Invaders (a sequel to Vaz, Tiona and Disc) (27 page)

Tiona opened the door at the bottom of the stairs and they stepped into an enormous, high-ceilinged, well-lit, painstakingly-organized… “physics lab” Cooper decided was the best term for it, though semi-industrial workshop could have applied as well. Cooper carefully followed behind Tiona, not exactly hiding, just not making his presence an obtrusive thing. Dr. Gettnor, wearing the same ill-fitting baggy clothes Cooper remembered, stood and turned away from a series of big screens on the wall covered with what Cooper thought were programming blocks.

Cooper would have described Gettnor smile at seeing his daughter as “shy.” There followed a brief hug between the two, loving on Tiona’s part and almost painfully clumsy on the part of her father. Tiona turned and indicated Cooper, “Dad, you remember General Cooper? He came to see us shortly after we first got the thrusters working.”

Gettnor looked in Cooper’s direction though his eyes didn’t rise high enough to meet Cooper’s. He nodded and said, “Hello.”

As Tiona had suggested, Cooper didn’t try to extend his hand for a shake. He merely said, “Hello,” himself, then actually stepped backward to make himself less conspicuous.

Gettnor started across the room, Cooper would have said somewhat eagerly, saying, “I’ve finished the wheelchair. Do you think you could take it to that boy?”

Tiona gave Cooper an amused look and a little shake of the head. She followed her father over to a legless chair that was reclining on the floor. It did
look
something like a wheelchair, if the wheelchair had had its wheels removed. Dr. Gettnor spoke a few words to his AI and the chair suddenly lifted into the air. Now it looked even more like a wheel-less wheelchair. Tiona’s dad sat down in it, lifted his feet into the foot rests and pushed forward on a little joyball. The chair scooted across the room, then ascended to slide effortlessly over a big work-table and descend on the other side. Gettnor turned the chair and came back toward them. “Any suggestions?”

Tiona said, “No Dad, it looks awesome. I’ll be happy to take it to him, but I think it’s really important that we talk about the aliens first, okay?”

“Sure…” Gettnor looked a little puzzled, but then brightened, “The encoding on their communications was fascinating.”

Cooper felt the hair stand up on the back of his neck, but Tiona merely said, “You were able to figure it out?”

Gettnor lifted his shoulders a little and what Cooper thought was a conscious effort to form a shrug. “Yeah, but it took
several days
!” Cooper got the impression that Gettnor was astonished to have had to spend several days puzzling out a completely alien form of communication. Gettnor continued, “Fortunately, the computers on the mothership are in almost constant communication with the daughter-ship. The daughter-ship returns communications constantly as well, though we’re presumably only getting some backside leakage from some kind of parabolic antenna. The signal’s weak and fades out completely a lot of the time.” He glanced to the side, “We’re pretty lucky that they’re lined up almost coaxially with us and that the daughter-ship’s antenna leaks.” He’d gotten out of the wheel-less chair and—apparently controlled by his AI— the chair had returned to its original location. Dr. Gettnor started back across the room to his screens, his eyes already back up on the screens’ cryptic contents.

Apparently realizing that her dad wasn’t spontaneously going to tell them any more about whatever he’d discovered regarding the aliens’ communications, Tiona said, “So what did you learn about their communication system?”

“Oh,” Gettnor said, sounding a little interested, “they use trinary, rather than binary. From the signals they’re sending I don’t think their computers have a great deal of processing power. That might be because microchips with fine architecture are so much more susceptible to radiation effects” He glanced at his daughter as if to check whether she understood, even though his glance didn’t rise to her eyes. “They passed near the sun on their way here they’d need their chips to be pretty radiation resistant.”

“So, you can understand what their computers are saying to each other?”

Vaz nodded.

“Can you tell what their people are saying to each other?”

He frowned, “They aren’t
people
… They’re
definitely
aliens.”

Tiona gave Cooper an amused but frustrated look. Turning back to her dad, she said, “Can you tell what the
aliens
are saying to each other?”

“Well… I’m still working on this program,” he waved at the programming blocks up on his big screens. “It translates most things. I picked up a poor quality program from them that translates the aliens’ acoustic emissions into machine code. The voice-to-code program on the daughter-ship had become corrupted so they sent a backup copy of the whole program over from the mothership. Their machine code is logically organized so I can almost always work out what their voice commands tell their computers to do, and from that the program can usually work out what their spoken words mean.” He tilted his head, “Fortunately, they were worried that the data corruption may have affected some of their other files. Instead of just using checksums to determine whether the data’d been corrupted, they’ve been sending entire libraries of material from the mothership to the daughter-ship, apparently confirming information identity on a bit by bit basis. Those libraries have a lot of images that have helped my program define a lot of nouns.” He glanced toward Tiona with an odd expression that Cooper thought might mean he was about to divulge a particularly interesting fact. “They
don’t
have any security protocols to protect their data; as if they’ve never encountered data espionage or hacking.” He gave one of his minute shrugs, “So if you can get me a way to transmit to them, I can probably tell the computer on their mothership to send stuff directly to us. That way I could get the answers to a lot of things that have been puzzling me, but that they haven’t transmitted. If you wanted to know some things, I could tell their computer to send that stuff too.”

Cooper was so stunned by this assertion that he found it difficult to believe. However, when Tiona turned to look at him questioningly he simply nodded. He’d already been told by the people at NSA that the aliens were coding in trinary, but the coders over there kept saying they just couldn’t get any further understanding of what they meant without some kind of Rosetta Stone.

Tiona turned back to her father, “Have you been able to figure out what the aliens are doing here in our solar system?”

“Oh, yeah. The Epsilon Eridani system they came from is severely overpopulated. They’re moving here because they need more room.”

Tiona turned an appalled glance back to Cooper, but then turned back to her father and continued in a relatively calm tone, “Moving?”

“Yeah, they have an amazing system for packing
millions
of hibernating colonists into enormous ships. They time the ships’ transits so that when they come through their orbits send them where they want the ships to go in the next system. I thought it’d be impossible to move significant numbers of aliens over interstellar distances, but apparently their race has moved billions, not just once, but over and over again. Each system they move into eventually becomes hyper populated and then they send a lot of their population on to the next set of systems. They’re gradually spreading around the galaxy.”

Though Tiona looked wide-eyed, she continued to speak in an ordinary tenor. “You’re not saying they could put a million aliens in a single ship, are you?”

“More than that. Once they’re in hibernation, they can pack each one into less than 100 liters of space. That means they could put a million of them in 100,000 cubic meters. That’s only one third the volume of an oil supertanker and their ships are quite a bit bigger than supertankers.”

Tiona frowned doubtfully at him, “They’re physiologically able to live on Earth?”

“Well, no. The gravity’s too high and the atmosphere’s too thin.” For a moment Cooper felt a surge of relief, but then Dr. Gettnor continued calmly and with what appeared to be less interest than he’d displayed while discussing the floating wheelchair, “But apparently they’re really accomplished at genetic modification. They’ve already modified the aliens on board the daughter-ship so that they have a heavier skeleton, stronger muscles and bigger lungs. That way they’ll be able to function here on Earth. They can modify themselves to live in weightless environments on the asteroids. They plan to float habitat in the atmosphere of Venus and build subterranean habitat on the Moon, Mars, and the moons of the Jovian planets… they’re really quite adaptable”

“My God Dad!” Tiona said, giving Cooper a horrified look. “Are they thinking they could just move in a huge population to live alongside us on Earth?”

Gettnor shook his head as if surprised that she might think that. “No, they design viruses to wipe out any lifeforms they find problematic. Apparently they’ve never encountered intelligent life forms before, but they don’t think it’ll be difficult to design a virus for us.”

Cooper swallowed. As a young soldier he’d been shot at in a couple of conflicts, but hearing Gettnor calmly describe how the aliens fully expected to wipe out the human race was making his heart pound harder than it had back then.

Apparently it was upsetting Tiona as well. She bent down as if to look up into her father’s eyes, but then stood abruptly back up when he turned slowly to keep from having to meet her gaze. Cooper saw her take a deep, presumably calming, breath. “Dad? Doesn’t this worry you? They’re planning to kill
everybody
on Earth! You, Mom, Dante, me, Linda, all our cousins… Everyone!”

“Well, yeah,” he said, not sounding particularly upset. “We’ll have to keep that from happening.” He got up from his chair and walked over to a corner of the basement that looked a little bit like an inner-city boxing gym.

Tiona said with what sounded like forced patience, “
How
are we going to keep that from happening Dad?”

Gettnor jumped up and grabbed an overhead pipe. To Cooper’s astonishment Gettnor started ripping off pull-ups. Cooper had been thinking that the baggy clothing hid a soft obese body—but
that
couldn’t be. The man must have done forty pull-ups before he dropped off the bar, grabbed a couple of handgrips and started doing push-ups. Cooper counted those and Gettnor stopped at eighty. He did
100
sit-ups.

Cooper watched this in awe. During the performance Tiona on several occasions tried to ask Gettnor questions, but got no answers. She even went so far as to touch her father on the shoulder a couple of times, but if he noticed he gave no indication. After the sit-ups, Gettnor pulled on a couple of lightweight boxing gloves and began absolutely pounding a heavy bag, then a light bag.

Hands on her hips, Tiona watched her father exasperatedly for about another minute, then turned to Cooper and said, “We’re wasting our time here. Let’s go talk to my Mom. Milk, cookies, hot chocolate, coffee.”

Thus Cooper found himself sitting in a pleasant farmhouse kitchen, eating cookies, drinking coffee and talking to the woman that Tiona had inherited her good looks from. It was a pleasant conversation—when Cooper could keep his mind off of the end of the world as he knew it.

A few oblique questions Tiona addressed to her mother made it evident that Ms. Gettnor had no idea what was going on with the aliens… or what her husband had discovered.

After the coffee, they went back over to Gettnors’ basement. Dr. Gettnor was back over in the area with all the screens, intently focused on one of the screens with all the programming blocks. He ignored all attempts his daughter made to communicate with him.

Eventually her shoulders slumped and she waved Cooper toward the stairs. As they walked out to her car, she said, “He’s always been weird and hard to talk to, but I’ve never seen him like this. “ She got a distant look in her eyes, “Well, maybe something a little bit like it. Having a fight with my mom, he once locked himself in the basement for weeks. We didn’t see him the whole time so he might’ve been like this.” She shrugged, “Maybe he’ll be better tomorrow.” She turned and eyed
died
Cooper, “Sorry to say, but it looks like General Stoddard was right about the aliens.”

Cooper said, “Maybe. Somehow we’ve got to get your dad to tell you us how he decoded the aliens’ transmissions. If NSA can’t confirm his translations, I can tell you the president is going to be very reluctant to attack interstellar visitors based on what she’ll think are outlandish claims…”

***

New York, New York — Demonstrations have broken out here in New York City today, as in many other major cities around the world. Central Park has been the scene of a semi-spontaneous “peace party,” with tens of thousands of people watching a number of musical acts, both large and small, that have appeared to call on our leaders for restraint. As has been a common theme in other areas, these people wish to greet the aliens as beneficent emissaries of another world.

A separate group has marched on the UN, urging it to represent our world to the aliens.

Another group calling itself “Preparation” has chosen the 9/11 Monument for a demonstration highlighting its concern that the aliens might be malignant rather than benign. Their spokesman urges that the government, “… should
hope
to welcome the aliens with open arms, but should also be
prepared
to fight for our lives!”