"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?"
No one answered him.
Crowell said, "One other thing puzzles me. How the swarm up there got into orbit. It takes a while to eject an object into orbit. Several times around the Earth until it's where you want it and moving at the speed you want it. If this new object, if this swarm did any jockeying preliminary to getting into orbit our spotters would have caught it well ahead of time. But they didn't. When they found it, it already was in a settled orbit. And, another thing: It would have had to know quite a lot about the planet around which it intended to set up an orbit—the planet's speed, its rotation rate, its gravitational attraction. This would apply to any kind of orbit, but to set up a synchronous orbit, it would have had to have all the factors figured to a fraction. Apparently, it just plopped in and settled to the correct altitude at the correct speed and how the hell that could be done, I don't know. I'd say, offhand, it would be impossible."
"So now that we have all the bad news," said Hammond, "what are we going to do about it? That's what this meeting is for, isn't it? So we can map a course of action. In the morning, I'd like to be able to tell the man upstairs that we have some answers for him."
"One thing we should do is to notify all the governors to put the National Guard on alert," said Whiteside.
"That would be guaranteed," said Hammond, "to scare the country senseless."
"And make some of our international neighbors nervous," said Clark.
The general asked, "How about passing the word along quietly? Telling the governors to be prepared to call out the guard at a moment's notice."
"It would leak," said Porter. "There's no such thing as secrecy among forty-eight governors—fifty if you were to include Hawaii and Alaska and I suppose Hawaii and Alaska would have their noses out of joint if we passed them by. Governors are political creatures and some of them are blabbermouths. Besides, they all have staffs and.
"Dave is right," Hammond told Whiteside. "You'd simply be asking for it."
"If it comes to that," said Porter, "the country should be told, not only about what we are doing but why we're doing it. They'll find out in a few days in any case and it would go down better if we told the people at once. Let the news come from us rather than from someone else."
"Otherwise than the National Guard, what can we do?" asked Whiteside.
"You persist," said Allen, "in regarding these things as enemies.
"At least, they're potential enemies," said the general. "Until we know more about them, we must be prepared to recognize them as possible threats. If they should invade us, then, automatically, they are enemies.
"Maybe it's time for us to lay out the situation to some of our international friends," said Hammond. "We've held out from doing this, but if that swarm up there starts coming down, we're not going to be the only ones involved. Maybe we owe it to the others to let them know what is going on."
Whiteside said, "The President should be sitting in with us on this."
"No," said Hammond. "Let him sleep. He needs the rest. A long, hard day is coming up.
"Why do we assume that we are the only ones who sent out a shuttle to have a look at the swarm?" asked Porter. "The Soviets also have a space station. They could have sent out a shuttle. We announced the new object in space more than twenty-four hours ago. They'd have had the time."
"I can't be sure," said Hammond. "I think it is unlikely. Their station is a considerable distance from ours, the shuttle trip would be longer. Not that distance makes that great a difference, but somehow I don't think so. For one thing, they'd have less reason to react. The visitor is in our country, not theirs."
"What difference does it make, anyhow?" asked Clark.
"We wouldn't want to go to them," said Porter, "and say, ‘Look, pal, we got these things up there' if we had any reason to believe they knew as much as we do, maybe more than we do."
"I think your objection is academic," said Hammond.
"Perhaps so," said Porter. "We just don't want to look any sillier than we have to."
"Let's get back," said Whiteside, "to the matter of defense. You vetoed the National Guard. If we can't do that, the regular military establishments should be alerted."
"If it can be done without publicity," said Hammond. "If you can guarantee no leaks."
"That can be managed," said Whiteside.
"What I'm worried about is public panic," said Hammond. "It's been all right so far, but touch the wrong button and the country can go sky-high. There's been so much talk, so much controversy, all these years, about the UFOs, that the country's ripe."