He slid off the windowsill and laughed. “You ever get that creepy feeling of being watched from above? Like, when you were little? Kwarive tells me it’s nature’s way of overprotecting us, if I understand her right. You’re safer to be wrong that way lots of times than wrong the other way once. Well. There’s no point trying to hide from the aliens. We’re not going to try. We’re going to do everything right out in the open. It’s our only chance.”
“For what?” asked Kwarive. “Scaring them off?”
“In a word,” said Bahron, “yes.”
Darvin and Kwarive laughed. None of the others did.
“It’s not as mad as it sounds,” said Bahron. “The wingless may be driven by population pressure, like anyone else, but there’s no reason to think Orro was wrong about their being peaceful — at least in their past experience. That big world-ship of theirs doesn’t look like it was expecting trouble. Markhan and Nollam have had a chance to go through the pictures and do some calculations, and it looks like a big tin drum full of their women and children. It’s not the sort of thing you’d send first into an unknown system if you had any idea there might be somebody shooting back. So regardless of what their capabilities are, they might not have much stomach for a fight. If they see us tooling up, building rockets and aeroplanes and such, they might just back off.”
Kwarive laughed again. “That’s quite a supposition!”
“Like I said,” Bahron replied, “it’s our only chance. And anyway, what have we got to lose?”
“Lose!” echoed Handful. “Lose!”
Bahron fixed a glare on the kit. “There is that, of course. I don’t see how turning trudges into men is anything but hostile. But now we know what’s going on, we can deal with it.”
“How?” Kwarive asked. She held the kit closer as she said so, wrapping a wing around it, Darvin noticed.
“The Sight is on the case,” Bahron said. “What the Height intends to do has to be kept secret from the public until the last minute. That’s all I can say for now. I would advise you all very strongly to say nothing on the subject.”
With that ominous admonition he left.
Darvin had last spent time at the observatory when he was a student. The popular image of the astronomer as nightly stargazer had never had much truth in it, and in modern times it had even less. Observation was still the basis, but the long-exposure camera had become a much more fruitful source of observation than the telescope alone. Much observation could be done by poring over photographs and spectroscope readings, and besides, it was in the application of mathematics to the results that such progress as occurred was being made. The science was in one of its difficult periods, when new observations didn’t so much solve problems as raise them. What fuelled the stars? Why did they show such a regular sequence of colours? What was the nature of the nebulae? What subtle property of the ether made the light of distant stars and nebulae shift toward the red end of the spectrum? Compared with such questions as these, Darvin’s search for the outermost planet had been triviaclass="underline" a postgraduate project carried too far into the early part of his professional career, more out of a certain stubbornness — and the lure of knowing that, if he did find the planet, it would forever be associated with his name — than any true scientific urgency.
Now he had his fame, for what that was worth.
In the observatory, what it was worth was that he had had complete control over the telescope for four outer-months. All other work had been set aside for the project’s priorities. Night after night Darvin and his colleagues scanned the skies and took photographs. Day after day they inspected the plates in a blink comparator. The diminished Object — the cylinder, according to the Southern data — remained close to the orbit of the Warrior. Of the two cones that had broken away, no trace could be found. None of Orro’s calculations — and there had been many — had successfully predicted their new location. There had been moments of excitement, whenever a new body was found among the Camp-Followers. But when its location was sent by radio to the Southern Rule, to be viewed through the superior telescopes of the antipodean astrologers, it was always resolved as yet another natural asteroid.
While Darvin cursed his luck, every other aspect of the project raced ahead. The treaty proclamation had been greeted more with relief about the prospect of a lasting peace with Gevork than anxiety about the aliens. People still, Darvin suspected, didn’t quite believe in the aliens. Not even the publication of pictures from the aliens’ indecipherable message had shaken the popular complacency. The existence of aliens had for so long been the subject of a lax assent — or article of faith, for cults and pulps alike — that its confirmation unsettled no prejudice and provoked no panic. It was quite possible that what people thought they saw in their everyday lives was progress stimulated, perhaps inspired, by the aliens, rather than the massive, coordinated military mobilization that it was. Taxes had gone up, prices risen, but the great manufactories and their penumbra of backstreet workshops had full order books. The sight of an aeroplane over a town no longer brought all activity to a halt. The most visible sign of great change was the sight of the tethered balloons that had sprung up on every horizon as TK relay stations. All the larger towns now had at least one huge public screen, upon which every night telekinematographic pictures were projected. They showed the work at the desert camps and proving grounds: the rockets rising and crashing, the vast arrays of etheric aerials, the test flights of experimental airframes; they gave nightly glimpses of the day’s debates in Seloh’s Roost; they had begun to carry lighter, more trivial news items and even theatrical performances later in the evening.
Whatever was going on among the trudges had stirred no unrest. The question was never raised in the Roost, nor discussed in the papers. The Sight was no doubt kept busy. What it was busy doing, Darvin did not want to think about. He felt himself a coward for that. In the cluster of buildings around the observatory, there seemed no grounds for worry. Handful had become something of a mascot. Kwarive’s instructions for her part of the project had simply been to go on studying the infant trudge’s language acquisition, and she had moved to the same accommodation block as Darvin in order to study it discreetly. Handful flew around freely indoors and out, picked up new words and formed short sentences, and thrived. The only danger he faced, and that was slight, was of being attacked by one of the long-winged, long-necked flitters — carrion-eaters and opportunistic predators — that circled the thermals of the high desert.
It was a hot evening, after a hotter day, near the turning of the outer-month. The sun had set, and the pylons of the cable-car system clicked and rang as their metal cooled. Nocturnal animals stirred and chittered in the scrub and sand. Soon the sky would be dark, the air chill. Darvin looked forward to it as he prepared the night’s observations. His eyelids were gritty with lack of sleep, his fur damp with sweat. The technician working beside him was equally exhausted.
Handful flew in through the open window and perched on the telescope’s circular railing.