Authors: Robert Silverberg
“And your own tide these days, Lloyd?” the Colonel asked quietly, when Buckley seemed to have finished.
Buckley seemed nonplussed at that. It was the Vice President who said, while Buckley merely gaped, “Mr. Buckley is the National Security Advisor, Colonel Carmichael.”
Ah, so. A long way up from being an assistant secretary of state for cultural affairs. But of course Buckley had surely been angling for something like this all the time, turning his expertise in anthropology and history and the psychology of nationalistic fervor into credentials for a quasi- military post of Cabinet status in this era of resurgent cultural rivalries with roots going back beyond medieval times. The Colonel murmured something in an apologetic tone about not keeping up with the news as assiduously as he once did, now that he was retired to his hillside walnut groves and his almond trees.
There was action at the conference-room door, now. A flurry among the guards; new people arriving. The rest of the passengers from the Colonel’s cross-country flight filed in at last: Joshua Leonards, the rotund UCLA anthropologist, who with his untrimmed red beard and ratty argyle sweater looked like some nineteenth-century Russian anarchist, and Peter Carlyle-Macavoy, the British astronomer from the CalTech extraterrestrial-intelligence search program, extremely elongated of body and fiercely bright of eye, and the shopping- mall abductee, Margaret Something-or-Other, a petite, rather attractive woman of thirty or so who was either still in shock from her experiences or else was under sedation, because she had said essentially nothing during the entire journey from California.
“Good,” Buckley said. “We’re all here, now. This would be a good moment to bring our newcomers up to date on the situation as it now stands.” He clapped a data wand to his wrist—that was interesting, the Colonel thought, a man of Buckley’s age has had a biochip implant—and uttered a quick command into it, and a screen blossomed into vivid colors on the wall behind him.
“These,” said Buckley, “are the sites of known Entity landings. As you see, their ships have touched down on every continent except Antarctica and in most of the capital cities of the world, not including this city and three or four other places where they would have been expected to land. As of the noon recap, we believe that at least thirty-four large- scale ships, containing hundreds or even thousands of aliens, have arrived. Landings are apparently continuing; and aliens of various kinds are coming forth from the big ships in smaller vehicles, also of various kinds. So far we have identified five different types of Entity vehicles and three distinct species of alien life, as so—”
He touched the wand to the implanted biochip node in his forearm and said the magic word, and pictures of strange life- forms appeared on the screen. The Colonel recognized the upright squid-like things that he had seen on television, stalking around that shopping mall in Porter Ranch, and Margaret Something-or-Other recognized them too, uttering a little gasp of shock or distaste. But then the squids went away and some creatures that looked like faceless, limbless ghosts appeared, and, after those, some truly monstrous things as big as houses that were galumphing around in a park on clusters of immense legs, knocking over tall trees as they went.
“Up till now,” Buckley went on, “the Entities have made no attempt at communicating with us, insofar as we are aware. We have sent messages to them by every means we could think of, in a variety of languages and artificial information-organizing systems, but we have no way of telling whether they’ve received them, or, if they have, whether they’re capable of understanding them. At the present time—”
“What means have you actually used for sending these messages?” asked Carlyle-Macavoy, the CalTech man, crisply.
“Radio, of course. Short wave, AM, FM, right on up the communications spectrum. Plus semaphore signals of various kinds, laser flashes and such, Morse code: you name it. Just about everything but smoke signals, as a matter of fact, and we hope Secretary of Communications Crawford will have someone working on that route pretty soon.”
Thin laughter went through the room. Secretary of Communications Crawford was not among those who seemed amused.
Carlyle-Macavoy said, “How about coded emissions at 1420 megahertz? The universal hydrogen emission frequency, I mean.”
“First thing they tried,” said Kaufman of Harvard.
“Nada.
Zilch.”
“So,” Buckley said, “the aliens are here, we somehow didn’t see them coming in any way, and they’re prowling around unhindered in thirty or forty cities. We don’t know what they want, we don’t know what they plan to do. Of course, if they have any kind of hostile intent, we intend to be on guard against it. I should tell you, though, that we have discussed already today, and already ruled out, the thought of an immediate pre-emptive attack against them.”
The Colonel raised an eyebrow at that. But Joshua Leonards, the burly, shaggy UCLA anthropology professor, went ballistic. “You mean,” he said, “that at one point you were seriously considering tossing a few nuclear bombs at them as they sat there in midtown Manhattan and the middle of London and a shopping mall in the San Fernando Valley?”
Buckley’s florid cheeks turned very red. “We’ve explored all sorts of options today, Dr. Leonards. Including some that obviously needed to be rejected instantly.”
“A nuclear attack was never for a moment under consideration,” said General Steele of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in the tone of voice he might have used to a bright but obstreperous eleven-year-old boy. “Never. But going nuclear isn’t our only offensive choice. We have plenty of ways of making war by means of conventional methods. For the time being, though, we have decided that any sort of offensive move would be—”
“The
time being?”
Leonards cried. He waved his arms around wildly and flung his head back, unkempt russet beard jabbing upward, which made him look more than ever like some primordial Marxist getting ready to toss a grenade at the Czar. “Mr. Buckley, is it too soon after my arrival at this meeting for me to be butting in? Because I think I need to do some butting in right away.”
“Go ahead, Dr. Leonards.”
“I know you say you’ve already ruled out a pre-emptive strike. Which I assume that you mean that
we,
the United States of America, aren’t planning any such thing. And I assume that there’s nobody on Earth
crazy
enough to be in favor of nuking ships that happen to be occupying sites right in the middle of big cities. But, as you say, that doesn’t rule out other kinds of military action. I don’t see anyone in this room representing Russia or England or France, to name just three of the countries where spaceships have landed that can be considered major military powers. Are we making any attempt to coordinate our response with such countries as those?”
Buckley looked toward the Vice President.
She said, “We are, Dr. Leonards, and we will be continuing to do so on a round-the-clock basis. Let me assure you of that.”
“Good. Because Mr. Buckley has said that every imaginable means has been used in trying to communicate with the aliens, but he also said that we had been at least
considering
making them targets for our weaponry. May I point out that suddenly firing a cannon at somebody is a form of communication too?
Which I think would indeed result in the opening of a dialog with the aliens, but it probably wouldn’t be a conversation we’d enjoy having. And the Russians and the French and everybody else ought to be told that, if they haven’t figured it out already themselves.”
“You’re suggesting that if we attacked, we’d be met with unanswerable force?” asked Secretary of Defense Gallagher, sounding displeased by the thought. “You’re saying that we’re fundamentally helpless before them?”
Leonards said, “We don’t know that. Very possibly we are. But it’s not a hypothesis that we really need to test right this minute by doing something stupid.”
At least seven people spoke at once. But Peter Carlyle-Macavoy said, in the kind of quiet, chipped-around-the-edges voice that cuts through any sort of hubbub, “I think we can safely assume that we’d be completely out of our depth in any kind of military encounter with them. Attacking those ships would be the most suicidal thing we could possibly do.”
The Colonel, a silent witness to all this, nodded.
But the Joint Chiefs and more than a few others in the room began once again to stir and thrash about in their seats and show other signs of agitation before the astronomer was halfway through his statement.
The Secretary of the Army was the first to voice his objections. “You’re taking the same pessimistic position as Dr. Leonards, aren’t you?” he demanded. “You’re essentially telling us that we’re beaten already, without our firing a shot, right?” He was quickly followed by half a dozen others saying approximately the same thing.
“Essentially, yes, that’s the situation,” replied Carlyle-Macavoy. “If we try to fight, I have no doubt we’ll be met with a display of insuperable power.” Which set off a second and louder uproar that was interrupted only by the impressive clapping of Buckley’s hands.
“Please, gentlemen.
Please!”
The room actually grew quiet.
Buckley said, “Colonel Carmichael, I saw you nodding a moment ago. As our expert on interactions with alien cultures, what do you think of the situation?”
“That we are absolutely in the dark at the present moment and we had damned well not do anything until we know what’s what. We don’t even know whether we’ve been invaded. This may simply be a friendly visit. It may be a bunch of harmless tourists making a summer cruise of the galaxy. On the other hand, if it
is
an invasion, it’s being undertaken by a vastly superior civilization and there’s every chance that we are just as helpless before it as Dr. Carlyle-Macavoy says we are.”
Defense, Navy, Army, and three or four others were standing by that time, waving their arms for attention. The Colonel wasn’t through speaking, though.
“We know nothing about these beings,” he said, with great firmness. “
Nothing.
We don’t even know how to go about
learning
anything about them. Do they understand any of our languages? Who knows? We sure don’t understand any of theirs. Among the many things we don’t know about this collection of Entities,” he went on, “is, for example, which of them is the dominant species. We suspect that the big squid-like ones are, but how can we be sure? For all we know, the various kinds we’ve seen up till now are just drones, and the real masters are still up in space aboard a mother ship that they’ve made invisible and indetectable to us, waiting for the lesser breeds to get done with the initial phases of the conquest.”
That was quite a wild idea to have come from the lips of an elderly, retired, walnut-farming colonel. Lloyd Buckley looked startled. So did the scientists, Carlyle-Macavoy and Kaufman and Elias. The Colonel was pretty startled by it himself.
“I have another thought,” the Colonel went on, “about their failure so far to attempt any kind of communication with us, and how it reflects on their sense of their relative superiority to us. Speaking now in my academic capacity as a professor of non-western psychology, rather than as a former military man, I want to put forth the point that their refusal to speak with us might not be a function of their ignorance so much as it is a way of making that overwhelming superiority obvious. I mean, how could they
not
have learned our languages, if they had wanted to? Considering all the other capabilities they obviously have. Races that can travel between the stars shouldn’t have any difficulty decoding simple stuff like Indo-European-based languages. But if they’re looking for a way to show us that we are altogether insignificant to them, well, not bothering to say hello to us in our own language is a pretty good way of doing it. I could cite plenty of precedent for that kind of attitude right out of Japanese or Chinese history.”
Buckley said to Carlyle-Macavoy, “Can we have some of your thoughts about all this, if you will?”
“What the Colonel has proposed is an interesting notion, though of course I have no way of telling whether there’s any substance to it. But let me point out this: these aliens appeared in our skies without having given us a whisper of radio noise and not a smidgeon of visual evidence that they were approaching us. Let’s not even mention the various Starguard groups that keep watch for unexpected incoming asteroids. Let’s just consider the radio evidence. Do you know about the SETI project that’s been going on under that and several other names for the last forty or fifty years? Scanning the heavens for radio signals from intelligent beings elsewhere in the galaxy? I happen to be affiliated with one branch of that project. Don’t you think we had instruments looking all up and down the electromagnetic spectrum for signs of alien life at the very moment the aliens arrived? And we didn’t detect a thing until they began showing up on airport radar screens.”
“So you think there
can
be a hidden mother ship sitting out there in orbit,” Steele said.
“It’s perfectly possible that there is. But the main point, as I know Colonel Carmichael will agree, is that the only thing we can say about these aliens for certain at this moment is that they’re representatives of a race vastly more advanced than ourselves, and we had bloody well be cautious about how we react to their arrival here.”
“You keep telling us that,” the Army Secretary grumbled, “but you don’t support it with any—”
“Look,” said Peter Carlyle-Macavoy, “either they materialized right bang out of hyperspace somewhere inside the orbit of the moon, a concept which I think will make Dr. Kaufman and some of the rest of you extremely uncomfortable on the level of theoretical physics, or else they used some method of shielding themselves from all of our detecting devices as they came sneaking up on us. But however they managed to conceal themselves from us as they made their final approach to Earth, it shows that we are dealing with beings who possess an exceedingly superior technology. It’s reasonable to believe that they would easily be able to cope with any sort of firepower we might throw at them. Our most frightful nuclear weapons would be so much bows-and-arrows stuff to them. And they might, if sufficiently annoyed, retaliate to even a non-nuclear attack in a way intended to teach us to be less bothersome.”