15. WASHINGTON, D.C
Porter had gotten into his pajamas and was turning down his bed when the phone rang. He glanced at the clock on his bedside table; it was almost two o'clock.
"This is Jack," said the voice on the other end of the line. "Jack Clark. Were you asleep?"
"In another minute, I would have been."
"Dave, I think this is important. Can you come down to the White House? Meet us in your office."
"Who is us?"
"Me, NASA, the science advisor, Whiteside."
"Not the President?"
"He's asleep. We don't want to wake him. There are a few things we should talk out."
"Such as?"
"Your line is not secured. I can't tell you. I repeat, it is important."
"Be there in ten, maybe fifteen, minutes."
"On second thought, maybe I should get the White House chief of staff in on this too. You have any objection?"
"Hammond? Sure. Why not? By all means, get him in."
"All right, then. We'll be expecting you.
Porter put the phone back in the cradle. Now what the hell? he wondered. Clark was excited and concerned; it could be heard in his tone of voice. Perhaps, Porter thought, no one else could have known. But he did. He'd known Jack Clark for a long time.
He took another look at the bed. Why not just sack out, he asked himself, and to hell with Clark and the others? God knows, he needed the rest. In the last twenty-four hours, he had logged little sleep. But he knew that he was only trying the thought on for size. In fifteen minutes, he would be walking down the corridor toward the press office. He started taking off his pajamas, heading for the chest of drawers to get socks and underwear.
In the driveway, before he got into the car, he stood for a moment, looking at the sky. Somewhere to the north, some distance off, he could hear the mutter of a plane coming in to land. He looked for the blinking lights of the craft, but they could not be seen. Out in the street, fallen leaves made a rustling sound as they were driven along the pavement by the wind.
Everyone except Hammond was present and waiting when he entered the door of the press room. Against the wall, the wire machines made soft chortling noises. The kitchen had brought up coffee; a gleaming urn sat on one of the desks, with white coffee mugs ranged in a huddled group.
Whiteside had taken the chair behind Porter's desk, was teetering back and forth in it. Crowell, the NASA man, and Dr. Allen sat side by side on a small sofa. Clark was filling coffee cups preparatory to passing them out. Hammond came striding briskly through the door.
"What is going on?" he asked. "You sounded urgent, Jack."
"I don't know how urgent," said Clark. "It's something we should talk over. The shuttle went out and the station has sent the word."
"What kind of word?"
Clark gestured toward Crowell. All eyes in the room turned to the NASA man.
"The new object in space," said Crowell, "as many of us must have suspected, but didn't want to talk out loud about, very definitely has a connection with the visitor that came down in Minnesota."
"How connected?" asked Hammond.
"It's not an object at all, in the classical sense of the term. It is a cluster of the visitors, hundreds of them, perhaps thousands. No one so far has taken the time to compute how many there could be."
"You mean a swan-n of them clustered in the form of a wheel?" Crowell nodded. "We should have known without even going out to look. Telescopic observation from the station should have tipped us off. The observers saw no solid object, what they saw was a collection of discrete particles."
"Not exactly discrete particles," said Clark.
"From the distance of a thousand miles, they would have seemed to be."
"But they're still remaining in the cluster," said Hammond. "What I mean, they're not beginning to break up."
"We can't be sure," said Crowell. "The two men on the shuttle said they seemed to be sort of unraveling at the edge. All the visitors—visitors is an awkward word, but I don't know what else to call them—all the visitors at the edge of the disc didn't seem to be as neatly tucked away as they should have been. Whether this means the swarm is beginning to break up, we don't know. If you carry the analogy to that of a swarm of bees, that situation could be quite normal. In a swarm of bees, while the swarm itself may be intact, there are always quite a number of bees in motion around the edges of the swarm, jockeying around to find a more secure place where they can fit themselves. That may be the case with our swarm out there. The men in the shuttle couldn't be sure. They had trouble seeing."
"Couldn't see?" asked Whiteside. "What could prevent their seeing?"
"In space, objects often are hard to detect," said Crowell. "There's not a proper background against which to see them. You see mostly by reflected light."
"But there's the sun," said Whiteside. "The swarm would have been in full sunlight. There should have been plenty of reflection."
"General, there simply wasn't. Which leads me to believe we may be dealing with what amounts to black bodies."
"Black bodies? I've heard the term, but.
"Bodies that absorb all energy, in this case, the radiation from the sun. A perfect black body would absorb all energy, reflect none at all."
"Why, certainly," said Allen. "I should have suspected that. Should have known it, in fact. To navigate through space, a fair amount of energy is needed. That's the way these things get their energy. There isn't much, but they get all there is. Not only from the suns in space, however feeble the radiations from those suns may be, but from anything else from which they could extract energy. The impact of micrometeorites would give them some. Kinetic energy, of course, but probably they could transform that into potential energy. Cosmic rays, and cosmic rays have a lot of energy. All other kinds of radiation. They'd gobble it all up. They'd be energy sponges."
"Doctor, you're sure of that?" asked Hammond, dryly.
"Well, no, not exactly. Certainly I'm not certain of it. But the hypothesis is sound. It could be the way it works. There'd have to be some such means for a space-going machine to extract sufficient energy to keep going."
He said to Crowell, "Even before you told us what the object is, I had a hunch we'd find what you describe. My men at Lone Pine report the visitor there is sending out signals, modulated signals, which would argue that it is in communication with something. And I asked myself what could it be communicating with. The answer seemed to be others of its kind. No one else could decode the garbage that it's sending."
"Which means," said Whiteside, "that it is telling all of its relatives out there what fine forests it has found. Inviting them in to eat their fill. In a little while, there may be others tumbling down, landing in our forests and tucking their napkins underneath their chins."
"Henry," said Hammond, "you're jumping to conclusions again. We can't be sure of that."
"The possibility exists," said the general, stubbornly. "We can't close our eyes to it. My God, what a horrible situation!"
"What else did your men find?" Porter asked Allen.
"Not much. The visitor is not metal. We are sure of that. We don't know what it is. We tried to get samples…"
"You mean your men just walked up to it and pried away at it and scraped away at it?"
"Hell, man, they climbed all over it. They examined every inch of it. It paid them no attention. It never even twitched its hide. It just went on with its lumbering."
"For the love of God," asked Clark, "what are we dealing with?"