Manhattan Transfer

by John E. Stith

  Julie hesitated. "And what do you think about talking to aliens in those domes out there?"

  "Well, ma'am." The guard scratched the stubble on his chin. "I guess if we can talk to them, maybe they're not all that strange. And if we can't, what's the harm in trying?"

  I don't know, Julie thought as she walked toward the room on the south wall. Would they be punished for breaking some unknown rule?

  The room was even busier than she had expected it to be. On the perimeter of the room were several journalists, some of whom she recognized. She noticed some of the screens borrowed from the station, but some of the rest of the equipment must have come from a communications company or a school. She slipped on her viewfinder glasses and turned on the minivid resting on her hip. The rectangular viewfinder border came on, and she turned her head so the optics on her headband would catch the center of activity.

  Two men and two women worked their computers in front of a large screen showing the symbols on the dome overhead. Matt Sheehan and some people she didn't know stood behind a bald man at a control console. The large screen held a rectangular array of flickering black and white confetti. As the man at the console moved his hands across the touch screen, the rectangle of confetti changed aspect ratio and became a horizontal bar. In a series of steps, it narrowed and grew in height until it was square, and then kept changing until it was a vertical bar. The confetti inside was the only consistent property.

  Julie turned her minivid toward the expanded views of other domes. One of them covered what looked to be glass houses. Inside the structures were creatures that looked vaguely like cockroaches that walked upright. In one of the larger structures, behind two or three transparent walls, a group of a dozen or so of the creatures sat in a ring. In a small building, three of the creatures tumbled and gyrated in unison. It was only then that it occurred to Julie that perhaps even though she could see through these walls, perhaps the creatures living there could not.

  She turned back to Matt and the group at the largest screen. She caught his eye and he came closer, bringing with him a shorter blonde woman.

  "Thanks again for the equipment loan," he said. "It's invaluable."

  "You're welcome. I'm glad it's being put to good use."

  Matt introduced the blonde as Abby Tersa, who was in charge of several people working on translating the message overhead. Julie shook her hand. Abby seemed calm but ultra–alert, as though she were really enjoying the job.

  Julie said to Matt, "Well, I'm here for the return favor. Is there anything you don't want on the news?"

  Matt glanced around. "I can't think of anything that needs to be restricted. This screen is a display of a signal we're getting from the dome in that view up there, the one with all the cones. So far it's not making any sense, but—" Matt suddenly stopped and looked at the screen showing the conical buildings. "Just a minute."

  Matt went closer to the bald man at the console and tapped his shoulder. "Say, how hard would it be to try to convert that image to a triangular picture?"

  "Triangular?" the man said.

  Matt pointed at the screen showing the conical buildings. "Like that shape."

  The bald man was quiet for a moment. "Why not? I'll give it a shot."

  Matt came back to Julie and pointed at the bald guy. "That's Dr. Bobby Joe Brewster. He's from Columbia U, and he's been terrific for getting this set up."

  Matt pointed to the upper left dome on the display and started giving her a rundown on what little they knew so far about each view. About the time he finished the last screen, Bobby Joe suddenly cried out, "Yes!"

  On the center screen was a triangular screen full of confetti. Besides the shape of the outline, the only thing different from before was that the confetti was changing much more slowly. Julie didn't see that it was much of an improvement, but she moved closer with Matt.

  Bobby Joe manipulated the controls as he spoke to Abby. "I think we're getting closer." A second later, the triangle began to shrink and then expand. Abruptly it locked into a fixed size, and the confetti was gone. In its place was a distorted view of something that moved slowly down the screen.

  Bobby Joe continued his efforts, and the screen image came closer and closer to an image that made sense. No longer bits of pure black and white, the screen became a gray–scale view that looked like an old photographic negative sliced into horizontal strips. The slices disappeared as Bobby Joe did something with his left hand, then the blacks swapped places with whites, and the image was suddenly a monochrome view of a room, containing two people who looked very much like human beings, one a Latin male.

  The male spoke. "Lucy? Lucy, is that you?"

  The woman looked nervous. "Oh, no, señor."

  As the woman averted her face, the man said, "That is you!"

  What sounded like an old–fashioned laugh track came from the speakers.

  Matt, looking incredulous, turned to Bobby Joe. "That's what we're picking up from the dome out there?"

  Bobby Joe looked up at Matt and gave him the biggest grin Julie had seen in days. He said, "Oops, sorry, wrong channel."

  One of the women behind Julie suddenly started to laugh hysterically, and her laughter cut off just as abruptly.

  #

  Matt tapped Bobby Joe on the shoulder. Bobby Joe looked up.

  "Come with me for just a minute," Matt said.

  Bobby Joe looked puzzled, but he rose from his chair and followed.

  Matt left the operations center and entered an unused room down that hall. Bobby Joe looked nervous. "I'm sorry about the I Love Lucy recording. It's from a file of stuff I keep."

  "It's all right," Matt said. "I'm not going to hold that little incident against you, and it'll be forgotten the instant we get back in that room. But if you're going to be of any help, you are not to waste anyone's time with jokes like that. We've been tasked with an important job. When the pressure's off, I can laugh just like anyone else. Right now we can't afford the luxury of unproductive time."

  "I'm sorry. It's just that sometimes I—" Bobby Joe turned away, then seemed to screw up his resolve, and he turned back to Matt. "Sometimes I feel like a geek. I'm not strong and tall and macho. And especially in this company, I'm a little intimidated. I guess humor is what I do to overcome that."

  Matt nodded. "I think I understand. But maybe you're underestimating us. No one has to be tall or muscular or articulate to help us save ourselves. What we need from you is your intelligence and your skill. No one is going to be looking down at you because you're not a football player. We don't want a football player. We need you. We need your skills."

  Bobby Joe seemed to stand a little taller. "I understand. I'll do my best. But just so I understand, is all humor off limits?"

  "No. But if it costs us time, or if it unsettles people, or if it irritates people, it hurts us all right now."

  "Understood."

  #

  Julie watched as Bobby Joe touched the controls again. A new image formed on the screen, this one a view of a planet's surface.

  Noise in the room fell to nothing until the only sounds were those of Bobby Joe's hands on the console controls. Colors replaced some of the shades of gray, and the picture took on a false–color look common in satellite photos of resources.

  The colors mutated for several minutes, and a true–color moving image formed on the triangular screen. In the foreground were two conical structures in vivid detail, showing people walking down the stairs. Only these people weren't human. They made Julie think of humans who had been very badly burned. Their skin was brown and leathery, clearly showing a web of white veins everywhere their skin was visible. The most unusual feature of their faces was the single eye, centered just below the forehead.

  The view moved sideways, and a black shape appeared in the air. The sky suddenly changed to a deeper blue, probably because Bobby Joe was still making adjustments. The black craft looked exactly like the ones Julie had seen in amateur recordings made as Manhattan had b
een lifted. The view swung downward and the horizon came into view. Stretching far into the distance were clusters of cones much like the ones sitting under the dome they could see on the other screen. Running between the clusters were a grid of bridge–like connecting structures. Below the black ship, a line of destruction followed its path. Clouds of vapor steamed off the surface, and a crack opened up, as though an earthquake were ripping apart the surface.

  The view moved to the left, following the rift in the ground as it lengthened, and an enormous structure came into view. It was a high, square platform supported by four huge leaning columns, each with a stairway winding around the perimeter. The platform grew in the image, and it became obvious that what had at first seemed to be a mottled surface was instead a huge crowd of people. Julie was trying to guess how many people might be there, certainly many thousands, when the violent slicing reached the platform. In what seemed to be super slow motion, a swath of destruction cut through the multitudes, and the platform split into two city–sized plates that began to tilt then fall toward the ground as masses of people slid off the edges.

  Many seconds passed before the first falling people hit the ground. A cloud of dust began to rise as the structure reached the ground and began to crumble. Julie felt dazed, numb. Thousands upon thousands of people must have died in a period of one minute.

  Julie was still in shock as the image showed black ships putting a filmy bubble in place. The sudden flash of light made her blink. Behind her someone was crying.

  The recording continued as the land beyond the edge of the dome lurched and dropped away. Suddenly the image started jumping violently. The recording had been taken from near enough the edge that whoever was on the camera side of the lens ran toward the dome and reached it in time to aim down at the planet's surface.

  The planet already seemed as far below as it would probably look like from a commercial airliner. The planet was predominantly gray, with far less surface water than Earth. The view tilted upward and showed a huge black shape blocking out most of the stars. Unfamiliar constellations disappeared as the black shape grew larger.

  The view tilted back toward the planet, now far enough below that the thin layer of atmosphere glowed over the curved horizon.

  Two things happened concurrently. Starting at the apex of the picture, a black band expanded downward and cut off the view entirely after about ten seconds. During the last three or four seconds, something happened over the planet's horizon. Julie thought of a huge lightning storm as seen from several miles away, but this was on a planetary scale. The air in the thin band still visible flickered with bright light, as though a fireworks display to end them all had started just out of direct sight.

  The black band reached the bottom of the screen, and the view of the horizon narrowed to a slit before it was cut off completely and the image went black. In the silent room, Julie could hear her heart beat.

  The recording began all over.

  Finally Matt swallowed hard, then said to Bobby Joe, "If we provide you with equivalent recordings from the ones made in Manhattan, can you translate them to this format and send them to the people in that dome?"

  "Probably. It'll take some doing. The hardest part is the transmitter. Most of our stuff's intended for transmitting in a fairly narrow spectrum, but I can probably cobble something together."

  "Okay. Let me know if you need resources you don't have." Matt turned to Julie. "You've probably got a fair selection of amateur videos at the station. When you get a chance, can you get someone to edit some video equivalent to what they saw, and get it to Bobby Joe?"

  Julie nodded. She still wasn't sure if she could speak.

  #

  Dorine Underwood faced the camera and worked toward the conclusion of her nightly message. She still had a headache from a long, angry conversation with Oscar Anklehunt, the U.N. Secretary General. Oscar plainly felt the situation was one of Earth dealing with an alien threat, whereas Dorine argued that the mayor of the city was the one in the position of dealing with aliens. As she had most of her normal network of support intact, and Oscar was in charge of a large group of delegates cut off from their home countries, Dorine had never doubted who'd win the argument. It just took some time to convince Oscar.

  He kept insisting on getting all the information available to anyone, and he demanded that support be provided him so he, as the sole representative of the world's collective governments, could deal with the situation. When Dorine had finally had enough, she asked Oscar how many people reported to him. When he answered, Dorine explained that a thousand times that many people were in place in the city government, all under her direction, all of whom knew their jobs and were getting a steady supply of new guidance as more information became available.

  At the end of the conversation she threw him a bone and said she could still use more translators and she'd appreciate his help in sending them her way. Oscar was enough of a statesman to know when the battle was over, and he finally backed down from his original demands and promised to help. He was obviously unhappy to have to be fitting into her plans, but he knew when he was outgunned.

  Dorine looked back at the camera and tried to keep her tone casual. The audience was bound to include people on the verge of suicide. "…so I'm happy to report the restrictions on toilet usage and water consumption have been lifted. Garbage collection will start tomorrow, but I caution you not to throw away anything that might have future use.

  "Following this telecast will be a series of numbers to call for medical help for withdrawal symptoms. Area hospitals have already responded very well to those who are suffering from drug withdrawal, and they've got specialists ready to help with the tobacco and alcohol withdrawal that's not very far away. Better get used to it, folks; the supplies have been cut off. Chemical labs and home brew will last just so long. It's only a matter of time until every ounce of controlled substances in Manhattan is used up. The area trauma centers have been extremely busy, and additional operators are standing by on suicide hot–lines. We will do all we can to help. And we are going to make it one way or another."

  One thing that gave Dorine even more faith was a visit earlier in the day from a senior member of the Italian families, saying they would be doing their part in discouraging gang violence and pitching in for the common good, just the way they had done in WW II. A week ago, Dorine would have been pleased to see the gentleman in jail, but at the moment Manhattan could use all the help it could get. The drug problem was going to get a lot worse than it already was, but she didn't want to panic people.

  "On the subject of food, I know there's a sizable number of people who are either too proud to eat anything delivered from a cement mixer, or are suspicious of anything provided by our captors. I understand both of those feelings, but we simply don't have any choice. There are too many of us, and too little conventional food left. We eat what we're being provided, or we starve.

  "And finally, to answer the most–asked question from yesterday's phone messages, the reason we're trying to contact other races in this giant zoo or whatever it is, is that we want to learn as much as we possibly can. That's the same reason we're trying to decipher the message on top of the dome. I don't want to hold out any false hopes, but we need to keep learning. For all we know, by finding out more and more about why we were taken, we can possibly negotiate our return. The point is that ignorance leaves us in the worst possible position.

  "There are many theories about why we're here, ranging from some grotesque biological or sociological experiment to crackpot ideas such as us being a food supply. We need to find out what the real answer is. We might not like whatever we find out, but perhaps we'll get some answers. I'm assuming that not many people listening to this broadcast would willingly stay here forever. We may not have any choice, but sticking our head in the sand is the coward's way, and New York isn't known for its cowards.

  "Good night, Manhattan."

  #

  Stuart Lund switched off the tele
vision in his hospital room. This wasn't right.

  What could the mayor be thinking? The message on top of the dome was obviously a message from God. What else could this whole business be but the second coming of Noah's Ark?

  The only other possibility was the millennium coming a little late, but, one, God could certainly count, and, two, if this were the millennium, then God would have saved only those worthy of saving, and while Stuart had high regard for many people he knew in Manhattan, he couldn't possibly accept the monumental coincidence that every single person worthy of saving happened to be in Manhattan at exactly the same time.

  He struggled to get out of bed and find his clothes. The task would have been easier with both hands, but Stuart had flatly resisted the idea of a prosthetic hand. God had made him this way. Who was he to try to reverse God's will?

  He had to get out. Whoever interpreted the message from God on the dome above should be someone called by God, not some scummy bunch of scientists.

  #

  Matt awoke on a cot, high in the World Trade Center, the dream of Nadine still vivid in his mind. Her decision still cut deep, and he found himself recalling danger signs that he'd ignored because he wanted her so much.

  Nadine had always been something of a flirt, a woman very conscious of her power over men. Before they were married, they'd had an argument on the way to a picnic with other military personnel assigned to McChord Air Force Base, south of Tacoma. They reached the picnic grounds, a football–field–sized irregular area partly cleared of trees but surrounded by forest.

  Matt had tried to apologize for his share of the sharp words spoken in the car, but when they arrived, Nadine was cool, unforgiving. They drifted in and out of conversations with friends and casual acquaintances, all the while Matt feeling frustrated that they couldn't get closure on the argument and put it behind them. As people were getting ready for the big meal, a male officer whose name Matt couldn't even remember anymore pulled a muscle in his back while carrying a huge bag of ice. With hardly any coaxing at all, Nadine volunteered to give the guy a back rub.