TEN-THOUSAND LIGHT YEARS FROM HOME, page 7
“A solar screen.” George’s voice was gray, too. “They can lay it with their exhaust in a couple of dozen orbits. It doesn’t take much, and it lasts, that is, there’s an irreversible interaction. I don’t understand the physics. Harry gave me the R & D analysis at lunch, but the waiter kept taking the mesons away. The point is, they can screen off enough solar energy to kick us back to the ice age. Without time to prepare, we’ll be finished. Snow could start here about June. When it does it won’t quit. Or melt. Most of the big lakes and quite a lot of ocean will go to ice. The survivors will be back in caves. Perfect for their purpose, of course—they literally put us on ice.”
“What the hell is being done?” I squeaked.
“Not counting the people who are running around cackling, there are two general lines. One, hit them with something before they do it. Two, undo it afterwards. And a massive technological research depot is being shipped to Columbia. So far the word has been held pretty close. Bound to leak soon, though.”
“Hit them?” I coughed. “Hit them? The whole U.N. military can’t scratch that VTO that’s sitting in their laps! Even if they could get a warhead on the mother ship, they’re bound to have shielding. Christ, look at the deflectors they use to hold their atomics. And they know the state of our art. Childish! And as for dispersing the screen in time to save anything—”
“What do you think you’re doing? Max?” They were pawing at me.
“Getting out of here.... Godamnit, give me a knife, I can’t untie this bastard! Let go. Nurse! WHERE ARE MY PANTS?”
They finally hauled me over to George’s war room in a kind of mobile mummy-case and saw I got fed all the info and rumors. I kept telling my brain to produce. It kept telling me back Tilt. With the top men of ten nations working on it, what did I imagine I could contribute? When I had been grunting to myself for a couple of hours Tillie and George filed in with a purposeful air.
“In a bad position there is no good move: Bogoljubov. Give over, Max.”
“In a bad position you can always wiggle something,” I rasped. “What about the men, Tillie?”
“What about them?”
“How do they feel about the plan?”
“Well, they don’t like it.”
“In what way don’t they like it?”
“The established harem favorites don’t like to see new girls brought in,” she recited and quick looked me in the eye.
“Having a good time, baby?” I asked her gently. She looked away.
“Okay. There’s our loose piece. Now, how do we wiggle it at a quarter of a million miles? What about that character Leif—Mavrua?” I mused. “Isn’t he some sort of communications tech?”
“He’s chief commo sergeant,” Tillie said, and added slowly, “he’s alone on duty, sometimes.”
“What’s he like? You were friendly with him?”
“Yes, kind of. He’s—I don’t know—like gay only not.”
I was holding her eye.
“But in this situation your interests coincide?” I probed her hard. The American black who goes to Kenya often discovers he is an American first and an African second, no matter what they did to him in Newark. George had the sense to keep quiet, although I doubt he ever understood.
She swung back her hair, slowly. I could see mad dreams dying in her eyes.
“Yes. They... coincide.”
“Think you can talk to him?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll get over to Harry,” George jumped up, he was ahead of the play now. “We’ll see what we can lash up. Ten days, maximum.”
“Call the campus. I can take a meeting. But get me something so I don’t sound like a frog’s ghost.”
The chief we had then was all right. He came to me. Of course we had only the start of a plan, but nobody else had anything, and we had Tillie. He agreed we were nuts and gave us everything we needed. The lateral channels were laid on by 1500; Jodrell Bank was to set us up.
The waning moon came over Greenwich before dawn that week, and we got Tillie through to Mavrua about midnight E.S.T.. He was alone. It took her about a dozen exchanges to work out agreement in principle. She was good with him. I studied him on the monitors; as Tillie said, queer but not gay. Clean cut, muscular, good grin; gonads okay. Something sapless in the eyes. What in hell could he do?
The chief’s first thought had been, of course, sabotage.
“Stupid,” I husked to George. “Harem slaves don’t blow up the harem and themselves just to keep the new girls out. They wait and poison the new girls when they can get away with it. That does us no good.”
“Nor do historical analogies, after a point.”
“Analogic reasoning works when you have the right reference frame. We need a new one. For instance, look at the way the Capellans overturned our psychic scenery, our view of ourselves as integral to this world. Or look at their threat to our male-dominant structure. Bigger, more dominant women who treat our males as sex-slave material. Walking nightmares... notice that ’mare?’ All right—what is the exact relationship between the Capellans and us? Give me that Danish report again.”
The two gorgeous Danes had at least gotten some biological information between orgies, maybe they were more used to them. They confirmed that the Capellans carried sex-linked differences. Capellan males matured to Earth-normal size and sexual features, but the adolescent females went through a secondary development spurt and emerged as the giantesses we had seen. With the specialized characteristics that I had inadvertently become familiar with. And more: some milennia back a mutation started cropping up among the women. Fallout from a war, perhaps? No answer. Whatever the cause, women began failing to develop. In other words, they stayed as earth-type normals, able to reproduce in what the Capellans regarded as immature form.
Alarmed, the Capellan matriarchate dealt with the problem in a relatively humane way. They rounded up all suspected mutant lines and deported them to remote planets, of which Terra was one. Hence the old chart notation.
Our present visitors had been ore-hunting at nearly maximum range when they decided to check on the semi-mythical colony. No one else ever had.
“What about the Capellan’s own history?”
“Not much. Look at that British quote: ‘We have always been as we are.’ ”
“Isn’t that just what we thought about ourselves—until they landed?”
George’s tired eyelids came open wide.
“Are you thinking what I—”
“We’ve got Tillie. Mavrua probably knows enough to noodle their input indicators. It wouldn’t take much. What is to Tillie as a Capellan is to us?”
“Bobo!” put in Mrs. Peabody, from some ambush.
“Bobo will do nicely,” I went on. “Now we work up the exact scenery—”
“But, Jesus, Max! Talk about forlorn chances—” protested George.
“Any chance beats no chance. Besides, it’s a better chance than you think. Some day I’ll tell you about irrational sex phobias, I’ve had some unique data. Right now we’ve got to get this perfect, that’s all. No slips. You cook it and I’m going to vet every millimeter of every frame. Twice.”
But I didn’t. My fever went up, and they put me back in the cooler. Every now and then Tillie dropped in to tell me things like the ore piles on Luna had quit growing, and the crew was evidently busy air-sealing the hold. How was George doing? Great. Mavrua had transmitted the crucial frames. In my more lucid moments I realized George probably didn’t need any riding—after all, he’d trained on those Mongolian yak parties.
If this were public history I’d give you the big drama of those nine days, the technical problems that got licked, the human foul-ups that squeaked by. Like the twenty-four hours in which the Joint Chiefs were insisting on monitoring the show through a channel that would have generated an echo—their scientists said no, but the President finally trusted ours and killed that. Or the uproar when we found out, about Day Five, that the French had independently come up with a scheme of their own, and were trying to talk privately to Mavrua—at a time when his Capellan chief was around, too. The President had to get the U.N. Secretary and the French Premier’s mother-in-law to hold that.
That let the cat out of the first bag; the high-level push to get in the act began. And there was the persistent intrusion from our own Security side, who wanted to hitch Mavrua up to some kind of interstellar polygraph to check him out. And the discovery at the last minute, of a flaw in our scanning pulse which would have left a fatal trace, so that new equipment had to be assembled and lofted to the satellite relay all one sleepless night. Oh, there was drama, all right. George got quite familiar with the sight of the President pulling on his pants.
Or I could paint you the horror visions now growing in all our minds, of snow that never stopped, of glaciers forming and grinding down from the poles across the world’s arable land. Of eight billion people ultimately trying to jam themselves into the shrinking, foodless equatorial belt. Of how few would survive. A great and dramatic week in world history—during which our hero, in actual fact, was worrying mostly about an uncontrolled staph colony in his cracked pelvis and dreaming of dragging seals home to his igloo off Key West.
“How’re your teeth, baby?” I asked what seemed to be a solid version of Tillie, swimming in the antibiotic fogs. I’d been dreaming that her head had been resting on my arm cast.
“?”
“Teeth. Like for chewing blubber. That’s what Eskimo women do.”
She drew back primly, seeing I was conscious.
“It’s getting out, Max. The wise money is starting to slip south.”
“Best stick with me, baby. I have a complete arctic camping outfit.”
She put her hand on my head then. Nice hand.
“Sex will get you nowhere,” I told her. “In times to come it’s the girls who can chew hides who’ll get the men.”
She blew smoke in my face and left.
On Day Minus Four there was a diversion. The Capellan party who had landed in Africa were now partying around the Pacific on their way to pick up the VTO launch in Mexico. Since Authority was still sitting on all the vital information, the new batch of Girls from Capella were as popular as ever with the public. Behind the scenes there was a hot debate in progress about how they could be used as hostages. To me this was futile—what could we even hope to get?
Meanwhile their launch was sitting unattended at Mexico City, showing no signs of the various cosmic can-openers we had tried. All the united military could do was to englobe it with guard devices and a mob of assorted special troops.
On Day Minus Four the three Girls went fishing off a Hawaiian atoll, in a catamaran. They were inshore of their naval escort. One of them yawned, said something.
At that moment the VTO boat in Mexico went whirr, let out a blast that incinerated a platoon of Marines and took off. A Jap pilot earned his family a pension by crashing it at 90,000 feet with his atomic warheads armed. As far as we could find out, he never even caused a course correction.
The VTO came scorching down on the atoll just as the Girls drifted up to the beach. They sauntered over and were inside before the naval watchdogs got their heads out of their radar hoods. Two minutes later they were out of atmosphere. So much for the great hostage plan.
After this I kept dreaming it was getting colder. On Day Minus Three I thought I saw rhododendron leaves outside my window hanging straight down, which they do at 46 degrees Fahrenheit. Mrs. Peabody had to come over to tell me the ship was still on Luna, and it was 82 outside.
Day Minus Two was it. They rolled me over to George’s projection room for the show. We had one of the two slave-screens, the U.N. had the other. The Chief hadn’t wanted that—partly from the risk of detection, but mostly because it was ninety-nine to one the thing would bomb out. But too many nations knew we were trying something.
I was late, due to a flat tire on my motorized coffin. George’s masterpiece was already running when they wedged me through the doors. In the dimness I could make out the Chief up front, with a few cabinet types and the President. The rest seemed to be just two-feather Indians like me. I guess the President wanted to be in his own family when it blew.
The screen show was pretty impressive. A big Capellan hunched over her console, sweat streaming down her face, yelling a low steely contralto into her mike. I couldn’t get the words but I picked up the repetitive cadence. The screen flickered—George had worked authentic interstellar noise into the send—and then it jumped a bit, like an early flick when the ship goes down with Pearl White lashed to a bunk. There were intermittent background crashes, getting louder, and one cut-off screech.
Then the back wall started to quake, and the door went out in a laser flare. Something huge kicked it all the way down, and Bobo came in.
Oh my aunt, he was beautiful. Bobo Updyke, the sweetest monster I’ve known. I heard a chair squeak beside me and there he was, beaming at his image on the screen. They’d fixed him up with love. Nothing crude—just a bit more browridge on what he had, and the terrible great paws very clean. The uniform—Mau-Mau on a solid base of S.S. Schrechlichheit. Somebody had done something artfully inhuman about the eyes, too. For an instant he just stood there. The crashes quit, like held breath.
There’s rape and rape, you know. Most rape has some shred of humanity in it, some acknowledgment of the victim’s existence. That kind most women aren’t really scared of. But there’s another kind. The kind a golem might do, or a torture device. Violation done by a thing to a thing. That’s what they’d put into Bobo and that’s what the Capellan on the screen turned up her face to look at. All sweet Auschwitz.
Did I say Bobo is seven feet two plus his helmet which brushed the ceiling, and Tillie isn’t five feet? It was something to see. He put out one huge hand. (I heard that footage was reshot twenty-two times.) His other hand was coming toward the camera. More background crash. The last you saw between Bobo’s oncoming fingers was her breast ripping naked and more hulking males beyond the open door. Blackness—a broken shriek and a, well, noise. The screen went dead.
Our lights came on. Bobo giggled shyly. People were getting up. I saw Tillie before the crowd covered her. She had some blue gook on her eyelids and her hair was combed. I decided I’d give her a break on the blubber-chewing.
People moved around, but the tension didn’t break. There was nothing to do but wait. In one corner was Harry with a console. Somebody brought in coffee; somebody else brought in a napkin that gurgled into the chiefs dixie cups. There was a little low talk that stopped whenever Harry twitched.
The world knows what happened, of course. They didn’t even stop for their ore. It was 74 minutes later that Harry’s read-outs began to purr softly.
Up on Luna, power was being used to close airlocks, shift busbars. Generators were running up. The great sensitive ears yearning at them from the Bank quivered. At minute 82.5 the dials started to swing. The big ship was moving. It floated off its dock in the Alps, drifted briefly in an expanding orbit, and then Harry’s board went wild as it kicked itself outward. Toward Pluto.
“Roughly one hundred and seventy-nine degrees from the direction of Capella,” said George, as they rolled me out. “If they took Harry’s advice, they’re working their way home via the Magellanic Clouds.”
Next day we got the electronic snow as they went into space drive. To leave us, we may hope, for another couple of millennia.
The official confirmation of their trajectory came on the day they let me try walking. (I told you this was history as I lived it.) I walked out the front door, over a chorus of yowls. Tillie came along to help. We never did refer to precisely what it was that made her able to grip my waist and let me lean on her shoulder. Or why we were suddenly in Magruder’s buying steak and stuff to take to my place. She was distrustful of my claim to own garlic, and insisted on buying fresh. The closest we came—then or ever—to an explanation was over the avocado counter.
“It’s all relative, isn’t it?” she said to the avocados.
“It is indeed,” I replied.
And really, that was it. If the Capellans could bring us the news that we were inferior mutations, somebody could bring them the word that they were inferior mutations. If big, hairy Mamma could come back and surprise her runt relations, a bigger, harrier Papa could appear and surprise Mamma.
—Always provided that you had a half-pint female who could look and talk like a Capellan for seven minutes of tape, and a big boy who could impersonate a walking nightmare, and one disaffected alien to juggle frequencies so a transmission from a nearby planet came through as a send from home base. And a pop genius like George to screen the last stand of the brave Capellan HQ officer, sticking to her mike to warn all ships to save themselves from the horror overwhelming the home planet.
It had been Harry’s touch to add that the invaders had long-range detector sweeps out and ordering all ships to scatter to the ends of the galaxy.
So, all things being potentially relative, everybody including Mrs. Peabody got a medal from bringing Papa home. And my mamma came home with me, although I still don’t know how she is on chewing blubber.
HELP
“Here we go again,” said Harry’s voice in my ear.
I discovered my wife had waked up first and was holding the office phone over my face. It was still dark.
“—down by the Lunar Alps. Visuals just coming in.”
“Not those Capellan jocks again?” I groaned.
“Smaller. Different emission features. Get down here, Max.”
Tillie was already dressing. When we’d gone to bed two hours back, the ears of Earth were following a moving source which kept disappearing behind Luna, and our moonstation near Mersenius was scrambling to set up a far-side relay. Now the alien had landed, a third of a great circle from our station.
The photo courier passed us at the office door. Mersenius had sent a camera-eye over the alien ship.
“Looks as if they’re interested in those ore-piles the Capellans left,” said George. “What’s that, a derrick?”
