That seemed to unsettle her. “You aren’t a deer hunter, are you? I mean it’s OK someone has to do it or they eat themselves into starvation, I know all that, it’s just that it’s not something I think we could share easily, but we don’t have to share everything, just—”
I held up a hand. “Nothing like that. I just want you to meet my folks. They rent canoes.”
“Your folks?”
“Yeah. Dad will be ninety-three in August. My stepmother is a couple years younger than I am, but she’s got a bad hip. Dad’s been taking care of her. Longevity, uh, runs in the family. Grandpa died when he got caught in a convenience store robbery in Saint Cloud and tried to stop it. He was a hundred and two.”
So if Kate was having ideas of being a middling wealthy young widow with a boat repair business all her own in her late thirties or early forties, well, she could probably do better.
But she giggled and kissed me. “Sounds better and better.”
The engine revved down and went into reverse, then idled.
“Grandpa, Frog says we’re here.”
We scrambled up to the deck. The night had changed dramatically; a fresh breeze was all there was left of the storm, and stars were peeking through billowing clouds, ghost-lit by a setting crescent Moon. We were about halfway to the island that splits Steamboat Bay in two, some distance from the fireworks and the rest of the boat traffic. It was warm again near the water; the brief cold front hadn’t done much to cool down the mid-summer-tepid lake shallows.
“They’re on the port side,” Frog said.
I got a flashlight and scanned the water, stopping at something that looked like a large propane tank floating on its side. But it had kind of a beach ball attached to one end by a lattice of open struts.
“I got it. The shroud is supposed to cover those struts, then?”
“Precisely.”
So this was an alien spaceship. I shivered as all the implications of Frog hit home again. It was too ridiculous to start with; then it had been one silly thing after another, Kim and Kate, and the overall significance of this really hadn’t sunk in.
“One would think you guys could do a lot for us,” I said finally.
“If we started, where would we stop? Oh there’ve been a few individual exceptions, but an effective large scale intervention would destroy your cultures—removing the checks and balances of war, disease, and aging would require compensatory checks on population growth which would, I fear, be vigorously resisted. And that is but one example. There have been some very large scale dynamic simulations on this, I assure you, and much may happen in the not too distant future. But for now, for most people, the cure would be assuredly worse than the disease. You have to come to understand the choices and make your own decisions. Not all members of all races we have encountered have wanted to accept the changes involved in easing even a harsh and brutal culture. It is not our choice, ethically.”
“You give me a look at heaven, and snatch it away.”
“To take your reference to heaven to mean eternal life, we cannot banish death; accidents and violence statistically limit biological life span even absent aging and disease. For snatching it away; as you are someone who risked so much for libertarian principle, I suspect you see the larger issue.”
Yeah, he had me there. I could see it all too clearly. What the hell do we do when chimps kill other chimps’ children, or tribal warfare, or superstition, breaks out among our fellow human beings? We sit back, take notes, and call it zoology, anthropology, peace and wisdom as long as we aren’t involved ourselves. We’ve no right to complain about the ethics of others not helping us.
“We’d better get this thing fixed and on its way.” I put the engine back in gear, edged us over to the spaceship and pulled it close with the boat hook. Kate tossed the anchor in.
The spaceship wasn’t quite as long as Kate’s boat. The upper part of the “beach ball” on the end of the tank was transparent. I saw immediately that it was a double sphere, the inner sphere freely rotating to keep down, down, no matter what else was happening. In this horizontal orientation, I could just see the edge of a platform in the transparent part, moving up and down with the waves. On that were what looked like two miniature army helmets side by side, each on four legs with long skinny jointed arms sticking out from under the helmets, each ending in a delicate spidery four-fingered hand. What looked like eyestalks protruded directly from the “helmet.” The left eyestalk of the being on the right was entwined with the right eyestalk of the one on the left. I didn’t need a degree to figure that out.
“Kate?”
“I’m here.” She was right behind me. I put my arm around her so the aliens could see it.
“Let’s wave.”
The two free eyestalks waved back.
“They wish to tell you of their thanks and relief,” Frog translated, “but they must hurry.”
“Right. Can they rotate that thing so it’s vertical, ball on top?” I asked.
“Certainly. They assumed their present attitude to reduce visibility and achieve some limited control over their movement.”
As I watched, the ball rose out of the water as the tank submerged.
“Ellie, we need the shroud. Wrap a line around it before you give it to me.” Didn’t want another one lost down in the muck. “Frog, time to get wet.” I was still wearing the life jacket, and I jumped in hoping it would keep me far enough up so I didn’t have to tread water continuously. It did.
There were sharp pieces of the old shroud stuck in the grooved fitting around the end of the tank. I was about to ask for pliers to try to pull them out when frog hopped up on the latticework and started to apply his tongue to the problem. The shards fell away, leaving a clean groove.
“Nice work,” I said. “Time for the shroud.”
Ellie handed me the shroud. The line wasn’t wrapped around it, but seemed to be fastened to it with a metal stud at a point opposite the open seam. I looked at Frog in the water next to me.
“What did you hold that with?” I asked.
“A rivet,” Frog said, “One, ahem, which I can readily undo once we have the shroud attached.”
“You bet. Let’s do it.”
Easier said than done. The shroud was a flapping, half bent piece of metal, and I quickly found I couldn’t get it into place by myself. I needed four hands. Kate saw me struggling, stripped off her sweatshirt and jumped in with me. More agile than I, she managed to wrap her legs around the tank and hold. Together, we managed to open the shroud enough to fit it over the latticework.
Frog’s measurements and cutting turned out to be almost too precise; it took a quite of bit of bending and worrying to get both ends seated. The seam didn’t quite come straight, overlapping a bit at the top and having a gap at the bottom, but Frog said it was close enough, and after he finished doing whatever he did with that fuzzy tongue, I couldn’t see the seam.
I knocked on the transparent dome. “That about does it guys,” I said, assuming Frog would translate. “Guess we’d all better be on our way.”
Something that sounded like crickets chirping seemed to come from the dome, but it might have been from shore. Frog was nowhere to be seen. Must have gotten on board the spacecraft somehow, I figured. But I didn’t need a translation to tell me that, even if it was a very small rocket, we didn’t want to be in the water next to it when it did its thing. Kate and I swam over to the ladder on the stern and climbed back in the boat. She got the engine going while I pulled in the anchor and we trolled out of there quietly enough not to draw too much attention to ourselves.