“Yes, you did.”
She answered him only indirectly. “Jim…there could be nobody aboard.”
“Probably there isn’t,” he said, and knew that his voice betrayed him. Not belief so much as desire, not desire so much as need. And he was thirty-four goddamn years old, goddamn it! “Look!” someone yelled, and every head swiveled up, desperately searching a clear, star-jeweled sky.
Cowell couldn’t see anything. Then he could: a faint pinprick of light, marginally moving. As he watched, it moved faster and then it flared, entering the atmosphere. He caught his breath.
“Oh my God, it’s swerving off course!” somebody shouted from his left, where unofficial jerry-rigged tracking equipment had been assembled in a ramshackle group effort. “Impossible!” someone else shouted, although the only reason for this was that the object hadn’t swerved off a steady course before now. So what? Cowell felt a strange mood grip him, and stranger words flowed through his mind:Of course. They wouldn’t let me miss this.
“A tenth of a degree northwest…no, wait…”
Cowell’s mood intensified. With one part of his mind, he recognized that the mood was born of fatigue and strain, but it didn’t seem to matter. The sense of inevitability grew on him, and he wasn’t surprised when Ann cried, “It’s landinghere! Run!” Cowell didn’t move as the others scattered. He watched calmly, holding his half-filled Styrofoam cup of too-sweet coffee, face tilted to the sky.
The object slowed, silvery in the starlight. It continued to slow until it was moving at perhaps three miles per hour, no more, at a roughly forty-five degree angle. The landing was smooth and even. There was no hovering, no jet blasts, no scorched ground. Only a faintwhump as the object touched the earth, and a rustle of corn husks in the unseen wind.
It seemed completely natural to walk over to the spacecraft. Cowell was the first one to reach it.
Made of some smooth, dull-silver metal, he noted calmly, and unblackened by re-entry. An irregular oval, although his mind couldn’t pin down in precisely what the irregularity lay. Not humming or moving, or, in fact, doing anything at all.
He put out his hand to touch it, and the hand stopped nearly a foot away.
“Jim!” Ann called, and somebody else-must be Kleinschmidt-said, “Herr Dr. Cowell!” Cowell moved his hand along whatever hewas touching. An invisible wall, or maybe some sort of hard field, encased the craft.
“Hello, ship,” he said softly, and afterward wasn’t ever sure if he’d said it aloud.
“Don’t touch it! Wait!” Ann called, and her hand snatched away his.
It didn’t matter. He turned to her, not really seeing her, and said something that, like his greeting to the ship, he wasn’t ever sure about afterward. “I was raised Orthodox, you know. Waiting for the Messiah,” and then the rest were on them, with helicopters pulsing overhead and soldiers ordering everyone back,back I said! And Cowell was pushed into the crowd with no choice except to set himself to wait for the visitors to come out.
“Are you absolutely positive?” the president, who was given to superlatives, asked his military scientists.
He had assembled them, along with the joint chiefs of staff, the cabinet, the Canadian lieutenant-governor, and a sprinkling of advisors, in the cabinet room of the White House. The same group had been meeting daily for a week, ever since the object had landed. Washington was warmer than Minnesota; outside, dahlias and chrysanthemums still bloomed on the manicured lawn. “No signal of any type issued from the craft, at any time after you picked it up on the Hubble?”
The scientists looked uncomfortable. It was the kind of question only non-scientists asked. Before his political career, the president had been a financier.
“Sir, we can’t say for certain that we know all types of signals that could or do exist. Or that we had comprehensive, fixed-position monitoring of the craft at all times. As you-”
“All right, all right. Since it landed, then, and you got your equipment trained on it. No radio signals emanating from it, at any wavelength whatsoever?”
“No, sir. That’s definite.”
“No light signals, even in infrared or ultraviolet?”
“No, Mr. President.”
“No gamma lengths, or other radioactivity?”
“No, sir.”
“No quantum effects?” the president said, surprising everyone. He was not noted for his wide reading.
“Do you mean things like quantum entanglement to transport information?” the head of Livermore National Laboratory said cautiously. “Of course, we don’t know enough about that area of physics to predict for certain what may be discovered eventually, or what a race of beings more advanced than ours might have discovered already.”
“So there might be quantum signals going out from the craft constantly, for all you know.”
The Livermore director spread his hands in helpless appeal. “Sir, we can only monitor signals we already understand.”
The president addressed his chief military advisor, General Dayton. “This shield covering the craft-you don’t understand that, either? What kind of field it is, why nothing at all gets through except light?”
“Everything except electromagnetic radiation in the visible-light wavelengths is simply reflected back at us,” Dayton said.
“So you can’t use sonar, X-rays, anything that could image the inside?”
This time Dayton didn’t answer. The president already knew all this. The whole world knew it. The best scientific and military minds from several nations had been at work on the object all week.
“So what is your recommendation to me?” the president said.
“Sir, our only recommendation is that we continue full monitoring of the craft, with full preparation to meet any change in its behavior.”
“In other words, ‘Wait and see.’ I could have decided that for myself, without all you high-priced talent!” the president said in disgust, and several people in the room reflected with satisfaction that this particular president had only a year and three months left in office. There was no way he would be re-elected. The economy had taken too sharp a downturn.
Unless, of course, a miracle happened to save him.
“Well, go back to your labs, then,” the president said, and even though he knew it was a mistake, the director of Livermore gave in to impulse.
“Science can’t always be a savior, Mr. President.”
“Then what good is it?” the president said, with a puzzled simplicity that took the director’s breath away.
“Just keep a close eye on that craft. And try to come up with some actual scientific data, for a blessed change.”
ALIEN FIELD MAY BE FORM OF BOSE-EINSTEIN
CONDENSATE, SAY SCIENTISTS AT STANFORD
NOBEL PRIZE WINNER RIDICULES STANFORD STATEMENT
MINNESOTA STATE COURT THROWS OUT CASE CLAIMING
CONTAMINATED GROUND WATER NEAR ALIEN OBJECT
SPACE SHIELD MAY BE PENETRATED BY UNDETECTED
COSMIC RAYS, SAYS FRENCH SCIENTIST
SPACE-OBJECT T-SHIRTS RULED OBSCENE BY LOCAL
TOURIST COUNCIL, REMOVED FROM VENDOR STANDS
NEUTRINO STREAM TURNED BACK FROM SPACE SHIELD IN EXPENSIVE HIGH-TECH
FIASCO:
Congress to Review All Peer-Judged Science Funding
WOMAN CLAIMS UNDER HYPNOSIS TO HEAR VOICES FROM SPACE OBJECT-KENT
