One might have supposed that Bledsoe would feel he was at some sort of a disadvantage. He didn’t. “Thanks for letting me come in and talk to you,” he said. “I didn’t want to have to turn my boys loose on your guards.”
Ranjit wasn’t sure whether he should be amused or angry but decided not to try to figure that out. He went right to the point. “Talk about what?” he asked.
Bledsoe nodded. “Right, let’s not waste time. I’m here representing the president of the United States, and he has determined that the human race can’t afford to let these alien assassins land on Earth.”
It was Ranjit’s intention to ask how the president of the United States proposed to prevent it, but his wife got in first. “What makes your president think he can speak for the whole human race? Don’t—for instance—Russia and China have something to say about it?”
To Ranjit’s surprise, Bledsoe seemed to expect the question. “You’re living in the past, Mrs. Subramanian. You act like there still was a big three. There isn’t. Russia and China are nothing but paper tigers anymore! They don’t need to be considered.”
He went on to explain, his tone scornful, that they were both preoccupied with internal problems they tried to keep secret. “The People’s Republic of China,” he lectured, “has just about lost control of Jilin province to the Falun Gong movement, and they can’t afford that. Oh, sure, you never heard of Jilin province, did you? But it’s where the Chinese government gets a lot of its grain, not to mention a lot of its automobiles and railway cars. You heard me. Agriculture and manufacturing! And Falun Gong’s spreading across the border to Inner Mongolia.”
He shook his head in a manner that might have been sympathetic, if the little grin at the corners of his mouth hadn’t been so obviously gloating. “And what about the Russians?” he asked. “They’re even worse off. Chechnya is a running sore. There are Muslims there, and every Islamic jihadist anywhere in the world who still wants to kill heretics is going to flock to Chechnya to pick up a gun—and there goes some of Russia’s most important oil pipelines. And if Chechnya finally does get loose, there are a bunch of other provinces that would like nothing better than to go the same way.”
Myra commented, “You look happy about it.”
Bledsoe pursed his lips. “Happy? No. What do I care what kind of trouble the Chinks and the Russkis have? But it sure simplifies things when action has to be taken and the president doesn’t have to worry about getting them on board. And that’s where you and your family come in, Subramanian. The president has a plan. And you’re all part of it.”
The mood Ranjit and his family had toward their uninvited guest had never been warmer than tepid. Now it congealed to brittle antarctic ice.
“What do you want?” Ranjit asked, in a tone that suggested that whatever it was, there was small chance he would get it.
“It’s simple,” Bledsoe said. “I want your daughter, Natasha, to go on a broadcast to say that while she was their prisoner, they let her know that ‘sterilizing’ the Earth meant killing every human being so their aliens can take possession of it.”
Natasha spoke up at once. “That never happened, Mr. Bledsoe. I don’t remember anything at all of being a captive.”
Her father raised one hand. “He knows it’s a lie, hon,” he told her. “All right, Bledsoe. Why do you want to whip up the hatred for these creatures?”
“Because sooner or later we’re going to have to wipe them out. What else? Oh, we’ll let them land, all right. But then you go on the air, Subramanian, to say your daughter has confided things in you that you think the world needs to know, and then Natasha comes on and tells her story.”
He was looking actually pleased about the prospect, Ranjit thought. “And then what?” he demanded.
Bledsoe shrugged. “We wipe ’em out,” he said. “Hit them first with a Silent Thunder so they can’t do anything about it. Then we turn the entire American air force on them with every bomb and rocket they can carry, and all the ICBMs, too. Nuclear and all. I guarantee there won’t be anything bigger than the tip of your little finger left when we’re through.”
Myra snorted, but it was Ranjit who spoke. “Bledsoe,” he said, “you’re crazy. Do you think these people don’t have their own weapons? All you’re going to do is get a few thousand air crew killed—and make the aliens mad.”
“Wrong twice,” Bledsoe said scornfully. “Every one of those American planes is fly-by-wire, with all the crews safely on the ground. And it doesn’t matter if those things get mad. We’ve got a saying in the States, Subramanian. ‘Live free or die.’ Or don’t you believe in that?”
Myra opened her mouth to answer for all of them, but Ranjit forestalled her. “What I don’t believe in,” he said, “is telling lies that are going to get people killed, even if they aren’t human people. We aren’t going to do what you want, Bledsoe. What I think we ought to do is get on the screens, all right, but what we ought to do is tell the world what you proposed.”
Bledsoe gave him a poisonous look. “You think that would make any difference? Hell, Subramanian, do you know what ‘deniable’ means? I’m deniable. If this gets out, the president just shakes his head and says, ‘Poor old Colonel Bledsoe. He was doing what he thought was right, but completely on his own initiative. I never authorized any such plan.’ And maybe some reporters pester me for a while, but I just don’t talk to them and pretty soon it all blows over. As leader of the predominant force on this planet, it’s the president’s duty to defend the weaker states, and he has determined that to attack is the best course to follow. I serve at the pleasure of the president. What do you say to that?”
Ranjit stood up. “I want to live free, all right, but that isn’t on offer here, is it? If the choice is between living in a world where people like you are in charge and one run by scaly green monsters from space, why, I just might pick the monsters. And now get out of my house!”
42
A GREAT DEPRESSION
When at last the One Point Five fleet came down to the surface of Earth, they were accompanied by an enormous fireworks show. That pyrotechnical display did not come about for the same reasons a returning human fleet of spacecraft might produce such a display, though. All those old human-built Mercury capsules and Soyuzes and space shuttles struck Earth’s air in an eye-straining blaze of fire when they came home, and the reason was simple. They had no choice about it. They had to slow down for reentry, and nothing but friction with the atmosphere could brake their descent enough to allow safe landing on the ground.
The spacecraft of the One Point Fives, on the other hand, had no need for air friction. Their descent was slowed by a completely different mechanism. They simply fired their ionic rockets in a forward direction, at full power, to serve as brakes. It was a gentler way to land, and one that offered more accurate control on a landing site.
It also required immensely more energy, but conserving energy was not a priority for the One Point Fives.
A problem for human observers was figuring out just where the armada had chosen to set down. An early guess was somewhere in the Libyan desert, perhaps on the beaches along the Mediterranean. That was quickly revised to somewhere a bit farther east and north, perhaps somewhere in the otherwise empty northwestern desert provinces of Egypt.
It didn’t take the news channels’ experts long to come up with the name “Qattara Depression.”
Then it took Myra and Ranjit less time than that to get their search engines going. “This Qattara thing is the world’s fifth deepest depression,” Myra called, reading from her screen. “It goes down as low as 133 meters below sea level.”
“And it’s only fifty-six kilometers from the sea,” Ranjit added, eyes on his own screen. “And—wait a minute!—in some ways it’s the world’s biggest depression of the Earth’s surface there is on land, with more than forty thousand square kilometers that are below sea level.” And it was uninhabited, they both learned at once, except for wandering bedouin tribes and their
flocks, and of no apparent value to anyone—at least not to any human. The only thing about it that seemed ever to have mattered to human beings was that at least for a few weeks it had been really important in one of those twentieth-century wars, the one between the Germans and the English. Then the impassable Qattara Depression had trapped the Germans where the English could inflict heavy losses on them in what was called the Battle of El Alamein.
At that point Myra and Ranjit gave up the search as unproductive. “I don’t think that’s why these aliens picked it,” Ranjit said at last. “Because it’s easy to defend against an army, I mean.”
“But what, then?” Myra asked.
For that Ranjit frowned but did not answer. They spent the next quarter of an hour inventing increasingly unlikely motives, until the news screen broke in. What the reporter had to tell them was that the first official bluster had just come in from Cairo. Its tone was belligerent.
Well, that’s not quite giving the true picture. The broadcast came from Cairo, all right, but it wasn’t delivered by an Egyptian. The speaker was the American ambassador. The Egyptian government, he informed the world, had asked him to give the official reply for them. That area called Munkhafad al-Qattar-ah, he said, was an integral part of the sovereign state of the Arab Republic of Egypt. The intruders had no right to be there. They were commanded to leave Egyptian territory at once or face the consequences.
It was obvious that secret meetings had been going on, and the ambassador’s next words left no doubt of what they had been about. “The Arab Republic of Egypt,” he proclaimed, “is one of America’s oldest and closest allies. Trespassers will have to face Egypt’s military might as well as that of the United States.”
“Oh my God,” Ranjit murmured. “I smell T. Orion Bledsoe again.”
“And heaven help us now,” said the irreligious Myra to her even less religious husband.
It might have eased the situation if the alien beings landing on Earth had taken time to announce what their long-range plans actually were. No explanation was offered. Perhaps the aliens couldn’t handle more than one thing at a time—or thought that these primitive Earth humans couldn’t—because what they did do, incessantly, was keep their promise to show humanity, all over again, every last one of the galaxy’s assorted races of beings.
This had been quite interesting at one time. That time, however, was past. About the only viewers who stayed tuned in were producers of low-budget horror films, eagerly seeking ideas to pass on to their makeup departments, plus what remained of the world’s dwindling corps of taxonomists, each of whom had been intoxicated by a sudden breathtaking vision of becoming the Carolus Linnaeus (subclass Alien Biota) of the twenty-first century.
Of course, none of that was a problem for the human race. There was a problem, though, and it came in two parts.
First was the inordinate demand being made on the world’s communications bandwidths. The mere broadcast of the catalog of galactic sentients itself made no real dent in these. What made a difference was the aliens’ courteous habit of broadcasting everything they had to say in a large fraction of the world’s 6,900-odd languages.
But even that discommoded only the handful of people whose favorite game show was squeezed off the air. Far more serious was the interference with communications, particularly the behind-the-scenes negotiations among many of the world’s military forces.
A quick call to Gamini Bandara confirmed what Ranjit was already sure of. No, it hadn’t been a voluntary decision of the Egyptian government that had produced the saber-rattling remarks of the American ambassador. The old Egyptian friend of Dhatusena Bandara, now Egyptian ambassador to Sri Lanka, Hameed Al-Zasr, had explained it all by phone to Gamini’s father. “He managed to get a personal call through to Dad. It was American pressure and they couldn’t fight it. There was some American cloak-and-dagger guy, Dad said—”
“Of course there was. Your old pal Colonel Bledsoe, I bet.”
Gamini sounded startled when he said, “You’re probably right. Anyway, Al-Zasr says Egypt wasn’t forgetting its Pax per Fidem obligations, but it’s still in the middle of implementing them. The changeover isn’t complete, and Egypt’s too poor to antagonize the U.S. Billions of dollars in American aid are involved.”
“Hell,” said Ranjit. And when he reported the conversation to Myra, she said much the same.
“We should have guessed,” she said. “Let’s hope it doesn’t get any worse.”
43
LANDED IMMIGRANTS
In the Subramanian family it might have been young Robert who was the least affected by the scary developments in the world they lived in. He cried a bit more these days, true. It didn’t seem to be the state of the outside world that was saddening him, though. Rather, it was the obvious distress of his parents. Robert’s way of dealing with the problem was to be especially good—patting them, cuddling with them, even eating all his vegetables without argument and going to bed without protest when told it was time. And trying to cheer them up by repeating words and phrases from his Sunday school. “’Olden ’Ule,” he would say reassuringly, and, “’Oo unto others.”
Of course, hearing Robert’s recollections of Sunday school lessons about the Golden Rule didn’t really make things better for Ranjit and Myra. They were not displeased when he began to take an interest in things that were showing on the world’s news screens—when he could find a channel that was not overrun with the quaint denizens of the galaxy.
What was showing there was what these One Point Five invaders were doing in the Qattara Depression. Every human spy satellite not hijacked by reruns of the galactic bestiary was brought to bear on that almost forgotten part of the world.
As soon as the One Point Five armada had landed, it became clear why they had used rockets to decelerate instead of simple air friction. Air friction would have shredded their spacecraft. They weren’t streamlined. They weren’t even simple tube shapes, like the pygmy vessels of the Nine-Limbeds. The One Point Fives’ ships looked more like Christmas trees than any aerodynamic design, with cubes and balls and polygons hanging off the main bodies at all sorts of angles.
That explained their willingness to expend fuel on a slow-down. A shuttle-type reentry would have turned them into the brightest shooting star display ever, quickly followed by glowing fields of debris covering thousands of hectares.
Once they were landed in orderly ranks, the One Point Fives showed what all those grotesque add-ons were for. Some of them were tentacle-like in appearance; these detached themselves, waved indecisively for a moment, and then squirmed away to explore their new surroundings. Others linked together and headed for the brackish waters of the oasis, to do what, Ranjit could not guess. “That’s not potable water,” he said. “I hope they’re aware of that.”
Myra studied his face. “You know,” she said meditatively, “you’re looking a lot more cheerful since Joris called to say the dynamiters gave up. Now you’re worried about what these One Point Five creatures have to drink.”
Since what his wife said was true, Ranjit made no attempt to argue. “It’s like Robert keeps telling us,” he said. “We should ’oo unto others as we would have others ’oo unto us. I personally would not like any others to be shooting me.”
Myra grinned and then was caught by what was now going on on the screen. Some of the alien bits and pieces of machinery had detached themselves from their spacecraft, had crawled to a dune, and had begun chewing at it. “They’re digging a tunnel,” Myra marveled. “What do you think, maybe a kind of bomb shelter in case anyone attacks them?”
Ranjit didn’t answer that. The idea that the aliens might be expecting armed attack was all too plausible, but he didn’t want to say as much….
And didn’t need to, because all the news screens that still belonged to the human race at once went dark. They were quickly replaced by a flustered newscaster, hurriedly informing the audience that the president of the United States had requested immediate air ti
me to make an announcement of “world importance.” “Those were the president’s words,” the newscaster on the Subramanian screen nervously informed her audience. “We know nothing beyond that here, except that this is almost unprecedented in—What?”
She was asking the question of someone invisible, but the answer was obvious. All she had time to say was, “Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the—”
And then the screen went briefly to black. When it lighted up again, it was showing a group of important-looking (but also worried-looking) men and women clustered around a table that bore a forest of microphones. Ranjit looked with some puzzlement at the scene; it was not the usual Rose Garden setting, or the Oval Office, or any of the other backgrounds the president usually preferred. There was, it was true, the giant American flag behind the standing group, as the president almost always required. But what Ranjit could see of the chamber they were in was unfamiliar to him—windowless, harshly lit with floodlights, with a corporal’s guard of armed United States Marines standing at attention, their fingers on the triggers of their weapons.
“Oh my God,” Myra whispered. “They’re in their nuke shelter.”
But Ranjit hardly heard her. He had made a discovery of his own. “Look who’s standing between the president and the Egyptian ambassador. Isn’t that Orion Bledsoe?”
It was. They had no time to discuss his presence, though, because the president had begun to speak. “My friends,” he said, “it is with a heavy heart that I come before you to say that the invasion—yes, invasion; I can find no other word to describe what has happened—of our planet by these beings from space has passed the point at which it can be tolerated. The government of the Arab Republic of Egypt has explicitly demanded that those who have committed this act of aggression stop their preparations for war at once and begin to withdraw from Egyptian territory. The aggressors not only have failed to comply with this demand, which is according to international law, they haven’t even had the courtesy to acknowledge receiving it.