"I scanned and recorded a film copy of _Rite of Spring_, the
Disney-Stravinsky combination, and sent it back along the same line we
were receiving from. Just testing. It wouldn't get there for a good
number of years, if it got there at all, but I thought it would please
the library to get a new record in.
"Two weeks later, when we caught and slowed a new batch of recordings,
we found an answer. It was obviously meant for us. It was a flash of
the Disney being played to a large audience, and then the audience
sitting and waiting before a blank screen. The signal was very clear
and loud. We'd intercepted a spaceship. They were asking for an encore,
you see. They liked the film and wanted more...."
He smiled at them in sudden thought. "You can see them for yourself.
It's all right down the hall where the linguists are working on the
automatic translator."
The listening officer frowned and cleared his throat, and the thin
young man turned to him quickly. "No security reason why they should
not see the broadcasts, is there? Perhaps you should show them." He
said to the reporters reassuringly, "It's right down the hall. You
will be informed the moment the spaceship approaches."
The interview was very definitely over. The lank-haired, nervous young
man turned away and seated himself at the radio set while the officer
swallowed his objections and showed them dourly down the hall to a
closed door.
They opened it and fumbled into a darkened room crowded with empty
folding chairs, dominated by a glowing bright screen. The door closed
behind them, bringing total darkness.
There was the sound of reporters fumbling their way into seats around
him, but the _Times_ man remained standing, aware of an enormous
surprise, as if he had been asleep and wakened to find himself in the
wrong country.
The bright colors of the double image seemed the only real thing in the
darkened room. Even blurred as they were, he could see that the action
was subtly different, the shapes subtly not right.
_He was looking at aliens._
* * * * *
The impression was of two humans disguised, humans moving oddly,
half-dancing, half-crippled. Carefully, afraid the images would go
away, he reached up to his breast pocket, took out his polarized
glasses, rotated one lens at right angles to the other and put them on.
Immediately, the two beings came into sharp focus, real and solid,
and the screen became a wide, illusively near window through which he
watched them.
They were conversing with each other in a gray-walled room, discussing
something with restrained excitement. The large man in the green tunic
closed his purple eyes for an instant at something the other said, and
grimaced, making a motion with his fingers as if shoving something away
from him.
Mellerdrammer.
The second, smaller, with yellowish-green eyes, stepped closer, talking
more rapidly in a lower voice. The first stood very still, not trying
to interrupt.
Obviously, the proposal was some advantageous treachery, and he wanted
to be persuaded. The _Times_ groped for a chair and sat down.
Perhaps gesture is universal; desire and aversion, a leaning forward or
a leaning back, tension, relaxation. Perhaps these actors were masters.
The scenes changed, a corridor, a parklike place in what he began to
realize was a spaceship, a lecture room. There were others talking
and working, speaking to the man in the green tunic, and never was it
unclear what was happening or how they felt.
They talked a flowing language with many short vowels and shifts of
pitch, and they gestured in the heat of talk, their hands moving with
an odd lagging difference of motion, not slow, but somehow drifting.
He ignored the language, but after a time the difference in motion
began to arouse his interest. Something in the way they walked....
With an effort he pulled his mind from the plot and forced his
attention to the physical difference. Brown hair in short silky crew
cuts, varied eye colors, the colors showing clearly because their
irises were very large, their round eyes set very widely apart in
tapering light-brown faces. Their necks and shoulders were thick in a
way that would indicate unusual strength for a human, but their wrists
were narrow and their fingers long and thin and delicate.
There seemed to be more than the usual number of fingers.
Since he came in, a machine had been whirring and a voice muttering
beside him. He called his attention from counting their fingers and
looked around. Beside him sat an alert-looking man wearing earphones,
watching and listening with hawklike concentration. Beside him was a
tall streamlined box. From the screen came the sound of the alien
language. The man abruptly flipped a switch on the box, muttered a word
into a small hand-microphone and flipped the switch back with nervous
rapidity.
He reminded the _Times_ man of the earphoned interpreters at the UN.
The machine was probably a vocal translator and the mutterer a linguist
adding to its vocabulary. Near the screen were two other linguists
taking notes.
* * * * *
The _Times_ remembered the Senator pacing in the observatory room,
rehearsing his speech of welcome. The speech would not be just
the empty pompous gesture he had expected. It would be translated
mechanically and understood by the aliens.
On the other side of the glowing window that was the stereo screen, the
large protagonist in the green tunic was speaking to a pilot in a gray
uniform. They stood in a brightly lit canary-yellow control room in a
spaceship.
The _Times_ tried to pick up the thread of the plot. Already he was
interested in the fate of the hero, and liked him. That was the effect
of good acting, probably, for part of the art of acting is to win
affection from the audience, and this actor might be the matinee idol
of whole solar systems.
Controlled tension, betraying itself by a jerk of the hands, a
too-quick answer to a question. The uniformed one, not suspicious,
turned his back, busying himself at some task involving a map lit with
glowing red points, his motions sharing the same fluid dragging grace
of the others, as if they were underwater, or on a slow motion film.
The other was watching a switch, a switch set into a panel, moving
closer to it, talking casually--background music coming and rising in
thin chords of tension.
There was a closeup of the alien's face watching the switch, and the
_Times_ noted that his ears were symmetrically half-circles, almost
perfect with no earholes visible. The voice of the uniformed one
answered, a brief word in a preoccupied deep voice. His back was still
turned. The other glanced at the switch, moving closer to it, talking
casually, the switch coming closer and closer stereoscopically. It was
in reach, filling the screen. His hand came into view, darting out,
closed over the switch--
There was a sharp clap of sound and his hand opened in a frozen
shape of pain. Beyond him, as his gaze swung up, stood the figure of
the uniformed officer, unmoving, a weapon rigid in his hand, in the
startled position in which he had turned and fired, watching with
widening eyes as the man in the green tunic swayed and fell.
The tableau held, the uniformed one drooping, looking down at his hand
holding the weapon which had killed, and music began to build in from
the background. Just for an instant, the room and the things within
it flashed into one of those bewildering color changes which were the
bane of color television, and switched to a color negative of itself, a
green man standing in a violet control room, looking down at the body
of a green man in a red tunic. It held for less than a second; then the
color band alternator fell back into phase and the colors reversed to
normal.
Another uniformed man came and took the weapon from the limp hand of
the other, who began to explain dejectedly in a low voice while the
music mounted and covered his words and the screen slowly went blank,
like a window that slowly filmed over with gray fog.
The music faded.
In the dark, someone clapped appreciatively.
The earphoned man beside the _Times_ shifted his earphones back from
his ears and spoke briskly. "I can't get any more. Either of you want a
replay?"
There was a short silence until the linguist nearest the set said, "I
guess we've squeezed that one dry. Let's run the tape where Nathen and
that ship radio boy are kidding around CQing and tuning their beams in
closer. I have a hunch the boy is talking routine ham talk and giving
the old radio count--one-two-three-testing."
There was some fumbling in the semi-dark and then the screen came to
life again.
* * * * *
It showed a flash of an audience sitting before a screen and gave a
clipped chord of some familiar symphony. "Crazy about Stravinsky and
Mozart," remarked the earphoned linguist to the _Times_, resettling his
earphones. "Can't stand Gershwin. Can you beat that?" He turned his
attention back to the screen as the right sequence came on.
The _Post_, who was sitting just in front of him, turned to the _Times_
and said, "Funny how much they look like people." He was writing,
making notes to telephone his report. "What color hair did that
character have?"
"I didn't notice." He wondered if he should remind the reporter that
Nathen had said he assigned the color bands on guess, choosing the
colors that gave the most plausible images. The guests, when they
arrived, could turn out to be bright green with blue hair. Only the
gradations of color in the picture were sure, only the similarities and
contrasts, the relationship of one color to another.
From the screen came the sound of the alien language again. This race
averaged deeper voices than human. He liked deep voices. Could he write
that?
No, there was something wrong with that, too. How had Nathen
established the right sound-track pitch? Was it a matter of taking the
modulation as it came in, or some sort of hetrodyning up and down by
trial and error? Probably.
It might be safer to assume that Nathen had simply preferred deep
voices.
As he sat there, doubting, an uneasiness he had seen in Nathen came
back to add to his own uncertainty, and he remembered just how close
that uneasiness had come to something that looked like restrained fear.
"What I don't get is why he went to all the trouble of picking up TV
shows instead of just contacting them," the _News_ complained. "They're
good shows, but what's the point?"
"Maybe so we'd get to learn their language too," said the _Herald_.
On the screen now was the obviously unstaged and genuine scene of a
young alien working over a bank of apparatus. He turned and waved and
opened his mouth in the comical O shape which the _Times_ was beginning
to recognize as their equivalent of a smile, then went back to trying
to explain something about the equipment, in elaborate awkward gestures
and carefully mouthed words.
The _Times_ got up quietly, went out into the bright white stone
corridor and walked back the way he had come, thoughtfully folding his
stereo glasses and putting them away.
No one stopped him. Secrecy restrictions were ambiguous here. The
reticence of the Army seemed more a matter of habit, mere reflex, from
the fact that it had all originated in the Intelligence Department,
than any reasoned policy of keeping the landing a secret.
The main room was more crowded than he had left it. The TV camera
and sound crew stood near their apparatus, the Senator had found a
chair and was reading, and at the far end of the room eight men were
grouped in a circle of chairs, arguing something with impassioned
concentration. The _Times_ recognized a few he knew personally, eminent
names in science, workers in field theory.
A stray phrase reached him: "--reference to the universal constants as
ratio--" It was probably a discussion of ways of converting formulas
from one mathematics to another for a rapid exchange of information.
They had reason to be intent, aware of the flood of insights that novel
viewpoints could bring, if they could grasp them. He would have liked
to go over and listen, but there was too little time left before the
spaceship was due, and he had a question to ask.
* * * * *
The hand-rigged transceiver was still humming, tuned to the sending
band of the circling ship, and the young man who had started it all
was sitting on the edge of the TV platform with his chin resting in
one hand. He did not look up as the _Times_ approached, but it was the
indifference of preoccupation, not discourtesy.
The _Times_ sat down on the edge of the platform beside him and took
out a pack of cigarettes, then remembered the coming TV broadcast
and the ban on smoking. He put them away, thoughtfully watching the
diminishing rain spray against the streaming windows.
"What's wrong?" he asked.
Nathen showed that he was aware and friendly by a slight motion of his
head.
"_You_ tell me."
"Hunch," said the _Times_ man. "Sheer hunch. Everything sailing along
too smoothly, everyone taking too much for granted."