by Ben Bova
The sphere floated upward, sailing in to a point a bit less than a meter away from the hardened plastiglass canopy of the flight deck. It moved back and forth a few times, as if trying to peer into the darkened cabin, then glided back to its familiar position over the platform.
“In the meantime,” he concluded, “we just sit and wait.”
28
INTRODUCTION
“I won’t permit it,” Lewis said. He had remained aboard the Scartaris and, although work being done by the combined survey teams at South Camp and elsewhere on the planet continued unabated, the commander had placed the ships of the Imperial fleet on standby alert status following the events in the Big One fissure. “After what happened down there, I would think you’d agree.”
“I don’t think we were attacked,” Adela countered, looking around at the others. Only the copilot, ordered by Anmoore to remain on the flight deck in case they needed to lift off in a hurry, was absent from the hopper’s passenger cabin. “We stumbled into a sensor field that explosively overloaded the power chips in the joint servos of the suits. It was accidental. And since we’ve had a chance to go over the readings from the worksuit, even Lan agrees that there would have been no indication of danger even if it had been detected.”
Lewis raised an eyebrow. “That sounds like a damned effective defensive system to me. It convinces me even more that you need to stay right where you are and do nothing until the lander gets there. In the meantime, you don’t even know what the sphere is. How do you know it’s not a defensive system? It attacked Heathseven, after all—”
“We don’t know that it was attacking him.”
“That’s right,” Lewis shot back. “It was just trying to take him for a friendly walk … through a field that would have blown him to pieces. Look, when the lander arrives and you’ve got some defensive backup of your own, then maybe I’ll allow it.”
“Allow it?” As her anger rose, Adela could feel the skin of her face and neck warming. She glanced at the others and saw that everyone in the cabin looked distinctly uncomfortable with the confrontation between the two. “Since when do I need your permission? I don’t recall your father giving you jurisdiction over me.”
He opened his mouth to say something, then thought better of it. Then finally, “That’s true, that’s true.” It was clear to Adela, as it must certainly have been to everyone else, that he was just as angry as she. “Captain Anmoore, under no circumstances is anyone to leave the hopper until the lander touches down.”
“Yes, sir.” He seemed slightly embarrassed.
“Now, wait a minute! What are we here for if not to learn what’s going on?” She pulled back, not at all liking the sound of her own voice.
“I’m forced to concur with her,” Brendan put in. “The sphere is out there now. We’ve gotten as much as we’re going to get from the worksuit readings we took in the fissure, as well as what we’ve been able do from in here. We’ve taken several hours of recordings of the thing as it comes and goes out on the surface, but that’s the extent of what we can do inside the hopper.” He hesitated, looking at Adela. “It might not still be there when the lander arrives. I think we need to get closer to it while we still can.”
“No.”
“Lewis, this is a science decision,” he said bluntly. “And Father clearly left judgments of that nature in my hands. I wouldn’t dream of telling you how to make a military judgment. It’s no more my area than this is yours.”
Lewis said nothing, just sat thinking for several long moments, and Adela wondered: Was he considering what Brendan had said, or was he trying to control his anger at both of them? “Towsen?” he asked at last.
The academician spoke up immediately. “Geology is more in my realm, Commander Wood; but I, too, feel that waiting for several more hours is unwise. The sphere has already disappeared three times. It’s come back each time. So far.” He shrugged.
“I suppose you agree, too,” he said, regarding Anmoore.
“That is what we’re here for.”
Outnumbered and unable to come up with a suitable rebuttal, he finally assented. “All right, then. Captain, ignore my previous order. However, as before, you still make the calls.” He started to go, then added for Adela and Brendan’s benefit, “If you two get yourselves killed, I don’t want to know about it. Good luck.” His image winked out and the screens went dark.
“That’s it,” Anmoore said. “Let’s get going before he calls back and reconsiders.” He turned to Adela and Brendan, and motioned the others to circle around their seats. “What do you two have in mind?”
“Obviously, we need to get back outside with the worksuit; the instrumentation in it is the most sophisticated we have. Besides, it was the scanning frequency Lan used in the worksuit that made them all rush forward. As far as we could tell, it was the only thing they heard from us.”
“We’ve tried sending it everything we can think of from the comm system here on the hopper,” Brendan added. “But if it’s picking anything up, it’s not showing it.”
Anmoore nodded at Lan. “Look at him,” he said, pointing to the sling cradling the vac tech’s arm. “He broke it in two places. He can’t go out in the suit, and …” He looked quickly around at everyone. “I don’t think anyone else here can fit in it.”
“I’m small enough,” said Adela.
“Wait a minute.” Lan stood, looking down at her. “I’m not very big, but you’re even smaller. You won’t even be able to get your feet into the boots. You’ll just rattle around inside it, hardly able to move. And in case you forgot, there’s a big hole where the arm used to be.”
“But the shielding will keep it intact. And I’ll need to keep my arm inside anyway to run the instrumentation.”
“Sorry, Doctor; he’s right. Besides, I want to try something first that might be a little safer than risking going outside just yet.”
Five minutes later, down in the suit room, they moved the worksuit to stand—empty—facing the hatch. The thing was massive, even in the lower gravity, and without operating it from inside with the servos assisting movement, it took three of them to bully it into an upright stance. Once it was in place, Lan, still remarkably facile using only his left arm, temporarily hard-wired the output jack into the comm terminal by the hatch.
“Slaving the worksuit instrument panel to the main control on the flight deck,” Anmoore said, “we can remote every system it’s got. This way, Lan—who knows the system inside and out—can still be the one running it. We can’t walk it out onto the surface, but with the hatch open the sensors should be able to reach to the platform.”
They retreated to the upper level and crowded onto the flight deck, some of them craning their necks to see the hatch as it lowered onto the surface, the others intently watching the two flatscreen monitors. One showed the pickup from the comm terminal next to the hatch, angled in at the worksuit. The other screen displayed the video signal from the helmet camera, the worksuit placement affording a straight-out shot of the descending hatch. A small cloud of dust kicked up as it thumped to the regolith, and the sphere moved slightly closer, as though to get a better look at what was happening.
“Good,” Hannah observed as the others watched in silence. “Did not scare it away.”
“All right, here goes.” Lan pressed the membrane keypad on the control panel to activate the same instrument setting that had excited the flock of spheres back in the cavern. Instantly, the silver orb zoomed to a position in front of the visor of the worksuit. It hovered around it, moving first up and down, then in steady circles around the one-armed suit in a similar manner to what they had seen earlier, although the motions of this single silver sphere did not seem as frantic as the crowd of golden ones had.
It nudged experimentally at the torso, sending the worksuit rocking back and forth. If the thing had any notion the suit was dinerent—empty now, and not controlled from inside as it had been in the cavern—it gave no indication. For that matter, they h
ad no way of knowing if the sphere even comprehended that these were suits containing life-forms,
It circled to the right side and nudged the worksuit again, then swung up to where the arm had exploded off, giving the appearance that it was examining the damage to the suit. Plainly, then, it could tell that the suit was different, at least from the aspect that it had found something that had not been there before. It moved closer still, then pressed against the jagged plastic-and-metal fitting of the hole torn in the suit.
“What’s it doing?” Adela and the others crowded shoulder to shoulder at the screen, and watched as the sphere seemed to shrink. “Is it … ?” She watched a moment longer, then said, “It is. It’s going inside.”
As they stared, the sphere poured itself into the gaping opening at the worksuit’s shoulder. They could see the silvery, floating mass through the visor as it undulated and reshaped itself down inside, falling from view into the lower part of the torso.
“I’m not believing this,” Lan said, punching almost randomly at the keypad controller. “It’s getting into the instrumentation.” He pulled his good arm back and they all watched as system after system turned itself on and off. Several of the tools embedded into the outside of the worksuit, their catches released from inside, fell tumbling to the floor. One of them, a spot-welding rod, glowed white hot, searing the deck plate where it had fallen before it shut off.
The left screen, the one showing the helmet camera, winked out, as did the control keypad Lan had been using. “That’s it, then,” he groaned. “It got into the onboard computer.”
At that moment the worksuit shuddered, the servos in the remaining arm and both legs activating simultaneously. Unable to remain upright, the worksuit collapsed in a heap on top of the spilled tools.
Anmoore reached for the flight-deck main control panel and angled the comm terminal’s video pickup toward the downed suit in time to see a rippling silver blob ooze itself out of the shoulder hole and coalesce into its spherical shape once more. Free of the suit, it shot out the open hatch.
“There it goes—” Adela started to say, but stopped abruptly when the sphere bumped into the forward canopy, bouncing back with the force with which it had been flying. It came closer again, slower this time, and softly touched the plastiglass, spreading out and flattening as it pressed against it.
Anmoore reached for the hopper’s shield generator control, his hand poised over the switch.
“Wait!” Adela put her hand on his shoulder. “It can’t break the glass, can it?”
“I don’t know—we don’t know what it’s made of; we don’t even know how heavy it is. But if I get any significant pressure reading on the canopy, I’m popping the shield on and knocking it back to a respectable distance.”
“I don’t understand,” Towsen said. “What’s it trying to do?”
“Look at it,” she said. “It almost seems like it’s trying to come in the canopy the way it entered the worksuit.” Adela put both hands against the cold inside surface of the plastiglass, and could feel just the slightest vibration. She turned to Brendan, a questioning look on her face. “Could something it did in the suit be making it act like this?”
Before he could answer, the center of the flattened sphere pulled away from the canopy and then fell back against it, once, with a soft slap! that could be heard inside the flight deck. There was a short pause; then it pulled back again and hit the glass again, three times, one right after the other. Another pause, then three slower slaps. Then three fast ones again.
The sphere peeled itself off the window and hovered in front of the canopy, unmoving for nearly a minute. Then, attaching itself to the same spot on the window again, it repeated the routine.
“An SOS?” Adela breathed. “Is that what I’m seeing?”
“Yes,” Anmoore verified. “It’s an SOS, but don’t ask me why.”
“The last subroutine that ran in the worksuit’s comm circuitry would have been the emergency sequence activated when the arm was torn loose and the skin-shield came on.” They all turned to face Lan, who gestured with his good hand. “It’s the automatic locator sequence. It would have been the last thing in memory when you all got me out of the suit.”
Adela stood up to the glass, facing the sphere at eye level. She balled her hand into a fist and held it against the glass, then opened it palm out—three times fast, three times slow, three times fast.
The sphere came close again, extending a silvery tendril to touch the glass just opposite Adela’s hand.
“I think it just said ‘hello.’”
They stood at the entrance hatch to the suit room, Anmoore with his hand over the opening plate. He nodded to Waltz, saying, “And one for Hannah, too.” Waltz went to one of the equipment lockers and returned with two shield guns, handing one to the xenoguide. The weapon projected a shield force that could either—depending on its setting—gently shove someone back or hit them with the force of a solid, flying wall of steel.
Adela and Brendan bristled at the weapons, but did not protest Anmoore’s decision to go into the suit room armed. It had been all they could do to convince him it was necessary to make direct contact with the sphere, in an attempt to find some way to link into whatever communication capabilities it had.
That the sphere could communicate there was no doubt. She had managed to use hand signs and flashing lights though the canopy to the point where all were in agreement that the sphere was either intelligent, or intelligently controlled.
“I don’t know how much it picked up when it went into the worksuit computer,” the captain was saying by way of explaining the precautionary measures. “Or what it’s doing with the information. But I’ve got to assume that if it studied and understood the suit’s working and life-support systems, it also understands what we are.”
“Of course,” Adela countered, “if that’s true, then it also knows it could have entered on its own by interfacing the hatch opening plate from the other side while the suit room was still open to the surface. If it wanted to hurt us, popping this entrance hatch while the suit room was open and depressurized would have done it quite neatly.” She looked at him evenly. “But it chose not to, waiting instead for us to let it in.”
“Let’s hope so.” Anmoore pressed his hand against the plate, and the hatch fell inward. “I want this closed and sealed as soon as we’re in,” he said to Lan, Towsen and the copilot; then he turned to Hannah and Waltz, motioning for them to climb on down. He went down next, followed by Adela and Brendan.
The sphere hovered over the worksuit piled on the floor by the now-closed main hatch, but as the five of them stood facing it in a semicircle, it sidled closer, bobbing in the air in front of Adela.
“I can’t imagine how it sees, but I think it recognizes me as the one sending the hand signals through the canopy.” She turned to Brendan and he came forward. The sphere oriented on him as he neared, but then went back to Adela.
“Radar?” he posited. “Maybe sound waves, or heat readings, or even a scanning mechanism of some kind. At this point, it knows more about us just from that suit over there than we can even guess about it.”
Adela raised her hand slowly, extending a fingertip toward the sphere. A bump rose in the silvery surface, forming a short tendril that reached out to meet Adela’s finger.
“Oh!” She jerked her hand back, making Waltz and Hannah stiffen. The sphere did not move, but absorbed the tendril back inside itself.
“What?” Anmoore asked, waving the weapons down. “Was it hot? Did it hurt, or was there a shock? What?”
“It felt … I don’t know, it tingled.” She smiled sheepishly. “It didn’t hurt; it just startled me is all.” She reached out again, this time allowing the liquid metal tendril to engulf her finger. Her eyes widened and a brightness came to her face. “It feels like … like I’m sharing something with her.”
Brendan arched an eyebrow. “Her?”
She faced her grandson abruptly. “Yes, I sense that
somehow.” Withdrawing her hand, she turned and paced back to the ladder, sitting on one of the lower rungs, and regarded each of them in turn. “It’s not intelligently controlled, or even intelligent in the sense of some kind of AI programming.” She shook her head at the gravity of what she had learned from the single touch. “It’s a living being.”
Hannah gasped, and Anmoore let out a low whistle.
“Are you sure?” Brendan asked. “How could you know that from just touching it?”
“You know that the Sarpan pass a part of themselves on to their spawn through touch—a sense of identity, customs, behavior patterns, personality traits. The touching ritual is very important to them, even among their dealings with us. I touched with Oidar, once, and got an idea of what it was like. But this—”
She rose and returned to the gleaming sphere, letting it envelop her hand in a softly spreading tendril. “It’s cool to the touch, and feels like dipping your hand into a beaker of mercury—it moves to my touch, but I can feel the density of it. It is metal, by the way.”
“A mechanical intelligence?”
She nodded wordlessly, her eyes closed.
“She’s confused.” Adela’s brow furrowed. “I don’t know … .” She pulled her hand away again, letting the living metal snap back from each fingertip like silver rubber bands. She crossed her arms and let her breath out in a long, slow sigh.
“What?” Anmoore asked.
“I just can’t be sure. I get a sense that she doesn’t know why we’re here.” Adela shook her head, frowning. “She doesn’t understand why we’re shaped this way, why our skin is so smooth.”
Waltz chuckled. “And what are we supposed to be shaped like?”
“I just don’t know.” She turned to Anmoore. “We have to come up with some means to talk to her directly.”
“Lan? Are you watching all this?”
“I sure am, Captain.” The voice echoed in the small room from the comm terminal loudspeaker.
