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CHAPTER 19

From deep within a beanbag chair—Kyle had now brought one for most rooms of the building, Swelk watched two more curious and dissatisfied visitors leave. Humans under stress, she knew from both intercepted movies and her short time on Earth, paced to and fro. Krulirim in like circumstances also moved, in their case—naturally—always in circles.

Swelk's present immobility was willed. Her lame leg always ruined the perfection of her loops; she'd endured enough ridicule about her deviancies to have learned long ago how not to evoke more. Seething though she was in unexpressed frustration, a fragment of her mind laughed at the foolishness of maintaining self-discipline in front of the bilateral humans.

"May I join you?" asked Darlene Lyons from the doorway. She was at the house much more often than Kyle.

Why bother, thought Swelk. So far today she had failed dismally to answer questions about the engines of the Consensus, the numbers and capabilities of its antimeteor lasers, and the range of its lifeboats. Of the lifeboats she had known only that the reach was less than interstellar. She had abruptly ended the last session, about "military capabilities," when she realized what motivated the two men's inquiries: a possible assault on the Consensus. Despite Swelk's abuse by its passengers and crew, thoughts of revenge had not motivated her hasty departure.

"Of course," Swelk waggled two digits in feigned welcome. The gray tabby, now named Stripes, leapt clumsily onto the beanbag chair. It toppled against her, and almost immediately fell asleep. The fuzzy little thing, all legs and ears and impossibly soft fur, could not have been more different from a Girillian swampbeast—and the kitten reminded Swelk achingly of her abandoned charges. She would not cause them more suffering. "But I won't help Earth attack my former shipmates."

Darlene's cheeks reddened, a reaction whose meaning Swelk could not penetrate. "I have no desire to become a radioactive extra in a Krulchukor movie. What would you propose we do?"

Swelk's sensor stalks drooped in sadness and shame. The passengers and officers of the Consensus were eager to sacrifice the most advanced race her people had ever discovered. Would the plotters accept disappointment, meekly heading home if their plans were widely disclosed . . . or would they find new means to produce the same result? Rualf's special-effects wizards had already produced the robotic F'thk and the illusion of a gigantic moon-orbiting mother ship. Did she dare gamble they could not find a way to goad any Earth country into attacking its national rival? From newscasts Swelk had surreptitiously watched in her lifeboat hideaway before her escape, it seemed that counterstrike after counter-counterstrike would inevitably follow the first hostile launch.

And what if the filmmakers' attempts to fool Earth into a photogenic self-destruction did fail? Would Rualf and Captain Grelben, their dreams of vast wealth dashed, lash out at Earth in anger and disappointment? Swelk felt certain that an unsuccessful attack on the Consensus would draw an enraged response. Either way, as the morning's earlier visitors had made her realize, she simply did not know what danger the Krulchukor ship represented. There was no doubting from the humans' questions that they were concerned.

And she had led Rualf and Captain Grelben here. The exile's sensor stalks collapsed in withdrawal. The suddenly limp tendrils lay draped across her torso, obscuring her vision and muffling her hearing.

"Swelk!" called Darlene. "Are you all right?"

Swelk roused herself with a shake, her sensor stalks snapping painfully erect. "I am far from all right, but I have only myself to blame for that.

"And as for your previous question, I have no idea what we should do."

Kyle watched Swelk watching the kittens from the comfort of the beanbag chair she had towed into the dining room. Blackie and Stripes—there were two unimaginative names . . . were all Krulirim so literal?—were tussling for no obvious reason, their tiny mouths opening repeatedly in meows either silent or too high-pitched for him to hear. From time to time a cat forgot what she was doing and pounced on the disheveled fringe of the oriental rug on which they played.

The little alien had two sensor stalks pointed at her pets; the third was time-shared between Kyle and routine scanning of the room. One needed little time with Swelk, he thought, to deduce where the ET's attention was focused. He glanced at his wristwatch and sighed inwardly. His impatience was unfair, and he knew it. One debriefer after another grilled her most of the day, every day. He had to allow her an occasional mental break.

Those feelings of tolerance did nothing to expand the hours in Kyle's day. Well, he hadn't grown up with pets for nothing. After a while, he took the laser pointer from his pocket, waving it to make a jiggly red dot beside the kittens. They immediately stopped wrestling to chase the spot around the room. The hunt became a stakeout at the hall-closet door beneath which the laser dot had vanished. They were likely to stay there, staring at the gap under the door, for some time.

With the kittens quieted down, he tried to get Swelk back to business. "I'd like to talk some more about the bioconverter."

Success: she favored him now with two sensor stalks. "What else is there to say? I put organic material in. I take different stuff out."

"How does it work?"

"Here is the On-Off button. I can pick what I want made from the list in this display, or insert a sample here. I speak how much I want. Raw material, when needed, goes into this chute. Anything it can't use is emptied here. Food is deposited in the final compartment." She flicked, three times, all the digits of one limb. He took it as a sign of annoyance. "I have told you, and others, all of this before."

The day was overcast; the illumination from the window was gloomy. He pointed at the chandelier over the dining-room table. "Would you mind if I turn on the lamp?" Standing without waiting for an answer, he was surprised at the response he got.

"I do not like your lights. They make me jumpy."

"All right." He sat back down. Kyle knew people who got depressed in the winter from too little sun. There was even a medical name for the condition: seasonal affective disorder. In Swelk's case, of course, the ambient light wouldn't improve with the months-distant lengthening of the days. Renewed sympathy for the solitary alien washed over him. He tamped down the feeling—what Earth needed now was information. "I understand the controls for the bioconverter. My question is different. What happens inside to make it work?"

The alien hesitated. "Chemicals are broken apart. The pieces are recombined into new chemicals. Maybe there's a computer inside to control it."

Foiled again. Kyle's certified-evidence-free theory was that the bioconverter employed nanotechnology: self-replicating molecular-sized machines to manipulate atoms and molecules. Nanotech was conceptual at best in some of Earth's cutting-edge labs; any clues to its practical implementation could be priceless. The darker side of Kyle's speculation, if he could substantiate it, would be a whole new reason to fear the possible wrath of the Galactics. Imagine flesh-eating bacteria with attitude . . . .

Quit it, Kyle. It seemed he would be getting no hints from Swelk. Alas, her failure to answer these sorts of questions implied nothing about the truth of her story. How many people did he know without a clue how, say, their TV or refrigerator worked?

Speaking of refrigerators, and probably why he thought of one, he wouldn't mind a cold soda. Retrieving a can would provide a few minutes in which to exorcise his frustrations, since the safehouse was presently without a functioning cooler.

No one had seen a way to tell whether Swelk's bioconverter or computer had undisclosed capabilities . . . such as communicating with the ship from which she had, or claimed to have, defected. Even if her story were accepted—personally, he believed her—the danger would remain that hostile Krulirim could eavesdrop through her stolen equipment.

One of the few things he truly knew was that F'thk spying devices, the Galactic orbs, used microwaves. That Swelk's gear, if it had a communications mode, also exploited the electromagnetic spectrum, seemed like a good bet to take.

In terms of suppressing radio-based communications, stashing the alien in an existing radiometrics lab would have been ideal—but it would have sacrificed secrecy and discretion. Instead, the isolated one-time farmhouse had been hastily "remodeled" before Swelk was moved in and her debriefing begun in earnest.

The farmhouse's walls were newly spray painted with an electrically conductive pigment. Rolls of fine copper mesh lined the attic floor and cellar ceiling. Copper screens now covered all windows and doors. Everything was interconnected and grounded. Kyle had personally tested and blessed the finished product: an unobtrusive electromagnetic shield.

In the greater scheme of things, it was a small matter: a too casually draped dropcloth had let some of the sprayed conductive paint drift into the guts of the refrigerator. Plugged back in after the alterations were finished, the motor, obviously shorted out, had fried itself. It appeared that the owner previous to the CIA was one of those frugal fools who used pennies as fuses.

"I'm going to the trailer for a soda," Kyle told Swelk. "Can I get you anything?"

"I will stay with water from the kitchen tap."

The back door banged shut behind Kyle. The Airstream trailer to which Kyle now headed sat discreetly behind the house. Originally deployed as a communications station—the safehouse's shielding also blocked the agents' cell phones—the motor home was now most prized for its tiny refrigerator. He waved at an agent behind the house on a cigarette break, got a Coke, and returned.

"Sorry for the interruption." Blackie and Stripes were still waiting for the "mouse" to emerge from the closet. "About the bioconverter again, how is it powered?"

Swelk had gotten a glass of water during his absence. She had to climb to the counter to operate the sink. Instead of answering, she and her computer traded untranslated squeals. Finally, her computer said, "The translation program does not have the word I want. Maybe your technology does not have this capability. Some of the material I feed into the bioconverter is used to make the electricity. The energy is stored in something like a battery."

It sounded like a fuel cell, although a much better and more flexible design than any Kyle knew. That itself was interesting, but another opportunity had just presented itself. "Does your computer have notes about how the bioconverter itself works? Maybe even a design?"

More squeals and whines. "I am sorry. No."

Had he imagined a pregnant pause after "sorry"? Or was Swelk short of breath, as so often happened? She'd told him that Earth had more CO₂ than home. "Why not?"

Swelk's sensor stalks dropped. Body language for regret? Or for evasion? "I was unprepared for my escape." Pause. "I left the Consensus when my spying was discovered. My computer was mostly filled with movies." An even longer pause. "Sorry."

Another plausible explanation . . . for another aggravating roadblock. Britt's skepticism had one more data point of support.

"Cold War II: First Casualties!" screamed the headline.

A well-read Washington Post had been left on the table of the NASA conference room in which Kyle waited for Britt Arledge. Goddard Space Flight Center, in Greenbelt, Maryland, was a short drive from the White House—and the sprawling, campuslike complex had several electromagnetically shielded labs for the routine assembly and checkout of scientific satellites. A get-together here offered reasonable assurances against Galactic eavesdropping without drawing alien attention to Kyle or the federal lab at which he officially worked. Proximity to the District was simply a bonus.

Despite the inch-tall banner, details on the clash were sparse. There had been a brief but deadly dogfight over the South China Sea between Russian fighters based in Vietnam and carrier-based American fighters. Accounts differed, of course, as to who had fired first. Moscow claimed its planes had been on a routine exercise, and their approach to the carrier task force was no more sinister than hundreds of similar events over the years. Washington said a targeting radar had been detected.

What was clear was that three SU-22s and two F/A-18s had been splashed. Two pilots, one Russian and one American, had failed to eject. Both were missing and presumed dead.

"Dirty business, that."

Kyle looked up at the sound of Britt's voice. "That it is." The wonder was that more incidents, and more deaths, had not occurred as the tensions between the United States and Russia kept rising. It was, to the very few who knew, a simulation of a nuclear crisis . . . but that pretense of hostility could turn real enough at a moment's notice. Too many nerves were stretched taut. Too many weapons could be loosed on a moment's notice.

He flung down the newspaper he'd been studying. Given what Swelk had told them, did Earth's nuclear powers need to continue the disaster-prone deception? He was trying to work that through in his own mind. "We'll be meeting down the hall."

Nodding, Britt followed Kyle along a road-stripe-yellow corridor to the shielded privacy of a cavernous, multistory satellite-assembly lab. Hands clasping the steel-pipe railing of a catwalk, Kyle felt free to speak his mind. "Is the President prepared to tell the Russians about our defector? We need to stop the madness before something even worse happens."

Britt's nostrils flared slightly, as visible a sign as he ever gave of disagreement. "I'm not yet convinced that she is a defector, and not an agent. Why are you?"

It was the debate they kept having. Nothing in Swelk's ongoing CIA debriefings had revealed any inconsistencies in her story, nor had the little ET shared anything irreconcilable with Kyle or Darlene. A large part of that consistent story, unfortunately, was wide-ranging unfamiliarity with her species' science and engineering. That an intelligent member of a modern society could be ignorant of its technologies—Britt cheerfully admitted that he was without a clue how a radio worked and what kept a plane in the air—settled nothing.

The more cynical CIA debriefers went further, speculating that the very absence of minor loose ends in Swelk's story suggested a fabrication. Kyle thought he'd squelched that insinuation, as a groundless extrapolation to the aliens of a human foible. Who was to say all Krulirim didn't have a flawless memory for detail?

This was no trivial difference of opinion; humanity's future teetered on the fulcrum of the choice they must soon make. Kyle's knuckles were white from pressure as he fought to control his emotions. "No amount of contradiction-free interrogation is going to overcome your doubts. Ironclad proof of her story, if Swelk is telling the truth, is on the Consensus . . . which, as you know, the ETs won't allow us aboard." The few attempts to hide bugs on the aliens or their equipment had been met with uniform failure and angry F'thk denunciations. The President himself had banned further attempts as too dangerous.

"And yet," Britt flashed a momentary smile, "you asked that we get together."

"True." Kyle extracted two glossy sheets from the manila envelope that he'd carried tucked under an arm. Each page bore an image of the moon, its cratered landscape unmistakable. "Take a look at these."

Britt's eyes switched back and forth between pictures. The tiny timestamps in the corners of each differed by only milliseconds. "They're the same scene, right? The left one shows much more detail."

"The higher-resolution shot is an optical image. The other is a computer reconstruction from a reflected microwave pulse." Kyle suppressed an urge to discuss just how much computation had been required to generate the latter image. "We adopted technology used to predict the stealthiness of airplane designs without having to build them first."

He took back the images before handing over a third. The new picture showed the supposed Galactic mother ship. Less than half a hemisphere was visible, the rest an inky blackness. A similarly divided lunar landscape provided a dramatic backdrop. "Sunlight is striking from the side, obviously."

Britt tapped the photo. "What's this dark spot?"

"Good eye—it's a shadow."

"Of what? It must be something big."

"A hangar. Their utility spacecraft, the ones that never land on the Earth-visible side of the moon, emerge from and return to that bay. Most of the time the door is closed." One of the just-mentioned auxiliary craft was also in the image. Kyle was aware, although the still frame didn't support the knowledge, that the smaller vessel had just exited the hangar.

Britt looked at him shrewdly. "But you claim not to believe in this mother ship. Swelk says it doesn't exist."

"That hangar for the auxiliary craft would be a thousand-plus feet deep. We can calculate that depth from the geometry of the shadow." The previous microwave observation had shown craters much shallower than that. With a flourish, Kyle offered a final image. "Now look at this."

This computer-reconstructed microwave image, its timestamp again well within a second of its optical analogue, did not show any auxiliary craft. And the Galactic mother ship appeared only as a featureless sphere.

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Framed

Back | Next
Contents

CHAPTER 19

From deep within a beanbag chair—Kyle had now brought one for most rooms of the building, Swelk watched two more curious and dissatisfied visitors leave. Humans under stress, she knew from both intercepted movies and her short time on Earth, paced to and fro. Krulirim in like circumstances also moved, in their case—naturally—always in circles.

Swelk's present immobility was willed. Her lame leg always ruined the perfection of her loops; she'd endured enough ridicule about her deviancies to have learned long ago how not to evoke more. Seething though she was in unexpressed frustration, a fragment of her mind laughed at the foolishness of maintaining self-discipline in front of the bilateral humans.

"May I join you?" asked Darlene Lyons from the doorway. She was at the house much more often than Kyle.

Why bother, thought Swelk. So far today she had failed dismally to answer questions about the engines of the Consensus, the numbers and capabilities of its antimeteor lasers, and the range of its lifeboats. Of the lifeboats she had known only that the reach was less than interstellar. She had abruptly ended the last session, about "military capabilities," when she realized what motivated the two men's inquiries: a possible assault on the Consensus. Despite Swelk's abuse by its passengers and crew, thoughts of revenge had not motivated her hasty departure.

"Of course," Swelk waggled two digits in feigned welcome. The gray tabby, now named Stripes, leapt clumsily onto the beanbag chair. It toppled against her, and almost immediately fell asleep. The fuzzy little thing, all legs and ears and impossibly soft fur, could not have been more different from a Girillian swampbeast—and the kitten reminded Swelk achingly of her abandoned charges. She would not cause them more suffering. "But I won't help Earth attack my former shipmates."

Darlene's cheeks reddened, a reaction whose meaning Swelk could not penetrate. "I have no desire to become a radioactive extra in a Krulchukor movie. What would you propose we do?"

Swelk's sensor stalks drooped in sadness and shame. The passengers and officers of the Consensus were eager to sacrifice the most advanced race her people had ever discovered. Would the plotters accept disappointment, meekly heading home if their plans were widely disclosed . . . or would they find new means to produce the same result? Rualf's special-effects wizards had already produced the robotic F'thk and the illusion of a gigantic moon-orbiting mother ship. Did she dare gamble they could not find a way to goad any Earth country into attacking its national rival? From newscasts Swelk had surreptitiously watched in her lifeboat hideaway before her escape, it seemed that counterstrike after counter-counterstrike would inevitably follow the first hostile launch.

And what if the filmmakers' attempts to fool Earth into a photogenic self-destruction did fail? Would Rualf and Captain Grelben, their dreams of vast wealth dashed, lash out at Earth in anger and disappointment? Swelk felt certain that an unsuccessful attack on the Consensus would draw an enraged response. Either way, as the morning's earlier visitors had made her realize, she simply did not know what danger the Krulchukor ship represented. There was no doubting from the humans' questions that they were concerned.

And she had led Rualf and Captain Grelben here. The exile's sensor stalks collapsed in withdrawal. The suddenly limp tendrils lay draped across her torso, obscuring her vision and muffling her hearing.

"Swelk!" called Darlene. "Are you all right?"

Swelk roused herself with a shake, her sensor stalks snapping painfully erect. "I am far from all right, but I have only myself to blame for that.

"And as for your previous question, I have no idea what we should do."

Kyle watched Swelk watching the kittens from the comfort of the beanbag chair she had towed into the dining room. Blackie and Stripes—there were two unimaginative names . . . were all Krulirim so literal?—were tussling for no obvious reason, their tiny mouths opening repeatedly in meows either silent or too high-pitched for him to hear. From time to time a cat forgot what she was doing and pounced on the disheveled fringe of the oriental rug on which they played.

The little alien had two sensor stalks pointed at her pets; the third was time-shared between Kyle and routine scanning of the room. One needed little time with Swelk, he thought, to deduce where the ET's attention was focused. He glanced at his wristwatch and sighed inwardly. His impatience was unfair, and he knew it. One debriefer after another grilled her most of the day, every day. He had to allow her an occasional mental break.

Those feelings of tolerance did nothing to expand the hours in Kyle's day. Well, he hadn't grown up with pets for nothing. After a while, he took the laser pointer from his pocket, waving it to make a jiggly red dot beside the kittens. They immediately stopped wrestling to chase the spot around the room. The hunt became a stakeout at the hall-closet door beneath which the laser dot had vanished. They were likely to stay there, staring at the gap under the door, for some time.

With the kittens quieted down, he tried to get Swelk back to business. "I'd like to talk some more about the bioconverter."

Success: she favored him now with two sensor stalks. "What else is there to say? I put organic material in. I take different stuff out."

"How does it work?"

"Here is the On-Off button. I can pick what I want made from the list in this display, or insert a sample here. I speak how much I want. Raw material, when needed, goes into this chute. Anything it can't use is emptied here. Food is deposited in the final compartment." She flicked, three times, all the digits of one limb. He took it as a sign of annoyance. "I have told you, and others, all of this before."

The day was overcast; the illumination from the window was gloomy. He pointed at the chandelier over the dining-room table. "Would you mind if I turn on the lamp?" Standing without waiting for an answer, he was surprised at the response he got.

"I do not like your lights. They make me jumpy."

"All right." He sat back down. Kyle knew people who got depressed in the winter from too little sun. There was even a medical name for the condition: seasonal affective disorder. In Swelk's case, of course, the ambient light wouldn't improve with the months-distant lengthening of the days. Renewed sympathy for the solitary alien washed over him. He tamped down the feeling—what Earth needed now was information. "I understand the controls for the bioconverter. My question is different. What happens inside to make it work?"

The alien hesitated. "Chemicals are broken apart. The pieces are recombined into new chemicals. Maybe there's a computer inside to control it."

Foiled again. Kyle's certified-evidence-free theory was that the bioconverter employed nanotechnology: self-replicating molecular-sized machines to manipulate atoms and molecules. Nanotech was conceptual at best in some of Earth's cutting-edge labs; any clues to its practical implementation could be priceless. The darker side of Kyle's speculation, if he could substantiate it, would be a whole new reason to fear the possible wrath of the Galactics. Imagine flesh-eating bacteria with attitude . . . .

Quit it, Kyle. It seemed he would be getting no hints from Swelk. Alas, her failure to answer these sorts of questions implied nothing about the truth of her story. How many people did he know without a clue how, say, their TV or refrigerator worked?

Speaking of refrigerators, and probably why he thought of one, he wouldn't mind a cold soda. Retrieving a can would provide a few minutes in which to exorcise his frustrations, since the safehouse was presently without a functioning cooler.

No one had seen a way to tell whether Swelk's bioconverter or computer had undisclosed capabilities . . . such as communicating with the ship from which she had, or claimed to have, defected. Even if her story were accepted—personally, he believed her—the danger would remain that hostile Krulirim could eavesdrop through her stolen equipment.

One of the few things he truly knew was that F'thk spying devices, the Galactic orbs, used microwaves. That Swelk's gear, if it had a communications mode, also exploited the electromagnetic spectrum, seemed like a good bet to take.

In terms of suppressing radio-based communications, stashing the alien in an existing radiometrics lab would have been ideal—but it would have sacrificed secrecy and discretion. Instead, the isolated one-time farmhouse had been hastily "remodeled" before Swelk was moved in and her debriefing begun in earnest.

The farmhouse's walls were newly spray painted with an electrically conductive pigment. Rolls of fine copper mesh lined the attic floor and cellar ceiling. Copper screens now covered all windows and doors. Everything was interconnected and grounded. Kyle had personally tested and blessed the finished product: an unobtrusive electromagnetic shield.

In the greater scheme of things, it was a small matter: a too casually draped dropcloth had let some of the sprayed conductive paint drift into the guts of the refrigerator. Plugged back in after the alterations were finished, the motor, obviously shorted out, had fried itself. It appeared that the owner previous to the CIA was one of those frugal fools who used pennies as fuses.

"I'm going to the trailer for a soda," Kyle told Swelk. "Can I get you anything?"

"I will stay with water from the kitchen tap."

The back door banged shut behind Kyle. The Airstream trailer to which Kyle now headed sat discreetly behind the house. Originally deployed as a communications station—the safehouse's shielding also blocked the agents' cell phones—the motor home was now most prized for its tiny refrigerator. He waved at an agent behind the house on a cigarette break, got a Coke, and returned.

"Sorry for the interruption." Blackie and Stripes were still waiting for the "mouse" to emerge from the closet. "About the bioconverter again, how is it powered?"

Swelk had gotten a glass of water during his absence. She had to climb to the counter to operate the sink. Instead of answering, she and her computer traded untranslated squeals. Finally, her computer said, "The translation program does not have the word I want. Maybe your technology does not have this capability. Some of the material I feed into the bioconverter is used to make the electricity. The energy is stored in something like a battery."

It sounded like a fuel cell, although a much better and more flexible design than any Kyle knew. That itself was interesting, but another opportunity had just presented itself. "Does your computer have notes about how the bioconverter itself works? Maybe even a design?"

More squeals and whines. "I am sorry. No."

Had he imagined a pregnant pause after "sorry"? Or was Swelk short of breath, as so often happened? She'd told him that Earth had more CO₂ than home. "Why not?"

Swelk's sensor stalks dropped. Body language for regret? Or for evasion? "I was unprepared for my escape." Pause. "I left the Consensus when my spying was discovered. My computer was mostly filled with movies." An even longer pause. "Sorry."

Another plausible explanation . . . for another aggravating roadblock. Britt's skepticism had one more data point of support.

"Cold War II: First Casualties!" screamed the headline.

A well-read Washington Post had been left on the table of the NASA conference room in which Kyle waited for Britt Arledge. Goddard Space Flight Center, in Greenbelt, Maryland, was a short drive from the White House—and the sprawling, campuslike complex had several electromagnetically shielded labs for the routine assembly and checkout of scientific satellites. A get-together here offered reasonable assurances against Galactic eavesdropping without drawing alien attention to Kyle or the federal lab at which he officially worked. Proximity to the District was simply a bonus.

Despite the inch-tall banner, details on the clash were sparse. There had been a brief but deadly dogfight over the South China Sea between Russian fighters based in Vietnam and carrier-based American fighters. Accounts differed, of course, as to who had fired first. Moscow claimed its planes had been on a routine exercise, and their approach to the carrier task force was no more sinister than hundreds of similar events over the years. Washington said a targeting radar had been detected.

What was clear was that three SU-22s and two F/A-18s had been splashed. Two pilots, one Russian and one American, had failed to eject. Both were missing and presumed dead.

"Dirty business, that."

Kyle looked up at the sound of Britt's voice. "That it is." The wonder was that more incidents, and more deaths, had not occurred as the tensions between the United States and Russia kept rising. It was, to the very few who knew, a simulation of a nuclear crisis . . . but that pretense of hostility could turn real enough at a moment's notice. Too many nerves were stretched taut. Too many weapons could be loosed on a moment's notice.

He flung down the newspaper he'd been studying. Given what Swelk had told them, did Earth's nuclear powers need to continue the disaster-prone deception? He was trying to work that through in his own mind. "We'll be meeting down the hall."

Nodding, Britt followed Kyle along a road-stripe-yellow corridor to the shielded privacy of a cavernous, multistory satellite-assembly lab. Hands clasping the steel-pipe railing of a catwalk, Kyle felt free to speak his mind. "Is the President prepared to tell the Russians about our defector? We need to stop the madness before something even worse happens."

Britt's nostrils flared slightly, as visible a sign as he ever gave of disagreement. "I'm not yet convinced that she is a defector, and not an agent. Why are you?"

It was the debate they kept having. Nothing in Swelk's ongoing CIA debriefings had revealed any inconsistencies in her story, nor had the little ET shared anything irreconcilable with Kyle or Darlene. A large part of that consistent story, unfortunately, was wide-ranging unfamiliarity with her species' science and engineering. That an intelligent member of a modern society could be ignorant of its technologies—Britt cheerfully admitted that he was without a clue how a radio worked and what kept a plane in the air—settled nothing.

The more cynical CIA debriefers went further, speculating that the very absence of minor loose ends in Swelk's story suggested a fabrication. Kyle thought he'd squelched that insinuation, as a groundless extrapolation to the aliens of a human foible. Who was to say all Krulirim didn't have a flawless memory for detail?

This was no trivial difference of opinion; humanity's future teetered on the fulcrum of the choice they must soon make. Kyle's knuckles were white from pressure as he fought to control his emotions. "No amount of contradiction-free interrogation is going to overcome your doubts. Ironclad proof of her story, if Swelk is telling the truth, is on the Consensus . . . which, as you know, the ETs won't allow us aboard." The few attempts to hide bugs on the aliens or their equipment had been met with uniform failure and angry F'thk denunciations. The President himself had banned further attempts as too dangerous.

"And yet," Britt flashed a momentary smile, "you asked that we get together."

"True." Kyle extracted two glossy sheets from the manila envelope that he'd carried tucked under an arm. Each page bore an image of the moon, its cratered landscape unmistakable. "Take a look at these."

Britt's eyes switched back and forth between pictures. The tiny timestamps in the corners of each differed by only milliseconds. "They're the same scene, right? The left one shows much more detail."

"The higher-resolution shot is an optical image. The other is a computer reconstruction from a reflected microwave pulse." Kyle suppressed an urge to discuss just how much computation had been required to generate the latter image. "We adopted technology used to predict the stealthiness of airplane designs without having to build them first."

He took back the images before handing over a third. The new picture showed the supposed Galactic mother ship. Less than half a hemisphere was visible, the rest an inky blackness. A similarly divided lunar landscape provided a dramatic backdrop. "Sunlight is striking from the side, obviously."

Britt tapped the photo. "What's this dark spot?"

"Good eye—it's a shadow."

"Of what? It must be something big."

"A hangar. Their utility spacecraft, the ones that never land on the Earth-visible side of the moon, emerge from and return to that bay. Most of the time the door is closed." One of the just-mentioned auxiliary craft was also in the image. Kyle was aware, although the still frame didn't support the knowledge, that the smaller vessel had just exited the hangar.

Britt looked at him shrewdly. "But you claim not to believe in this mother ship. Swelk says it doesn't exist."

"That hangar for the auxiliary craft would be a thousand-plus feet deep. We can calculate that depth from the geometry of the shadow." The previous microwave observation had shown craters much shallower than that. With a flourish, Kyle offered a final image. "Now look at this."

This computer-reconstructed microwave image, its timestamp again well within a second of its optical analogue, did not show any auxiliary craft. And the Galactic mother ship appeared only as a featureless sphere.

Back | Next
Contents
Framed