The D’neeran Factor (8 page)

After a minute she realized there were no voices. But somewhere on
Endeavor
were some very excited people.

She went out into the corridor and followed her instinct toward the source of excitement—Communications. The suggestion of noise grew stronger as she focused her attention. The walls seemed to carry it like a vibration, and the unsound pricked at her scalp. Something was happening, something important. People stood in clusters talking about it, but she did not ask them what it was. She went on toward Communications, moving faster, her breath short for no reason.

It was controlled, crowded chaos inside, but everyone's
attention was focused on instrument readings and—something else: something mind-conjured yet so shapeless, shadowy, hidden in cloud that her dream came upon her in a great rush and she drew in her breath harshly, for an instant thinking all of it a dream, and almost turning to run.

Nearby Brown called, “Tamara! Hey, Tam!”

Tamara looked across bent heads. Brown said, “Secondary traces negative. Exclusion from the relay pipeline confirmed.”

Tamara said, “Check it again.” She plunged back into conversation with Erik.

Hanna was shivering. She was not dreaming, but still everything seemed faintly unreal. She looked for someone to talk to. De Assis, the linguist, was speaking with animation to McCarthy of exobiology; but Marte Koster, chief of exopsychology, stood silent and a little apart. Hanna went to her, picking her way carefully through a larger crowd than the space was designed to handle. Koster was a pudgy woman who made Hanna think of an ill-tempered duck, but her face, Hanna saw with shock, was transfigured, and she caught at Hanna's arm with plump hands.

“It's wonderful! Wonderful!” she said. A clean pure note of excitement made her almost likable.

Hanna said—with an edge of reluctance that made no sense—“What is it?”

“You haven't heard?”

“No. No. I was busy. Heard what?”

“Contact! A first contact!”

“What?”
Hanna said. Koster kept talking, but Hanna did not hear her. She looked at Koster's shining eyes, at the bustle around them, as if all of it would collapse now, immediately, any second. Humankind knows one star-traveling race and that is F'thal. Elementary knowledge, you knew it before you knew what stars were—

She stood perfectly still. Koster patted at her nervously. “It's a shock, I know. I don't believe it yet myself. But it's true. It's true!”

Hanna said with an effort, “What happened?”

“They got a message a few hours ago. They're still checking to make sure it's not of human origin. It's a series of prime numbers and a location. Clearly intelligent.”

“From the system they've been signaling?”

“Where else?”

“But there's no power generation there!”

“You mean not that we recognized. No heat or radiation. We've got to find out how they do it. Think of it!”

Koster was ecstatic; more than ecstatic—bordering on hysteria. “Don't,” Hanna said, trying to soothe her. “Don't. For heaven's sake—” She felt giddy. Everyone seemed to be shouting, but that was an illusion; it was only that they could not help projecting. She shut them out as well as she could and tried to think sensibly.

“That's the location they gave? That system?” she asked.

“No. No. The rendezvous is a week away, I think. In deep space.”

“Why?”

“Who knows?” But the questions calmed Koster. She took a deep breath and said quite rationally, “I don't suppose you've felt anything, have you?”

“Felt—?”

“Felt anything telepathically that might have come from them.”

“I wouldn't. There are too many people on this ship. The aliens would have to—”

She stopped abruptly. Koster said, “They'd have to what?”

“I was going to say, they'd have to be telepaths themselves. But if they touched us I wouldn't necessarily know it was them.”

“You let me know if there's anything. Anything at all. Any slightest possibility.”

“I will,” Hanna said, but she was glad Koster was not looking at her too closely when she said it, because she did not want to be questioned about possibilities. She did not want to talk about the one that had just occurred to her, which was preposterous anyway, but then it was all preposterous. It was too new, she could not believe in aliens yet and half these busy people could not either. History was being made but it wasn't, for those making it, real. Not yet. So the possibility wasn't real either, and besides she did not even want to think about it because—thinking about it made her afraid, and if she thought about it she would have to do something about it; the fear would not go away until she knew she was wrong.

E
ndeavor
came to the appointed place nine days later, and found no one there.

The journey ought to have taken longer, and Hanna, like everyone else in Navigation, was tired when the push for speed was over. She was not at once concerned with the silence that answered
Endeavor
's homing beacon, nor were any of the others. Species X had not specified a time for rendezvous. Perhaps the aliens were still on their way. If this area of space was familiar to them, they might have started for it later, underestimating
Endeavor
's pace through unknown space. They might think less like humans than like F'thalians, who were universally tardy. As long as the creatures were an enigma, there was no point in speculating about their punctuality or their notion of a timely tryst.

Besides, there was the micro factor to consider. From the macroscopic point of view, an interstellar location could be pinpointed with high accuracy; but on the scale of two small ships seeking each other in perpetual night, there was room for error in even the most precise equations. The
Endeavor
's beacon had its limitations, too. Inspace signals did not travel, but came into existence more or less at the point of reception, the more or less being a matter of probability. The beacon therefore consisted not of one Inspace signal but of billions, fired in a series run at subatomic speed to an array of points within a radius of one light-year in any direction from
Endeavor.
This left sizable gaps in the reception pattern, so it was customary to shift the whole thing in space for each repetition of the sequence of signals. If you were in a crack at the beginning, you had only to wait until
a point in the pattern was close enough to register on reasonably sensitive instruments.

Of course, the aliens would not know that; but as the days wore on and stretched into a week of silence, the fear that grew on the crew of the
Endeavor
and the project's Earth-based managers was that they did not care.

*   *   *

Starr Jameson watched the conference and doodled.

He had positioned himself so that he could see past the video screen that showed a dozen members of
Endeavor
's complement at their conference table, and look instead at the brilliant June afternoon outside. He had gone even farther than his Heartworld predecessors in making his Central Admin quarters at least appear utterly unguarded, though the appearance was deceptive. This room had no visible outer wall, so that the broad river running past the administration complex lapped at its edges, and he could walk straight off the thick carpet into the water if he chose. He never would; a Polity commissioner did not do such things, and in any case Jameson would not have done it because he had seldom done an impulsive thing in his life. But sometimes he thought about it, especially at times like this.

In front of the conference screen floated a smaller screen which displayed the conferees' words as they spoke. Jameson had lowered the volume of the dialogue. He kept half an ear on it and half an eye on the readout, and in his lap he held a notepad and stylus. He would appear to the
Endeavor
personnel, and to the other Earth-based participants whose disembodied voices joined in from time to time from Admin and other locations, to be taking studious notes. He never took notes, but a lifetime of conferences had taught him the necessity of doodling to have something to do besides look at interchangeable faces and listen with diminishing concentration to interminable voices going on and on.

This meeting had been going on half an hour and he had already filled and wiped the notepad's screen once before something on the readout caught his attention.

He leaned forward and said, “One moment, please.”

All the voices stopped immediately. He said, “Lieutenant Hweng, back up a moment, please. What did you say about confirmation of the source of the original signal?”

Tamara Hweng said without hesitation, “It took some time to refine the parameters of transmission, sir, probably because of equipment incompatibility, and we've only just pinned down the ambiguity margin. The signal we received didn't originate in the target stellar system. It came from perhaps a third of that distance from
Endeavor.
Unless you accept the possibility of our being directly in line with an established relay system, that means they answered us from a spacecraft.”

“Thank you,” Jameson said. He waited for the voices to take up their theme before he leaned back and considered the news. It must fit into a pattern somewhere; but there were not yet enough facts to form a discernible pattern. There were only the signal to a distant new world, the answer from a spacecraft close at hand, a meeting set for an unspecified hour—then nothing.

He appreciated the irony of the situation. All the laws of chance and logic argued the impossibility of
Endeavor
's first effort drawing an answer. Hundreds or thousands of efforts with no answer had been the likely scenario. The impossible had most gratifyingly happened, however—and now was slipping out of reach.

Why had species X not answered from the system that received the signal? To draw
Endeavor
away from it? To avoid being caught on the ground? If they had answered from a spacecraft, why had they not simply made physical contact with
Endeavor
at its original, well-described position?

The readout said: “—suppose we scouted the target system just went there maybe used one of the shuttles or—”

Jameson said, “No.”

The speaker was McCarthy. He was a Heartworlder and not over-fond of Jameson. He looked up and said with a familiarity most of the others would not have dared, “Why not?”

“You have no shuttles with Inspace capability, Harry,” Jameson said. “You'd have to take the
Endeavor
into the gravity complex. If you took nine days to get to your present location, in deep space and working flat out, you would need—how long, Captain Fleming, to chart a safe path to and through the target system?”

Fleming nodded. He said, “At a guess—and this is just a guess—a month. At least. Probably longer.”

“Yes. And you would relinquish the chance of contact where you are.”

First Officer Ito Hirasawa said, “What about getting a smaller Inspace vessel out from the closest base? We could stay where we are while somebody else charts a course.”

Jameson said, “We don't know yet that they don't consider one ship an invasion. We don't want them worrying about two. Gentlemen and ladies, we have no idea what we're dealing with. It has been seventeen days since Signal Alpha. Seventeen days may be only a moment to these beings. I suggest maintaining your position for a time. There are other reasons, but at present let's just assume that your time can be best employed in waiting.”

Marte Koster said rather plaintively, “But how long, Commissioner?”

She looked woebegone. Jameson did not like her expression, and he did not like Koster. Sheer weight of Fleet seniority had earned her this choice assignment. There had been no valid reason to reject her, and he had not tried to do so. But he did not like her. He said, “I don't know how long you should wait. But as an exopsychologist you're certainly aware that curiosity is a prime trait of sentient life. They'll come take a look at you sooner or later.”

She tapped the table restlessly and said, “It might speed them up if we gave them more information. We could add to the beacon content.”

One of the disembodied voices—an I&S man from Morisz's office—said immediately, “No!” There was a pause during which he must have considered how his haste looked—a little too paranoid, perhaps—and he added more smoothly, “I'm not an exopsychologist, but surely what we've already told them is enough to stir up any reasoning creature's curiosity. What if we got a message out of nowhere from somebody identifying himself as an intelligent, oxygen-breathing biped? I know how we'd react. Wouldn't we, ma'am?”

Koster said, “You can't generalize—” and was quickly interrupted. Jameson listened long enough to be sure the I&S man was carrying his point, and tuned out again.

The conference started to disintegrate, its business done. Jameson began to think of the long cool evening ahead, of catching up on his endless reading in the sweet-scented garden
of his nearby home. Presently Henriette would come to be beautiful and compliant over drinks at twilight, and later all warmth in the dark.

But once he looked again at Marte Koster, and wondered if she were making any use of the D'neeran girl who was somewhere on
Endeavor.
A long time ago he had given Koster a gentle hint of the possibilities there. Too gentle perhaps; but his was a very private experiment.

“What?” Hanna said.

“Umm?”

“Did you say something?”