by Jerry Oltion
"Fair enough," Judy said. "That's as much as we could ask."
"No," Tippet replied. "You asked for more. But that is what we will do."
"All right then," Allen said. He fumbled around in the dark on his side of the tank, then cursed and reached for the flashlight. "Watch your eyes," he warned.
"Don't shine it outside!" Tippet warned.
"I won't." He held his hand over the lens while he flipped it on, then moved a single finger aside to cast a thin beam of light onto the wall beside him. After the total darkness, the bright yellow glow lit up the tank like day. He pushed aside floating debris until he found what he was looking for: the spare hyperdrive. He picked up the bundle of wires and batteries, switched out the light, and pushed himself out through the hatch.
"Okay," he said. "Let's see how quickly we can beef up the circuitry to handle the extra field size." The butterflies' engineering shop was a mad scientist's dream. When Tippet led them inside, Allen's eyes glittered in delight, and even Judy had to admit it was pretty cool. It was the size of a warehouse store, and packed with gadgetry of every description. Judy recognized metalworking lathes, electronic test equipment, power generators—everything a spaceship would need to keep itself in good repair during an interstellar flight. Most of the stuff was tiny, to match the butterflies' own proportions, but some of it was on a more human scale, and some of the industrial tools dwarfed even that. Robotic arms provided control for anything too large for the butterflies to manipulate on their own. Tippet led the way into the middle of it. They had brought the walkie-talkie with them so he could talk with them, but he hadn't abandoned the tree; another butterfly had come into the garden to continue the conversation with a speakerphone that could produce the same frequency of sound that the tree did. Tippet was just as much a part of that conversation as the one he carried on with his human guests, but Judy was glad he had come along with them anyway. She knew it was silly, but no matter how interchangeable the individual butterflies were, she felt more comfortable with the same one she had come to know.
They quickly met more members of the hive as curious engineers came to see Allen's invention. There were easily a dozen of them crawling around on the circuitry while he explained what each part did, and what they needed to do to make it move a ship the size of theirs. It took them less than an hour to grasp the concepts and make the modifications. Their circuitry looked like fungus spreading tendrils through a barrel full of bread loaves, but it accepted the output from Allen's patchwork construction and amplified the size of the jump field a thousandfold. Allen and the engineers spent another hour testing it with an automated maintenance pod—automated because none of the butterflies wanted to be cut off from the group mind— but when they were satisfied that it actually worked and that the field was large enough to take the whole starship with it, they all trooped inward to the center of the ship and mounted it on a wall there.
If there had been any doubt that the ship was alive, the deep interior removed it. The corridors were tubular and meandering, and they pulsed with constant motion. They glowed with a greenish bioluminescence that gave them a ghastly, spoiled-ham sheen, and fluids moved sluggishly through parallel tubes that pressed against the walls. Gurgling noises came from all sides, growing louder the deeper they went into the ship's belly.
"You, uh, genetically modified all of this?" Judy asked at one point.
"That's right," said Tippet proudly.
"Starting with what?"
"A swssht. An eater of comets. They already use rocket propulsion, so it wasn't that radical a change. We added extra stomachs and vessels for our own use and modified its nervous system to take our commands, but that was relatively easy."
"For you, maybe." She wondered if there were swsshts around the Sun. There could be all sorts of things out in the comet belt beyond Pluto that people knew nothing about. Not that it mattered now, except for curiosity. People wouldn't need huge spaceships, even if they could be grown like fish in a hatchery. Neither would the butterflies, anymore.
Just as well, she thought as they negotiated a tight passage that reminded her just a little too much of a gullet.
At least it was warm in the heart of the ship. They finally reached the very center of it: a wet, smelly oblong chamber with three-foot-long protrusions sticking out at all angles like thin stalactites from the ceiling of a cave. A host of electronic gadgetry was already mounted to the spines; evidently more than just the hyperdrive needed to be located in the middle of things.
They found an unused stalactite and tied the modified hyperdrive engine to it, tested the remote control circuitry, then backed away a few feet. "No sense in waiting," Allen said. "Go ahead and give it a try."
He had already shown them where Earth was. Tippet said, "We are measuring the field axis. Correcting our aim. Translation in three . . . two . . . one . . . now." Judy felt an instant of disorientation, gone as soon as she became aware of it. Tippet made a hissing sound, then said, "This is not going to be a popular method of travel among my kind."
"You still got cut off from the hive mind?" Allen asked.
"Not cut off this time," Tippet replied, "but our thoughts were . . . scrambled . . . for a moment. Perhaps it was from the sudden loss of our members on the planet." Judy had completely forgotten about them. They had just been doomed to die as dumb animals.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I—I hadn't even thought about them. We should have picked them up first."
"That would have taken more time than we have. Don't worry; they knew they would end up alone when they left the ship. Their thoughts are still part of us. The mind goes on."
"Did, uh, did the modifications work?" Allen asked.
"We have gone somewhere," Tippet said. "It will take a moment to determine if we went where we intended to."
They waited. There was no sense leaving until they were sure the drive didn't need adjustment. But within a few seconds, Tippet said, "We are on target. Twenty-six billion of your kilometers to galactic north of your sun."
One light-day. That was over four times Pluto's distance and they were out of the plane of the ecliptic to boot; there was no way anybody could spot them there.
They worked their way back out to the periphery of the ship. That's where most of the living space was, either because it was the easiest part of the organism to modify or because it let more rooms have windows; Judy didn't know which. Whatever the reason, by the time they got there, she was glad to get back into a chamber that was cold and damp.
Tippet led them toward the communications center, which was near the nose of the ship. Judy expected a dizzying array of equipment, something like a cross between a television studio and mission control, but when they got there, it was surprisingly small and austere. It was a spherical chamber maybe twenty feet across, with a couple of dozen butterfly-sized workstations scattered around it seemingly at random. One whole side was given over to green space, and there was even a two-foot pond in the middle of it. That would be the floor during thrust, then, but for now it would make a good background for their computer-generated alien.
"Here's what we have come up with," Tippet said, fluttering up to the biggest of the workstations, at which another butterfly stood, his eight legs gripping the controls. There was a flat monitor about the size of her hand mounted on the wall, from which a triangular head with a face like a bat stared out at them. Judy and Allen nearly clonked their heads together getting close enough to see it, and Tippet had to cling to Judy's collar to stay out of their way, but she supposed this was a theater-sized screen for a butterfly. The galactic overlord had six eyes on stalks and nostrils where a bat's eyes would be, and the mouth was a round hole with teeth all around, but it was closer to a bat than anything else Judy had seen. The hive mind had created it from her and Allen's descriptions of their nightmare images, and embellished it from there.
"Pretty good," Allen said, "but make it hairier."
The technician tweaked a couple of controls, and th
e creature's forehead and cheeks sprouted thick, spiky hair.
"No," Judy said. "Now it looks like a teenager. Besides, hair is too mammalian. We need alien. How about tentacles?"
The hair morphed into thicker tendrils about half the length of the eyestalks. "Good. Now put some drool on those teeth. Make it slobber when it speaks."
That was the work of another few seconds. Now the thing looked like it wanted to bite someone's head off just sitting there. "What does it look like in motion?" she asked.
"If you will provide the template, we will show you," Tippet said.
"Template?" Judy asked.
"Yes. In order to give it truly lifelike behavior, we will overlay it on a real-time image of you."
"Oh," she said, startled at the sudden realization that they expected her to play the actual overlord.
"I . . . well, okay. Where do you want me?"
"Over by the pond." Tippet took a camera from the workstation and flew out to the middle of the room.
Judy pushed herself into position, then said, "What do you want me to do?"
"Whatever you want our simulation to do."
"Right." She felt even more self-conscious than she had the first time Tippet got her on camera, but she took a deep breath and said, "Okay, this is just for practice, right?"
"Of course," Tippet said.
"Okay, here goes." She threw her head back in what she hoped was a haughty attitude and said,
"People of Earth! You have intruded upon the domain of the Federation of Galactic Societies. Normally you would be welcomed with knotted tentacles—" she held up her arms and wiggled them back and forth "—but you are in violation of section forty-two, paragraph twelve, subparagraph three of the charter of member races, which strictly prohibits the construction, transport, or use of weapons of mass destruction, or the export of hostile attitudes into Federation territory. You must immediately dismantle these weapons and cease your hostilities toward one another, or we will be forced to subdue you before you disturb the galactic peace with your uncivilized behavior. This is your only warning!" She tried to hold a stern expression on her face, but it only lasted for a second before a giggle slipped past and she burst into laughter.
"God, that was terrible!" she said.
Allen shook his head. "No, no, it was wonderful! Look!" He reached out for her and helped pull her over to float in front of the tiny screen. "Play it again," he said. The technician backed it up to the beginning and let the clip run. Judy shuddered when the face took on life; it suddenly looked like a real creature, mad as hell and eager to kick ass. Its lips moved in perfect synch with her speech, which had been lowered in pitch and altered with echoes and harmonics until it sounded like it came from the bottom of a mile-deep pit and out of a throat that was used to howling at the moon. "People of Yaarth!" it bellowed.
The plants in the background had all been altered, too. Perhaps taking a cue from the intelligent tree they had discovered, the technician had made them all quiver when the overlord spoke. The pond had been morphed into a nimbus of light in their midst, and it rippled with multicolored waves that varied with the intensity of the voice.
When it came to the line about "knotted tentacles," the creature raised four sinuous arms entwined in a ball, but they slid apart as he spoke, scraping a layer of slime off one another until it dripped off their ends and out of the frame.
"Eewww! Disgusting," Judy said.
"Did we overdo it?" Tippet asked.
"No, that's perfect. It'll scare the bejeezus out of practically everybody, and gross out the rest." They watched it through to the end, then Allen said, "That was perfect. I thought the 'subparagraph three' bit was particularly inspired. I don't see any reason to do another take." Judy had to agree. She would never be able to match the spontaneity of that one.
"Okay," she said. "Let's go see how it plays in Peoria." 45
They jumped to within two light-minutes of Earth. Their message was only forty-three seconds long; that left them plenty of time to send it and be gone before anyone even knew they were there. And it was far enough away that the ship would only be a speck in the best of telescopes, even if anyone managed to get one pointed in the right direction in such a short time. Plus the closer they were to Earth, the more signal strength they had. They were broadcasting on every commercial television and radio frequency at once, plus the microwave downlink frequencies the satellites in geosynchronous orbit used. Those signals would probably be fuzzy and distorted from coming in at the wrong angle, but what they lacked in direction they made up for in power. The starship's communication equipment had been designed to punch a signal across a dozen light-years or more in order to make regular reports to the homeworld. Judy waited by the window when they jumped. The stars didn't shift, but a new one popped into view directly in front of her: a double star, both members showing tiny half-moon crescents. The smaller one was indeed the Moon. The other one was Earth.
She wasn't prepared for the pang of homesickness that shot through her when she saw it. Her breath caught in her throat, and her eyes misted up so badly she had to squeeze them shut and shake the tears away. She was home.
Well, actually she was still farther away than any astronaut had ever gone until the last couple of weeks, but after where she had just been, what was a few light-minutes?
"Deploying relays," Tippet said. The ship's engineers had built a fleet of baseball-sized satellites that would stay behind and listen for any response to Judy's message that people might send from Earth. They were small enough to be virtually undetectable, but they could record incoming transmissions and then jump to within useful radio distance of the starship and deliver their recordings in a compressed burst, and they would relay back and forth so there wouldn't be any gaps in coverage. Even if nobody replied, they would listen in on radio and television signals so Judy and Allen and Tippet could learn what was going on.
They had decided to hide the ship in the asteroid belt beyond Mars. There were thousands of free-flying rocks out there, ranging in size from grains of sand all the way up to spherical bodies hundreds of kilometers across; nobody would notice if one of the medium-sized ones suddenly acquired a companion.
"Broadcasting message," Tippet said.
From the workstation behind her, the voice of the Galactic Overlord growled, "People of Yaarth!" Judy grinned as she listened to it. She could see her own image reflected in the window, a ghost-Judy superimposed over Earth and Moon like a protective angel while her evil twin's ultimatum raced outward at the speed of light to stir up trouble.
The message finished, and Allen, still hovering near the control board, let out a whoop. "Hah! Take that, foul minions of chaos!"
They didn't replay it. A true Galactic Overlord would never repeat himself. Of course a true Galactic Overlord wouldn't say what Tippet said next, either: "Heading for cover." Earth and Moon blinked out like headlights dropping behind a distant hill. Judy turned away from the window. Now they waited to see what people would do.
"How's the tree holding up?" she asked Tippet.
"Very well," he replied. "Our vocabulary improves by the minute. It finds our subterfuge amusing, and the reason for it horrifying. It wants to know, if your people treat each other so poorly, how do they treat the other trees on your planet?"
She and Allen exchanged a worried glance. By "other trees" it probably meant "all the other lifeforms," but the answer was the same in either case. Judy said, "Um, it probably doesn't want to know."
Tippet said, "I told it as much. I find many alarming terms among the words I learned from your dictionary. 'Clearcut.' 'Genocide.' 'Desertification.' It's a wonder your species has survived as long as it has."
Judy nodded, feeling the crush of world pressure squeeze the joy out of her life again. "Well, it's anybody's guess whether we'll make it through the next few days."
The first burst of news from the relay drones wasn't encouraging. The message had interrupted programming even better than they had hoped
, but the United States had quickly branded it a hoax, and the rest of the world had accused the U.S. of doing it on purpose to confuse their enemies. Allen snorted when he heard that. "Hoax, eh? That's what they said about the hyperdrive plans, too. They apparently got a quantity discount on stupid excuses when they decided to start lying to the public."
"So what are we going to do about it?" Judy asked.
"Just what we planned to do," Allen said. "Throw rocks."
"I'm not enthusiastic about this part," Tippet said.
Allen shrugged. "Me either, but we've got to convince 'em we mean business. Have you mapped the orbits of the asteroids we need?"
The butterflies' stellar comparator equipment was designed to detect debris in the ship's path while traveling in the darkness of interstellar space; they could spot a lump of coal a million kilometers away. Tippet said, "We have determined the orbit of every asteroid larger than . . . well, larger than your head, roughly. There are thousands of candidates with the required mass and vector to use as projectiles."
"Good. Call up an image of Earth and let me show you what we want to hit." That proved to be more difficult than it sounded. Allen didn't have the experience in space that Judy did, and didn't realize how difficult it was to recognize familiar landmarks when they were partially obscured by cloud or stretched out at odd angles across the curving surface. She edged closer to help him, squinting to see the tiny screen without bumping her nose on it or on the butterfly operating the controls. It reminded her of her first computer, an Osborne 1, one of the first portable computers ever built. In its day, "portable" meant it was the size and weight of a suitcase full of rocks, but it was a complete, functional computer—provided you had a magnifying glass to see the five-inch diagonal monitor.
"That's the Atlantic Ocean," she said, pointing at the blue-and-white swirls of cloud and water in the middle of the screen. She pointed to the right, at a hint of green and brown amid the blue. "There's the U.S. coast. Lake Michigan. Gulf of Mexico." On the left, she pointed out the Mediterranean.
