The getaway special

by Jerry Oltion

  ". . . Eight, nine, ten, eleven. Hah, it missed one."

  The light winked out, and the butterfly hovered over their heads, waiting.

  "Nine's not prime," Judy said softly.

  Allen looked at her, then back at the butterfly. "You're kidding."

  "No," Judy said. "I think it's blinking prime numbers at us. Hold up one finger."

  "What for?"

  "Just do it."

  Allen did, and Judy added both of her hands beside his, all ten fingers extended.

  "Now hold out three."

  He did.

  "Now . . . uh . . ."

  "Seven," he said, tucking the gun between his knees and holding up two fingers of one hand and all five of the other.

  They held that position for a few seconds, then dropped their hands and waited to see what the butterfly would do.

  It blinked the light again. Judy counted nineteen, then a pause, then twenty-three.

  "I'll be damned," Allen said, carefully lowering the hammer on the gun and tucking it in the waistband of his pants. "It skipped twenty-one. I think you're right. The thing's intelligent." Judy shivered, thinking, Be careful what you ask for. "Now what?" she asked.

  "I don't know. How do we communicate with a bug?"

  They just had, she supposed, but unless they could teach it Morse code, they were limited to math. Judy thought it over for a few seconds while the butterfly hovered patiently overhead, then she extended her hand out like Allen had done earlier, making a little landing pad. She held her other hand over it and fluttered her fingers like wings, then brought them down into her open palm.

  "Let's see if it understands an invitation," she said.

  "Even if it understands, it may not be brave enough to—"

  Before Allen could finish his sentence, the butterfly swooped down and touched her palm, then backed away. Judy flinched, but she forced herself to keep her fingers extended. The touch had tickled, but if the butterfly saw her clench her fist, it would never trust her.

  "It's all right," she said softly. "I'll be careful." She mimed landing again, and this time it followed her fingers down to stand on the muscle at the base of her thumb. It weighed no more than a couple of quarters.

  She lowered her hand until her face was just inches from the butterfly. From there she could see its body in detail, but there wasn't a whole lot of detail to see. Its wings were the same color blue from root to outer edge, and its body was shiny yellow, like their septic tank. It had a bulbous yellow head with one big oblong eye that wrapped halfway around, not faceted like an Earth bug's, but smooth all the way across. It had eight legs, two of which were holding the source of the winking light: a metallic silver box with an unmistakable lens in front and an activity indicator above the lens. The butterfly held the box up to its eye again and the light came on.

  "It's filming," she whispered. She couldn't have spoken louder if she'd wanted to. She was surprised her voice worked at all. This was an intelligent alien, standing right on the palm of her hand. She swallowed, then said, "H-hello. My name's Judy. What's yours?" If it replied, its voice was out of the range of her hearing, but it folded all of its wings to point straight up, then lowered them one at a time until all six touched her hand.

  "What do you suppose that means?" she asked.

  Allen shook his head. "I haven't got a clue."

  This was the moment when a properly equipped interstellar explorer would break out the Universal Translator and immediately begin discussing trade relations with the aliens. Or failing that, they would at least start learning each other's language, teaching one another concepts as diverse as love, courage, wonder, and "that's mine" until they could converse like schoolmates. Judy supposed the latter might be possible, given enough time, but it assumed that the aliens at least had a language to learn.

  "How about the computer?" she asked. "Can we use it to draw pictures or something?"

  "What?"

  "We've got to figure out some way to communicate with this guy. It doesn't sound like he uses speech, so I thought maybe we could try pictures."

  Allen said, "Good idea, but I don't have a drawing program."

  They hadn't brought any paper or pens, either.

  The butterfly raised and lowered its wings again; quickly on the upstroke, slowly going down. Judy imagined that was its equivalent of talking loudly for the foreigner, but it didn't help her a bit. She felt a sudden urge to clench her fist; not out of any desire to harm the butterfly, but merely because this was a fist-clenching moment if ever there was one. Here she was, meeting face-to-face with an intelligent alien, the first one humanity had ever found. This could be the most important discovery in history, even bigger than Allen's, but it could just as easily turn into the most pathetic footnote for lack of a way to communicate.

  "We use sound," she said to it. "Words. My name is Judy." She pointed to herself with her free hand, then pointed to Allen, "And that's Allen." For lack of anything better to say, she repeated it a couple of times, pointing back and forth. "Judy, Allen, Judy, Allen." The butterfly flapped its wings once more.

  "How about the radio?" Allen said.

  "The radio? But he's right here."

  "It's another way to communicate. If this little guy's got a video camera, maybe he's got a radio, too. We did hear a lot of static when we were in orbit; maybe some of that was actual transmissions."

  "I suppose it's worth a try," Judy said.

  "I'll go fire it up." Allen backed away, then turned and jogged to the Getaway. Judy followed him at a slower pace, hoping the butterfly would stay put if she didn't jostle it too much. It grew more and more agitated, flapping its wings and crawling around on her hand, but it didn't fly away. Nor did it settle down when she stopped beside the yellow plastic tank. Its wings quivered and its feet danced, tickling Judy's skin. She wondered if it was truly excited or if she was reading human emotion into something completely different, but it certainly seemed to be doing a little victory dance on the palm of her hand. After a few seconds it settled down and turned its camera toward the makeshift spaceship, panning from one end to the other, then it did lift off and circumnavigate it once before coming to rest on Judy's hand again.

  Allen's voice echoed from inside the tank. "I'm setting the frequency as high as it'll go. That guy doesn't have much room for a long antenna. Hello, this is Allen Meisner. Do you hear me?" He let up the microphone button, but there was only static.

  "Okay, let's try a little lower. Hello, this is Allen Meisner. Do you hear me?" Still just a little bit of static.

  "Lower still. Hello, this is Allen Meisner. Do you hear me?"

  The butterfly dropped its camera.

  The tiny box bounced off Judy's palm and tumbled over the edge between her thumb and forefinger. She lunged for it with her other hand and caught it just a foot or so down, then tilted her hand until she could grasp it in her fingers and hold it out for the butterfly to take from her, but it wasn't paying any attention. Its wings were quivering again, and all eight legs were moving at once, spinning it slowly around like a radar dish.

  "I think he heard that," she said.

  "Yeah?"

  "Something spooked him."

  She took a closer look at the camera. It was no bigger than a watch battery, and a small one at that. The lens was the biggest part of it; an eighth of an inch across and just as long. If the camera were scaled up to human size, that would almost certainly be a zoom lens with macro capability. It connected to a boxy housing with tiny slots in the sides for the ends of the operator's legs to fit into. The radio crackled with static inside the Getaway, then Allen spoke again: "Hello out there. One. Two two. Three three three. Four four four four. Five five five five five." The static returned, rising and falling in waves, but the waves were the same length, separated by long and short pauses, and they came in sets of six, seven, and eight. Not primes this time, but Allen had simply been counting upward, so the butterfly had apparently decided to continue the same progres
sion.

  "Yes!" Allen called out triumphantly. "That's him!"

  "Oh, great," Judy muttered. "Now we're doing math over the radio." Then the receiver crackled again, and a voice like a kids' toy with a string in the back said, "Oh, great. Now we're doing math over the radio."

  "Who the hell was that?" Allen yelled.

  "That was me. Our friend must have heard me and relayed it back to you." A second later, the radio echoed that, too.

  "All right," Allen said. "Now we're getting somewhere." Judy didn't see that simple mimicry was all that much better than exchanging numbers, but she supposed it at least proved that the butterfly could hear her and make the same sounds. Over the radio, of course, but it was still sound.

  Then the radio crackled again and the pulled-string voice said, " Skkkkk , one, two, three, four, five."

  "Math again," she muttered, but Allen had already keyed the microphone and said, "Six, seven, eight, nine, ten."

  There was a pause, then the voice said, "Three . . . one, one, skkkkk three, seven, five, five."

  "What the heck is that, a phone number?" Judy asked.

  Allen said, "No, it's pi. Provided skkkkk is zero."

  "Yeah, right. Pi is three point one four one five nine something or other."

  "Not in base eight. And base eight is just what you'd expect from somebody who's got eight legs." Judy stretched up and peered inside the tank at Allen. "You know pi in base eight?"

  "No, I calculated it."

  "With what?"

  "In my head."

  The radio crackled, and the scratchy voice said, "Yes! That's him! Three point one four one five nine two six five."

  "Hot damn!" Allen said. "He heard you, and he filled it out to ten digits. That means he's already figured out that we use decimal notation. This is going to be a piece of cake." Maybe for Allen, but Judy hadn't come all this way to trade numbers. What were they going to do, start talking in sines, cosines, and tangents? This could be the trigonometry class from hell if she didn't do something to derail it.

  She held the tiny camera in front of the butterfly, and this time it took it from her with its front two legs. "What do you call that?" she asked. "We call it a camera."

  "We call it a camera," the voice said over the radio.

  She bent down and picked up a rock, then said, "This is a rock. Rock. Rock."

  "Rock," said the voice over the radio.

  She walked up to the closest tree and rested her hand against its trunk. "Tree." The radio was hard to hear from this distance, but she could just make out the scratchy reply:

  "Tree."

  "Now we're talking," she said.

  30

  The sun set way too soon. Judy and Allen and the butterfly had barely gotten into sentences like "I fly to tree" before the clouds over the mountain turned red and the shadows began to deepen. Judy would have gone on with the language lesson all night, but when the light began to fail, the butterfly, whom they'd begun calling "Tippet" as the closest approximation they could manage to its name, lifted into the air and said, " Tppppt go skkkkk dark."

  "You can stay with us," Judy said, but she knew there were too many new concepts even in that short a sentence for Tippet to understand. "Tippet stay here dark," she said, patting the side of the Getaway.

  The butterfly paused, evidently considering her offer, then said, "No. Tppppt go. Come back sun east sky bright."

  Judy was getting good at puzzling out the sentences he made with his limited—but fast growing—vocabulary. "Yes," she said. "We'll be here at sunrise. Sun east sky bright is sunrise. Sunrise. Understand?"

  "Sunrise. Understand. Tppppt come back sunrise." Then the butterfly turned away and flew up over the trees, heading south. That was toward the river. Maybe tomorrow they could kill two birds with one stone: get some water and see where the aliens lived.

  Since Tippet had seemed able to hear them just fine without the radio, Allen had left the receiver turned on with the volume cranked up and had climbed out of the Getaway to participate in the language lesson. Now he leaned back against the side of the tank and said, "He's obviously not afraid of bats or birds, or he wouldn't be flying up high like that. I wonder if he's at the top of the food chain here."

  "Add that to the list of questions," Judy said. She'd been keeping mental note of all the things she wanted to ask when they learned how to communicate well enough. It was a long list. But at the rate they were going, they might start whittling it down pretty soon.

  They had given up trying to learn Tippet's language, but that was mostly because he was so much faster at learning English. He only needed to be told the names of things once, and he could pick up simple verbs like "walk" and "run" after only a couple of demonstrations. He didn't have any trouble forming the words, either. His pronunciation was so good, in fact, that Judy suspected he was somehow storing them and playing them back when he needed them, which implied computer technology and digital sampling capability at least as good as humanity's, if not better.

  "Intelligent butterflies," she said, shaking her head. "Who'd have guessed?" Allen crossed his arms over his chest. "Bugs have a pretty well developed social structure, so it's not too surprising that they could develop high-order brains."

  "It's the size of the package that amazes me." Judy flexed her hand to get the blood flowing in it again. She'd been holding it out as a landing platform for most of an hour, taking breaks only when Tippet flew over to something to name it. "And all that tiny stuff he was carrying with him. That's some serious miniaturization there."

  Allen laughed. "I doubt if Tippet looks at it that way. That's just the size you build things if you're his scale."

  "I guess." She looked out into the forest, which was taking on a different character as twilight deepened toward night and the shadows spread beneath the trees. What other sorts of creatures might live here? Tippet was the only animal they'd seen all day, but who knew what might come out at night?

  Tippet traveled armed, if that little stinger of his was what it looked like. That implied the existence of something at least dangerous to him.

  On the other hand, she and Allen had traveled armed today, too, and that was because they didn't know what to expect. But Tippet presumably did.

  "Oh," she said out loud.

  "What?"

  "I just realized something. Tippet must have come looking for us on purpose, after he saw us land. That's why the video camera and the radio and the stinger and stuff. I was wondering why he was so well prepared for a first-contact situation, but it makes sense if he was expecting it."

  "Hmm," Allen said. "I never thought about that, but yeah, you could be right. He did seem to be pretty well equipped."

  "I wonder if he told any of his friends about us, or if he's keeping the discovery to himself?" Allen climbed onto the tank and held out a hand to help Judy up. "Well, I don't know about him, but we were broadcasting at a couple of hundred watts. Unless he's the only one with a radio, we could have had an audience for kilometers around."

  Judy shivered at the thought of thousands of aliens knowing about them. Even as tiny as Tippet was, if a bunch of his compatriots decided to come after the intruders with pitchforks, things could get ugly. There had been no indication that Tippet thought that way, but humans didn't all think alike; why should butterflies?

  "Let's, uh, make sure we're ready to jump at a moment's notice tonight, eh?" He paused with one foot inside the Getaway and one out. "You expecting trouble?"

  "No. Just paranoid."

  "Ah. Well, there's no harm in being prepared."

  They climbed inside and settled in for the night. Judy set the pistol on the five-gallon bucket that housed the auxiliary hyperdrive so either she or Allen could get to it, and he put the computer in landing mode so all he would have to do if they needed to jump was hit the escape button and it would take them 100,000 kilometers into space. They had to switch on the flashlights so they could see what they were doing, but as soon as they had zipped
themselves into their sleeping bags and snuggled into place, Judy switched the lights off. Their plasma batteries would last for months, but she didn't want the tank glowing like a beacon in the night. They were high-intensity halogen lights; even shining into the milky-white bags to diffuse their beams, they were bright enough to light up the inside of the tank like day. She wished they could close the hatches, but then they would have to use their internal oxygen supply to keep the air from growing stale. They couldn't afford to do that; they needed the rest of their oxygen for the trip home. Closing the hatches wouldn't offer much protection anyway, since they opened inward. She and Allen would just have to stay alert.

  "I'll keep first watch," she offered. Her voice echoed in the enclosed space. It might have been the only sound on the whole planet as far as she could tell.

  "Oh, sure," Allen said. "Very generous of you, considering we're both too wired to sleep."

  "All right, then, let's draw straws."

  "Why don't we just see who drops off first, and the other guy can stay awake for a while longer." She snorted. "That's the stupidest idea I've ever heard. What if we both fall asleep?"

  "Then we both get some sleep. Nothing's going to happen."

  "Famous last words."

  Allen didn't reply right away, and when he did it was to say, "This is when my mother is supposed to stick her head in the room and say, 'You kids knock it off and go to bed.' " Judy giggled. "It is kind of like a slumber party, isn't it?"

  "It is. I definitely feel like a little kid again, that's for sure."

  "Me too." Judy felt a lump under her butt, and twisted around so she wasn't sitting on it anymore. She pulled the sleeping bag up to her neck and inhaled its familiar aroma. It took her right back to childhood, back to the times when she would go car-camping with her dad. They always pitched a tent, and she always intended to spend the night in it, but rain or wind or night noises would keep her awake until she crawled into the back seat of the car.

  "You know," she said, "I haven't felt this good since . . . heck, I don't know if I've ever felt this good. We've discovered aliens!"