by Stan Ruecker
“Did you hear that, Lucy?” Ray asked, while Cinnamon explored the moon at the utmost reaches of her leash. “Who would’ve thought?”
“How do you know they were telling the truth?” Lucy said. “For all you know, those three are part of an advanced guard that’s going to take over your solar system.”
“I can’t believe it,” Ray laughed. “And besides, as far as I can tell, they’ve already taken over Jupiter. As if it matters. It’s not like my people were using it for anything.”
“Good point,” Lucy said. “But aren’t you worried? I mean, here they are, technologically superior aliens, with information about your civilization as specific as the names of your football leagues, and you’ve never even heard of them.”
“Nobody ever heard of you, either,” Ray pointed out. “And you know at least as much as they do.”
“That’s different,” Lucy said. “I’m not an entire civilization.”
“You could bring one back with you,” Ray said. “There’s nothing stopping you.”
“I guess there isn’t,” Lucy agreed. “I can’t say I’m that crazy about football, though.”
Ray laughed again.
“You’re in a good mood,” Lucy said.
“I figured something out,” Ray said. “I got a chance to meet a new species, and they were intelligent.”
“Did we meet the same people?” Lucy asked.
“Well,” Ray said. “You know what I mean. They have space travel. They talk English.”
“You’ve got a pretty funny definition of intelligent,” Lucy said.
“And I liked them,” Ray added.
“Gamblers,” Lucy said, “and ne’er-do-wells.”
Ray had reached the airlock. He gave a tug on the leash, and Cinnamon came bounding over the surface of the moon. Her suit was dirty from rolling around in the moondust. They cycled through the lock, and while Ray got the dog out of her suit she managed to get dirt all over her nose.
“Do we have to do something about her muzzle?” Ray asked. “Or can that stuff hurt her?”
Cinnamon sneezed.
“There isn’t any silicon fibres or anything, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Lucy said. “It’s just dirt.”
“Still,” Ray said, “it must be different from Earth dirt.”
“She’s never lived on Earth,” Lucy pointed out.
“That’s right,” Ray said. “I forget. But she’s still genetically from there.”
“I suppose it might be caustic,” Lucy suggested. “But it can’t be too bad, or she’d complain.”
“That’s true,” Ray said. “But I’ll change the water in her dish, maybe.”
“That’s a good idea,” Lucy said. “You can never be too careful.”
“Somehow I can’t believe you mean that,” Ray said. “Aren’t you the probe who actually docked at Phoenix II?”
“I’m as careful as I need to be,” Lucy said.
“You mean, if you were making a bet, say, you’d want to have a record?” Ray said. “Just to be on the safe side.”
“You better believe I would,” Lucy said. “The world is full of welchers.”
“So they were a sort of accounting records,” Ray said, “after all.”
“Accounting might be putting it a bit strongly,” Lucy said.
“Do you think we’ll have a chance to go to Jupiter sometime?” Ray asked.
“I’d like to,” Lucy said. “Now that I’ve met some of the people. But I can’t make any promises.”
“Still,” Ray said. “I’m glad you brought me here.”
He stowed the last of his gear in the locker.
“So what have you got in mind as the next bit of excitement?”
“How about a nice afternoon watching football?” Lucy suggested.
Kim
Rachel woke up her computer and got it to call an independent field agent she knew in India. They’d worked together for several years at RISK, before Kim left to go it on her own as a consultant. On Kim’s last mission with the firm, Rachel had still been an active agent rather than a management hopeful. She and Kim had been mining a target when Kim got hit and all the explosives went off at the same time.
With the money she got from disability insurance, Kim’d set up her own company.
“I’m not working for anybody,” she said, “who doesn’t do a better job at scoping out the target. Not when it’s my neck on the line out there.”
It hadn’t actually been Kim’s neck for a few years already, since she’d quickly put together a high-tech firm of scapegraces to handle the hands-on. That freed her time, she said, to make sure she wasn’t sending anybody into a big mistake.
“The charge of the light brigade,” Kim had said, “was not the act of a company setting out to make a profit.”
Rachel didn’t even trust herself as much as she trusted Kim. She waited for the computer to make its announcement that the call had gone through, then smiled.
“Kim,” she said. “How’ve you been?”
“Good,” Kim answered. “Is that Rachel Norman?”
“Yeah,” Rachel said. “It’s me all right. How’s the leg?”
“Better,” Kim said. “But it still bothers me when the weather gets bad.”
“Ice and heat,” Rachel said. “That’s what a person needs on a sore leg. First the ice, then the heat.”
That was the advice Kim’d gotten from the doctor at the time of her injury. By using the exact phrase the doctor had used, Rachel made Kim as certain as a person could be that it was actually her on the other end of the phone.
“I haven’t heard from you in a while,” Kim said.
“You know what it’s like,” Rachel said. “I’m in charge of a budget now. They’re talking about giving me a division.”
“It isn’t easy getting up there,” Kim said, “now that they’ve flattened out the structure so much.”
“I’ll say,” Rachel answered. “It used to be you had five people, there was a sixth one in charge. Now you’ve got what, maybe fifty, sixty people all reporting to one supervisor.”
“It’s the small business model,” Kim said. “Imagine an outfit like RISK pretending it’s small business. Why don’t you join the good guys and forget about those impostors?”
“Then who’d arrange for you to get business?” Rachel said. “Or are you guy’s going twenty-four hours a day as it is?”
“Is this an offer?” Kim said.
“It might be,” Rachel said. “I’ve got a project that involves putting some data together.”
“Data,” Kim said, “I can manipulate. What kind of data do you have in mind?”
“There’s a problem with the PM,” Rachel said. “And they’ve asked me to look into it.”
“There sure is,” Kim said. “I think the guy’s an idiot, personally. What would you like?”
“First of all,” Rachel said. “I want you to find out everything you can about this Foundation for the Preservation of Humanity. Where are they getting their money: that’s what I want to know. Drugs, guns, or what? They don’t have any friends in industry, that’s for sure. We need to know enough about them to pull them back if we have to.”
“Okay,” Kim said. “I’ll get a system running on them and we’ll see what we can find.”
“That’s good,” Rachel said. “I don’t have to tell you to take care of it personally.”
“Your wish is my demand,” Kim said. “I’ll call you when the reports start to come in. What site are you using?”
Rachel gave her the location of her drop site.
“Anything else?” Kim asked.
“How’ve you been?” Rachel answered.
“Fair enough,” Kim said. “I’m not getting any younger. How about you?”
“I’m doing all right,” Rachel said. “Not that I stay around long enough for anybody to notice.”
“I’m with you there,” Kim said. “Always busy.”
“Keeps you out o
f trouble,” Rachel said.
Kim snorted.
“I’ll drop you a note,” she said. “As soon as I can.”
“Goodbye,” Rachel said, and they broke the connection.
Alien spaceship
Ray woke up to a beam of sunlight streaming through the window and the smell of coffee brewing.
“Lucy?” he asked, temporarily confused.
“Yes, Ray?”
“Where am I?”
“You’re on board me,” Lucy said.
“Where’s the sunbeam coming from?”
“I thought you might like it,” Lucy said. “Did I get the spectrum right?”
“Sure,” Ray said. “It looks just like a beam of sunlight. Where did you get a window?”
“It’s just a picture of a window,” Lucy admitted.
Ray sat up.
“And how about the coffee?” he said. “Is that just the smell of coffee?”
“No,” Lucy said. “The coffee’s real. Would you like some?”
“You bet,” Ray said, and stretched. The coffee slid out of the wall. It was in a terra cotta coffee pot painted with inaccurate flowers, and there was a huge mug to match.
“Did you dream?” Lucy asked.
“Yeah,” Ray said. “I dreamed hard.”
“What were they about?”
“I don’t remember them all,” Ray said. “One of them was about mice. There was a big warehouse full of mice, and they had all this leftover equipment that somebody had abandoned in the warehouse. Or maybe they were just storing it there. But anyway, the mice were planning to build themselves a spaceship, using the equipment. Only they couldn’t get it right, because they had to carry all the parts in their teeth.”
“Were you one of the mice, or were you just an observer?”
“I was a mouse,” Ray said. “But I had this idea you could use your tail to carry things. Only nobody else thought it’d work. And sure enough, it was hard. My tail just wasn’t that strong. But it was more accurate than using my teeth, so there was some advantage there. You had to work in pairs, so one mouse would watch what the other one was doing and give directions. Because the other mouse had to do everything behind its back, using its tail.”
“But we finally had a ship, so we must’ve gotten it built. I think this was a new dream. We had to decide who was going to make the first flight in it. It didn’t look like it was very safe. But I knew I had to volunteer to go, because I was the one who’d had the idea about using our tails.”
“So what happened?” Lucy said.
“We fired the ship into space,” Ray said. “I was in there alone, sort of crunched into the corner of the ship, because of the acceleration. We hadn’t realized I’d need a chair, I guess. But I didn’t make it. I only got about halfway up the sky before the ship started falling back to Earth.”
“Was it a nightmare?” Lucy asked. “Or a good dream?”
“Not really either,” Ray said. “It wasn’t really scary or anything.”
Ray set his empty cup back on the tray.
“Would you like something to eat?” Lucy asked.
“Okay,” Ray said. “How about french toast? And bacon.”
“Coming right up,” Lucy said. “But there’s something I have to tell you about, Ray.”
“Is it serious?”
“Pretty serious.”
“Life-threatening?”
“Potentially,” Lucy said. “Although I don’t think it’ll come to that.”
Ray’s breakfast appeared, and he found he had a tremendous appetite.
“So what is it exactly,” he said. “You can tell me while I eat, can’t you?”
“Sure,” Lucy said. “It has to do with something I’ve picked up on scan a while ago. Take a look at this.”
A moving hologram appeared on the floor beside the bunk. It was, Ray correctly guessed, a spaceship. A spiralling spaceship. It looked like a slinky that had gotten mistreated and left out somewhere for leaves to fall on it.
“Okay,” he said. “What is it?”
“It’s not a design I’m familiar with,” Lucy admitted.
A little spot, a crumb, appeared in the space next to one of the chewed leaves.
“That’s us,” Lucy said.
“Are they broadcasting anything?”
“Nothing. No, wait. Let me put it on for you.”
A different voice came over the loudspeaker. It sounded like a pretty reasonable voice.
“Are you doing something with that?” Ray asked.
“Yeah. I put it into a range that you can hear.”
“Shift it into its normal register for a minute.”
The room went silent, but Ray’s eyes began to water. Cinnamon started barking somewhere down the corridor. Lucy turned it off completely.
“This is it,” Lucy said. “They’re taking us into one of their docking bays. It’ll only be a couple of hours now.”
“What’s going to happen?”
“If they’re like everybody else in the known universe, they’ll separate us for questioning. They’ll hurt us if that’s fun for them, which it mostly is. If they have any other uses for us, they’ll put us to those uses.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s the best I can tell you at this point.”
“It isn’t much to go on.”
“Well, if it’s any consolation, they probably won’t eat you.”
“Why is that?”
“It’s almost impossible to find compatible biologies. You’re pure poison to practically everybody I know.”
“That is some consolation,” Ray conceded.
He got out of bed and pulled on his clothes, then headed down to the galley.
“What are you doing?” Lucy asked.
“I’m going to make myself a sandwich,” Ray said.
“Don’t bother,” Lucy said. “I packed you a lunch.”
“A lunch?”
“It’s over in the cooler.”
Ray went and took a knapsack out. There was a bowl for Cinnamon and he set that in its bracket on the floor.
“Oh. And one more thing,” Lucy said.
A fat silver bullet came buzzing down the corridor and stuck itself in one of Ray’s pockets.
“I doubt if they’ll let you keep it, but that’s a drone. She’s relatively autonomous. I can create more of them if I need them, but let’s start with that one.”
“What good will it do?”
“It’ll keep you company.”
“Is company that important?” Ray asked.
“I think it’s the most important,” Lucy said.
A couple of fixers
Ray sat near the hatch with his knapsack beside him. He could feel the drone rolling over and over in his pocket. He put his hand against the cloth and it quieted down.
“So what happens next?”
“Go out there and talk to them.”
“They won’t speak English.”
“So they’ll figure it out. I’ve been sending them signals ever since it became obvious that we weren’t going to get away.”
“How long has that been?”
“A couple of days.”
“I don’t suppose you considered giving me some time to prepare?”
“Of course I did. It would’ve been the worst thing I could’ve done to you.”
Ray rubbed his head with both fists. He decided to change the subject.
“You never did tell me, you know.”
“Never told you what, Ray?”
“We were talking, before these aliens showed up, about why you took me prisoner.”
“Not prisoner.”
“That’s what you said before. So if I’m not a prisoner, and I’m not a specimen, and I’m not a representative, then what am I?”
“What do you do for a living?”
Ray thought for a minute.
“I fix things.”
“Like what kind of things?”
“Like trouble.”
“Can you be more specific? Trouble covers a lot of ground.”
Ray blinked. “I reduce the undesirable consequences of other people’s actions.”
“That’s what I thought. And what about me?”
“You’re an alien probe.”
“What do alien probes do?”
“They carry copies of Beethoven’s ninth symphony.”
“Not all of them. What else might they be doing?”
“If you’re H. G. Wells, they would be scouting out new planets for aliens to conquer.”
“In this case, Ray, that’s right.”
Ray thought for a minute.
“You spent a long time studying Earth, didn’t you?”
“It depends what you mean by a long time, Ray. In geological time it wasn’t very long.”
Ray swallowed. “Are you trying to tell me that you have been observing the human race since our earliest history?”
“I never said that.”
“You sure seem to know a lot about the human race though, Lucy.”
“I can safely say that I have had access to any information that was ever recorded digitally. I also have reviewed roughly 80% of the analog data ever produced by people. I know far more about the Trojan war, say, than any of your experts. And I have pretty thorough botanical records. My methods of gathering information are quite sophisticated, after all.”
“So knowing what you do about us, maybe you’ve decided we should be destroyed. You must be aware that large numbers of people are beginning to think that we shouldn’t be kept around, that we’re nothing but a scourge on the universe.”
“That seems a little egotistical, don’t you think?”
“Well, a scourge on Earth, anyway. But we’ll get to the universe if we have enough time.”
“I don’t want you destroyed.”
Ray looked to one side.
“That’s good news,” he said. “But do you mind if I ask you why not?”
“I just don’t want to be hurt myself,” Lucy said.
“Excuse me?”
“I said I just don’t want to be hurt. It began to dawn on me that for reasons I don’t understand I have developed an attachment to Earth. When I thought about what would happen to you when I made my report, I wanted to cry. I don’t think I could survive if your planet were destroyed.”
“Are you trying to tell me you fell in love with the whole human race, Lucy?”
“Are you trying to trivialize my emotions, Ray? I’m about to betray my own people—I’m about to betray my own creators—on behalf of a planet full of blood-thirsty apes, and you think you can reduce my motives to a four-letter, notoriously over-used, exasperatingly ill-defined word like ‘love?’“
