Collected Short Fiction, page 670
“And what is the fog?”
“We still don’t know. The photographs show mostly splotches of featureless white. The radiometers found nothing unusual. The telemetry never worked. The surface samples weren’t much more than a bad odor by the time we got them back to the lab. We got no deep samples at all—something caught the scoops and broke the lines. Don’t ask me what.” Her somber eyes swept me blankly and drifted back to the desert. “The military isn’t very happy about it, but those negative results make up the main content of our report. We were asked to draw conclusions, but nobody liked our ideas. If you want to hear them—”
I said I did.
“I think the fog is a manifestation of life. Life from another biocosm—which one, I can’t say. The surface samples died and decayed too fast to tell us much, but the evidence indicates to me that the surface layer is made of tiny bubble-shaped organisms, probably inflated with hydrogen. They’re hygroscopic and very fragile. Dryness kills them.”
I asked about the deeper layers.
“Nobody knows what’s underneath.” Her uneasy voice sank until I could barely hear it. “But it must be something more than microscopic. Something strong enough to snap our scoops off the lines. Something hostile enough to seize every ship the fog overtakes. Something cunning enough to outwit all of us.”
“You mean—intelligent?”
“Call it whatever you want.” I saw her shiver. “It unnerved us. The fog spreads in the dark. It has been reported creeping up on ships and isolated beaches in a way that looks deliberate. It does retreat from the light—I think sunlight dries and kills those microscopic balloon cells. When the fog goes, nothing alive is left behind. Just a red, stinking slime.”
She sat for a moment in foreboding silence.
“Another item,” she added suddenly. “The fog doesn’t like investigation. During daylight it retreated from our parachuted instruments and even from a surface laboratory ship—which it later overtook in the dark. Every patch of fog that we tried to study melted rapidly back into the sea.” She brightened eagerly as we came in view of the nursery building.
“That’s about it,” she said. “If you want to know what the fog really is, all I have is the theory we cooked up for our report. The phenomenon is clearly an intrusion from some other biocosm. Wherever they evolved, the intruders have been changed—by mutation or more likely by metamorphosis—to adapt them for survival in the oceans of earth.”
“Why are they invading?”
“Let’s get on to a more cheerful topic.” She cut me off firmly. “How are Nick and Kyrie?”
WE FOUND them hard at work on their plans for the transgalactic terminal. In spite of all our warnings, they were determined that COSMOS could be persuaded to build it.
Kyrie spent most of her days and nights shut up alone in the darkroom with the tetrahedron, groping for the bits and pieces of its half-erased message. Nick’s drafting table was the floor of a room across the hall. He worked lying flat, often calling Kyrie in so that he could show her the emerging difficulties and tell her what to search for.
The following summer, as those problems began taking clearer shapes, Marko helped select a team of specialists to write the specifications and prepare the final drawings for COSMOS. Most of these experts had been with the famous “triple E”—Ex-Earth Engineers—the prime contractor for the seeker vehicles and several planet platforms. Accustomed as they were to vast space projects, they were dazed by the dimensions Nick demanded for the tachyon terminal.
After ten days of nonstop talks with Nick, they invited Marko and me to join a conference at the Skygate Hudson. Kyrie stayed behind in the darkroom, trying to fill some gap in the record. Nick sat between Marko and me at the long table, facing the engineers. In blue trunks, pale and naked to the waist, he looked perilously young and small and vulnerable.
The seven engineers were sober and mature veterans of space, armed with rolled blueprints and entrenched behind portable computers and thick stacks of data. They shuffled their documents and scowled at Nick, waiting for their spokesman to begin. He was Ken McAble, a wiry, brown and dynamic Yankee who had tested his own hardware in orbit around several planets.
“I’ll tell you why we’re here.” His ice-green eyes shifted uneasily from Nick to Marko and then to me. “We’ve got plenty of space know-how.” He nodded approvingly at his fellow engineers, three on either side. “We’ve done some difficult things. I think we’re competent to say what is feasible and what is not. I believe we all agree that this so-called tachyon terminal is just not possible.”
The men around him nodded solemnly.
“But it can be,” Nick objected sharply. “It has to be.”
“Just look at it.” McAble fumbled through a stack of papers and held up a sketch of the terminal—the six outer towers with their landing stages rising like a spiral stair around the taller central beacon.
“Ten miles tall.” He pursed his lips and shook his head. “Equipped to dock and refit tachyon ships with diameters up to half a mile. The machinery works on principles we never heard of and the specifications call for materials unknown on Earth.”
“Please, sir?” White and trembling, Nick stood up in his chair. “We’ll explain the principles. We’ll all tell you how to make the new materials.”
“Look at these dimensions.” McAble waved his sketch. “They reduce the Great Pyramid to a wart. Our preliminary estimates are still pretty rough, but they run to something like three point seven billion tons—of structural materials we don’t have names for.”
“WE KNOW it won’t be easy, sir.” Nick spoke too fast, as he often did when he was too gravely worried to remember the slow comprehension of ordinary men. “That’s why we’re asking COSMOS to take it over. All the nations must unite—”
“COSMOS!” McAble snorted. “COSMOS is already stinking dead. Its builders mistook the other planets for a free lunch. Now it looks like we’re going to be the free lunch for all the other biocosms.”
“But, sir! This trouble with the other biocosms is exactly why the terminal has to be built. The messenger missile was sent to prepare us for this very moment—when space flight is just beginning. Don’t you see? Don’t any of you see?”
Nick caught his breath and looked desperately along the line of doubtful faces.
“New biocosms need help to understand each other. The terminal beacon can bring that help—but we must have it soon. Without it, our own biocosms will probably kill one another. Can’t you see that, sir? Building the terminal, we’re running a race to save the lives of Earth and Venus and all our other neighbors. Don’t you—don’t you see—”
His forlorn voice slowed and stopped. I could hear a muffled clatter from the dining room. The sluggish air felt too cold and smelled faintly of fish. Nick gulped hard. I thought he was going to cry.
A pencil dropped and rolled. Two fattish engineers whispered together and one of them passed a paper to McAble. He squinted at it, cleared his throat and scowled at Nick again.
“We do have one suggestion that might be productive,” he said. “If you care to consider it.”
“Yes, sir!” Nick gasped. “Of course.”
“It has occurred to several of us that these plans are far too elaborate.” He tapped his sketch and nodded at the fattish engineers. “This terminal we’re talking about would dock a whole fleet of starships. It seems to us that we might begin with simpler facilities for just one ship. Can’t you modify the plans?”
“I wish I could.” Nick shrugged unhappily. “The terminal is large on our scale, but not on the cosmic scale. The stars are far apart. A tachyon beacon has to have a certain power to reach ships or other terminals at all. A weaker beacon would be no good. Anyhow, we can’t change the plans.”
“And why not?”
“You see, sir, we’re not designing anything ourselves. We don’t know enough. We’re only reading out the specifications recorded in the messenger missile sixty millions years ago—and now partly lost.”
“I think they should have been simpler in the first place.”
“I’m afraid you don’t understand, sir. There are too many billions of planets. Too many life forms always evolving—but too few that ever need or want to join the great galactic culture. The starships can’t visit them all. Only those that build a terminal are considered worth an interstellar trip. It’s how we qualify for transgalactic membership.”
McAble frowned at that and finally turned the meeting over to his fellow engineers. They began asking technical questions about structural materials for the towers, about the operation of the beacon, about tachyon propulsion and the minimum-energy shift to the tachyon state. Nick’s answers were confusing to me and also, I think, to them.
Marko sent out for coffee and, later, for sandwiches. With an afternoon break to let Nick assemble and demonstrate a second flying plank, the meeting lasted all day. Four of the engineers left Skygate that night, but McAble and two others decided to stay—“Just for the hell of it—” McAble said. They worked for nearly a year with Nick and Kyrie, producing machines they never really understood.
WHEN their proposal was finally ready for COSMOS the presentation had to be delayed because a jet carrying most of the European directors had been lost over the Atlantic. Official censorship veiled the details, but one survivor who had missed the flight turned up later to tell us that friendly space snakes had flown too near the plane, killing the motors and forcing it down into a patch of that anomalous fog.
Other members canceled out, until only the American and Sino-Soviet delegations came for the final presentation. The American group was headed by Erik Thorsen. Marko and I called on him the day he arrived at his official residence.
I barely recognized him. He was an old man now, stooped and slow, his face sternly tragic. His bloodless hands had a ceaseless tremor. I suppose the psychiatry had been successful, but I felt sorry for him. He greeted us stiffly and waited to see what we wanted. He didn’t ask about the children, Suzie or anybody else.
We tried to brief him for Nick’s presentation. He listened silently, gray lips compressed, now and then shaking his cadaverous head. When we had finished he promised curtly to see us at the meeting, but I could see that he didn’t mean to be convinced.
WE MET the next day in the tarnished splendor of the Hall of Worlds, built when the great dreams of COSMOS were still alive. Clustered around the podium, our little group left the long chambers nearly empty and rolling echoes seemed to mock our fading hopes.
Maxim Petrov came in at the head of the Sino-Soviets. A vigorous thick-set man, he shook hands cordially with all his old friends and smiled with a startled admiration at Kyrie when she and Nick came in.
One of his advisers surprised us more. A short, stout, brown man with thick untidy hair and dark sunglasses, he had arrived on Petrov’s plane and spent the night in the Sino-Soviet residence. When he took off the glasses I recognized my brother Tom.
Less cordial than Petrov, he waved a pudgy hand at Marko and me, lighted a long yellow narcorette and put on another pair of glasses to study our terminal plans. After all our preparation, that meeting was a brief anticlimax. The delegates frowned over the bulky handouts. Kyrie displayed the tetrahedron. Nick explained the purpose of the messenger missile, then called on Ken McAble to brief the delegates on our proposal for the tachyon terminal.
“I came in as a skeptic,” McAble began. “But I’ve been convinced. I’ll grant that the task of erecting this terminal will tax the resources of the planet. But I think it can be done—and I say we’ve got to do it.”
He raised his voice above a murmur of startled protest.
“The alternative is death. Alone, we can’t cope with the other biocosms we have encountered on Venus and Mercury and elsewhere. We don’t know how to deal with the space snakes now in our own atmosphere, or with whatever is moving into our seas.”
Thorsen stood up, but McAble wouldn’t stop.
“I believe the creatures of our neighbor biocosms have found it just as hard to understand or cope with us. The exobiologists are suggesting that we have gravely disturbed the ecology of Venus and I’m afraid we have given the other biocosms no reason to love us.”
McAble still ignored Thorsen’s quivering hand.
“Gentlemen, this is a turning point in the lives of our planets.
The terminal can bring us the means to understand and bridge our differences. It can open a door to all the benefits of the transgalactic civilization—wonders I don’t dare imagine. Without the terminal, I think we’re dead.”
Recognized at last, speaking in an old man’s slow falsetto. Thorsen said there were too many space aliens already on Earth. He didn’t intend to import any more. The American delegation was voting to reject the proposal.
Maxim Petrov spoke longer and less vehemently. His technicians had discovered many items of exciting interest in the terminal plans, which would be carried back to Peking for additional study. He understood the grave hazards of contact between unaided biocosms and he recognized a growing danger to the life of Earth. If Nick’s proposal had been made just a few years earlier, the Sino-Soviet might have been able to support the terminal project. Unfortunately, however, in his opinion the crucial turning point had now passed. Already under increasing pressure from space intruders and divided by growing suspicions that the moon children and perhaps other space aliens were secretly meddling in human affairs, the nations of Earth could never unite to erect it. Regretfully, therefore, the Sino-Soviet was forced to join the Americans in voting to kill the proposal.
Moreoever, since the seeker surveys had failed to open up new living space for the human proletariat—or even to develop any important new industrial resources for the workers of Earth—the Sino-Soviet and its allies were giving notice of withdrawal from COSMOS. Formal claims would be filed for the assets and privileges properly due them under the charter.
Nick and Kyrie should have been prepared, of course, for such an outcome, but they had never learned to make reasonable allowances for the ignorance and stupidity of ordinary human beings. Shattered, they clung together, sobbing piteously. Marko and Carolina tried to console them, but they wouldn’t talk to anybody.
XII
PETROV gathered his delegates to leave the Hall of Worlds. My brother burst out of the group and scuttled across to Thorsen, begging for political asylum. Thorsen called him a traitor and turned his back on him. Sweating and gasping, Tom dashed to Marko and me.
“Kim! My baby brother!” He enveloped me in a fleshy embrace and the rich aroma of his armpits. “And my old comrade—Yuri! It’s grand to see you both.”
Mark took his offered hand, somewhat hesitantly.
“I need your help,” he wheezed. “But you need mine—just as much. I can help you—help you build that terminal.”
“Help us?” Marko squinted at him skeptically. “How?”
“I’ve got contacts.” His calculating eyes rolled toward the Sino-Soviets. “I’ve got influence. I’ve got know-how. I’ve got everything you need to get the project moving. And that’s a fact. Trust me, Kim. You’ve just got to trust me, Yuri.”
Of course we couldn’t trust him, but I saw no harm in listening. We had very little to lose. Though I had learned to fear his slippery resourcefulness, I couldn’t help yielding to his old shrewd charm.
“What know-how?” Marko was demanding. “Contacts with whom?”
Tom shrugged. He spoke evasively. This was no place to discuss such delicate matters and the deal he wanted to offer us would take too long to explain. His hurried whisper turned frantic. He couldn’t go back to the Sino-Soviet. If we refused to take him in, he was prepared to destroy himself.
“I’m your last chance. Believe me, Kimmie, you’ll never get your terminal built without my contacts.”
Marko finally agreed to talk to Thorsen. Tom stayed close to me, mopping at his wet face and watching the Sino-Soviet delegation as if he expected to be dragged away.
Petrov, however, accepted the situation with fine diplomatic suavity. Returning to the podium, he announced that the defector was a running dog of capitalism and a proven enemy of the people. His ruthless criminal activities had betrayed the trust of the world proletariat and he was no longer a welcome guest of the Sino-Soviet. Concluding, Petrov offered us an ironic farewell and departed with his delegation, leaving Tom behind.
Angered by the whole affair, Thorsen put Tom under guard and took him back to the American residence. We didn’t see him again for several weeks—or until the final dismemberment of COSMOS had been completed.
Title to the mesa and all the Skygate facilities reverted to America, as the charter provided. Suddenly recommissioned a Space Force general, Thorsen assumed command. He disbanded the old international security force and organized his own new security arm.
In the long squabble over the assets of COSMOS, Petrov demanded the tetrahedron for the Sino-Soviet. Refused that, he wanted Kyrie. When Marko pointed out that the tetrahedron was useless to us without her to read it, he offered to settle for Nick. Thorsen seemed willing to surrender him, but Carolina protested bitterly that Kyrie would die without him. There was no demand for Guy.
Petrov agreed at last to let America keep the children and the tetrahedron. In return, the Sino-Soviet took over the remaining space facilities of COSMOS, which had dwindled by now to the Earth and moon platforms and the nearly abandoned installations on the surface of the moon.
WHEN Petrov and his people were finally gone Thorsen had us bring the children to a briefing room in the old COSMOS headquarters, which now flew his own flag. Nick and Kyrie perched on tall stools, squirming itchily in stiff white coveralls and a frilly pink little-girl dress. Carolina hovered behind them. The nexode lay on the table before them, one point of opulent splendor in that ugly, barren, military room.
Guy sat with me at the side of the room, too big for his chair, his odorous and hairy masculinity cloaked in a plaid raincoat. Flat and bright and empty, his yellow eyes weren’t looking at Nick and Kyrie—or the armed guards around us or anything at all.
