She had numerous patents in her name to this effect, and had already demonstrated an extraordinary ability to attract various animals through unlikely renditions. Her work had made for happier zoos and theme parks, as well as serving as the foundation for several new trends in popular music. Fydia was both famous on Earth and well-liked on the Moon, and since she intended to keep it that way, she did not give in to her instincts and rush out to confront The New Guy solo. Instead, she sat in her cubicle and pondered. She thought about her recent experience and tried to associate what she had felt with some other sensation from her life. The closest she came was how it felt when she had a song stuck in her head, a song she didn't even like and couldn't get rid of. "Yes," she told herself, "that's exactly what it was like." Her next though was whether that condition could be objectively studied and measured, and if so, if it were possible to develop a cure. That would be worthy of another patent for sure, not to mention another excellent opportunity to make the world an even better place.
It so happened that her most recent ex-girlfriend, Pina Peru, was not only an excellent neurologist, but was also right there, in Moon Base One. Fydia pinged her, and before long had presented her concept. Pina, a normal-sized person who had never gotten used to Fydia's rather imposing height, was still very fond of her, even though she'd been the one to break off the relationship. There had been no hard feelings, and Pina was excited to try this new experiment. All Fydia had to do was commit to lying completely still inside a 'mental echo chamber' while having a horrible tune lodged in her brain. Fydia had selected a truly grating oldie, a song called 'Waterloo' by a thing called ABBA. She lay perfectly placidly in the chamber and let the dull, repetitive, silly chorus swirl around and around in her mind. In the meantime, Pina recorded every synapse and cortex and and filament in Fydia's head.
Pina gathered the other scientists and they compared notes from the measurements made earlier from The New Guy encounter team. There were definitely some pattern matches. Fydia's temperamental lobes were displaying the same corrosion and grinding as had been seen on the tips of Galen's fingers, and from just behind Gelano's right knee ligaments. But although these similarities were clear, it wasn't at all obvious what could be made of it. The immediate problem was protection, rather than prevention. They needed to find some kind of shielding, and even Pina had to conclude that the 'song' approach was more long-term than immediate in terms of potential benefit. Fydia was disappointed, but not downhearted. Once she got that idiotic tune out of her head, she was certain she'd come up with another good idea.
Chapter Eleven
The science delegation was, of course, a team of four, consisting of Pina Peru, Gayle Henderson, Rolanda Lin and Rayburn Willis. They gathered to compare notes for a half an hour out of every three for the rest of that day and into the night, dispersing in the intervals to work on their own or with other colleagues. They had come to a formal agreement on the goal of prevention, and the immediate task was to discern some sort of protective material that would make it possible for contact to recur with The New Guy. No one had to tell them that sooner would be better. Everyone on the moon was eager to discover more about this fellow. Nothing had yet been ruled out. Just because the scouting expedition had not turned up any evidence of a ship did not mean there was none. It could be somewhere further out, where they hadn't yet looked, and the man could have walked in and his footsteps lost in the chaos of tracks in the dust. The possibility of error was never excluded by the members of the crew. They were not the kind of people to be overly confident or to quickly jump to conclusions.
Maya Nguyen did not want to be seen as hovering, yet she couldn't help but check in now and then with the delegation, who took turns mildly dismissing her with a lack of news. She carried these messages throughout both Bases, as she made the rounds keeping everyone up to date. By nineteen hundred hours GMT, however, she was beginning to show some signs of impatience.
"How about guessing?" she asked Rayburn Willis as she butted in on a delegation conference. Willis glanced up at her with a look of disapproval, but then drew his eyebrows together and reconsidered.
"Hmm," he murmured, "you might be on to something there."
"I don't see how," Pina countered. "Science isn't guesswork."
"You can't pick the truth out of a hat," Rolanda Lin chimed in.
"No, but you can experiment," the botanist, Henderson, added thoughtfully. "We could subject different substances to the same conditions, and compare results."
"Sure," Pina said, "but what conditions? Arbitrary? We don't know what we're dealing with here."
"There's the music, for one thing," Willis said, recalling Fydia's gambit.
"So we play pop music to plastic and see what happens?" Rolanda sniffed.
"Not to plastic," Willis replied, "but to people wearing plastic."
"Or newsprint," Gayle Henderson suggested.
"Or fibers?" Pina Peru was catching on.
"At least do something," Maya said quietly, and departed. Her attitude was not a good sign, and she was the first to realize it. It wasn't fair to the scientists. They had been working hard for hours and it wasn't their fault they hadn't yet solved a new and puzzling riddle. Maya told herself to stay away for a while, better yet to go and get some sleep. If she herself was beginning to show some symptoms of distress, what could she expect from the rest of the settlement? Keeping cool and calm was paramount. The whole fate of the station depended upon it, from everyone.
Since Fydia had already been recorded and was willing to subject herself to further tests, the new experiments got underway rapidly. They could not necessarily rely on Fydia keeping up the strain of keeping horrible noises clanging around in her head voluntarily, so they piped it in audibly through speakers. She lay on the cold gray table, keeping perfectly still and with her eyes closed as they repeatedly pulled her out of the chamber tube, piled some different material on top of her, pushed her back inside and played snatches of sincere and sappy songs from decades long past. While she was undergoing this unique form of torture, Pina Peru carefully calibrated and calculated the responses of Fydia's nerve endings.
They used whatever materials they had lying around in bulk, or those they could manufacture in quantity if they had to. These included straw mats, tin foil, printer paper, algae, plastic wrap, and peat moss. Then they added sheets of lead, blankets, tapestry cloth, duct tape, and plywood. They tried denim, leather and cardigan wool. They used house paint, curtains, and glue. Finally, after several hours of this, in the very early dawn they let her go take a shower and take a nap. They all needed desperately to sleep, and while they did, they entrusted all the data they'd collected to Barley MacDunhill, to see if he could work some more of his inscrutable magic.
Chapter Twelve
Barley was happy to take the data and see what he could do with it.
"But," he proposed when Maya came to ask him, "why not send GIMM over?"
Maya was stunned that she hadn't already thought of that. After all, GIMM was there on her recommendation, having served with it previously in a top-secret installation miles below the surface of Antarctica. GIMM, pronounced Jim, stood for Gregarious Intruder Monitoring Mechanism, and took the form of a life-size, pewter-colored, elaborately detailed, lead-clad imitation of a Golden Retriever. On detecting an intruder, GIMM would bark extremely loudly and mercilessly until deactivated by several combinations of secret codes and vital sign transmissions. GIMM also had the special attribute of being able to transmit and receive vocally, using enhanced multilingual communication techniques. In other words, it could talk and listen. All Maya would have to do was control it from her end.
GIMM, being a machine, was likely to be completely immune to the tissue damaging effects of The New Guy. She hurried over to the cabinet where GIMM was currently resting, pulled him out and rapidly placed his several component pieces together. There were reasons why GIMM had to be disassembled between missions. While she was doing this, she called Fydia,
Rolanda and Rayburn Willis, and briefed them on her intention. They all gathered together in conference room Jedediah where they could operate the radio equipment required for GIMM. When turned on, the dog-machine began to wag its tail and smile. It appeared to enjoy its activation. Rolanda fed it some holographic biscuits, which it liked to jump up to reach, while Maya and Willis discussed the necessary steps of operation.
GIMM would be dispatched out of Doorlock Six and directed towards Moon Base Twelve, where it would need to open the outer and inner doors in the proper sequence. GIMM was agile enough, but it would be tricky getting it to balance on its hind legs while operating the door controls with a paw. They discussed whether one or more of them should accompany the dog, if only to open the doors, but decided they would first try to let the dog accomplish these tasks itself and only follow up later in person if needed. They practiced some broadcasting and receiving, while Fydia made notes of the questions they would put to The New Guy and in which order. Then they dispatched GIMM and prayed, in an atheistic manner, for the success of this attempt.
They need not have worried about the logistics. GIMM had no problem getting into Moon Base Twelve. His arrival startled The New Guy, who had been snoozing comfortably on the couch and had only recently awakened. He scratched his belly and gazed thoughtfully at the dully shining metallic creature.
"What are you?" The New Guy asked, and nearly jumped back when the dog opened its mouth and spoke in the clear, calm tones of Maya Nguyen.
"This is GIMM," she was saying. "He is our ambassador. I am Captain Maya Nguyen. We met in person earlier, however, we seem to be having some trouble with direct contact. Hence, the dog."
"The dog," Martin echoed enthusiastically, emphasizing the latter word as if it told him everything he needed to know.
"Your name is Martin, is that correct?" Maya asked, checking off item number one on Fydia's list.
"Martin, yes," The New Guy told the dog. He approached it cautiously. The thing was wagging its tail and smiling broadly whenever it was not engaged in talking. Martin reached out his hand to its face but GIMM took no special notice of this gesture. Martin's hand retreated. He knelt down before it, as if he felt easier chatting on the same vertical level as the thing.
"We would like you to tell us a few things. First, how did you get here?" Maya asked.
"The usual way?" Martin said questioningly, after a few moments pause.
"Why have you come here?" Maya proceeded, as if that previous answer was satisfactory. Rayburn Willis was by her side, shaking his head and trying to get her attention, but she ignored him.
"I came here," Martin began to say, then paused again. "To be here. Yes, I came here to be here."
"For what reason?" Maya insisted.
"The reason being?"
"Yes, for what reason? Why?"
"A reason is usually an explanation, is it not? It supplies an answer to the question 'why'"
"Why are you here?" Maya repeated, feeling her teeth beginning to clench. Something was completely wrong about this whole situation and she felt certain it was going to drive her insane long before she could make any sense of it.
Martin did not respond this time. He had reached out his arm again and was now manually investigating the dog, not petting it, but poking and stroking at it. He had a puzzled expression on his face, but the group inside couldn't see this, because they had forgotten to enable the camera lenses in GIMM's eyes. They could only hear his voice. Martin was confused. He was getting nothing from the machine, feeling nothing at all. He couldn't read it, couldn't interpret it, couldn't understand it. It was only cold. It looked happy but it had no heart. It looked not really alive but not dead either. It was a fake of some sort, he concluded. It existed but was not a being. The thought of that word reminded him of the voice he'd been hearing, the female voice that was coming from the dog.
"This is not a being," Martin announced, and waited for Maya to reply.
"No," she said. "It is only a messenger."
"I cannot feel it," he told her. "I cannot know it."
"I don't understand," Maya said. Fydia's list of questions was going to have to wait. They had gotten nothing out of The New Guy so far. He didn't seem to speak their language, although he spoke in English. There was a gap between their way of talking and his way of comprehending.
"A being has a reason," Martin said. "That's your 'why'. There is no 'why' for this thing here, this dog as you called it. It does not exist."
"It's a way of communicating," Maya explained. "We cannot be in the room there with you, so we are in another room and talking to you through GIMM."
"I cannot be talking through this GIMM," Martin sighed. He had retreated to the couch and lay down again. He closed his eyes and refused to say anything further. Maya tried, kept asking questions through the dog, but The New Guy didn't reply. Eventually she shook her head, turned off the radio, and put GIMM through his paces out of the doors and back to Moon Base One, where she patiently and sadly took him apart him and returned his pieces to his cupboard.
Chapter Thirteen
Maya didn't get much brooding time. Even before she'd finished putting away GIMM's pieces she was told that General O'Nail was waiting to speak with her. She stalled a bit, then gathered Rayburn Willis to join her on the conference call. If there was one thing the General disapproved of- well, actually there was quite a long list - but 'failure' was at the very top of it. He demanded a thorough accounting of their progress and when she told him there had been, in fact, none, he was not at all pleased.
"I don't understand, Captain," he frowned at her. "You've got one sole civilian in a hidey-hole a hundred yards away, and you still can't tell me anything about him."
"It's complicated, sir," she said respectfully, "and it's not like we're not trying. We're working very hard. We've got everyone on board ..."
"Yes, yes, I know," he rudely interrupted. "You even have that Barleycorn fellow eating up all our bandwidth with some kind of download to Los Alamos here."
"Data, sir," Maya began, when he interrupted her again, nearly shouting this time.
"Of course it's data, dammit," he said. "What else does somebody download I'd like to know? At least tell me you got that video hookup we talked about."
"Video hookup?" Maya mouthed to Willis, who was sitting beside her. He shrugged and shook his head. They were going to have to look their notes at a later time to double check on that one.
"Yes, the damn video hookup," General O'Nail blared. 'Don't think I can't see you whispering up there! We've got a video hookup on you too, you know. So what about that hut out there? Didn't you even get the robot dog to put in a camera?"
"No, sir," Maya acknowledged sheepishly. "We sort of, didn't think of it, I guess."
"Didn't think of it? Dammit, what kind of ship are you running up there? I'd come out there myself if they hadn't of canceled the entire damn space program. How do we know this guy isn't Chinese?"
"Chinese?" Willis and Maya blurted out together.
"He doesn't look Chinese," Willis added to the added fury of General O'Nail.
"What do I care what somebody looks like?" he fumed. "Listen. You've got to get that video pronto and that's an order. I've got my own orders too, you know. Right now the President's breathing down my neck and then there's Mister Wonderful to deal with too."
"Mister Wonderful?" Maya asked wonderingly. The name was unfamiliar to her.
"He's demanding crowd-sourcing," the General informed them, "and he's got the world-wide audience we need."
"I don't know what you're talking about," Maya said.
"Mister Wonderful!" the General repeated. "Oh, maybe you wouldn't, seeing as you're on the freaking moon and all. He's a TV guy. Got some kind of talk show. Number one, they tell me. Anyway, he's on me day and night with this crowd-sourcing idea. Seems your New Guy leaked out. It's all anyone's talking about down here. They're even planning to turn your show back on."
"Oh no," Willis groaned,
"not that."
None of the settlers had ever been happy about the Loonie Show. Everything had been better for them since it was canceled. They had tried not to let it interfere with their work, but there were emails to answer and constant reminders of the folks back home. In the pleasant era since then, they'd hardly bothered to think about Earth at all, other than watching it rise and set as it liked to do.
"So do it," O'Nail barked. "I want to hear back no later than oh five hundred hours that it's done. After that, we'll turn it over to Mister Wonderful down here and see what he comes up with. Got it? Right. Over."
Maya and Willis switched off their microphones and left the area, muttering to each other that everyone knew very well that the General was in no position to give them any orders, and that they were under no obligation to follow them. Maya was particularly annoyed about the leak. She had hoped to solve the problem of The New Guy before anyone else on Earth even heard about him. Now it looked like she had to feed him live to the globe without knowing anything more about him. Her only hope now was to get one last chance before turning the cameras on. They needed a breakthrough. They needed a way for someone to be able to get in there and squeeze something out of that guy without him causing any further damage.
Chapter Fourteen
Barley MacDunhill had needed the extra processing power that only the Earth's entire network would supply. He'd had his contacts back on the home planet tie in to every available computer they could connect to, and launched his massively parallel data processing program on the collection of materials analysis the Moon Base scientists had put together. The aim was to discover which if any of their available materials could be adapted and produced to create an nerve-protecting body suit. The answer was surprising, and at first disheartening to the entire settlement.
"Kentucky Blue Grass?" Rayburn Willis exclaimed. "Really?"
"I know, right?" said Anita Frey.
"How's somebody going to wear grass armor?" Marco Velez wanted to know.
A quorum of the crew had gathered for the third general meeting in less than forty-eight hours, a new record. No one cheered the news Maya Nguyen brought about Mister Wonderful or the potential resurrection of their lunar reality show. The carpet area was filled with signs and moans as she spoke. Then, when Barley appeared with these results, the groaning only grew louder.