by Damon Knight
“What about the pressure?” Dominick prompted eagerly.)
“How long would it take you to build a thing like that?” Carver was asking Ritner.
“Well—ten, eleven hours.”
“Too long. That’s out. Next!”
(“They’re actually a single cell—all colloidal fluid, at a considerable osmotic pressure. The bigger they get, the more pressure it takes to keep that shape. If they got too big, I rather imagine—”
Alvarez snapped his fingers, awed. “They’d burst!”)
Carver turned with an indignant glare. “Gentlemen, if I could get a little cooperation out of you, instead of this continual distraction—All right, Womrath?”
“Sir, I was just wondering, suppose if we let him turn into a fish, the way he did before in the pool—but then we’d net him and take him out of the water fast. That way, maybe—”
“It wouldn’t work,” said Kelly. “He changed back in about a second, the other time.”
Nobody was paying any attention to him. One of the big gorgons, who had been staring fixedly at the flowers in the middle of the table, had suddenly grabbed a handful and was stuffing them into his mouth. George said something shrill in gorgon talk, and snatched. the flowers away again. The other gorgon looked abashed, but flushed pink.
George, on the other hand, was distinctly blue.
His “hand,” clutching the mangled flowers, hesitated. Slowly, as if with an effort, he put them back in the bowl.
The other two gorgons twined their “arms” around him. After a moment George looked more like his old self, but a hint of blue remained.
“What is it?” said Carver alertly. “Did we do something, finally?” He snapped open his wristcom. “There’s still ten minutes before the deadline, so—”
“Did you turn blue because we punished you, George?” Womrath asked.
“No,” said George unexpectedly. “Hard for me to be elder.” He added a few words in his own language to the other gorgons, and their “arms” twined around him again. “Before, they panga to me,” added George.
(“Then that’s why he took the pie away from the Commandant’s wife!” said Dominick, smiting himself on the forehead.
“Of course. They—”
“What’s that? What’s that?” Carver turned, bristling.
“Why, this explains that pie business,” said Dominick. “He felt protective towards your wife, you see—that’s what ‘panga’ means. They none of them have much control over their own appetites, so they guard each other. As they grow older, and get more self-control, they’re expected to get smaller, not bigger. George felt confused about his panga relationships to us, but in your wife’s case, he was positive one more mouthful would make her explode—”
Carver was red to the ears. “Nonsense!” he shouted. “Dominick, you’re being insulting, insubordinate and unpatriotic!”
George, looking on interestedly, piped a few words in the gorgon language. One of the other gorgons immediately spoke up: “Elder person says, you with smooth head are a smart man. He says, the other big one who talks too much is wrong.”
Carver’s jaws worked. He looked at the gorgons, then around the table. No one said anything.
Carver set his jaw heroically. “Well, gentlemen,” he began, “we certainly tried, but—”
“Wait a minute!” said Alvarez. Somewhere in his narrow skull a great light had dawned. “George, am I panga to you?”
George’s auricles weaved tensely. “Yes,” he said. “You very small man.”
“Good,” said Alvarez, dry-washing his bony hands. “And you still have to be punished, for that mistake you made at the banquet?”
George’s speaking tube buzzed unhappily. “Yes,” he said.
“All right,” said Alvarez. Everybody was looking at him, with expressions varying from puzzlement to alarm. Alvarez took a deep breath. “Then here are my orders to you,” he said. “Do as you please!”
There was a hiss of indrawn breath from Urban. Most of the others looked at Alvarez as if he had grown snakes for hair. “Doctor,” said Carver, “have you gone off your—”
The chorus of gasps stopped him. Up on the table, flushing blue and bright pink by turns like a sky sign, George was gobbling up the flowers in the centerpiece. Next he ate the bowl. One of his flailing limbs raked in the scratch pad Urban had been doodling on. He ate that.
Next moment he was leaping to the floor, making Ritner duck wildly as he passed. Part of Dominick’s detachable hood went with him, disappearing with hoarse munching sounds. With a gulp, George swallowed it and began on the carpet. He was eating greedily, frantically. The other two gorgons hovered around him with shrill gorgon cries, but he ate on, oblivious. Now he was bright blue and bulging, but still he ate.
“Stop it!” shouted Alvarez. “George, stop that!”
George rocked to a halt. Gradually his blueness faded. The other gorgons were prodding and patting him anxiously. George looked all right, but it was obvious as he stood there that he would never fit into the panga box again.
He was as big as the other two; maybe a little bigger.
“Alvarez,” said Carver, wildly, “why did you—”
“He was going to burst,” said Alvarez, twitching with excitement. “Couldn’t you tell? Another mouthful or two—”
Carver recovered himself. He straightened his coverall and thrust out his chin. “At any rate,” he said, “he was certainly blue that time. You all saw it—isn’t that right?” He looked around triumphantly. “And by heaven, it happened inside the time limit. So, unless I’m very much mistaken—”
One of the two attendant gorgons raised his photoceptors. It was hard to tell which was George, now, except that his color was still a little lavender. The other gorgon spoke two brief sentences in his own language, and then all three of them waddled off together toward the exit.
“What was that? What did he say?” demanded Carver.
Urban cleared his throat; he had turned pale again. “He said you should get the tender ready to take them back home.”
“The tender is there,” said Carver indignantly, “they can go back any time they want. But what did he say about the punishment?”
Urban cleared his throat again, looking bemused. “They say the punishment is good. More severe than any they ever thought of, in twenty thousand years. They say they won’t have to punish Rubinson and the others, now, because you have done all the punishment necessary.”
“Well?” said Carver. “Why are you looking that way? What’s the hitch? Are they going to refuse to enter the Union, after all this?”
“No,” said Urban. “They say we are all panga to them now. They’ll do as we say—let us land and build the distribution centers, start them consuming in massive quantity…”
“But that’ll destroy them!” someone interjected in a horrified tone.
“Oh, yes,” said Urban.
Carver sighed. He had been in the SAPS service most of his life and was proud of his record. He played it as a game; the new, virgin planets were the prizes, and he kept score with the row of tiny iridium buttons on his breast pocket. He said into his wristcom, “Let me know when Rubinson and his crew are on the way up.”
There was a long wait. The silence grew oppressive. At length the wall screen lighted up with a view of Planet Seven, gilded along one cusp, blue-green and mysterious in the shadow. A silver spark was floating up out of the night side.
“Here they come now,” said the voice.
Carver sighed again. “When they make contact,” he said, “secure the tender and then signal for acceleration stations. We’re leaving Seven—tell Mr. Fruman to set a first approximation for our next star of call.”
Alvarez, twitching and frowning, clutched at the front of his coverall. “You’re letting them go?” he demanded. “Not landing on Seven—after all this work?”
Carver was staring into the view plate. “Some things,” he said slowly and unwillingly, “are not me
ant to be consumed.”
STRANGER STATION
The clang of metal echoed hollowly down through the Station’s many vaulted corridors and rooms. Paul Wesson stood listening for a moment as the rolling echoes died away. The maintenance rocket was gone, heading back to Home; they had left him alone in Stranger Station.
Stranger Station! The name itself quickened his imagination. Wesson knew that both orbital stations had been named a century ago by the then British administration of the satellite service; “Home” because the larger, inner station handled the traffic of Earth and its colonies; “Stranger” because the outer station was designed specifically for dealings with foreigners… beings from outside the solar system. But even that could not diminish the wonder of Stranger Station, whirling out here alone in the dark—waiting for its once-in-two-decades visitor…
One man, out of all Sol’s billions, had the task and privilege of enduring the alien’s presence when it came. The two races, according to Wesson’s understanding of the subject, were so fundamentally different that it was painful for them to meet. Well, he had volunteered for the job, and he thought he could handle it—the rewards were big enough.
He had gone through all the tests, and against his own expectations he had been chosen. The maintenance crew had brought him up as dead weight, drugged in a survival hamper; they had kept him the same way while they did their work, and then had brought him back to consciousness. Now they were gone. He was alone.
… But not quite.
“Welcome to Stranger Station, Sergeant Wesson,” said a pleasant voice. “This is your alpha network speaking. I’m here to protect and serve you in every way. If there’s anything you want, just ask me.” It was a neutral voice, with a kind of professional friendliness in it, like that of a good schoolteacher or rec supervisor.
Wesson had been warned, but he was still shocked at the human quality of it. The alpha networks were the last word in robot brains—computers, safety devices, personal servants, libraries, all wrapped up in one, with something so close to “personality” and “free will” that experts were still arguing the question. They were rare and fantastically expensive; Wesson had never met one before.
“Thanks,” he said now, to the empty air. “Uh—what do I call you, by the way? I can’t keep saying, “Hey, alpha network.”
“One of your recent predecessors called me Aunt Nettie,” was the response.
Wesson grimaced. Alpha network—Aunt Nettie. He hated puns; that wouldn’t do. “The aunt part is all right,” he said.
“Suppose I call you Aunt Jane. That was my mother’s sister; you sound like her, a little bit.”
“I am honored,” said the invisible mechanism politely. “Can I serve you any refreshments now? Sandwiches? A drink?”
“Not just yet,” said Wesson. “I think I’ll look the place over first.”
He turned away. That seemed to end the conversation as far as the network was concerned. A good thing; it was all right to have it for company, speaking when spoken to, but if it got talkative…
The human part of the Station was in four segments: bedroom, living room, dining room, bath. The living room was comfortably large and pleasantly furnished in greens and tans: the only mechanical note in it was the big instrument console in one corner. The other rooms, arranged in a ring around the living room, were tiny; just enough space for Wesson, a narrow encircling corridor, and the mechanisms that would serve him. The whole place was spotlessly clean, gleaming and efficient in spite of its twenty-year layoff.
This is the gravy part of the run, Wesson told himself. The month before the alien came—good food, no work, and an alpha network for conversation. “Aunt Jane, I’ll have a small steak now,” he said to the network. “Medium rare, with hashed brown potatoes, onions and mushrooms, and a glass of lager. Call me when it’s ready.”
“Right,” said the voice pleasantly. Out in the dining room, the autochef began to hum and cluck self-importantly. Wesson wandered over and inspected the instrument console. Airlocks were sealed and tight, said the dials; the air was cycling. The Station was in orbit, and rotating on its axis with a force at the perimeter, where Wesson was, of one g. The internal temperature of this part of the Station was an even 73°.
The other side of the board told a different story; all the dials were dark and dead. Sector Two, occupying a volume some eighty-eight thousand times as great as this one, was not yet functioning.
Wesson had a vivid mental image of the Station, from photographs and diagrams—a five-hundred-foot duralumin sphere, onto which the shallow thirty-foot disk of the human section had been stuck apparently as an afterthought. The whole cavity of .the sphere, very nearly—except for a honeycomb of supply and maintenance rooms, and the all-important, recently enlarged vats—was one cramped chamber for the alien…
“Steak’s ready!” said Aunt Jane.
The steak was good, bubbling crisp outside the way he liked it, tender. and pink inside. “Aunt Jane,” he said with his mouth full, “this is pretty soft, isn’t it?”
“The steak?” asked the voice, with a faintly anxious note.
Wesson grinned. “Never mind,” he said. “Listen, Aunt Jane, you’ve been through this routine—how many times? Were you installed with the Station, or what?”
“I was not installed with the Station,” said Aunt Jane primly. “I have assisted at three contacts.”
“Um. Cigarette,” said Wesson, slapping his pockets. The autochef hummed for a moment, and popped a pack of G.I.“s out of a vent. Wesson lit up. “All right,” he said, “you’ve been through this three times. There are a lot of things you can tell me, right?”
“Oh, yes, certainly. What would you like to know?”
Wesson smoked, leaning back reflectively, green eyes narrowed.
“First,” he said, “read me the Pigeon report-you know, from the Brief History. I want to see if I remember it right.”
“Chapter Two,” said the voice promptly. “First contact with a non-Solar intelligence was made by Commander Ralph C. Pigeon on July 1, 1987, during an emergency landing on Titan. The following is an excerpt from his official report:
“ ‘While searching for a possible cause for our mental disturbance, we discovered what appeared to be a gigantic construction of metal on the far side of the ridge. Our distress grew stronger with the approach to this construction, which was polyhedral and approximately five times the length of the Cologne.
“ ‘Some of those present expressed a wish to retire, but Lt. Acuff and myself had a strong sense of being called or summoned in some indefinable way. Although our uneasiness was not lessened, we therefore agreed to go forward and keep radio contact with the rest of the party while they returned to the ship.
“ ‘We gained access to the alien construction by way of a large, irregular opening… The internal temperature was minus seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit; the atmosphere appeared to consist of methane and ammonia… Inside the second chamber, an alien creature was waiting for us. We felt the distress which I have tried to describe, to a much greater degree than before, and also the sense of summoning or pleading… We observed that the creature was exuding a thick yellowish fluid from certain joints or pores in its surface. Though disgusted, I managed to collect a sample of this exudate, and it was later forwarded for analysis…”
“The second contact was made ten years later by Commodore Crawford’s famous Titan Expedition—”
“No, that’s enough,” said Wesson; “I just wanted the Pigeon quote.” He smoked, brooding. “It seems kind of chopped off, doesn’t it. Have you got a longer version in your memory banks anywhere?”
There was a pause. “No,” said Aunt Jane.
“There was more to it when I was a kid,” Wesson complained nervously. “I read that book when I was twelve, and I remember a long description of the alien… that is, I remember its being there.” He swung around, “Listen,Aunt Jane—you’re a sort of universal watchdog, that right? You’ve got ca
meras and mikes all over the Station?”
“Yes,” said the network, sounding—was it Wesson’s imagination?—faintly injured.
“Well, what about Sector Two—you must have cameras up there, too, isn’t that so?”
“Yes.”
“All right, then you can tell me. What do the aliens look like?”
There was a definite pause. “I’m sorry, I can’t tell you that,” said Aunt Jane.
“No,” said Wesson, “I didn’t think you could. You’ve got orders not to, I guess, for the same reason those history books have been cut since I was a kid. Now, what would the reason .be? Have you got any idea, Aunt Jane?”
There was another pause. “Yes,” the voice admitted.
“Well?”
“I’m sorry, I can’t—”
“—tell you that,” Wesson repeated along with it. “All right. At least we know where we stand.”
“Yes, Sergeant. Would you like some dessert?”
“No dessert. One other thing. What happens to Station watchmen, like me, after their tour of duty?”
“They are upgraded to Class Seven, students with unlimited leisure, and receive outright gifts of seven thousand stellors, plus free Class One housing…”
“Yeah, I know all that,” said Wesson, licking his dry lips. “But here’s what I’m asking you. The ones you know—what kind of shape were they in when they left here?”
“The usual human shape,” said the voice brightly. “Why do you ask, Sergeant?”
Wesson made a discontented gesture. “Something I remember from a bull session at the Academy. I can’t get it out of my head; I know it had something to do with the Station. Just part of a sentence—“blind as a bat, and white bristles all over.” Now, would that be a description of the alien… or the watchman when they came to take him away?”
Aunt Jane went into one of her heavy pauses. “All right, I’ll save you the trouble,” said Wesson. “You’re sorry, you can’t tell me that.”
“I am sorry,” said the robot, sincerely.