The Last Theorem

42 A GREAT DEPRESSION

When at last the One Point Five fleet came down to the surface of Earth, they were accompanied by an enormous fireworks show. That pyrotechnical display did not come about for the same reasons a returning human fleet of spacecraft might produce such a display, though. All those old human-built Mercury capsules and Soyuzes and space shuttles struck Earth’s air in an eye-straining blaze of fire when they came home, and the reason was simple. They had no choice about it. They had to slow down for reentry, and nothing but friction with the atmosphere could brake their descent enough to allow safe landing on the ground.

The spacecraft of the One Point Fives, on the other hand, had no need for air friction. Their descent was slowed by a completely different mechanism. They simply fired their ionic rockets in a forward direction, at full power, to serve as brakes. It was a gentler way to land, and one that offered more accurate control on a landing site.

It also required immensely more energy, but conserving energy was not a priority for the One Point Fives.

A problem for human observers was figuring out just where the armada had chosen to set down. An early guess was somewhere in the Libyan desert, perhaps on the beaches along the Mediterranean. That was quickly revised to somewhere a bit farther east and north, perhaps somewhere in the otherwise empty northwestern desert provinces of Egypt.

It didn’t take the news channels’ experts long to come up with the name “Qattara Depression.”

Then it took Myra and Ranjit less time than that to get their search engines going. “This Qattara thing is the world’s fifth deepest depression,” Myra called, reading from her screen. “It goes down as low as 133 meters below sea level.”

“And it’s only fifty-six kilometers from the sea,” Ranjit added, eyes on his own screen. “And—wait a minute!—in some ways it’s the world’s biggest depression of the Earth’s surface there is on land, with more than forty thousand square kilometers that are below sea level.” And it was uninhabited, they both learned at once, except for wandering bedouin tribes and their flocks, and of no apparent value to anyone—at least not to any human. The only thing about it that seemed ever to have mattered to human beings was that at least for a few weeks it had been really important in one of those twentieth-century wars, the one between the Germans and the English. Then the impassable Qattara Depression had trapped the Germans where the English could inflict heavy losses on them in what was called the Battle of El Alamein.

At that point Myra and Ranjit gave up the search as unproductive. “I don’t think that’s why these aliens picked it,” Ranjit said at last. “Because it’s easy to defend against an army, I mean.”

“But what, then?” Myra asked.

For that Ranjit frowned but did not answer. They spent the next quarter of an hour inventing increasingly unlikely motives, until the news screen broke in. What the reporter had to tell them was that the first official bluster had just come in from Cairo. Its tone was belligerent.

Well, that’s not quite giving the true picture. The broadcast came from Cairo, all right, but it wasn’t delivered by an Egyptian. The speaker was the American ambassador. The Egyptian government, he informed the world, had asked him to give the official reply for them. That area called Munkhafad al-Qattar-ah, he said, was an integral part of the sovereign state of the Arab Republic of Egypt. The intruders had no right to be there. They were commanded to leave Egyptian territory at once or face the consequences.

It was obvious that secret meetings had been going on, and the ambassador’s next words left no doubt of what they had been about. “The Arab Republic of Egypt,” he proclaimed, “is one of America’s oldest and closest allies. Trespassers will have to face Egypt’s military might as well as that of the United States.”

“Oh my God,” Ranjit murmured. “I smell T. Orion Bledsoe again.”

“And heaven help us now,” said the irreligious Myra to her even less religious husband.

It might have eased the situation if the alien beings landing on Earth had taken time to announce what their long-range plans actually were. No explanation was offered. Perhaps the aliens couldn’t handle more than one thing at a time—or thought that these primitive Earth humans couldn’t—because what they did do, incessantly, was keep their promise to show humanity, all over again, every last one of the galaxy’s assorted races of beings.

This had been quite interesting at one time. That time, however, was past. About the only viewers who stayed tuned in were producers of low-budget horror films, eagerly seeking ideas to pass on to their makeup departments, plus what remained of the world’s dwindling corps of taxonomists, each of whom had been intoxicated by a sudden breathtaking vision of becoming the Carolus Linnaeus (subclass Alien Biota) of the twenty-first century.

Of course, none of that was a problem for the human race. There was a problem, though, and it came in two parts.

First was the inordinate demand being made on the world’s communications bandwidths. The mere broadcast of the catalog of galactic sentients itself made no real dent in these. What made a difference was the aliens’ courteous habit of broadcasting everything they had to say in a large fraction of the world’s 6,900-odd languages.

But even that discommoded only the handful of people whose favorite game show was squeezed off the air. Far more serious was the interference with communications, particularly the behind-the-scenes negotiations among many of the world’s military forces.

A quick call to Gamini Bandara confirmed what Ranjit was already sure of. No, it hadn’t been a voluntary decision of the Egyptian government that had produced the saber-rattling remarks of the American ambassador. The old Egyptian friend of Dhatusena Bandara, now Egyptian ambassador to Sri Lanka, Hameed Al-Zasr, had explained it all by phone to Gamini’s father. “He managed to get a personal call through to Dad. It was American pressure and they couldn’t fight it. There was some American cloak-and-dagger guy, Dad said—”

“Of course there was. Your old pal Colonel Bledsoe, I bet.”

Gamini sounded startled when he said, “You’re probably right. Anyway, Al-Zasr says Egypt wasn’t forgetting its Pax per Fidem obligations, but it’s still in the middle of implementing them. The changeover isn’t complete, and Egypt’s too poor to antagonize the U.S. Billions of dollars in American aid are involved.”

“Hell,” said Ranjit. And when he reported the conversation to Myra, she said much the same.

“We should have guessed,” she said. “Let’s hope it doesn’t get any worse.”