Lucifer Comet (2464 CE)

by Ian Wallace

  “Yes, I see!” Quarfar exclaimed; and so did Dorita, who for the first time in her life was beginning to understand star charts. Then Quarfar added, almost plaintively, “Is Dora on that chart?”

  “I have no way to know. I do not know which star is Dora’s. It could be on this chart, anywhere—or on one of three related charts showing other quarters of the heavens.”

  Quarfar was taut. “Dorita tells me that I have been fifty thousand years away from Dora, and so has Narfar. Those people must be in terrible trouble without either of us. 7 have got to find my way back there—and back there—then!”

  That was when Methuen arrived with his three task-force members.

  Methuen presented the guests to Quarfar, then asked through Dorita if Quarfar minded being put on exhibition while they interviewed him. Quarfar said he didn’t mind, and he offered to take off his clothes. When this offer was communicated to the committee, the two women were confusedly and diffidently interested; Dr. Chu settled it by remarking, “We have complete medical reports; and in courtesy, if he is to strip, so should we all.” The decision was that he should not strip. Quarfar, puzzled by all the fuss about stripping, watched while Dorita seated Methuen at one end of the dining table and arrayed the three committee members and Zor-bin along the two sides; and then Quarfar allowed her to place him in an easy chair somewhat back from the other table end. While she took a standing position behind Quarfar, there was a paper-rustling.

  Methuen opened it: “Gentlepeople, what is your pleasure?” Methuen, receiving Dorita’s mind-translations and understanding that the pleasure of the task force and not his pleasure was momentarily wanted, courteously and attentively waited.

  Linguist Alexandrovna opened peremptorily. “I recall Captain Methuen’s excellent formulation of our five problems: what sort of creatures are these, where and when did they originate, how did they get caught in a comet having velocity .03 C, do they represent any threat to our Erth and how do we crack their language or languages so we can communicate. I wish to address the fifth, which, as the captain said, is ancillary to all the others—”

  Crisply inserted Dr. Sita Sari, the Senevendian astrophysicist, a trim, petite, dark-skinned brunette with a faint trace of Hindu twang: “If only those problems have been voiced, I will add one. We must learn everything we can about the comet, including details of its trajectory and reasons why it was traveling so swiftly. I cannot emphasize enough that this is a unique comet. It is indeed unfortunate” (and here she looked fire at Methuen) “that Captain Methuen saw fit to capture it before the trajectory had been adequately tracked.”

  Methuen responded, “Dr. Sari, desert-thirsty people, including those of your own subcontinent, needed the ice. We do have some good tracking figures for you, extending over a period of more than forty hours, a distance of well over four hundred million kilometers. Over all this distance, the comet’s track was a perfectly straight line; and the fact that it was following the five-forty-six gradient leads to the obvious inference that its track would have reached Erth. Nevertheless your formulation of a sixth problem is noted. And now I will add a seventh: to analyze the five-forty-six gradient, which we have now tracked all the way from Erth to four hundred seventy light-years out, which is a first. Committee?”

  Brief silence followed; now Astrophysicist Sari, too, knew about their chairman.

  Then Alexandrovna came in hard: “I submit that the first problem in time-priority is the languages of this Quarfar and his brother, Narfar, in order to get at the other problems.” Methuen looked around. “Hearing no objection, let Dr. Alexandrovna proceed.”

  She said, “You have presented Miss Lanceo to us. Is she the telepath who has established communication with Quarfar?” Methuen affirmed. “Then I should like to begin by testing her. Young lady, I am formulating a clear thought in my mind. Can you read it?”

  Dorita responded, “Madam, I cannot understand the Moskovian words in your thought, but the thought essence is that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides—the Pythagorean theorem.” After staring, Alexandrovna snapped: “Correct, but it could be a clever guess at what I might formulate as a test. Will a colleague try?”

  “Try me,” piped Anthropologist Chu.

  Dorita told him, “Your thought is that the appearance of Quarfar, along with his medical records, gives every reason to believe that he is exactly like an Aryan specimen of Homo sapiens sapiens.” She turned then to Sari: “You are not volunteering, Madam, but you are thinking that if you were to test me, you would ask how the Pythagorean theorem is used in celestial geography. And I’m afraid I do not know.”

  That made Sari smile, and there were chuckles. Methuen noticed that Sari’s face when smile-softened was rather merry, in a tight sort of way.

  Alexandrovna went back at it. “Miss Lanceo, you do appear to qualify as an expert telepath, but there remains a question.

  We have no way to know whether you are translating to and from Quarfar correctly, or instead for some reason falsifying translations.”

  “Miss Lanceo,” the chairman told them, “has made extensive flakes of the information that Quarfar has given her, and in many instances has associated the word-sounds of Quarfar with their mind-meanings. For supplement, we have Dr. Almagor’s flakes of the sounds made by both Quarfar and Nar-far when they were first unfrozen. Do you wish to listen to playbacks?”

  “How long would it take?” the linguist queried.

  “At normal speed, approximately seven hours.”

  “For my linguistic purposes, you could play it at hundred-speed in slightly over four minutes. My recorder-computer here would catch all the word-meaning associations and would create a language pattern, if there is one, a few minutes later. But perhaps others would prefer normal speed for their own purposes?”

  “Do speed it up,” requested Senevendian Sari. “I’ll be flaking it for private playback tonight.” Chu affirmed. All three now had recorders on the table; those of Sari and Chu were pocket-size, while Alexandrovna’s was more elaborate.

  Nodding, Methuen produced apparatus and played back the seven hours of creature-flaking at hundred-speed, while Dorita mind-sketched for Quarfar what was going on. (For a being out of touch with any world since the paleolithic ages, Quarfar was remarkably apt at comprehending modern apparatus and concepts!) There followed several minutes of waiting while Alexandrovna’s little computer beep-muttered; whereafter it climaxed by laboriously emitting a long tongue of print-out tape—much more tape than its bowels would seem able to contain, if you didn’t understand the principle of reonic expansion out of a condensed hyper-liquid pack. A good deal of suspense generated itself while Alexandrovna was using another three minutes to scan the tape.

  Then the linguist asserted: ‘The language of this departed Narfar, from the brief specimen that we have, appears to be an impoverished version of Quarfar’s language. And indeed this language includes distorted elements of pre-Tellene, as Lieutenant Zorbin is said to have intuited, although there are many other sorts of linguistic elements. I have the sense of it now, but I have to gain a preliminary mastery of the enunciation also, otherwise Quarfar and I will not understand each other. Excuse me another few minutes while I study these phonemes—”

  A bit of side conversation was beginning to develop between Chu and Zorbin, between Methuen and Sari, between Dorita and Quarfar….

  Alexandrovna broke in: “I think I have it near enough now; I can correct myself in the course of conversation. What I wish to do first is to talk directly with Quarfar for the purpose of checking on the accuracy of Miss Lanceo’s reporting.”

  Dorita stiffened; Quarfar stiffened also. Smoothly Methuen intervened: “As to that, I see two little difficulties. First, the speech of Quarfar is so much slower than ours that you must speak to him through a recorder for slowed playback to him, and vice versa.”

  “No difficulty,” announced the linguist, making adjustments to her computer. “My lit
tle friend here will do all that automatically.”

  “And second—in order to test the accuracy of what Miss Lanceo has reported, I think you will have to know what she has reported. And I don’t think you have that knowledge from a hundred-speed playback.”

  In the silence that followed, they all watched embarrassed Alexandrovna. Finally she had the grace to smile faintly. “Former Commander Methuen,” she murmured, “you merit your promotion.”

  She raised her head. “I will merely try a few exchanges with him now, and I will test Miss Lanceo tomorrow. Quarfar—”

  “Yes, Madam?”

  ‘I try speak your language. You understand me?”

  “With difficulty, Madam. But it will get better.”

  The exchange had been in Quarfar’s tongue; Alexandrovna now translated into Anglian, and there was a little round of applause for her. The linguist accepted it impassively; Quarfar looked pleased.

  Alexandrovna (and it may now be easier to call her Olga) rejoined: “Where you come from?”

  “I come from Dora.”

  “Where is Dora?”

  “Please help me find out. It is important for me to get back to Dora.”

  “Why is important?”

  ‘To let out the good evils. I have been away too long. Dora may be dead without the good evils.”

  “Good evils? What they?”

  “It is hard to describe. I do not think I can say.” But Dorita was getting a cloudy double image in a dismal contexture.

  Olga wet her lips. “Quarfar, you know, maybe we not find where Dora is. Maybe you have to stay here. What then?” Prolonged thought by Quarfar. Decisively: “Then I have to get into Erth-ice and explode Erth to make a comet. Maybe the comet can take me back to Dora.”

  Olga froze. Chu demanded: ‘Translate!” Olga uttered the Anglian. All froze.

  Sari expostulated: “Explode Erth? Can he do that?” Before Olga could relay the question to Quarfar, Dorita replied, “Probably he can, you know. I think he is some kind of a god.”

  Quarfar vanished.

  Two minutes later, Quarfar reappeared in the same chair, freezing the task-force arousal which had followed the shock of his disappearance. “You see what I mean,”’ he said quietly in his tongue. “You have no control over me. I remain here voluntarily, and only to help you find my Dora. Please forget my threat, I respect your Erth, I will not injure her unless finally I must.”

  Dorita had to translate; Olga Alexandrovna had swooned. Chu, dry: “We seem at least to have begun a meeting with problem four: do the comet-creatures present a threat to Erth. In Quarfar’s case, it appears that he can, but he doesn’t want to, but he reserves the right.”

  12

  The task force had adjourned until 0900 hours tomorrow in order that its members might privately study (at normal speed) their flakings of Dorita’s flakes, together with their flakings of today’s upsetting conclave, and arrive at sortie orientation—which, in view of Quarfar’s bizarre behavior, would require also a certain amount of quality alcohol and a great deal of good food at Norwestian expense. It is worth remembering that the flakes included the primitive yet surprisingly good astronomical data which Quarfar had given her concerning Dora’s prime constellation Mizdorf and the relative brightnesses and chemical compositions of its stars.

  Methuen remained in the apartment with Zorbin, Dorita and Quarfar. Reporting by phone to the assistant secretary, he discussed everything, including the semi-threat by Quarfar and his subsequent disappearance and reappearance. His chief, impressed, ordered this material classified secret, and promised some sort of an alert. Over a light lunch with the others, Methuen sardonically reflected that his telepath, who was cleared only for classified information, already had hold of some that was secret; he would have to do something about this, but he didn’t quite know what; he would sleep on it.

  Since Quarfar was growing uncommonly nervous in semiconfinement and in his anxiety to get on with Dora-homing, diversion was in order; and the four of them set out on a skimmer tour of Manhattan and its immediate environs. Methuen judged (and Zorbin agreed) that their guest was not likely to try anything rash as long as he could hope for decent progress.

  The comet-man showed interest in the sights of Manhattan, which were principally the astonishing buildings. They were beginning to talk together fairly well, more and more often bypassing Dorita’s mediation. Neither officer was a fool with languages, and neither was Quarfar (but why?); Dorita had helped them enormously, so that the officers were building their vocabularies in Quarfar’s tongue, and he in theirs. They were even learning to surmount the tempo barrier: he was making himself talk fast and high for him, the Erthlings slow and low for them, and words came through, and many were understood and learned. Zorbin kept wondering why there were the frequent word-inclusions which seemed to be distorted Tellenic.

  They visited the Metropolitan, where in a one-hour quickie visit their guest manifested prime interest in ancient Kamat and in 19th-century landscape painting. “Want more,” he remarked, and they promised for another day. (He had shrugged off ancient Tellas!) They hurried him through parts of the Museum of Natural History; in an hour there, he liked the evolutionary exhibit of humanoid-to-human skulls, and he loved the dinosaurs, and he marveled at the whale models. “Want more,” he repeated, and they promised.

  Then it occurred to Zorbin that the planetarium would be highly in order, but unfortunately it was late in the afternoon. Dorita mourned that they couldn’t have a private showing, where they could discuss the stars without troubling the spectators, and perhaps hold and zero in on certain projections. “Good idea,” agree Methuen. “Let me try—” He went to a public phone, ranged his last five quarter-credit coins on the rolling ramp at telephone top and called the planetarium. When someone answered, thoop went a coin being sucked into the slot. He gave his name, rank and service, and asked to speak with the planetarium director, to whom he said {thoop): “Excuse me, sir, but we have a situation here involving an extraplanetary guest. He is being studied by an interconstellational task force of scientists, and I am chairman. Might we possibly” {thoop) “arrange a showing after hours—” The male director broke in with enthusiasm: “That would be one of the creatures from the comet? Indeed, Captain. I can arrange it—at 1730 this afternoon, if that” (thoop) “will be convenient. We’ll use the standard show and the usual voice-flake, but I’ll be on hand with the projectionist so that we can” (thoop) “freeze scenes or backtrack and enter into two-way discussion—”

  Methuen, breaking in: “Done, sir! I’m out of quarters!”

  Quarfar watched awed through the early projections, with Dorita mind-translating the narrative: the change from daylight through twilight into starry night, the sun, the solar system with planets wending their ways, the starry processional across the heavens from sunset to sunrise. He leaned back and gazed at the starry dome of the northern sky (that is, the sky north of the celestial equator, which is relatively independent of changing seasons) while the flake went through the customary discussion of constellations and some individual stars, with a glowing arrow pointing to the subject of discussion. In a spectacular rotation of the heavens, the scene shifted to the southern sky. …

  Dorita became aware of some sort of interest in the mind of Quarfar, a focused interest, a puzzled interest. She spoke to Methuen, who called down to the director in the floor-center projection dome: “Can we go back for a moment to the northern sky?” It was done; and again Quarfar gazed at the 0500 sector in the neighborhood of the celestial equator.

  Presently he mindspoke rapidly; Dorita translated to the captain, who inquired of the director: “Sir, is it possible for you to show the celestial hemisphere from plus ninety to minus ninety and from zero hours to 1200?”

  “Please give us a couple of minutes,” the director responded. And after a brief wait, the overhead dome glowed with that night sky. Again, having been told what it was, Quarfar zeroed in on the five o’clock sector around th
e equator.

  He twisted his head around to stare at that area from another angle.

  Methuen urged in the alien’s tongue: ‘Tell where you look.” Quarfar pointed. Having leaned over to sight along Quarfar’s arm, Methuen called to the director: “Can you please point your arrow at Orion?” The arrow whisked across the sky and aimed itself at Orion’s belt. “Yes,” said Quarfar in Anglian, “but—” He gave up, his thought was too complex for limited words in either language; he mindspoke to Dorita; when she had comprehended, she relayed to Methuen.

  The captain called: “Sir, please bring your arrow down to Saiph.” That was the star in Orion’s right foot, if you assumed that Orion was looking at you. Quarfar barked “Yes!” and rapidly mindspoke to Dorita.

  On hearing what he wanted, Methuen swallowed and called: “Sir, this may be most difficult if not impossible. Our guest would like to have most of the sky filled with the constellation Orion as it would look from Saiph. Is that a possibility?”

  Pause. Then the director, apologetically: “Captain, we must have these data somewhere in our files, but we would have to bring them out, study them, and design a whole new arrangement of projection lenses. If this is important, I can put my staff on it tomorrow, we would hope to be ready by 1730 tomorrow afternoon. Would that work?”

  Zorbin whispered, “B.J., remember that Saiph lies exactly on the line of the five-forty-six gradient, and their declinations are the same: minus nine degrees forty-one minutes.” Methuen responded to the director: “Thank you, sir, it will work, and indeed we may be on to something important.” “However,” added the director, “we need a stipulation of coordinates—**