Tomorrow’s Heritage

by Juanita Coulson

  The ranking officer saluted Todd as they reached the door. “Sir, if I might suggest? You’re a flier? Better use air transport, you and all your important people, next time. You and your corporation are sort of an attractive target right now, if you take my meaning.”

  “I do. I’m not used to a bodyguard,” Todd said shortly.

  “That might not be a bad idea, either, sir.” The officer wheeled and started shouting orders to his personnel. “Tighten up there! Get that transport down to the intersection! We’re going to keep things settled!”

  Inside the offices, ComLink and sanity still existed. Todd’s elderly security guard, all they had ever needed until now, scowled at the enforcement troops, then smiled warmly at Todd. Mikhail Feodor, Elaine Putnam, and a dozen other top ComLink executives crowded around Todd, all talking at once. They had seen the Science Council debacle, sympathized, cursed the cretins who wouldn’t listen. And they had a pile of decisions for him to make in a hurry. They were good, as Dian had often noted, teasing Todd, saying he was lazy and delegated authority strictly for that reason. Yet they hadn’t brought trivia. Riccardi and his other rivals needed countering, and only Todd Saunder could give the word. He flipped through the readouts while Mikhail and the rest looked on.

  “This one, and boost the Pacific link. No, don’t increase the rate on these entertainment leasers. We need their good will. Elaine, if you can give the science outlets any more push, do it. Color it good. That’s where we need the entertainment types. Hire.” She grinned at the tactic, and Todd grinned back. “Okay, we’re setting the telecom business back fifty or sixty years, back to when ‘network’ meant an entertainment source. But, dammit, we can’t afford to coast on just supplying services and news. What good is owning the company if I can’t make it a mouthpiece for my hobby?”

  That brought a round of approving laughter. Most of them hadn’t hired on with plans of working to reach an alien intelligence. But now that the boss had pulled it off, company loyalty turned in his favor. He had paid well and been lavish with the perks, when deserved. Pride went with the job, pride in being able to read and write and think in an era when the bulk of humanity reacted too often out of emotion.

  “You’re stretching it pretty thin, boss,” Putnam warned him. “That’s why I wanted to boost the rate on the dramas and comedy leasers.”

  “Sell a few more voter-response outlets to my brother. Pat’s got the money, and he always needs the votes,” Todd suggested sourly. It was a joke that stung. A few of his people grimaced. “I know you can do it. What have I got you for, if not to let me loaf?”

  The impromptu conference broke up, his supervisors and execs drifting away to their own upper-story offices, leaving Todd with Iris Halevy and her staff of front-door screen experts, as Iris termed it. They handled the calls, the off-the-street traffic, as efficiently as ComLink’s upper echelons tracked the heavy stuff.

  Todd eyed the metal shutters Enforcement had insisted he put over the front windows, ruining the view for Iris. Bodyguards! Then he looked at the scene on the big wall display beyond Reception. Miguel Falco, ComLink’s crack media interviewer, had cornered Pat just as the Protectors of Earth assembly session adjourned for lunch. The boss’s brother was big news, even if the boss and his brother were temporarily on the outs these days.

  “. . . quite a bit of panic around the world. Would you care to comment, Mr. Saunder?”

  “Earth First’s position is on public record, Miguel. I’ve said again and again that people should remain calm.”

  “Yes, but people have reacted strongly to your speeches, sir. You don’t feel your oratory has agitated some . . .”

  The handsome face stiffened in indignation. “Certainly not! Anyone who says I’m whipping the public into a frenzy had better come up with some pretty solid proof, Miguel. I have never advocated civil disorder. We’ve got to be well organized and work together to combat this alien invasion.”

  “You do think it’s going to be an invasion, then? You haven’t changed your mind on that?” Falco made sure his techs caught him in the lenses along with Pat. The interviewer was a ham, but fortunately one without any political ambitions, or he wouldn’t have been worth keeping on ComLink’s payroll.

  “No question whatsoever. Until we know otherwise, we must assume the alien is hostile. Why else would it be coming here, if not to scout for an invasion?” Todd gritted his teeth, forcing himself to listen despite his frustrated anger. What angered him the most was that Pat could make statements like that and the people bought it, just as they bought tainted peace treaties and all the other political fast deals Pat palmed off on them. He spoke, and they signed up.

  “Your brother’s Project Search scientific group is the one that discovered this alien vehicle. He says we can’t know if the alien’s hostile, that it’s probably friendly and can offer us all sorts of help for Earth’s problems . . .”

  Pat’s bodyguards moved in close, ready, if necessary, to get the pest off their employer’s back. Pat forestalled them. “Yes, Todd’s little group did spot the signals first. You must understand, Miguel, that my brother’s a bit of an ivory-tower type. He means well, but he’s far too trusting. He even believes we should keep handing over funds to Goddard Colony, while people here on Earth are starving. We just can’t afford to waste our resources, especially now, when we need all our strength to combat that alien.” A benign, patronizing smile lightened Pat’s face as he gazed into the ComLink cameras. It was his salesman’s smile, the one that clinched the deals and piled up the votes. “I don’t blame my brother. He thinks he’s doing the right thing. And we must remember, because he detected the alien machine so soon, now we have a better chance of defending ourselves . . .”

  Todd didn’t want to hear any more. Pat could make black seem like white and vice versa, and millions would swallow the guff. He went across the reception area to the front building section he had converted for Project Search’s use.

  He stood inside the door, surveying, his mood easing. His baby. He was cooperating with the Global Science Council closely now, of course, feeding them the data as soon as Project Search confirmed. And he had had to resist a lot of very tempting offers of help—too much help, much of it actually disguised efforts to get on his bandwagon. But Search was still his and his alone—with a little help from a very bright woman named Foix and some loyal, hard-working ComLink top techs and translators.

  Dian noticed him and waved. She didn’t come over to greet him. She was busy doing some language cross-checks with Beth Isaacs. Todd didn’t feel neglected, well aware he was an interloper here. He was a capable translator and top tech, but not up to the team’s abilities. It was enough they acknowledged his leadership and let him look over their shoulders.

  The staff had grown quite a bit in the last two weeks. The old-timers needed help, had needed it for weeks, though they had been reluctant to open up the ranks. They had developed a Goddard Colony closed-circuit possessiveness about Project Search and disliked sharing. But the furor resulting from the presentation to the Council drew eager would-be recruits by the hundreds. Anticipating that, Todd and Dian had their pre-selected possibilities already spotted, so when the people applied to them, the clearance checks had already been run. They had started right in. There were over thirty ComLink translator techs and interpretive specialists involved now, splitting the work into round-the-clock eight-hour shifts, leaving Todd in their wake.

  He found an empty terminal and cued up the available data, knowing his action wouldn’t interrupt anything currently in progress. Translation was discouragingly slow. He had anticipated it would be, but that didn’t soften his impatience. Todd cushioned his chin on the heel of his hand, gazing at the moving letters. Two weeks’ intense effort, high gear, new staff to assist. And so far Project Search had broken down a grand total of three symbols, and those weren’t yet guarantee-confirmed. Dian kept telling Todd what he already knew—that until certain vital keys were translated, they weren’t
going to pick up much beyond the messenger’s ident signals, its rearrangement of their words, its pattern for “repeat,” and another for “ready to run.”

  The signals continued to adapt and adjust to Earth’s signals. They had fed it some very intricate sequences, and it had handled all of them. Todd’s estimates of the intelligence of the machine—and the species which made it—kept escalating. So did his hope.

  They couldn’t be hostile!

  Yet did he really have anything but faith to assure that? He didn’t know. No one did. Yet.

  But the point had been made—better the possible devil we know than not knowing at all. The trouble was, thanks to Pat’s rabble-rousing, that too few humans felt that way. The day of judgment was approaching, and they seemed determined to make Earth into a living hell even before it arrived.

  Todd was getting a mild headache, staring at the screen. He rested his eyes a moment, putting the monitor on hold, looking around the room. Heads bent over other monitors. People reading old language books. That was a strange sight! Young techs reading paper books. But nobody illiterate in print media could be recruited for Project Search. There was simply too much invaluable information stored in places the worldwide telecom ed systems didn’t touch. Thanks to Todd’s Science Council connections, Search had been able to raid university and institutional back files and musty libraries everywhere. He had achieved a malicious triumph when Pat’s military connections discovered to their consternation that their frenzy to update and computerize everything worked against them in this translation job. Todd suspected Pat’s staff had hired its own bunch of translators and that they were trying to twist what little data was available to back up Pat’s paranoia theme. They had issued two releases, and the media science commentators had managed to reduce them both to jokes, explaining the silliness of Pat’s scientists even to the layman.

  But the paranoia continued. Most of the public didn’t really care what the alien messenger was saying. The mere fact that it was there was the trigger. Fear happened without the higher brain areas ever becoming involved.

  I’m not sure you’ll want to deal with a species as emotional and fear-oriented as we are, alien people. I hope you’re tolerant. We’ll grow up. Eventually. I hope.

  The last two weeks had gone from nervous to tense. How long would it take for things to settle? Would they settle?

  He cued the monitor again. The screen split. Nine miniature frames showed him the progress, distilled into basics. Updates on the orbiter’s input and outgo. They were getting some relays from the lunar backside telescopes and transmitters, too. Todd hadn’t expected that much cooperation from Lunar Base Copernicus, not after Mariette’s performance. Goddard was still maintaining virtual com silence, and the military was making noises about relieving the entire command of the Lunar Base. In theory, that meant Kevin would be posted back planetside, too. Todd wasn’t going to hold his breath waiting for that to happen, though.

  They had some now-recognizable key phrases. Correction, probable phrases. Dian insisted on qualifiers until she could hold a language in her hand and read it in three dimensions.

  1. Hello. I am Alien Messenger.

  2. Please repeat your last message.

  3. Do you copy?

  And there were pictures. Nothing like a holo-mode or even a distinct two-dimensional image. But there were visuals, hampered by the enormous gulf between the two stations, yet coherent. One of them, when Todd had displayed it for the Science Council, had caused pandemonium and fierce debate. One faction insisted it was an alien interpretation of a plaque Earth had sent into space decades earlier, and that therefore the alien had encountered the plaque, learned from it, and was returning Earth’s message as a form of greeting. A large faction disagreed violently. To them the images represented the alien species itself, and in that form it was indeed a greeting.

  Todd had liked the first interpretation, but he wasn’t sure he believed it. Things would be so much simpler if the alien could speak a human language, had learned one years before it had contacted Project Search. But Todd wasn’t convinced. The concept made him shiver.

  If it had happened that way, the aliens were so far ahead of them in knowing about Homo sapiens that Project Search could never catch up.

  And if the second interpretation were correct . . .

  The image, static broken, filtered through twenty-eight A.U.s of space, seemed to depict two bipedal figures. Humanoid. If it was what it appeared to be, the image was showing them the rough outlines of its makers.

  The figure image hadn’t come through the orbiter’s scanners until the day after Todd and Dian left Saunderhome. Beth Isaacs had greeted them at the door of the Science Council conference with the news, relayed to her fellow techs stationed at the conference. They had all been very excited and had debated on the spot whether to include the new data, knowing in advance they wouldn’t be able to keep it back. It was the most startling thing yet found.

  What would Pat and lad have done at the birthday memorial if I’d shown them that? Maybe it’s just as well they had time to adjust to the shock before that got sprung on them, too. Humanoid? Definitely smarter than we are, to have built that vehicle. And who’s teaching whom the other language?

  Project Search was turning out to be a rather humbling experience.

  Beth Isaacs’ training with the dolphin-human teams of Sea-Search Rescue was serving them well. Five of the new recruits came from the same background. They had all had practice talking to an alien species, though that intelligent beast was a native of Earth. Beth had observed with a smile that it was just a slightly bigger step to communicating with an intelligent alien from somewhere else.

  Todd could see her working over a monitor, her dark, short curls and sharp profile eerily lit by the screen’s glow. Other Search workers leaned over her shoulder. One was scribbling on some paper, not wanting to leave the readout in order to record what he was thinking on another monitor. They could read, write, and translate. The cream of humanity’s ability to reason, and they worked for Todd Saunder.

  Dian finished what she had been doing and left her station, coming over to sit beside Todd. “Read any good monitors lately?” she inquired with a smile.

  “Everything you and the team put into them. I feel like sitting in front of the screen day and night so I won’t miss a single exciting development.”

  “You’ll get a sore ass and tired eyes, doing that.”

  “Should I set up shorter team hours?” Todd asked, concerned.

  Dian shook her head. “No, we’re just as eager as you are. It’s fatiguing, but we all hate to see our duty rotations end. Just when we think we might have something, another team takes over. But it’s a friendly rivalry. We’re afraid it’ll be the other one to break the key instead of us.” She paused and stared at him, and a tingle of anticipation worked along Todd’s gut. He felt what she was going to say before she spoke. “Like now.”

  He held his breath a moment, wanting to savor the news. “Close?”

  “Very, very close. Things starting to fit. Still a hell of a lot we have to put together, even with the comps doing the work. But it’s there, Todd. I can damned near taste it. A week, maybe. I may be wrong, but I don’t think I am. Beth doesn’t think so, either. We’re practically there. It’ll be baby talk, pidgin English—but it’ll be genuine communication.”

  “And we can touch them, prove they’re friendly, end this damned paranoia and talk of invasion,” Todd said almost prayerfully.

  She looked at him anxiously, reaching a deeper part of the emotions. “Was it worth it? What’s happening between you and your family . . .”

  “It was worth it,” Todd replied without hesitation.

  “Are you sure?” She was as adept at breaking down his code as she was at deciphering the alien messenger’s signals.

  “Not entirely. It hurts. But we can’t go back. I knew that from the start.”

  “Are you getting enough sleep?” Dian asked abruptly.r />
  “With you spending most of your time here and knocked out completely when you’re not on duty station? Of course I am,” Todd said, giving a lewd smirk; Dian rolled her eyes.

  “Todd . . .” He heard the change in her tone and eyed her intently. “I think maybe we should hire some extra security.”

  He turned her statement over in his mind, feeling cold. “Why?”

  “We’re starting to get some threats, calls from the outside. Someone apparently tapped into our circuits to the Science Council reference files. I don’t care if they listen in when we call to get some obscure datum, but the tap lets them call us . . . and they have.”

  Todd knew such problems had existed in the Twentieth Century, before feedback com private lines were instituted and anonymous calls eliminated. “I’ll tell CNAU Enforcement . . .”

  “Won’t do any good. They’re using some kind of scrambler lock.”

  Todd was shaken. “Military? Spies? Spying on Project Search? That’s crazy! We’re handing data out to the media as fast as we get it!”

  “I don’t think that’s what they’re after. They’re not trying to steal the data. They want us to shut down. The last call came to Beth. The guy told her she’d better get out of the project while she was still alive. Huh! That one rattled us pretty badly.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “That one? About an hour ago, while you were at the meeting. That’s why I didn’t call you to tell you about it. The earlier calls were just annoying. This one sounded mean,” Dian explained.

  Todd stood up, his anger building. “I’ll get some military specialist techs on the case right away, maybe borrow some from Mari’s sources. Dammit, this is a private corporation. Scrambler locks! What right have they got to spy on us? Nobody’s going to tap into my lines anonymously. I’ll take it to the top in P.O.E. if I have to.” He added with some chagrin, “This is galling—ComLink, circuit-tapped. But I’ll take care of it. Rely on it.”