Part 6 (2/2)
It had been Harry's touch to add that the invaders had long-range detector sweeps out and ordering all s.h.i.+ps to scatter to the ends of the galaxy.
So, all things being potentially relative, everybody including Mrs. Peabody got a medal from bringing Papa home. And my mamma came home with me, although I still don't know how she is on chewing blubber.
HELP.
”Here we go again,” said Harry's voice in my ear.
I discovered my wife had waked up first and was holding the office phone over my face. It was still dark.
”-down by the Lunar Alps. Visuals just coming in.”
”Not those Capellan jocks again?” I groaned.
”Smaller. Different emission features. Get down here, Max.”
Tillie was already dressing. When we'd gone to bed two hours back, the ears of Earth were following a moving source which kept disappearing behind Luna, and our moonstation near Mersenius was scrambling to set up a far-side relay. Now the alien had landed, a third of a great circle from our station.
The photo courier pa.s.sed us at the office door. Mersenius had sent a camera-eye over the alien s.h.i.+p.
”Looks as if they're interested in those ore-piles the Capellans left,” said George. ”What's that, a derrick?”
”Derrick my azimuth,” I grunted, rapidly opening and closing alternate eyes to catch small differences in consecutive negatives. That's called flas.h.i.+ng. Big photo-shops do it with a trunk-sized geewhizzus that's almost as efficient as the trained human eye.
”That's them. It He. He is moving an arm... he is s.h.i.+fting his stance... bipedal? Maybe, if that's a tail.
Yes! He is moving his tail. What did we have for the height of that ore-pile?”
”Forty-one meters.” Little Mrs. Peabody had joined us, Living Bra alert and dedicated.
”Tentative estimate, six meters tall,” I concluded. ”We'll see what Langley says in the morning; they've got better comparators. And not human. Let me project this shadow-if it straightened up, it would look something like a small tyrannosaurus, wouldn't you say?”
The spy-eye gave us a close-up on its second pa.s.s, just before the alien knocked it down. We saw a lizard-like creature, helmeted and harnessed with weird hardware, wearing an unpleasant expression on its lipless face. And blue.
”Eighteen-foot blue s.p.a.ce-going dinosaurs, that's what's up there,” said Harry. ”At least two of them.”
”Or praying mantises,” said George.
”Maybe he's a she,” said Tillie.”Quit dreaming, kid,” I told her. ”The lulu is played only once in a lifetime.”
By this time, the main photo-shop had confirmed my height guess and added that the two aliens had pulled the spy-eye in with some sort of beam and then apparently cut it open for a brief look before blowing the remains.
Meanwhile the hotlines of the world were steaming, and the United Nations halls were boiling with delegates trying to get a decision on what to tell Mersenius to do. So many electric razors were used in the U.N. lounge that they blew a fuse and killed our landline for fifteen minutes. At 0800 EST the question became academic. The aliens took off on a fast-precessing orbit around Terra itself.
So far they had been silent. Now they began to transmit, and George ascended to his idea of heaven with an endless supply of alien gabble to chew on.
What exactly is our shop? Basically, an unimportant bit of C.I.A. that got left out in the big move to Langley. (I warned you this would be the inside story from the pick-and-shovel level; I couldn't know less about what the President said to the Premier.) We're officially listed as a communications and special support facility. Just a small crew of oddball linguists and blown operators put out to pasture. It was a nice restful life until we accidentally got into the first great alien contact flap three years back. The Capellans, you'll recall.
George came out of that as our official Extraterrestrial Language Specialist, which hasn't done his small-man's ego any good. I am optimistically regarded as having a flare for alien psychology-shows you what can happen to a fair photo-interpreter. And Tillie is a crack polyglot. Did you know you get clobbered for calling a polyglot a linguist? Anyway, she's George's aide. And my wife. Harry is our captive physicist-of-all-work since they decided we rated an R&D. Little Mrs. Peabody got upgraded to Chief of Archives, but she still helps me with my income-tax forms.
After the Girls from Capella left hurriedly we all expected to coast into distinguished retirement with no further calls on our peculiar talents, if any. Now suddenly here was Another Alien merrily orbiting Terra, and our little shop was being pelted with data and demands for answers.
”They appear to be sending some sort of standard contact broadcast,” George reported. ”Three or four phrases repeated, and switch to a different language. At least twenty-eight so far. One of them resembles Capellan, but not enough to read.”
”I think it's like a high Capellan,” said Tillie. ”You know, like Mandarin to Cantonese. The Capellans who came here must have spoken a dialect. I'm sure I heard a formal I and you and something about speak.”
”Could it be Do you speak our language? Or Will you speak?”
The nations were now in hot debate as to whether and what to reply to the alien. George could scarcely be prevented from trying to pull something through his friends at N.S.A.; he was sweating for fear the Swedes or j.a.ps would beat us to it. But we couldn't get an O.K. That was the time our Joint Chiefs were so cozy with the President-remember?-and I think there was a struggle to keep them from testing their new anti-orbital-missile missile on the aliens. It may have been the same elsewhere; the big nations had all been working up some s.p.a.ce defense since the Capellan visit.
The upshot was that n.o.body did anything before the alien abruptly stopped transmitting speech and went into repeated da-dits. That lasted an hour. Then two things happened right together.
First, Harry got a signal from Defense R&D that one of their boys had identified a digital equation having to do with fissionable elements in the da-dits. Right after that came the word from a Soviet tracker that the alien had ejected an object which was now trailing their s.h.i.+p.
We all ducked and held our breaths.
The blip stayed in orbit.
Just as we started breathing again, the alien poked out a laser finger and the trailing blip went up in the prettiest fusion flare you ever saw-a complex burst, like three shorts and a long.This is probably where you came in. With that flare overhead, the world media roared out of control. ”ALIENS BLAST EARTH!” ”BLUE LIZARDS HURL BOMB FROM SKY!” The military was already loose, of course, and an a.s.sortment of mega-squibs were blasting up towards the alien s.h.i.+p.
They never connected. The alien deftly distributed three more blips in a pattern around earth, about 150,000 miles out, and took off in the direction of the Coal Sack. They had been in our system exactly thirteen hours, during which the united brains of Earth had demonstrated all the initiative of a shocked opossum.
”Call me anthropocentric, but they struck me as ugly customers,” I brooded later.
”And very alien,” said Tillie.
”You're supposed to be able to identify, remember?”
She gave me the old sulky leer, with the new magic ingredient.
”Marriage has ruined you, stud.... Hey, George! Did you hear that those bombs they left are covered with writing? About a zillion different scripts, in a nice fluorescent blue. It's your life work, old brother.”
”A galactic Rosetta stone,” breathed George as he sat down. ”Max, you must prevent the military from destroying them. The photos are not adequate.”
”Three tune-bombs going past our ears on the hour, and you want to preserve them as a reference library? What if they're loaded with disease? Or mutation inducers? Stupid-making generators, so we won't get into s.p.a.ce? Have you heard the newscasts? George, sober up.”
”They can't,” he groaned. ”It's priceless! The key to the galaxy!”
As it turned out, they didn't, at least not then. Somebody was either too scared or too avid for alien technology. A US-Soviet astroteam managed to make a remote-control dock with one of the ten-foot missiles and spent two weeks gingerly coaxing it around to a crater on the far side of Luna.
From that minute, George lived to get to the moon. To my amazement, he screamed the medicos into an acceleration and low-G clearance, and next thing we knew he was actually booked for the Mersenius shuttle trip. In spite of looking like a dissipated gerbil, George was fundamentally pretty healthy.
At the good-bye party he told me he felt sure he had detected Capellan script on the missile's fin.
”Same as the verbal transmission-something about I you speak.”
”How about: If you can read this you're too d.a.m.n close? Good luck.”
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