“Shouldn’t we go through Coordinator Valiera?” There was a note of concern in her voice.
“Needn’t worry about that, luv. I’m sure the New Sons have a tight rein on what comes out of the NSF. They needn’t rely on Valiera.”
“Valiera isn’t a New Son,” Nikka said testily. “I’m sure he’s impartial.”
“I didn’t say he was a New Son, but on the other hand I don’t think it’s wise to assume he isn’t. ‘I frame no hypotheses,’ as Newton said. Anyway, look, we should be getting on with it.”
Nigel shifted uncomfortably in his chair and turned down the illumination above his console. The small, cramped room was about five degrees colder than he liked. Site Seven had been thrown up rather quickly and some of the niceties, such as adequate insulation and a good air circulating system, had been neglected.
He studied his notes for several moments. “Right, then, let’s try sequence 8COOE.” He made a notation. The difficulty of prospecting for information in a totally unfamiliar computer bank was that you had no way of knowing how the information was catalogued. Intuition told him that the first few settings on the alien console should be more general than later settings, just as if it were a number setting in ordinary Arabic notation. The rub there was that even in terrestrial languages the logical left-to-right sequence was no more common than a right-to-left sequence or up-to-down or any other frame one could imagine. The aliens might not even have used a positional notation at all.
So far they had been reasonably lucky. Occasionally, similar settings on the console yielded images on the screen that had some relationship. There were the common arrays of dots, including those that moved. The sequences which called these forth had some of the same prefixes. Perhaps this indicated a positional notation, and perhaps it was merely lucky chance. So far he had asked Nikka to use only a portion of the switches available on the console. Some of them certainly would not be simple catalogue numbers for information retrieval. Some must represent command modes. The third switch from the right in the eighteenth tier, for example, had two fixed positions. Did one mean “off” and the other “on”? Was one “file this data” or “destroy it”? If he and Nikka kept to a small area of the board, perhaps they would not encounter too many command modes before they got some information straight. They didn’t want to run the risk of turning off the computer entirely by proceeding at random through all the switches.
Nigel studied the screen for a moment. An image flickered on. It seemed to show a dark red image of a passageway in the ship. There was a bend in the corridor visible and as he watched some of the Persian-like script appeared on the screen, pulsed from yellow to blue and then disappeared. He waited and the pattern repeated.
“Mysterious,” he said.
“I don’t believe I’ve seen that passageway,” Nikka said.
“This must be something like the three photos Team One reported from the last shift. They are from unrecognizable parts of the ship.”
“We should check with the engineers,” Nikka said. “But my guess would be that all these show part of the ship that was pulverized on landing.”
Nigel pursed his lips. “You know, it just occurred to me that we can deduce something from the fact that this script goes on and off with a period of several seconds. Our friends the aliens must have been able to resolve time patterns faster than a second or so, if they could read this.”
“Any animal can do that.”
“Just so. But whoever built this ship might not be just any animal. For example, the little switches on the console imply something finger-sized to manipulate them. True enough, we know animals must be able to see things moving faster than on a one-second time scale, or else they’ll be overrun and gobbled up pretty quickly. It’s interesting to note the aliens were similar to us in at least that way. Anyway, let’s go on. I’ll log that”—he punched a few buttons—“for Team One to check.”
He chose a few sequences which differed from earlier ones only in the last “digit” and the screen showed no response at all. “Are you sure that switch is still working?” Nigel asked.
“As far as I can tell. The meters here show no loss of power.”
“Very well. Try this.” He read off a number.
This time the screen immediately sprang to life: a confused red jumble of nearly circular objects.
A long black line traced across the screen. It penetrated one of the odd-shaped blobs; there were small details of dark shading inside this blob alone. The others did not show it.
“Odd,” Nigel said. “Looks to me like a photomicro-graph. Reminds me of something from my student days, biology laboratory or something. I’ll send it to Kardensky.”
He dialed for the direct line through Site Seven to Alphonsus, obtained a confirmation and transmitted directly on the links to Earth. This took several minutes. Simultaneously the signal was logged into tape storage at Site Seven; Alphonsus served only as a communication vertex. Nigel made some notes and gave Nikka another sequence.
“Hey!” Nikka’s voice made him look up from his writing. On the screen something in a slick, rubbery suit stood against a backdrop of low ferns. It did not appear to have legs, but rather a semicircular base. There were two arms and some blunt protrusions below them, with a helmet on top opaqued partially. Through it a vague outline of a head could be seen. Nigel had a conviction that the site was Earth. The pattern of the fronds was simple and somehow familiar.
The figure in the suit showed no more detail, but he was not what attracted Nigel’s attention. There was something else, taller and obviously not wearing a suit. It was covered with thick dark fur and stood partially concealed in the ferns. It held something like a large rock in massive, stubby hands.
Nikka and Nigel spoke about it for several moments. The suited figure seemed strange, as though it violated the way a creature should stand upright against gravity. But the tall creature, heavy and hairy and threatening, made Nigel feel a vague unease.
Try as he might, he could not shake the conviction that it was human.
Nigel had opened his mouth to say something more when an excited male voice spoke into the circuit. “Everyone in the ship, out! Engineering has just reported an arc discharge in passage eleven. There are power surges registered on another level. We’re afraid it might be a revival of the defense system. Evacuate at once.”
“Better get out, old girl,” Nigel said ineffectually. He was safe, buried beneath meters of lunar dust near the living quarters. Nikka agreed and broke the circuit.
Nigel sat for long moments looking at the creature on the screen. It was partially turned away, one leg slightly raised. Somehow, though, he had the sensation that it was looking directly at him.
NINE
Peter Graves’s fever abated through the day and he awoke in the night. He babbled at first and Mr. Ichino fed him a broth heavy with the warm tang of brandy. It seemed to give the man energy.
Graves stared at the ceiling, not seeming to know where he was, and rambled without making sense. After a few minutes he suddenly blinked and focused on Mr. Ichino’s weathered face for the first time.
“I had ’em, you see?” he muttered imploringly. “They were that close. I could have touched ’em, almost. Too quiet, though, even with that singing they were doing. Couldn’t run the camera. Makes a clicking sound.”
“Fine,” Mr. Ichino said. “Don’t roll onto your side.” “Yeah, that,” Graves murmured, staring mechanically down at his shirt. “The big one did that. Bastard. Thought he’d never drop. The guide and me kept pumpin’ the slugs into him and that flamethrower they had was goin’ off in all directions. Orange. Blew the guide right over and he didn’t get up. The flash lit up every… every…”
Graves’s dry, rasping voice trailed off. The sedatives in the broth were taking effect. In a moment the man breathed easily. When he was sure Graves was asleep Mr. Ichino pulled on his coat and went outside. The snow was at least a meter deep now, a white blanket that dulled the usually sharp outline of horizon on the opposite hill. Flakes fell in the soft silence, stirred by the breeze. It was impossible to reach the road.
Mr. Ichino struggled across the clearing, glad of the exercise. Perhaps it wasn’t necessary to get help now. The worst was probably over. If infection didn’t set in—with all the antibiotics he had, it wasn’t likely—Graves could recover without professional care.
He wondered what all the babble had meant. “The big one” might be anybody. Something had made the wound, for certain, but Mr. Ichino knew of no weapon that could cause that large a burn, not even a laser.
Mr. Ichino shook his head to clear it, black curls falling into his eyes. He would have to cut his hair soon. One forgot things like that, living away from people.
He looked upward and found Orion immediately. He could just barely make out the diffuse patch of light that was the great nebula. Across the dark bowl of the sky he found Andromeda. It had always seemed incredible to him that in one glance he could see three hundred billion stars, an entire galaxy that seemed a sprinkle of light far fainter than the adjacent stars. Stars like grains of sand, infinite and immortal.
In the face of such infinity, why did man’s attempts at worship seem so comic? Or horrible.
