'Yes,' Brundle says tersely.
'Oh dear.' A reflex trips and Gregor takes off his spectacles and polishes them nervously on his tie before replacing them. 'Is it just him, or does it go further?' He leaves the rest of the sentence unspoken by convention — is it just him you think we'll have to silence?
'Further.' Brundle tends to talk out of the side of his mouth when he's agitated, and from his current expression Gregor figures he's really upset. 'Sagan and his friends at Cornell have been using the Arecibo dish to listen to the neighbors. This wasn't anticipated. Now they're asking for permission to beam a signal at the nearest of the other disks. Straight up, more or less; 'talk to us.' Unfortunately Sagan is well-known, which is why he caught the attention of our nominal superiors. Meanwhile, the Soviets have found something that scared them. CIA didn't hear about it through the usual assets — they contacted the State Department via the embassy, they're that scared.' Brundle pauses a moment. 'Sagan and his buddies don't know about that, of course.'
'Why has nobody shot them already?' Gregor asks coldly.
Brundle shrugs. 'We pulled the plug on their funding just in time. If we shot them as well someone might notice. Everything could go nonlinear while we were trying to cover it up. You know the problem; this is a semi-open society, inadequately controlled. A bunch of astronomers get together on their own initiative — academic conference, whatever — and decide to spend a couple of thousand bucks of research grant money from NIST to establish communications with the nearest disk. How are we supposed to police that kind of thing?'
'Shut down all their radio telescopes. At gunpoint, if necessary, but I figure a power cut or a congressional committee would be just as effective as leverage.'
'Perhaps, but we don't have the Soviets' resources to work with. Anyway, that's why I dragged Sagan in for the CAB. It's a Potemkin village, you understand, to convince everybody he contacted that something is being done, but we're going to have to figure out how to shut him up.'
'Sagan is the leader of the 'talk-to-us, alien gods' crowd, I take it.'
'Yes.'
'Well.' Gregor considers his next words carefully. 'Assuming he's still clean and uncontaminated, we can turn him or we can ice him. If we're going to turn him we need to do it convincingly — full Tellerization — and we'll need to come up with a convincing rationale. Use him to evangelize the astronomical community into shutting up or haring off in the wrong direction. Like Heisenberg and the Nazi nuclear weapons program.' He snaps his fingers. 'Why don't we tell him the truth? At least, something close enough to it to confuse the issue completely?'
'Because he's a member of the Federation of American Scientists and he won't believe anything we tell him without independent confirmation,' Brundle mutters through one side of his mouth. 'That's the trouble with using a government agency as our cover story.'
They walk in silence for a minute. 'I think it would be very dangerous to underestimate him,' says Gregor. 'He could be a real asset to us, but uncontrolled he's very dangerous. If we can't silence him we may have to resort to physical violence. And with the number of colonies they've already seeded, we can't be sure of getting them all.'
'Itemize the state of their understanding,' Brundle says abruptly. 'I want a reality check. I'll tell you what's new after you run down the checklist.'
'Okay.' Gregor thinks for a minute. 'Let us see. What everyone knows is that between zero three fifteen and twelve seconds and thirteen seconds Zulu time, on October second, sixty two, all the clocks stopped, the satellites went away, the star map changed, nineteen airliners and forty six ships in transit ended up in terminal trouble, and they found themselves transferred from a globe in the Milky Way galaxy to a disk which we figure is somewhere in the lesser Magellanic cloud. Meanwhile the Milky Way galaxy — we assume that's what it is — has changed visibly. Lots of metal-depleted stars, signs of macroscopic cosmic engineering, that sort of thing. The public explanation is that the visitors froze time, skinned the earth, and plated it over the disk. Luckily they're still bickering over whether the explanation is Minsky's copying, uh, hypothesis, or that guy Moravec with his digital simulation theory.'
'Indeed.' Brundle kicks at a paving stone idly. 'Now. What is your forward analysis?'
'Well, sooner or later they're going to turn dangerous. They have the historic predisposition towards teleological errors, to belief in a giant omnipotent creator and a purpose to their existence. If they start speculating about the intentions of a transcendent intelligence, it's likely they'll eventually ask whether their presence here is symptomatic of God's desire to probe the circumstances of its own birth. After all, we have evidence of how many technological species on the disk, ten million, twelve? Replicated many times, in some cases. They might put it together with their concept of manifest destiny and conclude that they are, in fact, doomed to give birth to God. Which is an entirely undesirable conclusion for them to reach from our point of view. Teleologists being bad neighbors, so to speak.'
'Yes indeed,' Brundle says thoughtfully, then titters quietly to himself for a moment.
'This isn't the first time they've avoided throwing around H-bombs in bulk. That's unusual for primate civilizations. If they keep doing it, they could be dangerous.'
'Dangerous is relative,' says Brundle. He titters again. Things move inside his mouth.
'Don't do that!' Gregor snaps. He glances round instinctively, but nothing happens.
'You're jumpy.' Brundle frowns. 'Stop worrying so much. We don't have much longer here.'
'Are we being ordered to move? Or to prepare a sterilization strike?'
'Not yet.' Brundle shrugs. 'We have further research to continue with before a decision is reached. The Soviets have made a discovery. Their crewed exploration program. The
'They—' Gregor tenses. 'What did they find?' He knows about the big nuclear-powered Ekranoplan, the dragon of the Caspian, searching the seven oceans for new worlds to conquer. He even knows about the small fleet they're trying to build at Archangelsk, the ruinous expense of it. But this is new. 'What did they find?'
Brundle grins humorlessly. 'They found ruins. Then they spent another eight weeks mapping the coastline. They've confirmed what they found, they sent the State Department photographs, survey details — the lot.' Brundle gestures at the Cuban War monument, the huge granite column dominating the Mall, its shadow pointing towards the Capitol. 'They found Washington DC, in ruins. One hundred and forty thousand miles that way.' He points due north. 'They're not total idiots, and it's the first time they've found one of their own species-transfer cognates. They might be well on their way to understanding the truth, but luckily our comrades in Moscow have that side of the affair under control. But they communicated their discovery to the CIA before it could be suppressed, which raises certain headaches.
'We must make sure that nobody here asks why. So I want you to start by dealing with Sagan.'
Chapter Eleven: Collecting Jar
It's noon, and the rippling heat haze turns the horizon to fog in the distance. Maddy tries not to move too much: the cycads cast imperfect shadows, and she can feel the Venetian blinds of light burning into her pale skin. She sighs slightly as she hefts the heavy canvas sample bag out of the back of the Land Rover: John will be needing it soon, once he's finished photographing the mock-termite nests. It's their third field trip together, their furthest dash into the outback, and she's already getting used to working with John. He's surprisingly easy to get on with, because he's so absorbed in his work that he's refreshingly free of social expectations. If she didn't know better she could almost let her guard down and start thinking of him as a friend, not an employer.
The heat makes her mind drift: she tries to remember what sparked her most recent quarrel with Bob, but it seems so distant and irrelevant now — like home, like Bob arguing with her father, like their hurried registry-office wedding and furtive emigration board hearing. All that makes sense now is the stifling heat, the glare of not-sunlight, John working with his camera out in the noonday sun where only mad dogs and Englishmen dare go. Ah, it was the washing. Who was going to do the washing while Maddy was away on the two-day field trip? Bob seemed to think he was doing her a favor, cooking for himself and taking his clothes to the single over- used public laundry. (Some year real soon now they'd get washing machines, but not yet…) Bob seemed to think he was being big-hearted, not publicly getting jealous all over her having a job that took her away from home with a male superior who was notoriously single. Bob seemed to think he was some kind of progressive liberated man, for putting up with a wife who had read Betty Freidan and didn't shave her armpits. Fuck you, Bob, she thinks tiredly, and tugs the heavy strap of the sample case over her shoulder and turns to head in John's direction. There'll be time to sort things out with Bob later. For now, she's got a job to do.
John is leaning over the battered camera, peering through its viewfinder in search of…something. 'What's up?' she asks.
'Mock termites are up,' he says, very seriously. 'See the entrances?' The mock termites are what they've come to take a look at — nobody's reported on them from close up, but they're very visible as soon as you venture into the dusty plain. She peers at the foot of the termite mound, a baked clay hump in the soil that seems to writhe with life. There are little pipe-like holes, tunnels almost, emerging from the base of the mound, and little black mock-termites dancing in and out of the holes in never-ending streams. Little is relative — they're almost as large as mice. 'Don't touch them,' he warns.
'Are they poisonous?' asks Maddy.
'Don't know, don't want to find out this far from the hospital. The fact that there are no vertebrates here—' he shrugs. 'We know they're poisonous to other insectoida.'
Maddy puts the sample case down. 'But nobody's been bitten, or died, or anything.'
'Not that we know of.' He folds back the lid of the case and she shivers, abruptly cold, imagining bleached bones lying unburied in the long grass of the inland plain, where no humans will live for centuries to come. 'It's essential to take care out here. We could be missing for days before anyone noticed, and a search party wouldn't necessarily find us, even with the journey plan we filed.'
'Okay.' She watches as he takes out an empty sample jar and a label and carefully notes down time and date, distance and direction from the milestone at the heart of Fort Eisenhower. Thirty six miles. They might as well be on another planet. 'You're taking samples?'
He glances round: 'Of course.' Then he reaches into the side pocket of the bag and removes a pair of heavy gloves, which he proceeds to put on, and a trowel. 'If you could put the case down over there?'
Maddy glances inside the case as he kneels down by the mock termite mound. It's full of jars with blank labels, neatly segregated, impassable quarantine zones for improbable species. She looks round. John is busy with the mock-termite mound. He's neatly lopped the top off it: inside, the earth is a squirming mass of — things. Black things, white things like bits of string, and a pulp of half-decayed vegetable matter that smells damply of humus. He probes the mound delicately with the trowel, seeking something. 'Look,' he calls over his shoulder. 'It's a queen!'
Maddy hurries over. 'Really?' she asks. Following his gloved finger, she sees something the size of her left forearm, white and glistening. It twitches, expelling something round, and she feels her gorge rise. 'Ugh!'
'It's just a happy mother,' John says calmly. He lowers the trowel, works it in under the queen and lifts her — and a collection of hangers-on, courtiers and
