We’d head for home, that is, unless the slave-drone’s brief intrusion into the neutron star released disruptive forces that splattered us all over this end of the galaxy. IBM/Toshiba didn’t really think that was going to happen. In theory a neutron star is one of the most stable things there is in the universe, and the math didn’t indicate that taking a nip from its interior would cause real problems. This neighborhood had already had its full quota of giant explosions, anyway.
Still, the possibility existed. Especially since there was a black hole just thirty light-minutes away, a souvenir of the second and much larger supernova bang that had happened here in the recent past. Having a black hole nearby is a little like playing with an extra wild card whose existence isn’t made known to the players until some randomly chosen moment midway through the game. If we destabilized the neutron star in some way not anticipated by the scientists back on Earth, we might just find ourselves going for a visit to the event horizon instead of getting to go home. Or we might not. There was only one way of finding out.
I didn’t know, by the way, what use the parent companies planned to make of the neutronium we had been hired to bring them. I hoped it was a good one.
But obviously we weren’t going to tackle any of this while there was an alien ship in the vicinity. So all we could do was wait. And see. Right now we were doing a lot of waiting, and no seeing at all.
Two days later Cal Bjornsen said, “We’re getting a message back from them now. Audio only. In English.”
We had wanted that, we had even hoped for that. And yet it shook me to learn that it was happening.
“Let’s hear it,” I said.
“The relay’s coming over ship channel seven.”
I tuned in. What I heard was an obviously synthetic voice, no undertones or overtones, not much inflection. They were trying to mimic the speech rhythms of what we had sent them, and I suppose they were actually doing a fair job of it, but the result was still unmistakably mechanical-sounding. Of course there might be nothing on board that ship but a computer, I thought, or maybe robots. I wish now that they had been robots.
It had the absolute and utter familiarity of a recurring dream. In stiff, halting, but weirdly comprehensible English came the first greetings of an alien race to the people of the planet of Earth. “This who speak be First of Nine Sparg,” the voice said. Nine Sparg, we soon realized from context, was the name of their planet. First might have been the speaker’s name, or his—hers, its?—title; that was unclear, and stayed that way. In an awkward pidgin-English that we nevertheless had little trouble understanding, First expressed gratitude for our transmission and asked us to send more words. To send a dictionary, in fact: now that they had the algorithm for our speech they needed more content to jam in behind it, so that we could go on to exchange more complex statements than Hello and How are you.
Bjornsen queried me on the override. “We’ve got an English program that we could start feeding them,” he said. “Thirty thousand words: that should give them plenty. You want me to put it on for them?”
“Not so fast,” I said. “We need to edit it first.”
“For what?”
“Anything that might help them find the location of Earth. That’s in our orders, under Eventuality of Contact with Extraterrestrials. Remember, I have Nakamura and Nagy-Szabo breathing down my neck, telling me that there’s a ship full of boogiemen out there and we mustn’t have anything to do with them. I don’t believe that myself. But right now we don’t know how friendly these Spargs are and we aren’t supposed to bring strangers home with us.”
“But how could a dictionary entry—”
“Suppose the sun—our sun—is defined as a yellow G2 type star,” I said. “That gives them a pretty good beginning. Or something about the constellations as seen from Earth. I don’t know, Cal. I just want to make sure we don’t accidentally hand these beings a road-map to our home planet before we find out what sort of critters they are.”
Three of us spent half a day screening the dictionary, and we put Brain Central to work on it too. In the end we pulled seven words—you’d laugh if you knew which they were, but we wanted to be careful—and sent the rest across to the Spargs. They were silent for nine or ten hours. When they came back on the air their command of English was immensely more fluent. Frighteningly more fluent. Yesterday First had sounded like a tourist using a Fifty Handy Phrases program. A day later, First’s command of English was as good as that of an intelligent Japanese who has been living in the United States for ten or fifteen years.
It was a tense, wary conversation. Or so it seemed to me, the way it began to seem that First was male and that his way of speaking was brusque and bluntly probing. I may have been wrong on every count.
First wanted to know who we were and why we were here. Jumping right in, getting down to the heart of the matter. I felt a little like a butterfly collector who has wandered onto the grounds of a fusion plant and is being interrogated by a security guard. But I kept my tone and phrasing as neutral as I could, and told him that our planet was called Earth and that we had come on a mission of exploration and investigation.
So had they, he told me. Where is Earth?
Pretty straightforward of him, I thought. I answered that I lacked at this point a means of explaining galactic positions to him in terms that he would understand. I did volunteer the information that Earth was not anywhere close at hand.
He was willing to drop that line of inquiry for the time being. He shifted to the other obvious one:
What were we investigating?
Certain properties of collapsed stars, I said, after a bit of hesitation.
And which properties were those?
I told him that we didn’t have enough vocabulary in common for me to try to explain that either.
The Nine Sparg captain seemed to accept that evasion too. And provided me with a pause that indicated that it was my turn. Fair enough.
When I asked him what he was doing here, he replied without any apparent trace of evasiveness that he had come on a mission of historical inquiry. I pressed for details. It has to do with the ancestry of our race, he said. We used to live in this part of the galaxy, before the great explosion. No hesitation at all about telling me that. It struck me that First was being less reticent about dealing with my queries than I was with his; but of course I had no way of judging whether I was hearing the truth from him.
“I’d like to know more,” I said, as much as a test as anything else. “How long ago did your people flee this great explosion? And how far from here is your present home world?”
A long silence: several minutes. I wondered uncomfortably if I had overplayed my hand. If they were as edgy about our finding their home world as I was about their finding ours, I had to be careful not to push them into an overreaction. They might just think that the safest thing to do would be to blow us out of the sky as soon as they had learned all they could from us.
But when First spoke again it was only to say, “Are you willing to establish contact in the visual band?”
“Is such a thing possible?”