“Could they learn to speak it, do you think?”
“Again, with something that can process as fast as these transmissions indicate they can process, it wouldn’t be a matter of learning a new skill, the way it is for us. Once they’ve got English on file, they’d simply reverse the algorithm and spit it back out. The problem is, though, whether they think enough like us that anything they say is comprehensible.”
“Well,” said Allerton. “The main thing is that he’s communicating. Which is good, because I have questions I expect answers to. And some propositions I’d like to put to it.”
Penderson looked tired at the thought, and rubbed a hand across his leathery face. “What makes you think it wants to talk to you, Allerton?”
“I’m the President, damn it! Leader of this planet’s preeminent nation. Don’t you think that’s why it’s here? Do you think it’s a coincidence? I believe that this attack was just a negotiating ploy. That’s why I instructed Ed to come and work out the technical details, so that I could negotiate with it. And remember—this animal’s our prisoner, completely at our mercy. It has no choice but to talk to us. And who are you to say differently, in any case, an asteroid miner like you. Did asteroid mining teach you the finer points of trading in power?”
“No, Mr. President, I’m just an old journalist who knows that nobody reveals anything unless there’s something in it for him.”
W
e stood on the packed dirt outside the hangar and ate sandwiches, while the comm techs instructed their MI to perform a particular task Penderson and I had requested.
There was to be an antenna placed next to the cage, through which the MI would listen for the EHF band the aliens appeared to be using. Since it would be a long time before the priests could decode the aliens’ own compacted transmissions, the communications MI was to ignore those messages and listen instead for ordinary sound carried on the same frequency, and then broadcast the sound back through a speaker near the cage. It was to act as an ordinary radio, in other words, tuned to the aliens’ remarkably high broadcast frequency.
The sky had lowered and blackened, and out on the rise beyond the buildings the ranchers herded their cattle toward lower ground. Heat lightning still flickered behind us in the east, and the air smelled even more strongly of dust and the coming rain than before.
Finally the device was ready and Penderson and I left the others to finish their lunches, and went in and told the alien that if it would modulate its communications frequency with human speech, it could communicate with us.
Nothing happened. We tried prompting it by asking for the hexadecimal value of pi, or for the measurement in its units of the frequency of free hydrogen, or for where it came from; but it didn’t move and the speaker made no sound, and finally we gave up and went back outside.
Sometime later we were talking about how to move the alien to the ship and had decided it would be easier to have our ship brought up to the base, when a technician stuck his head out the door to report that an experimental squawk had come over the speaker.
Penderson and I went back in and ran through our questions all over again, spicing them up with vague threats and promises, but still the alien remained silent. We gave it up again and walked out into the hangar for coffee, then met the others in the conference room. Allerton came in late, saying he’d had to make calls to his office.
“I would have been surprised,” said Penderson, “if it had been any different.”
“Why?”
“Well, think about it. Did you notice, for instance, that out in the comm van there was a screen there in the back, flashing on and off in big red letters something about ‘advise system time and status?’ ”
“Um—”
“Well, it was right there next to me, and I saw it, yet I didn’t advise it of any such thing. Even though it wanted to know.”
“Harry . . .” Dorczak’s brown eyes studied him as she stole a sip from his coffee.
“The truth is,” he said, “I couldn’t have cared less whether it got its ‘system time and status.’ Why the hell should I have?” He took back his coffee.
“Well.” Allerton smoothed back his white hair and began to pace. “I’m sure this animal realizes that it should care whether it answers our questions. It must know that it’s in an untenable position—”
“My guess,” interrupted Penderson, “from listening to Colonel Becker here, is that personal danger isn’t even a concept to these things. There’s nothing it fears from us, and nothing it needs.”
“That’s scary,” said Becker.
“Yes,” I said, “but wait a minute, Harry. There is one thing it wants, and it is something we have control over.”
T
he technicians laid copper mesh across the entire roof of the storeroom, working quietly up under the hangar’s ceiling. Then with a series of power cells they drove the mesh’s potential down to a negative fifty thousand volts. The aliens’ signals could get neither in nor out. A switch to disable the shielding was placed just outside of the cage.
Numbers of us went near the cage a few times to make important-sounding statements, and in between, the technicians paraded intriguing and powerful-looking contraptions past it. The antennas picked up the alien’s brief squirts of attempted transmissions, and then finally the communications MI reported that, whatever was being transmitted, the exact same thing had just been transmitted twice in a row: The alien finally knew it wasn’t getting through.
Penderson and I told Allerton and the others that for the next step we would need to concentrate, and over their objections we shut them out of the storeroom and pulled chairs up to the cage. I picked up the switch that controlled the shielding.
“If you answer some questions,” I said, “I can let you talk to your friends again.”
Nothing happened.
Penderson leaned closer to me. “It may be real weak on some of those concepts, Torres. Let me try.” He worked his teeth across his lip for a minute in thought, then spoke.
“If information is provided, communications will be open.”
“Query information type,” said the alien.
The words had come from the speaker without hesitation, in a thin, sharp voice, very slightly inflected. The creature itself remained perfectly still.
“No shit,” said Penderson.
“How do we ask it where it’s from?” I said.
He stared at the cage. “Query,” he said, “your place of origin.”
“Deck ninety-one,” said the speaker, “communications not open.”
Penderson glanced at me. “That’s a big help. It had a berth on deck ninety-one. You’d better hit your switch—it expects its communications to be opened the instant it gives an answer.”
“It’s hardly told us anything, Harry—”
“Do it. It’s the interviewer’s first law, Torres: Don’t mess with the ground rules. Or they never talk to you again.”
I hit the switch for an instant and our indicator lit up to show that the alien had transmitted something, presumably the bits of information we’d been dropping near its cage earlier.
“Query,” I said, “cause of the attack against this base.”
We waited for several minutes, but nothing else came from the speaker. “It’s got no reason to answer,” said Penderson.
“It’s got the same reason as before: being allowed to transmit.”
“There’s nothing new it wants to send.”
“Ah-hah, tit for tat.” I turned back to the cage. “The attack against the Chinese weapons base on planet number three caused weapons production there to stop permanently. Query: cause of the attack against this base.”
“Origin of explosions on planet six satellite three removed before remainder removed. Communications not open.”
Penderson understood before I did.
“Jesus, Torres, I don’t believe this. Come here a minute. No, hit the switch first. Okay, come here.” He pulled me back in amon
g the shelves and leaned down to speak quietly. “Can Allerton hear what this thing’s saying?”
“Hell, no, not a chance. When the shielding’s live we’ve got the only antenna. I’ll bet he’s shitting bricks, though, wondering what’s going on. Did you understand that last answer the same way I did?”
“Yeah. Allerton’s got interplanetary delivery systems and he’s testing them by dropping warheads on H-vi’s third moon. Where he thinks no one will notice. Except that the aliens did, and they saw where the missiles were coming from. Torres, there’s no way Allerton’s going to let you back off this planet with that alien.”
“He’s still got Polaski to answer to. He isn’t strong enough yet to rock the boat that much.”
“Accidents happen.”
“Let me deal with Allerton. How did you like the tail end of that last answer: ‘before remainder removed’? As though removing this base was just a chore on the way to scraping humans out of the system.”
“I thought they didn’t care one way or the other about humans.”
“Okay, on the way to scraping out of the system whatever it is they think they see here.” I rubbed at my eyes and leaned out to look down the row of shelves at the grey beast frozen in its cage. “It’s being damned honest about things, isn’t it?”
“It may not understand deceit,” he said. “It’s a pretty refined art, hard to calculate. So is the mutual leaking of military information, which is what we’re doing. We’ve got a finely tuned sense for it, developed over thousands of years. It may not.”
“Well, I do. Come on.” We sat back down, and I spoke again to the alien.
“The Chinese weapons production that is stopped permanently on planet three is now continuing on planet five, satellite one, underground beneath the equatorial base on the near-planet side—”
“Jesus, Torres,” hissed Penderson, “that’s the Indian—” I held up a hand to stop him.
“Query:” I said, “origin of fractures to environment domes on black planet—planet number four—prior to your attack there.”
“Vessels of mass three element one moving from planet five satellite two to planet two. Communications not open.”
My stomach turned. It wasn’t an answer I’d expected.
I pressed the switch to allow the alien to pass along the information about the Indian mines on H-v’s moon, then shook my head to clear it and stared around the storeroom. Polaski. The shutter in the wall rattled in the wind and a rumble of thunder came in from outside. I walked away to lean on a shelf, and Penderson followed me.
“What’s going on?” he said. “You asked how they blew out our domes?”
“No . . . no, that’s not it.” Had I? “No,” I said, “I asked it who did it.”
“You asked—what’s the matter, Torres, you don’t look so good.”
The world had tilted on its side, and it had filled with images of McKenna and the black domes cracking at night.
“You sick, or what?” said Penderson.
“I’m all right.”
“No, you’re not,” said Penderson. “So what was that all about with the alien? What’s a vessel of mass three element one? Is that what this is all about? Come on, what’s going on, Torres?”
“Element one is hydrogen,” I said. “The isotope of hydrogen with a mass of three is tritium. It’s produced at a plant on H-v’s second moon.”
“Okay, but it said tritium vessels.”
“We’ve been shipping tritium from H-v’s moon to Lowhead on light freighters. Those are the vessels it’s talking about. The tritium was supposed to be resold here as a medical tracer.”
“Supposed to be?”
“Tritium’s also used to make hydrogen warheads.”
“Oh. I see.”
“No, you don’t. The point is, we’re the ones who’ve been shipping it. Us—the black planet. We pick it up from the mines and bring it to Lowhead on ships we lease from Pikes Mountain. It’s a project of Polaski’s.”
“You telling me Polaski knew the tritium was for weapons instead of for medical tracers?”
I looked away.
“Wait a minute, Torres. The alien said it was the ships carrying tritium that caused our dome failures. Is that what this is all about? I mean, forget how they could do it, why would they do it? It doesn’t make sense.”
My hands were cold. I wanted to get moving, get somewhere else.
“Torres,” said Penderson after a minute, “I’ve got a feeling you’d better make real sure everyone thinks that having you talk to this alien is the best thing that’s ever happened to them.”
“Yes.”
“You know that? So what’s this business about the Indian mine? You just sentenced a couple hundred miners to death.”
“No, I didn’t. Let’s go, Harry. I’ve got more questions, then I want to get out of here.”
I sat down in front of the alien again as the first of the rain spattered against the shutters. I felt sluggish, no longer interested in the process. Or in Serenitas, or in the attacks, or in my brief ascendancy over Allerton. The alien in its cage had become dull and colorless, unimportant.
“On the black planet,” I said to the alien, “on the side farthest from the environment domes that you attacked, are deep fissures in the surface. New weapons capable of destroying your forces are being hidden in those fissures. Query: place you were created.”
“Deck ninety-one. Communications not open.”
I pressed the switch and tried a last time.
“On the anti-spinward shore of the sea of this planet, large orbital habitats are being prepared for launch. Query: place your species was created.”
“Deck ninety-one. Communications not open.”
S
o maybe that’s where it was built, and it doesn’t know any different.” Becker put his hands in his pockets and turned to watch the rain. He and Allerton stood with us at the opening to the hangar, a step back from the streams of water that flowed across the apron. The wind had stopped and the rain poured straight down from the afternoon sky. Crews in slick coveralls worked to tow the iron ship toward the hangar through the rain, while the tractor’s wheels put up a mist and the hot motors hissed from the moisture. Water poured in sheets down the sides of the brooding vessel and splashed against the apron with a monotonous sound. Behind us in the hangar, a motorized pallet-jack navigated across the building’s floor, with the alien in its cage balanced carefully on the metal runners.
Allerton was restless. He folded his arms and looked down at me again with his best aristocratic look. “So, fine,” he said. “We know where it comes from. What else did it say? You two were in there for a long time.”
“It said they’re going to attack the Indian mines on Five’s first moon.”
“What? It said that?”
“Yes.”
He brushed his hair back with both palms, then jammed his hands in his pockets. He watched the rain and rocked up and down on his toes.
“I suppose,” I said, “that I should warn them.”
“No,” said Allerton quickly. “No. You let me take care of that.” He pushed his hands farther into his pockets. “So why is it telling us this, Torres?”
“I don’t know, Bart. Maybe it’s on our side. Maybe the attack on the base here was just a negotiating ploy like you said, and now it’s trying to show good faith.”
“You think so? I should talk to it. Becker, let’s go talk to this fellow we caught.”
Allerton stalked back through the hangar with Becker shuffling along behind. They stopped the handlers who were moving the alien, then after a discussion the technicians were called over to unpack the antenna and speaker device.
Penderson watched me from tired eyes. “You’re skating pretty close to the edge here, Torres. So are you going to warn the Indians or not?”
“No, Allerton’s going to do it. He’ll want the system to believe he’s in thick with the aliens. Or at least that he’s got a source among them.”<
br />
“What about the Russians? You told the alien about the habitats they’re putting up.”
“I already called them, a few minutes ago when I went out to check the ship. They pissed and moaned, but they agreed to evacuate the launch site. I don’t think the aliens are going to do anything there, though.”
“Well, whatever game you’re playing, it’s better you than me. Don’t underestimate Allerton.”
No, I thought. I hadn’t underestimated Allerton at all.
We stood a while longer watching the crews turn the ship around in the bleak weather, preparing to back it up to the hangar. Becker and Allerton finally approached from behind us.
“It won’t talk to me,” said Allerton.
“That’s too bad, Bart. Maybe being mechanical the way it is, it’s more comfortable with technical people. I don’t know.”
“Hm. So what else did it say?”
“It said it wants to see Polaski.”
“Really?” He looked at me closely in the poor light, turning his head a couple of times to glance back at the approaching cage. Finally he stuck out his hand. “All right. Ed, listen. Thanks for coming to help out. And I want to say that if you’ve still got any little concerns about the treaties, why don’t you work them through your boss. I’m sure no one wants to overreact at a time like this. Okay? Good. He’ll know what to do. Have a good trip back.” He shook Penderson’s hand, then touched Colonel Becker’s shoulder on the way by. “It’s all right, Becker,” he said. He disappeared into the hangar. Becker ignored him.
The tractor pulling the ship switched on its yellow beacon as the afternoon darkened, and the reflection slid across the rain to mix with the sound of wheels hissing through the puddles. After we’d watched it for a minute Penderson took me aside. He started to say something, then turned back toward the rain and held his silence. We stood that way for several minutes.
“Listen, Torres,” he said at last. “I didn’t want to say anything back there. I wasn’t even sure—”
A Grey Moon Over China Page 37
