Harry scowled and shook his head, temporarily unable to speak. He waved a hand in front of his mouth, glancing at Arthur, and coughed.
“We don’t know quite what to say to you,” Arthur finally managed. “We’ve been waiting a long time for someone to visit the Earth from space.”
“Yes.” The Guest’s head swung back and forth, the jewel-bright, moist, sherry-colored eyes fully revealed. “I wish I could bring better words on such an important occasion.”
“What…ah, what words do you bring?” Harry asked.
“Are you related?” the Guest asked in turn.
“I’m sorry — related?”
“There is a question about my communication?”
“We are not of the same family — not siblings, brother or father and son or…whatever,” Arthur said.
“You have a social relationship.”
“He’s my boss,” Harry said, pointing to Arthur. “My hierarchical superior. We’re friends, also.”
“And you are not the same individuals in different form as the individuals behind you?”
“No,” Harry said.
“Your forms are steady.”
“Yes.”
“Then…” The Guest made a sharp, high-pitched whistling noise, and the long crest above the level of the shoulders appeared to inflate slightly. Arthur could not see a mouth or nose near the eyes, and surmised such openings might be on the head below the neck and facing the chest, in the area corresponding — if such correspondences were at all useful — to a long “chin.” “I will relate my bad news to you, as well. Are you placed highly in your group, your society?”
“Not the highest, but yes, we are highly placed,” Harry said.
“The news I bring is not happy. It may be unhappy for all of you. This I have not spoken before in detail.” Again the whistling noise. The head lifted and Arthur spotted slitlike openings on the underside. “If you have the ability to leave, you will wish to do so soon. A disease has entered your system of planets. There is little time left for your world.”
Harry pulled his chair a few inches forward, and the Guest, with an awkward sidling motion, came closer to the thick glass. Then it sat on the floor, leaving only its upper arms and long head visible. The three eyes pointed steadily at Harry, as if wishing to establish some unbreakable and facile rapport, or as if commiserating…
“Our world is doomed?” Harry asked, somehow avoiding all melodrama, giving the last word a perfectly straightforward and unstrained emphasis.
“Unless I sadly misknow your abilities, yes. This is bad news.”
“It does seem so,” Harry said. “What is the cause of this disease? Are you part of an army of conquest?”
“Conquest…Uncertain. Army?”
“Organized group of soldiers, fighters, destroyers and occupiers. Invaders.”
The Guest was silent and still for a few minutes. It might have been a statue but for the almost invisible throbbing of its upper crest. “I am a parasite, a happen-by voyager.”
“Explain that, please.”
“I am a flea, not a soldier or a builder. My world is dead and eaten. I travel here within a child of a machine that eats worlds.”
“You’ve come on a spaceship?”
“Not my own. Not ours.” The emphasis there was striking.
“Whose, then?” Harry pursued.
“Its forebears made by very distant people. It controls itself. It eats and reproduces.”
Arthur trembled with confusion and fear and a deep anger he could not explain. “I don’t understand,” he said, blocking Harry’s next words.
“It is a traveler that destroys and makes the stars safe for its builders. It gathers information, learns, and then eats worlds and makes new younger forms of itself. Is this clear?”
“Yes, but why are you here?” Arthur almost shouted.
“Shh,” Harry said, holding up one hand. “It just said that. It’s hitched a ride. It’s a flea.”
“You didn’t build the rock, the spaceship or whatever it is, in the desert? That’s not your vehicle?” Colonel Hall asked. Obviously, they had heard none of this before. Young Lieutenant Sanborn was visibly shaken.
“Not our vehicle,” the Guest affirmed. “It is powerful enough not to fear our presence. We cannot hurt it. We sacrifice…” Again it whistled. “We survive only to warn of the death our kind has met.”
“Where are the pilots, the soldiers?” Harry asked.
“The machine does not live as we do,” the Guest said.
“It’s a robot, automatic?”
“It is a machine.”
Harry pushed his chair back and rubbed his face vigorously with both hands. The Guest appeared to observe this closely, but otherwise did not change position.
“We have a couple of names for that kind of machine,” Arthur said, facing Colonel Hall. “It sounds like a von Neumann device. Self-replicating, without outside instructions. Frank Drinkwater thinks the lack of such machines proves there is no intelligent life besides our own in the galaxy.”
“Playing devil’s advocate, no doubt,” Harry said, still massaging the bridge of his nose. “What scientist would want to prove intelligence was unique?”
Colonel Hall regarded the Guest with an expression of mild pain. “It’s saying we should be on war alert?”
“It’s saying…” Harry began angrily, and then controlled his tone, “it’s saying we haven’t got the chance of an ice cube in hell. Art, you read more science fiction than I do. Who was that fellow—”
“Saberhagen. Fred Saberhagen. He called them ‘Berserkers.’”
“I am not being spoken with,” the Guest said. “Have you become aware of the results of this information?”
“I think so,” Arthur replied. They had not asked a perfectly obvious question. Perhaps they didn’t want to know. He appraised the Guest in the silence that fell over them. “How long do we have?”
“I do not know. Perhaps less than an orbit.”
Harry winced. Colonel Hall simply gaped.
“How long ago did your — did the ship land?” Arthur continued.
The Guest made a small hissing sound and turned away. “I do not know,” it replied. “We have not been aware.”
Arthur did not hesitate to ask the next question. “Did the ship stop by a planet in our solar system? Did it destroy a moon?”
“I don’t know.”
A short, powerfully built Asiatic man with close-trimmed black hair, dark pockmarked skin, and broad cheekbones entered the room. Arthur slapped his hands on his knees and glared at him.
“I beg your pardon, gentlemen,” he said.
Sanborn cleared his throat. “This is Colonel Tuan Anh Phan.” He introduced Arthur and Harry.
Phan greeted each with a reserved nod. “I’ve just been informed that the Australians are releasing news photos and motion pictures. I believe this is important. Their visitors are not like our own.”
InfoNet Political News Forum, October 6, 1996, Frank Topp, commentator: President Crockerman’s rating in the World-News public opinion polls has been a rocksteady 60 to 65 percent approval since June, with no signs of change as Election Day approaches. Political pundits in Washington doubt that anything can derail the President ‘ s easy victory in November, not even the hundred-billion-dollar trade imbalance between the Eastern Pacific Rim nations and Uncle Sam…or the enigmatic situation in Australia. I, for one, am not even wearing campaign buttons. It’s going to be a dull election.