The Mote in God's Eye (10 page)

“Commander Sinclair, have we enough energy for a report to Fleet?”

“Aye, Skipper, the engines hold verra well indeed. Yon object is nae so massive as we thought, and we’ve hydrogen to spare.”

“Good.” Blaine called the communications room to send out his report. Intruder aboard. Cylinder, ratio of axes four to one. Uniform metallic in appearance but close inspection impossible until acceleration eases off. Suggest
Lermontov
attempt to recover the sail, which would decelerate rapidly with no pod ahead of it. Estimated time of arrival, New Scotland . . . suggest
MacArthur
put into orbit around uninhabited moon of New Scotland. No evidence of life or activity aboard alien, but...

It was a very large “but,” Rod thought. Just what was that thing? Had it fired on him deliberately? Was it under command, or what kind of robot could pilot it across light years of normal space? What would it, whoever or whatever was commanding it, think of being stuffed into the hangar deck of a battle cruiser, cut loose from its shrouds.

Hell of an undignified end to thirty-five light years of travel.

And there was nothing he could do to find out. Nothing at all.
MacArthur
’s situation wasn’t so critical, Renner had her well under control; but neither Blaine nor Cargill could leave his station, and he wasn’t about to send junior officers to investigate that thing.

“Is it over?” Sally’s voice was plaintive. “Is everything all right?”

“Yes.” Rod shuddered involuntarily as he thought of what might have happened. “Yes, it’s aboard and we’ve seen nothing about it other than its size. It won’t answer signals.” Now why did he feel a little twinge of satisfaction because she’d just have to wait like the rest of them?

MacArthur
plunged on, whipping around Cal so close that there was a measurable drag from the corona; but Renner’s astrogation was perfect and the Field held nicely.

They waited.

At two gravities Rod could leave the bridge. He stood with an effort, transferred to a scooter, and started aft. The elevators let him “down” as he moved through the ship, and he stopped at each deck to note the alert crewmen still at their posts despite being at general quarters too long.
MacArthur
had to be the best ship in the Navy . . . and he’d keep her that way!

When he reached Kelley’s position at the air lock to hangar deck, there was still nothing new.

“You can see there’s hatches or something there, sir,”

Kelley said. He pointed with a flash. As the light flicked up the alien craft Rod saw the ruins of his boats crushed against the steel decks.

“And it’s done nothing?”

“Not one thing, Captain. It come in, whapped against the decks—like to threw me into a bulkhead; that thing didn’t come in fast but she come down hard. Then, nothing. My files, me, the middies who keep swarming around here, none of us seen a thing, Cap’n,”

“Just as well,” Rod muttered. He took out his own light and played it on the enormous cylinder. The upper half vanished into the uniform black of the Field.

His light swept across a row of conical knobs; each a meter in diameter and three times that in length. He searched, but there was nothing there—no tag ends of the shrouds which ought to be hanging from them, no visible opening in the knob through which the shroud could have been reeled. Nothing.

“Keep watching it, Kelley. I want continuous surveillance.” Captain Rod Blaine went back to the bridge with no more information than he’d had before and sat staring at his screens. Unconsciously his hand moved to rub the bridge of his nose.

Just what in God’s name
had
he caught?

Blaine stood rigidly at attention before the massive desk. Fleet Admiral Howland Cranston, Commander-in-Chief of His Majesty’s forces beyond the Coal Sack, glared across a rose-teak desk whose exquisite carvings would have fascinated Rod if he’d been at liberty to examine them. The Admiral fingered a thick sheaf of papers.

“Know what these are, Captain?”

“No, sir.”

“Requests that you be dismissed from the Service. Half the faculty at Imperial University. Couple of padres from the Church and one Bishop. Secretary of the Humanity League. Every bleeding heart this side of the Coal Sack wants your scalp.”

“Yes, sir.” There didn’t seem to be anything else to say. Rod stood at stiff attention, waiting for it to be over. What would his father think? Would anyone understand?

Cranston glared again. There was no expression in his eyes at all. His undress uniform was shapeless. Miniatures of a dozen decorations told the story of a commander who’d ruthlessly driven himself and his subordinates beyond any hope of survival.

“The man who fired on the first alien contact the human race ever made,” Cranston said coldly. “Crippled their probe. You know we only found one passenger, and he’s
dead
? Life-system failure, maybe,” Cranston fingered the sheaf of papers and viciously thrust them away. “Damned civilians, they always end up influencing the Navy. They leave me no choice.

“All right. Captain Blaine, as Fleet Admiral of this Sector I hereby confirm your promotion to captain and assign you to command of His Majesty’s battle cruiser
MacArthur
. Now sit down.” As Rod dazedly looked for a chair, Cranston grunted. “That’ll show the bastards. Try to tell me how to run my command, will they? Blaine, you’re the luckiest officer in the Service. A board would have confirmed your promotion anyway, but without this you’d never have kept that ship.”

“Yes. Sir.” It was true enough, but that couldn’t keep the note of pride out of Rod’s voice. And
MacArthur
was his— “Sir? Have they found out anything about the probe? Since we left the probe in orbit I’ve been busy in the Yards getting
MacArthur
refitted.”

“We’ve opened it, Captain. I’m not sure I believe what we found, but we’ve got inside the thing. We found this.” He produced an enlarged photograph.

The creature was stretched out on a laboratory table. The scale beside it showed that it was small, 1.24 meters from top of head to what Rod at first thought were shoes, then decided were its feet. There were no toes, although a ridge of what might have been horn covered the forward edges.

The rest was a scrambled nightmare. There were two slender right arms ending in delicate hands, four fingers and two opposed thumbs on each. On the left side was a single massive arm, virtually a club of flesh, easily bigger than both right arms combined. Its hand was three thick fingers closed like a vise.

Cripple? Mutation? The creature was symmetrical below where its waist would have been; from the waist up it was—different.

The torso was lumpy. The musculature was more complex than that of men. Rod could not discern the basic bone structure beneath.

The arms—well, they made a weird kind of sense. The elbows of the right arms fitted too well, like nested plastic cups. Evolution had done that. The creature was not a cripple.

The head was the worst.

There was no neck. The massive muscles of the left shoulder sloped smoothly up to the top of the alien’s head. The left side of the skull blended into the left shoulder and was much larger than the right. There was no left ear and no room for one. A great membranous goblin’s ear decorated the right side, above a narrow shoulder that would have been almost human except that there was a similar shoulder below and slightly behind the first.

The face was like nothing he had ever seen. On such a head it should not even have been a face. But there were two symmetrical slanted eyes, wide open in death, very human, somehow oriental. There was a mouth, expressionless, with the lips slightly parted to show points of teeth.

“Well, how do you like him?”

Rod answered, “I’m sorry it’s dead. I can think of a million questions to ask it— There was only this one?”

“Yes. Only him, inside the ship. Now look at this.”

Cranston touched a corner of his desk to reveal a recessed control panel. Curtains on the wall to Rod’s left parted and the room lights dimmed. A screen lighted uniformly white.

Shadows suddenly shot in from the edges, dwindled as they converged toward the center, and were gone, all in a few seconds.

“We took that off your sun-side cameras, the ones that weren’t burned off. Now I’ll slow it down.”

Shadows moved jerkily inward on a white background. There were half a dozen showing when the Admiral stopped the film.

“Well?”

“They look like—like that,” said Rod.

“Glad you think so. Now watch.” The projector started again. The odd shapes dwindled, converged, and disappeared, not as if they had dwindled to infinity, but as if they had evaporated.

“But that shows passengers being ejected from the probe and burned up by the light sail. What sense does that make?”

“It doesn’t. And you can find forty explanations out at the university. Picture’s not too clear anyway. Notice how distorted they were? Different sizes, different shapes. No way to tell if they were alive. One of the anthropologist types thinks they were statues of gods thrown out to protect them from profanation. He’s about sold that theory to the rest of ‘em, except for those who say the pictures were flawed film, or mirages from the Langston Field, or fakes.”

“Yes, sir.” That didn’t need comment, and Blaine made none. He returned to his seat and examined the photograph again. A million questions . . . if only the pilot were not dead.

After a long time the Admiral grunted, “Yeah. Here’s a copy of the report on what we found in the probe. Take it somewhere and study it, you’ve got an appointment with the Viceroy tomorrow afternoon and he’ll expect you to know something. Your anthropologist helped write that report, you can discuss it with her if you want. Later on you can go look at the probe, we’re bringing it down today.” Cranston chuckled at Blaine’s surprised look. “Curious about why you’re getting this stuff? You’ll find out. His Highness has plans and you’re going to be part of them. We’ll let you know.”

Rod saluted and left in bewilderment, the TOP SECRET report clutched under his arm.

The report was mostly questions.

Most of the probe’s internal equipment was junk, fused and melted clutters of plastic blocks, remains of integrated circuitry, odd strips of conducting and semi conducting materials jumbled together in no rational order. There was no trace of the shroud lines, no gear for reeling them in, no apertures in the thirty-two projections at one end of the probe. If the shrouds were all one molecule it might explain why they were missing; they would have come apart, changed chemically, when Blaine’s cannon cut them. But how had they controlled the sail? Could the shrouds somehow be made to contract and relax, like a muscle?

An odd idea, but some of the intact mechanisms were just as odd. There was no standardization of parts in the probe. Two widgets intended to do almost the same job could be subtly different or wildly different. Braces and mountings seemed hand carved. The probe was as much a sculpture as a machine.

Blaine read that, shook his head, and called Sally. Presently she joined him in his cabin.

“Yes, I wrote that,” she said. “It seems to be true. Every nut and bolt in that probe was designed separately. It’s less surprising if you think of the probe as having a religious purpose. But that’s not all. You know how redundancy works?”

“In machines? Two gilkickies to do one job. In case one fails.”

“Well, it seems that the Moties work it both ways.”

“Moties?”

She shrugged. “We had to call them something. The Mote engineers made two widgets do one job, all right, but the second widget does two other jobs, and some of the supports are also bimetallic thermostats and thermoelectric generators all in one. Rod, I barely understand the words. Modules: human engineers work in modules, don’t they?”

“For a complicated job, of course they do.”

“The Moties don’t. It’s all one piece, everything working on everything else. Rod, there’s a fair chance the Moties are brighter than we are.”

Rod whistled. “That’s . . . frightening. Now, wait a minute. They’d have the Alderson Drive, wouldn’t they?”

“I wouldn’t know about that. But they have some things we don’t. There are biotemperature superconductors,” she said, rolling it as if she’d memorized the phrase, “painted on in strips.”

“Then there’s this.” She reached past him to turn pages. “Here, look at this photo. And the little pebbly meteor holes.”

“Micrometeorites. It figures.”

“Well, nothing larger than four thousand microns got through the meteor defense. Only nobody ever found a meteor defense. They don’t have the Langston Field or anything like it.”

“But—”

“It must have been the sail. You see what that means? The autopilot attacked us because it thought
MacArthur
was a meteor.”

“What about the pilot? Why didn’t—”

“No. The alien was in frozen sleep, as near as we can tell. The life-support systems went wrong about the time we took it aboard. We killed it.”

“That’s definite?”

Sally nodded.

“Hell. All that way it came. The Humanity League wants my head on a platter with an apple in my mouth, and I don’t blame them. Aghhhh . . .” A sound of pain.

“Stop it,” Sally said softly.

“Sorry. Where do we go from here?”

“The autopsy. It fills half the report.” She turned pages and Rod winced. Sally Fowler had a stronger stomach than most ladies of the Court.

The meat of the Motie was pale; its blood was pink, like a mixture of tree sap and human blood. The surgeons had cut deep into its back, exposing the bones from the back of the skull to where the coccyx would have been on a man.

“I don’t understand. Where’s the spine?”

“There is none,” Sally told him. “Evolution doesn’t seem to have invented vertebrae on Mote Prime,”

There were three bones in the back, each as solid as a leg bone. The uppermost was an extension of the skull, as if the skull had a twenty-cm handle. The joint at its lower end was at shoulder level; it would nod the head but would not turn it.