The getaway special

by Jerry Oltion

  The defining moment, as it was, came when he reached "Zymurgy," stared at the blank screen below it for a moment, then said, "That was very illuminating. But it leaves several questions unanswered. Specifically, what is Copenhagen? And what is the significance of unequal bells?"

  "What?" asked Allen, nearly dropping the computer in surprise. Tippet leaped into the air until he got it under control, then landed again and said, "Do we not use the words correctly? We have inferred the rules of grammar from usage examples within the dictionary and from the recordings I have taken of your speech. We believe our comprehension to be extensive, if not exhaustive, but perhaps we are mistaken."

  "No, you've . . . you've got it right. But I don't—"

  " 'Good morning, Judy. Allen and I have been discussing the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics and the ramifications of Bell's inequality. Would you care to join us?' This is what you taught me to say this morning, is it not? We understand quantum physics, but this dictionary does not list

  'Copenhagen,' nor any definition of 'bell' that would elucidate the greeting." Allen blushed. "I . . . that was a joke. I just had you say it to surprise Judy."

  "Ah. Humor. Specifically the prank, or perhaps the practical joke. We understand. We see. We comprehend, follow, get, make out, take in, catch, conceive, grasp, fathom, compass, and grok. Ha, ha, ha."

  34

  It was an easy walk to the river. For one thing, they were crossing the foothills to the mouth of the canyon this time rather than climbing up into the mountains, but they could have been scaling a cliff and Judy would hardly have noticed the effort. Now that they could actually talk with Tippet, the floodgates burst open on both sides, and they peppered each other with questions.

  This was the fourth port of call for Tippet's ship, but the first habitable planet. He had been growing discouraged as star after star proved barren of life, but when he had arrived here, he had been ecstatic, even when he discovered that the atmosphere held too much oxygen for him to breathe safely. Judy had been thinking of Tippet as "him" since their first meeting—either out of habit or because her subconscious mind thought only a male would take pictures of a woman urinating—but the concept of "him" versus "them" proved even more slippery than gender. There were thousands of individual Tippets on board the ship, and hundreds of them on the planet's surface, but they weren't all autonomous. They could be for short periods of time when abstract thought wasn't required, but even then they would link with the others every few hours to share their experiences. And when they needed to solve a problem, they could all join into a single intelligence far greater than the sum of its individual parts.

  "That's how you learned English so fast," Allen said when he heard that.

  "Partially," Tippet replied. "Even our combined intellect would have taken days to assimilate all the concepts, so we enhanced it artificially. Our mind is less than half biological at the moment."

  "Jesus," Judy said softly. "Committees that are actually smarter than their individual members. And plug-in intelligence to boost it even further. If you could teach humanity that trick, you could name your price."

  "I suspect you would have to evolve the brain structures for linking first, but we can investigate the possibility."

  That led to a discussion of trade, and what each had to offer the other. Judy suggested music, then had to sing a song to demonstrate what she meant. She felt totally self-conscious, especially knowing that this would be the first exposure to Earth music for an entire race, but she took a deep breath and sang the Beatles' "With a Little Help From My Friends." She picked it for the opening line about singing out of tune, but the deeper she got into it, the more appropriate it seemed for the whole situation. Themes of loneliness, friendship, and love wove all through the song. After the first verse, Allen joined in and sang harmony, and she lost her embarrassment and gave it a lilting, happy tone that carried them all the way through to the end, which they stretched out until they burst into giggles and gasped for air.

  "Wonderful!" Tippet said, and he clapped his wings together in silent applause. "We have music, but ours is very different. We use a sixteen-tone scale, and since our language is not verbal, all of our compositions are instrumental."

  "Not verbal?" Allen asked. "How do you communicate?"

  "Directly through our neural link when we are in physical contact; otherwise by radio, but even then we send and receive the same nerve impulses that we would use directly."

  "You mean you learned a totally alien concept of language as well as the vocabulary when you learned English?"

  "Not entirely. We have audiolingual species on our world as well."

  "Hey," Judy said. "Before we get sidetracked into that, I want to hear one of your songs." Tippet hesitated a moment, then said, "We will have to lower it in frequency for you to hear it. Some of the nuances will be lost. But here is one that might interest you." The walkie-talkie had the acoustic fidelity of a rotting stump, but the foreignness of the music came through even so. It sounded all electronic, like experimental synthesizer music full of buzzes and beeps and warbling sine waves, and the notes were too close together. Judy kept waiting for a satisfying resolution, but measure after measure left her hanging, almost but not quite reaching the note that would have concluded the phrase. When the song ended, maybe ten minutes after it began, she had to hum the final note to keep from going nuts with frustrated expectation.

  "Yes!" Tippet said. "You understand!"

  "It's supposed to end like that?"

  "Yes. That was called 'The Solitary Scout.' An isolated explorer searches, and occasionally finds novelties, but without a hive to share them with, cannot find resolution."

  "That sounds like your own experience. Did you make it up just now?"

  "No. We composed it on board the ship on the way here from the last star we visited." We composed it. Judy wondered how many Tippets he was talking about. Did something like that take the entire hive mind, or was it the work of a few individuals? Just how smart were these guys on their own? She supposed it didn't really matter if they could link up when they needed to boost their brainpower. God, what an advantage that would give them!

  She wondered if there was an upper limit. The fact that they hadn't discovered hyperdrive implied that there was, but even so, Tippet's upgradable intellect scared the hell out of her. What if his race weren't the easygoing xenophiles they seemed to be? If they came into conflict with Earth, would humanity even have a chance?

  The back of her neck prickled. She tried to tell herself she was being silly, but she couldn't calm down, and the farther they got from the Getaway Special, the worse the feeling became. She told herself it was just fear of being stranded on an alien planet, but she knew that wasn't it. She hadn't felt this way yesterday when she and Allen had hiked up the ridge. This was a much more focused anxiety, centered directly on Tippet and his hive-mates overhead.

  They were almost to the river before she realized why: Tippet hadn't asked about the hyperdrive. Allen was busy talking with him about the natural harmonic overtones of a vibrating string, but he must have seen her stiffen in shock, because he suddenly turned to her and said, "What's wrong?"

  "Nothing," she lied. "I, um, I just understood something for the first time, that's all."

  "Oh." He ducked his head in a little shrug of pleased acknowledgment. "Glad to have been of service." He turned back to Tippet. "So the second overtone gives us what we call the dominant note in the musical scale, and the fourth gives us the mediant, which I'll bet are the very same notes you use for your sixth and tenth in your sixteen-note scale . . ."

  Judy glanced over her shoulder while he babbled happily on. She didn't see anything but forest and blue sky, and she hadn't heard any rocket engines or sonic booms from decelerating spacecraft, but how big would a landing craft full of Tippets need to be? It could decelerate way the hell up in the upper atmosphere and glide down the rest of the way and she would never notice. Maybe she was just bei
ng paranoid, but she and Allen had left the Getaway unattended, with the hyperdrive not just there for the nosy but spread out on her beanbag chair like an exhibit in a museum. She could imagine a whole army of butterflies busily studying it while she and Allen were away. Hell, last night's curious tree could have come back and learned the secret by now. The pistol in her waistband mocked her with its useless weight. Humanity's most valuable discovery since the wheel lay open for grabs a couple miles away, and there was nothing she could do about it. She would have turned around and gone back, but if Tippet hadn't thought of stealing it, she didn't want to give him the idea. Besides, she could hear running water up ahead. They had nearly reached the river; they might as well get what they came for and head back with a full bucket. The forest grew denser the closer they drew to the river. The competition for water apparently overrode whatever evolutionary signals kept the trees spaced so generously up in the hills. There were a lot more low bushes to contend with, too, sometimes blocking their path in long, heavily entwined rows, but Tippet took to the air and directed Judy and Allen through the maze until they were able to scramble down the last few dozen feet of bank to the streambed.

  It was heavily shaded down there. Big, stately trees hugged the bank, stretching their branches out over the river, which looked to be about thirty feet across and two or three feet deep. It was still moving fast on its way out of the mountains; the roar of water cascading over boulders made it hard to hear Tippet's voice on the walkie-talkie, and Judy and Allen had to shout to make themselves heard even a few feet away from one another.

  Judy didn't bother trying. She just pried the lid off the bucket, took her stuff sack out, dipped the bucket in the stream—

  —and the next thing she knew she was in the water. She screamed in surprise, got a mouthful of ice cold snowmelt that she swallowed before she could stop herself, then smacked her shoulder into a rock. She didn't let go of the bucket. The water was freezing and the same shoulder clipped another rock as she thrashed around trying to get her feet under her, but she kept a death-grip on the handle. She wasn't about to lose it now. She had walked all morning to fill that bucket, and in the process left the hyperdrive unguarded for anyone who came along to steal it; she wasn't going to compound her ineptitude by going back empty-handed.

  The rocks were at least rounded from erosion. Judy caromed off one after another, bouncing along like a boulder herself while the bucket dragged her downstream like a parachute in the wind. She pulled it up against her stomach and rolled over it, bringing her head out of the water for a second before she tumbled on around.

  "Judy!"

  She gasped a quick breath and saw Allen reaching for her, but when she stretched out an arm for him to grab, there was still a foot of space between their fingers.

  She went under again, rolled sideways, and managed to get her feet beneath her. Momentum carried her upright, and even though she knew the reaction would push her even farther into the stream, she flung the bucket toward the bank.

  Water sprayed out in a wide fan as it flew through the air. Judy had just enough time to think Good, it will hit the ground empty before she lost her footing and splashed into the stream again. The current carried her around a boulder the size of the Getaway, then dropped her into the pool in the lee of it. She swirled around a time or two before she found her footing again, then braced herself with her legs wide apart and stood up.

  "Yeeeow!" she screamed, flinging her head backward to throw her wet hair out of her face. "God, this is cold!"

  Allen was scrambling over tree roots to reach the point on the bank opposite her. "Are you all right?" he shouted.

  "I think so." She looked at the torrent that rushed past between them. The swath of white water was at least eight feet across: too far to jump even if she wasn't thigh-deep in a pool. If she tried to swim it, she would just get swept even farther downstream, and there were a couple more boulders down there she would just as soon not hit.

  But she had to do something before she froze to death. She was already growing numb; it wouldn't take long before she lost control of her legs and went under again. And besides, who knew what lived in the water?

  She looked up at the canopy of branches overhead, but they were way too high for her to reach. No vines, either.

  And of course there were no dead sticks on the bank for Allen to pull her to shore with. The forest was as clean here as everywhere else.

  Tippet fluttered up to one of the branches overhead. Allen followed Judy's gaze, then suddenly crouched down and leaped. For an instant she thought he was going for Tippet, but he grabbed the branch a foot past where the butterfly stood. Tippet sprang into the air, and the branch flexed under Allen's weight, but he did a quick hand-over-hand until he hung out over the water.

  "Be careful!" Judy shouted.

  He didn't reply, just kept coming one grip at a time, the branch swaying up and down with the motion until his feet bobbed up and down in front of her.

  "Grab on!"

  "I'll pull you in!"

  "No you won't. Grab on! Hurry!"

  There wasn't much choice. The branch was slowly drooping under his weight; if she didn't do something, he would wind up in the drink with her. She reached up and took hold of his ankles, but instead of adding her weight to his, she pushed upward instead, using his weight to push her feet firmly against the streambed while she walked across to the bank.

  He kept pace with her, pulling himself along hand-overhand above her and helping her steady herself when her feet slipped on the smooth rocks. When he made it to the trunk he let her drag herself onto dry ground before he let go and collapsed beside her, panting heavily.

  "Are you okay?" he asked.

  Judy felt her shoulder where it had hit the rocks. There would be a hell of a bruise there, but it didn't feel broken.

  "Other than feeling like a total idiot, I think I'm fine. What a dumb shit! I might as well have pitched an anchor in instead of that bucket. Hell, I'd have been better off with an anchor; it wouldn't have carried me so far downstream."

  Tippet flew down to land on a rock beside her. The walkie-talkie at Allen's waist crackled with his voice, but

  Judy couldn't hear the words. At the moment she didn't care. She just stood up, gave Allen a hand up as well, then squelched over the tree roots to the bucket. It lay on its side in the crevice between a root and a rock, undamaged. She picked it up and braced herself against the root, then dipped it cautiously into the water and lifted it out full, straining against its weight. Allen helped her stand up with it, then he retrieved the computer and her stuff sack while she snapped the lid on tight.

  "Let me carry that," he said, holding out the lighter equipment for her.

  "No," she said. "I can get it. Let's just go. I need to get back in the sunlight before I freeze."

  "What?" He bent closer.

  "I've got it! Let's go!"

  "Okay." He started up the bank, and as soon as Tippet realized what they were doing, he flew up ahead of them to lead the way.

  35

  When they could hear one another again, Tippet said, "Are you sure you are unharmed? You received several blows that would have killed a being of your size from my planet."

  "I'm fine," Judy replied. "I'm more worried about the water I swallowed when I went under." She set the bucket down on the ground at the top of the steep incline, then took a couple of steps away and shook like a dog. Allen's eyes nearly bugged out of his head when she did that, and she realized that her shirt was clinging to her body. She shook again just to taunt him, but she certainly didn't feel sexy at the moment. In fact, the thought of alien microorganisms swimming around in her stomach made her feel like throwing up, but years of astronaut training had given her a steady stomach. She could probably make herself do it if she had to, but she already felt miserable enough as it was, and she didn't imagine it would do much good anyway. Liquids didn't stay in the stomach long; if she'd swallowed anything dangerous, it was already spreading t
hrough her intestines.

  "Do you know anything about what lives in the water?" she asked Tippet.

  "I have tested samples of it for lifeforms," he said. "There are several different types of single-and multi-celled organisms, none of which are inimical to my health, but I don't know what their effect will be on you."

  "Inimical? Is that a word?"

  "I believe so. Did I not use it correctly?"

  "I don't know. I've never heard it before."

  "The dictionary defines it as 'injurious or harmful in effect.' It seemed the most appropriate word for the situation.

  "It probably is," Judy said. "I just never learned that one." She felt a little embarrassed to admit it. An alien who'd only learned the language an hour ago had a better vocabulary than a native speaker. He had no idea which words were common and which were obscure, but he knew every shade of meaning available. And what more did he know from reading between the lines?

  She couldn't shake her unease at his mental capacity, especially now that she stood before him dripping wet after a stupid mistake that could have gotten her killed. A mistake that could kill her yet if the alien bacteria proved deadly. His impression of the human race couldn't be good, and she wasn't doing anything to help it out.

  She checked the pistol, still tucked in her waistband. It was as wet as everything else, but she bet it would still fire if she needed it. It had the look of something that could take a lot of abuse and still work. Hah. Their weapons technology was probably the one thing humanity possessed that would impress Tippet's people, and that was exactly the wrong kind of impression to give them. She lifted the bucket again. Gah. Forty pounds. Maybe a little less here, but in a mile it would feel like eighty. If they had a pole to run through the handle, she and Allen could carry it on their shoulders, but she had seen no dead branches in the entire forest, and the live ones acted more like rubber hoses than branches. Besides which, she didn't know how to tell a mobile tree from a regular one—assuming any of them were normal trees. Cutting off a branch could be like amputating an arm. Neither she nor Allen could carry the bucket far alone, though. She set it down again and said,