Cowboy interrupted. “But it doesn’t matter what size the thing is to make ace, right? The little fighter or the cruiser, either works in the rating. Or have I got it wrong?”
Sutter Washington smiled slowly. “Well, in technical terms it doesn’t mean nothing, but truth to tell I really wanted to do my granddaddy one better. He was career Fleet, and so was my daddy and my momma and neither of them ever got to do more than push data around a screen. So I got a lot of making up to do.
“Anyhow, I don’t know how you targeted the guy. He sure had me upside down and gravy. I only say, you ever need anything, you got a friend.” Sutter Washington the Third solemnly lifted the remains of his Guinness and tapped glasses with everyone at the table.
“Intuition,” Cowboy said seriously. “Just pure intuition.” He didn’t know what he meant by that, but somehow it seemed the only explanation he could find.
“You know, some researchers think that intuition is that the brain notices and processes data we don’t consciously observe.”
The voice was a woman’s, low and familiar. Cowboy looked up, startled. Avrama Blackwell was standing over the group drinking, her clear blue eyes steady. She was looking directly at him, “Everybody here know Doc Blackwell?” Cowboy introduced her casually.
Sutter Washington’s mahogany skin went mottled gray.
Avrama Blackwell actually giggled at the young fighter pilot. “I’m in Xeno, I don’t do anything with humans,” she said. “You’re safe.”
Washington’s color returned slowly. “I would rather be surrounded by bug cruisers, would rather even be with one of those grunt reaction units on the ground, than spend ten minutes in Med Red,” the pilot admitted. “Anything with a stethoscope gives me the tummy wobbles.” He pointed to the pocket in the pale blue medical tunic Avrama Blackwell wore over her regulation utilities. The earpiece of a stethoscope was hanging out.
She stuffed it down hastily. “Take two aspirin and call me in the morning,” she said, trying to make a joke of it. The others all forced some laughter and then found excuses to leave. Immediately. Which Cowboy didn’t mind one bit.
“I didn’t mean to make your friends uncomfortable,” she told him.
Cowboy shrugged. “Their loss,” he said. “Besides, I don’t think they were so much uncomfortable as just giving me some space with a pretty lady. So, pretty lady, what are you drinking?”
Avrama Blackwell knit her fingers and looked down. “Actually, I’m not. I was just on my way down to Blue U to consult a little on the civilian side, and heard some scuttlebutt that a bunch of you heroes were in here. I thought you might be interested in coming along. I don’t have all the answers yet, but you might find this informative.”
Cowboy drained his glass and stood. Blue U was not his idea of a good time, and surely not where he had in mind going with a woman as winning as Dr. Blackwell, but it seemed like he had no choice. He was surprised to find that she even knew the slang term for the areas set aside for civilian research and scholarship. The term usually wasn’t considered complimentary.
They crossed Bright Green to the far lift, which would be closer to scientist country when they arrived on Sky. The full science complement, including offices, labs, and lecture rooms, took a full quarter of both the Light Blue and Sky decks, one on top of the other, the two joined by the large amphitheater that doubled as the ship’s main entertainment hall when it was not being used to display slides of alien viruses to fifteen lab assistants.
“Are we going to talk to Brynn Te Mon?” Cowboy asked. Te Mon was the only scientist Cowboy had heard of. Normally he never ventured below Dark Green. He didn’t have the money to eat at any of the expensive restaurants in Violet and didn’t need any of the luxuries sold at the civilian shops in the rest of the Blues. He could get the necessities from the commissary on Yellow with the military discount, and there were flea markets there on Sundays when some of the civ merchants came up.
Avrama Blackwell shook her head. “No. Brynn Te Mon is way too busy minding the existence of the universe to be interested in something as mundane as this. No, I sent my findings and the specimens down to Vladimir Tsorko as soon as I had my data. The eyes only live twelve hours, you know. But there are some experiments that can be done when they’re less alive, and there’s also a biochemical analysis. That isn’t my specialty.”
“There isn’t anyone up on Med Red who could have done it?” Cowboy asked, interested. “You had to contract out?”
“’We’ve got two full specimens to take apart, and five fast-grown clones lying in our one xeno cloning vat. And let me tell you, those cost way too much to let anyone just take them apart. Even in the interests of defense,” Blackwell said matter-of-factly. “And Tsorko’s specialty is radio astronomy. There were a couple of anomalies that I just didn’t understand and Vladimir is, well, you’ll see. A good friend. Anyway, he just came through with the results so he can explain the peculiarities I observed.”
They stopped at a Sky Blue door covered with cartoons. In fact, Cowboy noticed, most of the doors down here were like that. It offended his sense of what was shipshape. Scientists were generally an unruly bunch. If they needed to put cartoons on their doors, the least they could do was use the inside.
Avrama didn’t knock, she just touched the door panel. It was open. “We’re expected,” she explained before she went inside.
Vladimir Tsorko was a big man with a very big silvering mustache. He immediately jumped up and held Avrama by the shoulders. “Ah, my colleague, how very pleasant to greet you down here. I have looked at your specimens and run the tests as we discussed, and I have read your results. All I can do is confirm them. So I suppose I will be only a second or third author on your paper. However, I think that I have enough data to write one of my own, though it would be more in the nature of a note without further data. Of course, the more data I have the better. So if you come by any more specimens I would be so grateful. . . .”
Avrama flashed that warm, winning smile at him. “Of course, Vladimir, it would be my pleasure.”
The older scientist seemed to notice Cowboy for the first time. “And who is this, your friend? Another optical specialist? If so we shall have to get the vodka and drink to all of us getting publications from this discovery! A very excellent thing, research.”
Avrama Blackwell laughed again. “No, Vladimir, this is Cowboy, weapons officer on the light cruiser Glory. But he brought the specimens in and was interested in the tests, so I thought I’d bring him along.”
“Ah, then, it is my honor to meet you,” Tsorko said firmly. “And shall we get to business, then? Avrama, it is exactly as you suspected, only more so, if that is possible. I think the multiple structures you had questions about are suited to microwave reception. And the others, well, there is indeed an anomaly. However, I have a theory . . .”
“Microwaves?” Cowboy asked.
Dr. Blackwell nodded. “Oh, yes. Maybe I should go back to the beginning and explain a little.”
“That would be very helpful to me as well,” Vladimir Tsorko agreed quickly. “I read your findings but you write so technically. And I have not studied any biology since I was an undergraduate, and then I threw up in the lab. I was excused from the practicums for the rest of the course. Ah, well, I had never planned on a career in surgery anyway.”
Even Cowboy had to grin. There was something about the scientist that was so completely familiar. Texan, one might say, though it looked like Vladimir Tsorko had never heard of the planet called Texas or the Great Range system at all. But he had the expansiveness that made Cowboy suddenly, sharply, miss home.
Avrama Blackwell pushed the tea mug and a stack of papers to one side of the display monitor and put a stack of journal hard copies on the floor. Then she called up a series of pictures on the screen that meant nothing at all to Cowboy.
“These are photographs of the Ichton eyes,” she stated, as if starting a lecture. “You will notice they are faceted, and that each i
ndividual facet is quite different. There are sections you will notice here with pupils and large sections that have no pupil structure at all. Of the facets with no pupils, there are two distinct types. One type has a strange structure that covers nearly the entire back of the retina, and the others are missing these structures. These were some of the anomalies that I consulted Dr. Tsorko about.
“However, as a first test, I placed electrodes in the cones of the retinas in all three kinds of facets, and shone light of different frequencies at them. The cones generate electrical current when they are stimulated by wavelengths they can detect.” Then she paused. “How much do you know about waves?” she asked innocuously.
Cowboy shook his head. “I know that sound travels way slower than light and that some of them are no good for you. I guess I never thought about it.”
“I don’t know enough about waves, either,” Blackwell admitted. “But sound waves and light waves are very different things. With sound you can hear ten different notes at once. If you aren’t trained you might not realize what you’re hearing, but a musician would. The wavelengths don’t blend.
“Light is the opposite. Wavelengths blend, so you can’t tell if, say, orange is the wavelength that produces true orange or a combination of wavelengths. What we see as colors are different wavelengths, and for us the visible range is from four hundred to seven hundred nanometers.
“Now, the longer the wave the lower the energy of the wave. The waves in our visible range are very small and X-rays are smaller and higher energy than that. Infrared is larger, and microwaves at the long end can be a meter from peak to peak. Radio waves cover the largest range, from ten to the minus two meters all the way up to a million meters peak to peak. Which is why I wanted to talk to Vladimir, he knows all about radio waves.”
“No, my dear, I wish I could know all about radio waves,” the older man said sadly. “I know only a little bit about them.” And then his eyes twinkled. “But what I do not know about them, nobody else knows it either. And I shall be the first to learn. But so far you are essentially correct.”
Avrama smiled at him and then the picture on the screen changed to display a chart that Cowboy thought looked like a graph of his last poker winnings. It was a lot more pleasant than the alien eyeballs, though, and he was glad of the change.
“So I tried different wavelengths of light, first in our visual range. And until I hit red there was no response at all,” Blackwell continued. “So I kept going lower. It seems that the facets with pupils responded to light from visible red though infrared.”
“So these bugs see heat, basically,” Cowboy said, thinking about it, wondering what it meant as far as Glory’s fighting capabilities were concerned.
“Well, yes,” Dr. Blackwell agreed, “but that’s not all. I ran the same experiments on the facet without pupils. Now some of the lower energy waves can pass through wood or paper or plastic. Microwaves, for example, and radio waves of course. So I tried them, and guess what?”
“The bugs see microwaves and radio waves,” Cowboy guessed. “Must make cooking dinner a real experiment in living. But what does it change? I mean, it’s all very interesting and that, but what use is it?”
“Well, it might help us find their home planet,” Avrama Blackwell said. “Our eyes are adapted to our sun. Obviously theirs must have some advantage to wherever they’re from.”
Vladimir Tsorko nodded vigorously. “Indeed. But there is still more, very interesting about this species. Avrama asked me about the eyes with no pupils. Ah, I think, this is very strange, they react to very low energy waves. But how can they focus these waves? If you cannot focus, you cannot localize. It is like sound. We cannot focus sound waves.”
“But you can tell where sound is coming from,” Cowboy protested.
“Indeed,” Dr. Tsorko agreed. “That is because you have two ears and you can triangulate. But sound waves travel so very slowly compared to electromagnetic waves. No, to focus these you need some antenna larger than the wave. If the wave is a meter long, then you need something bigger than a meter to focus it. We use dish antennas in great arrays to focus the long radio waves and we have only the two Trilimar observatories to focus those very long waves at the bottom of the scale. But the Trilimar observatory stations have dishes the size of a small solar system and it is so very difficult to maintain them. Even with all the graduate students one could want, and really they are more interested in doing theoretical work than going EVA and patching up dish plates two weeks away.”
“So they can’t see those waves,” Cowboy said.
Dr. Tsorko beamed. “If you are interested in perhaps a small graduate stipend when we return it could be arranged. . . .”
But Cowboy shook his head. More school was not exactly on the immediate agenda, not at all. In fact, this long lecture about waves and eyes was starting to get a little dull and he still didn’t see the point of it all. So maybe they could figure out from their vision what kind of star the home world of the Ichtons circled. Maybe there would be a strategic advantage there and it was important to the effort. Right now, though, he was more concerned with cleaning out this one little pocket of space.
Those Silbers down there, now, this wasn’t one bit of use to them. They needed help, and fast. Cowboy silently wished the scientists would get on with it and maybe do something like make Ichton-free Raid. After what he’d heard about Sandworld and what was happening on the Gersons’ home planet, this was one enemy he had no trouble using chems against.
“You are indeed right.” Dr. Tsorko didn’t notice Cowboy’s lapse of attention. “They can see the smallest radio waves but they cannot focus them. The way we hear sound. But, and this is very interesting, the eyes with no pupils but with a strange structure before the retina, that structure is a type of organic dish antenna for the smaller microwaves.”
“Like I said, dinner is a laugh a minute,” Cowboy responded. His patience was just about used up. He’d known Blue U was not exactly his idea of a rec deck. Damn, the stupid things he’d do for a good-looking woman.
“So now you can write up your paper and I can write mine, and we can let the referees decide which of us will publish first,” Vladimir Tsorko said gleefully.
Avrama led Cowboy to the door. “As always, it was a pleasure to have an excuse to visit, even if it was far too short,” she said brightly.
“Indeed, we have to get together for some palmyari next week, of a certitude. My treat,” the older scientist said firmly, then they stepped into the Sky Blue hallway and the door closed behind them.
“What are palmyari?” Cowboy asked with some trepidation.
“Dumplings,” Avrama Blackwell answered firmly. “Delicate little dumplings in sour cream sauce.”
“Speaking of which, I’m starving. Would you be willing to introduce me to these dumplings tonight?” Cowboy asked, his eyes twinkling. Maybe the lecture in Blue U was going to pay off after all.
Avrama’s eyes lit up as well, with mischief as well as pleasure. “I think I’m more in the mood for Chinese, and it’s dim sum night at the Golden Dragon.”
“I know it well,” he said solemnly and stepped aside formally as the doors to the lift opened.
He didn’t sleep well that night and he couldn’t understand why. Maybe it was the duck’s feet; he usually didn’t like duck’s feet but Avrama chose two little plates of them. But when he left her after dinner and a stroll through the garden, without a single mention of bug eyes or any other educational topic, he couldn’t get to sleep for hours.
And when he finally did manage to sack out the dreams came. Dismembered monsters were after him and he was small and afraid and in the boarding school in Sam’s Town. And Jackson Byrne was there again, like all his nightmares, only now Jackson had faceted opaque eyes.
The dream followed the same structure. First Jackson erased every other line in his physics text, then the flash of the blind bomb that Jackson had thrown at him the day he moved into the Junior dorm and th
e headmaster’s office, all reproak paneling and leather. The leather was real, butterscotch-colored even in his dream. Only the headmaster looked like Vladimir Tsorko and he was being sentenced to a life of auditing upper-level chemistry classes. Forever.
When he woke up he was soaked with perspiration and it was barely oh-dark-thirty. His two roommates were both snoring and Cowboy knew he should try to grab that last hour’s sleep. What happened to the time in Weapons Command School when he could go to sleep anytime at all, when twenty minutes was enough for a good nap, and now he had trouble when the alarm went off at 0615 every morning?
Well, there was nothing he could do about it now. He knew he wasn’t going to be able to drift back off, so he hauled himself out of the rack and spent the minimum in the recycle room. His utilities came out of the locker fresh enough to pass inspection. Dressed, he headed back to the bay where the Glory sat among all the light cruisers.
Cowboy loved the bay. He loved it when it seethed with activity, when men and women reported at a run when the enemy had been sighted, when the tech crews ran their refueling and prep after every mission. He loved it in silence when the lights were at half and the array of battle-weary light cruisers and scout boats waited in the semilights of the enormous bay. So large, so hushed, so like a church it made Cowboy want to pray.
But someone had violated the silence of the dark cycle of the ships. Crews worked round the clock, but there was no one else here now, no names on the door manifest, but a jangle of what passed for music somewhere out beyond Gremonsk still played on the wall plug. Made him think of Jackson Byrne playing that damned radio after lights out in the dorm, getting them all put on detention for a week.
Furious, Cowboy strode over and tore the offending box out of the jack. The only reason he didn’t slam it against the composition bulkhead was that all hell broke loose.
A thousand watts of light came up on the registers in nanoseconds as orders boomed over the speaker. “All personnel report immediately to your assigned briefing room, bays six through nine, six through nine. All personnel report immediately to your assigned briefing room. Hot status, go, hot status.”
Battlestations Page 11
