Major General Parst was a big, bald man in his fifties, whose figure would have been more military if the Prussian corset had not gone out of fashion. I took him for a Pentagon soldier; he had the Pentagon smoothness of manner, but there seemed to be a good deal more under it than the usual well-oiled vacancy. He was also, I judged, a very worried man.
“There’s just one thing I’d like to make clear to you at the beginning, Mr. Dahl. I’m not a grudge-holding man, and I hope you’re not either, because there’s a good chance that you and I will be seeing a lot of each other during the next three or four years. But I thought it might make it a little easier for you to know that you’re not the only one with a grievance. You see this isn’t an easy job, it never has been. I’m just stating the fact: it’s been considerably harder since your newspaper took an interest in us.” He spread his hands and smiled wryly.
“Just what is your job, General?”
“You mean, what is Chillicothe.” He snorted. “I’m not going to waste my breath telling you.”
My expression must have changed.
“Don’t misunderstand me—I mean that if I told you, you wouldn’t believe me. I didn’t myself. I’m going to have to show you.” He stood up, looking at his wristwatch. “I have a little more than an hour. That’s more than enough for the demonstration, but you’re going to have a lot of questions afterward. We’d better start.”
He thumbed his intercom. “I’ll be in Section One for the next fifteen minutes.”
When we were in the corridor outside he said, “Tell me something, Mr. Dahclass="underline" I suppose it occurred to you that if you were right in your suspicions of Chillicothe, you might be running a certain personal risk in coming here, in spite of any precautions you might take?”
“I considered the possibility. I haven’t seen anything to rule it out yet.”
“And still, I gather that you chose this alternative almost without hesitation. Why was that, if you don’t mind telling me?”
It was a fair question. There’s nothing very attractive about a Federal prison, but at least they don’t saw your skull open there, or turn your mind inside out with drugs. I said, “Call it curiosity.”
He nodded. “Yes. A very potent force, Mr. Dahl. More mountains have been moved by it than by faith.”
We passed a guard with a T44, then a second, and a third. Finally Parst stopped at the first of three metal doors. There was a small pane of thick glass set into it at eyelevel, and what looked like a microphone grill under that. Parst spoke into the grilclass="underline" “Open up Three, Sergeant.”
“Yes, sir."
I followed Parst to the second door. It slid open as we reached it and we walked into a large, empty room. The door closed behind us with a thud and a solid click. Both sounds rattled back starlingly; the room was solid metal, I realized—floor, walls and ceiling.
In the opposite wall was another heavy door. To my left was a huge metal hemisphere, painted the same gray as the walls, with a machine-gun’s snout projecting through a horizontal slit in a deadly and impressive manner.
Echoes blurred the General’s voice: “This is Section One. We’re rather proud of it. The only entrance to the central room is here, but each of the three others that adjoin it is covered from a gun-turret like that one. The gun rooms are accessible only from the corridors outside.”
He motioned me over to the other door. “This door is double,” he said. “It’s going to be an airlock eventually, we hope. All right, Sergeant.”
The door slid back, exposing another one a yard farther in; like the others, it had a thick inset panel of glass.
Parst stepped in and waited for me. “Get ready for a shock,” he said.
I loosened the muscles in my back and shoulders; my wind isn’t what it used to be, but I can still hit. Get ready for one yourself, I thought, if this is what I think it is.
I walked into the tiny room, and heard the door thump behind me. Parst motioned to the glass pane.
I saw a room the size of the one behind me. There was a washbasin in it, and a toilet, and what looked like a hammock slung across one corner, and a wooden table with papers and a couple of pencils or crayons on it.
And against the far wall, propped upright on an ordinary lunch-counter stool, was something I couldn’t recognize at all; I saw it and I didn’t see it. If I had looked away then, I couldn’t possibly have told anyone what it looked like.
Then it stirred slightly, and I realized that it was alive.
I saw that it had eyes.
I saw that it had arms.
I saw that it had legs.
Very gradually the rest of it came into focus. The top about four feet off the floor, a small truncated cone about the size and shape of one of those cones of string that some merchants keep to tie packages. Under that came the eyes, three of them. They were round and oyster-gray, with round black pupils, and they faced in different directions. They were set into a flattened bulb of flesh that just fitted under the base of the cone; there was no nose, no ears, no mouth, and no room on the flesh for any.
The cone was black; the rest of the thing was a very dark, shiny blue-gray.
The head, if that is the word, was supported by a thin neck from which a sparse growth of fuzzy spines curved down and outward, like a botched attempt at feathers. The neck thickened gradually until it became the torso. The torso was shaped something like a bottle gourd, except that the upper lobe was almost as large as the lower. The upper lobe expanded and contracted evenly, all around, as the thing breathed.
Between each arm and the next, the torso curved inward to form a deep vertical gash.
There were three arms and three legs, spaced evenly around the body so that you couldn’t tell front from back. The arms sprouted just below the top of the torso, the legs from its base. The legs were bent only slightly to reach the floor; each hand, with five slender, shapeless fingers, rested on the opposite-number thigh. The feet were a little like a chicken’s ...
I turned away and saw Parst; I had forgotten he was there, and where I was, and who I was. I don’t recall planning to say anything, but I heard my own voice, faint and hoarse:
“Did you make that?”
2
“Stop it!” he said sharply.
I was trembling. I had fallen into a crouch without realizing it, weight on my toes, fists clenched.
I straightened up slowly and put my hands into my pockets. “Sorry.”
The speaker rasped.
“Is everything all right, sir?”
“Yes, Sergeant,” said Parst. “We’re coming out.” He turned as the door opened, and I followed him, feeling all churned up inside.
Halfway down the corridor I stopped. Parst turned and looked at me.
“Ithaca,” I said.
Three months back there had been a Monster-from-Mars scare in and around Ithaca, New York; several hundred people had seen, or claimed to have seen, a white wingless aircraft hovering over various out-of-the-way places; and over thirty, including one very respectable Cornell professor, had caught sight of something that wasn’t a man in the woods around Cayuga Lake. None of these people had got close enough for a good look, but nearly all of them agreed on one point—the thing walked erect, but had too many arms and legs... .
“Yes,” said Parst. “That’s right. But let’s talk about it in my office, Mr. Dahl.”
I followed him back there. As soon as the door was shut I said, “Where did it come from? Are there any more of them? What about the ship?”
He offered me a cigarette. I took it and sat down, hitting the chair by luck.
“Those are just three of the questions we can’t answer,” he said. “He claims that his home world revolves around a sun in our constellation of Aquarius; he says that it isn’t visible from Earth. He also—”
I said, “He talks—? You’ve taught him to speak English?” For some reason that was hard to accept; then I remembered the linguists.
“Yes. Quite well, considering that he doesn’t have vocal cords like ours. He uses a tympanum under each of those vertical openings in his body—those are his mouths. His name is Aza-Kra, by the way. I was going to say that he also claims to have come here alone?As for the ship, he says it’s hidden, but he won’t tell us where. We’ve been searching that area, particularly the hills near Cayuga and the lake itself, but we haven’t turned it up yet. It’s been suggested that he may have launched it under remote control and put it into an orbit somewhere outside the atmosphere. The Lunar Observatory is watching for it, and so are the orbital stations, but I’m inclined to think that’s a dead end. In any case, that’s not my responsibility. He had some gadgets in his possession when he was captured, but even those are being studied elsewhere. Chillicothe is what you saw a few minutes ago, and that’s all it is. God knows it’s enough.”
His intercom buzzed. “Yes.”
“Dr. Meshevski would like to talk to you about the technical vocabularies, sir.”
“Ask him to hold it until the conference if he possibly can.”
“Yes, sir”
“Two more questions we can’t answer,” Parst said, “are what his civilization is like and what he came here to do. I’ll tell you what he says. The planet he comes from belongs to a galactic union of highly advanced, peace-loving races. He came here to help us prepare ourselves for membership in that union.”
I was trying hard to keep up, but it wasn’t easy. After a moment I said, “Suppose it’s true?”
He gave me the cold eye.
“All right, suppose it’s true.” For the first time, his voice was impatient. “Then suppose the opposite. Think about it for a minute.”
I saw where he was leading me, but I tried to circle around to it from another direction; I wanted to reason it out for myself. I couldn’t make the grade; I had to fall back on analogies, which are a kind of thinking I distrust.
You were a cannibal islander, and a missionary came along. He meant well, but you thought he wanted to steal your yam-fields and your wives, so you chopped him up and ate him for dinner.
Or:
You were a West Indian, and Columbus came along. You treated him as a guest, but he made a slave of you, worked you till you dropped, and finally wiped out your whole nation, to the last woman and child.
I said, “A while ago you mentioned three or four years as the possible term of the Project. Did you—?”
“That wasn’t meant to be taken literally,” he said, “It may take a lifetime.” He was staring at his desk-top.
“In other words, if nothing stops you, you’re going to go right on just this way, sitting on this thing. Until What’s-his-name dies, or his friends show up with an army, or something else blows it wide open.”
“That’s right.”
“Well, damn it, don’t you see that’s the one thing you can’t do? Either way you guess it, that won’t work. If he’s friendly—”
Parst lifted a pencil in his hand and slapped it palmdown against the desk-top. His mouth was tight. “It’s necessary,” he said.
After a silent moment he straightened in his chair and spread the fingers of his right hand at me. “One,” he said, touching the thumb: “weapons. Leaving everything else aside, if we can get one strategically superior weapon out of him, or the theory that will enable us to build one, then we’ve got to do it and we’ve got to do it in secret.”
The index finger. “Two: the spaceship.” Middle finger. “Three: the civilization he comes from. If they’re planning to attack us we’ve got to find that out, and when, and how, and what we can do about it.” Ring finger. “Four: Aza-Kra himself. If we don’t hold him in secret we can’t hold him at all, and how do we know what he might do if we let him go? There isn’t a single possibility we can rule out. Not one.”
He put the hand flat on the desk. “Five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, infinity. Biology, psychology, sociology, ecology, chemistry, physics, right down the line. Every science. In any one of them we might find something that would mean the difference between life and death for this country or this whole planet.”
He stared at me for a moment, his face set. “You don’t have to remind me of the other possibilities, Dahl. I know what they are; I’ve been on this project for thirteen weeks. I’ve also heard of the Golden Rule, and the Ten Commandments, and the Constitution of the United States. But this is the survival of the human race we’re talking about.”
I opened my mouth to say “That’s just the point,” or something equally stale, but I shut it again; I saw it was no good. I had one argument—that if this alien ambassador was what he claimed to be, then the whole world had to know about it; any nation that tried to suppress that knowledge, or dictate the whole planet’s future, was committing a crime against humanity. That, on the other hand, if he was an advance agent for an invasion fleet, the same thing was true only a great deal more so.
Beyond that I had nothing but instinctive moral conviction; and Parst had that on his side too; so did Frisbee and the President and all the rest. Being who and what they were, they had to believe as they did. Maybe they were right.
Half an hour later, the last-thought I had before my head hit the pillow was, Suppose there isn’t any Aza-Kra? Suppose that thing was a fake, a mechanical dummy?
But I knew better, and I slept soundly.