"Let 'em alone!" snapped Soames. "They couldn't tell you how it was made, even if they could talk English! Give them a chance to learn how to talk! They've had a bad time anyhow."
He took the boys and the other girl away. He led them to his own quarters. He whistled for his dog, Rex, and showed the children how to play with him. They began to relax and enjoy the fun heretofore unknown to them.
Soames left his quarters and held his head. There was much to worry about. For example, Captain Moggs in Washington, there to pass on information perfectly calculated to bring about confusion. And at the base itself a completely natural routine event took place to make the confusion twice confounded.
The director of the Gissell Bay base made his normal, regular, short-wave report to the scientific organization which controlled and co-ordinated the base's activities and kept it supplied and equipped. The Gissell Bay director was an eminent scientist. He talked comfortably to an even more eminent scientist in the capital of the United States. Naturally, the static scream was mentioned in Washington. As naturally, the discovery of a crashed spaceship came up. It was important. It should be reported. It was. The Gissell Bay director went into details about the children and about the gadgets they'd selected to be salvaged when they destroyed their ship. A complete account preceded Captain Moggs to Washington, but not to the military. She was in charge of that angle.
The eminent scientist in Washington naturally discussed the report with other scientists who would naturally be as much concerned as himself. Later in the morning, one of those scientists received a reporter. The reporter asked various routine questions. In all innocence, the scientist who had been told by the scientist who had been told by the director at Gissell Bay, told the reporter.
And therefore, as Captain Moggs rode toward the Pentagon she did not notice the headlines, but they had already been seen in the Pentagon.
"Spaceship Lands in Antarctica!
Alien Life Forms Aboard
Scientists Alarmed."
No newspaper would spoil a good story by underplaying it. Wire services wasted no time. There were other similar headlines all over the United States.
It should be added that the first editions of the first newspapers to print the story did mention that the invaders were in appearance like human children, but somehow it did not sound plausible. Also, other sorts of descriptions were more exciting. The description of children as invaders was classed as a guess. Then as a bad guess. Then as something so preposterous that it wasn't worth relating. Anyhow the point of the story was that a ship from off the Earth had landed, with intelligent beings in it, equipped with marvellous devices. And marvellous devices would naturally—in the state of the world at that time—be weapons. So rewrite men expanded the news service dispatches by the sound business-like rule that the public is entitled to get what it wants. The public likes to be scared.
A lieutenant-general greeted Captain Moggs at the Pentagon.
"This business is true?" he demanded. "A spaceship from off Earth has landed? It had a crew? The crew's still alive? Hell and damnation! What weapons have they got?"
Captain Moggs stammered but managed to give answers. They did not give an impression of a properly complete investigation of the landing of an alien spaceship. In particular, her statement that the crew of the ship was human children simply did not register.
"Hah!" said the lieutenant-general, bitterly. "Nothing to go on! You, Captain whatever-your-name-is, you were there when the ship was found, you say. Very well. Keep your mouth shut. Get a plane and go back."
He addressed his men, "Bring up all their stuff, the stuff they brought from their ship. Get the stray unburned parts of their ship. Get our guided missile men set to work on them and find out how the drive worked. They ought to come up with something! Round up some special-weapons men to investigate those fragments too. See what they've got! Work from these pictures until we've got the samples." He swung back to Captain Moggs. "You go back and bring those aliens and everything that can be brought! Bring everything! And in the meantime," he looked around his office, "a lid goes on this! Top secret—top-top secret! The newspapers have to be choked off. Deny everything!"
He waved his hand. She left the office.
Her plane was barely south of Virginia when a spokesman for the Pentagon assured a news conference that the Defense Department had no information about an alleged non-terrestrial spaceship landing in Antarctica. The newspaper reporters pulled newspapers from their pockets. The Pentagon had been denying things right and left, in obedience to orders. Now the newspapers printed reproductions of United Nations records, showing that at the request of the Defense Department four United Nations passports had been issued. The records said that the passports were for Jane and John Doe, and Ruth and Richard Roe, who obviously could not enter the United States without proper documents. The UN information on those persons was: birthplace, unknown; nationality, unknown; age, unknown; description, not given; race, unknown; occupation, unknown. And all the newspapers carried headlines about "SPACESHIP CREW US-BOUND." Or:
"Take Us To Your President"—Aliens
Spaceship Crew Demands Top-Level Conference.
Ultimatum Hinted At
It was not, of course, exclusively an American affair. The London Times pointed out the remarkable amount of detailed speculation in the air, as compared with the minute amount of admitted facts. But elsewhere: Pravda insisted that the aliens had refused to enter into discussions with America after learning of its capitalistic social system and tyrannical government. Ce Soir claimed exclusive private information that the crew of the spaceship—which was twelve hundred metres long—were winged monsters of repellant aspect. The official newspaper in Bucharest, to the contrary, said that they were intelligent reptiles. In Cairo it was believed and printed that the spacecraft was manned by creatures of protean structure, remarkably resembling legendary djinns.
There were other descriptions, all attributing monstrous qualities and brutally aggressive actions to the aliens.
And at Gissell Bay the staff became rather fond of four young people whose names were Zani, Fran, Hod and Mal, because they had been very well brought up by their parents and were thoroughly nice children.
They were tense, and they were desperately anxious and uneasy. But they displayed a resolute courage that made moderately decent people like them very much. Most of the research-staff wanted very badly to ask them questions, but that was impossible, so they studied the rather fuzzy photographs of the inside of the ship—the base photographer had run off several sets of extra prints—and poked helplessly at the things the children had brought with them, and racked their brains to imagine how such things work. The spinning thing atop the tripod made it quite pleasant to be out-of-doors around the Gissell Bay base, though there were forty-mile winds and thermometers read ten below zero two hundred yards from the thing Hod had set up. The cooking-pot boiled merrily without fuel, with an increasingly thick layer of frost on its outside. The thing Soames had called a super-radar allowed a penguin rookery to be watched in detail without disturbing the penguins, and Fran obligingly loaned his pocket instrument—the one that cut metal like butter—to the physicists of the staff.