chromosphere of Mira Ceti. I thought you knew that. Basically a real observation, but with the contact between our ships and theirs variably emended.”
“Oh. Uh-huh.”
The boy looked quizzically at him. He said, “The thing is, Charles, we get graded on these simulations. But it’s all right; it didn’t hurt us.”
“Sure.” Forrester could feel the beginnings of an idea asserting themselves. No doubt it was the spray from the joymaker, but . . . “Could you do the same trick with some other things about the Sirians? So I could get a better look at them? Maybe the original encounter, for instance?”
“Neg.” The boy glared at his sister. “It’s Tunt’s fault, of course. She cried when the Sirians got killed. We have to wait to take the prebriefing over when we’re older.”
The little girl hung her head. “I was sad,” she said defensively. “But there’s other things we can do, Charles. Would you like to see the coconut on the Moon?”
“The what?”
“Oh, sweat. We’ll just show you.” The boy scratched his ear thoughtfully, then spoke to his junior joymaker. The view-walls clouded again.
“It’s supposed to be another artifact like the one the Sirians were searching for in Mira Ceti’s atmosphere,” he said over his shoulder, manipulating his teaching machine as he spoke. “Don’t know much about it, really. It’s not Sirian. It’s also not ours. Nobody knows whose they are, really, but there are lots of them around—and the Sirians don’t seem to know any more about them than we do. They’re old. And this is the nearest one.”
The view-walls cleared to show the lunar Farside. They were near the terminator line, with crystalline white peaks and craters before them, the jet black of a lunar night to one side. They were looking down into the shallow cup of a crater, where figures were moving.
“This is just tape,” the boy said. “No participation. Just look as long’s you want to.”
There was a clump of pressure huts in the crater. Perhaps they were laboratories, perhaps housing for the scientists or for those who were studying the “artifact” in the center of the screen—or who had been studying it once, perhaps, and had given it up.
It did indeed look like a coconut. As much as it looked like anything.
It was shaggy and rather egg-shaped. Its tendrils of—whatever they were—were not organic, Forrester thought. They were almost glassy in their brightness, reflecting and refracting the sunlight in a spray of color. By the scale of the huts, the thing appeared to be about the size of a locomotive.
“It’s empty, Charles,” volunteered the girl. “They all are.”
“But what are they?”
The girl giggled. “If you find out, tell us. They’ll make us twelfth-phase for sure!”
But the boy said kindly, “Now you know as much as anybody does.”
“But the Sirians must—”
“Oh, no, Charles. The Sirians are late arrivals. Like us. And that thing’s been there, just the way it is now, for no less than a couple gigayears.” He switched off the scene. “Well,” he said brightly. “Anything else you want to know?”
There was indeed. But Forrester had grasped the fact that the more he got to know, the more he was going to realize how little that knowledge was.
Astonishingly enough, it has not really occurred to him before this that a lot of things had been happening to the human race while he was lying deep in the liquid-helium baths of the West Annex Facility. It was like a story in a magazine. You turn a page. Ten years have passed; but you know perfectly well that they weren’t important; if they were, the author would have told you about them.
But far more than ten years had passed. And they were important, all right. And there was no Author to fill in the gaps in his knowledge.
Ten
On the third day of his job, Forrester had been six days out of the freezer. He felt as though it had been a million.
But he was learning. Yes, he told himself—gravely gratulatory—he was doing all his homework, and it was only a question of time until all answers were revealed to him and he took his proper place in this freemasonry of heroes.
Meanwhile, working for the Sirian was not at all disagreeable. The social pressure against his job came only from Adne, and he had seen very little of her since that first day. He missed her; but he had other things on his mind. The Sirian—it had agreed to allow Forrester to think of it as a male, although it did not concur in the diagnosis and would not explain further—was curious, insatiable but patient. When Forrester could not answer questions, it permitted him to take time to look them up. Its orientation, surprisingly enough, was all to the past. It volunteered an explanation for this—well, a sort of explanation. In its view, it said, the present state of any phenomenon was a mere obvious derivative of some prior state; and it was the prior states of mankind that it wanted to know about.
It crossed Forrester’s mind that if he were a war captive on a planet of alien enemies, the sort of knowledge that he would try to acquire would have more to do with arms and defense strategies. But he was not a Sirian, and he had decided not to bother trying to think like one. That was obviously beyond his powers. So he answered questions about Madison Avenue ad agencies and the angst that surrounded a World Series, and every day called up his bank to verify that his day’s salary had been deposited.
It had finally penetrated to Forrester that money was still money. His quarter of a million dollars would have bought him—and in fact had bought him—something very like a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of goods and services, even by twentieth-century standards. It was not the dollar that had been inflated. It was the standard of
