Mindbridge (17 page)

From what little we know about their behavior and capabilities, it’s impossible to say how great a threat the aliens actually present. But certainly the only prudent course of action is for the Agency to invest all available money and manpower in learning as much as we can about them, as fast as we can.

(On Tuesday, 14 Jan, there will be a meeting of the Psych and PR groups, along with Planning and the Industrial Relations Committee, to discuss funding for Project Bogeyman. All interested personnel are urged to attend. Auditorium B, 13:30.)

Jacque and Carol gave the funding meeting a miss. But the next morning a predawn call summoned them to Auditorium B anyhow: emergency meeting, no details. With minimal ablutions, no breakfast, and hasty dressing, it still took them forty-five minutes to get to the auditorium. It was almost filled; they took seats in the back.

“Oh shit,” Jacque said as they sat down. “That doesn’t look good.”

The only thing on the stage was a goldfish bowl filled with slips of paper. Carol nodded. “It probably isn’t going to be a raffle.”

John Riley got up from the front row and mounted the stage. In an effort to seem casual, he half-sat (stiffly) on the table that held the goldfish bowl.

“Sorry to haul you out of bed like this. It’s important.

“The physics group got in contact with me around midnight. They’ve found out what the aliens’ weapon is, and have a way to neutralize it.

“Quiet, please, quiet. . . It’s not really good news, not in the long run.”

Dead silence. “Those little, uh, microphone-like things are miniature LMT crystals.

“Yes, I know... . Please. . . quiet. . . . Thank you. It seems odd that they would use starships, however fast, knowing about the Levant-Meyer Translation. Makes you wonder.

“Maybe the amount of time a voyage takes doesn’t mean anything to them. Or it might just be possible that they’ve never experimented with large crystals. That they think of it as a. . . sort of a temporary disintegrating ray. Dr. Sweeney’s report notes that they may lack scientific curiosity. This doesn’t have to be inconsistent with a high level of technology; they could be the decadent descendants of a more vigorous culture, using leftover gadgets that they don’t really understand.

“We can hope that it’s something like that. It would be unpleasant to have them cropping up on our planets. On earth.”

With his finger he stirred the slips of paper in the bowl. “As all of you must know, the LMT field can be deflected up to ninety degrees by a sufficiently strong magnetic field. It’s a simple matter to modify a GPEM suit so that it acts as a large magnet. Simple in principle, anyhow. The engineering and bioengineering people will start work on it today.

“We have to get one of those creatures back here for inspection. We have to know what we’re up against. Somebody has to go get us one.”

He got up and paced two steps, then sat down again. “The last time we were in this room together I told you I wouldn’t ask anybody to volunteer for a suicide mission. Well, this isn’t exactly . . . that. Still, it’s the most dangerous mission any Tamer has ever been asked to do, forewarned.

“What we’ll do is send one Tamer to Achernar on a 191/2-minute jump. Assuming the aliens show up again, what he has to do is stay with them, near them, until slingshot time. Then grab one. Embrace him and bring him back.

“Obviously a perilous mission. We don’t know what other sort of weapons the aliens might have.”

He picked up the goldfish bowl and swirled it. “In here, we have the names of every available Tamer - except for pregnant women. That’s not out of chivalry; the magnetic field won’t be strong enough to harm an adult, but we don’t know what it could do to a developing fetus.”

“Quick,” Carol whispered, “make me pregnant.”

“Here?”

“Any one of you is qualified for this mission,” Riley was saying. “For my own peace of mind, if nothing else, I don’t want a volunteer. Is there any objection to this procedure?”

“Yeah-my name’s in that goddam bowl,” Jacque murmured.

Riley picked a Tamer from the front row to draw a name from the bowl and hand it to him.

He looked up. “Wachal. Tamer Three Carol Wachal.”

Jacque went with Carol to the Krupp factory in Denver, where GPEM suits were made. She was to get a final fitting and practice using some of the suit’s unique accessories.

It was larger than a regular suit and had a shiny, crinkly surface, Like rumpled aluminum foil. The man who showed it to them was a Spaniard named Tueme. Jacque had expected a German. He had nothing against Germans, but they always seemed to fall into his life at times of crisis.

“You probably will not have to use all of these things,” Tueme said. “But you should test them, and yourself, just in case.”

He ran his finger along six metal eggs attached to the suit’s chest. “These are limited-radius fragmentation grenades. Each contains thousands of needle-sharp crystals, under pressure, of some sulfur compound that evaporates in air. They will shred any person standing within 21/2 meters when they detonate. Beyond 21/2 meters, the crystals will have evaporated and will do no harm. They explode on contact.

“We suggest that you try to stay outside of the fatal radius. The crystals will not penetrate your suit, of course, but they might harm your equipment.”

“No holo cameras,” Carol said.

“No. The Z-axis camera has to be mounted on a boom. It is awkward. There are two flat cameras, front and back.

“Built into the helmet is a ten-megawatt laser which you aim automatically. There are crosshairs on the screen of your image amplifier. Simply look at your target and depress the tongue switch that normally would put you in contact with your unit’s supervisor. One-second burst, each time you switch-but use it with caution. It drains power from the magnetic field generator, and will leave you temporarily vulnerable.

“The other tongue switch, that normally calls the food and water tubes, will trigger a strong injection of para-amphetamine: this will accelerate your muscular responses and make your senses temporarily more acute. But it will also affect your judgment; it will make you self-confident, perhaps to the point of recklessness. So use it only in an extreme emergency.

“If you hit the switch a second time, it will deliver a compensating dosage of a depressant. Then you may repeat the para-amphetamine if it is needed again.”

“What, no cyanide pill?” Jacque said.

“No, it is not necessary.”

“That’s good to hear.”

“If the aliens overpower you and attempt to open the suit, its power plant will overload and detonate. This will cause a fusion reaction on the order of one megaton.”

“I see,” Carol said.

“A natural precaution. One that should not be necessary, however. You have many defenses.

“These three bulbs contain a powerful tranquilizing gas.” They were rounded cylinders, juice-can-sized, colored yellow, green, and red. “The green one is ten times as strong as the yellow. The red, ten times as strong as the green. Be sure to set them off in the proper order. The gas will work on any mammal and many other creatures: the yellow will make a human drowsy and confused; the green will put him to sleep. The red would kill him.

“Just pull the pin on the top and drop the bulb. It diffuses very rapidly, and is effective out to ten or twenty meters.”

They fitted Carol to the suit and took her to a “proving ground” (a domed-over vacant lot behind the Krupp factory), where she practiced for an hour on dummy targets. Then she and Jacque had a leisurely dinner at La Fondita and flew with the suit back to Colorado Springs.

The Colorado Spring LMT chamber had never been so crowded. Four Tamers in GPEM suits, one in each quadrant, crouched behind tripod-mounted lasers. Four others had rifles with tranquilizer darts. The walls were lined with specialists, sitting behind stacked sandbags, breathers dangling around their necks. A stubby one-person floater was perched on the crystal, Carol standing beside it in her glittering suit.

Jacque sat waiting on the sandbags. Forty seconds after Carol jumped, a slingshot was coming from Groombridge: volunteer suicide with a fresh bridge. Jacque was to hold the bridge and try to make contact with the alien Carol was bringing back.

If she came back. Jacque had been on mood elevators for two days, a prescription to exorcise black despair. He felt vaguely guilty at not being able to worry about Carol for more than a few minutes at a time.

(They had sent him to the head doctor after he’d exploded at the people in the planning office. He’d gone there to propose that they find among the Project Thanos volunteers a suicide who was physically and mentally capable of doing Carol’s job. They said that they had tried, but there was no one suitable. He expressed his disbelief emphatically.)

Arnold Bates was in the primary chair in the control room. John Riley was in the backup.

“Take your position,” Bates said. Carol lifted up the floater and held it over her head. She stood centered on the LMT crystal and the plastic cylinder slid down over her.

After a minute the cylinder rose again. “Get ready, Lefavre.”

Carol landed on a high bluff over a river valley. She set down the floater and took a look around.

“There’s a small city below me, at the junction of two rivers,” she said. She had been instructed to give a verbal report. They hadn’t said why but it was obvious: if she came back sliced up, as O’Brien had, they might not get the slice that had the camera tapes.

“Nineteen minutes. I can’t make out much detail in the city, even under highest magnification. Moving specks that are vehicles. Oh-it’s daytime. Achernar looks much smaller than the sun, but is painfully bright to look at, up to the last filter stop.

“I’ll get on the floater, go down there and see if I can nab-wait.” A round floater like the one that had approached O’Brien was settling out of the sky. “Here we go again.”

It was a virtual replay of the first contact, except that the aliens on the floater were all female. Immediately after they landed, the long black ship followed, rushing in and then slowly settling on the grassy field, making the ground move under Carol’s feet. The reflection of Achernar was a hard brilliant line down the ship’s hull.

Again, the door dilated open, the ramp came down, and the aliens invited her aboard. There’ve been some changes made, though, Carol thought.

Among her vague instructions was the suggestion she not turn on the magnetic field until she was actually threatened. She followed them up the ramp, turning to-the right and left so that the cameras would get everything.

“So far, no aggressive moves,” she said. They didn’t atop at the entrance, the scene of the earlier slaughter, but led her on down the corridor.

They walked for a hundred meters or so. “A door opened on the right; they’re taking me inside. . . . The walls are gray in this room. The ceiling and floor give off that yellow light. Sixteen minutes.”

They led her to the far wall. “There’s a real door here, a door that opens. Not just a seam. They want me to go through first. I’m motioning them through. After you, Alphonse.”

The aliens won’t understand, won’t budge. “They must think I’m pretty stupid. Here goes.”

She stepped toward the door but at the last moment grabbed one of the aliens by the shoulders and tossed her through first. She hit the floor with a hard bump, but did not get sliced to ribbons or explode or turn into a frog.

Carol stepped through and the woman scrambled away from her, staring expressionlessly. The door slammed shut and the room was dark. Carol turned on her suit lights.

“The walls and ceiling of this room are all metal except for a small window. The floor, too. Maybe they think it’ll keep me from disappearing. Or from communicating. Think I’ll wreck their door.”

There was no latch on her side of the door, but the right-hand edge was a long ribbed strip like a piano hinge. She melted the hinge with four laser bursts and then pushed on the door.

As the door fell, the woman behind Carol jumped onto her back. She shrugged and flipped her across the room.

The door hit with a satisfying boom; curls of smoke rose from the hot edge as it melted a line on the floor. Three of the aliens edged back cautiously as she moved through the doorway.

Then the opposite wall opened and the fourth alien stepped through, cradling an armful of the microphone weapons. Carol plucked a grenade off her chest and threw it at the alien’s feet.

The force of the blast staggered the woman, knocking her on her back. The weapons scattered.

The alien got back up. She had a thousand cuts from scalp to foot; the front of her body was a uniform red sheen. Her right foot was hanging on by a thin strip of flesh. When she put her weight on it the useless foot flopped aside and she walked on the shattered end of her exposed shinbone. She smiled at Carol with red pointed teeth and picked up a weapon. As she plugged it into her belt, Carol snapped the thumb switch that turned on her magnetic field.

And Carol sailed backwards into the metal room, slammed up against the wall, and stayed pinned there like an insect.