Manhattan Transfer

by John E. Stith

"What we need now is a weapon. We need something that can help us change the odds, to help us destroy the planet shaper. If you know of anything that is here with us in the dome that can help, I want to know about it.

  "What I don't want to know about are conventional weapons. Rifles, even assault rifles, and things like bazookas are not going to help us defeat a huge, armed ship. But if, for instance, any nuclear weapons were being transported through Manhattan when we were taken, or if, God help us, a group of terrorists had a weapon ready to use as a threat, we need to know about it. If you know of any hugely powerful weapon of any kind, call nine–one–one right now. The nine–one–one system operators are ready to funnel emergency calls like this into a staff standing by right now. Do not call nine–one–one during the next hour unless your call clearly pertains to exactly what I requested, or it's an emergency that threatens many lives. Anyone abusing the nine–one–one system during the next twenty–four hours will be dealt with harshly, under martial law provisions. The lives of billions of people are at stake.

  "Now, for those of you who are having trouble accepting all of this information, or are simply curious about the ship we are on—and I assume that's almost everyone—I'm going to show you some still–frame video that's been sent back by Matt Sheehan and his team, who are at this moment on the ship's bridge high above us, at the center of the level that forms the roof of this giant chamber we're in."

  Dorine pressed the switch the technicians had rigged, and the first still–frame replaced her image on the monitor. Matt Sheehan and Abby Tersa stood next to a spider–like creature almost as tall as they were. Above their heads was a view of space that made it seem as if the roof of the bridge had just been ripped away.

  When Dorine had finished showing the still frames, her image came back up on the monitor.

  She took a breath, wanting her audience to be able to catch their breaths also. Finally she said, "I don't know how much time we've got, but right now I don't have any more information. The station is going to keep this channel transmitting around the clock until we know the fate of the Earth. Until we get additional information, or need to make more requests, the transmitted sound will be turned down all the way. I suggest you just leave your televisions on and don't turn down the volume. The crew here will show a series of still–frames sent down by the exploration team, and I will be back on the air as soon as we know anything more.

  "Perhaps a miracle will occur. Perhaps the planet shaper will not arrive. Perhaps our 'rescuers' made a mistake about which way it is traveling. Whatever happens, I think this is another one of those times when Manhattanites who are so inclined might do well to pray in whatever manner you're comfortable with.

  "I honestly don't know what we're going to do, but I do know we can't just do nothing."

  #

  Stuart Lund stopped in the street, watching a huge array of television screens on display as they all moved in unison, showing what the mayor said had been transmitted from the exploratory team. He suddenly felt tired.

  Stuart turned and shouted to his followers who nearly surrounded him, "These images must have been falsified. You all know how easy it is to generate pictures like this. You see it every day in movies."

  In the portion of the crowd near enough to see the pictures for themselves, people turned to their neighbors and whispered. A few people turned and started to walk away. A man at the back started to shout, but the guy next to him shut him up.

  Stuart began to speak again, but suddenly stopped in mid–sentence. Abruptly he felt tension in his stomach as he realized what was wrong. He was having trouble working up the enthusiasm he'd had before. The pictures were extremely unsettling. If Stuart and all the others were indeed in God's house, awaiting God's decision, these images of giant spiders didn't square with Stuart's expectations. Not at all.

  The earlier pictures had been easier to accept as fakes, mainly because only one of the images showed a spider, and that really had looked like a fake. These pictures showed more than a dozen of the creatures, most of them sitting in chairs obviously designed for their strange bodies.

  As Stuart stood at the side of the street, he realized it was over. He scanned faces among his followers. Many of them seemed to accept his denouncement of the video, but his followers weren't the problem. Stuart was the problem. He realized then and there that he no longer had the conviction he had started out with. The videos could all be fakes, but he had a terrible feeling they weren't.

  So it no longer mattered what the crowd believed. Stuart's enthusiasm and conviction had carried them this far. Without that certainty in his voice and manner, they would know he had changed. The fire he had felt could not be faked. The crowd would know within minutes that the fire had died.

  Stuart stood there, numb, and his followers looked at his face, and they began to whisper among themselves as they looked from his face to the television monitors and back.

  The crowd began to dwindle slowly at first, but within ten minutes the stragglers were clearly disgruntled, distraught, and dispersing. Stuart no longer had the will to try to stop them. He sagged. He sat on the curb, watching most of his followers spread out along the dark streets. Maybe a tenth of the people stayed behind, most of them looking expectantly at Stuart, obviously still willing to believe. But Stuart wasn't sure he had anything appropriate to say.

  A burly man in a plaid shirt came forward through the diminishing throng. He stopped in front of Stuart long enough to say, "Maybe we should all repent for all those bugs we've stepped on, huh?"

  A young mother with two children at her side walked up to Stuart. The woman said gently, "We still believe you, Reverend."

  Stuart waved her away.

  As he sat there watching most of the people disappear, two boys in their late teens or early twenties came up and stood facing Stuart, their feet spread wide in a hostile stance.

  The taller boy wore a conventional Mohawk, and his companion sported a twin Mohawk. They both wore left–hand–side–only mustaches made popular last year by Twisted Sabbath, and both had tattoos on their upper arms.

  The taller boy said, "You made us look stupid. We really don't like to look stupid."

  Stuart was sorely tempted to tell them they looked pretty stupid anyway, but he just turned his back and walked away. If they wanted to follow him and attack, let them. Stuart didn't care anymore.

  #

  "That bastard," Benny Kellermund said as he watched the screen relaying pictures from the bridge of the ship. "Man, do I feel stupid."

  "That's 'cause you are stupid," Lucky Stiles said.

  "You thought he was right, too."

  "Yeah, maybe."

  "Well, we know we're nowhere near heaven. And those spider things aren't going to come down here and kill us. They would have killed us already if that's what they wanted."

  "Right again, brain surgeon."

  "So, what are we going to do?"

  "You mean are we going to pull the switch? Explode the Empire State Building?"

  "Right."

  "Well, it's pretty tempting."

  Benny knew he looked shocked. He was speechless.

  "Just kidding," Lucky said quickly.

  "So, do we go back and get the stuff?"

  "Are you kidding? They'll have cops all over the place. And I'm not lugging that stuff back down. They can have it."

  "Yeah?"

  "Yeah. I'll find a pay phone and tell the mayor how to get it out safely."

  "Man, we came pretty close."

  "Too close." Lucky rose suddenly. "I'm gonna go out for a while. I'll be back."

  #

  "It doesn't sound good," Rudy said. "Not if the lasers won't do any good against the planet shaper."

  Matt rubbed his eyes. "True. But there's got to be something we can do."

  "Even if the Archies aren't willing to fight?" Richard asked.

  Matt glanced at the Archies at their positions on the bridge. "We'll just have to persuade them."

/>   Abby took a break from her conversation with the Archie captain. She came over and sat down next to the group of humans. "So far I haven't found any inconsistencies in their story. You want what I've got now or later?"

  "Go ahead," said Matt. "We should hear pretty soon if there's anything in Manhattan that might be useful. And the more we know about the Archies' ship, the better."

  "All right. Some of this will be repetition. When the planet shaper finishes with whatever planets it damages in a solar system, it starts up some kind of interstellar drive that I'm just going to call warp drive. I think what happens is that the ship somehow jumps from one location in space to another one far away, and it has to make sure it's far from the sun—several times the distance we're at now. The planet shaper makes a series of these jumps, and eventually arrives in a new solar system, and starts doing whatever it does again. Apparently the planet shaper doesn't distinguish between inhabited and uninhabited planets.

  "Anyway, the Archies' ship is better at this warp drive, if I understand this correctly. By watching which way the planet shaper jumps, the Archies can see what solar systems lie on that course, and then make a single huge jump, getting to the destination before the planet shaper does. If the solar systems are close together, the Archies don't gain much lead time, but if the planet shaper has to make a long series of jumps, then the Archies usually have more time. When the planet shaper jumped toward us, the Archies knew it would take several jumps, so they're not surprised the planet shaper hasn't arrived, but it could be here any time. It all sounds fairly inexact, but I guess that's because they can't predict exactly what intermediate steps the planet shaper will make."

  Rudy looked up. "So that's why the destruction on the planet with the city of cones started even before the city was secure. The Archies didn't have much of a lead."

  "Exactly," Abby said. "And that's why we're still here in our own solar system. The Archies have to wait until the planet shaper is finished here before they know which way to go next."

  "God, I hate that sound," Bobby Joe said. "They sound like teenagers when they eat."

  Not far away, one of the Archies was eating as it sat at its station. The Archie apparently sucked its food into its mouth, sounding as if it were trying to get the last dribble of malt through a straw. Then, for a change of pace, it made a sound like it was sucking strands of spaghetti.

  Abby grimaced. "I take back that last sentence. The Archies don't have to wait here until they see which way the planet shaper goes; they have to wait here at least until they fix the warp drive. Oh, and on the other side of the ship, the other set of eight huge cylinders—–they're the main components of the normal drive. They can still get around inside the solar system with the normal drive. They just can't make the long–distance jumps until the damage is fixed."

  "And how long will that take?" Matt asked.

  "They think about twenty to thirty days."

  "I don't understand. If they can fix it in that long, why do they say they'll be unable to help the next few planets?"

  "Because they think it may take them quite a while to find the planet shaper again. Incidentally, no more than one out of ten of the planets it converts has life on it; they figure it will hit another fifty or sixty planets before their search will locate it again."

  "How can they transform an entire planet that fast?"

  "They don't. The initial barrage kills most of the native life, but the total transformation takes many years. Part of what the planet shaper does is deposit machinery—I don't know what size they're talking about—that slowly finishes the job."

  Motion overhead caught Matt's eye. Thin arcs formed in what Matt now realized had to be a display rather than a window on top of the bridge. A gray line intersected the Earth and curved out of sight on both ends. Six more gentle arcs formed in the display, two of them intersecting what looked to be stars, one yellow, one red. Six of the arcs seemed to all fall in a plane, but the most distant arc cut through the plane at an angle of maybe twenty degrees. In addition, the outside curve cut inside the nearest curve for part of its arc.

  "Those must be orbits," Bobby Joe said. "We're a little above the plane of the ecliptic. I bet those curves represent the orbits of Earth and the other planets." He pointed. "Those bright 'stars' on the lines near the center must be Mars and Saturn. The other planets must be behind us or at our side."

  "Makes sense," said Rudy.

  "Of course it—whoa!" Bobby Joe's mouth dropped open as elements of the display changed. The two "stars" representing Mars and Saturn suddenly grew until they were perhaps a quarter of the size of the Earth in the display.

  Mars was a reddish disk with few blemishes. Saturn was large enough to show its rings.

  "What happened?" Richard asked. "We can't have moved. The Earth looks the same."

  "Display enhancement," Bobby Joe said. "I like it. They magnified small elements in the display, just enough to show details. If they'd zoomed the whole display enough to show that much of Saturn, they would have narrowed the field to something less than one percent of what we can see. By doing it this way, we still get the big picture, but we can see what's what. Very elegant."

  The display suddenly shifted, as though the ship were turning. Enormous cross hairs formed in the display, and the lines spread into filmy translucent planes, dividing space into four quadrants. Grids formed on both of the planes, and then two dotted lines emerged from the Earth, each one extending toward one of the grids. Matt was sure the two points where the dotted lines intersected the grids defined the Earth's position relative to the ship.

  Jupiter, its streaked clouds visible, and Venus, a yellowish disk, appeared in the screen, obviously made to look close by the display enhancement.

  Suddenly several of the Archies on the bridge chattered. Abby turned to the captain as a star near Jupiter began to blink. More dotted lines appeared between it and the grid planes. Dotted lines sprouted from Jupiter, and Matt realized the new object was roughly midway between the orbits of Jupiter and the next planet out, which Bobby Joe reminded him was Saturn.

  Matt felt the adrenaline rush and a brief, sharp pain in his chest even before Abby turned from the captain and verified what they were all assuming.

  In a hushed voice she said, "The planet shaper has arrived."

  Chapter 16

  Throwing Rocks

  Abby felt the hush in the room as human eyes turned and Archie eye–stalks swiveled toward the new pin–point of light blinking against the backdrop of stars. After the initial flurry of whispering and chattering, the bridge was suddenly as quiet as an early morning run. Even Bobby Joe was still. Then Abby was aware of Julie speaking quietly into a walkie–talkie, calmly feeding details to Manhattan. At the moment, Abby envied Julie's calm acceptance of recent events, no doubt aided by her experience in covering tragedy after tragedy in the past. Then again, maybe she was just like Abby, striving to be calm on the outside, but inside, a furious whirlpool of questions and fears.

  At times Abby felt like moving off to a corner and going quietly and seriously insane. In Abby's place, her mother probably would have done exactly that. Her mother had been frightened just to think of Abby living on her own in New York.

  Several times Abby had been on the verge of panic, despite her outward calm. Each time she had felt that fear tightening her throat, the experience had been something like feeling really out of breath halfway into a long run. And each time she had miraculously found her second wind, just as when she ran.

  She couldn't freeze now; she couldn't give in to the panic. Now that the planet shaper had actually arrived, she had a sudden image of her parents sitting out on the back porch, waiting in quiet anguish, wondering what had happened to Abby. Unless the team could somehow find a way to divert or destroy the planet shaper, her parents would be gone, without even knowing why. An image from an old nuclear holocaust film jammed in her brain and wouldn't go away until she pinched herself so hard the pain brought her back to the b
ridge.

  The area surrounding the blinking light in the display shimmered, and a larger image formed in its place, as though the planet shaper had suddenly moved much closer than it had been seconds earlier, or the Archies had magnified its image, the way they had with the planets.

  The planet shaper looked more like a shiny piece of jewelry than a starship. Not quite a four–leaf clover, the planet shaper brought to mind a cluster of four silvery teardrops, all joined at their narrow ends. At that central junction was a small sphere, the glob of glue holding the four sections together. Two teardrops opposite each other were slightly elongated, so together the teardrops formed a diamond. Distorted star fields reflected off the shiny surfaces.

  Suddenly the star images slid aside and new ones replaced them as the planet shaper changed orientation. Abby was struck by how beautiful the ship was.

  "God," Richard whispered.

  Abby glanced at Matt. She couldn't read his expression. He could have been in the middle of a poker game or a war. And this really was war, she realized.

  A line began growing from the planet shaper. The Archie captain said something Abby's computer transformed into, "Direction."

  The line continued growing until seconds later the destination was obvious: Venus. The line kept lengthening until it intersected the image of Venus.

  "Maybe they don't want the Earth," Abby said suddenly. To the captain she said, "One planet? Not Earth?"

  The Archie's four support legs flexed for just an instant, and its entire body dipped. It chattered and the computer said, "Two planets."

  Bobby Joe said, "Earth and Venus must both be close enough to whatever profile they're using to pick planets. Venus is close to the size of Earth, and close to the same distance from the sun."

  "What about Mars?" asked Rudy.

  Bobby Joe shook his head. "Mars has about ten percent of the mass of Earth. Venus is more like Earth, except for the heat and atmosphere, and I'm guessing this thing can deal with those little problems."