Tomorrow’s Heritage (17 page)

“It’s an interstellar vehicle,” Mari replied scornfully. “Of course. Sit down and watch and maybe you’ll learn something. You won’t be able to see it, not yet. How far out is it, Todd? How many A.U.’s?”

“Approximately twenty-eight, as of yesterday, and coming fairly fast. We originally estimated a year to make Earth orbit. It was making one-twentieth of one percent C, but that’s gone up considerably.” Mari’s jaw dropped in admiration as Todd confirmed, “Faster than our best. But not light-speed, which will relieve a few physicists at the Science Council.” He smiled to himself, not bothering to tell the others about the theoretical wars among the ranking minds of celestial mechanics. “We believe it’s quite small, and obviously very sophisticated,” he said. “We’re talking a couple of months till visual contact, with the orbiting Wilson-Palo lens and the Council’s big radio scanners. They haven’t been looking in that region of the sky. But they will when we give them the data. It’s just too damned bad the Australian scope got wrecked before the Space Neutrality Treaty went into effect. That was a beautiful eye. We certainly could—”

“A few months until you can see it and define its shape,” Jael interrupted. She waved toward the monitor scene within the holo-mode. “Your data claims it’s adjusting its course.”

“That’s right. Reacting to us.”

“Maybe . . . maybe it’s one of our own,” Jael suggested somewhat desperately. “I remember they launched a number of deep-space craft, before I was born and when I was a child. Until funding got diverted into more useful channels.”

“This thing is incoming, Mother,” Todd reminded her with great patience. “The chances of its being one of ours are nil. But we held off announcing this until we could be sure. It’s an alien vehicle, no question whatsoever.”

His image and Dian’s in the holo-mode projection resembled those of proud parents displaying a new baby. There was a bit of historical posing in their manner. They faced the cameras, aware they were going into the records along with the astonishing readouts. Feeble signals were computer enhanced and boosted. New signals were sent, new incoming data added to that building in the files. Time condensed. Confusing static became regularly spaced intervals alternated with other patterned bursts. Energy commg from Neptune’s orbit began to form symbols and, possibly, letters and numerals. Dian’s team responded in kind. The alien copied, questioned, returned its own queries—or at least that was what they appeared to be. It took days, sometimes, before the precious answer would come. And the most recent response was a binary readout. Not the one Project Search had sent, but the sequence intelligently re-formed and returned to demonstrate that the machine understood what they were trying to do.

The checks and rechecks had worn their patience thin. The tension had become nearly unbearable. Dian was tireless, and even she grew snappy. A hundred times. A thousand. Again. No doubt. They had it. Payoff. Project Search, out of all the scanning efforts, had tracked down its quarry.

And now the dream had come true.

Was it going to be Pandora’s box, or Prometheus’ stolen gift to mankind? There was no way to predict— whichever it was, it was going to happen.

On the holo-mode monitor, the long-sought word appeared after each laborious cross-check:
Cnfrmd
.

The inserts disappeared, and so did the frozen star-field photo. Dian poised her hands over the glowing projector panels. “I can run back anything you’d like to see again. We have a great deal more, but it’s redundant. Everything here and lots more very dry stats. The extreme emphasis and time compression came from the last three months, when we were positive we were onto something. The signal’s been getting steadier as the vehicle corrects its Vector . . .”

“Lights!” Jael’s normally soft voice was shrill with panic.

Dian obeyed. Interior illumination dimmed the stars beyond the dome. Mari jerked around, staring at Todd. “Correcting? How? And why?”

He thought over his reply, knowing that she, most of all, was aware of celestial navigation’s distances and problems. “We don’t know what its propulsion system is. We assume it’s realigning
via
our frequencies.”

“Homing in on Earth’s telecommunications, in other words,” Mariette finished for him, nodding.

“My God.” Pat breathed that prayer. “You . . . you’re leading it to us.”

Dian shook her head, dismayed. Todd went on guard. “No, I’m not.
Earth
is leading it. Hear me out, Pat. That thing’s a probe. It was coming in on Neptune’s orbit when we detected it. In all likelihood, it’s been programmed to prowl interstellar space, looking for a contact just like ours. The odds are high it had already picked up plenty before we beamed anything directly at it. Maybe it’s been talking for quite a while, saying ‘hello,’ trying to get an answer out of us. Only we didn’t talk its language and didn’t notice what it was doing—not until Project Search.”

He paused, waiting to see if they would interrupt. “I can’t claim I found it. I don’t know if I did. Maybe Project Search is just the first Earth station that answered the com when that thing was hailing us. Now that we have responded, it’s talking back. We think it can learn. We hope so. We’re like two children—our species and that one out there which sent the messenger—and we speak totally different languages. We’re seeing each other for the first time across a pool in a park. A very tiny pool, as interstellar distances go. This child,
Homo sapiens,
hasn’t learned to walk or swim very well yet.”

“We
can!
” Mari said fiercely. “We have the capability to go out there right now.
Have
had it for decades. If only those damned reactionary—”

“Stop it!” Todd waited for her to cool down, then resumed his explanation. “All right. Humanity hasn’t been allowed to swim across the pool very far, for lack of encouragement and support. Okay, Mari? But that other child, the alien messenger,
can
swim. It’s doing so. It’s been looking for us, or something like us—intelligent life. Funny, isn’t it? Both of us looking for the same thing, we from the bottom of a well, they from the top. Now it’s coming over to meet us.”

“You mustn’t!” Jael’s terror transformed her face and voice. “You mustn’t talk to it any more. You mustn’t let it know where we are.”

Dian didn’t hide her disappointment. She spoke gently. “Mrs. Saunder, we’re way past that. For all we know, that probe’s been coming our way for over a century, wandering at random. Maybe it picked up our first radio signals a long while ago. You must see that. We aren’t doing anything to attract it. What’s happened is that we picked up on it in progress. It was coming here, anyway. This way, we have time to talk to it, learn its language and teach it ours, communicate with it and find out something about its creators.”

“Sending.” Blood drained from Jael’s round face. “It receives and sends. It thinks.”

“Of course it does.” Mariette didn’t consult with Todd. Something in her manner alarmed him. Her excitement was fading. “And it’s probably already sent word home when it first picked up an Earth transmission. I wonder where its home is?” She looked at Todd, on his wavelength once more. But the rapport was brief. She rose to her feet, began pacing back and forth. “Pick and vector and align itself, talk, interpret. Told its masters where it’s going. Now it’s going to have a look.”

“No! No!” Jael was screaming. “Patrick! We’ve got to do something!”

“Try cutting off its funds in P.O.E.,” Mari suggested, laughing nastily. “How does it feel to meet an entity you can’t buy off or control?” Todd felt the moment slipping away from him, going off in directions
he
couldn’t control.

Jael was ranting. “Our resources are stretched to the limits now . . . just recovering from the Chaos . . . can’t let it . . . we have it all about to work . . .”

“Oh, shut up!” Mariette exploded. “You haven’t got the slightest idea what—”

“Dammit!” Pat said suddenly, “Are
you
blind? I’ve got a kid brother who talks to aliens and thinks it’s wonderful. Starry-eyed kid brother. That thing’s a threat. You say it’s faster than our fastest spaceships, intelligent, and you’re going to feed it everything it needs to know about us humans.”

“Everything
we
need to know may come to us in return!” Todd roared, trying to outshout him. Futile. Desperate, he kept on. “We can’t run away from it. We’d better learn to deal with it. Mankind’s tried that before, fearing changes and trying to stifle exploration. There was a time when we tried to halt travel by machines, vaccination against disease, anesthetics, nuclear experiments, investigation and use of recombinant DNA, seabed thermal energy drilling, building Goddard. We probably tried to stop the discoveries of fire and the wheel. But we can’t! Not as long as we’re human. We have to take the risks along with our curiosity!”

He hurt his throat to no purpose. Everyone was talking at once. Carissa begging them to discuss things calmly. Jael raving, supporting Pat, yet stepping on the heels of his words, turning his arguments into gibberish. Mari screaming at them both. Dian hopelessly trying, as Todd had, to spell out logic.

Unexpectedly, Mariette rounded on Todd, slapping him so hard his head jerked from the blow. “Damn you! Oh, damn you! You knew about this when you were up at Goddard! Why didn’t you tell me, tell us? You let me come down here, and all the time you knew, you . . . you bastard!”

Her hand went back again. Todd lunged, pinning her. Nose to nose with her, he used his superior strength, anticipating she would knee him, yelling into her face. “Yes, we knew! What difference does that make? What could you have done? We’re in this together.
All
of us. I wanted to start straight with everyone.” She hadn’t lashed out yet. His face burned where she had connected. Mari didn’t pull her punches. She was sniffling, angry tears gathering in her pale eyes. Todd found himself begging for comprehension in spite of his anger. “All of us, Mari. The whole species.”

“We could have been out there already, to Mars and beyond. We
should
have been!” The tears spilled over. She twisted this way and that, trying to wrench free. Todd released her, gauging she wasn’t going to strike out at him any more. “We . . , we could have met them halfway . . .”

“Met them?” Pat was a man walking in a nightmare. He grabbed Mariette and shoved her toward a chair, throwing her down into it. He stood back out of range of her fists and feet, pointing warningly, impaling her with his stare. “Meet the aliens to do what? Betray us? Ride off with them into some . . . some interstellar paradise? You’d like that, wouldn’t you? You and McKelvey and all the rest of those crazy Spacers—split off and let some alien beings make us slaves, while you—”

“You stupid, contemptible paranoid.” Mariette made the word sound worse than the rudest obscenity. “Invasion? Is that what you’re thinking? Yes, you would. It’s the
only
way you think. Everybody’s out to get you, and you’ve got to be king and beat everybody down before you’ll feel safe. Do you know what? You won’t feel safe even then. You’ll still be worrying that somebody’s going to try to take that precious Chairmanship away from you. Well, you won’t be able to beat this, and you won’t be able to hide from it. You think if something doesn’t suit your plans, you can lock it away or destroy it. You’ve got some waking up to do—a lot of it!”

“You’re both paranoid!” Todd managed to yell. He was certain his throat must resemble butchered meat, but he had made them listen. “You’re mad, aren’t you, Mari? The alien messenger stole your piece of dessert. It’s going to get here before Goddard can launch that Mars lander.”

“It’s Pat’s fault, him and Earth First cutting off our funds—”

“Don’t you start in on me again!”

Jael rushed into the next narrow opening in the verbal violence. “Pat may be right, Todd. Admit it. This alien thing probably is hostile. We’ve got to do something . . .”

“It’s possible.” Silence enveloped them. Dian eyed Todd sharply while the others gasped. “This is a first contact. We can’t predict outcomes.”

“You see?” Pat was maliciously triumphant.

Todd didn’t let him go on. “It can be either friendly or hostile. My logic says any probe that sophisticated wasn’t built by a species looking for new worlds to conquer. It could conquer them, anyway. It’s looking for new trade outlets, maybe. Or just curious. And if it’s this intelligent and powerful, we aren’t going to be able to do much to resist the species that built it—
unless we can talk to their probe and find out as much as we can about its creators.
”

He was flying in circles, covering the same ground, increasingly frustrated. He had gotten too used to Dian, to his techs, to delegating explanations to his media experts. He was getting a depressing sample of what the Global Science Council presentation was going to be like, how some of the members were going to react. Was the whole damned planet becoming paranoid? Todd didn’t want to claim the credit any more. Or make the presentation. Maybe he would turn the whole thing over to Dian and Beth. No, that was the coward’s way out. He would have to take the good with the bad.

He hadn’t reached Pat, the one person he most needed to reach. He tried once more. “Pat, they can be our friends. They can open up the whole universe to us. This is the start of a new era in human history, and you can go down in the books as the Chairman who greeted the alien messenger when it arrived.”

“Can’t take chances,” Pat said. He glared at the holomode Dian was lifting out of the projector as if he wanted to grab it and smash the terrifying evidence. The fatal proof. Disaster coming. An element beyond his control. “I . . . I have to prepare my listeners, consult the party. We have to get ready . . .”

“For what? Mass suicide?” Mari asked, shaking her head pityingly. She was pouting, a precocious child robbed of a chance to show off her special talent. Only her withering scorn for Pat was preventing another tantrum. “If they can build that, what the hell do you think you can do to get ready for them, except roll out a welcome mat? If you had any sense, you silly son of a bitch—”

“Don’t talk to your brother that way!” Jael cried, advancing on Mari in maternal wrath. “I won’t have it!”