She blinked. And blinked again. "Goodness," she said. "Well, it wasn't cleared with me. How do they expect me to run a section if they don't keep me informed?" She took the pink copy of my orders, adjusted her glasses on her nose and looked down at it. She held it almost at arm's length. When she finished scanning, she said, "Hm," very quietly. She passed the paper back almost absentmindedly. "Yes. Well, I'm sure we can find something for you boys to do. Come and see me on, ah . . . Tuesday. No, wait a minute-where did I leave my calendar?-oh, here it is. Let's see, now. No, Thursday will be better-"
"Uh, ma'am?" She stopped and blinked and gave me that wide-eyed look again. "We'd like to get to work immediately. If you could assign us a terminal ... ?"
"My goodness, are you Special Forces boys always in such a hurry?"
"Yes, ma'am, we are. There's a war on." I remembered something Shorty had said and added, "It's the first invasion ever fought on American territory." I held up my disk meaningfully. "A terminal? And can we get our live specimens settled in?"
Major Bombast interrupted then. "Dr. Partridge-it's already Friday afternoon, and you have a reception and a plenary session-"
"Yes, I know." There was an impatient edge to her voice. She caught herself and smiled sweetly at him. "I'll finish up here, and you can pick me up for the briefing in-ah, forty-five minutes." The major hrumphed and disappeared. Dr. Partridge stepped to a desk and hit a buzzer. "Jerry!" she called.
Jerry was a dumpy-looking potato of a human being hiding a rubbery face behind thick glasses and a frazzle of dirty blond hair. He appeared in a smudged lab coat and was carrying a disemboweled modulator. He didn't seem to be aware that he still had it in his hands. His nametag said J. LARSON, and he wore a slightly confused frown, as if he were perpetually preoccupied in some minor befuddlement.
Dr. Partridge gave him a cloying smile. "Oh, there you are. Will you handle James and-what is your name? Ted? Will you help them out? They're here as observers."
"Oh," said Jerry. He stared at us as if we were intruders. He looked to be somewhere in his mid-thirties, but he could have been any age from twenty-five to fifty. "Do you have orders?" he asked.
I passed them over. As he glanced through them, Dr. Partridge chirped, "I know that Jerry will take good care of you. If there's anything you need, just see him. He represents me. Now, if you'll excuse me-" And she disappeared into an office.
Jerry finished reading our orders and passed them back. "Special Forces, I see." He coughed. "My uncle's in the Special Forces. My Uncle Ira."
I nodded politely. "Sorry. I don't know him. Look, can we get on with this? I need a terminal. And I want these millipedes installed under special conditions."
Jerry rubbed his nose, then looked at me with a flat expression. "I'll have to have you cleared before I can assign you a terminal and work space. It'll take two weeks."
"Oh, terrific," I said. "Look-I'm in the middle of a process here. I can't wait two weeks." I pointed to the cases on the cart. "Those eggs and millipedes have to be installed under special conditions-"
"What kind of conditions?" Jerry had stepped over to the cart and was opening the metal handling cases and peering in.
"A cool, dry place for the eggs. The millipedes too-a cool room with dim light. I can give you specific recommendations."
"That won't be necessary."
"Ahh-I strongly suggest it."
Jerry opened another case. "Why?"
"Because that's what they like." I stepped over to the cart next to him. "Use a little common sense. Look at the size of their eyes. They're all pupil. Of course they're not going to like bright light."
Jerry hmphed.
I said, "Hazy sunshine blinds them. Indoor light blinds them. Even dim light blinds them. They can maneuver in twilight or dusk, but they can only see well in the dark."
Jerry looked skeptical. "Even absolute dark?"
I nodded. "I think their eyes are heat sensitive. I wasn't able to test it, but it looks as if they can see pretty far into the infra-red."
Ted spoke up then, for the first time. "Tell him what that means, Jim."
"Uh . . ." I wished he hadn't done that. I said, "They're not nocturnal-"
Jerry looked up from the case, frowning. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his lab coat. "I don't get that."
"-on their home planet. On Earth, they have to be."
"Huh?"
"Well," I said, "it's the size of their eyes. That really suggests that they've evolved under much poorer lighting conditions than we have here. It's compensation. Either their home planet is farther from its primary, or the primary doesn't put out as much light in the visible spectrum as Sol. Or both. That makes the planet noticeably cooler than Earth; probably its temperatures range between five and twenty degrees Centigrade. Maybe it's in a long glaciation. The millipedes seem most comfortable between ten and thirteen degrees, but that depends on the amount of light hitting them."
Jerry began to look interested.
"Earth daylight is too bright," I continued. "It slows them down, even makes them curl up. At a light level approximating dusk, they're at their most active across the widest possible temperature range-that's when they really move. When we found them, they were torpid-but only by comparison. I take it to be a pretty good indication of the general level of brightness to be found on Chtorr. Hence, the big eyes."
Jerry said, "Hm," and looked back into the millipede case with studied thoughtfulness.
"If I had access to a terminal," I hinted, "I could tell a lot more. It's very interesting how sensitive to light and temperature differences these creatures are. That suggests to me that the climate on Chtorr is incredibly stable. The nights must be fairly warm in relation to the days. I'd guess that the planet has a fairly hazy atmosphere with a lot of carbon dioxide in it; that would create a greenhouse effect and keep the nights from cooling too much. I also think the planet may not have any moons-or maybe only very small ones. Nothing that can exert strong tidal effects. That would make the planet stormy, not hazy."
"Hazy, huh?" Jerry pursed his lips as he thought. His whole rubbery face deformed. "I do know a little bit of theoretical ecology," he said. "You might be right-" Then he added, "but I doubt it."
"Oh, thanks." I folded my arms across my chest. "Listen, if you know a little bit, then you know a little bit isn't enough."
He nodded his agreement. "I know. I took my degree in T.E."
"B.S.?"
"Ph.D."
"Oh." Suddenly, I felt stupid.
"Listen, I applaud your industriousness-as well as your imagination-but your theory has holes in it big enough to drive a worm through."
"Name six."
"Just one will do." He closed the lid on the case again. "If Chtorr has a hazy atmosphere, then that means they can't see the stars. If the atmosphere is hazy enough, they won't see any moons either, especially not if they're small. That means no celestial objects in the sky to attract their interest-and that means no incentive for an intelligent race to discover space travel. If your theory is correct, these bugs shouldn't be here, and neither should the worms who brought them."
"Their eyes are much more sensitive than ours," I replied. "They should be able to see celestial objects under far worse viewing conditions. Look-" I took a deep breath. "To an exobiologist, the species filling the bottom rungs of the ladder are very efficient little monitors of the physical conditions of the planet-its rotation, its temperature cycles, its light levels, its weather patterns and a thousand and six other variables. You can extrapolate the context of the ecology out of the content, if you know what to look for. Based on this evidence, Chtorr is a perpetually smoke-filled room. Or haze, or smog, or something. The point is, the atmosphere is thick and the primary is dim, but how much of each, I don't know-oh, but I can tell you what color it is."
"Huh?" Jerry's jaw dropped. "How?"
"That's what I've been working on." I tapped my disk. "It's all on here."
He blinked
. "What is it?"
"It's a three-dimensional graph-the variables are temperature, light intensity and light frequency, demonstrated by millipede reactivity."
"Oh," said Jerry. He looked impressed.
"Well, hey-!" put in Ted, "What color is it?"
"It's red," I grinned. "The star is dark red. What else?" Jerry considered that. His face was thoughtful. "That's fairly well advanced along the sequence. I can see why the Chtorrans might be looking for a new home; the old one's wearing out." He looked at me. "How do you know?"
"Serendipity," I admitted. "I thought I could approximate darkness with a two-hundred-lumen output in the red bandwell, it works in a dark room; why not here? I got tired of stumbling into things. But then the new measurements didn't fit the curve I'd already established. The bugs were way too active. So I started thinking about the wavelengths of their visual spectrum. All last night I had the computer varying the color temperature of the plates at regular intervals. I gave the bugs eighteen different colors. Most of them provoked no response at all. The yellow gave some, the orange a bit more, but it was the red that made them sit up twice. A little more testing this morning showed they like it best no brighter than a terrestrial twilight-and then it correlates almost perfectly with the other set of tests."
"It sounds like a good piece of work," said Jerry. Suddenly, he grinned. On his face, the effect was grotesque. "It reminds me of a project I did once. We were given three disparate life forms and we had to extrapolate the native ecology. It was a two-year project. I used over twenty thousand hours of parallel processing." He grew more serious. "So please don't be upset when I tell you that your conclusions might be premature. I've been through this exercise once. I know some of the pitfalls. You can't judge a planet by a single life form. There's a lot of difference between rattlesnakes and penguins. You don't know if these millipedes are representative or just a special case. We don't know what part of the planet they're from, or what kind of region-are they from the poles or the equator? Are they representative of mountainous fauna on Chtorr, or swampland creatures? Or desert, or grasslands, or what? And what would that identification imply about conditions on the rest of the planet? What kind of seasons are these bugs geared to-how long are they? What kind of biological cycles? How long are the days, months, years? If they have no moons, or more than one, do they even have cyclical equivalents of months? The real question about these specimens is, where do these millipedes fit in the Chtorran ecology? All you have here are indicators: the worms like to eat bugs, and the bugs like to eat anything-is that a general or arbitrary condition? What can we imply about the shape of their food chain? And what about their breeding-what is their reproductive cycle like? What are their growth patterns? Their psychology-if they even have one? Diseases? And I haven't even begun to ask questions."
"That's what we're here for," I said. "To help ask questions-and to help find answers."
Jerry accepted that. "Good." He said, "I'll see that your information gets passed along to those who can make the best use of it. You've probably opened up a valuable area of inquiry." He held his hand out for the disk.
"Sorry." I shook my head. "No terminal, no disk."
"Uh-" Jerry looked annoyed. "If you have information about any extraterrestrial or suspected extraterrestrial life forms, you know you're required by law to report it to the federal authorities. This is the agency." He held out his hand again.
"No way," I said. "A man died for this information. I owe it to him to see it delivered. I don't want it disappearing down some rabbit hole."
"It's against regulations to let you on a terminal before you're cleared." He looked unhappy. "What branch of Special Forces did you say you were with?"
"Alpha Bravo."
"And what do you do?"
"We burn worms."
"I wouldn't phrase it like that, if I were you. At least, not around here." He thought for a moment, then made a face. "Phooey on regulations. You've got a green card, haven't you? All right, I know how to do it. Come on." He led us to a nexus of four terminals, powered up two of them, logged himself in on one and slaved the second one to his control. "Go ahead," he said. "Create a password for yourself. You too-Jackson, is it? You'll be operating on a special department account for V.I.P.s---0h, and don't tell anyone I did this. Now, first thing-I want you to dupe that disk-"
SEVENTEEN
THE BUS station was next to the PX. There were fifteen or twenty people standing around and waiting, most of them dressed in evening clothes or uniforms.
Hardly anybody looked up as we approached. "What's up?" I whispered.
Ted said, "I'll find out," and disappeared into the crowd. He left me standing there looking after him.
Our intention had been to ride into town and take in a show or a tribe-dance. Now I just stood in front of the bus terminal, staring at the big wall-screen. It was flashing: NEXT BUS-22 MINUTES. There was a blinking dot on the map, showing its present location.
I shoved my hands into my pockets and turned around. Almost immediately, I found myself staring into the face of a thin, pale little girl who couldn't have been more than sixteen at most, probably younger; she was hanging on the arm of a large, bombastic-looking man. He was puffy and florid-faced, and obviously drunk. He was old enough to be her father. He wore a plaid kilt and a rumpled military jacket. I didn't recognize the nationality; he could have been anything from Australian to Scot. I pegged him as a colonel. Or a buffoon. I was just about to give the girl a smile when he noticed me studying them. He glared and I turned away embarrassed.
I looked at the two WACs instead-at least, I assumed they were WACs. They could just as easily have been whores. Dad always said the way to tell the difference was that "whores dress like ladies, and ladies dress like whores." But I never understood what he meant by that. I always thought a whore was a lady. By definition. These two were murmuring quietly to each other, obviously about something neither of them cared about. They were swathed in elegance and indifference. They should have been waiting for a limousine, not a bus; but-well, the whole crowd was an odd conglomeration. Maybe they were with the three Japanese businessmen in Sony-suits who were arguing so heatedly over something, while a fourth-obviously a secretarykept referring to the readouts on a pocket terminal.
There were four black delegates speaking some unidentifiable African language; I would have guessed Swahili, but I had no way of being sure. Three men and a tall, striking woman with her hair in painful-looking corn rows. All were in bright red and gold costumes. The woman caught me looking at her, smiled and turned away. She whispered something to one of the men and he turned and glanced at me; then he turned back to his companion and the two of them laughed softly together. I felt myself getting hot.
I was embarrassed. I turned and stared into the PX window. I stayed that way, staring at faded packages of men's makeup kits until Ted came up grinning and punched my arm. "You're gonna love this!" he said.
I turned away from the dusty window. "What did you find?"
"Oh ... something." He said it smugly.
"For instance?"
"An orientation reception. You know what's going on here?"
"Chtorran studies, I hope."
"Better than that. The First Worldwide Conference on Extraterrestrial Life, with special emphasis on the Chtorran species, and particular objectives of contact, negotiation and coexistence."
"What about control?"
"I guess that's implied. There is a subsection on defensive procedures and policies, but it seems to be downplayed. In any case, this is a major effort. There are five hundred of the best scientists-"
"Best remaining," I corrected.
Ted ignored me. "-in the world. Not just biologists, Jim boy, but psychologists, ecologists, anthropologists, space scientists-they've even got the head of the Asenion Foundation coming in."
"Who's he?"
"It's a group of speculative thinkers. Writers, artists, filmists, programmers-like your dad-and so on
. People with a high level of ideational fluency. People who can extrapolate-like futurists and science fiction writers."
"Oh," I said. "Crackpots. I'm whelmed."
"You gonna come?"
"Huh? We're not officially invited, are we?"
"So? It's about Chtorrans, isn't it? And we're Chtorran experts, aren't we? We have as much right as anybody to be there. Come on, the bus is here." It was a big Chrysler hydro-turbine, one of the regular shuttles between the base and downtown. The driver had all her lights on and the big beast gleamed like a dragon.
I didn't get a chance to object. Ted just grabbed my arm and pulled me aboard after him. The bus was moving even before we found seats; I wanted to head for the back, but Ted pulled me down next to him near a cluster of several young and elegantly dressed couples; we rumbled out the front gate and onto the main highway and I thought of a brilliantly lit cruise ship full of revelers in the middle of a dark and lonely ocean.
Someone up front started passing a flask around and the party unofficially began. Most of the people on the bus seemed to know each other already and were joking back and forth. Somehow, Ted fit himself into the group and within minutes was laughing and joking along with them. When they moved to the lounge at the front of the bus, he waved for me to come up and join them, but I shook my head.
Instead I retreated to the back of the bus-almost bumping into the thin, pale little girl as she came out of the lavatory. "Oops, sorry!"
She flashed a quick angry look at me, then started to step past. "I said I'm sorry."
"Yeah-they all are."
"Hey!" I caught her arm.
"What?!"
I looked into her face. "Who hurt you?"
She had the darkest eyes. "Nobody!" she said. She pulled her arm free and went forward to rejoin her friend, the fat florid colonel.
The Marriott-Regency was a glimmering fairy castle, floating like a cloud above a pool of silvery light. It was a huge white pyramid of a building, all dressed up in terraces and minarets, and poised in the center of a vast sparkling lake. It towered above Denver like a bright complacent giant-a glowing giant. Starbursts and reflections twinkled and blazed across the waterthere were lights below as well as above-and all around, shimmering laser beams played back and forth across the sky like swords of dancing color; the tower was enveloped in a dazzling halo.
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