by Greg Bear
Arthur shrugged.
“Maybe the powers behind these ships are incredibly unorganized or inconsistent or just plain callous. Or there’s some sort of dispute within their organization.”
“Whether to eat the Earth or not.”
“Right,” Harry said.
“Do you think Crockerman will make this public?”
“No,” Harry said, fingers wrapped on his ample stomach. “He’d be crazy if he did. Think of the disruption. If he’s smart, he’s going to sit back and wait until the very last minute — he’s going to see how people react to the Good News spaceship.”
“Perhaps we should be bombing Death Valley right now.” Arthur stared at a painting over the nightstand between the two single beds. It showed four F-104 fighters climbing straight up over China Lake. “Cauterize the whole area. Act without thinking.”
“Make them madder than hell, right?” Harry said. “If they are being incredibly arrogant, then it means they have some assurance we can’t hurt them. Not even with nuclear weapons.”
Arthur sat in a straight-backed chair, facing away from the windows and the painting. High-tech fighters and bombers. Cruise missiles. Mobile laser defenses. Thermonuclear weapons. No better than stone axes.
“Captain Cook,” he said, and then gently bit his lower lip.
“Yes?” Harry encouraged.
“The Hawaiians managed to kill Captain Cook. His technology was at least a couple of hundred years more advanced than theirs. Still, they killed him.”
“What good did it do them?” Harry asked.
Arthur shook his head. “None, I guess. Some personal satisfaction, perhaps.”
President William D. Crockerman, sixty-three, was certainly one of the most distinguished-looking men in America. With his graying black hair, penetrating green eyes, sharply defined, almost aquiline nose, and lines of goodwill around his eyes and mouth, he might be equally the revered head of a corporation or some teenager’s favorite grandparent. On television or in person, he projected self-confidence and a trenchant wit. There could be no doubt that he took his job seriously, but not himself — this was the image portrayed, and it had won him election after election along his twenty-six-year career in public office. Crockerman had only lost one election: his first, as a mayoral candidate in Kansas City, Missouri.
He entered the Vandenberg isolation laboratory accompanied by two Secret Service agents, his national security advisor — a thin, middle-aged Boston gentleman named Carl McClennan — and his science advisor, David Rotterjack, soporifically calm and thirty-eight years of age. Arthur knew the tall, plump blond-haired Rotterjack well enough to respect his credentials without necessarily liking the man. Rotterjack had tended toward science administration, rather than doing science, in his days as director of several private biological research laboratories.
This entourage was ushered into the combination laboratory and viewing room by General Paul Fulton, Commander in Chief of Shuttle Launch Center 6, West Coast Shuttle Launch Operations. Fulton, fifty-three, had been a football player in his academy days, and still carried substantial muscle on his six-foot frame.
Arthur and Harry awaited them in the central laboratory, standing by the Guest’s covered window. Rotterjack introduced the President and McClennan to Harry and Arthur, and then introductions were made in a circle around the chairs. Crockerman and Rotterjack sat in the front row, with Harry and Arthur standing to one side.
“I hope you understand why I’m nervous,” Crockerman said, concentrating on Arthur. “I haven’t been hearing good things about this place.”
“Yes, sir,” Arthur said.
“These stories…these statements about what the Guest has been saying…Do you believe them?”
“We see no reason not to believe them, sir,” Arthur said. Harry nodded.
“You, Mr. Feinman, what do you think of the Australian bogey?”
“From what I’ve seen, Mr. President, it appears to be an almost exact analog of our own. Perhaps larger, because it’s contained within a larger rock.”
“But we haven’t the foggiest notion what’s in either of the rocks, do we?”
“No, sir,” Harry said.
“Can’t X-ray them, or set off blasts nearby and listen on the other side?”
Rotterjack grinned. “We’ve been discussing a number of sneaky ways to learn what’s inside. None of them seem appropriate.”
Arthur felt a twinge, but nodded. “I think discretion is best now.”
“What about the robots, the conflicting stories? Some folks in my generation are calling them ‘shmoos,’ did you know that, Mr. Gordon, Mr. Feinman?”
“The name occurred to us, sir.”
“Bringers of everything good. That’s what they’ve been telling Prime Minister Miller. I’ve spoken to him. He’s not necessarily convinced, or at least he doesn’t let us think he is, but…he saw no reason to keep everybody in the dark. It’s a different situation here, isn’t it?”
“Yes, sir,” Arthur said.
McClennan cleared his throat. “We can’t predict what kind of harm might come if we tell the world we have a bogey, and it says doomsday is here.”
“Carl takes a dim view of any plans to release the story. So we have four civilians locked up, and we have agents in Shoshone and Furnace Creek, and the rock is off limits.”
“The civilians are locked up for other reasons,” Arthur said. “We haven’t found any evidence of biological contamination, but we can’t afford to take chances.”
“The Guest appears to be free of biologicals, true?” Rotterjack asked.
“So far,” General Fulton said. “We’re still testing.”
“In short, it’s not happening the way we thought it might,” Crockerman said. “No distant messages in Puerto Rico, no hovering flying saucers, no cannon shells falling in the boondocks and octopuses crawling out.”
Arthur shook his head, smiling. Crockerman had a way of coercing respect and affection from those around him. The President cocked one thick dark eyebrow at Harry, then Arthur, then briefly at McClennan. “But it is happening.”
“Yessir,” Fulton said.
“Mrs. Crockerman told me this would be the most important meeting of my life. I know she’s right. But I am scared, gentlemen. I’ll need your help to get me through this. To get us through this. We are going to get through this, aren’t we?”
“Yes, sir,” Rotterjack said grimly.
Nobody else answered.
“I’m ready, General.” The President sat straight-backed in the chair and faced the dark window. Fulton nodded at the duty officer.
The curtain opened.
The Guest stood beside the table, apparently in the same position as when Arthur and Harry had left it the day before.
“Hello,” Crockerman said, his face ashen in the subdued room light. The Guest, with its light-sensitive vision, could see them perhaps more clearly than they saw it.
“Hello,” it replied.
“My name is William Crockerman. I’m President of the United States of America, the nation you’ve landed in. Do you have nations where you live?”
The Guest did not answer. Crockerman looked aside at Arthur. “Can he hear me?”
“Yes, Mr. President,” Arthur said.
“Do you have nations where you live?” Crockerman repeated.
“You must ask important questions. I am dying.”
The President flinched back. Fulton moved forward as if he were about to take charge, clear the room, and protect the Guest from any further strain, but Rotterjack put a hand on his chest and shook his head.
“Do you have a name?” the President asked.
“Not in your language. My name is chemical and goes before me among my own kind.”
“Do you have family within the ship?”
“We are family. All others of our kind are dead.”
Crockerman was sweating. His eyes locked on the Guest’s face, on the three golden-yellow eyes that star
ed at him without blinking. “You’ve told my colleagues, our scientists, that this ship is a weapon and will destroy the Earth.”
“It is not a weapon. It is a mother of new ships. It will eat your world and make new ships to travel elsewhere.”
“I don’t understand this. Can you explain?”
“Ask good questions,” the Guest demanded.
“What happened to your world?” Crockerman said without hesitating. He had already read a brief of Gordon and Feinman’s conversation with the Guest on this subject, but obviously wanted to hear it again, for himself.
“I cannot give the name of my world, or where it was in your sky. We have lost track of the time that has passed since we left. Memory of the world is dimmed by long cold sleeping. The first ships arrived and hid themselves within ice masses that filled the valleys of one continent. They took what they needed from these ice masses, and parts of them worked their way into the world. We did not know what was happening. In the last times, this ship, newly made, appeared in the middle of a city, and did not move. Plans were made as the planet trembled. We had been in space, even between planets, but there were no planets that attracted us, so we stayed on our world. We knew how to survive in space, even over long times, and we built a home within the ship, believing it would leave before the end. The ship did not prevent us. It left before the weapons made our world melted rock and gaseous water, and took us with it, inside. No others live that we are aware of.”
Crockerman nodded once and folded his hands in his lap. “What was your world like?”
“Similar. More ice, a smaller star. Many like myself, not in form but in thought. Our kind was many-formed, some swimming in cold melt-seas, some like myself walking on ground, some flying, some living in ice. All thought alike. Thousands of long-times past, we had molded life to our own wishes, and lived happily. The air was rich and filled with smells of kin. Everywhere on the world, even in the far lands of thick ice, you could smell cousins and children.”
Arthur felt his throat catching. Crockerman’s cheek was wet with a single tear. He did not wipe it away.
“Did they tell you why your world was being destroyed?”
“They did not speak with us,” the Guest said. “We guessed the machines were eaters of worlds, and that they were not alive, just machines without smells, but with thoughts.”
“No robots came out to speak with you?”
“I have language difficulties.”
“Smaller machines,” Rotterjack prompted. “Talk with you, deceive you.”
“No smaller machines,” the Guest said.
Crockerman took a deep breath and closed his eyes for a moment. “Did you have children?” he asked.
“My kind were not allowed children. I had cousins.”
“Did you leave some sort of family behind?”
“Yes. Cousins and teachers. Ice brothers by command bonding.”
Crockerman shook his head. That meant nothing to him; indeed, it meant little to anybody in the room. Much of this would have to be sorted out later, with many more questions: — if the Guest lived long enough to answer all their questions.
“And you learned to speak our language by listening to radio broadcasts?”
“Yes. Your wasting drew the machines to you. We listened to what the machines were gathering.”
Harry scribbled furiously, his pencil making quick scratching noises on the notepad.
“Why didn’t you try to sabotage the machine — destroy it?” Rotterjack asked.
“Had we been able to do that, the machine would never have allowed us on board.”
“Arrogance,” Arthur said, his jaw tightening. “Incredible arrogance.”
“You’ve told us you were asleep, hibernating,” Rotterjack said. “How could you study our language and sleep at the same time?”
The Guest stood motionless, not answering. “It is done,” it finally replied.
“How many languages do you know?” Harry asked, pencil poised.
“I am speaker of English. Others, still within, speak Russian, Chinese, French.”
“These questions don’t seem terribly important,” Crockerman said quietly. “I feel as if a nightmare has come over us all. Who can I blame for this?” He glanced around the room, his eyes sharp, hawklike. “Nobody. I can’t simply announce we have visitors from other worlds, because people will want to see the visitors. After the Australian release, what we have here can only demoralize and confuse.”
“I’m not sure how long we can keep this a secret,” McClennan said.
“How can we hold this back from our people?” Crockerman seemed not to have heard anybody but the Guest. He stood and approached the glass, grimly concentrating on the Guest. “You’ve brought us the worst possible news. You say there’s nothing we can do. Your…civilization…must have been more advanced than ours. It died. This is a terrible message to bring. Why did you bother at all?”
“On some worlds, the contest might have been more equal,” the Guest said. “I am tired. I do not have much more time.”
General Fulton spoke in an undertone with McClennan and Rotterjack. Rotterjack approached the President and put a hand on his shoulder. “Mr. President, we are not the experts here. We can’t ask the right questions, and clearly there isn’t much time remaining. We should get out of the way and let the scientists do their work.”
Crockerman nodded, took a deep breath, and closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he seemed more composed. “Gentlemen, David is correct. Please get on with it. I’d like to speak to all of you before we go out to the site. Just one last question.” He turned back to the Guest. “Do you believe in God?”
Without a moment’s hesitation, the Guest replied, “We believe in punishment.”
Crockerman was visibly shaken. Mouth open slightly, he glanced at Harry and Arthur, then left the room on trembling legs, with McClennan, Rotterjack, and General Fulton following.
“What do you mean by that?” Harry asked after the door had closed. “Please expand on what you just said.”
“Detail is unimportant,” the Guest said. “The death of a world is judgment of its inadequacy. Death removes the unnecessary and the false. No more talk now. Rest.”
11
Bad news. Bad news.
Edward awoke from his dreaming doze and blinked at the off-white ceiling. He felt as if somebody very important to him had died. It took him a moment to orient to reality.
He had had a dream he couldn’t remember clearly now. His mind shuffled palm leaves over the sand to hide the tracks of the subconscious at play.
The duty officer had told them an hour before that nobody was sick, and no biologicals had been discovered in their blood or anywhere else. Not even on the Guest, which seemed as pure as the driven snow. Odd, that.
In any ecology Edward Shaw had heard of, which meant any Earth ecology, living things were always accompanied by parasitic or symbiotic organisms. On the skin, in the gut, within the bloodstream. Perhaps ecologies differed on other worlds. Perhaps the Guest’s people — wherever they came from — had advanced to the point of purity: only the primaries, the smart folks, left alive; no more little mutating beasties to cause illness.
Edward sat up and drew himself a glass of water from the lavatory sink. As he sipped, his eyes wandered to the window and the curtain beyond. Slowly but surely, he was losing the old Edward Shaw, and finding a new one: an ambiguous fellow, angry but not overtly so, afraid but not showing his fear, deeply pessimistic.
And then he remembered his dream.
He had been at his own funeral. The casket had been open and somebody had made a mistake, because within the box was the Guest. The minister, presiding in a purple robe with a huge medallion on his chest, had touched Edward on the shoulder and whispered into his ear,”This is Bad News indeed, don’t you think?”
He had never had dreams like that before.
The intercom signaled and he shouted,”No! Go away. I’m fine. Just go away
. I’m not sick. I’m not dying.”
“That’s okay, Mr. Shaw.” It was Eunice, the slender black duty officer who seemed most sympathetic to Edward. “You go ahead and let it out if you want. I can’t shut off the tapes, but I’ll shut down my speaker for a while if you wish.”
Edward sobered immediately. “I’m all right, Eunice. Really. Just need to know when we’re going to get out of here.”
“I don’t know that myself, Mr. Shaw.”
“Right. I don’t blame you.” And he didn’t. Not Eunice, not the other duty officers, not the doctors or the scientists who had spoken to him. Not even Harry Feinman or Arthur Gordon. The tears were turning to laughter he could barely suppress.
“Still all right, Mr. Shaw?” Eunice asked.
“I’m a victim of coicumstance,’” Edward quoted Curly, the plump and shave-pated member of the Three Stooges. He punched the intercom button for Minelli’s room. When Minelli answered, Edward imitated Curly again, and Minelli did a perfect ”Whoop hoop ooop.” Reslaw joined in, and Stella laughed, until they sounded like a laboratory full of chimpanzees. And that was what they became, chittering and eeking and stomping the floor. “Hey, I’m scratching my armpits,” Minelli said. “I really am. Eunice will vouch for me. Maybe we can get the sympathy of Friends of the Animals or something.”
“Friends of Geologists,” Reslaw said.
“Friends of Liberal Businesswomen,” Stella added.
“Come on, you guys,” Eunice said.
At eight o’clock in the evening, Edward glanced at his face in the shaving mirror over the sink. “Here comes the Prez,” he murmured. “I won’t even vote for the man, but I’m primping like a schoolgirl.” They wouldn’t be shaking hands. Yet the President would look in upon Shaw and Minelli and Reslaw and Morgan, would see them — and that was enough. Edward smiled grimly, then checked his teeth for food specks.
12
The Secretary of Defense, Otto Lehrman, arrived at seven-fifteen. After Crockerman had had a half hour alone with him and Rotterjack — sufficient time to gather his wits, Arthur surmised — they entered the laboratory around which the sealed cubicles were arranged, and onto which their windows all opened, a larger version of the central complex that held the Guest. Colonel Tuan Anh Phan stood before the isolation chambers’ control board.