by Rick Cook
“We have found none in thousands of cycles,” the Colonist on the screen informed him.
“That’s incredible! . . . I mean, how does it work?”
“It is somewhat complex. But we can provide you with the information—privately.”
“What do you mean—privately?”
The alien made an odd gesture that Waddell had been told was the equivalent of a shrug. “It is not necessary that we even be mentioned. If you were the human discoverer of this thing it would help you, would it not?”
“Well, sure, but . . .”
“That can be arranged,” the Colonist told him. “I can see to it that none of my colleagues convey the complete information to other humans. You would seem to have taken what you learned from us and developed it further. And if later it were discovered that some of us had evolved a similar theory—well, your culture recognizes priority of independent discovery, does it not?”
A complete theory, Waddell thought frantically. My God, that’s a Nobel for sure! Visions of a chair at a major university in Nairobi or even Djarkata danced before his eyes.
“It would not necessarily be an untruth,” the alien went on. “We could supply the basis and you could work out the details yourself. In that it would be no different than building on the work of others.”
“Yes,” Waddell said at last. “It’s irregular of course, but, yes, I’ll do it.”
“We would require some assistance on other matters, of course,” the Colonist said.
“Like what?”
“As you know, we are interested in the details of your star drive. Unfortunately, your captain refuses to share the information with us.”
“I don’t know a lot about the drive. It’s not my field.”
“But as an astrophysicist you have an understanding of the basic phenomena. That is all we would require.”
Harry Waddell thought very hard for maybe ten seconds. “Nuts,” he said. “It’s a stupid rule anyway. Okay, I’ll tell you what I can about the drive.”
The alien quivered.
“The basic principle is that you go with the flow,” Harry began. “For any appropriate set of coordinates the X flow is connected to the Y flow, the Z flow is connected to the X flow and them bones naturally gonna rise again.”
“I do not understand,” said the alien. “Is this flow gentle?”
“Gentle, hard, it doesn’t matter. The important thing is that round and round and round it flows and where it stops is Heisenberg-indeterminate.”
“Let us go back to the beginning,” the alien said. “The flow runs from high potential to low potential, correct?”
“No, you see the harbustrang murfitzes the weebitz and then a thousand flowers bloom.”
The alien said nothing for a long time.
“You mean that the sternchaser outpumps the impalement gryonny?”
Man and alien stared at each other incredulously.
“No, that’s not what I mean at all. There’s this flange, see? And on the flange there is a space-time node . . .”
Eventually they gave up by mutual agreement.
“That was gold!” Jewett exclaimed as soon as his alien friend appeared on the screen.
“It has value for you?” Splicer seemed only mildly interested.
“Hell, yes, it’s valuable! Where did you get it?”
The Owlie made the equivalent of a shrug. “We have a sufficiency of it. Would it please you to have some?”
“Well, yeah, but we’re not supposed to have physical contact with you.”
“We did not have physical contact when I gave you this. Why should that change?”
Jewett thought hard. “What do you want in return?”
The Owlie started. “Want? Why should I want anything? We have much of this and we obtain more every time we smelt an asteroid. I can easily acquire some and it pleases you. It is a simple enough thing to arrange.”
“Well . . .”
“Consider,” the Owlie went on. “You have but a single thing we do not and that is your star drive. My bosses want that, but what has that to do with you or me? You do not know the secret and it would profit me nothing to have it.”
“Yeah, but, I mean gold,” Jewett protested.
“If it causes you anguish, forget that I said anything,” the Owlie urged. “I will not mention it again. It is just that among my people such—unofficial? yes, unofficial—arrangements are common among workers in spite of what the bosses say. I did not realize it was so different for you.”
“Now wait a minute!” Jewett’s mind was working furiously. “We do the same sort of thing. It’s just that this is a special deal, see, and . . .” he sighed. “Oh hell, what can it hurt? Yeah, sure I’d like some more of that gold. How can we do it?”
The Owlie opened his beak in the equivalent of a smile.
“Let me know when you will be out on the hull next. Give me four or five hours’ notice and the package will be waiting for you.”
Not all of the trade with the aliens was illicit. In a matter of weeks, a softly glowing construct had blossomed not far from the Maxwell for exactly that purpose.
Meetpoint’s proportions were wrong for human eyes and it stuck out in unusual places, as if someone had draped gold foil around a milkweed seed, but to Andrew Aubrey it was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.
“Wonderful!” he breathed as he floated into a golden chamber near the center of the station. “This is wonderful!”
The light was reddish and dim by human standards. In another context it might have been called gloomy. But to Aubrey the room seemed like part of a fairy castle.
“We are glad you like it,” said the Colonist.
He turned to the alien floating easily in the room. “It is a pleasure to meet you in person at last.”
The Colonist nodded acknowledgement in a very human fashion.
“It is quite remarkable. You have taught us so much already.”
The Colonist was prepared for this. He had studied tapes of Aubrey’s conversations carefully, as well as the reports of the psychologists assigned to study the humans and he had his responses thoroughly worked out.
“You have been most apt pupils. We have been very pleased with your progress.”
Aubrey almost dimpled. “Thank you. I hope we can continue to learn from you. And I hope we have the opportunity for further discussions as well as the exchange of artifacts.”
“Yes,” said the alien. “We have many more things to discuss.”
“Lulu, have you got those results yet?”
“I’m working on them,” Lulu Pine said sullenly, not looking up from the bench. She was a doughy, lumpy woman with a potato face, coarse complexion and wiry black hair pulled back in a bun. Even in low gravity, she moved with a heavy, flat-footed gait that made it seem her body weighed too much for her to bear.
“I need them now, Lulu,” Albers said with a hint of exasperation.
“I can only work so fast,” Lulu snapped.
Albers hesitated and then recognized it for a losing game. “Well, as fast as you can, please.” He turned on his heel and tried to stalk out of the lab—but the low gravity betrayed him and he bounced jerkily each time his foot hit the floor.
Lulu never looked up so she missed it. Assholes. Goddamn assholes giving orders all the time. And all of them acting like their little project was the most important goddamn thing in the world. Well Mr. High-And-Mighty Albers, your images just got shoved to the bottom of the pile. I’ll tell Dr. Wadsworth they came in late and I couldn’t get the time on the computers. She snorted. Talk to me like that, will you? Asshole!
Albers was still muttering when he ran into Wadsworth in the corridor.
“What’s wrong, Luke?” his superior asked when he saw the look on his face.
“Oh, that Pine woman.”
Wadsworth nodded sympathetically and fell in beside Albers.
“How in the world did we ever get saddled with her?” Albers asked hi
s boss.
“Sanchez recommended her very highly. I’m afraid I didn’t figure out why until it was too late.”
Albers grunted. “Meaning dumping her on us was the simplest way to get her out of his lab. We’ll have to think of a way to return the favor when we get back to Earth.”
“Meanwhile I’m afraid we’re stuck with her. The best we can do is keep her on jobs where she’ll do the least damage.”
“It’s ironic. I was talking to DeLorenzo yesterday and he says his biggest problem is to find something for his construction crews to do. Yet we are so understaffed our work is suffering.”
“Are you proposing we re-train a couple of vacuum jacks to work in the lab?” he said jokingly.
Wadsworth flinched at the thought of the stereotypical vacuum jack, huge, clumsy and hairy-eared, turned loose in his lab.
“A couple more run-ins with that woman and even a vacuum jack would look good,” Albers told him.
Dressed in an engineering blue coverall, DeLorenzo half-bounced and half-swam down the corridor. This close to the ship’s central axis there was almost no gravity.
And almost no people. The walls and floor were light blue above, brown below without any of the murals or decorations that marked the ways further out to the hub. This was an engineering corridor and a place of refuge in time of solar storm. In any event, not a main passage. DeLorenzo didn’t expect to meet anyone here and he was not disappointed.
A quick turn brought him into a shallow alcove with three blank walls and a closet without a door. He reached up and with an expert twist of a screwdriverlike tool he released the fasteners holding the panel. Setting the panel to one side he stepped through into a cramped little room lined with cables.
Consulting his compad, he found a gray metal box with ranks of cables leading in and out of it and counted over until he found what he was searching for.
The gray box was called a punchblock, DeLorenzo knew, just as this space was called a wiring cabinet. Both names were misnomers now. There were no wires running through this area, only hair-fine filaments of glass that carried optical signals. And they were connected through optical switching ICs in the box, not by being punched down into connector strips.
The names had nothing to do with the reality, he thought, but they had survived, just as what he was doing now had nothing to do with the wooden shoes disgruntled workers used to throw into machinery. But they still called it sabotage.
From his tool belt he drew out a black plastic box just too large to fit comfortably in his hand. There were leads dangling from each end of the box, in colors matching the cables.
DeLorenzo hefted his version of a wooden shoe and smiled slightly. The box was a standard components container from the Maxwell’s stores. The leads were the appropriate colors and the code stenciled white on the top was appropriate for a part in this punchblock. The smart tag embedded in the box would read out a reasonable but quite confusing description of the box’s contents, complete with references to a logical set of change orders that somehow never quite described what this box was actually supposed to do.
He set the box aside and plugged a hand-held programming unit into the punchblock. A few quick strokes and one of the switches was programmed to tie two additional connections in parallel with one of the cables. Then he carefully connected the leads from his box to the connection points and carefully stuck the box to the side of the punchblock case with the approved nine dabs of the approved adhesive. Another command to his programmer and the cable’s original path through the block was deactivated. Now all the signals on that line had to flow through his black box.
And that line was a key link in the ship’s command system.
DeLorenzo closed the punchblock cabinet and wiped his hands on his coveralls. For now the box would do nothing. As long as he gave a certain command to the ship’s computer every twenty-four hours, the box would do nothing. But if he failed to give that command, or if he gave a different command, the Maxwell’s nervous system would be cut into pieces.
Among other things. There were similar boxes on other punchblocks around the ship. There were other devices elsewhere attached to pipes, gas lines, electronic circuits and equipment all over the Maxwell. At his command he could cripple and ultimately destroy the Maxwell.
Whistling, Major DeLorenzo replaced the panel over the wiring closet and headed down the corridor to place his next box.
Lulu Pine shifted and snuffled in front of the screen. The yellow-eyed, beaked face in front of her repelled her, but she wasn’t going to have anyone say she was afraid of these unholy creatures. Besides, this one seemed almost sympathetic—although what she had to put up with would make a stone weep.
“Your bosses oppress you, then?” the Owlie asked gently.
“They’re always after me. Just yesterday I was up to my elbows in plates and Dr. Albers comes in and starts harassing me. For no reason at all! I told him I’d get to his stuff as soon as I could, but he was on me for just no reason at all!” She snuffled.
“They use you harshly.”
“Well, I’m a Christian and I try to keep a Christian attitude,” Lulu responded. “But it’s hard. When those high hats start ordering me around it’s hard to keep my principles.”
“I wonder that you can stand it.”
“Oh, it’s a trial, I can tell you. And you know what the worst of it is? All the time they look down on you. Who gets them their plates, huh? But they’re always riding me. All the time getting on my case.”
“Perhaps things could be different,” the alien told her. “Yeah,” Lulu said suspiciously, “how?”
The image of the heron perching on the sun-dappled limb in the wall of the Cypress Lounge seemed to eye Andrew Aubrey and his little knot of admirers.
“They are fantastic,” Aubrey was saying. “They truly are an elder race. Their history goes back hundreds of thousands of years, their civilization spans light-years. They have so much they can teach us.”
From where she was sitting, a little apart, Sharon noticed the heron, but Aubrey was oblivious to everything but his audience and the others around the table listened raptly. He was back from three days at Meetpoint and that made him one of the few humans to have direct physical contact with the aliens.
“It’s not just the material things. Those are the least of it. They have no war. Just think of it! No war for thousands and thousands of years.”
The talk made Sharon uncomfortable. She understood better than Aubrey what the aliens could offer humanity in technology and she knew well enough what war had cost Earth, but there was something in his manner of speaking that bothered her. It was as if he were a worshiper reciting a creed.
She knew he had been spending more and more of his time talking to the aliens and leaving the business of the Ship’s Council to C.D. MacNamara and the others. That bothered her too.
Deep down, Dr. Sharon Dolan felt that things were not at all right on the Maxwell. She prayed they would get out, back to Earth, before something went really wrong.
PART IV: TESUJI
“Captain, may I speak to you?” Father Simon asked from the door of Jenkins’ office.
“Sure. Sit down.”
The priest pulled himself in clumsily and settled into the chair. “I would have called you, but I wanted to be sure our conversation was absolutely private,” he said half-apologetically.
“What’s the problem, Father?”
“Temptation.”
Jenkins frowned. “That’s more your business than mine, I’d think.”
Father Simon shook his head. “I’m afraid this kind of temptation is your concern.” He hesitated and took a deep breath.
“As you know, I have spent a good deal of time talking to the Colonists. Very frankly, I am quite disturbed by some of the things I have seen and heard.”
“Like what?”
“I think they are deliberately trying to manipulate us. I think to obtain the secret of our drive, and possibly for oth
er things as well.”
“Dr. Aubrey sees them differently,” Jenkins said noncommittally.
“I suspect Dr. Aubrey is not completely unbiased on this point,” the priest said. “He has, shall we say, an unusually high regard for the Colonists.”
“What makes you think they are tempting us?”
“It’s a combination of a number of things. First, this policy of open communication. Anyone on the ship who wants to talk to an alien can always find someone to talk to. Someone who is interested, a good listener and as sympathetic as you can expect an alien to be.”
“So . . . ?”
“Captain, how much information have we gotten out of this ‘treasure trove’? The Colonists will talk to us, and talk and talk. But they don’t tell us anything. As far as I can tell we have learned very little about their culture or their society and practically nothing about their science.” The priest rubbed his graying temple.
“What we do get is a constant, subtle probing under the guise of friendly curiosity. They are interested in everything about us. Including, especially, our gossip and, most especially, anything about our individual foibles and weaknesses.”
“I certainly haven’t seen that.”
Father Simon smiled. “Captain, with all due respect, I doubt very much that you would. You’re not attuned to it and I suspect they have written you off as hopeless.”
“Have you been offered anything directly?”
“You mean as a bribe? No. But there have been very delicate hints. If I express interest in anything there is an intimation that it could be available. Once or twice, I have been asked to do things—very small things—that would violate the ground rules. As soon as I made objection, the suggestion was immediately withdrawn with apologies, or passed off as a bad translation.”
“I don’t know,” Jenkins said. “Besides their knowledge, what could an alien culture possibly have to tempt humans with?”
“Captain, these people have the resources of an ancient culture and the wealth of an entire solar system behind them. If I am right they are very skilled at this sort of thing.”