“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. “Nothin
g. 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.”
“Agreed,” said Joshua Leonards. “Completely.”
“They may be superior,” said a voice from the back, “but we’ve got the superiority of numbers on our side. We’re a whole planet full of human beings on our home turf and they’re just forty shiploads of—”
“Perhaps we outnumber them, yes,” Colonel Carmichael said, “but may I remind you that the Aztecs considerably outnumbered the Spaniards and were also on their home turf, and people speak Spanish in Mexico today?”
“So is it an invasion, do you think, Colonel?” General Steele asked.
“I told you: I can’t say. Certainly it has the look of one. But the only real fact we have about these—ah—Entities—is that they’re here. We can’t make any assumptions at all about their behavior. If we learned anything at all out of our unhappy entanglement in Vietnam, it’s that there are plenty of peoples on this planet whose minds don’t necessarily operate the way ours do, who work off an entirely different set of basic assumptions from ours; and even so those are all human beings with the same inner mental wiring that we have. The Entities aren’t even remotely human, and their way of thinking is entirely beyond my expertise right now. Until we know how to communicate with them—or, to put it another way, until they have deigned to communicate with us—we need to simply sit tight and—”
“Maybe they have communicated with us, if what I was told aboard the ship was true,” said the woman who had been taken hostage at the shopping mall, suddenly, in a tiny and dreamy but perfectly audible voice. “With one of us, at least. And they told her lots of things about themselves. So it’s already happened. If you can believe what she said, that is.”
More hubbub. Sounds of surprise, even shock, and a few low exasperated expostulations. Some of these high masters and overlords plainly were not enjoying the experience of finding themselves transformed into characters in a science-fiction movie.
Lloyd Buckley asked the dark-haired woman to stand and introduce herself. The Colonel yielded the floor to her with a little formal bow. She got a bit unsteadily to her feet and said, not looking at anyone in particular and speaking in a breathy monotone, “My name is Margaret Gabrielson and I live on Wilbur Avenue in Northridge, California, and yesterday morning I was on my way to visit my sister who lives in Thousand Oaks when I stopped for gas at a Chevron station in a mall in Porter Ranch. And I was captured by an alien and taken aboard their spaceship, which is the truth and nothing but truth, so help me God.”
“This isn’t a courtroom, Ms. Gabrielson,” said Buckley gently. “You aren’t testifying now. Just tell us what happened to you when you were on board the alien ship.”
“Yes,” she said. “What happened to me when I was on board the alien ship.”
And then she was silent for about ten thousand years.
Was she abashed at finding herself inside the actual and literal Pentagon, standing in front of a largely though not entirely male group of highly important governmental personages and asked to describe the wholly improbable, even absurd, events that had befallen her? Was she still befuddled and bewildered by her strange experiences among the Entities, or by the sedatives that had been given to her afterward? Or was she simply your basic inarticulate early-twenty-first century American, who had not in any way been equipped during the thirty years of her life with the technical skill required in order to express herself in public in linear and connected sentences?
Some of each, no doubt, the Colonel thought.
Everyone was very patient with her. What choice was there?
And after that interminable-seeming silence she said, “It was like, mirrors, everywhere. The ship. All metal and everything shining and it was gigantic inside, like some sort of stadium with walls around it.”
It was a start. The Colonel, sitting just beside her, gave her a warm encouraging smile. Lloyd Buckley
beamed encouragement at her too. So did Ms. Crawford, the Cherokee-faced Secretary of Communications. Carlyle-Macavoy, though, who obviously didn’t suffer fools gladly, glared at her with barely veiled contempt.
“There were, you know, around twenty of us, maybe twenty-five,” she continued, after another immense terrified pause. “They put us, like, in two groups in different rooms. Mine was a little girl and an old man and a bunch of women around my age and then three men. One of the men had been hurt when they caught him, like, I think, a broken leg, and the other two men were trying to make him, you know, comfortable. It was this giant-sized room, like maybe as big as a movie theater, with weird enormous flowers floating through the air everywhere, and we were all in one corner of it. And very scared, most of us. We figured they were, like, going to cut us up, you know, to see what was inside of us. Like, you know, what they do to laboratory animals. Somebody said that and after that we couldn’t stop thinking about it.”
She dabbed away tears.
There was another interminable silence.
“The aliens,” Buckley prompted softly. “Tell us about them.”
They were big, the woman said. Huge. Terrifying. But they came by only occasionally, perhaps every hour or two, never more than one at a time, just checking up, gazing at them for a little while and then going away again. It was, she said, like seeing your worst nightmares come to life, whenever one of those monsters entered the chamber where they were being kept. She had felt sick to her stomach every time she looked at one of them. She had wanted to curl up and cry. She looked as though she wanted to curl up and cry right this minute, here and now, in front of the Vice President and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and all these Cabinet members.