Entoverse

CHAPTER TWO

Dr. Victor Hunt closed the starter circuit, and the turbine engine of the GM Husky groundmobile standing in the driveway outside the garage kicked into life. As Hunt eased the throttle valve open with a screwdriver, the pitch rose, then settled at a smooth, satisfying whine. He held the position steady and cocked an inquiring eye at his neighbor, Jerry Santello, who was on the far side of the opened hood, tapping at buttons and watching the screen of a portable test unit connected to the vehicle’s drive processor.

“It’s looking better, Vic. Try it a few revs higher… Now gun it a few times… Yup, I think we’ve cracked it.”

“How about the burn on idle?” Hunt ran the turbine down to a murmur while Jerry inspected the panel; then Hunt’speeded it back up a little and repeated the process several times.

“Good,” Jerry pronounced. “I reckon that’s it. It had to be the equalizer. Shut it down now, and let’s have that beer.”

“That sounds like one of the better ideas I’ve heard today.” Hunt turned the valve fully back, operated a cutout, and the engine died.

Jerry unplugged the test lead, which rewound itself into the case. He closed the lid, gathered together the tools they had been using, and returned them to their box. “How is it with you English guys? Is it right, you drink it warm? Am I supposed to put it in the cooker or something?”

“Oh, don’t believe everything they tell you, Jerry.”

Jerry looked relieved. “So it’s okay normal?”

“Sure.”

“Hang on there while I get a couple from inside. We can sit out here and take in the sun.”

“Even better.”

While Jerry’s swarthy, mustached form, clad in beach shorts and a navy sweatshirt, flip-flopped its way eupeptically up the shallow, curving steps flanking the rockery by the side of the apartment, Hunt walked around the front of the Husky to toss a few more items into the toolbox. Then he sat down on a grassy hump below the wall separating Jerry’s driveway from his own and fished a pack of Winston’s from his shirt pocket.

Around him, the other apartment units of Redfern Canyons clustered in comfortable, leafy seclusion on terraced slopes divided by steep ravines climbing from a central valley. The main valley contained a common access road running alongside a creek that widened at intervals into shady pools fringed by rocky shelves and overhangs. Although the name was more than a little forced in the middle of Maryland less than a dozen miles north of the center of Washington, D.C., and the artificiality of the pseudo-Californian contouring went without saying, on the whole it had all been pleasingly accomplished. The effect worked. After the months that he had spent inside the cramped, miniature metal cities of the UN Space Arm’s long-range mission ships and at its bases down on the ice fields beneath the methane haze of Ganymede, Hunt wasn’t complaining.

He lit a cigarette and exhaled, smiling faintly to himself as the vista of Redfern Canyons brought to mind the two directors from an Italian urban-development corporation who had approached him several days previously. Could the Ganymean “gravitic” technology-which enabled gravitational fields to be generated, manipulated, and switched on and off at will as readily as familiar electrical and magnetic effects-be somehow engineered into a piece of mountainous terrain, they had wanted to know, in such a way as to render it gravitationally flat? The idea was to create high-income habitats, or even entire townships, in places that would offer all the visual aesthetics of the Dolomites, and yet be as easy to walk around as Constitution Gardens. Ingenious, Hunt had conceded.

And typical of human adaptability.

It was hardly a year since mankind had made the first contact with intelligent aliens and brought them back to Earth; and as if that weren’t enough, the discovery of an interstellar alien culture, and Earth’s opening what promised to become a permanent relationship with it, had followed less than half as long since, with all the promise which that portended of unimaginable gains to human knowledge and the greatest single upheaval ever to occur in the history of the race. The whole edifice of science could crash and have to be rebuilt afresh; every philosophic insight might be demolished to its foundations-but people only became seriously affected when they thought they saw a way of making a buck or two. The human alacrity for getting back to business-as-usual would never cease to amaze him, Hunt thought. Ganymeans had often marveled at the same thing.

Jerry came ambling back down from the house with a six-pack of Coors, a large bag of potato chips, and a tub of onion-flavored dip. He perched himself on one of the rocks lining the foot of the bank that Hunt was sprawled on and passed him a can. “I thought you guys were supposed to drink it warm,” he said again.

“English beer is heavier,” Hunt said. “If it’s too cold you lose the taste. It’s better at room temperature, that’s all-which in a pub means cellar temperature, usually a bit less than the bar. Nobody actually warms it.”

“And the lighter lager stuff, which is closer to yours, they prefer chilled, just like you do. So we’re not really so alien, after all.”

“That’s nice to know, anyhow. We’ve had enough aliens showing up around here recently.” Jerry flipped open his own can and tilted his head back to take a swig; then he wiped his mustache with the back of a hand. “Hell, what am I telling you for? You must get tired of people asking about them.”

“Sometimes, Jerry. It depends on the people.”

“There’s a couple I know across in Silver Spring-old friends-with this kid who’s about five. Last time I was over there, he wanted to know what planet Australians come from.”

“What planet?”

Jerry nodded. “Yeah, see: Australians. It was the way he heard it. He figured they had to be from someplace else.”

“Oh, I get it.” Hunt grinned. “Smart kid.”

“I never thought about it that way in over thirty years.”

“Kids don’t have the ruts yet that adults have carved into their minds. They’re born logical. Crooked thinking has to be taught.”

“It doesn’t work that way in your area, though-science? That right?” Jerry said.

“Oh, don’t believe that myth. If anything, it’s worse. You always have to wait for a generation of entrenched authority to die off before anything new happens. It’s not like revolutions in your business. At least in politics you can get rid of the obstructions yourself and move things along.”

“But at least you always know you’ve got a job,” Jerry pointed out.

“There is that side to it, I suppose,” Hunt agreed.

Although still officially an employee of the CIA at Langley, Jerry had been on extended leave for three months. With the residual Soviet-Western rivalry transforming into economic competition, and the global development of nuclear technology spelling an end to the dependence of advanced nations on oil-rich, medieval dictator-states and sheikhdoms, the world had been on its way to resolving the twentieth century’s legacy of political absurdities even before the first Ganymean contact. That had shaken things up enough, even though it involved only a single shipload of time-stranded aliens. But after the meeting with the Thuriens, immediately following that event, nobody knew what the next ten years would hold in store. Few doubted, however, that there was little in the realm of human affairs that would stand unaffacted.

“Although, I don’t know… with all those new worlds out there, you never know what we might find,” Hunt said. “It’s your line of business that the Ganymeans can’t compete in, not mine. I wouldn’t think of turning my badge in just yet if I were you.”

Jerry seemed unconvinced as he took another draft, but there was nothing to make an issue over. “Let’s hope you’re right,” he replied. After a pause he went on. “So I guess it’s all keeping you pretty busy over at Goddard, eh? I hear you coming and going at all hours of the day and night.”

“We’re up to our ears there,” Hunt agreed. He snorted lightly. “And the funny thing is that at the beginning of the last century it was the scientists who were talking about handing their badges in-half of them, anyway-because they didn’t think there was anything worthwhile left to discover. So maybe you can take some heart from that.”

“Are you mixed up with that thing that’s been in orbit up there for the last couple of weeks?” Jerry asked. “I saw on the news that a bunch of ‘em from there were down at Goddard.” A gigantic Thurien space vessel, named the Vishnu by Terrans, after the Hindu deity that was able to cross the universe in two strides, was currently visiting Earth, having brought delegations to meet with representatives of various nations, institutions, corporations, and other organizations for all manner of purposes as the scope of dealings between the two cultures grew.

“Yes, I talk to some of them,” Hunt said, nodding.

“What kind of thing do you do there exactly?” Jerry asked curiously.

Hunt drew on his cigarette and stared out at the central valley between the green, terraced slopes. A glint of metallic bronze appeared briefly as a car rounded a bend a short distance away on the road below. “I used to be with UNSA’s Navcomms division down in Houston-that was how I got to go on the Jupiter Five mission. So I was out at Ganymede and mixed up with the Ganymeans right from the start.”

“Okay.” Jerry nodded.

“Well, now this business with Thurien is all happening, one of the things we need to find out is what sense we can make of their sciences, and how much of our own needs to go in the trash can. UNSA moved me up to Goddard to head up a team that’s looking into some parts of that.”

“And they do things like travel around between stars and remodel whole planets?” Jerry thought about it for a moment. “That could be pretty hair-raising.”

Hunt nodded. “They’ve got power plants out in space that turn eight lunar masses of material a day into energy and beam it instantly to wherever you need it, light-years away. Sometimes I feel like a scribe from an old monastery would have, trying to unravel what goes on inside IBM.”

“Wasn’t there a woman who used to visit sometimes, when you first moved here?”Jerry asked. “Kinda red hair, not bad-looking..

Hunt nodded. “That’s right. Lyn.”

“I talked to her once or twice. Said she’d moved up from Houston, too. So was she with UNSA as well?”

“Right.”

“Haven’t seen her around lately.”

Hunt made a vague gesture with the can he was holding, and stubbed his cigarette in a tin lid that he had found in the toolbox. “An old flame from her college days breezed in out of nowhere, and the next thing I knew it was serious and they got married. They’re over in Germany now. She’s still with UNSA-coordinating some program with the European side.”

“Just like that, eh?”

“Oh, it was just as well, Jerry. She’d been sending domestication signals my way for a while. You know how it is.”

“Not really your scene, huh?”

“No… Probably a great institution, mind you, Jerry. But I don’t think I’m ready for an institution yet.”

Jerry seemed more at ease, as if back on ground that he understood. He raised his beer. “I’ll drink to that.”

“Never tried it?” Hunt asked.

“Once. That was enough.”

“Not exactly a happy affair?”

Jerry pulled a face. “Oh, no, there’s no such thing as an unhappy marriage. They’re all happy-you only have to look at the wedding pictures. It’s the living together afterward that does it.” He crumpled his empty can and dropped it into the carton, then pulled out another, peeled back the tab, and settled back comfortably until he was half lying against a tree standing behind the rock.

Hunt stretched back on the grassy bank and clasped his hands behind his head. “Anyhow, life’s full and exciting right now. I don’t need any of that kind of complication. A whole alien civilization. A revolution in science-profound things that need concentration.”

“You need all your time,”Jerry agreed solemnly. “Can’t afford the distraction.”

“To tell you the truth, life has never been simpler and more exhilarating.”

“A good way for it to be.”

Hunt lay back in the sun and closed his eyes. “Oh, you don’t have to worry about that. All the complications are three thousand miles away now, in Germany, and that’s about where I intend to keep them.”

At the sound of a car coming to a halt, he opened his eyes and sat up again. The metallic bronze car that he had glimpsed approaching a minute or two before had come up the access road and was standing outside the gateway where the driveways from the two apartments merged. It was a newish-looking Peugeot import, sleek in line, but with just the right note of restraint in dark brown upholstery and trim to set it apart from pretentiousness.

The same could be said of the woman who was driving it. She was in her early to mid-thirties, with a sweep of raven hair framing an open face with high cheeks, a slightly pouting, well-formed mouth, rounded, tapering chin, and a straight nose, just upturned enough to add a hint of puckishness. She was wearing a neatly cut, sleeveless navy dress with a square white collar, and the tanned arm resting along the sill of the open window bore a light silver bracelet.

“Hi,” she said. Her voice was easy and natural. She inclined her head slightly to indicate the still-open hood of Jerry’s Husky. “Since you’re relaxing, I assume you got it fixed.”

Jerry detached himself from the tree and straightened up. “Yes. It’s fine now. Er… can we help you?”

Her eyes were bright and alive, with a deep, intelligent quality about them that gave the impression of having taken in everything of note in the scene in a brief, first glance. Her gaze flickered over the two men candidly, curiously, but with no attempt at beguiling. Her manner was neither overly assertive nor defensive, intrusive nor apologetic, or calculated to impress. It was just, simply and refreshingly, the way that strangers everywhere ought to be able to be with each other.

“I think I’m in the right place,” she said. “The sign at the bottom said there were only these two places up here. I’m looking for a Dr. Hunt.”