“Just pull the pin on the top and drop the bulb. It diffuses very rapidly, and is effective out to ten or twenty meters.”
They fitted Carol to the suit and took her to a “proving ground” (a domed-over vacant lot behind the Krupp factory), where she practiced for an hour on dummy targets. Then she and Jacque had a leisurely dinner at La Fondita and flew with the suit back to Colorado Springs.
The Colorado Spring LMT chamber had never been so crowded. Four Tamers in GPEM suits, one in each quadrant, crouched behind tripod-mounted lasers. Four others had rifles with tranquilizer darts. The walls were lined with specialists, sitting behind stacked sandbags, breathers dangling around their necks. A stubby one-person floater was perched on the crystal, Carol standing beside it in her glittering suit.
Jacque sat waiting on the sandbags. Forty seconds after Carol jumped, a slingshot was coming from Groombridge: volunteer suicide with a fresh bridge. Jacque was to hold the bridge and try to make contact with the alien Carol was bringing back.
If she came back. Jacque had been on mood elevators for two days, a prescription to exorcise black despair. He felt vaguely guilty at not being able to worry about Carol for more than a few minutes at a time.
(They had sent him to the head doctor after he’d exploded at the people in the planning office. He’d gone there to propose that they find among the Project Thanos volunteers a suicide who was physically and mentally capable of doing Carol’s job. They said that they had tried, but there was no one suitable. He expressed his disbelief emphatically.)
Arnold Bates was in the primary chair in the control room. John Riley was in the backup.
“Take your position,” Bates said. Carol lifted up the floater and held it over her head. She stood centered on the LMT crystal and the plastic cylinder slid down over her.
After a minute the cylinder rose again. “Get ready, Lefavre.”
38 – Second Contact
Carol landed on a high bluff over a river valley. She set down the floater and took a look around.
“There’s a small city below me, at the junction of two rivers,” she said. She had been instructed to give a verbal report. They hadn’t said why but it was obvious: if she came back sliced up, as O’Brien had, they might not get the slice that had the camera tapes.
“Nineteen minutes. I can’t make out much detail in the city, even under highest magnification. Moving specks that are vehicles. Oh-it’s daytime. Achernar looks much smaller than the sun, but is painfully bright to look at, up to the last filter stop.
“I’ll get on the floater, go down there and see if I can nab-wait.” A round floater like the one that had approached O’Brien was settling out of the sky. “Here we go again.”
It was a virtual replay of the first contact, except that the aliens on the floater were all female. Immediately after they landed, the long black ship followed, rushing in and then slowly settling on the grassy field, making the ground move under Carol’s feet. The reflection of Achernar was a hard brilliant line down the ship’s hull.
Again, the door dilated open, the ramp came down, and the aliens invited her aboard. There’ve been some changes made, though, Carol thought.
Among her vague instructions was the suggestion she not turn on the magnetic field until she was actually threatened. She followed them up the ramp, turning to-the right and left so that the cameras would get everything.
“So far, no aggressive moves,” she said. They didn’t atop at the entrance, the scene of the earlier slaughter, but led her on down the corridor.
They walked for a hundred meters or so. “A door opened on the right; they’re taking me inside. . . . The walls are gray in this room. The ceiling and floor give off that yellow light. Sixteen minutes.”
They led her to the far wall. “There’s a real door here, a door that opens. Not just a seam. They want me to go through first. I’m motioning them through. After you, Alphonse.”