Mindbridge (15 page)

“Stay on the line. If you’re calling long distance, you’ll be switched to the transportation operator. Otherwise-be here as soon as possible. Main amphitheater.”

Riley faded and was replaced by Mike Sohne, a drinking buddy of Jacque’s, who looked harried.

“Mike! What’s up?”

Half-second lag; satellite relay. “Oh. Hi, Jacque. Don’t know, guess I’ll find out when you do. The place is in an uproar, everybody running around and nobody talking. We had a long-range probe come back all deaders, that’s all I know. Don’t even know that for sure. . . . You’re in Paris?”

“That’s right.”

“Lucky son of a bitch. Look, you have to be here by 1300. That’s 2000 Greenwich, 2100 your time.”

“Two hours?” Jacque checked his watch. “You’ve-“

“That’s right. One hour fifty minutes.”

“You’ll have to start without me, then. End without me, too: I can’t get a flight out-“

“Uh-uh, Jacque. Just get your ass over to Orly. Is Wachal with you?”

“No, she’s out shopping somewhere.”

“I mean is she in Paris.”

“Oh, sure. I just don’t know-“

“She must’ve got one of the other operators, then. Get over to Orly as fast as you can and wait for her.

Or she’ll wait for you. You’re reserved on pad thirty-nine, that’s a suborbital express.”

“But Mike, look . . . all of my stuff is back at the hotel-my fucking passport! I can’t-

“Don’t worry about it, we’ll clean up after you. I punched up the travel budget here and got all nines. What hotel?”

“Uh . . . Studio Etoile, just a second.” He pulled a matchbook out of his pocket. “That’s 32-754-69-31, got it?”

“Okay. Passport . . . You don’t know your number?”

“No.”

“No matter, I’ll give them a picture. When you get to Orly, go to the departures wing and find out who’s in charge.”

“All right.”

“See you in a couple of hours. Endit.”

“Endit,” Jacque said to the empty screen.

Jacque and Carol were sitting in the amphitheater in Colorado Springs. “Oh, did you find that dress you wanted?”

“Suit, not dress. No, the ones I liked cost too much. If I’d known we were coming back today I would’ve bought one.”

“Yeah.” There were four or five hundred people in the hall, murmuring. “I would’ve drunk faster.”

“You drank fast enough. You still smell like a licorice factory.”

“Love it.” A woman came out on the stage and set up a podium. “Feeling better?”

“No.” She was taking hormones to suppress lactation. She was dizzy and her breasts ached. “Free fall didn’t help.”

A shimmering cube appeared around the podium. A white blob in the center shrank to a sharp point, and the cube disappeared: holo projectors focused. John Riley came out and put a couple of sheets of paper on the podium. The crowd fell silent.

He looked around. “I don’t know exactly where to begin.” He tapped the podium nervously. “This all started with the astrophysics group. Some fellows from Bellcomm University came to them with a jump proposal. To Achernar.”

Somebody whistled. “That’s right, 115 light-years. Expensive proposition. Bellcomm offered to match funds, but we haggled and . . . they wound up paying ninety percent.

“Well, it seemed reasonable. No way we could colonize a planet that far away. Besides, it’s a B5 star, not likely to have anything interesting.

“The Bellcomm people, Drs. Wiley and Eisberg, had been mapping gravity waves. They caught a strong pulse from Achernar. Looking back over the records, they found similar pulses occurring for over twenty years, at irregular intervals.

“You’re all familiar with the normal mechanisms that produce gravity waves. There’s nothing about Achernar that suggests it could be a source. So they wanted to go take a look.

“We tapped Shirley O’Brien’s team for this, a thirty-minute jump. Outfitted them as we would a normal trailbreaker assignment, plus some gadgets the Bellcomm people gave them. This is what came back.”

The auditorium lights dimmed and the podium and Riley disappeared, replaced by an image of the LMT chamber. Nothing happened for a few seconds. Then half a GPEM suit appeared. It toppled over and spilled. Collective gasp of anguish.

The lights returned; Riley was wiping his forehead with a handkerchief. “All right, it’s not very pretty. But it’s the chance we all take, every time we step on to that crystal.

“That’s what we thought it was, just a horrible slingshot accident. Evidently O’Brien had gotten separated from her team, and had the black box off-center when return time came up. How they could manage to get separated on a thirty-minute jump we didn’t know.

“Her personnel recorder was intact, though, and she was carrying an automatic holo camera for Bellcomm. So we could find out what happened.”

He paused and shook his head. “I won’t keep you in suspense,” he said quietly. “What they found was an anomalous Earthlike planet. An inhabited planet.

“Quiet, please. The people, the creatures, on this planet were evidently not indigenous. They seemed also to be an exploration team. And they found O’Brien, not vice versa.

“They landed on nightside and waited for their floater.” Riley nodded at the projectionist.

The Tamers were standing in a broad savannah in dim blue moonlight. There were dark mountains on the horizon, and large single trees every couple of hundred meters. They were talking excitedly. O’Brien had just relayed the information that the planet had a terrestrial atmosphere.

They were taking soil and plant samples when the floater came. They started to get on board; race to where Achernar was visible before their half hour ran out.

Then another floater landed.

It was a round platform enclosed by a railing, inside a semitransparent dome. The dome disappeared when it touched the ground.

There were four human beings on the platform; two very female and two very male, wearing nothing but dark tan skin and silver belts. They were beautiful.

They hopped lightly out of their floater and approached O’Brien’s team. The woman leading them raised her right hand in a gesture that seemed to mean “wait.” Or perhaps a sign of peaceful intent. Then the sky fell.

Between them and the mountains a huge black mass settled noiselessly. In the dim light, no details were visible, only a slender ellipsoid about three kilometers long by a half kilometer wide. A spaceship.

O’Brien had found her voice. “Don’t do anything that might seem aggressive. We must look pretty fearsome in the suits.”

A seam opened in the front of the ship and warm yellow light poured out. The woman beckoned them toward the light.

“Should we go with her?” one of the crew said.

“It-I don’t know,” O’Brien said. “Yes. But everybody stay close to me. We jump in twenty-one minutes.”

She led them to a ramp that had slid out of the opening in the ship. The Tamers waited while the aliens went up the ramp, which had no apparent moving part but acted like a conveyor belt, and then followed them up.

The ramp was at one end of a corridor that appeared to extend the full length of the ship. Its walls were a seamless, glassy substance that radiated a uniform, soft yellow light.

When the last of them stepped off the ramp, the floor closed behind him. Then there was a hollow “boom,” perhaps the ramp sliding back into place.

“Looks like we’ve been kidnapped,” someone said.

“Or collected,” O’Brien said. “No matter. The ceiling is high enough for us to pyramid. I don’t imagine they could stop us.”

The alien leader made half-fists of her hands and put them together over her sternum, then drew them apart slowly: a gesture probably inviting them to open their suits. She repeated it several times, then smoothed a hand over her naked body and smiled. She had too many canines.

“I’ll be glad to get out of my suit,” a male voice said, “if you promise not to open your mouth.”

“Shut up, Jerry. Let me answer.” Since the cameras were on her suit, it was impossible to see what O’Brien did. The alien shook her head and said something in a surprisingly low growl.

“That could mean either yes or no, even on Earth.”

One of the males rapped on the wall with his knuckles and a small rectangle opened. He reached in with both arms and came out with four objects that looked like old-fashioned microphones. A short length of silvery wire dangled from each.

He handed one to the leader and then to the other two. Each one plugged the wire into his silver belt.

“Couldn’t be a translator,” Jerry’s voice said. “A weapon?”

“Maybe it is a translator,” someone said. “We don’t know everything. . . .” The leader approached the nearest Tamer, pointed the microphone at him and smiled.

The sound from the holo cube screamed a split second before the audience did.

The beam from a ten-megawatt laser couldn’t penetrate that suit, but where she pointed the wand a round hole opened, then widened into a long gash that sprayed blood. Dying, the Tamer snatched her arm and pulled. She dropped the wand as the amplified grip broke her arm.

The other three aliens attacked simultaneously; it was over in a second. The holo picture tilted sideways, then dimmed red and turned two-dimensional as blood washed over two of the three lenses.

The aliens walked slowly down the corridor, the injured one showing no sign of pain, even though jagged gray bone protruded through the bloodslick on her useless arm. A couple of dozen paces down, the wall opened and they turned left.

The auditorium lights went on. “That’s all,” Riley said. “There’s another nineteen minutes of the same scene. The aliens never come back.”

He referred to his notes for the first time. “We-myself and representatives from Bio, Psych, and Senior Survey-we have some tentative remarks, observations about these aliens.

“The most striking thing, of course, is that they look so much like us. The compelling explanation is that we have common ancestors, either in prehistory or. . . well, any number of interesting scenarios. Another possibility is that they are able to change shape, and adapted this form to throw our Tamers off their guard.

“How they could know what a human being looks like is anybody’s guess. Perhaps they could read the Tamers’ minds.

“That they should conform to our current standards of beauty is a suspicious coincidence. As Dr. Sweeney pointed out, a culture will generally regard as beautiful such characteristics as have survival value, for the individual or for the race. A similar aesthetic about the body presupposes a similar environment. Of course, two highly developed technological societies will have similar environments, the most comfortable possible. Which brings us back to square one.”

He held up a piece of paper. “See whether any of you can add to this list. Dr. Jameson made it up: anatomical differences between us and them.

“The teeth are obvious. But that could be cosmetic; various Earth cultures have filed or chipped teeth to make them look more ferocious.

“Did you notice that the men have no nipples? I didn’t. Jameson says they could have been excised in infancy, though, for cosmetic or ritual reasons, and not leave scars visible from our range.

“Their umbilici are all the same, a simple vertical groove. You would almost never find this in four humans chosen at random. The same with genital size in the men. But we have no reason to presuppose randomness; maybe only men with strange navels and large genitalia are recruited for the job.

“Also, the females . . . the genital slit extends about a centimeter higher than it normally does in humans, viewed frontally. And in a low dorsal presentation, the last view we have of the injured alien, the external genitalia aren’t visible. They would be in a human.”

He shook his head. “These are small details, but maybe one of them is a clue.

“None of the aliens had a mole, birthmark, or other visible skin deformity. Every one of them had brown eyes. The two women were the same height, 173 centimeters. The men were four and seven centimeters taller. Neither of the men ever opened their mouths.

All four had long, graceful fingers and the high foreheads that we unconsciously, erroneously, associate with intellectual ability.

“Their fingernails and toenails were closely trimmed, what would be painfully close for a human. Collarbones and shoulderblades less prominent than the average human.

“Dr. Jameson feels that the skeletal structure in the legs and pelvis is slightly different than in humans. But that awaits more precise measurement.

“Finally, the injury the female alien sustained. Most people would go into shock and pass out with that kind of a severe fracture. A human might ignore such an injury if he were in a berserker rage, or under deep hypnosis of anesthesia. She seemed to act the same, before and after.

Also, in my opinion, the damage should have been more severe. He grabbed her just above the elbow, in a dying spasm, and shook her twice. With the GPEM’s amplification circuits, that’s like being attacked by a bulldozer. Her arm should have come off.

“We’ll be running this cube continuously for several days, in Studio A next door. I want everybody to see it over and over, as often as you can stand it. There’s no specialty that applies to this problem; there’s none that doesn’t apply. Anything you come up with, send it on to me through Planning.