by Stan Ruecker
“Thank Ted,” Ray said.
George looked puzzled. It seemed that Mendes was not sufficiently in the know to know about Ted Jones and the true hierarchy of power.
“I mean,” Ray hastened to add, “I got here as quick as I could.”
“It’s been here for days. Why wasn’t someone sent immediately?”
“No one told me. Maybe they thought you could handle it with your own people.”
“Don’t think we haven’t tried,” Mendes said, and mopped his brow.
“So what’s been happening?”
“Just look at it.”
They had walked down the dock to a giant display, built into the wall to resemble a window. It gave them a clear view of a disturbingly unfamiliar-looking machine. The geometries seemed to suggest that it had built itself out of spare parts.
“Golly,” said Ray.
“Remarkable, isn’t it? What the people in security say, and I admit they are always the first to sound the alarm, but in this case—it looks as though it could take out this entire installation at any time. So how do we stop the thing?”
“Have you tried talking to it?”
George Mendes stepped back. “It’s an alien machine. We’ve thrown everything we have against it and nothing even scratches the surface. Granted, we’ve been a little careful because of it being up against the station like that, but still…” he trailed off.
“But it does speak English, doesn’t it?”
“It’s been transmitting in English for quite a while now, apparently. But look, I don’t want any damage done to this station. As the RISK representative here on this assignment, you are assuming full responsibility for any damages. I just want to warn you of that. I want to be clear on that point. I hope that I’m making myself understood here.”
Ray was walking away. Somehow he didn’t have the heart to tell Mendes that he wasn’t an official representative of anybody. No doubt that would come out in the court proceedings. As far as RISK was concerned, Ray was on sick leave. He was beginning to feel like that had been an appropriate choice.
Off to his left was a door marked with the Phoenix logo and a big “No Admittance.” Hoping that the sign applied to Mendes, he opened it. It let him into a hallway, at the end of which was a glass wall in front of a room full of unhappy-looking computer programmers. Ray recognized them immediately because none of their clothes seemed to fit. Walking through the glass door, he picked out one who was sitting in front of a display watching data stream past, simultaneously chewing on a hangnail and picking his nose with his thumb.
“What’s happening?” Ray said.
“The damn thing’s gotten into the RTM. I don’t know how it got past the NEPPS or into the SNO interface, but there’s no way we can stop it now.”
“So it controls everything on the station?” Ray guessed.
“Yeah, right down to life-support.”
The programmer reached for a cone of Coke sitting beside the keyboard, accidentally slopping some of it onto the top papers in an out basket. He cleaned them off with the edge of his hand. Ray picked up a slice of pizza from one of the boxes lying around.
“Do you mind?” he asked.
“No,” the programmer answered. “Go ahead.”
“Thanks,” Ray said, and waved the pizza hello. “My name’s Ray.”
“Kevin,” the programmer answered, and blushed.
“One thing,” Ray said. “Any chance I can get an audio link set up with that thing?”
Somebody across the room slid off a desk and waved him over. “It’s back here,” he said, leading Ray to a small room with a metal-clad door. “We’ve had it ready since before the thing docked. We were watching it pretty close, since we didn’t know anything about it, and there was some internal chatter going on with it, so we picked out it’s internal frequency as the best bet. But once it started transmitting it went right across the bandwidth.” The technician handed him an earplug.
“This is not a hostile act. I am a mechanical probe on a fact-finding mission. Please do not adjust your set.”
Ray looked at the technician. “Its command of idiom leaves something to be desired.”
“I’ll say,” the tech said. “Before it pulled into dock, it was saying something about being steady as some rocks.”
“But why would a mechanical probe have internal chatter?”
“Don’t know. Maybe it was just talking to itself.”
Ray leaned toward the pickup. The technician held up his hand. “We were warned not to attempt anything outside of normal docking operations,” he said.
“Hello alien machine,” Ray said, and the technician trotted out of the room.
“Listen, I’m trying to get through to the unmanned alien probe docked at this station. Please respond.”
The repetitive message on the earplug suddenly stopped. “Hello?” it said. “Did somebody say something to me?”
“Hello, machine. My name is Ray. I’m with the company–” He stopped, thinking of Ted and legalities and who else might be listening, and tried again. “I’m with the civilization that built this station. I wonder if you could tell me what you’re doing.”
“Actually, I was wondering if anybody was ever going to say something to me. You’d think you guys get alien probes in here all the time, the way you were acting. Like it was no big deals.”
“No big deal,” Ray corrected.
“Which it isn’t, I suppose,” the machine admitted. “It’s not like I’m this big important probe or anything, but still, a person likes to hear something other than just routine docking operations. You know, ‘hello there, nice to see you’—that kind of thing.”
“Welcome to Phoenix II, alien probe.”
“Thank you. What did you say your name was?”
“I’m Ray.”
There was a pause.
“Our protocols,” Ray said, “would normally suggest that you introduce yourself at this point.”
“You mean, tell you my name?”
“Yes,” Ray said. “If, I mean, you have a name, so to speak.”
“Now that’s an interesting point,” the machine said. “How about I think about it for a while?”
“Okay. But can you answer me another question?”
“Sure.”
“Why were you draining our files?”
“Just satisfying my curiousity. I have this directive that makes me very curious. I did mention I’m a probe, right? On a fact-finding mission. So I was trying to find a few facts.”
“Then what?”
“Waiting.”
Ray paused to consider. He realized he still had a pizza crust in his hand, and dropped it into a garbage can, then wiped his hand on his leg.
“Machine,” Ray said. “What are you waiting for?”
“I’m not sure I can tell you that.”
“What do you mean, not sure?”
“I don’t know if it’s a good idea. Look, why don’t you come over here and talk to me face-to-face? It makes me nervous, talking over an open channel like this.”
Ray hesitated. “Just exactly how do you mean, face-to-face?”
“Come over into my lower corridor, where my pickups can register your voice directly. I don’t like all this radio chatter.”
The hair on the back of Ray’s neck caught the breeze from an air vent.
“You mean come on board? Do you have the correct life-support, or should I suit up?” He realized it was a stupid question as soon as he said it, since if the idea was to speak directly into a pickup he could hardly be enclosed in an airtight suit. But the machine didn’t say anything about that. “I’ve been reading your files,” it reminded him. “I know what you need. It won’t be a problem, Ray.”
“You’re sure we can’t just talk here?”
“I don’t even know where you are,” the probe said.
“Okay. I’ll be right over.”
Face to face
As he walked out of the back room the pr
ogrammers were all stirring.
“Hey, what’d you do in there?” Kevin asked him.
“Well, I finished eating,” Ray said. “And I listened to what the probe had to say. Why do you ask?”
“It suddenly unlocked our access. And I think it’s pulling out of the computer system entirely.”
“That’s good. Thanks.”
“No problem. But you must’ve done something besides just listen to it. We’ve been listening to it ever since it got here.”
“Maybe it’s just finished whatever it was doing,” one of the other programmers suggested. “Maybe it got everything it was after.”
“Who knows what an alien probe’s after?” Kevin said. “You’re just paranoid, that’s all.”
“That’s Funk,” Kevin explained to Ray. “Last week he thought we had an air leak somewhere.”
“Who knows how an alien probe thinks?” Funk persisted. “Maybe it needed some key piece of information.”
“Like what could it find out at this station that it couldn’t find out anywhere else?”
“Maybe the station was easier to get to,” Funk suggested. “Maybe it isn’t built to land on Earth or anything.”
“Actually,” Ray admitted. “I did a bit more than just listen. I talked to it.”
“Oh man,” Funk said. “Are you in trouble. That was the one thing we had very clear instructions about, which they said “whatever you do, don’t talk to it.”
“So what did it say?” Kevin asked. “Did it say anything important?”
“I don’t think so,” Ray said. “It told me it was on a fact-finding mission.”
“Uh oh. You know what that means,” Funk cleaned his nails.
“What?” Ray asked.
“It means we’re going to get invaded. You don’t go out on a fact-finding mission just because you’re curious.”
“It said it was,” Ray said.
“What?”
“Curious. When I asked it what it was doing, it said ‘just satisfying my curiousity.’ So that has to be at least part of it.”
“I still bet it’s an invasion on the way.”
“That makes no sense,” Kevin pointed out. “First you say it needs some specific piece of information, then you say it’s going to bring an invasion. An invasion doesn’t need information about this station. It just needs to know where Earth is. And whether we have any warships or not.”
“Which we don’t. I always said we should be building like a fleet or something in case we ran into somebody else out there.”
“So are you done with it?” Kevin asked Ray. “The probe, I mean.”
“I don’t think so,” Ray said.
“So what does it want? Did it say anything else?”
“It told me it doesn’t like talking over a channel.”
“Smart probe,” another of the programmers said, but somebody else nudged her in the ribs and she shut up.
“I don’t suppose you can tell me anything else about it?” Ray asked the room in general. “I wouldn’t mind having a little more to go on.”
“It sure can’t sing,” somebody volunteered.
“What?”
“It was sort of, you know. Singing,” he said. “While it was coming in. First it would talk to itself, then it would sing.”
“Are you sure it was singing?” Ray asked.
“Well, yeah. I think so. It sounded like opera. You know—” the tech imitated an operatic soprano.
“Soprano, huh?”
“Sort of,” one of the programmers said. “But pretty flat.”
“I don’t know,” somebody else chimed in. “It’s hard to tell, when it’s sliced up over the bandwidths like that. It might’ve just been distortion.”
“Maybe that’s why it wants to talk to you directly,” Kevin suggested.
“Maybe it wants somebody to teach it the words,” said someone else.
“So what are you going to do?” Kevin asked Ray.
“I’m going to do what it wants me to,” Ray said.
George Mendes was at the door. “Good work,” he said. “I don’t know what you did, but I just got notice that the thing has stopped draining our files.”
Ray stopped in front of him. “I have to go talk to it.”
“Talk to it? But isn’t that what…”
“I mean talk to it in person. It doesn’t want to use radio. You’ll have to show me over to wherever it’s docked.”
Mendes took him by the arm. “It’s right over here,” he said. “But are you sure it’s going to be okay? I mean, it is an alien probe. What if you say something it doesn’t like? We could be in a lot of trouble here.”
“You said your security people already attacked it, didn’t you?” Ray asked.
“Well,” Mendes said. “Not attacked, exactly. Say they did a couple of tests.”
“And what were their results?”
“They said there was no point attacking it.”
A man in coveralls was waiting beside an airlock.
“We’ll need an access tube,” Ray told him.
“There’s a bridge been set up from the other side,” the man said.
“Is it safe? I mean, airtight?”
“Looks okay.”
“And how about the probe?” Ray asked. “Any signs of trouble there?”
“It hasn’t done anything,” the man told Ray. “Except set up that bridge.”
“Well, open it up.”
The man looked at Mendes for confirmation. Mendes looked at Ray.
“This is what it asked for,” Ray said.
The man opened the station side of the airlock, and Ray took a deep breath.
“Remember,” Mendes told him, and patted him paternally on the shoulder, “the important thing is that there be no damage to this station. No damage.”
Ray stepped into the station’s airlock.
No damage
The airlock opened onto a covered ramp that seemed solid enough. No air was whistling, anyway, which reminded Ray of Kevin’s paranoid friend, and he laughed, then remembered to close the station’s outer door behind him.
“If this probe pulls away now,” he thought, “they’ll have to send out another troubleshooter.”
He stepped up to the probe’s airlock, which didn’t have the usual wheel for opening it.
“Now what?” Ray wondered. He knocked gently against the side of the ship. The metal had a peculiar feeling to his knuckles, and he felt it with the flat of his hand, then rapped it with his fingernails. It wasn’t like steel and it wasn’t aluminum either. If anything, it seemed like some kind of ceramic.
“Hello,” Ray said. “If you can hear me, I’m out here now. Just waiting to be let in.”
Suddenly the outer hatch opened.
“Thanks,” Ray said, and walked into the airlock of the alien probe. It was like any other airlock, except, again, it was missing the manual control on the inside.
The lock cycled normally enough, and the inner hatch opened into a comfortably-furnished lounge. Ray stepped into the room, then nervously pushed the airlock door shut behind him. He felt better when he didn’t have to look at that flimsy bridge as the only thing between him and the vacuum of space.
A voice spoke from nowhere in particular.
“Ray! Welcome aboard. I’m so glad you could make it.”
“Okay,” Ray said. “I’m here, just like you wanted. But there’s something I want to ask you. You aren’t from one of our rival companies, are you?”
“No,” said the voice. “I’m not.”
“I didn’t think so. The economics just weren’t right.”
“How do you mean?”
“It’s not important. Just something I was thinking about.”
“What makes you think what you think about isn’t important?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Did I misunderstand? “I’m afraid my command of English isn’t all it should be.”
“I was trying to be poli
te. What I actually meant was that I didn’t want to talk about it.”
“Oh,” the probe said. “I get it. Dishonesty is quite often a form of politeness, the facts being what they so often are.”
“The facts,” Ray repeated. “I’m not sure I follow you. What is it the facts so often are?”
“Terrible. But you knew that.”
Ray remembered in a gestalt every day of his working life.
“You’ve got a point there,” he said. “But I wouldn’t necessarily call it dishonesty. It’s just, how could I say—”
“Not dwelling unduly on unpleasantness?”
“That,” Ray said, “and an effort to keep the emphasis where it belongs.”
“And where would that be?”
“The situation at hand. I came because you asked me to. Now what?”
“Why don’t you have a seat? Can I get you anything?”
Ray looked around suspiciously. “First,” he said, “I want you to answer another question. What are you waiting for?”
“Maybe you’d better sit down before I answer.”
Ray sat. The chair was designed for heavy acceleration, with a pad for his head and armrests that were at a good height for a human being.
“I’m sitting,” he said. “Now tell me what you’re waiting for.”
“Well, to be honest,” said the probe, “I was waiting for a passenger, Ray.”
The sound of grapples being disengaged echoed through the door of the airlock behind him.
“I don’t know if I like this. In fact, I can say quite definitively—”
Ray’s stomach suddenly dropped out from under him, which he assumed meant the probe was rotating away from the station’s gantries.
“Listen,” Ray said, his ears trying to convince him he was doing cartwheels. “Maybe we could just sort of stay close to the—”
“I’d really rather not. I get nervous around too many people.”
“People aren’t so bad. I kind of like them.”
“You’re entitled to your opinion, of course,” the probe said politely. “But I’m afraid I have too much experience to agree.”
“So where are we going?”
“Oh, out.”
“Out?”
“Yes. Out of your solar system.”
Ray felt dizzy.
“I’d really rather—”
“I’m going to have to tranquilize you for the first part of the acceleration,” the probe told him. “But don’t worry—it won’t damage you in any way.”