Footfall (14 page)

“You have no need of that machine at this moment,” Lorena said firmly. She took his hand and guided it to her breast.

He had been expecting the telephone, but it startled him anyway. Pavel Bondarev disengaged his hand from within his secretary’s blouse. The ringing phone was on a secure line, permanently attached to a scrambler. He had been told that not even the KGB could listen to calls on that line. Pavel didn’t believe that, but it was well to act as if he did. He lifted the receiver. “Academician Bondarev.”

“Narovchatov. The Voice of America announces that the Americans are aboard”

“I heard. There was no jamming.”

Narovchatov chuckled. “So long as they do our work, why should we interfere? But it is a good sign. They are not upset by our mobilizations.”

“I trust not,” Bondarev said. “I have done much to keep such matters under control

“You are now satisfied with the preparations?’

“I believe so. Grushin reports that all is well aboard the spacecraft. The Strategic Rocket Forces are alerted, the Fleet is at sea, but the Air Force remains grounded and visible to the American satellites. This was not achieved without cost. Colonel General Akhmanov proved uncooperative, and has been replaced by Genera] Tretyak. The transfer of power was accomplished without incident, and Akhmanov has been promoted to the General Inspectorate of the Ministry of Defense.”

“Um. You are becoming accustomed to military authority. Perhaps I should have you appointed a general

“That could do no harm,” Bondarev said. Generals have enormous perquisites Meanwhile, I receive reports from both Grushin and Rogachev, and there are no contradictions. Nikolai Nikolayevich, I believe we have done everything possible.”

“All we know to do. Why, then, do I worry?”

Bondarev grinned mirthlessly. “We have nothing to guide us here. No history and no theory.”

“Da.” There was a pause, as if Narovchatov were thinking. Then the general said, “From tomorrow on, this line will be connected directly to the Chairman. You will use it to keep us informed.”

“Certainly.” It would be an excuse to ask where you and the Chairman will be. “Perhaps Marina and the children could visit you?’

“That has been arranged.”

“Then no more remains to be said.” Bondarev put the telephone down and stared out the window.

“You are frightened,” Lorena said.

“Yes.”

The meeting was called for 0900, but they were still straggling in at a quarter past. Some had hangovers. All had stayed up too late.

Too bad, Jenny thought. They’ll have to get used to military hours. She had a strong urge to giggle. Suppose they didn’t? Maybe they’d make Cheyenne Mountain adapt to the hours science fiction writers kept…

They took their places in the lecture room, but they tended to sit for a moment, then get up and gather in clumps. Most of them talked at once. Working with the science-fiction people was an educational experience. They had no reverence for anything or anyone, except possibly for Mr. Anson, and they argued with him; they just didn’t call him names.

They’d spent the past days learning about U.S. and Soviet weapons. Now it was time to examine what was known about the aliens.

Not that there’s anything to know. Our best photos don’t show details. Just that it’s damned big.

One of the men, the one with the heavy mustache, began before she could. “Major Crichton, I assume that the government has been no more successful in communicating with the aliens than all the private attempts were?”

“Correct. We’ve tried every means of communication we can think of.”

“And a few no one would have thought of,” Sherry Atkinson added. They all laughed, remembering that the mayor of San Diego had persuaded the citizens of his city to blink their lights on and off while they were in the alien ship’s view.

“With no result,” Jenny said. “Our best prediction is that the alien ship will arrive day after tomorrow. Sometime day after tomorrow. We can’t predict it closer than that, because the ship has begun random acceleration and deceleration.”

“As if it didn’t want us to know the precise ETA,” Curtis said.

“ETA?” Atkinson asked.

“Estimated Time of Arrival” Jenny said. “And yes, we’ve thought of that.”

“It might be their engines aren’t working properly.” Atkinson looked thoughtful. “Or that the concepts of time and regularity don’t mean much to them.”

“Bat puckey,” Curtis said. “If they’re space travelers, they have to have clocks.”

“Doesn’t mean they use them,” someone said.

Jenny spoke through rising voices. “Lieutenant Sherrad will review what we know.” The chatter stopped.

Sherrad was a Regular Navy man hoping for his bad foot to heat so that he could go back to sea. Jenny wasn’t quite sure how he’d been assigned to Colorado Springs, but she did know the Admiral thought well of him. His father had been a classmate.

The Navy seemed to have even more of that sort of thing than the Army. He ran new blowups of films taken by the Mauna Kea telescopes as far back as the late l970s. A few showed a flickering star that must have been the alien ship, although at the time no one had realized it.

Sherrad showed each film in sequence. Then again. He brought the lights up and waited, as if teasing the audience.

“Son of a bitch.”

“What, Joe?”

“It dropped something.”

Sherrad nodded. “It does look that way.”

It took me four hours to see that, Jenny thought. Maybe there is a good reason to have these birds here-.

“Our best guess is that it came from the southern region of the Centaur, dropped something heavy, rounded the sun, and went to Saturn,” Lieutenant Sherrad said. “Decelerating all the way.”

“They knew where they were going, then.”

“Well, Dr. Curtis, it does seem so.”

Jenny nodded approval. Sherrad had memorized the doctorates.

Voices arose from one of the clumps. “Okay, they refueled at Saturn—”

“Why not Jupiter?”

“It takes less delta-V to slow down for Saturn. Jesus, but they must have been going on the last teacup of fuel for that to matter!”

“Jupiter could have been around on the other side—”

“Could we see it again?” Anson asked.

Sherrad waited until they were quiet. “Certainly. We also have the computer simulation.”

The room darkened again.

Black dots speckled a white field: a negative of the night sky. Astronomers generally preferred to use negatives; it was easier to see the spots that were stars. The scene jumped minutely every few seconds. The stars stayed where they were-the photographs had been superimposed-but one dot jumped too, and grew Larger.

“These were taken from Mauna Kea observatory. Notice the point that jumps. When we realized what we had, we made same graphs—”

The first showed a curve across the star background, not very informative.

“And this is what it would look like from above the Sun’s north pole.”

Three faintly curved lines radiated from a central point. Near that point, the sun, they were dotted lines-of course, no camera would have seen anything then-and they almost brushed the solar rim. The Navy man’s light-pointer traced the incoming line. “It came in at several hundred miles per second,” he said, “decelerating all the way. Of course the Invader wasn’t seen near the sun, and nobody was even looking for it then. This—” The light-pointer traced a line outward. “We have only three photos of it, and of course they could be artifacts, garbage. If they’re real, then this one wasn’t under power when it left the sun. It was dropped.” The third line ran nearly parallel to the second, then curved away. ‘This section was under power, and decelerating at around two gravities, with fluctuations. We’ve got five photos, and then it’s lost, but it might well have been on its way to Saturn.”

“Not good,” said a voice in the dark.

The lights came on. The Navy man said, “Who said that?’

“Joe Ransom.” He had a gaudy mustache and the air of self-assurance the SF writers all seemed to share. “Look: they dropped something to save fuel. Could have been a fuel tank—”

“I’d think it was a Bussard ramjet,” someone interrupted.

Ransom waved it away. “It almost doesn’t matter. They dropped something they needed to get here. They probably planned to. Odds are they didn’t take enough fuel to stop inside the solar system without dropping-well, something massive, something they didn’t need any more, something that served its purpose once it got them from Alpha Centauri or wherever. If—”

Burnham jumped on it. “A Bussard ramjet wouldn’t be any use inside the solar system. You need a thousand kilometers per second to intercept enough fuel-or there are some alternate versions, but you still—”

Ransom rode him down. “We can’t figure out what it was yet and we don’t care. They used it to cross, and then they dropped it. Either they figure to make someone build them another one, or they’re not going home. You see the problem?”

Something icy congealed in Jenny’s guts. They don’t expect to go home. Maybe a Threat Team isn’t such a bad idea. I’ll have to call the Admiral.

Meanwhile, the meeting was degenerating into isolated clumps of conversation. Jenny spoke up to resume control. “Enough!” The noise dropped by half. “Mr. Ransom, you said Alpha Centauri. Why?”

“Just a shot in the dark. It’s the three closest stars in the sky, and two of them are yellow dwarfs, stars very like ours.”

“Stars?”

“Yes. What we call Alpha Centauri, meaning the brightest star in the Centaur constellation, is really three stars: two yellow ones pretty close together, and one wretched red dwarf.”

“Our own sun’s a yellow dwarf,” Curtis said.

“Interesting,” Lieutenant Sherrad said. “Our astronomers say the object came from the Centaur region. Is Alpha Centauri really a good prospect?”

The meeting came apart again. This time Jenny let it ride for a bit. Her patience was rewarded when Curtis bellowed, “May I have a consensus? Who likes Alpha Centauri?”

Two hands went up.

“Who hates it?”

Three hands. And three undecided.

“Sherry? Why don’t you like Alpha Centauri?”

“Wade, you know how many other choices there are! There are almost a dozen yellow dwarf stars near us; and we don’t know they came from that kind of star anyway!”

“Bob? You like it.”

The wide white-haired man with the gaudy vest laughed and said, “I didn’t at first it’s trite. But, you know, it’s trite because it got used so much, and it got used so much because it’s the best choice. Why wouldn’t they go looking for the closest star that’s like their own? And, Sherry, there aren’t many yellow stars in that direction. That clump centers around Procyon and Tau Ceti and—”

“That’s what I was getting at,” Dr Curtis said. “It’s trite. As I see it, the way to bet is that they came from Alpha Centauri, or else they came a hell of a long distance — And if they dropped half their ship-you see?”

Burnham said, “It’d be their first trip. They won’t be very good at talking to us. Chances are they’ll want to watch us from high orbit.”

“Maybe it’s good the Soviets can’t go after them. They might run.”

“It still isn’t good. We should have met them around Saturn, just to get a little more respect—”

“Could have had a hotel on Titan by now—”

“Proxmire—”

They were at it again. Out of the babble she heard Curtis say, “One thing’s suit. They came from a long way off. So the next question is, what do they want?”

Rogachev’s office was roomy enough, by station standards. Much of its furniture looked like afterthoughts: the hot plate, the curved sofa that had replaced a standard air mattress; even the window, shuttled from Earth and welded Into a hole sawn in the hull: a thick-walled box, two panes of glass sandwiching a goop that would foam and harden in near vacuum. But it let light through, so that Station Commander Arvid Pavlovlch Rogachev could see the stars.

They flowed past, left to right, while Arvid mixed powdered tea with boiling water in a plastic bag. The station was equipped for free-fall, in case of emergencies. He served the tea into two cups, and passed one to his second in command.

“The station will house twelve,” Arvid said. “Twelve are aboard. Four are foreign observers. No more important event has occurred aboard any spacecraft, and it will happen while Kosmograd is both crowded and shorthanded.”

“Not quite so bad as all that,” said Aliana Aleksandrovna Thtsikova. “Recall that there is nothing to be done about the alien ship. We don’t have to go to meet them; we don’t even have a motor.”

“Neither drive nor weapons. We could not flee either.”

“Exactly. It will come, we are privileged to watch. I suggest that we are doing fairly well.”

“Perhaps we are.” Arvid smiled. “It helps that our guests cannot talk to each other well”

“Their dossiers said that”

Arvid didn’t entirely trust any dossiers but Aliana knew that. He said, “I’ve watched them exercising their language deficiencies.

“Do you see a security problem?”

“From them? No. It is my habit to make threat estimates. Shall we? As a game?”

“My mother would call it gossip.”

“Let us gossip, then. Which of our guests do you find interesting?”

“The Nigerian. He’s the blackest man I’ve ever seen. I actually have trouble looking him in the face.”

“Really? What will you do when aliens are aboard?”

“Perhaps I’ll hide in your office.” She lost her smile. “Comrade Commander, I have an irrational fear of spiders and insects.”

“Then we must hope that the approaching guests will be neither.” But they will not be shaped like men, Arvid thought; and Aliana could not even see all men as men. She would be of little help to him if aliens came aboard. He had not suspected this weakness in her. It was well he’d learned it now.

She said, “The Nigerian speaks English and three native languages. . which must make him effectively retarded. There are forty-three languages active within the borders of Nigeria. Educated in England, then Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, but he learned little Russian. He favors economic independence for Nigeria,”—

“We won’t cure that here. He spends all his time with Dmitri Parfenovich and Wes Dawson. That would be good, except that Dmitri has been trying to convert Dawson to his own views, whereas Dawson sometimes takes the time to try to tell George what’s going on. Dawson is good at explaining complex matters.”

“Could you have a word with Dmitri?”

Arvid laughed. “Do you want me to tell our Political Commissar how to convert the heathen? Aliana, I do not seek converts.”

She laughed. Officially, Dmitri Grushin was Deputy Commander and Information Officer for the station, but he was so little qualified for either job that his KGB origins showed clearly. “We may find ourselves seeking converts among people with nightmare shapes,” Aliana said. “If so, Dawson is the one to watch. Nigeria and France would be no threat to us—”

“His nation made a good choice there, I think. The Honorable Wes Dawson is frantic to meet aliens.”

“Wasn’t it politics that—”

Rogachev shrugged. “Certainly his dossier suggests that he forced himself aboard. Even so, although I know little of American politics, I would not think a mere congressman could force the American President too far in a direction he did not wish to go.”

Aliana grinned. “Dawson is more qualified than Dmitri. Surely they have similar positions?”

Rogachev shrugged. “I do not think so, but it hardly matters.”

“Dawson’s dossier calls him politically liberal.”

“A lazy agent wrote that. ‘Politically liberal’ — he copied that out of some newspaper! Dawson has invariably favored the American space program.” Rogachev’s face twisted into a look he didn’t show to many people: a distinctly guilty grin. “I have closely watched the Honorable Wes Dawson. He has been sick with envy since he came aboard. He does not even care much for the design. Indeed, he knows precisely how he would rebuild the station if it were his. But as it is not, it is killing him!”