That could all be a total misinterpretation of the facts, of course. The whole theory was guesswork. Nothing explicit had been said. It was a matter of actions and reactions, of powerful but inarticulate forces operating in a certain way that could be construed as meaning such-and-such, and had been so construed. But in years gone by astronomers had discovered entire hitherto-unsuspected planets of the solar system by studying cosmic actions and reactions of that sort; the California people decided that it was worth gambling on the hope that their interpretation of the London maneuvers was correct, and going forward on that basis with a delegation.
And so. The Liberation Army chose Joshua Leonards, for his anthropological wisdom. Peter Carlyle-Macavoy, for general savvy and scientific insight. Plus Colonel Anson Carmichael III (U.S. Army, Ret.) for any number of reasons. And there on a mild autumn morning the Colonel stood with the other two in front of the sleek gray bulk of the Entity vessel that had begun the whole shebang by making that fiery landing in the San Fernando Valley two years before—Leonards and Carlyle-Macavoy once more, the only remaining residue in the Colonel’s life, aside from Peggy Gabrielson, of that grandiose, ambitious, utterly futile What-Shall-We-Do-About-It meeting at the Pentagon the day after the invasion.
“Is it a trap?” Joshua Leonards asked. “I heard this morning that they let five people on board a ship in Budapest last month. They never came out again.”
“Are you saying you want to back out?” Peter Carlyle-Macavoy asked, looking down almost distastefully at the stocky anthropologist from his great height.
“If they don’t let us out, we can study them from within while they study us,” said Leonards. “That’s fine with me.”
“And you, Colonel?”
The Colonel grinned. “I’d surely hate to spend the rest of my life aboard that ship. But I’d hate it worse to spend the rest of my life knowing that I could have gone in there but I said no.”
There was always the curious possibility, he thought, that he might wind up being shipped off to the Entities’ home world the way his former sister-in-law Cindy supposedly had been. That would be strange, all right, finishing his days in a P.O.W. camp on some weird alien world, undergoing perpetual telepathic interrogation by fifteen-foot-tall squids. Well, he would take the risk.
The big hatch in the side of the immense shining starship opened and the covering slid some twenty feet downward along an invisible track to become a platform on which all three of them could stand. Leonards was the first to mount it, then Carlyle-Macavoy, then the Colonel. The moment the last of the three men had come aboard, the platform silently ascended until it reached the level of the dark opening in the ship’s side. Dazzling brightness came splashing out at them from within. “Here we go,” Leonards said. “The three musketeers.”
The Colonel’s mind in that initial moment of entry was full of the questions he hoped to ask. All of them were variations on Where have you come from and why are you here and what do you plan to do with us? but they were couched in an assortment of marginally more indirect conceptualizations. Such as: Were the Entities representatives of a galactic confederation of worlds? If so, would the entry of Earth into that confederation be possible, either now or at some time in the future? And was there any immediate intention of working toward more constructive human-Entity communication? And did they understand that their presence here, their interference with human institutions and the functioning of human economic life, had caused great distress to the inhabitants of a peaceful and by its own lights civilized world? And so on and so on, questions that once upon a time he would never in a million years have imagined himself ever asking, or ever needing to ask.
But the Colonel did not, of course, get to ask any of them, so far as he could tell.
Upon entering a kind of vestibule of the alien ship he was swallowed up in a world of bewildering light, out of which a pair of mountainous alien figures came swimming gracefully toward him amidst veils of even greater brightness. They moved in an air of glory. Long flickers of cold flame rose up about them.
When he could see them clearly, which they permitted him to do after some indeterminate period of time, he was startled to discover that they were beautiful. Awesome and immense, yes. Frightening, perhaps. But in the subtle opalescent shimmer of their glossy translucent integuments and the graceful eddying of their movements and the mellow liquid gaze of their great eyes there lay a potent and ineffable beauty—a delicacy of form, even—that surprised him with its benign impact.
You could disappear into the shining yellow seas of those eyes. You could vanish into the pulsing radiant luminosity of their powerful intelligences, which surrounded them like whirling capes of light, an aura that partook of something close to the divine. You were overwhelmed by that. You were amazed. You were humbled. You were suffused with a sensation that hovered bewilderingly midway between terror and love.
Kings of the universe, they were, lords of creation. And the new masters of Earth.
“Well,” the Colonel wanted to say, “here we are. We’re very happy to have been given the opportunity to—”
But he did not say that, or anything else. Nor did Leonards and Carlyle-Macavoy say anything. Nor did either of the aliens, at least not as we understand the meaning of the verb to say.
The meeting that took place in that vestibule of the starship was defined, mostly, by what did not happen.
The three human delegates were not asked their names, nor given any chance to offer them. The two Entities who had come forth to interview them likewise proffered no introductions. There was no pleasant little speech of welcome by the hosts nor expression of gratitude for the invitation by the delegates. Cocktails and canapes were not served. Ceremonial gifts were not exchanged. The visitors were not taken on a tour of the ship.
No questions were asked, no answers given.
Not a word, in fact, was spoken by either side in any language either human or alien.
What did happen was that the Colonel and his two companions stood side by side in awe and wonder and utter stunned silence before the two extraterrestrial titans for a long moment, an infinitely prolonged moment, during which nothing in particular seemed to be happening. And then, gradually, each of the three humans found himself dwindling away within, experiencing in the most excruciating fashion an utter diminution and devaluation of the sense of self-worth that he had painstakingly constructed during the course of a lifetime of hard work, study, and outstanding accomplishment. The Colonel felt dwarfed, and not just in the physical sense, by these eerie giants. The Colonel felt deflated and impaired—shriveled, almost. Reduced in every way.
It was like becoming a small child again, confronted by stern, vast, incomprehensible, omnipotent, and distinctly unloving parents. The Colonel felt utterly and completely disempowered. He was nothing. He was nobody.
This was the experience that had already become known to its recipients as the Touch. It was caused by the silent and non-verbal penetration of a human mind in some telepathic way by the mind of an Entity.
Had the Entities, the Colonel wondered afterward, really intended any such humiliation of their human guests? Perhaps that had been the whole purpose of the meeting: a reinforcement of the fact of their superiority. On the other hand, they had established that fact pretty damned thoroughly already. Why bother to make the point again in this fashion? When you’ve conquered a world overnight without lifting a tentacle in anger, you have no real need to rub it in. More likely the depressing effect of the meeting had merely been an inevitable thing: they are what they are, we are what we are, and when we stand before them we must unavoidably feel this way as an incidental by-product of the disparity in general puissance and all-around effectuality between one species and the other. And so, he concluded, they probably hadn’t meant them to come away from the meeting feeling quite as crappy as they did.