“That can wait. I have one problem, though. I should be getting back to the university.”
“Chet will be driving into Bemidji in another hour or so with some rolls of film to put on a plane to Minneapolis. One of the kids who hang around the gas station walked out this morning and brought in the car for Chet. It had been stranded in the traffic jam when the troopers closed roads into Lone Pine and has been sitting there ever since. You can ride with Chet to Bemidji and take the plane from there.”
“Kathy, I haven’t the price of a plane ticket on me.”
“That’s all right. I have. I picked up a wad of expense money before I left the Tribune.”
“I’ll pay you back later on. You may have to wait.”
“No need. I can work it into my expense account somehow. If not all this trip, the rest of it on the next.”
“I hate to leave,” he said. “It’s so peaceful up here. Once I get back, I’ll sit hunched over waiting for the phone to ring or for someone to tap me on the shoulder.”
“It may take a while. They may not move too fast. There’ll be other things for them to do.”
“When will Chet be leaving?”
“Not for a while. We still have a while.”
“When will you be back at the Tribune?”
“I have no idea. Not too long, I hope. I’ve been thinking about one thing you said. The thought of home you said the visitor projected into your mind—if that is what it did. What do you make of it?”
“I’ve thought and thought of it,” he said. “It was a curious thing to happen. Not something one would expect. All I do is think around in circles. I can’t seem to get a handle on it.”
“It does seem strange.”
“It all seems strange. If it hadn’t happened to me, I’d say it couldn’t happen.”
“Any overall impressions? Any idea of the kind of thing this visitor could be?”
“It was all so confusing,” he said. “I’ve tried to figure out if it is some sort of machine controlled by an intelligence or if it is actually a live creature. Sometimes I think one way, sometimes another. It all stays confused. Yet, I’m haunted by it. Maybe if I could tell it all, describe exactly what I saw and felt, to some scientist, an exobiologist perhaps, he might see something that I missed.”
“Talking to someone about it is exactly what you are trying to dodge,” she reminded him.
“What I’m trying to dodge,” he said, “is public exposure, questioning by governmental agencies, being sneered at or treated like an over-imaginative child, beaten to death by people who have no imagination, no concept of what may be involved.”
Kathy said, trying to comfort him, “Maybe in another day or two, our visitor will just fly off and leave. We may never see its like again. It may have dropped by only for a visit, a short rest before it goes on to wherever it is going.”
“I don’t think so,” said Jerry. “I don’t know why I think this, but I do.”
“There’s a man at the university,” said Kathy. “Dr. Albert Barr. An exobiologist. Not widely known, but he has published a few papers. Maybe you should talk with him. Jay wrote a story a year or so ago about him. He sounded like a good guy.”
“Maybe I’ll look him up,” said Jerry.
12. SPACE
“Do you see anything?” the pilot of the shuttle asked the co-pilot. “Our beam says we’re close, but I can’t see a thing. We should be seeing something. Some glint, some reflection. The sun is straight behind us.
“I see nothing,” said the co-pilot. “I thought I did a minute or so ago. But there’s nothing now.”
“I’d hate to run into the damn thing,” the pilot said. “Why don’t you get on the horn, check with the station?”
The co-pilot picked up the mike. “Station,” he said. “Station, this is Shuttle. Can you tell us where we are?”
“Shuttle,” said a voice, “our readings put you right on top of it. Don’t you see anything at all? Can’t you spot it?”
“Negative. We cannot see it.”
“Sheer off,” said Station. “To the left. You’re too close. Try an approach from another angle.”
“Sheering off7” the pilot said. “We’ll get out and try a new approach.”
The co-pilot grabbed his arm. ~‘My god,” he said, “do you see what I see? Will you look at that!”
13. WASHINGTON, D.C.
Once again, as he always did, to his continuing gratification, Dave Porter felt a deep, quiet pride in Alice Davenport, pride in being seen with her, in knowing that this splendid, ~ove1y woman would consent to spend some time with him. She sat across the table from him in one of the dim, far corners of an intimate Washington restaurant, with candles on the table and music coming from some place far away. She lifted her glass and looked across it at him.
“It can’t be too bad yet,” she said. “You’ve not taken on that terrible haggard look that I see too often. Did everything go all right today?”
“The news briefing went off fine,” he said. “They didn’t beat me up. They were almost buddy-buddy. There were no awkward moments. I hope it can keep on that way. I’ve told the President that on this one, we have to come out clean. No holding back on anything. The meeting with the President and his men was something else again. Some of those bastards are positively paranoid.”
“They want to muffle the news?”
“Well, not really. Although I suspect some of them would be happy if I did. No, it was other things. Sullivan screaming off his head about a few trees being cut down, as if a few trees are of any great account. State insisting that we immediately set up a policy for dealing with the visitor. The CIA counseling that we keep secret all that we may learn from it. Whiteside worrying about how we can defend ourselves against it.”
“Dave, you say the President and his men, as if you were not one of the President’s men. You don’t really like these men, do you. The men the President has around him.”
“It isn’t a question of whether I like them or not. I have to work with them. But on my own terms. More and more I am seeing that I have to do that. Some of them I like. Jack Clark, the presidential military aide—I like him. We generally see eye to eye.”
“Actually,” said Alice, “we don’t know what our Minnesota visitor is.”
“No, of course we don’t. Not the slightest idea. It seems quite apparent that it came from space, but that is all we know. Some of these men we were talking about aren’t even willing to admit that much, including our science advisor. Not knowing what it is is not to be wondered at. It landed just a little more than twenty-four hours ago. We’ll be lucky if we have any real idea of what it is by this time next week. It may take months to know.”
“If it stays that long.”
“That, too. It may not stay more than a day or two. If that should be the case, it will give us something to talk about and argue about for years. All sorts of conjecture. All Sorts of ideas about how its reception could have been handled differently. All sorts of theories about what we should have done. I hope it stays long enough for us to get a few things nailed down.”
“What I am afraid of, if it stays long enough,” said Alice, “is that we’ll get angry at it, for cutting down some of our precious trees or for some other reasons. Dave, we can’t afford to hate this thing. We can’t allow ourselves to become tilled with a blind hatred for it. We may not love it, but we must respect it as another life form.”
“There,” said Porter; “speaks the true anthropology student.”
“You can make fun of me if you want to,” she said, “but that’s the way it has to be, for our own good. There probably is other life in the universe and if there’s life, there should be some intelligence—but it’s unlikely there are too many intelligences .
“Alice, we don’t even know if this thing is alive, let alone intelligent.”
“There must be intelligence. It landed on a road; it picked its landing site. It is cutting down trees and extracting cellulose. That would argue some intelligence.”
“A pre-programmed machine
“I can’t accept that,” said Alice. “It requires too much. A preprogrammed machine would have to be programmed to respond to millions of situations and environments. I doubt that could be done. When the visitor landed, it could have had no preconceived notions of what kind of planet it was landing on. A general idea maybe but that is all Even if it were only a machine and was capable of all these things that seem so impossible there would have to be somewhere an intelligence that put the pro gram into it.”