Mindbridge (19 page)

AED ON SIRIUS HOAX:

NO COMMENT?

COLORADO SPRINGS, 14 July (WPI). An angry spokesman for the AED at first refused to comment today on the UIS charge that his organization had deliberately misinterpreted data for the purpose of increasing AED’s appropriation next week.

John T. Riley, Director of AED Colorado Springs, was reached at his home early this afternoon. When queried on the UIS allegations, he said that they were “beneath the attention of any intelligent person.”

Riley at first refused to elaborate, but then gave his opinion as a private citizen (noting that his views did not necessarily agree with the official AED position), accusing the UIS of “criminal cynicism,” charging that the twenty-year-old union is “playing politics with the very survival of the human race.”

Riley further claimed that the explanation of the Sirius gravity waves advanced by the UIS “could be disproved by a retarded undergraduate with a blunt pencil.” He challenged the UIS to “come up with a mechanism, however absurd” that could change the total angular momentum of a stellar system without affecting the rotation and revolution rates of one of the stars.

TRILLION-DOLLAR

AED BUDGET PASSES

STOCKHOLM, 23 July (IP). The World Order Council today passed by a narrow margin appropriations totaling $877,000,000,000 for the operation of the Agency for Extraterrestrial Development in fiscal 2053-4.

Opposition to the bill, which passed by a vote of 563 to 489, was headed by Minority Leader Jakob Tshombe (L., Xerox), who has threatened to resign his post in protest to the record-breaking budget.

Almost three times the size of last year’s budget, most of the money is earmarked for the AED’s Sirius crash program. The most expensive part of this program is the construction of a Levant-Meyer Translation facility on a planet circling Tau Ceti.

Critics of the program point out that the Sirius system is almost certainly planetless, and that the LMT requires a target planet. The AED, however, claims that at the range of Sirius from Tau Ceti (less than thirteen light-years), the target body need be no larger than a small asteroid.

TAU CETI MISSION, 14 FEBRUARY 2054

PERSONNEL:

1.
 
TAMER 7 TANIA JEEVES. FEMALE, 33. 11
^TH
MISSION. SUPERVISOR.

2.
 
TAMER 5 GUSTAV HASENFEL. MALE, 28. 8
^TH
MISSION.

3.
 
TAMER 4 (PROB) JACQUE LEFAVRE. MALE, 28. 7
^TH
MISSION.

4.
 
TAMER 3 CAROL WACHAL. FEMALE, 26. 4
^TH
MISSION.

5.
 
TAMER 2 VIVIAN HERRICK. FEMALE, 26. 3
^RD
MISSION.

EQUIPMENT:

5 GPEM MODULES

1 PERSONNEL RECORDER

1 HOMING FLOATER (SECOND SHOT)

(ADDITIONAL EQUIPMENT WILL BE SUPPLIED ON TAU CETI FOR SECONDARY TRANSLATION TO SIRIUS SYSTEM (SEE ATTACHED SPECIFICATIONS))

POWER REQUIREMENT:

2 SHOTS 9.84699368131 SU, TUNING

@ LOCAL TIME

07:45:28.28867BDK200561

07:48:11.38557BDK200560

MISSION PRIORITY 1.

    
FUNDING
     
#999999
         
SIRIUS
           
90%

                
#000105
         
GEOFY
          
10%

Jacque and Carol went to Hell the week of its first rainfall.

Hell was the logical name for the only planet in Tau Ceti’s biosphere. No bodies of standing water, constant dust storms, Sahara-like temperatures even at the polar regions.

They landed near the equator, where Tau was an amorphous white glare overhead, where abrasive clouds sped along the ground on hurricane winds almost hot enough to boil water. Dunes melted and formed with surreal swiftness around them and there was no horizon, only white sand at your feet and white sky overhead and a white storm all around.

The wind loved only flatness; it had long since ground every mountain and hill down for dust to fill the valleys, and it screamed displeasure at their height and tried to blow them down.

Jacque could tune out the shriek of the wind outside, but the suit’s stabilizer moaned a wavering complaint as it fought to keep him upright. The sound all but deafened him, and made his teeth buzz.

Prudent animal instinct was telling him he’d be better off anyplace else. He resisted the urge to run blindly away, but did keep walking in nervous circles, looking for the floater. So did everyone else.

After a few minutes the floater appeared, tacking in against the wind. It bobbed like a bucking horse as they struggled on to it, then spiraled crazily up through the storm.

At about two thousand meters they hit a steady strong tailwind and started homing north, toward the polar settlement. Below them the top of the storm was an unbroken white surface, more like a snowscape than a maelstrom.

The storm began to break up as they moved north. Mottled ground was visible through twisting cyclone swirls of cloud. Eventually it turned hilly; nearing the pole they had to reach for altitude to clear the frost-dusted tops of mountains, Himalaya-sized but weathered into gentle lines.

And in a low bowl, protected by mountains on all sides, a sudden alien splash of green. Gardenspot. They dipped over it but didn’t land. The floater was homing toward where the LMT was being built, in another valley beyond.

It had taken six months to manufacture a crystal large enough to be practical and also free of internal flaws; a crystal with one microscopic bubble inside will explode with disconcerting force when you turn on the juice.

The crystal was in place and calibrated now, but the installation bore little resemblance to the streamlined efficiency of Colorado Springs. The first sign of it Tania’s team saw was a glittering metallic spiderweb covering acres of mountainside-the antenna that collected power from an orbiting microwave laser. A few kilometers away the actual station sat, an aluminum dome dwarfed by four concentric rings of huge squat metal cylinders, which were the fuel cells fed by the antenna. Cables linked everything in a confusing but graceful skein of catenaries.

They landed on a small concrete square by the entrance to the dome, between two larger vehicles that were obviously of local design and manufacture. There was nothing green here, just dark red dust that crunched underfoot.

A man dressed only in shorts met them at the door. He led them around back to a crude winch arrangement, where they climbed out of their GPEM suits.

Inside, he gave them homespun shorts and showed them the crystal.

“Ninety centimeters,” he said. “I’m afraid it can only transport two at a time. Or one, with equipment.”

“No facilities for sterilization,” Tania said.

“Not really. We can seal off the dome and heat everything inside-specimens included, I’m afraid.”

“It works, though?” Jacque said. “The crystal?”

“Sure. We’ve sent people to Sixty-one Cygnus and Vega.”

“Not Sirius?”

“Not yet. We don’t want to send anybody on a blind jump.”

“You’re still calibrating, then,” Gus said.

“For Sirius, yeah. We’ve lost eight probes doing longer and longer jumps.” The shorter a jump, the bigger its target has to be.

“That doesn’t sound good,” Tania said.

“Well, it means there’s no planet in the system the size of earth or bigger. . . or maybe there is. Maybe the L’vrai destroy our probes before they can slingshot back.

“There’s one due back tomorrow, a ten-day jump. You can spend the night in town and come back with me in the morning.”

“Fine,” Tania said. “It’s been a long day.”

He laughed. “Nothing but long days on this planet.” Hell’s axis was almost perpendicular to the ecliptic. Tau skimmed along the southern horizon for a ten-hour-long sunrise during the day; for night, they had ten hours of twilight.

They drove back to Gardenspot with the controller, whose name was Eliot Sampson. The ride on the electric truck was slow and bumpy.

They crawled up a long rise beyond which Sampson had said it was all downhill to town. When they got to the top, he slammed on the brakes.

“I’ll be damned. Look at that.” Suspended over Gardenspot was a large white-and-gray cloud. It was floating toward them.

“What,” Jacque said, “A cloud?”

“Right, a cloud, a cloud.” He put the truck in gear and lurched on down the hill. “I forgot,” he shouted over the whining motor, “today’s the big cloud-seed experiment. See whether local rain can be . . . can compete with irrigation.”

A few big drops spattered the windshield, leaving brown mud tracks in the dust. “Nothing but fossil water here,” he said, “but lots of it. Underground lakes, rivers. We can pump it up, surround Gardenspot with standing water. Water vapor in the air.” He laughed wildly.

Jacque had braced himself between the metal seatback and the dashboard, knuckles turning white. “Say, aren’t you going a little fast?”

“No, hell, all I ever do is drive this road. Want to get there before-“ Suddenly they were drenched, blinded by a solid sheet of water. The rear wheels of the truck decided they wanted to lead for a while.

They spun around several times, wheels trying to find traction under the thin layer of sudden mud. Finally they slid into a ditch and came to a jarring halt. The first rain in a million years had caused the planet’s first traffic accident.

The driver got a bloody nose and Jacque wrenched his shoulder, but there were no other injuries. The rain stopped while they were still pushing on the truck and listening to apologies.

“Sixty seconds now.” Eliot Sampson looked up from the control board and, with the rest of the small crowd, stared at the waiting crystal.

“I just thought of something,” Carol whispered.

“What’s that?” Jacque said.

She took his hand. Her palm was moist and cold. ‘What if . . . what if the probe doesn’t come back alone? What if some L’vrai is inside the slingshot radius?”

“Forty-five,” Sampson said.

“Seems unlikely,” Jacque said. “Crystal’s not that big.”

“Still. There isn’t a weapon in this place.”

Jacque shook his head. “Probe won’t even come back, probably.” He stepped to the wall and removed a heavy pair of boltcutters hanging there; he hefted the tool like a club. “Better than nothing.”

Sampson looked at him quizzically. “Thirty seconds. What are you doing, Lefavre?”

Some of the others caught on. “Move up here, Jacque,” Tania said. She was one of a half-dozen sitting closest to the crystal. “Just in case.”

“Oh. I see,” Sampson said. He started to count down from twenty. Jacque moved directly in front of the crystal and planted his feet in a wide solid stance. He had never played baseball or cricket, but he stared at the air over the crystal like a batter sizing up his strike zone.

“Zero—God!”

The probe was a squat black four-legged machine cluttered with instruments. Three severed tentacles clutched one side of it, pale white and writhing, spraying droplets of iridescent green fluid. Jacque half-swung and then stepped back.

The tentacles stopped squirming, relaxed, and dropped off. Tania broke the silence.

“I guess we do have a mission.”

Later that day they looked at the tapes from the probe. It hadn’t found a planet. It had come out of the LMT onto the hull of a L’vrai spaceship.

It sat on the long black hull undisturbed for days. Its holo camera revealed eight other L’vrai vessels, nearby, slowly orbiting Sirius. There might have been a thousand others, out of camera range.

Then a big spidery thing that could have been either a robot or an alien in a space suit-or just another L’vrai transmutation-scratched its way up the hull, captured the probe, and took it inside the ship through an iris in the hull.

It left the probe in an empty room, where it sat unmolested for hours. Then a L’vrai came in, shuffling awkwardly on four stiff legs: it had taken the form of the probe, perhaps to put the machine at its ease, perhaps for some less obvious motive.

The two machines regarded each other for some time. The probe’s instruments recorded no sound, no electromagnetic signal that might have been an attempt at communication. They just looked at each other for ninety-three minutes; then the bogus probe waddled out.

It was replaced immediately by several L’vrai, in what was probably their natural form (if indeed they had a natural form). It was a versatile shape, rather like an octopus with a flexible skeleton. They had six or eight-varying with the individual-large tentacles that could serve as feet or crude two-fingered hands. A tubular thorax broadened into a scalloped crest at the top, where it sported three eyes; one large fixed one and two smaller eyes on articulated stalks, which waved from the corners of the crest. Under the fixed eye was a slit that occasionally curled open to reveal parallel rows of black shark-like teeth set in foamy mucus.