The ramp struck the concrete runway with a solid thunk. The walkway faced about 20 degrees away from the crowd, a shallow enough angle that no one moved. Necks twisted and craned slightly towards the shadowed opening. An inner door—an airlock port?—remained closed.
Kyle snuck a peek at the meter in his pocket. The counter showed an increase in radiation levels since the ramp had descended, but not enough to worry about. Still, he chided himself for losing the argument that the welcoming party wear dosimeters. That battle lost, he'd done the best he could: the meter in his coat would beep if his cumulative exposure exceeded a preset threshold.
Inference one, he thought, eyeing once more the cracked runway. Radiation plus massive weight, enough weight for a major amount of shielding, denote nuclear power. Then a sharp intake of breath from the diplomat beside him returned Kyle's attention to the ramp. As he watched, the airlock door cycled silently open.
Four aliens cantered down the incline, their scales iridescent in the sunlight. The ramp boomed under thudding hooves, with a tone that reminded Kyle of ceramic. The creatures halted on the runway at the base of the ramp. For clothing, each wore only a many-pocketed belt from which hung a larger sack like a Scottish sporran. Only slight variations in skin tone, all shades of light green, differentiated them. Each had about twelve inches on Kyle, himself a six-footer.
The aliens didn't turn toward the human dignitaries. If rude by human standards, the position nonetheless made sense: a face-to-face stance would have given a good view to only one pair of eyes. They're not human, Kyle reminded himself. For them to act like us would be strange.
One of the aliens walked slowly toward the waiting humans. Pads on the bottom of his hooves rasped against concrete. Extending both arms, hands open, palms upward, the alien stopped directly in front of Harold Shively Robeson.
"Thank you for meeting me, Mr. President," said the creature, the bass voice rumbling eerily from the top of his head. "I am Ambassador H'ffl. I bring you greetings from the Galactic Commonwealth."
The President reached out and clasped one of the alien's hands. "On behalf of the people of America and planet Earth, welcome."
So many mysteries; so little time.
Kyle stood in the White House basement command post of the science-analysis team. There was no place on Earth he'd rather be, except possibly upstairs in the Oval Office where the President and sundry diplomats met with the F'thk themselves. Should he be here, helping to make sense of what data they already had, or there trying to gather more? The obvious answer was yes.
"How's it going?"
He'd been staring at a wall covered with Post-it notes. Each paper square bore, in scribbled form, one comment about the aliens. As he turned to the doorway where Britt Arledge had appeared, one of the drafted wizards from DOE did yet another reshuffle of the stickies. Two more squares, green ones, denoting inferences, appeared between the rearranged yellow factoids. One of the relocated squares, its adhesive dissipated by too many moves, fluttered to the floor. A secretary scurried over to rewrite its content on a new sheet.
Kyle gestured over toward his red-eyed boss, wondering who looked more exhausted. "We're learning."
Britt nodded; it was all the encouragement Kyle needed. "For starters, our guests have a fusion reactor aboard their landing craft. That technology alone would be invaluable."
"Is that so?" The response was nearly monotonic; Arledge seemed singularly unimpressed. "The F'thk didn't mention that."
"Gotta be." Kyle warmed to his subject. The meter he'd taken to National hadn't differentiated between types of radiation, but the gear he'd had stowed aboard the limos was far more sophisticated. The drivers, following his instructions, had parked the cars in positions well spaced around the spaceship. "There's definite neutron flux at the back of the ship and magnetic fringing like from a tokamak quadrupole."
"Uh-huh."
"Magnetic-bottle technology to contain the plasma, and lots of shielding to protect the crew. Tons and tons of shielding, Britt. You saw what their ship did to the runway."
"Okay."
"On our own, we may have practical fusion in fifty years." Thinking, suddenly, of the distant mother ship, two-plus miles across, he nervously ran both hands through his hair. "Momma must have one big fusion reactor aboard."
"Oh, I doubt it," said Britt, a cat-who-ate-the-canary grin lighting his tired face. "My friend H'ffl says it uses matter-to-energy conversion. He wondered if we have antimatter."
Antimatter! No wonder Arledge was so unimpressed by his own news. "Fleetingly, for research, and then only a few subatomic particles at a time. Nothing you could power a spaceship with." Or a lightbulb, for that matter. A flurry of new Post-it notes suggestive of more progress distracted him. "What was that?"
"I asked, is antimatter dangerous? H'ffl says it's standard practice to park antimatter-powered vessels in the gravity well of an uninhabited moon when near an inhabited planet. Something about protecting against the remote likelihood of a mishap. Does it make sense for them to keep the mother ship out by the moon?"
"Yes, it's dangerous, and I don't know . . . Equal amounts of matter and antimatter do convert totally to energy, at efficiencies far greater than fission or fusion. Orbit just a thousand miles above Earth, though, and there's no atmosphere whatever. No friction. Even without engines, a ship would circle forever. If, for some reason, it blew up, there'd be beaucoup radiation, but nothing—I should do some calculations to confirm this—nothing the atmosphere wouldn't effectively block.
"So, no, I don't see any reason to stay a quarter-million miles away. Then, what do I know? It's not like Earth has technology remotely like theirs."
The chief of staff persisted. "Is the mother ship a danger where it is? What if it crashed on the moon?"
"A really big crater, as if one more would matter. The point is that won't happen. The moon has no atmosphere. Any orbit higher than the tallest lunar mountain should last forever." Kyle had fudged a bit for effect: given enough time, he suspected, gravitational perturbations from lunar mascons or other planets, or tidal effects of the Earth, or solar wind would have disastrous effects on an orbit that low. None of which applied, in less than geological time, to the altitude at which the F'thk ship actually orbited the moon. One glance through a telescope had convinced him that the mother ship wasn't ever meant to land.
"The President will be relieved."
When had the Post-it notes stretched around to a second wall? "What else can I tell you?"
"Nothing, really—I was mostly making conversation. I actually came by to invite you to dinner." He waved off Kyle's protest. "A state dinner, upstairs, tonight at eight. Perhaps Ambassador H'ffl or one of his companions can enlighten you on F'thk orbital preferences."
Something was odd about the ballroom, thought Kyle, something other than the green aliens making chitchat with Washington's elite. What was it? He settled, at last, on the absence of hors d'oeuvres. The F'thk would not eat in public: they said that trace elements in their food were toxic to terrestrial life. White House protocol officers had then decreed that the humans wouldn't eat either.
Some dinner! He wished someone had mentioned this decision before he'd arrived. He'd gone home to change into a tux; any nuke 'n puke meal from his freezer, if not up to White House banquet standards, still would've beaten fasting.
He sipped his wine; the F'thk with whom he and a gaggle of civil servants were talking held tightly to a glass of water. The microcassette recorder in Kyle's pocket was hopefully catching the entire conversation. If not, well, he'd handed out others.
"You've been very quiet, Dr. Gustafson. I'd expected more curiosity from a man in your position."
Kyle needed a moment to realize that the comment had come from the alien. Earth's radio and TV broadcasts had served not only as beacons but also as language tutorials—lessons the F'thk had learned extremely well. "Lack of curiosity is not the problem, K'ddl." Despite his best efforts, a hint of vowel crept into the name. "Quite the opposite. I have so many questions that I don't know where to begin."
"Oh, God," whispered a State Department staffer behind him. "He's going to babble in nanobytes per quark volt."
Kyle ignored the crack, his mind still wrestling with the afternoon's conversation about the mother ship. "I'm puzzled about one thing. Why keep the F'thk mother ship in lunar orbit? It seems excessively cautious."
Swelling violins from the chamber orchestra—Mozart, Kyle thought—drowned out the alien's response. He shrugged reflexively, realizing even as he did it how foolish it was to expect the alien to understand the gesture.
Except K'ddl did. "I said, it's not F'thk. The mother ship is Aie'eel-built. They fly it, as well." The alien made a periodic rasping noise which, Kyle decided, must be a form of laughter. "You thought it coincidental that the Commonwealth's representatives were so humanlike? You would consider the Aie'eel so many headless, methane-breathing frogs. The Zxk'tl and the #$%^&"—Kyle couldn't even begin to organize that last sound burst into English letters—"and other crew species aboard the mother ship would seem less human still.
"We F'thk were chosen as the emissary species because we so closely resemble you. We are accustomed to similar gravity, temperature, sunlight, and atmosphere." He hoisted his still-filled glass and took a drink. "We are even both water-based."
That was when too much wine on an empty stomach betrayed Kyle. The room spun. His ears rang. Visions of . . . things . . . too inhuman even to lend themselves to description assailed him. All thought of orbits and exotic energy sources fled. He missed entirely the last comment K'ddl made before turning his attention to another White House guest.
The tape recorder in Kyle's pocket, however, was made of sterner stuff. K'ddl had added, "I do not wish to offend, but no F'thk would ever invent such dark nights or such a paltry number of moons."
Two sandwiches and four cups of coffee later, Kyle felt almost himself again. He ignored the disapproving sniffs of the White House chef. It was unclear, in any event, whether the criticism dealt with Kyle's plebeian taste for peanut butter or his part in that afternoon's delivery to the kitchen of so much bulky equipment. So many instrument-covered counters . . . perhaps it was just as well that dinner for three hundred had been canceled.
A Secret Service agent turned waiter for the evening came through the double doors, a single half-empty glass on his tray. "One of the aliens set this down. K'ddl I think, but I can't really tell 'em apart yet. Sorry it wasn't any fuller."
Kyle nodded his thanks. "Doesn't matter. It's more than we need." He tore the sterile wrapper from an eyedropper, then extracted a few milliliters from the alien's glass. The sample went into an automated mass spectrometer.
The analyzer beeped as it completed its tests. The color display lit up, chemical names and their concentrations scrolling down the screen. Water. Very dilute carbonic acid: carbon dioxide in solution, basic fizz. Traces of calcium and magnesium salts. Kyle compared the list to a sample taken before the aliens had arrived. As best he could tell, the glass contained pure Perrier.
"Kyle?"
He turned to the casually dressed engineer, a friend from the nearby Naval Research Labs, who'd spent the evening in the kitchen. "Yeah, Larry?"
"The air samples are different." To an eyebrow raised in interrogation, Larry added, "Check the plots yourself."
Kyle rolled out two strip charts, one annotated "6:05 p.m." and the other "9:00 p.m." Spikes of unrecognized complex hydrocarbons appeared on only the later sheet. If what passed for alien saliva held no trace of metabolic toxins, apparently their exhalations did. Still, the nine-o'clock spike seemed somehow familiar.
Ah.
"Can I bum a cigarette, Lar, and a match?" He lit up clumsily, almost choking as he inhaled. Waving away the suddenly solicitous engineer, he took a more cautious drag. He directed part of this lungful into a test tube, which he quickly stoppered.
Larry, catching on quickly, ran the latest sample through the mass spectrometer. The resulting strip chart, marked "10:11 p.m.," soon lay beside the others.
The evening's addition to the White House air was simply tobacco smoke. Whatever toxins the aliens ate didn't appear in their breath, either.
Kyle poured a fresh cup of coffee, only in part to wash the unaccustomed and unwelcome smoke residues from his mouth. He also hoped for a caffeine jolt to settle jangled nerves. First, the conundrum about the aliens' inconvenient orbit around the moon; now, undetectable toxins.
He wondered when, or if, his study of the aliens would begin to make sense.