cautious about how we react to their arrival here.”
“You keep telling us that,” the Army Secretary grumbled, “but you don’t support it with any—”
“Look,” said Peter Carlyle-Macavoy, “either they materialized right bang out of hyperspace somewhere inside the orbit of the moon, a concept which I think will make Dr. Kaufman and some of the rest of you extremely uncomfortable on the level of theoretical physics, or else they used some method of shielding themselves from all of our detecting devices as they came sneaking up on us. But however they managed to conceal themselves from us as they made their final approach to Earth, it shows that we are dealing with beings who possess an exceedingly superior technology. It’s reasonable to believe that they would easily be able to cope with any sort of firepower we might throw at them. Our most frightful nuclear weapons would be so much bows-and-arrows stuff to them. And they might, if sufficiently annoyed, retaliate to even a non-nuclear attack in a way intended to teach us to be less bothersome.”
“Agreed,” said Joshua Leonards. “Completely.”
“They may be superior,” said a voice from the back, “but we’ve got the superiority of numbers on our side. We’re a whole planet full of human beings on our home turf and they’re just forty shiploads of—”
“Perhaps we outnumber them, yes,” Colonel Carmichael said, “but may I remind you that the Aztecs considerably outnumbered the Spaniards and were also on their home turf, and people speak Spanish in Mexico today?”
“So is it an invasion, do you think, Colonel?” General Steele asked.
“I told you: I can’t say. Certainly it has the look of one. But the only real fact we have about these—ah—Entities—is that they’re here. We can’t make any assumptions at all about their behavior. If we learned anything at all out of our unhappy entanglement in Vietnam, it’s that there are plenty of peoples on this planet whose minds don’t necessarily operate the way ours do, who work off an entirely different set of basic assumptions from ours; and even so those are all human beings with the same inner mental wiring that we have. The Entities aren’t even remotely human, and their way of thinking is entirely beyond my expertise right now. Until we know how to communicate with them—or, to put it another way, until they have deigned to communicate with us—we need to simply sit tight and—”
“Maybe they have communicated with us, if what I was told aboard the ship was true,” said the woman who had been taken hostage at the shopping mall, suddenly, in a tiny and dreamy but perfectly audible voice. “With one of us, at least. And they told her lots of things about themselves. So it’s already happened. If you can believe what she said, that is.”
More hubbub. Sounds of surprise, even shock, and a few low exasperated expostulations. Some of these high masters and overlords plainly were not enjoying the experience of finding themselves transformed into characters in a science-fiction movie.
Lloyd Buckley asked the dark-haired woman to stand and introduce herself. The Colonel yielded the floor to her with a little formal bow. She got a bit unsteadily to her feet and said, not looking at anyone in particular and speaking in a breathy monotone, “My name is Margaret Gabrielson and I live on Wilbur Avenue in Northridge, California, and yesterday morning I was on my way to visit my sister who lives in Thousand Oaks when I stopped for gas at a Chevron station in a mall in Porter Ranch. And I was captured by an alien and taken aboard their spaceship, which is the truth and nothing but truth, so help me God.”
“This isn’t a courtroom, Ms. Gabrielson,” said Buckley gently. “You aren’t testifying now. Just tell us what happened to you when you were on board the alien ship.”
“Yes,” she said. “What happened to me when I was on board the alien ship.”
And then she
“You keep telling us that,” the Army Secretary grumbled, “but you don’t support it with any—”
“Look,” said Peter Carlyle-Macavoy, “either they materialized right bang out of hyperspace somewhere inside the orbit of the moon, a concept which I think will make Dr. Kaufman and some of the rest of you extremely uncomfortable on the level of theoretical physics, or else they used some method of shielding themselves from all of our detecting devices as they came sneaking up on us. But however they managed to conceal themselves from us as they made their final approach to Earth, it shows that we are dealing with beings who possess an exceedingly superior technology. It’s reasonable to believe that they would easily be able to cope with any sort of firepower we might throw at them. Our most frightful nuclear weapons would be so much bows-and-arrows stuff to them. And they might, if sufficiently annoyed, retaliate to even a non-nuclear attack in a way intended to teach us to be less bothersome.”
“Agreed,” said Joshua Leonards. “Completely.”
“They may be superior,” said a voice from the back, “but we’ve got the superiority of numbers on our side. We’re a whole planet full of human beings on our home turf and they’re just forty shiploads of—”
“Perhaps we outnumber them, yes,” Colonel Carmichael said, “but may I remind you that the Aztecs considerably outnumbered the Spaniards and were also on their home turf, and people speak Spanish in Mexico today?”
“So is it an invasion, do you think, Colonel?” General Steele asked.
“I told you: I can’t say. Certainly it has the look of one. But the only real fact we have about these—ah—Entities—is that they’re here. We can’t make any assumptions at all about their behavior. If we learned anything at all out of our unhappy entanglement in Vietnam, it’s that there are plenty of peoples on this planet whose minds don’t necessarily operate the way ours do, who work off an entirely different set of basic assumptions from ours; and even so those are all human beings with the same inner mental wiring that we have. The Entities aren’t even remotely human, and their way of thinking is entirely beyond my expertise right now. Until we know how to communicate with them—or, to put it another way, until they have deigned to communicate with us—we need to simply sit tight and—”
“Maybe they have communicated with us, if what I was told aboard the ship was true,” said the woman who had been taken hostage at the shopping mall, suddenly, in a tiny and dreamy but perfectly audible voice. “With one of us, at least. And they told her lots of things about themselves. So it’s already happened. If you can believe what she said, that is.”
More hubbub. Sounds of surprise, even shock, and a few low exasperated expostulations. Some of these high masters and overlords plainly were not enjoying the experience of finding themselves transformed into characters in a science-fiction movie.
Lloyd Buckley asked the dark-haired woman to stand and introduce herself. The Colonel yielded the floor to her with a little formal bow. She got a bit unsteadily to her feet and said, not looking at anyone in particular and speaking in a breathy monotone, “My name is Margaret Gabrielson and I live on Wilbur Avenue in Northridge, California, and yesterday morning I was on my way to visit my sister who lives in Thousand Oaks when I stopped for gas at a Chevron station in a mall in Porter Ranch. And I was captured by an alien and taken aboard their spaceship, which is the truth and nothing but truth, so help me God.”
“This isn’t a courtroom, Ms. Gabrielson,” said Buckley gently. “You aren’t testifying now. Just tell us what happened to you when you were on board the alien ship.”
“Yes,” she said. “What happened to me when I was on board the alien ship.”
And then she
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