And then, suddenly, I stopped short. Maybe I could. I turned to the kids.
“Look, children, you stay here,” I ordered crisply. “The radio reception circuitry is still on here. Here! Ham! Come over here!”
He came over to the panel.
“See that knob?” I said, using a sound pointer. He nodded. “Well, if you turn it to the right it increases the volume; to the left, it decreases. I’m going back to
150
The Web of the Chozen
the scout and I’ll call through here on the radio. I want you to turn that knob so that my voice is as loud as you can make it and still understand me. Okay?”
“Sure,” he replied. “It’s got some ridges. I think I can turn it with my hoof.”
I nodded. “Okay, then. Listen for me.” I turned to Eve. “Now, girl, you stand by the intercom, here. When I tell you, you turn this switch like this. See?” I demonstrated and she nodded understanding. I turned back to Ham. “Now, when I tell you, you throw that lever, there. That will put you into an open circuit. I won’t be able to hear you over this damned human-designed system, but I should be able to pick up the intercom, barely, at that volume. You stay still, both of you, or your own sounds will interfere. Any trouble, knock the panel three times and we’ll come running.”
Satisfied, I went back to the scout. My wounds from the gardener robot were really painful and I was starting to feel stiff; I needed a good sleep’s repair, but I didn’t have time for it now. I was too excited.
I made it into the bridge of my own ship and patched quickly into the computer.
“Okay, Ham,” I said through the radio. “I’ll start counting, and keep counting until you tap the panel twice. That will tell me you’re at maximum loudness.”
I started counting, slowly, and as I did I started to hear sounds coming back a little, some distortion and feedback from being so close. Finally, at thirty-one, Ham tapped twice.
“Good,” I told him. “Now, Eve, you throw that switch at the same time Ham throws the lever on his panel. Don’t worryI’ll know when it’s open. Then stay as still as you can.”
I reflected that as soon as we got the Nijinsky set up, we’d have to teach George and the kids intersystem code.
We? I thought suddenly. Funny … The thought was fleeting, for suddenly sound burst
151
The Web of the Chozen
into the room. I could hear the humming of the ma-chinery on the Nijinsky bridge, a lot of annoying mechanical sounds and static, and, almost pervasively the breathing sounds of the two kids.
Suddenly George came up.
“What in God’s great heaven?” was all he could manage.
“Quiet!” I whispered. “Experimenti”
He stood there, and I started.
“Bridge to Gardeners 41 and 42,” I called through the radio. It was horriblemy voice echoed and bounced all around and reflected back into the speaker. It was so great a sonic explosion that my big, sensitive ears barely caught, “Gardeners 41 and 42 standing by for instructions.”
I smiled. Contact! It’d be hell, though. I wondered about their capabilities, but, I told myself, first things
first.
“The insects are not insects at all,” I told them, wishing I could hold my ears when I spoke, or shut them off a bit. I turned to George, finally moving over into the Nijinsky for a while, and he was wincing. I wished I could join him, and fleetingly hoped poor Marsha was either sound asleep or hadn’t developed any of our hearing, yet.
“Not insects?” came the tinny reply. “But this ship is sterile. They are not-human. Therefore, they must be infestations.”
“Not infestations!” I told them sharply. “They are humans.”
“They are not-human,” the machines persisted.
“Different kind of human,” I told them, my head pounding from the sonic beating I was taking.
“We are programmed for but one kind of human,” came the reply.
“This is a different kind of human,” I argued. “You must accept them into your programming. The old hu-mans are no more. These are the new-humans, the only humans.”
152
The Web of the Chozen
There was silence, and I could almost hear their quasibiological relays considering and mulling over this statement. I could sympathize; they’d had a simple program, based on simple assumptions. Now they were being told that those assumptions were wrong, that their humans were not human but these new, strange, things were. It was impossible, inconceivableand yet this information came from the bridge, to whom they were ultimately responsible. Here they had a contra-diction. They would either accept it or they would switch off.
They accepted it.
“Not-human is human,” they responded finally. “We acknowledge this new programming.”
“You will accept voice programming and instructions only from the new-humans,” I instructed. “Acknowledge.”
“We acknowledge,” came the reply.
“The new-humans speak in high frequencies,” I told them. “Do you have the capability to receive them? What is your transducer frequency range?”
“We may receive any band selected up to one hundred thousand cycles,” they replied.
I relaxed. Okay, then, we would be able to talk to them, although definitely not over voice radio. I wondered if they were advanced enough to leam intersystem code. I hoped so.
“I shall come to you now,” I told them. “I will speak to you. You will adjust to my frequency.”
“We understand,” they replied. “Standing by.”
“Eve!” I called. “Switch that thing off! Ham! Turn it down, then come back here!”
I broke contact, and almost collapsed, my ears ringing, my whole head feeling scrambled. I don’t know how I managed to get through that ordeal, and I am very sure that I could never go through it again.
I lay there, collapsed in something of a heap, gasp-ing for breath.
153
The Web of the Chozen
George came back in. “You’re hurt,” he said, noticing my wounds for the first time.
“I’m at the stage where I wish I would die and I’m afraid I will,” I admitted. Even his voice beat like anvils in my head.
I heard Ham and Eve running down the corridor, and George turned to greet them.
“The kids will tell me what all this is about,” he said gently. “I’ll do whatever has to be done. You go below and collapse. We need you too much.”
I started to protest, but I could barely get up, and they had to help me down the ramp.
“You smell like warmed-over piss,” George said, a touch of revulsion in his tone. “After we get back I’ll wash you off as best I can. Lay down near the shower.”
I nodded, made it to the shower door, and collapsed knowing I could do nothing further except groan.
We didn’t fit in the shower, of course, and it’s ul-trabeaming wouldn’t stretch, but the basin was just outside and we used it as long as the water lasted.
George checked me over, and we went up first to hear the story of the robots from the kids and then | to meet them. I hoped fervently that I’d been a hundred percent successful.
I ached so much I couldn’t drop off, and I moved my head to look at Marsha.
In the short time I’d been gone, she’d changed. She lay there, stretched out on the grass, face up in a coma. She still wore the light jumpsuit, but I could see that it was already bulging a bit, stretching in odd places, and her head seemed slightly wider, a bit stretched. Her close-cropped hair was falling out;
there were bald spots.
I lay, looking at her, and lapsed into unconscious-ness.
There was a lot of noise, and people talking, when I awoke with a start.
154
The Web of the Chozen
I looked first at Marsha, who was out again on the grass. She was now greatly changed. Forelegs were well developed, the ears were well along, hind legs almost completely in. Her body was quite thin but properly proportioned for a Choz, and there was an even growth of body hair. And she showed green.
Quickly noting this new development, I looked over at the bio lab console. It was an amazing sight.
George was there, and Eve, and they were running samples. I knew some of the stuffall but the deeply analyticalcould be done without me; but only through the computer could I translate and amplify
the slides into sonic images George could understand.
George didn’t need that anymore.
A huge, spiderlike shape was also there suspended upside down on the curved ceiling, and it was talking.
“The red area of number twenty-seven, chain three, is now throwing a pseudopod at eight degrees, holding color steady at blue-white,” said an electronic voice.
George nodded to himself, apparently satisfied.
“Then it’s time we started playing some tunes,” he said lightly.
I Jumped up. “What the hell?” was all I could man-age.
George barely glanced at me. “Oh, hello. Bar. I was wondering if you’d ever wake up. Better eat somethingwe’ve been through two cycles since you conked out. How do you feel?”
“All right,” I managed, still confused. I glanced up at the robot, memories of it or one like it in a similar pose much less pleasant in my mind. Seeing it again made me nervous.
“What’s that thing doing here?” I asked suspiciously. “It’s helping us ‘track the virus in her blood,” Eve put in. “It can see in the same way the humans see.” Sure it could, I knew. “Butit’s a gardeneri”
155
The Web of the Chozen
“No, it’s a utility robot programmed as a gardener,” George responded. “Cheaper to make a standard model. You should know that. I’d assumed these things were a part of your everyday world.”
I shook my head. “No, not ones looking like that. Wheeled ones, tracked ones, even roughly humanoid ones, but no spiders.”
“Terraform unit model, obviously,” the biologist decided. “And you have some deep-seated phobia against spiders.”
It was true that I didn’t like them very much, but I let the remark pass and started to eat to get my strength back. –
“Any progress?” I asked between tubers.
“We’re getting there,” he replied.
“Getting there nothing!” Eve exclaimed admiringly. “He’s practically got it. Bar! He’s got samples from her blood doing tricks for him!”
I stopped and stared at the biologist, “That true?”
“Not exactly,” he responded cautiously. “What I needed, what I couldn’t really get from you, was a pre-cise description of the molecular structure of the virus in the early stages. I’ve been handicapped by not hav-ing a sample of the original intestinal virus that Moses worked onthat’s twenty years vanished in my mem-ory. But it wasn’t that complicated a thing, that I remember. I operated under the assumption that Moses’ changes would be obvious mathematical alterations in the basic structure rather than a complete mutation. Remember, it’s only been about fifty sorry, fifty for me, about three hundred for you years since we had electron microscopes capable of seeing something this tiny to begin with.”
“And you’ve figured out what he did?” I prompted. You had to do this when George lectured, and everything on his subject quickly became a lecture. It was an adventure to him to be back in his profession after twenty years.
156
The Web of the Chozen
He nodded. “Oh, yes. That German fellow, Wenzel, solved some of the great mysteries of man, like what caused the common cold and about ninety types of cancer and various minor diseases. He also opened up some real problemsa whole new molecular biology. Here were creatures only thirty or so times the size of a hydrogen atom, yet with all the elements of life. There were lots of them, of course. I doubt if anybody’s counted all the little critters yet. They’re a new kind of life, a third kind, neither plant nor animal.
We call them viruses only because that is what they most closely resemble.”
“And you have the virus doing tricks?” I prodded again, insistently.
He shook his head, radiating mild derision. “Hardly,” he said. “Oh, I’ve got it to stop growing
when I tell it and speed up when I tell it, but that’s all.”
I looked at Eve and she gave me a see-what-I mean kind of expression.
“Do you mean to tell me,” I said evenly, “that you have broken the code?”