Apes and Angels

by Ben Bova

Brad saw one of the hothouse buildings crushed as a boulder flattened it.

  Mom and Dad and Davie are still inside the housing complex!

  Brad stood in an agony of indecision. What should I do? What should I do?

  “Hey, you! Don’t just stand there!” one of the construction crewmen’s voices screamed in Brad’s helmet earphones. “Grab a tractor and pick up as many people as you can!”

  I don’t know how to run a tractor, Brad wanted to answer. I’ve never been allowed inside one. But whoever had yelled at him had run off to help others. Brad’s height had fooled him: in the helmeted pressure suit Brad looked tall enough to be an adult.

  He ran to an idle tractor and climbed into its cockpit. Gasping, his heart racing, Brad looked over the controls, then punched the big red button that started the engine. Looking up, he saw the whole wall of rock crumbling, falling, smashing the puny human buildings at its base.

  The tractor lurched into motion. Brad tried to steer it, but didn’t know how. The machine seemed to have a mind of its own. People were rushing away from the buildings, away from the killing rocks tumbling down the wall. Brad saw bodies sprawled everywhere, men and women and children who had bolted outside without sealing their pressure suits. Some of them didn’t even have their helmets on. Their faces had exploded in blood.

  Brad couldn’t control the tractor. It plowed ahead, rolling over bodies living and dead, until it bumped to a stop against the remains of what had been the building where Brad and his family had been quartered.

  Horrified, Brad looked down from his perch in the tractor and saw Mom, Dad, and Davie staring up at him. Dead and accusing. Why didn’t you help us? Why did you let us die?

  And Brad was struggling in his sleep cocoon, writhing inside its mesh confines, his eyes blinded with tears, his mind screaming with memories.

  He tore at the cocoon’s zipper and sailed out of the cocoon, banging his shoulder painfully against the far bulkhead of the narrow compartment.

  For long moments he hung there in a fetal crouch, in the darkness, slowly drifting across the chamber, gasping for air.

  It hadn’t happened the way his dream showed it. He had been outside, of course, fully suited up. But he had never taken a tractor. Panting, doubled over as he hung in midair, Brad muttered to himself, “There was nothing I could do. There was nothing I could do.”

  Yet the reality was that he survived the catastrophe without a scratch while his family was killed.

  He had had another argument with his father. Over what, Brad couldn’t remember. But he’d bolted from the breakfast table, grabbed his camera, run down to the air lock and pulled on a pressure suit, then gone outside—away from his father, away from the whole family. He had to get away from them.

  I was outside taking pictures of the chasm wall when it happened, Brad remembered. I should have been inside having breakfast with my family. But I couldn’t sit down with them. I went outside. I left them to be crushed to death while I went out to take fucking pictures.

  I let them die.

  I should have died with them.

  Every time Brad had the dream he awoke with the same overwhelming sense of guilt. He had gone through more than a year of intense psychotherapy; he had learned to control the guilt during the day. Sometimes he actually forgot it. Almost.

  Eventually, he earned a degree in anthropology from the distance-learning University of Mars. When the call went out for volunteers to participate in the star missions to save alien civilizations threatened by the death wave, Brad signed up. Atonement might be found in a flight to another star. He had nothing to lose, nothing to leave behind except his memories.

  But even two hundred light-years away from Mars he had to sleep. And, sooner or later, he would dream. And the awful sense of guilt and shame would crush him the way the tumbling rocks of Tithonium Chasma had crushed his mother, father, and little brother.

  CONVERSATIONS

  “I’m going to try to talk to the octopods,” Brad said to the image of Jonesey on the tutorial program’s screen.

  Jonesey’s eyes narrowed slightly. “Do you think that’s wise?”

  Brad was in the shuttlecraft’s tightly packed communications center, surrounded by consoles and screens. He always thought of the comm center as an all-seeing eye, searching everywhere, never sleeping. It was tight in there, especially for a gangling young man of Brad’s height. He was always bumping an elbow or banging a knee against the jam-packed instruments.

  Hovering weightlessly in front of the tutorial screen, Brad replied, “We’ve built up a mini dictionary of their terms. In another week I’ll be going back to Odysseus. I want to bring some positive results back with me.”

  “Have you gotten approval from Dr. Littlejohn?”

  “I haven’t told him yet.”

  “As I understand your mission guidelines, you should get your department head’s approval before attempting contact with the aliens.”

  Brad knew that Jonesey was right. He knows Kosoff’s routine better than I do, Brad thought. And he never forgets anything.

  “What do you hope to accomplish?” Jonesey asked.

  “Making meaningful contact with an alien species!” Brad snapped. “Isn’t that worthwhile?”

  “Not if it harms the aliens.”

  Brad realized he was floating away from the screen when his rump hit the corner of the neural analyzer’s console. Slightly flustered, he pushed himself back toward Jonesey’s image.

  “How can it harm them?”

  Jonesey shrugged his slim shoulders. “We don’t know anything about their understanding of the world they live in. It seems unlikely that they know anything about the universe outside of their ocean. Your sudden intrusion into their world could upset them, cause them harm.”

  Shaking his head so hard that he started drifting away from the screen again, Brad countered, “Look, they accustomed themselves to the probes we’ve placed among them. What’s the harm in saying hello to them?”

  “I’m an engineering program, not a psych system. But mission protocol specifically says that attempts to make contact with an alien species have to be approved by the highest scientific authority.”

  “Kosoff,” Brad growled.

  “Professor Kosoff is the chief of this mission. You’ll have to get his permission before you try to contact the octopods.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  Jonesey shrugged again. “As you yourself have complained many times, Professor Kosoff doesn’t like you. Going around him and making contact on your own isn’t going to improve his attitude toward you.”

  Brad knew that Jonesey was right. Still …

  “Talk to Dr. Littlejohn, at least,” the image on the screen suggested.

  “Yeah, maybe you’re right,” Brad muttered. Reluctantly.

  * * *

  “Make contact with them?” Littlejohn was startled by the idea.

  He was sitting at his desk, in his office aboard Odysseus, a small compartment next to his living quarters. Brad MacDaniels’s earnest—almost combative—face filled his desktop screen.

  Aware of the three-minute communications lag between them, Littlejohn went on, “Actual contact with an alien species has to be okayed by Kosoff and the executive committee. You’re not authorized to make that decision on your own.”

  But Brad was already saying, “The octopods have tolerated having our probes swimming along with them. They haven’t shown the slightest reaction to our probing their brains, although I guess they don’t even realize that we’re beaming neutrino probes at them. It would be an incredibly important step, making meaningful contact with them.”

  Littlejohn shook his head sternly. “No, no, no. You can’t do it. You mustn’t. Not until Kosoff okays it.”

  And then he waited for Brad’s reply. But he thought he knew what the headstrong young man would say.

  At last Brad’s words reached him. “All right. Ask Kosoff. But I’ve only got another week to stay here before I re
turn to Odysseus. Get Kosoff to make up his mind quickly.” As an afterthought, Brad added, “Please.”

  * * *

  Brad’s comm screen went dark. Littlejohn’s scared to death, he thought. He’s afraid of getting on Kosoff’s bad side. As if the bastard has a good side.

  Turning weightlessly toward the tutorial screen, Brad said to Jonesey’s image, “I’m going to set up a communications link with the probes down there. I want to be ready the instant Kosoff gives the go-ahead.”

  “If he gives you the go-ahead,” Jonesey cautioned.

  “Not if,” said Brad. “When.”

  * * *

  “Absolutely not!”

  Adrian Kosoff’s dark-bearded face reminded Brad of the images of pirates he had seen in videos when he’d been a lad. Scowling, dark eyes glowering menacingly, lips pulled tightly across his teeth. All he needs is an eye patch, Brad thought.

  To Kosoff’s image on his comm screen Brad asked, “Is that the executive committee’s decision?”

  Then the three-minute wait. Brad shifted his attention to the imagery coming from the probes floating among the octopods deep in the ocean. They look so peaceful, he thought. Not a care in the world. No problems, no conflicts.

  “It’s my decision,” Kosoff snapped. “I don’t need the committee to tell me what the mission protocol says. One of the prime directives is to avoid making contact with the aliens until all the preparatory steps have been taken. Those directives were written by some of the best scientific minds on Earth. I’m not going to let a junior member of the anthropology group go against them.”

  Brad felt no surprise, no anger, not even resentment. He realized that he’d known all along what Kosoff’s answer would be.

  “We’ve already made contact with them, of a sort,” he argued to the smoldering image on the comm screen. “We’ve placed a half-dozen probes among them. If they’re truly intelligent, they must realize that those probes came from someplace.”

  Kosoff’s response, when it came, was surprisingly moderate. “That’s true. It was a risk to put the probes among them, but a risk we had to take. We can’t study the beasts without them.”

  “They seem to have accepted them easily enough,” Brad pointed out.

  And again he waited. At last Kosoff answered, “That’s as far as we’re going, at present. Our task is to decipher their language, if the noises they make are truly a language. Once that’s done, we’ll decide on our next step.”

  Brad knew that Kosoff was right. Direct contact with an alien species was fraught with unknowns. He recalled how circumspect the alien Predecessors of New Earth had been, constructing a whole planet and populating it with humanlike creatures. They had spent centuries carefully orchestrating their contact with us.

  But what harm could it do? Brad asked himself. And answered, We don’t know. That’s the point. We don’t know and when you don’t know what the consequences of an action would be, you proceed slowly, carefully. Once the damage is done you can’t undo it, so you proceed along the path that has the least risk of damage.

  Kosoff demanded, “Do you understand me? No contact!”

  “I understand,” Brad said. “No contact.”

  Yet while he waited for Kosoff’s next message, Brad realized he had enough of the octopods’ sounds in his files to study them for meaning. It’s not contact, he told himself, but it’s a start.

  Kosoff said, “You’re due to return here to Odysseus next week. You’d better spend your time preparing for that.”

  Brad nodded, and realized that his request to make contact with the octopods had wiped out any ideas Kosoff might have had about prolonging his stay at Alpha. Grinning to himself, he thought, I’m a kind of devious devil, after all.

  RETURN

  Despite himself, Brad felt his innards coiling tensely as the shuttlecraft approached Odysseus.

  He was sitting in the shuttle’s command chair, up forward, surrounded by control panels and sensor readout displays that he ignored. His eyes were fastened on the view through the command center’s broad glassteel windows: the starship, an immense island floating in space, growing so huge that it filled the windows entirely.

  Odysseus was really a city in space, Brad realized. Compared to it, the shuttlecraft was a seed, a piece of flotsam, a baby returning to its womb.

  “Five klicks and approaching on the line,” said the unemotional voice of the flight controller from the screen in the center of the panel of consoles. It showed an oblong entry port in the smooth side of the starship, waiting for Brad’s craft to glide into the hangar inside.

  Brad had nothing to do but watch. His approach to Odysseus was completely automated. If anything went wrong, the flight controller would take command of the shuttlecraft remotely. Like my dream of the tractor, Brad thought. I don’t know how to handle this craft. I don’t have to know how. Everything’s being done automatically.

  So he sat with his hands in his lap as the entry port in the starship’s hull grew bigger, wider, like a mouth ready to engulf him.

  My three-month exile is finished, he told himself. Now I go back to work as an anthropologist. Then he smiled to himself and added, Plus something more.

  Brad had copied all the data that the probes had taken of the aliens swimming in Alpha’s ocean. Every squeak and twitter they uttered. Every move they made. He would hand the official files over to Kosoff, of course, or whoever Kosoff designated to receive them. Probably the head of the linguistics team, Brad thought.

  But he had his own copy of all that data and he intended to study it himself, with Jonesey’s help. Brad was determined to make sense out of the octopods’ language.

  “Touchdown.” The voice of the flight director jarred Brad out of his thoughts. “Velocity zero, grapplers connected. Flight is complete. Welcome home, Dr. MacDaniels.”

  I’m back, Brad realized. Back aboard Odysseus. For the first time in three months he felt gravity tugging at his arms, felt his heart thumping to pump blood through his arteries.

  Now let’s see if Kosoff’s allowed Felicia to greet me at the air lock.

  It took nearly half an hour for the flight controller’s crew to seal shut the outer hatch and pump the hangar full of breathable air. Brad sat impatiently through the procedure until he heard the director’s voice announce, “You are free to leave the shuttlecraft.”

  Brad got to his feet slowly, carefully, bending over to avoid bumping his head against the ceiling panels. He edged through the consoles toward the craft’s main hatch. The ground crew was swinging the hatch open when he got to it. Ducking through the hatch, Brad saw that the big hangar chamber was empty, except for the half-dozen members of the ground crew.

  “Welcome back, Dr. MacDaniels,” said one of them, sticking out his hand. “Careful of the steps now.”

  Clasping the man’s steadying hand, Brad made it down the metal ladder and onto the hangar floor. The half g of the ship’s gravity field felt good, solid, after his months of weightlessness. Back to normal, he thought.

  “Dr. Littlejohn said he’s waiting for you in his office,” the crewman said.

  Nodding, Brad asked, “Anybody else?”

  “Nope. Just the pygmy.”

  “He’s an Aborigine,” Brad snapped. “From Australia.”

  The crewman laughed. “Yeah, we know. We just call him a pygmy for fun.”

  Brad walked away from him, toward the hatch at the far side of the hangar. I wonder what they call me for fun, he asked himself.

  The crewman called out, “We’ll have your personal stuff delivered to your quarters. Might take a half hour or so.”

  “That’s fine,” Brad said over his shoulder. Then he added, “Thanks.”

  There were berths for two more shuttlecraft in the hangar, but both were empty. Probably gone down to Gamma’s surface, Brad thought. Why isn’t Felicia here? It’s a working day, of course, but she could’ve taken a few minutes off to greet me.

  He crossed the hangar floor alone and yank
ed open the hatch.

  And there was Felicia standing on the other side, her smile radiant. Before Brad could utter a word she rushed into his arms and kissed him soundly.

  “You’re here!” he gasped.

  “Where else would I be?” Felicia replied, clinging to him.

  Suddenly Brad felt embarrassed. This side of the hatch was a passageway with people walking briskly past, grinning at the young couple locked in each other’s arms.

  “I … it’s good to see you,” Brad said, still holding her close.

  “It’s wonderful to see you,” said Felicia.

  They disengaged and she started walking along the passageway. “I’ve got to get back to my lab,” she said. “The ground team has sent up dozens of soil and plant samples from Gamma. We’re all working flat out analyzing them.”

  “Great,” Brad said.

  “Dr. Littlejohn wants to see you.”

  Nodding, “Yes, I know.”

  “We can meet for lunch.”

  “In the cafeteria.”

  “High noon?”

  Brad realized he didn’t know what time it was. He remembered that he was scheduled to land at the hangar at ten after ten.

  “Noon,” he echoed, feeling awkward, almost disoriented.

  “If Littlejohn’s going to keep you longer, call me.”

  “Right.”

  Raising her eyes to meet his, Felicia added, “I’ve taken the afternoon off.”

  He couldn’t help grinning. “Great! That’s wonderful.”

  “See you in the cafeteria.”

  “High noon,” Brad said.

  REINTEGRATION

  The next two weeks were a blur in Brad’s mind. Felicia was warm and willing and seemed completely content to share her life with him. She maintained her own quarters, but spent most of her nights at Brad’s place. For his part, Brad requisitioned a housekeeping robot to make sure his quarters were as sparkling clean as possible.

  Littlejohn assigned Brad to interviewing individuals in the various scientific teams.

  “I want to build a picture of how the demands of their scientific investigations are reshaping their social structure,” the Aborigine told Brad.