BEEN HERE
BEFORE
Brundle has finally
taken the time to pull Gregor aside and explain what’s going on;
Gregor is not amused.
“Sorry you walked
into it cold,” says Brundle. “But I figured it would be best for
you to see for yourself.” He speaks with a Midwestern twang, and a
flatness of affect that his colleagues sometimes mistake for signs
of an underlying psychopathology.
“See what, in
particular?” Gregor asks sharply. “What, in particular?” Gregor
tends to repeat himself, changing only the intonation, when he’s
disturbed. He’s human enough to recognize it as a bad habit but
still finds it difficult to suppress the reflex.
Brundle pauses on the
footpath, looks around to make sure there’s nobody within earshot.
The Mall is nearly empty today, and only a humid breeze stirs the
waters on the pool. “Tell me what you think.”
Gregor thinks for a
moment, then summons up his full command of the local language:
it’s good practice. “The boys in the big house are asking for a
CAB. It means someone’s pulled his head out of his ass for long
enough to realize they’ve got worse things to worry about than
being shafted by the Soviets. Something’s happened to make them
realize they need a policy for dealing with the abductors. This is
against doctrine; we need to do something about it fast before they
start asking the right questions. Something’s shaken them up,
something secret, some HUMINT source from the wrong side of the
Curtain, perhaps. Could it be that man Gordievsky? But they haven’t
quite figured out what being here means. Sagan—does his presence
mean what I think it does?”
“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
semiopen 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 Potem kin 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 Heisen berg 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 toward 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 that, 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 Korolev
lucked out.”
“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 toward 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. 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.”