The D’neeran Factor (20 page)

In six weeks none of her reservations had left her, though all the logical benefits of “something” happening were fully present to her mind, and her curiosity about Species X finally was grown ravenous.

She turned wearily—and jumped, all her attention arrested by an impersonal impact like a stutter in her skull, an instant of total absorption that suspended all other thought. It lasted half a second, perhaps: then it was over.

They were used to it, she and the other two.

She got up and went back to the control room. Anja and Charl were both on the floor now. The glowing chips formed a rotating pyramid.

Hanna said, “I had it again. Did you?”

They shook their heads without looking up. Sometimes two or all three of them felt the same touch, sometimes only one. Why? They could not guess.

Hanna keyed a note of the incident into the scout's memory. On Earth they had tried to deduce a pattern from this record, but there was no pattern.

Then she turned to the others and saw that Anja was entranced. She stared straight ahead, motionless, eyes wide. Hanna had seen this look before in the instant of contact, but this went on a second, three seconds, five—

She crossed silently to Charl and Anja and knelt on the floor. Charl, guiding a game piece with a fingertip, had seen nothing. Hanna hissed at him. He looked up and saw Anja.

“Anja!
Annie!
” He reached for her. Hanna caught at his arm.

“Don't. Shut up. Don't disturb her.”

They waited. Hanna tried to glimpse Anja's awareness and found it closed. Yet there should have been a response to Hanna's touch, and there was none.

Anja sighed and shook herself and came back to them, and before anyone could speak the scout said: “Attention, please. I am receiving a radio transmission from an unidentified source analogous to communication identified as alien.”

Before it was finished Hanna was at the compact control console, Anja and Charl scrambling behind her. Charl opened his mouth to give an order and Hanna said quickly, “No, wait. No radar. Nothing. Anja—”

Anja began, “Mental contact? If you two—”

“No! We've got to notify Central. Anja, what was—”

“Not Central! No. They don't want us to do that.”

“What? Did they tell you that?”

“What?” Anja stared in confusion.

“Just then,” Hanna said impatiently. “When you were—”

She stopped, because Anja was bewildered. She created a picture of Anja in trance and exhibited it.

“I don't remember that,” Anja said.

“But you know they don't want us to call Central?”

The bewilderment deepened on Anja's face. “Something like that,” she said.

“All right. We won't yet, then,” Hanna said, and ignored an anxious sound from Charl.

There were two seats before the master controls. Hanna slipped into one of them and put her hands on the console as if to assure herself the scout would make no move of its own to change a precarious balance. She felt just as she had when Koster told her about Signal Alpha, so unprepared for this that she could not believe in what was happening. The aliens were unreal, a dream presence, hallucination. The message the computer showed her was the same old series of primes, so that it too had no more substance than a memory.

But it was a radio transmission; and creatures who moved among the stars used radio only across very short distances.

Charl half-thought, “H'ana, we must urgently act!”

She answered in the same way, “Patience…”

He looked longingly at the sensor panel. Most of the time they drifted blind, and silent except for their beacon. Charl thought of mass sensors.

Hanna said, “No. Nothing. Wait passive as water…”

(“They have no prey that moves so,” said an old echo in her thought.)

Which was bait and which was hunter?

Her hands itched to shape the event. There was something she could do. The computer could tell her the direction of the radio signal and turn passive receptors that way. She keyed the main video screen, a black polygon tall as herself.

“Uselessness,” she said. “Too-far. Computer. Begin passive-visual scan. Target's a spacecraft. Search: hypothesized alien mass. Highest magnification and full enhancement—”

“Oh!” they cried together, and saw for the first time with human eyes a thing made by Species X.

“Done,” said the scout, but no one heard it. The image fell off the sides of the screen. It flickered as the computer fine-tuned it.

Fuzzy, sharp-angled, brown in color-compensation:

“Close upon us, crush us, time run out to run—!”

“Anja, shut up!” Hanna said strongly. She shook with the panic-reaction.

“She wounds thee, true-human changeling,” Charl crooned, holding Anja.

Hanna gave them a look of disgust. Roly had thought her too good at things of this sort too. But someone had better be good.

She said steadily, “Back off, computer. Scale it down. Are they using radar on us? Yes? Scale down another step. Another. All right.”

It was not so threatening when it fit into the borders of the screen. Anja and Charl peered at it anxiously.

“So close,” they whispered. “How close? Too close!”

Charl looked out the nose as if he expected to see the ship there.

“It's ‘behind' us,” Hanna said absently. “You won't see anything, Charl. There ought to be more detail. Why isn't there any detail?”

“They come upon us from behind, then, stalking!”

“I don't think it
has
any details.”

“H'ana, please!”

“Hmm? They're not that close, Charl. Computer: What's the naked-eye view?”

A secondary monitor came to life. It showed only stars against black velvet. Anja sighed. Hanna felt Charl relax.

“You see,” she said.

She strained her eyes and cajoled the computer, but nothing changed except the object's apparent size. She thought of
N.S. Havock,
spiked and bristling with destructors. Now a brown box approached her. It had never been intended for atmospheric flight. No openings showed, nor any instrumentation.

She said, “Everything must be embedded in the skin. Or in a molecular film on the surface.”

The others only looked at her. They had not been much in space.

“Or…”

The angles seemed not quite right angles. The faceted sides bulged softly.

“…it's disguised, covered…enclosed….”

XS-12
seemed warmer. Light and life drifted, contained.

“This wait destroys me. I must know them!” Anja said suddenly.

Hysteria was far away, but too close for Hanna's liking. She said, “Use Standard, Anja. They spoke to you. Do you remember now?”

“No,” Anja said obstinately.

“Cease tormenting her, not-one-of-us!” Charl said, not in Standard.

“You did not have to come,” Hanna said, falling back.

But what were they saying that she had not said to the true-humans?

This might be a peak in the sea of time, but time stretched on. The box moved toward them, but slowly. Anja, calmer, detached herself from Charl. With the quick D'neeran forgetfulness of conflict she said, “H'ana?”

“Yes?”

“When are they going to do something that tells us something about them?”

“I don't know.” Hanna sat back. Her shoulders ached. More time had passed than she had thought. She had been thinking the same question. She said, “I never thought I could see one of their spacecraft and not be able to guess something about them.”

“They use right angles. The damn thing looks like a brick.” Charl touched her shoulder. His anger was gone too.

“Not quite, but all I can think is they've deliberately designed something we can see without their giving anything away.”

“The anthropomorphic fallacy,” Anja said. “You've warned against that yourself.”

“Yes, but if it's not that, you know what the only other thing is I can think? If this is just a typical spacecraft for them?”

“What?”

“They've all got galloping paranoia, and shut out
everything.
”

“They're galloping closer,” Anja said, and giggled. There was an edge to it, but not an edge of humor. She said, “In case you haven't noticed, it's partly off the screen again.”

“Reduce magnification,” Hanna said to the computer, and the box shrank with a jump.

Such optical tricks, Hanna thought, made the stately advance seem untrue. One could turn for ease to an illusion of distance.

They reduced magnification again and again. An hour passed, and a second hour. At intervals a data monitor showed them the radioed message was being repeated, but
its content did not change, Nothing happened, except that the box came closer. Charl returned to his game. He moved pieces aimlessly and looked at them less often than at the image of X. Anja sat beside Hanna, curiosity submerging her fear. And Hanna tried to touch the alien presence and felt: nothing. So slowly, so painfully accumulated, the bits of meaningless data. Did they know? Did they guess how little? Was it their intention? Surely.

Anja said into a long silence, “Collision course?”

“Maybe,” Hanna said. She shook herself. “Ridiculous.”

“But they must be awfully close.”

“Yes. They must.”

“Well?” Anja turned her head. Hanna felt Charl's attention too.

Do something something something something…

Their patience was giving way.

Slowly she reached out and silenced the unheard Inspace signal. Now it was inaudible to the aliens too.

“Wisdom?” Charl inquired, picking up Hanna's own doubt.

“They know our knowing of their closeness. Logic inevitable. Radio is for naught but closeness. Realtime makes it so.”

“No purpose then in silence,” Anja said.

They had fallen again into the use of more thought than speech. In Anja's vision time separated into segments discrete as beads. To act would change everything; for two civilizations. The moment of change was theirs to choose. She whispered, “Now, H'ana?”

“But their wish—” Dilatory, unwilling, Hanna hung back. “Silent and defenseless calls them—”

(“…
their terms, as nearly as we can guess…
”)

“
Our
terms,” Anja said.

Hanna's hand moved, hesitating. Why not? Bomb them with detectors, slice into the alien box for knowing's sake. She could not quite touch the instruments to do it, nor order it done with her voice. Anja and Charl looked at her strangely.

She took a deep breath and said, “Computer. Full scan.”

Numbers flickered and changed on
XS-12.
There were no strange shields, at least.

Charl said, “Fifty kilometers. Closing fast. I want a visual on that. Yes. That hotspot must be the reactor core.”

He talked softly with Anja. Hanna paid no attention. She was dizzy, as if she had taken a step and fallen off a mountain. The ranks of numbers drew her. Close and closer: an approaching veil. Finally to be withdrawn? She would see through the mist at last.

“It's not featureless,” Anja said. “You can see seams. Look, H'ana.”

Hanna looked blindly and then with attention. She said, “It doesn't have any ports. Don't they like to look at the stars?”

“
I
don't like to look at the stars, except from solid ground,” Anja said.

“But beings who choose space, like space. I mean, individual humans and individual F'thalians who come out here, we like to see where we're at. We—”

“Oh, look! Look!”

Openings appeared on the box's leading edge, black and bottomless. Hanna blinked at a burst of retrofire.

The scout said, “Decelerating.”

There was another, shorter burst.
XS-12
said without interest, “The object will be at rest relative to ground zero in thirty-four minutes sixteen-point-oh-oh-four seconds.”

Hanna looked at the box and thought she ought to be rejoicing. It was not a box. It was a space ship made by thinking creatures. She had trained for this for years.

She got up. Her stomach twisted but she said, “I'm going to suit up. This could be it.”

Anja said nervously, “Shouldn't we try talking to them? From here?”

“You can try,” Hanna said. “But
Endeavor
's been trying for a year. To go out there alone—that's something new….”

Her voice trailed away. She didn't want to do anything new. She saw in Anja's eyes the memory they shared of a dream. She said, “Nobody knows what they'll do. This is the only way to find out.”

Anja said, “We're being foolish. There's nothing to be afraid of, is there?”

With one accord they looked at the naked-eye monitor. In the center starlight glinted briefly off something, still tiny, that had not been there before.

Charl muttered, “Paranoia. H'ana, we ought to make a preliminary report to Central. Now.”

“We can't,” Hanna said. She looked at Anja. “Not if they don't want us to. I was told—their terms. And it doesn't matter anyway. Central's a long way from here.”

“Then let me record something for the black box,” he said, surprising her. For Charl was not a spacefarer. It was not routine for him to store information against his death at first sight of the unknown.

But Hanna said, “Do that.”

She left them to watch the growing image. Near the lock reserved for spacewalks she dressed for vacuum. Logic told her she should not need to do it. In spite of their caution, the X beings had been the aggressors so far. Logic suggested they would rather come here than have her, an alien, penetrate their flying box. Yet she was certain that she would have to go to them, and that there would be no communication until she did. She did not know where her certainty came from. Intuition? But she did not believe in intuition. It was only logic in less visible form, the product of a structure based on details unconsciously noted. She knew they waited for her, in silence.