“I didn’t know anybody was on the brink of war,” said Noxon as they walked.
“Nobody was,” said Ram. “Nobody on Earth.”
“What do you mean?”
“Those aircraft that just went by. They clearly don’t operate by any technological system I’ve heard of. And I’ve heard of them all.”
“Not of human origin? Or some country had a secret program?”
“Not made by Homo sapiens. And I’m betting they weren’t Erectid ships.”
It still took a moment for Noxon to be sure what Ram meant. Not anthropes. Not from Earth. “What do we do?”
“Get back into the past right now.”
“This radiation exposure,” said Noxon. “You know we took a lot of it while we were time-slicing, too. Only a small fraction of what it could have been, but it looks like we weren’t all that far from the center of the blast.”
“So we’re probably dying already,” said Ram.
“Any cures?” asked Noxon. “Any effective treatments?”
“Well, if your facemask can’t cure it, I doubt anything my body can do will be of much help.”
“So we need to go back and warn ourselves in person,” said Noxon.
Ram understood at once. “Which will duplicate us.”
“If you and I are going to die,” said Noxon, “our copies need to go on. At the moment, I think we’re more indispensable to the survival of the human race than ever.”
“And if we don’t die?” asked Ram.
“The more the merrier.”
They could learn nothing. The next time they reached that point in time, at least they were out of town, well to the south. They had communications equipment, but there were no signals to pick up.
The third time, Ram and Noxon visited one of Ram’s friends from the space program. They made their explanations and demonstrations and were given a connection so they could look in on the communications of the international space exploration authority. This time there was a little warning. A ship of some kind spotted just outside the orbit of Jupiter. And then a complete loss of control over all computers and communications for only a few minutes, and a near-simultaneous launch of all missiles from all nations.
Armed with this data, Ram and Noxon visited the same friend, played the recordings and showed the data from the near future. With a lot of “never mind how I got it,” this data provoked some serious alerts and this time the spacecraft was tracked. It seemed to have come from a direction similar to the route taken by one of the exploratory drones sent out prior to Ram Odin’s colonizing mission, when the space authority was searching for planets likely to be habitable. And this time, given some warning, some of the communications systems were uncoupled from the worldwide networks, so they remained under human control.
What Noxon and Ram took back with them this last time was a much clearer picture. The best guess was that the drone sent out more than two decades before had discovered, not just a habitable world, but an inhabited one. A world with space travel and a keen sense of umbrage, or paranoia about what a follow-up visit from humans might bring.
“Given what Ram Odin’s expedition did to the planet Garden to get it ready for human habitation,” said Noxon, “I can’t say they were wrong to determine on a preemptive strike.”
“We would never have attacked a planet with sentient life,” said Ram Odin. “We would have moved on to the next prospective colony world.”
“You would never have attacked,” said Noxon. “But who knows what the expendables would have done while you were in stasis?”
Speculation was all they had to go on, when it came to causes and motives. Results were a different matter. The aliens had such advanced tech that, virtually unnoticed, they were able to infiltrate our computers and communications from a distance, read enough data to know our weapons capabilities and what targets to hit, and then activate the surviving nuclear arsenals of two dozen former nation-states. The killoff was nearly complete. Then the alien ship reached Earth orbit at incredible speed, and those aircraft sought out every source of radio signals and then every sign of body heat.
“There weren’t going to be any survivors,” said Ram Odin.
“So by the time the Visitors come back to Earth from their voyage to Garden,” said Noxon, “they’re going to find that they’re the last human beings left in the solar system.”
“Then why would they go back and destroy the surviving humans on Garden?” asked Deborah. Immediately she shook her head, answering her own question. “Right. It wasn’t humans.”
“They got inside our computer systems,” said Ram Odin. “They knew all about my voyage and then the Visitors’ trip, including all the data they collected. So it was the aliens who went to Garden and activated the built-in self-destruct system orbiting the planet. It was never humans from Earth at all. It didn’t matter what the Visitors saw. Their ship’s log would show the aliens that there was another clump of humans. They found us completely defenseless and wiped us out.”
“I’m so glad we didn’t let the mice come back and infect the human race,” said Noxon. “But—no, the mice were going to sneak back with the Visitors. So they would have reached an uninhabited Earth no matter what.”
“What now?” asked Anthropologist Wheaton. “You’re the timeshapers.”
“I think our mission just broadened,” said Noxon. “Our job now is to save the whole human race. On both worlds.”
“Even though this alien attack on us was not completely irrational?” asked Philologist Wheaton. “We have a history of wiping out other flora and fauna to make way for our own biota.”
“This isn’t about justice,” said Ram Odin. “It isn’t about right and wrong. It’s about us and them. And I choose us.”
“All in favor?” asked Deborah.
They all raised their hands.
“We can philosophize to our hearts’ content after we’ve saved humanity,” said Ram.
“Now all we need is a plan,” said Noxon.
“I think I have another voyage ahead of me,” said Ram Odin. “But with a different destination. How long do you think since these aliens first developed space flight?”
Meanwhile, the original Noxon and Ram Odin had both developed radiation poisoning. Noxon’s facemask helped his body recover. Now there were two copies of him, though one was still in bed, sleeping almost constantly as his body’s cells were rebuilt and cancers were eliminated.
There was only one Ram Odin, though. Only one person in their group who could pilot the starship they had stashed in Antarctic ice in the remote past. This time the mice would be given the freedom of the ship. This time, they would be turned loose on an alien world.
Chapter 26
Tidiness
Param stood in the Tent of Light, bending over the table, studying the maps with Olivenko, Umbo, Loaf, Rigg, Ramex, and Square. Ram Odin sat in the doorway of the tent, looking out over the meadow, either keeping watch or dozing—it was hard to tell which.
Param spoke little at these councils. Her natural disposition coincided exactly with good policy on this—for she had quickly learned that if she even hinted at a preference, Olivenko would start to bend all his ideas and argument to favor the course of action that he guessed she was favoring.
She had had to be careful even of her questions, until she finally said, rather testily, that she could not make any rational decisions unless she was sure she understood the situation, which meant she must ask questions. But how could she ask questions if people reacted by trying to guess what she meant by her question? “I mean—I always mean—that I believe I need to know the answer to my question. Nothing else. I don’t hint. When I’ve come up with a tentative decision, I offer my conclusions for comment. It isn’t subtle, is it? You all understand when I do that?”