Alien Contact (12 page)

“We discovered it for ourselves,” he said proudly. “We did not have to learn it from some other starfaring race, as many folk do.”

“But how did you discover it?” she persisted.

“How do I know? I’m a soldier; what do I care for such things? Who knows who invented gunpowder or found out about using bellows in a smithy to get the fire hot enough to melt iron? These things happen, that’s all.”

She broke off the questions early that day.

“It’s humiliating,” Hilda Chester said. “If these fool aliens had waited a few more years before they came, we likely would have blown ourselves to kingdom come without ever knowing there was more real estate around. Christ, from what the Roxolani say, races that scarcely know how to work iron fly starships and never think twice about it.”

“Except when the starships don’t get home,” Charlie Ebbets answered. His tie was in his pocket and his collar open against Pasadena’s fierce summer heat, although the Caltech Athenaeum was efficiently air-conditioned. Along with so many other engineers and scientists, he depended on linguists like Hilda Chester for a link to the aliens.

“I don’t quite understand it myself,” she said. “Apart from the hyperdrive and contragravity, the Roxolani are backward, almost primitive. And the other species out there must be the same, or someone would have overrun them long since.”

Ebbets said, “Once you see it, the drive is amazingly simple. The research crews say anybody could have stumbled over the principle at almost any time in our history. The best guess is that most races did come across it, and once they did, why, all their creative energy would naturally go into refining and improving.”

“But we missed it,” Hilda said slowly, “and so our technology developed in a different way.”

“That’s right. That’s why the Roxolani don’t know anything about controlling electricity, to say nothing of atomics. And the thing is, as well as we can tell so far, the hyperdrive and contragravity don’t have the ancillary applications the electromagnetic spectrum does. All they do is move things from here to there in a hurry.”

“That should be enough at the moment,” Hilda said. Ebbets nodded. There were almost nine billion people jammed onto the Earth, half of them hungry. Now, suddenly, there were places for them to go and a means to get them there.

“I think,” Ebbets said musingly, “we’re going to be an awful surprise to the people out there.”

It took Hilda a second to see what he was driving at. “If that’s a joke, it’s not funny. It’s been a hundred years since the last war of conquest.”

“Sure—they’ve gotten too expensive and too dangerous. But what kind of fight could the Roxolani or anyone else at their level of technology put up against us? The Aztecs and Incas were plenty brave. How much good did it do them against the Spaniards?”

“I hope we’ve gotten smarter in the last five hundred years.” Hilda said. All the same, she left her sandwich half-eaten. She found she was not hungry anymore.

“Ransisc!” Togram exclaimed as the senior steerer limped into his cubicle. Ransisc was thinner than he had been a few moons before, aboard the misnamed
Indomitable
. His fur had grown out white around several scars Togram did not remember.

His air of amused detachment had not changed, though. “Tougher than bullets, are you, or didn’t the humans think you were worth killing?”

“The latter, I suspect. With their firepower, why should they worry about one soldier more or less?” Togram said bitterly. “I didn’t know you were still alive, either.”

“Through no fault of my own, I assure you,” Ransisc said. “Olgren, next to me—” His voice broke off. It was not possible to be detached about everything.

“What are you doing here?” the captain asked. “Not that I’m not glad to see you, but you’re the first Roxolan face I’ve set eyes on since—” It was his turn to hesitate.

“Since we landed.” Togram nodded in relief at the steerer’s circumlocution. Ransisc went on, “I’ve seen several others before you. I suspect we’re being allowed to get together so the humans can listen to us talking with each other.”

“How could they do that?” Togram asked, then answered his own question: “Oh, the recorders, of course.” He perforce used the English word. “Well, we’ll fix that.”

He dropped into Oyag, the most widely spoken language on a planet the Roxolani had conquered fifty years before. “What’s going to happen to us, Ransisc?”

“Back on Roxolan, they’ll have realized something’s gone wrong by now,” the steerer answered in the same tongue.

That did nothing to cheer Togram. “There are so many ways to lose ships,” he said gloomily. “And even if the High Warmaster does send another fleet after us, it won’t have any more luck than we did. These gods-accursed humans have too many war-machines.” He paused and took a long, moody pull at a bottle of vodka. The flavored liquors the locals brewed made him sick, but vodka he liked. “How is it they have all these machines and we don’t, or any race we know of? They must be wizards, selling their souls to the demons for knowledge.”

Ransisc’s nose twitched in disagreement. “I asked one of their savants the same question. He gave me back a poem by a human named Hail or Snow or something of that sort. It was about someone who stood at a fork in the road and ended up taking the less-used track. That’s what the humans did. Most races find the hyperdrive and go traveling. The humans never did, and so their search for knowledge went in a different direction.”

“Didn’t it!” Togram shuddered at the recollection of that brief, terrible combat. “Guns that spit dozens of bullets without reloading, cannon mounted on armored platforms that move by themselves, rockets that follow their targets by themselves. And there are the things we didn’t see, the ones the humans only talk about—the bombs that can blow up a whole city, each one by itself.”

“I don’t know if I believe that,” Ransisc said.

“I do. They sound afraid when they speak of them.”

“Well, maybe. But it’s not just the weapons they have. It’s the machines that let them see and talk to one another from far away; the machines that do their reckoning for them; their recorders and everything that has to do with them. From what they say of their medicine, I’m almost tempted to believe you and think they are wizards—they actually know what causes their diseases, and how to cure or even prevent them. And their farming: this planet is far more crowded than any I’ve seen or heard of, but it grows enough for all these humans.”

Togram sadly waggled his ears. “It seems so unfair. All that they got, just by not stumbling onto the hyperdrive.”

“They have it now,” Ransisc reminded him. “Thanks to us.”

The Roxolani looked at each other, appalled. They spoke together: “What have we done?”

was sitting at my desk, reading a report on the brown pelican situation, when the secretary of state burst in. “Mr. President,” he said, his eyes wide, “the aliens are here!” Just like that. “The aliens are here!” As if I had any idea of what to do about them.

“I see,” I said. I learned early in my first term that “I see” was one of the safest and most useful comments I could possibly make in any situation. When I said, “I see,” it indicated that I had digested the news and was waiting intelligently and calmly for further data. That knocked the ball back into my advisors’ court. I looked at the secretary of state expectantly. I was all prepared with my next utterance, in the event that he had nothing further to add. My next utterance would be “Well?” That would indicate that I was on top of the problem, but that I couldn’t be expected to make an executive decision without sufficient information, and that he should have known better than to burst into the Oval Office unless he had that information. That’s why we had protocol; that’s why we had proper channels; that’s why I had advisors. The voters out there didn’t want me to make decisions without sufficient information. If the secretary didn’t have anything more to tell me, he shouldn’t have burst in, in the first place. I looked at him awhile longer. “Well?” I asked at last.

“That’s about all we have at the moment,” he said uncomfortably. I looked at him sternly for a few seconds, scoring a couple of points while he stood there all flustered. I turned back to the pelican report, dismissing him. I certainly wasn’t going to get all flustered. I could think of only one president in recent memory who was ever flustered in office, and we all know what happened to him. As the secretary of state closed the door to my office behind him, I smiled. The aliens were probably going to be a bitch of a problem eventually, but it wasn’t my problem yet. I had a little time.

But I found that I couldn’t really keep my mind on the pelican question. Even the president of the United States has
some
imagination, and if the secretary of state was correct, I was going to have to confront these aliens pretty damn soon. I’d read stories about aliens when I was a kid, I’d seen all sorts of aliens in movies and television, but these were the first aliens who’d actually stopped by for a chat. Well, I wasn’t going to be the first American president to make a fool of himself in front of visitors from another world. I was going to be briefed. I telephoned the secretary of defense. “We must have some contingency plans drawn up for this,” I told him. “We have plans for every other possible situation.” This was true; the Defense Department has scenarios for such bizarre events as the rise of an imperialist fascist regime in Liechtenstein or the spontaneous depletion of all the world’s selenium.

“Just a second, Mr. President,” said the secretary. I could hear him muttering to someone else. I held the phone and stared out the window. There were crowds of people running around hysterically out there. Probably because of the aliens. “Mr. President?” came the voice of the secretary of defense. “I have one of the aliens here, and he suggests that we use the same plan that President Eisenhower used.”

I closed my eyes and sighed. I hated it when they said stuff like that. I wanted information, and they told me these things knowing that I would have to ask four or five more questions just to understand the answer to the first one. “You have an alien with you?” I said, in a pleasant enough voice.

“Yes, sir. They prefer not to be called ‘aliens.’ He tells me he’s a nup. That’s their word for ‘man,’ in the sense of ‘human being.’ The plural is ‘nuhp.’”