by Ben Bova
“I get it!” the other voice said. “Make the ship the bait in a mousetrap.”
“Right. That’s the way to get him.”
They both laughed.
And Johnny, lying quite still in his hideaway, began to know how a starving mouse must feel.
3
After a long, hot, sweaty time Johnny couldn’t hear any more voices or helicopter engines. And as he stared tiredly at the blanket over him, it seemed that the daylight was growing dimmer.
Must be close to sundown, he thought.
Despite his worked-up nerves, he fell asleep again. By the time he woke up, it was dark.
He sat up and let the blanket fall off to one side of his dugout shelter. Already it was getting cold.
But Johnny smiled.
If they’re going to have all their sensors looking in toward the ship, he told himself,that means nobody’s out here. It ought to be easy to get into the Army camp and hide there. Maybe I can find someplace warm. And food !
But another part of his mind asked,And what then? How are you going to get from there to the ship and the strangers ?
“I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it,” Johnny whispered to himself.
Clutching the blanket around his shoulders, for warmth in the chilly desert night wind, Johnny crept up to the top of the hill once more.
The Army tanks and trucks were still out there. A few tents had been set up, and there were lights strung out everywhere. It almost looked like a shopping center decorated for the Christmas season, there were so many lights and people milling around.
But the lights were glaring white, not the many colors of the holidays. And the people were soldiers. And the decorations were guns, cannon, radar antennas, lasers—all pointed inward at the strangers’ ship.
The ship itself was what made everything look like Christmas, Johnny decided. It stood in the middle of everything, glowing and golden like a cheerful tree ornament.
Johnny stared at it for a long time. Then he found his gaze floating upward, to the stars. In the clear cold night of the desert, the stars gleamed and winked like thousands of jewels: red, blue, white. The hazy swarm of the Milky Way swung across the sky. Johnny knew there were billions of stars in the heavens, hundreds of billions, so many stars that they were uncountable.
“That ship came from one of them,” he whispered to himself. “Which one?”
The wind moaned and sent a shiver of cold through him, despite his blanket.
Slowly, quietly, carefully, he got up and started walking down the hill toward the Army camp. He stayed in the shadows, away from the lights, and circled around the trucks and tanks. He was looking for an opening, a dark place where there was no one sitting around or standing guard, a place where he could slip in and maybe hide inside one of the trucks.
I wonder what the inside of a tank is like? he asked himself. Then he shook his head, as if to drive away such childish thoughts. He was an Apache warrior, he told himself, sneaking up on the Army camp.
He got close enough to hear soldiers talking and laughing among themselves. But still he stayed out in the darkness. He ignored the wind and cold, just pulled the blanket more tightly over his thin shoulders as he circled the camp. Off beyond the trucks, he could catch the warm yellow glow of the strangers’ ship. It looked inviting and friendly.
And then there was an opening! A slice of shadow that cut between pools of light. Johnny froze in his tracks and examined the spot carefully, squatting down on his heels to make himself as small and undetectable as possible.
There were four tents set up in a row, with their backs facing Johnny. On one side of them was a group of parked trucks and jeeps. Metal poles with lights on them brightened that area. On the other side of the tents were some big trailer vans, with all sorts of antennas poking out of their roofs. That area was well-lit too.
But the narrow lanes between the tents were dark with shadow. And Johnny could see no one around them. There were no lights showing from inside the tents, either.
Johnny hesitated only a moment or two. Then he quickly stepped up to the rear of one of the tents, poked his head around its corner and found no one in sight. So he ducked into the lane between the tents.
Flattening himself against the tent’s vinyl wall, Johnny listened for sounds of danger. Nothing except the distant rush of the wind and the pounding of his own heart. It was dark where he was standing. The area seemed to be deserted.
He stayed there for what seemed like hours. His mind was saying that this was a safe place to hide. But his stomach was telling him that there might be some food inside the tents.
Yeah, and there might be some people inside there, too, Johnny thought.
His stomach won the argument.
Johnny crept around toward the front of the tent. This area was still pretty well lit from the lamps over by the trucks and vans. Peeking around the tent’s corner, Johnny could see plenty of soldiers sitting in front of the parking areas, on the ground alongside their vehicles, eating food that steamed and somehow looked delicious, even from this distance. Johnny sniffed at the night air and thought he caught a trace of something filled with meat and bubbling juices.
Licking his lips, he slipped around the front of the tent and ducked inside.
It was dark, but enough light filtered through from the outside for Johnny to see that the tent was really a workroom of some sort. Two long tables ran the length of the tent. There were papers stacked at one end of one table, with a metal weight holding them in place. All sorts of instruments and gadgets were sitting on the tables: microscopes, cameras, something that looked sort of like a computer, other things that Johnny couldn’t figure out at all.
None of it was food.
Frowning, Johnny went back to the tent’s entrance. His stomach was growling now, complaining about being empty too long.
He pushed the tent flap back half an inch and peered outside. A group of men were walking in his direction. Four of them. One wore a soldier’s uniform and had a big pistol strapped to his hip. The others wore ordinary clothes: slacks, windbreaker jackets. One of them was smoking a pipe—or rather, he was waving it in his hand as he talked, swinging the pipe back and forth and pointing its stem at the glowing ship, then back at the other three men.
Johnny knew that if he stepped outside the tent now they would see him as clearly as anything.
Then he realized that the situation was even worse. They were heading straight for this tent!
4
There wasn’t any time to be scared. Johnny let the tent flap drop back into place and dived under one of the tables. No place else to hide.
He crawled into the farthest corner of the tent, under the table, and huddled there with his knees pulled up tight against his nose and the blanket wrapped around him.
Sure enough, the voices marched straight up to the tent and the lights flicked on.
“You’d better get some sleep, Ed. No sense staying up all night again.”
“Yeah, I will. Just want to go over the tapes from this afternoon one more time.”
“Might as well go to sleep, for all the goodthat’s going to do you.”
“I know. Well. . . see you tomorrow.”
“G’night.”
From underneath the table, Johnny saw a pair of desert-booted feet walk into the tent. The man, whoever it was, wore striped slacks. He wasn’t a soldier, or a policeman, and that let Johnny breathe a little easier.
He won’t notice me under here, Johnny thought. I’ll just wait until he leaves and . . .
“You can come out of there now,” the man’s voice said.
Johnny froze. He didn’t even breathe.
The man squatted down and grinned at Johnny. “Come on, kid. I’m not going to hurt you. I ran away from home a few times myself.”
Feeling helpless, Johnny crawled out from under the table. He stood up slowly, feeling stiff and achy all of a sudden.
The man looked him over. “When’s the last tim
e you ate?”
“Around noontime.”
Johnny watched the man’s face. He had stopped grinning, and there were tight lines around his mouth and eyes that came from worry. Or maybe anger. He wasn’t as big as Johnny’s father, but he was solidly built. His hair was dark and long, almost down to his shoulders. His eyes were deep brown, almost black, and burning with some inner fire.
“You must be hungry.”
Johnny nodded.
“If I go out to the cook van and get you some food, will you still be here when I come back?”
The thought of food reminded Johnny how hungry he really was. His stomach felt hollow.
“How do I know you won’t bring back the State Troopers?” he asked.
The man shrugged, “How do I know you’ll stay here and wait for me to come back?”
Johnny said nothing.
“Look kid,” the man said, more gently, “I’m not going to hurt you. Sooner or later you’re going to have to go home, but if you want to eat and maybe talk, then we can do that. I won’t tell anybody you’re here.”
Johnny wanted to believe him. The man wasn’t smiling; he seemed very serious about the whole thing.
“You’ve got to start trusting somebody, sooner or later,” he said.
“Yeah. . .” Johnny’s voice didn’t sound very sure about it, even to himself.
“My name’s Gene Beldone.” He put his hand out.
Johnny reached for it. “I’m Johnny Donato,” he said. Gene’s grip was strong.
“Okay Johnny,” Gene smiled wide. “You wait here and I’ll get you some food.”
Gene came back in five minutes with an Army type of plastic tray heaped with hot, steaming food. And a mug of cold milk to wash it down. There were no chairs in the tent, but Gene pushed aside some of the instruments and helped Johnny to clamber up on the table.
For several minutes Johnny concentrated on eating. Gene went to the other table and fiddled around with what looked like a tape recorder.
“Did you really run away from home?” Johnny asked at last.
Gene looked up from his work. “Sure did. More than once. I know how it feels.”
“Yeah.”
“But. . .” Gene walked over to stand beside Johnny. “You know you’ll have to go back home again, don’t you?”
“I guess so.”
“Your parents are probably worried. I thought I heard one of the State Troopers say that you were ill?”
Johnny nodded.
“Want to talk about it?”
Johnny turned his attention back to the tray of food. “No.”
Gene gave a little one-shouldered shrug. “Okay. As long as you don’t need any medicine right away, or anything like that.”
Looking up again, Johnny asked, “Are you a scientist?”
“Sort of. I’m a linguist.”
“Huh?”
“I study languages. The Army came and got me out of the university so I could help them understand the language the aliens speak.”
“Aliens?”
“The men from the ship.”
“Oh. Aliens—that’s what you call them?”
“Right.”
“Can you understand what they’re saying?”
Gene grinned again, but this time it wasn’t a happy expression. “Can’t understand anything,” he said.
“Nothing?” Johnny felt suddenly alarmed. “Why not?”
“Because the aliens haven’t said anything to us.”
“Huh?”
With a shake of his head, Gene said, “They just come out every day at high noon, stand there for a few minutes while we talk at them, and then pop back into their ship. I don’t think they’re listening to us at all. In fact, I don’t think they’re evenlooking at us. It’s like they don’t even know we’re here!”
5
Gene let Johnny listen to the tapes of their attempts to talk to the aliens.
With the big padded stereo earphones clamped to his head, Johnny could hear the Army officers speaking, and another man that Gene said was a scientist from Washington. He could hear the wind, and a soft whistling sound, like the steady note of a telephone that’s been left off the hook for too long. But no sounds at all from the aliens. No words of any kind, in any language.
Gene helped take the earphones off Johnny’s head.
“They haven’t said anything at all?”
“Nothing,“Gene answered, clicking off the tape recorder. “The only sound to come from them is that sort of whistling thing—and that’s coming from the ship. Some of the Army engineers think it’s a power generator of some sort.”
“Then we can’t talk with them.” Johnny suddenly felt very tired and defeated.
“We can talkto them,” Gene said, “but I’m not even certain that they hear us. It’s. . . it’s pretty weird. They seem to look right through us—as if we’re pictures hanging on a wall.”
“Or rocks or grass or something.”
“Right!” Gene looked impressed. “Like we’re a part of the scenery, nothing special, nothing you’d want to talk to.”
Something in Johnny was churning, trying to break loose. He felt tears forming in his eyes. “Then how can I tell them. . .”
“Tell them what?” Gene asked.
Johnny fought down his feelings. “Nothing,” he said. “It’s nothing.”
Gene came over and put a hand on Johnny’s shoulder. “So you’re going to tough it out, huh?”
“What do you mean?”
Smiling, Gene answered, “Listen kid. Nobody runs away from home and sneaks into an Army camp just for fun. At first I thought you were just curious about the aliens. But now. . . looks to me as if you’ve got something pretty big on your mind.”
Johnny didn’t reply, but—strangely—he felt safe with this man. He wasn’t afraid of him anymore.
“So stay quiet,” Gene went on, “It’syour problem, whatever it is, and you’ve got a right to tell me to keep my nose out of it.”
“You’re going to tell the State Troopers I’m here?”
Instead of answering, Gene leaned against the table’s edge and said, “Listen. When I was about your age I ran away from home for the first time. That was in Cleveland. It was winter and there was a lot of snow. Damned cold, too. Now, you’d think that whatever made me leave home and freeze my backside in the snow for two days and nights—you’d think it was something pretty important, wouldn’t you?”
“Wasn’t it?”
Gene laughed out loud. “I don’t know! I can’t for the life of me remember what it was! It was awfully important to me then, of course. But now it’s nothing, nowhere.”
Johnny wanted to laugh with him, but he couldn’t, “My problem’s different.”
“Yeah, I guess so,” Gene said. But he was still smiling.
“I’m going to be dead before the year’s over,” Johnny said.
Gene’s smile vanished. “What?”
Johnny told him the whole story. Gene asked several questions, looked doubtful for a while, but at last simply stood there looking very grave.
“Thatis tough,” he said, at last.
“So I thought maybe the strangers—the aliens, that is—might do something, maybe cure it. . .” Johnny’s voice trailed off.
“I see,” Gene said, And there was real pain in his voice. “And we can’t even get them to notice us, let alone talk with us.”
“I guess it’s hopeless then.”
Gene suddenly straightened up. “No. Why should we give up? There must be something we can do!”
“Like what?” Johnny asked.
Gene rubbed a hand across his chin. It was dark with stubbly beard. “Well. . . maybe theydo understand us and just don’t care. Maybe they’re just here sightseeing, or doing some scientific exploring. Maybe they think of us like we think of animals in a zoo, or cows in a field—”
“But we’re not animals!” Johnny said.
“Yeah? Imagine how we must seem to them,”
Gene began to pace down the length of the table. “They’ve travelled across lightyears—billions on billions of miles—to get here. Their ship, their brains, their minds must be thousands of years ahead of our own. We’re probably no more interesting to them than apes in a zoo.”
“Then why. . .”
“Wait a minute,” Gene said. “Maybe they’re not interested in us—but so far they’ve only seen adults, men, soldiers mostly. Suppose we show them a child,you , and make it clear to them that you’re going to die.”
“How are you going to get that across to them?”
“I don’t know,” Gene admitted. “Maybe they don’t even understand what death is. Maybe they’re so far ahead of us that they live for thousands of years—or they might even be immortal!”
Then he turned to look back at Johnny, “But I’ve had the feeling ever since the first time we tried to talk to them that they understand every word we say. They just don’tcare .”
“And you think they’ll care about me?”
“It’s worth a try. Nothing else we’ve done has worked. Maybe this will.”
6
Gene took Johnny to a tent that had cots and warm Army blankets.
“You get some sleep; you must be tired,” he said. “I’ll let the State Police know you’re okay.”
Johnny could feel himself falling asleep, even though he was only standing next to one of the cots.
“Do you want to talk to your parents? We can set up a radio-phone. . .”
“Later,” Johnny said. “As long as they know I’m okay—I don’t want to hassle with them until after we’ve talked to the aliens.”
Gene nodded and left the tent. Johnny sat on the cot, kicked off his boots, and was asleep by the time he had stretched out and pulled the blanket up to his chin.
Gene brought him breakfast on a tray the next morning. But as soon as Johnny had finished eating and pulled his boots back on, Gene led him out to one of the big vans.
“General Hackett isn’t too sure he likes our idea,” Gene said as they walked up to the tan-colored van. It was like a civilian camper, only much bigger. Two soldiers stood guard by its main door, with rifles slung over their shoulders. It was already hot and bright on the desert, even though the sun had hardly climbed above the distant mountains.