"Tom Purdom-Research Project" - читать интересную книгу автора (Purdom Tom)

Research Project
by Tom Purdom
This story copyright 2000 by Tom Purdom. This copy was created for Jean Hardy's personal use. All
other rights are reserved. Thank you for honoring the copyright.

Published by Seattle Book Company, www.seattlebook.com.

* * *


The Senior Fabricator talked for almost forty minutes but Postri-Dem felt his entire speech could have
been reduced to three sentences: "The humans are predators. Their mouths are covered with blood.
Every day we hesitate provides them with another day they can use to pursue their true objective -- the
search for some way they can kill us."
That's a translation, of course. But you can consider it an exact quote. Postri-Dem watched a
recording a few hours after the meeting took place and his memory was one of his most important assets.
If you make a reasonable allowance for bitterness and despair, I think you can assume his summary of
the meeting is essentially accurate.
Postri-Dem wasn't there himself for the same reason I wouldn't have been invited if a comparable
group of homo-sapiens had been conducting a similar meeting. The individuals who had been summoned
to the conference were all members of the Chosen Presider's power structure. Two of them were
participating by screenlink, from the groundbase the ifli had established on Mars. The others were
reclining in the Chosen Presider's chambers, as usual, with their fingers comfortably wrapped around
drinking containers and different types of finger-food.
***


Jinny reads at a fifteen-year-old level but her reader knows she is only nine. On the right-hand screen
of her reader, she is being presented with the text she has chosen -- Dr. Orlando Mazzeri's personal
account of the last months of his relationship with Postri-Dem. On the left hand screen, the reader fills in
the gaps in Dr. Mazzeri's description by offering her an artist's rendering of the meetings the ifli conducted
in the Chosen Presider's chambers on their starship. The aliens lie in hammocks that hang from slender,
transparent frames. Their faces are heavily wrinkled. Their skin is tinted blue. Their clothes look baggy.
Their arms and fingers are unusually long, by human standards.
Jinny has picked Dr. Mazzeri's memoir because she thinks he looks like a nice man. He has a bald,
oval head, just like the father in a group of stories her mother read her when she was a baby. His beard
adds a touch of cozy furriness. She knows his memoir will be considered an "original source" -- a
designation that impresses the mentor she is working with this year.
***


The Chosen Presider had apparently learned a truth that had been passed on to me a few years after I
had started chairing academic committees. If you let certain individuals say everything they want to say,
they'll usually let you do everything you want to do. I had never applied the technique with any
consistency, but Harap-If was a pro.
As far as the Senior Fabricator was concerned, the human species had been given an offer that was a
better bargain than it could possibly have hoped for. The ifli had agreed, after all, to help us expand into
the asteroid belt and any other part of the solar system that appealed to us -- with the exception of one
useless desert planet. If we hadn't accepted such a generous proposal after eighty-six of our own days,
shouldn't it be obvious we were probably using the delay as a camouflage for some less innocent