The Getaway Special

33

The look on Allen’s face was priceless. He’d invented hyperdrive, built a spaceship, and flown it to another star, but even the aliens weren’t impressed. He stammered, “It’s—it’s true! We did!” but Tippet wasn’t having any of it.

“No go from star to star,” the butterfly said. “Not in that.”

Judy laughed. She knew just how he felt. But there was an easy way to prove it, and it didn’t even involve a demonstration. Not of the hyperdrive anyway. She merely reached down to her feet and extricated her helmet from the pile of stuff there, set it on the top of the tank between her hatch and Allen’s, then tugged the rest of her spacesuit out as well. She had to climb out first and drag it through the hatch behind her, then lower it to the ground.

Tippet was totally silent while she split open the waist ring, stepped into the legs, wriggled into the top, and rejoined the two pieces. She put the helmet over her head and locked it down as well, then stepped away from the Getaway and did a slow pirouette.

She pulled off the helmet again. No sense in wasting oxygen. “This is my spacesuit,” she said.

Tippet had taken out his camera. He flew up and filmed her from all angles, then landed on her right shoulder and focused on the inside of her helmet as well. His walkie-talkie voice said simply, “Spacesuit.”

“Right. It holds air when I’m in space. Way up high above the sky, there’s no air. We call that space. You understand space?”

Tippet did a little dance. “Understand space? Understand space? Skkkkt.”

He flew back to the computer on Allen s lap, set his camera down on the “H” key, and said, “Watch.”

Judy knelt down until her face was only a couple feet away. Allen was already that close. Tippet stood there on the keyboard for a few seconds, not moving a muscle, then just as Judy was about to say, “Well, what are we supposed to see?” he reached up with his forelegs and pulled off his head.

Except he still had a head. It was a smaller one, wrinkled and dark like a raisin, and for a horrible moment Judy wondered if that was his brain, but then Tippet popped the smooth yellow bulb back over it and gave it a twist and the picture came clear.

“He’s wearing a spacesuit too,” she whispered.

“Son of a bitch,” said Allen.

Tippet’s radio voice squawked and honked for a few seconds while his suit refilled with his own air, then he gave a very human-sounding snuffle and said, “Tppppt understand space. Tppppt live in space! Whole life in space, move slow from star to star.”

Judy looked at the tiny butterfly standing there all aquiver on the laptop computer keyboard. His whole body barely covered four keys. How could something that small be an interstellar astronaut, especially on a ship that actually traversed every kilometer between stars? The energy required to accelerate to a useful velocity and to decelerate when he reached his destination would be enormous.

Of course the smaller the payload, the less energy it would take, but still. It would require controlled nuclear fusion at the very least, and probably total conversion of matter to energy to make it practical. The image of butterflies fooling around with those kind of elemental forces seemed ludicrous.

But he was wearing a pressure suit, or at least an environment suit, and there would be no reason for that if he’d evolved here.

“Well, that explains why he doesn’t know where the watering holes are,” Judy said. She was trying to decide whether this was good news or bad news. Finding intelligent aliens was one thing, but finding another spacefaring race opened up a whole different can of worms. For instance, if Tippet had come here slower than light, that implied a higher level of technology than humanity’s. Earth had been at least a century away from being able to field a sublight interstellar vessel before Allen changed the rules. There was no need for that particular kind of ship now, but the technology behind it was still well beyond what humanity had. Maybe beyond what they would ever have, if Carl Reinhardt was right. But Tippet and his people had already done it.

Suddenly he didn’t seem so small and cute as he had before.

“Where’s your spaceship?” she asked.

He was still recovering from his dose of air. “What is…” sniff “…spaceship?”

Judy pointed at the corrugated yellow Getaway. “That. Spaceship is where you live while you move from star to star.”

Tippet took a few seconds to reply. Maybe he was parsing out what she’d said, or maybe he was just trying to convince himself that a yellow plastic tank could be a spaceship. At last he said, “Tppppt spaceship above sky. Go around planet in space. Understand?”

“It’s in orbit,” Allen said. “Sure. Go around planet in space is orbit. How many more of you are up there? How many Tippets on spaceship?”

Tippet said, “Lot many, but number not matter. Same Tppppt there. All one Tppppt.”

“Oh.”

Oh, indeed. Judy hadn’t considered that possibility. She wondered how that worked, if it was some kind of clone-style gestalt where all the separate little Tippets added together to make one big organism, or if there was a queen who controlled all the little worker Tippets. She wanted to ask, but she didn’t have the vocabulary for it.

“We’ve got to learn how to communicate better,” she said. “And unfortunately, we’ve got to go get water today, too.”

“Maybe not,” Allen said. “How about your landing craft?” He held out his hand and made rocket noises while he brought it to the ground. “Landing craft. Conies down from spaceship. Where is your landing craft?”

Tippet tilted all his wings to the left. “There. South. Lot fly south.”

“That’s the same direction the river’s in. Can you bring water here in your landing craft?”

Again it took him a few seconds to answer. Judy had assumed he was just thinking when that happened, but now she wondered if he was receiving a translation from some supercomputer in orbit. Or instructions from the queen. “No,” he said. “Landing craft only come down. Not fly again.”

Allen said, “Oh. Then how do you get back up to your ship?”

“Not go back. Tppppt stay.”

“You’re setting up a colony here?”

“Not understand.”

“A colony. That’s when you live here, build houses, have children, and… never mind. We’ll talk about that later.”

“Not understand,” Tippet said again. There was no change in his tone of voice, but something felt different than it had a minute ago. Maybe it was just the longer pause between responses, or maybe the change was in Judy’s reaction to what he said. Learning just how technologically advanced he was had changed the picture for her considerably.

“Learn more words,” Tippet said. “Show me new words.”

“Right.” The computers screen had timed out and gone blank; Allen reached around Tippet and tapped it on again. “Let’s see if this thing’s got a dictionary.”

Judy removed the spare hyperdrive from the five-gallon bucket, nestling its unprotected wad of circuitry into a hollow in her beanbag chair. She put a couple more apples and the cheese they hadn’t eaten yesterday and a can of chicken noodle soup into her stuff sack, plus the spare walkie-talkie in case something happened to the first one. She stuck the portable camp stove and a cook pot in the sack, too, so they could boil the soup and any water they drank on the way home, and she put in all three remaining cans of beer in case they didn’t make it to water. She was getting tired of carrying the pistol everywhere she went—it had to weigh a couple of pounds—but she remembered the tree running amok last night, so she tucked it in her waistband. Who knew what they might find today?

She put the stuff sack in the bucket, climbed out of the Getaway and pulled the hatches closed behind her, then the three interstellar explorers set off for the river.

The forest was just as they had seen it yesterday: frond-topped trees standing well apart, with the occasional bush interspersed among them and fern-grass blanketing the ground. There was no motion while they walked through, no sense that anything was even aware of their presence. If she hadn’t seen a tree in motion last night, Judy would have sworn nothing had moved here for years. The place had a timeless, static feel to it, like a movie set on a soundstage. Even the sky seemed painted on, with only a couple of tiny clouds drifting over the mountains to the west.

Judy navigated while Allen held the computer and scrolled the dictionary up the screen one definition at a time for Tippet, who stood on the spacebar and filmed it with his video camera, presumably relaying the image directly to the mothership overhead. Judy wondered if that was such a good idea—after all, words like “war” and “genocide” were in there along with all the others—but there didn’t seem to be much choice. It was either turn him loose to learn at his own rate, or teach him a word at a time the way they’d been doing and watch their tongues around him forever after.

She’d had enough experience trying to hide stuff from her parents to know how well that worked.

At least Tippet wasn’t reading an encyclopedia. Not yet. But at the rate he was plowing through the dictionary, he might very well graduate to an encyclopedia within the hour. Of course there was a difference between uploading the language and learning how to speak it, but in Tippet’s case that wasn’t as big a gulf as it would have been for Judy or Allen. He seemed to have a natural aptitude for language, or a translation program on line that could assemble the pieces of an alien tongue in seconds. He would pause in his filming every now and then and the walkie-talkie at Allen’s waist would crackle to life with a question about verb tenses or parts of speech or grammar, and the questions grew more complex each time.

The defining moment, as it was, came when he reached “Zymurgy,” stared at the blank screen below it for a moment, then said, “That was very illuminating. But it leaves several questions unanswered. Specifically, what is Copenhagen? And what is the significance of unequal bells?”

“What?” asked Allen, nearly dropping the computer in surprise.

Tippet leaped into the air until he got it under control, then landed again and said, “Do we not use the words correctly? We have inferred the rules of grammar from usage examples within the dictionary and from the recordings I have taken of your speech. We believe our comprehension to be extensive, if not exhaustive, but perhaps we are mistaken.”

“No, you’ve… you’ve got it right. But I don’t—”

“ ‘Good morning, Judy. Allen and I have been discussing the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics and the ramifications of Bell’s inequality. Would you care to join us?’ This is what you taught me to say this morning, is it not? We understand quantum physics, but this dictionary does not list ‘Copenhagen,’ nor any definition of ‘bell’ that would elucidate the greeting.”

Allen blushed. “I… that was a joke. I just had you say it to surprise Judy.”

“Ah. Humor. Specifically the prank, or perhaps the practical joke. We understand. We see. We comprehend, follow, get, make out, take in, catch, conceive, grasp, fathom, compass, and grok. Ha, ha, ha.”