Starbridge (6 page)

Across the darkness filling the holo-tank, orange zigzags crawled. Jerry switched on the audio and deep yips interspersed with static and electronic squeals filled the bridge. "Get a directional reading!" Rob demanded. "Can we cross-vector with the original one?"

"Give me a minute!" Jerry's fingers flew over the board.

"Is the recorder on? Are you getting it all?"

"You bet your ass, Doc," Jerry said fervently. "And this one has already lasted for more than a minute! If I can get enough so I can put the computer to work analyzing both transmissions for similar sounds and patterns . . .

don't stop on me, signal . . . keep coming ..."

Suddenly Rob remembered Mahree.
She ought to be here. If it weren't for
her, Raoul would have given up the search . . .

He keyed the intercom, drumming his fingers nervously as he glanced around the bridge at the viewscreens, fore, aft, port, and starboard.
Which
one?
he wondered, eyeing the stars. Some were larger and brighter, others just faint pinpoints against the nightsatin of the void. Looking back along the Sagittarius Arm toward the center of the galaxy, they resembled a thick swath of multicolored fireflies.
Which one are you coming from? Who are we
listening to?

"Yes?" said a sleep-grainy voice.

"Get up here, Mahree. Jerry's got another transmission!"

An excited whoop was his only reply. Rob grinned as he closed the circuit, then reactivated it. "Yoki?"

"Huh?
Rob?
What's going on?"

"I'm up in the control cabin. Jerry's picked up the signal again. Get your rear up here."

"Great! Be right there."

Smiling, he walked back to the communications console, and saw that the signal was still marching across the holotank. "What are you doing now?" he asked Greendeer.

The communications specialist shook his head, absorbed. "He's trying to triangulate from our three recorded positions," Raoul told the doctor. "Like drawing invisible lines across space. Where they intersect is our goal."

"Theoretically, anyhow," muttered Jerry. "But gravity can 33

bend waves in space. So if we've got a star between us and their system ..."

The sound of hurried feet made Rob turn, to find Mahree behind him. "We did it!" he said, scooping her into a quick, hard embrace. "Jerry is trying to trace them!"

Her eyes shone and her cheeks were flushed when he set her back on her feet. "Oh, Rob . . . that's great!"

This transmission lasted nearly twenty minutes, and by the time it was over, everyone in the crew had had a chance to see it. Even Joan had to admit that it must be artificial in nature-- though she insisted that it must be some kind of robot beacon. "Guess you were't seeing things, Mahree," the older woman said awkwardly. "Sorry I gave you such a hard time."

"Hey, I was beginning to wonder myself!" Mahree smiled, touching her aunt's arm reassuringly. "But the question is, what do we do now?"

"We let the computer analyze and compare those little peaks and valleys,"

Jerry said. "And see whether it can cross-vector from our three positions--"

He broke off as a string of coordinates began marching across the screen.

"It's got it! The system!"

"Where?"
everyone demanded.

Jerry was speaking commands and didn't respond. As they watched, a three-dimensional view of their area of space appeared, with
Desiree's
location indicated by a flashing red dot. One nearby system was highlighted on the screen.

"That's it! About five parsecs away"--Jerry's words were clipped and precise, but there was no disguising his excitement --"and, Captain, it's practically on our course! We'll hardly have to deviate at all."

Everyone turned to Raoul, who stood staring at the starmap with a bemused expression. "I'll be damned. I never thought we'd actually find it."

"Well, I don't know which
planet
it is," Jerry said, trying to look modest. "But we ought to be able to discover that when we get there."

"Raoul," Paul Monteleon said urgently, "everyone's assuming we're going.

Are we?"

"How will a stop there leave our fuel reserves?" the Captain countered.

The lanky engineer's soft voice was flat. "I'll have to check it 34

on the computer, of course, but my guess is, we'd be okay. It isn't far off-course, Jerry's right about that."

"We've come this far," Raoul said, "it seems stupid to turn back now."

Rob looked over at Mahree and Yoki and gave them a thumbs-up signal.

They grinned back excitedly.

"How long will it take to reach the system?" Simon Viorst asked, no expression in his green eyes. I
need to have a talk with him,
Rob thought, studying the older man. Viorst's handsome features looked pinched beneath his shock of graying blond hair.
He's trying not to show it, but he's really
scared.

"About ten and a half days," Joan was saying. "Maximum Stellar Velocity, of course."

"We'd save fuel if we cruised at normal S.V.," Paul said. "That'd only add another two days."

"Yeah, that way we'll have more time to look over the computer analysis of these transmissions," Jerry said. "We may be able to figure out what we've been picking up."

"But how can the computer translate it?" Mahree asked, as Joan instructed
Desiree
to change course and speed.

"It can't," Jerry said, "but it
can
analyze the signals and determine like ones.

That's the first step ... trying to isolate just how many separate signals there are, and how frequently they occur. If it's a language as opposed to some kind of code, the distribution is probably very random. I mean, look at the old Morse Code. In that, things broke down to either dots or dashes. Spoken language has incredible variety in comparison."

"What if it
is
a language?" Yoki asked.

"Then we may be able to begin translating it. After all, arch'eologists were able to translate dead languages, like those Egyptian hieroglyphics and the Mayan symbols."

"Any chance that what we're seeing has a visual as well as an audio component?" Mahree asked. "Like holovids?"

"It certainly is possible," Jerry told her, "but without some idea of what visual images those transmissions are
supposed
to translate into, we're out of luck."

"I see," Rob admitted. "Maybe we're better off just trying to analyze the transmissions in terms of whether they're spoken language, machine-generated, or code."

"Yeah. In three days we may be able to get some sense of that," Jerry said.

35

Mahree sighed. "They made it look so easy in those movies ..."

"Can I talk to you a moment, Simon?" Rob Gable said quietly to the man seated by himself in the booth in
Desiree's
galley.

The older man hesitated. "Is it important?"

"Kind of. But if you're tied up, I can check back."

"How about later this evening?" Viorst asked.

"Depends," Rob said. "I'm meeting someone for dinner. If you're busy at the moment . ..." He knew very well that the Bio Officer was off-duty, but meeting with Simon was important enough that he'd be wil ing to cal Yoki and cancel if that's what it took to get Viorst to talk with him; he knew she'd understand.

The other man grimaced. "Hell, I suppose now's as good a time as any. You want to talk here?"

"Let's go down to hydroponics. I need to check on those seeds I've got germinating down there."

Viorst nodded curtly, and the two men left the galley. They walked in silence down the padded plas-steel corridors (this week they were a pale rose), until they reached the ladder-well to belowdecks, where the hydroponics system and the lower cargo holds were located. The artificial gravity was set at one-sixth gee in the well; both men swung down effortlessly, using only their hands.

When they reached the hydroponics labs, Rob went first to his seeds. After adjusting the moisture level in the germination incubator, he pulled up a stool and gestured the Bio Officer to another. "Have a seat, Simon."

The other man did so, plainly nervous. "What's going on? Why did you want to see me?"

"I just wanted to talk for a moment," Rob said, his voice consciously taking on the calm, neutral tone he had used during therapy sessions in med school. "So much-has been going on, these past couple of days, it's going to take all of us a while to get used to it. People tell me they're having trouble sleeping--so have I, matter of fact--so I'm trying to check on everyone. How about you, been experiencing any insomnia?"

Viorst shrugged. "I'm all right, I guess."

"Any nightmares?"

36

The Bio Officer's green eyes shifted for a second. "No, nothing of the kind."

"Uh huh. Well, it wouldn't surprise me if you did. The possibility of a First Contact is pretty stressful, don't you think? Meeting people completely different from ourselves."

"You mean aliens, not
people,'"
Viorst said. "Whatever they are, they won't look like
people."

Rob shrugged. "You're almost certainly right that they won't physically resemble us. But they may well be 'people' mentally and emotionally."

Viorst's well-cut features tightened. "Maybe, maybe not."

"What's the worst thing you can imagine an alien looking like?"

The Bio Officer considered for a moment. "Invisible, I guess. They could sneak up on you and you'd never know."

Rob blinked. "But it's possible that even invisible beings might not be antagonistic, isn't it?"

"I suppose so," Simon said, reluctantly. He hesitated for a moment, then burst out, "That's what you think, isn't it, Doc? That they'll be glad to see us, that everything will be peachy, right? Well, suppose it's not?"

"I don't know," Rob admitted. "But we'll never know unless we introduce ourselves, will we? And if they
are
people we'd rather not encounter again, we'll be able to warn Earth and the colonies to steer clear."

"If we
live to tell them."

"It might be a good idea to jettison an E-beacon with a copy of the ship's log, before we enter their system," Rob said thoughtfully. "That would serve as a warning to any other Terran ships, if we're never heard from again."

"I think our best course would be to head for Earth and send back a trained expeditionary force--and a squadron of troops to back it up." The Bio Officer's eyes were flat and hard. "We're asking for trouble, barging in this way."

"I admit you have a lot of good arguments," Rob acknowledged. "But instead of concentrating on everything going wrong, why not spend half your time thinking about the possibility that this may be a positive experience? That we may meet creatures who have a lot to share, that we can learn from?"

"I'd like to think that," the Bio Officer sounded almost 37

wistful. "But if their
outsides
are different, it makes sense to me that their
insides
will be, too."

"Makes sense to me, too," Rob said, studying Viorst's eyes, his face and hands, but careful to keep his glance casual. "But different doesn't invariably mean different in a negative sense. Who knows? They might be nicer than we are."

Viorst considered the idea. "I suppose it's possible," he admitted reluctantly.

Rob smiled reassuringly. "I think perhaps you're getting a little anxious over all this, Simon, which isn't surprising . . . but worrying about something that hasn't happened--and may never happen--isn't very productive."

Viorst glared. "Don't patronize me, Doc. It's hard enough having to report to someone who looks as though he isn't even shaving, yet."

Rob took a slow, deep breath, reminding himself not to let Viorst get to him.

The man was frightened, and that was making him antagonistic. I
ought to be
used to cracks like that by now,
he thought, with a trace of bitterness. "I'm sorry if it sounded like I was talking down to you," he said evenly. "I didn't intend that. Will you just promise me one thing?"

"What?"

"Think over what I said, okay? We'll talk again, soon. And, Simon, I want you to come to me if you don't get a good night's sleep tonight, and I'll give you a mild sedative to take tomorrow night. All right?"

"Okay, Doc."

Rob slid off the stool. "Thanks for talking."

Mahree groaned and rubbed her eyes. "I can't look at another orange squiggle without going blind. We've been at this for
hours,
and we're no closer to any answers than when we started!"

"She's right." Yoki stretched, her backbone creaking audibly. "Shit, maybe Joan's right, too. Maybe we've been getting signals from intelligent black holes."

"We haven't wasted our time. Some of the programming we've adapted will prove useful later, after we get there," Jerry said. "You've got a real feel for this kind of work, Mahree. How about helping me tomorrow when I try and set up a catalogue of universal constants?"

"Sure," Mahree said, pleased with the praise. Jerry never 38

said such things lightly. "I just hope we'll get further than we did with these transmissions." "We will."

"But we
have
made progress," Rob pointed out. "We're almost certain that each transmission was made by a different voice. And the computer has recorded nearly five hundred perfect matches. Some of the matches represent sequences that are repeated many times within each

transmission."

"So?" Yoki raised her eyebrows at him. "Tell me what good it's going to do us to be able to identify the alien equivalent of 'and,' 'the,' 'but,' and 'for.' Let's face it, Rob, these people are just going to have to remain an unknown quantity until we reach their world and contact them in person."

"Well, at least we're sure that we're dealing with a language instead of a machine-generated message or a code." Rob sighed, digging wearily at his own eyes. "Too much repetition and too much variety for it to be anything else."

"It is by any
human
standard," Jerry reminded him gloomily. "We don't have any way of knowing how sophisticated their machines are. We can only judge them in comparison to our own."