by Isaac Asimov
“Not by accident,” Nathen explained patiently. “I’d recognized a scanning pattern, and I wanted pictures. Pictures are understandable in any language.”
* * * *
Near the interviewers, a senator paced back and forth, muttering his memorized speech of welcome and nervously glancing out the wide, streaming windows into the gray, sleeting rain.
Opposite the windows of the long room was a small raised platform flanked by the tall shapes of TV cameras and sound pickups on booms, and darkened floodlights, arranged and ready for the senator to make his speech of welcome to the aliens and the world. A shabby radio sending set stood beside it without a case to conceal its parts, two cathode television tubes flickering nakedly on one side and the speaker humming on the other. A vertical panel of dials and knobs jutted up before them, and a small hand. mike sat ready on the table before the panel. It was connected to a boxlike, expensively cased piece of equipment with “Radio Lab, U. S. Property” stenciled on it.
“I recorded a couple of package screeches from Sagittarius and began working on them,” Nathen added. “It took a couple of months to find the synchronizing signals and set the scanners close enough to the right time to even get a pattern. When I showed the pattern to the Department, they gave me full time to work on it, and an assistant to help. It took eight months to pick out the color bands and assign them the right colors, to get anything intelligible on the screen.”
The shabby-looking mess of exposed parts was the original receiver that they had labored over for ten months, adjusting and readjusting to reduce the maddening rippling plaids of unsynchronized color scanners to some kind of sane picture.
“Trial and error,” said Nathen, “but it came out all right. The wide band spread of the squawks had suggested color TV from the beginning.”
He walked over and touched the set. The speaker bipped slightly and the gray screen flickered with a flash of color at the touch. The set was awake and sensitive, tuned to receive from the great interstellar spaceship which now circled the atmosphere.
“We wondered why there were so many bands, but when we got the set working and started recording and playing everything that came in, we found we’d tapped something like a lending-library line. It was all fiction, plays.”
Between the pauses in Nathen’s voice, the Times found himself unconsciously listening for the sound of roaring, swiftly approaching rocket jets.
The Post asked, “How did you contact the spaceship?”
“I scanned and recorded a film copy of The Rite of Spring, the Disney-Stravinsky combination, and sent it back along the same line we were receiving from. Just testing. It wouldn’t get there for a good number of years, if it got there at all, but I thought it would please the library to get a new record in.
“Two weeks later, when we caught and slowed a new batch of recordings, we found an answer. It was obviously meant for us. It was a flash of the Disney being played to a large audience, and then the audience sitting and waiting before a blank screen. The signal was very clear and loud. We’d intercepted a spaceship. They were asking for an encore, you see. They liked the film and wanted more… ”
He smiled at them in sudden thought. “You can see them for yourself. It’s all right down the hall where the linguists are working on the automatic translator.”
The listening officer frowned and cleared his throat, and the thin young man turned to him quickly. “No security reason why they should not see the broadcasts, is there? Perhaps you should show them.” He said to the reporters reassuringly, “It’s right down the hall. You will be informed the moment the spaceship approaches.”
The interview was very definitely over. The lank-haired, nervous young man turned away and seated himself at the radio set while the officer swallowed his objections and showed them dourly down the hall to a closed door.
They opened it and fumbled, into a darkened room crowded with empty folding chairs, dominated by a glowing bright screen. The door closed behind them, bringing total darkness.
There was the sound of reporters fumbling their way into seats around him, but the Times man remained standing, aware of an enormous surprise, as if he had been asleep and wakened to find himself in the wrong country.
The bright colors of the double image seemed the only real thing in the darkened room. Even blurred as they were, he could see that the action was subtly different, the shapes subtly not right.
He was looking at aliens.
The impression was of two humans, disguised, humans moving oddly, half dancing, half crippled. Carefully, afraid the images would go away, he reached up to his breast pocket, took out his polarized glasses, rotated one lens at right angles to the other, and put them on.
Immediately, the two beings came into sharp focus, real and solid, and the screen became a wide, illusively near window through which he watched them.
They were conversing with each other in a gray-walled room, discussing something with restrained excitement. The large man in the green tunic closed his purple eyes for an instant at something the other said and grimaced, making a motion with his fingers as if shoving something away from him.
Mellerdrammer.
The second, smaller, with yellowish-green eyes, stepped closer, talking more rapidly in a lower voice. The first stood very still, not trying to interrupt.
Obviously, the proposal was some advantageous treachery, and he wanted to be persuaded. The Times groped for a chair and sat down.
Perhaps gesture is universal; desire and aversion, a leaning forward or a leaning back, tension, relaxation. Perhaps these actors were masters. The scenes changed: a corridor, a parklike place in what he began to realize was a spaceship, a lecture room. There were others talking and working, speaking to the man in the green tunic, and never was it unclear what was happening or how they felt.
They talked a flowing language with many short vowels and shifts of pitch, and they gestured in the heat of talk, their hands moving with an odd lagging difference of motion, not slow, but somehow drifting.
He ignored the language, but after a time the difference in motion began to arouse his interest. Something in the way they walked.
With an effort, he pulled his mind from the plot and forced his attention to the physical difference. Brown hair in short, silky crew cuts, varied eye colors, the colors showing clearly because their irises were very large, their round eyes set very widely apart in tapering, light-brown faces. Their necks and shoulders were thick in a way that would indicate unusual strength for a human, but their wrists were narrow and their fingers long and thin and delicate.
There seemed to be more than the usual number of fingers.
Since he came in, a machine had been whirring and a voice muttering beside him. He turned from counting their fingers and looked around. Beside him sat an alert-looking man wearing earphones, watching and listening with hawk-like concentration. Beside him was a tall streamlined box.
From the screen came the sound of the alien language. The man abruptly flipped a switch on the box, muttered a word into a small hand microphone, and flipped the switch back with nervous rapidity.
He reminded the Times man of the earphoned interpreters at the U.N. The machine was probably a vocal translator and the mutterer a linguist adding to its vocabulary. Near the screen were two other linguists taking notes.
The Times remembered the senator pacing in the observatory room, rehearsing his speech of welcome. The speech would not be just the empty pompous gesture he had expected. It would be translated mechanically and understood by the aliens.
On the other side of the glowing window that was the stereo screen the large protagonist in the green tunic was speaking to a pilot in a gray uniform. They stood in a brightly lit canary-yellow control room in a spaceship.
The Times tried to pick up the thread of the plot. Already he was interested in the fate of the hero, and liked him. That was the effect of good acting, probably, for part of the art of acting is to win affection from the
audience, and this actor might be the matinee idol of whole Solar Systems.
Controlled tension, betraying itself by a jerk of the hands, a too quick answer to a question. The uniformed one, not suspicious, turned his back, busying himself at some task involving a map lit with glowing red points, his motions sharing the same fluid, dragging grace of the others, as if they were under water or on a slow-motion film. The other was watching a switch, a switch set into a panel, moving closer to it, talking casually—background music coming and rising in thin chords of tension.
There was a close-up of the alien’s face watching the switch, and the Times noted that his ears were symmetrical half circles, almost perfect, with no earholes visible. The voice of the uniformed one answered—a brief word in a preoccupied, deep voice. His back was still turned. The other glanced at the switch, moving closer to it, talking casually, the switch coming closer and closer stereoscopically. It was in reach, filling the screen. His hand came into view, darted out, closed over the switch—
There was a sharp clap of sound and his hand opened in a frozen shape of pain. Beyond him, as his gaze swung up, stood the figure of the uniformed officer, unmoving, a weapon rigid in his hand, in the startled position in which he had turned and fired, watching with widening eyes as the man in the green tunic swayed and fell.
The tableau held, the uniformed one drooping, looking down at his hand holding the weapon which had killed, and music began to build in from the background. Just for an instant, the room and the things within it flashed into one of those bewildering color changes that were the bane of color television—to a color negative of itself, a green man standing in a violet control room, looking down at the body of a green man in a red tunic. It held for less than a second; then the color-band alternator fell back into phase and the colors reversed to normal.
Another uniformed man came and took the weapon from the limp hand of the other, who began to explain dejectedly in a low voice while the music mounted and covered his words and the screen slowly went blank, like a window that slowly filmed over with gray fog.
The music faded.
In the dark, someone clapped appreciatively.
The earphoned man beside the Times shifted his earphones back from his ears and spoke briskly. “I can’t get any more. Either of you want a replay?”
There was a short silence until the linguist nearest the set said, “I guess we’ve squeezed that one dry. Let’s run the tape where Nathen and that ship radio boy are kidding around CQing and tuning their beams in closer. I have a hunch the boy is talking routine ham talk and giving the old radio count—one-two-three-testing.”
There was some fumbling in the semidark and then the screen came to life again.
It showed a flash of an audience sitting before a screen and gave a clipped chord of some familiar symphony. “Crazy about Stravinsky and Mozart,” remarked the ear-phoned linguist to the Times, resettling his earphones. “Can’t stand Gershwin. Can you beat that?” He turned his attention back to the screen as the right sequence came on.
The Post, who was sitting just in front of him, turned to the Times and said, “Funny how much they look like people.” He was writing, making notes to telephone his report. “What color hair did that character have?”
“I didn’t notice.” He wondered if he should remind the reporter that Nathen had said he assigned the color bands on guess, choosing the colors that gave the most plausible images. The guests, when they arrived, could turn out to be bright green with blue hair. Only the gradations of color in the picture were sure, only the similarities and contrasts, the relationship of one color to another.
From the screen came the sound of the alien language again. This race averaged deeper voices than human. He liked deep voices. Could he write that?
No, there was something wrong with that, too. How had Nathen established the right sound-track pitch? Was it a matter of taking the modulation as it came in, or some sort of heterodyning up and down by trial and error? Probably.
It might be safer to assume that Nathen had simply preferred deep voices.
As he sat there, doubting, an uneasiness he had seen in Nathen came back to add to his own uncertainty, and he remembered just how close that uneasiness had come to something that looked like restrained fear.
“What I don’t get is why he went to all the trouble of picking up TV shows instead of just contacting them,” the News complained. “They’re good shows, but what’s the point?”
“Maybe so we’d get to learn their language, too,” said the Herald.
On the screen now was the obviously unstaged and genuine scene of a young alien working over a bank of apparatus. He turned and waved and opened his mouth in the comical 0 shape which the Times was beginning to recognize as their equivalent of a smile, then went back to trying to explain something about the equipment, in elaborate, awkward gestures and carefully mouthed words.
The Times got up quietly, went out into the bright white stone corridor, and walked back the way he had come, thoughtfully folding his stereo glasses and putting them away.
No one stopped him. Secrecy restrictions were ambiguous here. The reticence of the Army seemed more a matter of habit—mere reflex, from the fact that it had all originated in the Intelligence Department—than any reasoned policy of keeping the landing a secret.
The main room was more crowded than he had left it. The TV camera and sound crew stood near their apparatus, the senator had found a chair and was reading, and at the far end of the room eight men were grouped in a circle of chairs, arguing something with impassioned concentration. The Times recognized a few he knew personally, eminent names in science, workers in field theory.
A stray phrase reached him: “—reference to the universal constants as ratio—” It was probably a discussion of ways of converting formulas from one mathematics to another for a rapid exchange of information.
They had reason to be intent, aware of the flood of insights that novel viewpoints could bring, if they could grasp them. He would have liked to go over and listen, but there was too little time left before the spaceship was due, and he had a question to ask.
* * * *
The hand-rigged transceiver was still humming, tuned to the sending band of the circling ship, and the young man who had started it all was sitting on the edge of the TV platform with his chin resting in one hand. He did not look up as the Times approached, but it was the indifference of preoccupation, not discourtesy.
The Times sat down on the edge of the platform beside him and took out a pack of cigarettes, then remembered the coming TV broadcast and the ban on smoking. He put them away, thoughtfully watching the diminishing rain spray against the streaming windows.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
Nathen showed that he was aware and friendly by a slight motion of his head.
“You tell me.”
“Hunch,” said the Times man. “Sheer hunch. Everything sailing along too smoothly, everyone taking too much for granted.”
Nathen relaxed slightly. “I’m still listening.”
“Something about the way they move… ”
Nathen shifted to glance at him.
“That’s bothered me, too.”
“Are you sure they’re adjusted to the right speed?”
Nathen clenched his hands out in front of him and looked at them consideringly. “I don’t know. When I turn the tape faster, they’re all rushing, and you begin to wonder why their clothes don’t stream behind them, why the doors close so quickly and yet you can’t hear them slam, why things fall so fast. If I turn it slower, they all seem to be swimming.” He gave the Times a considering sideways glance. “Didn’t catch the name.”
Country-bred guy, thought the Times. “Jacob Luke, Times,” he said, extending his hand.
Nathen gave the hand a quick, hard grip, identifying the name. “Sunday Science Section editor. I read it. Surprised to meet you here.”
“Likewise.” The Times smiled. “Look, have yo
u gone into this rationally, with formulas?” He found a pencil in his pocket. “Obviously, there’s something wrong with our judgment of their weight-to-speed-to-momentum ratio. Maybe it’s something simple, like low gravity aboard ship, with magnetic shoes. Maybe they are floating slightly.”
“Why worry?” Nathen cut in “I don’t see any reason to try to figure it out now.” He laughed and shoved back his black hair nervously. “We’ll see them in twenty minutes.”
“Will we?” asked the Times slowly.
There was a silence while the senator turned a page of his magazine with a slight crackling of paper and the scientists argued at the other end of the room. Nathen pushed at his lank black hair again, as if it were trying to fall forward in front of his eyes and keep him from seeing.
“Sure.” The young man laughed suddenly, talked rapidly. “Sure we’ll see them. Why shouldn’t we, with all the government ready with welcome speeches, the whole Army turned out and hiding over the hill, reporters all around, newsreel cameras—everything set up to broadcast the landing to the world. The President himself shaking hands with me and waiting in Washington—”
He came to the truth without pausing for breath.
He said, “Hell, no, they won’t get here. There’s some mistake somewhere. Something’s wrong. I should have told the brass hats yesterday when I started adding it up. Don’t know why I didn’t say anything. Scared, I guess. Too much top rank around here. Lost my nerve.”
He clutched the Times man’s sleeve. “Look. I don’t know what—”
A green light flashed on the sending-receiving set. Nathen didn’t look at it, but he stopped talking.
The loud-speaker on the set broke into a voice speaking in the aliens’ language. The senator started and looked nervously at it, straightening his tie. The voice stopped.
Nathen turned and looked at the loud-speaker. His worry seemed to be gone.
“What is it?” the Times asked anxiously.
“He says they’ve slowed enough to enter the atmosphere now. They’ll be here in five to ten minutes, I guess. That’s Bud. He’s all excited. He says holy smoke, what a murky-looking planet we live on.” Nathen smiled. “Kidding.”