The Long Result (5 page)

‘Give me that again slowly,’ I requested when I’d drawn breath.

‘I wanted the police to take them in for deliberately wrecking your truck. But Tinescu has to file complaint. He refused – wouldn’t stop to argue, said he had to leave the office right away.’

‘You haven’t just let them go?’ I demanded in dismay.

‘Of course not! But they’ve only been booked on suspicion of reckless driving – this bit with the manual controls being cut in. And that doesn’t rate lie-detector testing, so they may simply lie their way out from under.’

‘I think I see,’ I muttered. ‘I’ll bet money you mentioned this Stars Are For Man League to Tinescu.’

‘Of course I did.’

‘He refuses to take them seriously.’ I explained about the episode this morning, when I’d found some of their literature in my conveyor box, and Tinescu wrote the League off as a crank group to be ignored.

‘Cranks or not,’ Rattray said, ‘you can’t afford to ignore people like that! This is how I look at it. Disregarding the fact that the logistics of interstellar travel make the idea of conquering – let alone
holding
– a galactic empire completely absurd, we have a responsibility to the future. We’re the only race we know of, thus far, with interstellar flight. In a sense this gives us power over alien races. But according
to what I hear about the Tau Cetians, they’re enough like us to have discovered us in another couple of centuries, if we hadn’t come to them first! Somewhere, absolutely for sure, there must be a race which has had starflight longer than we have. What happens when our chauvinistic vacuum-brains hit that fact head on?’

‘I take your point,’ I said soberly. ‘And I hadn’t heard that about the Tau Cetians. I assumed from the file they must be fairly close to us psychologically – if they weren’t, the Starhomers couldn’t have coped even as well as they have. But —’

‘Just a second. What is it?’ – to someone else, presumably an intruder in his own office. I didn’t hear the reply, but it must have been an urgent call, for he came back with blurting haste.

‘Vincent, I just wanted to get you to talk to your boss – persuade him to file that charge. Because if he won’t play, I shall. I’ll have to make it a charge of interfering with the proper conduct of spatial traffic, or something equally specious, but I want a charge that carries compulsory psyching on conviction. That ought to prove how seriously I take these so-called cranks!’

In the neutral light of the Ark’s reception hall – dim, source-less illumination designed to serve creatures used to many different solar spectra – I caught the arm of a man in a lab smock. ‘Did the Tau Cetians get here okay?’ I demanded.

‘I’m afraid I haven’t heard,’ the man said. ‘I work in the Ophiuchian sector myself. If you know who’s looking after them I can probably direct you to him.’

‘Dr bin Ishmael, I think.’

‘G block, then. Second left, first right. But watch it – it’s being put under gas some time today.’

It must presumably already have been ‘put under gas’ – filled with air suitable to receive the Tau Cetians. I thanked him and departed at a run.

I passed the hospital, unique in the known galaxy, whose doctors were equally prepared to set a broken leg, help a Gamma Ophiuchian moult his shell, or repair the seared gills of a Stigma Sagittarian accidentally exposed to Earthly oxygen. I passed the air circulation rooms, where thumping generators secreted the gases needed to support our alien visitors. I turned a corner and almost collided with a robot trolley on which were trays of steaming mush, grey-green and repulsive to human eyes but the very staff of life to creatures from Fomalhaut V. I blessed the foresightedness of the Ark’s designers, who had made provision for almost every conceivable life-saving reaction. Preparing quarters to house the Tau Cetians would chiefly have been a matter of adjusting some controls.

The sealed door of Block G fetched me up short. A suggestive whiff of chlorine made me sure I’d come to the right place. Panting, I pressed the annunciator button and asked for bin Ishmael.

After only a few seconds, the sound of pumps whirring to get rid of the poisonous gas beyond the door informed me that someone was coming. And it was indeed bin Ishmael; he lifted off his helmet to reveal his brown, lined face with its beaky Arab nose.

‘Hoo! That’s better!’ he exclaimed. ‘Why, you’re Roald Vincent, aren’t you? I got your message via Asprey. Come up to my room – it’s just a step from here – and I’ll give you the latest developments.’

He shouted an open-up order at a door ten paces along the corridor, and led the way, shedding sections of his suit as he went. By the time we reached his room he was
stripped to the undersuit, and the various pieces were ready for casual tossing into a corner.

The whole of the main wall was lined with microfiles and textbooks, ranging from dogeared classics of the twentieth century dealing with human responses to conditions in space and printed on obsolete woodpulp paper to the very latest works on that contemporary conundrum, the metabolism of the fantastically adaptable Regulans. A duplicate of the Bureau file on Tau Cetians lay open on the desk.

I decided I would probably like bin Ishmael more than our previous casual – purely social – encounters had already made me. Old-fashioned or not, I liked people who had private libraries, and even Patricia – who took the modern attitude that all you needed was access to a good computer memory – couldn’t make me change my views.

‘It was smart to notify us about that wildcat of a courier,’ bin Ishmael said, running his hands through his sleek dark hair and rumpling it into untidy waves. ‘I laid on the medic you suggested, and he confirmed your opinion. Called it the worst case of nervous exhaustion he’d ever seen. She’s doped out in the hospital. Barring any allergies which may develop, she’ll be fit company tomorrow.’

I exhaled with relief. ‘But what are you going to do about communications till she wakes up? It only just struck me. If that’s the Bureau file you have there, the Starhomers haven’t passed enough data on the Tau Cetians’ language to enable —’

‘No problems,’ bin Ishmael chuckled. ‘Those beasts are bright.
Very
bright. You presumably know how close their mentality is to the human?’

‘Director Rattray, out at the port, said something about them being apt to invent spaceflight for themselves if they’d been left to their own devices.’

‘Correct. And bang go some beautiful theories about the connexion between oxygen-metabolism and the expansive
urge … Still, that’s irrelevant.’ He briskened. ‘I was about to say that of course the Starhomers discovered them by accident, and they didn’t have any linguists or semanticists with the expedition. Damned few such people on the whole planet, I imagine, as they don’t hold with the soft disciplines. So they took the much shorter course of teaching the Tau Cetians Anglic.’

‘I thought they used subsonics for communication,’ I objected.

‘So they do. The Starhomers threw together some sound transformers and worked the trick that way. Your lady friend had one with her, so I’ve sent it to our works to be copied. A beautiful engineering job, it looks like. Anyhow, the Tau Cetians are still apparently at the multilingual stage, but they’re close enough to an information theory to realize that Anglic – being artificially constrained to relate very closely to reality – would suit them better than one of their own haphazardly evolved natural languages. Oh yes! These are certainly the brightest bunch we’ve yet turned up.’

‘Always excepting the Regulans,’ I pointed out.

‘Hmmm… Well, yes. Though I’ve never decided whether Regulans are incredibly intelligent or just unbelievably adaptable.’

The sense of strain was leaving me. I hadn’t managed to do what Tinescu wanted – take over from Kay Lee Wong at the port – but at least we’d averted a crisis on the way here and the visitors were safely in the hands of experts. I might as well go back to the Bureau, in that case. But I lingered to ask one or two more questions.

‘What are you going to do with them now?’

‘The Tau Cetians? Oh, the usual routine. First off, we’ll study their biochemistry – got to make sure we can feed them while they’re here, cure any diseases they may pick up, and so on. At the same time we’ll work out a basic vocabulary in some of their own languages to make certain their
semantic orientation in Anglic is sound. It damned well ought to be – they have the same general attributes we do, including bisexuality. And then we’ll take them on a guided tour of Earth, though I’ve no idea how long it’ll be before Public Relations is ready to lay that on.’

‘I don’t get that,’ I said. ‘Why the difficulty? Simply because this is a first visit?’

‘Oh no. This ultimatum from the Stars Are For Man League.’

My mind refused to produce an answer to that for several seconds. At last I drew a deep breath.

‘Look, what
is
it about this League? That’s the third time today I’ve heard mention of it, but I’ve never run across it before. And what ultimatum?’

‘Oh, it’s absurd, of course, but as a matter of security we keep tabs on all anthropocentric organizations, and this one has come ahead lately. Got some money behind it from somewhere, apparently. Printed a lot of glossy new literature, for instance.’

‘Like this?’ I fished out the pamphlet I’d brought away from the spaceport.

‘Yes, that’s one I’ve seen several times recently,’ bin Ishmael nodded.

‘So – what ultimatum?’

‘They sent an anonymous message to say we’d better keep our aliens under careful guard, because they’re tired of monsters wandering around unattended.’

‘But this must surely be a hollow threat!’

‘Think we can afford to chance it? The Starhomers are longing to see us mishandle the first Tau Cetian delegation – that’s why they’re making things deliberately awkward for us. Think of the effects if someone does attempt the lives of a party of aliens! And think how much worse it’ll be if the Tau Cetians are involved – a race which as you said yourself was already on the way to eventual spaceflight.’

‘Yes. Yes, I see all that. I can also see I’m due for an argument with Tinescu. He denies that this League is worth worrying about.’

‘Let him come and sit in my chair for a while!’ bin Ishmael exclaimed, slapping the top of his desk.

‘You were telling me about your plans for the Tau Cetians,’ I reminded him. ‘Excuse me probing, but this is outside my regular field, and I’m curious.’

‘Yes, you’re more in human colonial work than alien contact, aren’t you? I’m surprised to find Tinescu involving you with this… Oh, never mind; he must have reasons.’ He leaned back, gazing at the ceiling.

‘Cultural survey missions are the next big step. Got to be doubly sure what is and what is not safe to trade with them. In the way of information, I mean. For instance, the Sagittarians are completely co-operative, as I’m sure you know. Their psychology doesn’t include the concept of competition, let alone violence. So we gave them radio-tracers without hesitation, and they found the techniques immensely useful. They have this big thing in silicon-oxygen genetics and tailor living creatures to their own specifications. But to have radio-tracers you need virtually the whole of nuclear physics, and we couldn’t give that to a warlike species. Are you with me?’

I was, naturally. He was only rehashing standard Bureau principles which one picked up even without being directly involved in alien contact. We didn’t hand over potentially dangerous techniques; equally, we didn’t infringe on any major racial goals, for fear of taking the spirit out of the species. In concrete terms, the Tau Cetians would doubtless ask for the stardrive. They wouldn’t get it. By the time they’d developed a world language and their own interplanetary ships, they’d almost certainly invent a stardrive of their own – and who could say? It might even be superior to ours, which suffered from all kinds of drawbacks, such as the
nuisance of having to use a set of engines once and once only, for some reason I didn’t fully understand but which was connected with the effect of stressed-space fields on intra-atomic distances.

There wasn’t much more for me to learn here, obviously. I made to rise, but at that moment the phone went and I paused.

‘Doc, we’ve finished with that subsonic converter now – we have the full specs and we’re ready to start building some of our own. But since we only have one I thought you’d like it back as soon as possible.’

‘Thanks very much,’ bin Ishmael confirmed. ‘Have it sent to my office, would you?’ He cut the circuit and looked at me.

‘Before you go, do you think it would be a good idea if the Tau Cetians met an official of the Bureau? Taking away their courier was probably a blow, but meeting you and being told who you are would help cancel that. They don’t have too high an opinion of human beings, quite candidly – the Starhomers made a lot of tactless errors in handling them, including the type of people they chose as members of the delegation.’

I said slowly, ‘In what way, especially?’

‘Well, you or I would have chosen a couple of scientists and a couple of psychologists, or the nearest available equivalent. The Starhomers picked four high functionaries. Politicians, if you like. The interpreter is the only one who’s really caught on, for instance, to the fact that our slow reactions aren’t due to stupidity but to our lower metabolic rate.’ He turned to a cupboard behind him. ‘Reminds me – I’m running short of chronodrin. Must have some more sent up.’

I hesitated. I didn’t really want to involve myself – I had my own work back at the Bureau. But suddenly I remembered all those cracks about my job with ‘Poor Relations’,
and came to a decision. It would harm me, even if I wasn’t in alien contact, if something went wrong with what was the entire Bureau’s responsibility. I held my arm out for the chronodrin shot which bin Ishmael offered.

It wasn’t so much of an ordeal as I’d feared. The interpreter – his name was approximately Shvast – was by far the brightest of the five, as bin Ishmael had stated. I had a shrewd suspicion, as I sat in my clammy atmosphere suit amid the dark gases which the Tau Cetians regarded as clean sweet air, that Shvast was censoring the conversation in both directions in order to maintain maximum tact and politeness. One reason for this suspicion was that occasionally his speed of utterance dropped to a mere gabble, instead of the racing compressed grunt the other visitors employed. The top boss seemed to be the one called Vroazh, whom I tried to identify and distinguish from his companions by physical features: the paleness of the flat prehensile pads he used for hands, the plump fat-sacs under each upper arm. I didn’t worry about their clothing, though they were several different colours. Next time, the garments might be totally unrecognizable.