by Hank Davis
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 hawklike 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 semi-dark 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 earphoned 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 O 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 you 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.”
The Times was puzzled. “What does he mean, ‘murky’? It can’t be raining over much territory on Earth.” Outside, the rain was slowing and bright-blue patches of sky were shining through breaks in the cloud blanket, glittering blue light from the drops that ran down the windows. He tried to think of an explanation. “Maybe they’re trying to land on Venus.” The thought was ridiculous, he knew. The spaceship was following Nathen’s sending beam. It couldn’t miss Earth. “Bud” had to be kidding.
The green light glowed on the set again, and they stopped speaking, waiting for the message to be recorded, slowed, and replayed. The cathode screen came to life suddenly with a picture of the young man sitting at his sending set, his back turned, watching a screen at one side that showed a glimpse of a huge dark plain approaching. As the ship plunged down toward it, the illusion of solidity melted into a boiling turbulence of black clouds. They expanded in an inky swirl, looked huge for an instant, and then blackness swallowed the screen. The young alien swung around to face the camera, speaking a few words as he moved, made the O of a smile again, then flipped the switch and the screen went gray.
Nathen’s voice was suddenly toneless and strained. “He said something like ‘break out the drinks, here they come’.”
“The atmosphere doesn’t look like that,” the Times said at random, knowing he was saying something too obvious even to think about. “Not Earth’s atmosphere.”
Some people drifted up. “What did they say?”
“ ‘Entering the atmosphere, ought to be landing in five or ten minutes’ ,” Nathen told them.
A ripple of heightened excitement ran through the room. Cameramen began adjusting the lens angles again, turning on the mike and checking it, turning on the floodlights. The scientists rose and stood near the window, still talking. The reporters trooped in from the hall and went to the windows to watch for the great event. The three linguists came in, trundling a large wheeled box that was the mechanical translator, supervising while it was hitched into the sound-broadcasting system.
“Landing where?” the Times asked Nathen brutally. “Why don’t you do something?”
“Tell me what to do and I’ll do it,” Nathen said quietly, not moving.
It was not sarcasm. Jacob Luke of the Times looked sideways at the strained whiteness of his face and moderated his tone. “Can’t you contact them?”
“Not while they’re landing.”
“What now?” The Times took out a pack of cigarettes, remembered the rule against smoking, and put it back.
“We just wait,” Nathen leaned his elbow on one knee and his chin in his hand.
They waited.
All the people in the room were waiting. There was no more conversation. A bald man of the scientist group was automatically buffing his fingernails over and over and inspecting them without seeing them; another absently polished his glasses, held them up to the light, put them on, and then a moment later took them off and began polishing again. The televisi
on crew concentrated on their jobs, moving quietly and efficiently, with perfectionist care, minutely arranging things that did not need to be arranged, checking things that had already been checked.
This was to be one of the great moments of human history, and they were all trying to forget that fact and remain impassive and wrapped up in the problems of their jobs, as good specialists should.
After an interminable age the Times consulted his watch. Three minutes had passed. He tried holding his breath a moment, listening for a distant approaching thunder of jets. There was no sound.
The sun came out from behind the clouds and lit up the field like a great spotlight on an empty stage.
Abruptly, the green light shone on the set again, indicating that a squawk message had been received. The recorder recorded it, slowed it, and fed it back to the speaker. It clicked and the sound was very loud in the still, tense room.
The screen remained gray, but Bud’s voice spoke a few words in the alien language. He stopped, the speaker clicked, and the light went out. When it was plain that nothing more would occur and no announcement was to be made of what was said, the people in the room turned back to the windows and talk picked up again.
Somebody told a joke and laughed alone.
One of the linguists remained turned toward the loud-speaker, then looked at the widening patches of blue sky showing out the window, his expression puzzled. He had understood.
“It’s dark,” the thin Intelligence Department decoder translated, low-voiced, to the man from the Times. “Your atmosphere is thick! That’s precisely what Bud said.”
Another three minutes. The Times caught himself about to light a cigarette and swore silently, blowing the match out and putting the cigarette back into its package. He listened for the sound of the rocket jets. It was time for the landing, yet he heard no blasts.
The green light came on in the transceiver.
Message in.
Instinctively, he came to his feet. Nathen abruptly was standing beside him. Then the message came in the voice he was coming to think of as Bud. It spoke and paused. Suddenly the Times knew.