“How would the Authority stop it, smart ass?” asked Gabriella. “It has no army, no weapons.”
“Depends what you call a weapon,”
said Eric quietly.
“What?” said Gabriella. For a moment they’d forgotten the fourth member of the party.
“Information’s a weapon. There wouldn’t be any threats. You never hear of a threat coming out of Switzerland. The Authority would simply stop giving replies to Federation questions. That’d drag it down quick enough. They wouldn’t be able to compete with neighbors who continued to receive answers. Not in fishing, not in mining, not in manufacturing; nothing.”
“Eric’s right.” Charlie was quick to jump on the bandwagon of rightness. “How’s the Federation going to market its coffee, for example, if it can't get allotment predictions, supply-demand forecasts, or even weather news from the Authority?”
Gabriella backed down, but not all the way. “I still think it’s a possibility. It all depends on how bad they want that territory.”
Charlie was looking smug. “No way, lady, that a hunk of land, or principle, is worth a big drop in GNP. You wait. The Federation’ll huff and puff and try to get all it can from the Katfoers but they won’t step past Authority bounds.”
“We’ll see,” said the combative Gabriella.
Crowd noise intensified behind them. The game was coming on. Tonight the Scorchers were playing Philadelphia, and Frank Alway, the network cosell, was having trouble with his mike. The rumble was due to overfeed from the Casa Grande stadium's air-conditioning system. Even though the moon was up, it was still over a hundred degrees outside on the sun-baked basin of the Sonoran Desert.
Eric and Charlie turned in their chairs, and the girls began murmuring among themselves. They were all fans. Their table sat on a raised dais from which they not only had a fine view outside, but also a clear line of sight to one of the four big optos that hung from the center of the ceiling.
Their waitress drifted past, and Eric absently ordered another hamburger and fries as he considered Gabriella from behind. She was undeniably attractive and, according to Charlie, seriously interested in him. A bit aggressive, though.
She followed the waitress’s progress, glanced back over her shoulder. “Honestly, Eric, I don’t know where you put it. I’ve never known anyone who eats like you do to stay so trim.”
If it’s any consolation, he mused silently, it’s a mystery to me also. It did seem that he ate much more than any of his friends, yet never put on weight. Didn’t exercise much either. The benefits of a benign metabolism, he thought. That’s what the company doctor had told him when he’d inquired about it during one of the annual physical exams everybody at Selvern had to take. His body just burned up calories faster than the norm. He felt guilty about it now and then, especially when he indulged in rich foods or fancy desserts, much to the consternation of his dietconscious acquaintances.
Once, to win a bet for Charlie, he’d downed eight slices of chocolate mousse cake at Oscar Taylor’s. This on top of a large steak dinner. Not only was the fellow who lost the bet astonished, so was the restaurant staff. In addition he was blessed with excellent general health, to the point of never catching a cold or the spring flu. He never did understand how anyone who took moderately good care of himself could catch cold in the heat-sink that was Phoenix.
“I watch myself, Charlie,” he’d told his closest friend one day. “It’s not hard to stay healthy.”
“Yeah, but there are other factors. You have to stay clear of sniffly kids on their way home from school, housewives coming back from marketing, old folks out for a stroll: anyone can carry germs. What’s your secret? Massive doses of vitamin C?”
Eric had shaken his head. “Nope. I just take care, watch myself.”
“In the mirror, I bet.” And they’d both laughed.
Yells and shouts joined with commentary from the patrons in the lower seats as the opto shifted from sportscaster to the field. Castillo had just taken the opening kickoff and run it back to the forty. A good opening. Liquor and good comradeship flowed freely among the watchers. Everyone was just getting into the gladiatorial spirit when there was a brief flash of light in an unpopulated corner of the restaurant. No one paid it much attention at first, but as the light intensified, conversation in the area quickly faded. The silence spread out like a wave from the disturbance, until the opto audio was blaring uncontested and the voices of the casters sounded suddenly shrill and hysterical, full of artificial enthusiasm. Eyes of patrons and employees alike had shifted from screen to manifestation.
Those nearest thought of retreating, reconsidered, and remained locked in place. Food lay untasted on plates while ice melted sloppily in tall glasses and thick mugs.
What had come into the restaurant began to stroll lithely across the floor. It traveled with a liquid grace redolent of oil crawling on glass. The tall, slim shape topped out at seven and a half feet, firm and steady despite the apparent lack of skeleton. It walked enveloped in a pale lambent glow that seemed to have smoke curling through it, reminding Eric of auto headlights viewed through heavy rain.
In color the creature was yellow fading to white at the extremities. The swirling, radiant cocoon blurred finer details below the head. The latter was ovoid and smooth save for a tiny wound of a mouth and large flat eyes flush with the taut skin. There were no ears, no hair, nothing else to characterize the alien face. Long arms swayed in elegant counterpoint to longer legs, and equally attenuated fingers fell to where there should have been knees but weren’t.
It was a coldly fluid gait appropriate for a gleaming, rubbery-skinned being. No one knew for certain what that thin flesh actually felt like because no one had ever penetrated one of the electric cloaks to feel it.
Within white-yellow eyes, small black pupils moved searchingly, silently, examining everything. Those eyes could operate independently, like a chameleon’s. They could not as one hysterical housewife had claimed, pop free of their sockets to travel cavalierly around a room like disembodied cameras.
Eric knew instantly what it was. Everyone in the now silent restaurant knew instantly what it was. Like the others, he was fascinated. Like most of them, it was the first time he’d found himself in close proximity to a Syrax.
It stopped and turned to gaze at the opto, watching the football game with the intensity of a life-long fan. Whether because of the fact that the shock of the initial appearance had worn off or this incongruous shift in attention, conversation in the restaurant was slowly resumed. There were no boisterous screams accompanying every play, however. Talk was muted and the voices of the play-by-play announcers thundered in the room, undiluted by inebriated babble.
Food was chewed with deliberation and drink was sipped instead of gulped. Attention drifted between game and guest. The patrons viewed the Syrax with a mixture of fear, uncertainty, and intense curiosity.
While it was rare for one of the aliens to materialize outside the Designated Areas, it was not unknown, and there was no reason for the stink of fear to manifest itself. Man had known of Syrax for over a hundred years. In all that time there was not a single documented instance of their harming a human being.
They communicated only with professional xenologists and political leaders, and that infrequently. That they were interested in mankind was self-evident, but they were reticent to discuss their interest and this was interpreted variously as aloofness, snobbery, or evasiveness. Those humans who dealt with them regarded them with polite suspicion. For their part the aliens were courteous if uninformative. They never spelled out their intentions and would not say where they came from, though it was known that their home worlds lay far away.
They arrived in peculiar craft after journeys of unknown duration, parking in orbit around Earth or Luna or Mars, Europa or Titan for unspecified periods before taking their leave as quietly as they’d come. Whether they returned straight home or continued their long travels elsewhere no one knew. The Syrax never said, and it was difficult to plot the course of their vessels.
The scientists insisted the aliens had extremely long life spans, or else they’d managed to sidestep some basic laws of physics, since so far as was known, the speed of light was still the ultimate barrier to long-distance ship travel. As the Syrax showed no outward signs of age, it was impossible to make a judgment on the first.
Tabloid media once had a field day insisting that a major government had managed to kidnap a Syrax for study, but Eric had discounted the rumor. No government would take such a risk on its own. It was true that the aliens possessed a technology far more developed than mankind’s, but they’d been nonhostile to the point of indifference since the first contact. It was doubtful they would have remained so if one of their number had been abducted and imprisoned, though nothing was certain where such an inscrutable race was concerned.
Eventually the Syrax switched its gaze from the opto and resumed its silent march among the tables. As it moved to a table the conversation there faded. The room was filled with whispers and darting eyes as everyone tried to examine the visitor while giving the appearance of ignoring it. It seemed obvious to Eric that the alien had to be aware of the attention it was receiving, but it did not react to it at all.
To everyone’s surprise, it paused at a table and without asking took up one of the glasses resting on the slick plastiwood. The glass was tall and thin. The Syrax ignored the handle and gripped the permanently frozen glass, seemingly indifferent to the cold. All four of the long, flexible fingers (one could just as easily call them tentacles, Eric thought) wrapped double around the transparent stem.
Delicately the alien swallowed half the contents. There was no outward reaction to the sweet alcohol. It paused as if considering before setting the glass carefully down on the table and moving on.
The woman whose drink the alien had sampled stared at her glass. Her expression told Eric she would not be finishing it.
It was hard to be intimidated by the Syrax. It displayed only smooth, graceful lines. There were no claws, no teeth, nothing threatening about it save perhaps its size. Despite that, it resembled nothing so much as a child’s toy, yet the undercurrent of nervousness in the restaurant remained. Eric felt it, too, though not as strongly as the obvious xenophiles.
Gabriella leaned over to whisper at Adrienne. “I hope it doesn’t come over here!”
“Me too.”
