on fire. I'm sure I don't have to say much about the unacceptability of that solution."

  She stopped to take a drink of water, checked her notes, then brought up another series of pictures on the screen-spme kind of insect-looking bug; but it stood on two legs. Its front four legs were very short, they looked atrophied, except that each terminated in a very strong-looking claw. The grasshopper in its mandibles establish
ed a sense of scale. The bug was the size of a sparrow. "This is not an insect," Dr. Zymph said. "Do not fall into the trap of thinking that it is an insect, because to do that is to wear blinders to the possibilities that the creature has some very un-insectlike capabilities."

  The next picture showed the creature standing-almost lurking-in a dark corner. It stood erect, and its long black shell-casing enveloped it like a cape. The shape of its head as well as its posture made me think of Jack the Ripper. "We call this fellow the nightwalker," Dr. Zymph said. "He's a comparatively recent discovery, so we can't tell you too much about him. He eats most kinds of terrestrial insects, and is not averse to the occasional mouse, bird or frog. This is a small one. We've found them as big as twenty centimeters. We hope that's as big as they get. We're not sure. They are not poisonous, but the bite is painful. An interesting thing about that bite-most predatory insects liquify their food to eat it; this fellow is large enough, he doesn't have to bother. He uses his mandibles like teeth. We believe that his digestion is something like a bird's in that he may have to swallow small pebbles to help grind the food in his stomach. This is a good place to note that he is a serious competitor for the birds' place in the ecology. He has a voracious appetite and will undoubtedly provide some very powerful competition to all of our smaller predators."

  Another set of pictures-this time, it was a pink puffball thing. "We're still not sure if this one is plant or animal. We call it the cotton candy bug. It's as light as a dandelion, and it's as easily spread. It is nontoxic, it is edible and, as far as we have been able to determine, it does not appear to endanger its surroundings. What that means is that we still haven't determined what kind of a danger it is-and I'll touch on that point in a minute too.

  "First, I want to show you this cute little fellow-" There was polite laughter as the slide came up on the screen. "We call him the pipe cleaner bug, because he looks like he's made out of pipe cleaners. Again, do not be misled by the fact that he looks like an insect. That's just the ecological niche he lives in. He does not have a segmented body, and his exoskeleton is covered with a thick skin and that soft white fur that you see. That fur is actually a very sensitive olfactory organ. The creature smells the air with his whole body. Now note the bunny feet: those pads are also sensory organs, even more sensitive. He's not just standing on that leaf, he's tasting it as well. The creature's eyes are on the tip of those two antennae, and they are regenerative. This fellow eats the cotton candy bugs; he is eaten by the nightwalker. I can't tell you much more than that. We know nothing about his breeding habits. We can tell you that he moves very fast and can eat twice his own weight in leaves every day. We expect to be seeing a lot more of him next summer. Or even sooner."