by Spider
Chapter 4
The sensation of falling that you get when you first enter zero gee is literal truth—but it fades rapidly as your body learns to treat it as illusion. Now, in zero gee for the last time, for the half hour or so before I would be back in Earth’s gravitational field, I felt like I was falling. Plummeting into some bottomless gravity well, dragged down by the anvil that was my heart, the scraps of a dream that should have held me aloft fluttering overhead.
The Champion was three times the size of Carrington’s yacht, which childishly pleased me until I recalled that he had summoned it here without paying for either fuel or crew. A guard at the airlock saluted as we entered. Cox led us aft to the compartment where we were to strap in. He noticed along the way that I used only my left hand to pull myself along, and when we stopped, he said, “Mr. Armstead, my late father also told me, ‘Hit the soft parts with your hand. Hit the hard parts with a utensil.’ Otherwise I can find no fault with your technique. I wish I could shake your hand.”
I tried to smile, but I didn’t have it in me. “I admire your taste in enemies, Major.”
“A man can’t ask for more. I’m afraid I can’t spare time to have your hand looked at until we’ve grounded. We begin reentry immediately.”
“Forget it. Get Shara down fast and easy.”
He bowed to Shara, did not tell her how deeply sorry he was to et cetera, wished us all a comfortable journey, and left. We strapped into our acceleration couches to await ignition. There ensued a long and heavy silence, compounded of a mutual sadness that bravado could only have underlined. We did not look at each other, as though our combined sorrow might achieve some kind of critical mass. Grief struck us dumb, and I believe that remarkably little of it was self-pity.
But then a whole lot of time seemed to have gone by. Quite a bit of intercom chatter came faintly from the next compartment, but ours was not in circuit. At last we began to talk desultorily, discussing the probable critical reaction to Mass Is A Verb, whether analysis was worthwhile or the theater really dead, anything at all except future plans. Eventually there was nothing else to talk about, so we shut up again. I guess I’d say we were in shock.
For some reason I came out of it first. “What the hell is taking them so long?” I barked irritably.
Tom started to say something soothing, then glanced at his watch and yelped. “You’re right. It’s been over an hour.”
I looked at the wall clock, got hopelessly confused until I realized it was on Greenwich time rather than Wall Street, and realized he was correct. “Chrissakes,” I shouted, “the whole bloody point of this exercise is to protect Shara from overexposure to free fall! I’m going forward.”
“Charlie, hold it.” Tom, with two good hands, unstrapped faster than I. “Dammit, stay right there and cool off. I’ll go find out what the holdup is.”
He was back in a few minutes, and his face was slack. “We’re not going anywhere. Cox has orders to sit tight.”
“What? Tom, what the hell are you talking about?”
His voice was all funny. “Red fireflies. More like bees, actually. In a balloon.”
He simply could not be joking, which meant he flat out had to have gone completely round the bend, which meant that somehow I had blundered into my favorite nightmare, where everyone but me goes crazy and begins gibbering at me. So I lowered my head like an enraged bull and charged out of the room so fast the door barely had time to get out of my way.
It just got worse. When I reached the door to the bridge I was going much too fast to be stopped by anything short of a body block, and the crewmen present were caught flatfooted. There was a brief flurry at the door, and then I was on the bridge, and then I decided that I had gone crazy too, which somehow made everything all right.
The forward wall of the bridge was one enormous video tank—and just enough off center to faintly irritate me, standing out against the black deep as clearly as cigarettes in a darkroom, there truly did swarm a multitude of red fireflies.
The conviction of unreality made it okay. But then Cox snapped me back to reality with a bellowed, “Off this bridge, Mister.” If I’d been in a normal frame of mind it would have blown me out the door and into the farthest corner of the ship; in my current state it managed to jolt me into acceptance of the impossible situation. I shivered like a wet dog and turned to him.
“Major,” I said desperately, “what is going on?”
As a king may be amused by an insolent varlet who refuses to kneel, he was bemused by the phenomenon of someone failing to obey him. It bought me an answer. “We are confronting intelligent alien life,” he said concisely. “I believe them to be sentient plasmoids.”
I had never for a moment believed that the mysterious object which had been leap-frogging around the solar system since I came to Skyfac was alive. I tried to take it in, then abandoned the task and went back to my main priority. “I don’t care if they’re eight tiny reindeer; you’ve got to get this can back to Earth now.”
“Sir, this vessel is on Emergency Red Alert and on Combat Standby. At this moment the suppers of every one in North America are getting cold unnoticed. I will consider myself fortunate if I ever see Earth again. Now get off my bridge.”
“But you don’t understand. Shara’s right on the edge: farting around like this’ll kill her. That’s what you came up here to prevent, dammit—”
“MISTER ARMSTEAD! This is a military vessel. We are facing more than fifty intelligent beings who appeared out of hyperspace near here twenty minutes ago, beings who therefore use a drive beyond my conception with no visible parts. If it makes you feel any better I am aware that I have a passenger aboard of greater intrinsic value to my species than this ship and everyone else aboard her and if it is any comfort to you this knowledge already provides a distraction I need like an auxiliary anus, and I can no more leave this orbit than I can grow horns. Now will you get off this bridge or will you be dragged?”
I didn’t get a chance to decide; they dragged me.
On the other hand, by the time I got back to our compartment, Cox had put our vidphone screen in circuit with the tank on the bridge. Shara and Tom were studying it with rapt attention. Having nothing better to do, I did too.
Tom had been right. They did act more like bees, in the swarming rapidity of their movement. I couldn’t get an accurate count: about fifty. And they were in a balloon—a faint, barely visible thing on the fine line between transparency and translucence. Though they darted like furious red gnats, it was only within the confines of the spheroid balloon—they never left it or seemed to touch its inner surface.
As I watched, the last of the adrenalin rinsed out of my kidneys, but it left a sense of frustrated urgency. I tried to grapple with the fact that these Space Commando special effects represented something that was—more important that Shara. It was a primevally disturbing notion, but I could not reject it.
In my mind were two voices, each hollering questions at the top of their lungs, each ignoring the other’s questions. One yelled: Are those things friendly? Or hostile? Or do they even use those concepts? How big are they? How far away? From where? The other voice was less ambitious, but just as loud; all it said, over and over again was: How much longer can Shara remain in free fall without dooming herself?
Shara’s voice was full of wonder. “They’re…they’re dancing.”
I looked closer. If there was a pattern to the flies-on-garbage swarm they made, I couldn’t detect it. “Looks random to me.”
“Charlie, look. All that furious activity, and they never bump into each other or the walls of that envelope they’re in. They must be in orbits as carefully choreographed as those of electrons.”
“Do atoms dance?”
She gave me all odd look. “Don’t they, Charlie?”
“Laser beam,” Tom said.
We looked at him.
“Those things have to be plasmoids—the man I talked to said they show on deepspace radar. That means they�
�re ionized gases of some kind—the kind of thing that used to cause UFO reports.” He giggled, then caught himself. “If you could slice through that envelope with a laser, I’ll bet you could deionize them pretty good—besides, that envelope has to hold their life support, whatever it is they metabolize.”
I was dizzy. “Then we’re not defenseless?”
“You’re both talking like soldiers,” Shara burst out. “I tell you, they’re dancing. Dancers aren’t fighters.”
“Come on, Shara,” I barked. “Even if those things happened to be remotely like us, that’s not true. T’ai chi, karate, kung fu—they’re dance.” I nodded to the screen. “All we know about these animated embers is that they travel interstellar space. That’s enough to scare me.”
“Charlie, look at them,” she commanded.
I did.
By God, they didn’t look threatening; and they did, the more I watched, seem to move in a dancelike way, whirling in mad adagios just too fast for the eye to follow. Not at all like conventional dance—more analogous to what Shara had begun with Mass Is A Verb. I found myself wanting to switch to another camera for contrast of perspective, and that made my mind start to wake up at last. Two ideas surfaced, the second one necessary in order to sell Cox the first.
“How far do you suppose we are from Skyfac?” I asked Tom.
He pursed his lips. “Not far. There hasn’t been much more than maneuvering acceleration. The damned things were probably attracted to Skyfac in the first place—it must be the most easily visible sign of intelligent life in this system.” He grimaced. “Maybe they don’t use planets.”
I reached forward and punched the audio circuit. “Major Cox.”
“Get off this circuit.”
“How would you like a closer view of those things?”
“We’re staying put. Now stop jiggling my elbow and get off this circuit or I’ll—”
“Will you listen to me? I have four mobile cameras in space, remote control, self-contained power and light, and better resolution than you’ve got. They were set up to tape Shara’s next dance.”
He shifted gears at once. “Can you patch them into my ship?”
“I think so. But I’ll have to get back to the master board in Ring One.”
“No good, then. I can’t tie myself to a top—what if I have to fight or run?”
“Major—how far a walk is it?”
It startled him a bit. “A couple of klicks, as the crow flies. But you’re a groundlubber.”
“I’ve been in free fall for most of two months. Give me a portable radar and I can ground on Phobos.”
“Mmmm. You’re a civilian—but dammit, I need better video. Permission granted.”
Now for the first idea. “Wait—one thing more. Shara and Tom must come with me.”
“Nuts. This isn’t a field trip.”
“Major Cox—Shara must return to a gravity field as quickly as possible. Ring One’ll do—in fact, it’d be ideal, if we enter through the ‘spoke’ in the center. She can descend very slowly and acclimatize gradually, the way a diver decompresses in stages, but in reverse. Tom will have to come along and stay with her—if she passes out and falls down the tube, she could break a leg even in one-sixth gee. Besides, he’s better at EVA than either of us.”
He thought it over. “Go.”
We went.
The trip back to Ring One was longer than any Shara or I had ever made, but under Tom’s guidance we made it with minimal maneuvering. Ring, Champion and aliens formed an equiangular triangle about five or six klicks on a side. Seen in perspective, the aliens took up about twice as much volume as a sphere the diameter of Ring One—one hell of a big balloon. They did not pause or slacken in their mad gyration, but somehow they seemed to watch us cross the gap to Skyfac. I got the impression of a biologist studying the strange antics of a new species. We kept our suit radios off to avoid distraction, and it made me just a little bit more susceptible to suggestion.
I failed to even notice the absence of a local vertical. I was too busy.
I left Tom with Shara and dropped down the tube six rungs at a time. Carrington was waiting for me in the reception room, with two flunkies. It was plain to see that he was scared silly, and trying to cover it with anger. “God damn it, Armstead those are my bloody cameras.”
“Shut up, Carrington. If you put those cameras in the hands of the best technicians available—me—and if I put their data in the hands of the best strategic mind in space—Cox—we might be able to save your damned factory for you. And the human race for the rest of us.” I moved forward, and he got out of my way. It figured. Putting all humanity in danger might just be bad PR.
After all the practicing I’d done it wasn’t hard to direct four mobile cameras through space simultaneously by eye. The aliens ignored their approach. The Skyfac comm crew fed my signals to the Champion, and patched me in to Cox on audio. At his direction I bracketed the balloon with the cameras, shifting POV at his command. Space Command Headquarters must have recorded the video, but I couldn’t hear their conversation with Cox, for which I was grateful. I gave him slow-motion replay, close ups, splitscreens—everything at my disposal. The movements of individual fireflies did not appear particularly symmetrical, but patterns began to repeat. In slow motion they looked more than ever as though they were dancing, and although I couldn’t be sure, it seemed to me that they were increasing their tempo. Somehow the dramatic tension of their dance began to build.
And then I shifted POV to the camera which included Skyfac in the background, and my heart turned to hard vacuum and I screamed in pure primal terror—halfway between Ring One and the swarm of aliens, coming up on them slowly but inexorably, was a p-suited figure that had to be Shara.
With theatrical timing, Tom appeared in the doorway beside me, leaning heavily on Harry Stein, his face drawn with pain. He stood on one foot, the other plainly broken.
“Guess I can’t…go back to exhibition work…after all,” he gasped. “Said…‘I’m sorry, Tom’…knew she was going to swing on me…wiped me out anyhow. Oh dammit, Charlie, I’m sorry.” He sank into an empty chair.
Cox’s voice came urgently. “What in hell is going on? Who is that?”
She had to be on our frequency. “Shara!” I screamed “Get your ass back in here!”
“I can’t Charlie.” Her voice was startlingly loud, and very calm. “Halfway down the tube my chest started to hurt like hell.”
“Ms. Drummond,” Cox rapped, “if you approach any closer to the aliens I will destroy you.”
She laughed, a merry sound that froze my blood. “Bullshit, Major. You aren’t about to get gay with laser beams near those things. Besides, you need me as much as you do Charlie.”
“What do you mean?”
“These creatures communicate by dance. It’s their equivalent of speech, a sophisticated kind of sign language, like hula.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I feel it. I know it. Hell, how else do you communicate in airless space? Major Cox, I am the only qualified interpreter the human race has at the moment. Now will you kindly shut up so I can try to learn their language?”
“I have no authority to…”
I said an extraordinary thing. I should have been gibbering, pleading with Shara to come back, even racing for a p-suit to bring her back. Instead I said, “She’s right. Shut up, Cox.”
“But—”
“Damn you, don’t waste her last effort.”
He shut up.
Panzella came in, shot Tom full of painkiller, and set his ankle right there in the room, but I was oblivious. For over an hour I watched Shara watch the aliens. I watched them myself, in the silence of utter despair, and for the life of me I could not follow their dance. I strained my mind, trying to suck meaning from their crazy whirling, and failed. The best I could do to aid Shara was to record everything that happened, for a hypothetical posterity. Several times she cried out softly, small muffled exclamations,
and I ached to call out to her in reply, but did not. With the last exclamation, she used her thrusters to bring her closer to the alien swarm, and hung there for a long time.
At last her voice came over the speaker, thick and slurred at first as though she were talking in her sleep. “God, Charlie. Strange. So strange. I’m beginning to read them.”
“How?”
“Every time I begin to understand a part of the dance, it…it brings us closer. Not telepathy, exactly, I just…know them better. Maybe it is telepathy. I don’t know. By dancing what they feel, they give it enough intensity to make me understand. I’m getting about one concept in three. It’s stronger up close.”
Cox’s voice was gentle but firm. “What have you learned, Shara?”
“That Tom and Charlie were right. They are warlike. At least, there’s a flavor of arrogance to them—a conviction of superiority. Their dance is a challenging, a dare. Tell Tom I think they do use planets.”
“What?”
“I think at one stage of their development they’re corporeal, planet-bound. Then when they have matured sufficiently, they…become these fireflies, and head out into space.”
“Why?” from Cox.
“To find spawning grounds. They want Earth.”
There was a silence lasting perhaps ten seconds. Then Cox spoke up quietly. “Back away, Shara. I’m going to see what lasers will do to them.”
“No!” she cried, loud enough to make a really first-rate speaker distort.
“Shara, as Charlie pointed out to me, you are not only expendable, you are for all practical purposes expended.”
“No!” this time it was me shouting.
“Major,” Shara said urgently, “that’s not the way. Believe me, they can dodge or withstand anything you or Earth can throw at them. I know.”
“Hell and damnation, woman,” Cox said. “What do you want me to do? Let them have the first shot? There are vessels from four countries on their way right now, but they won’t—”
“Major, wait. Give me time.”
He began to swear, then cut off. “How much time?”