Joseph Delaney - Partners

Cautiously, they did. Mel found himself wishing he hadn’t. His stomach was not prepared to meet the challenge. The sight of the gnawed bodies was more than it could take. Mel found he wasn’t the only one.

They were looking for the hole and couldn’t find it. During the time it had taken to bury what was left of the Bridges brothers daylight had arrived on both worlds, and that complicated the problem somewhat. But it wasn’t the entire explanation, since backtracking their own footprints should have led them right to it. And it hadn’t, and that meant the hole had moved.

While the humans muddled around, cursing their luck and in near panic, the aliens were busy solving the problem. It wasn’t very long until, to the chagrin of the humans, one of them winked out like a light. The hole, it seemed, had migrated to local south, some 200 feet from where it had been the night before. So much for an idea Mel had been cooking—to put a big, strong door over the hole.

In a few seconds they were through, and they could see that there had been a similar migration on the other side, although the distance was disproportionate. The Earth-side hole was only about six feet off the mark.

Back at the farmhouse the rest of the aliens and the posse watched their approach with trepidation. The aliens relaxed as soon as they saw they had suffered no casualties, and ran out to great their returning pack leaders with much sniffing and face licking.

With the humans, the reaction was mixed relief and horror, but they bore the news stoically.

“We’ve got to get the community together and decide what to do about all this,” the sheriff announced grimly, after briefing the posse. “And,” he added, “we have to keep all of this strictly to ourselves.”

He picked out two deputies. “Go into town,” he said. “Get hold of everybody you can. Don’t tell them why, but say there’ll be an emergency meeting on the town square at four o’clock. Tell them we want at least one adult from every family but to leave the kids at home. Got that?”

The deputies answered with nods.

The sheriff turned to Mel and Alice. “I hope you understand, this isn’t just your problem anymore, it’s everybody’s. With that hole floating around like it is it could be anywhere within a month, and we have to be in a position to control what goes in and out of it.”

“I just want to get my beans in,” Mel replied.

They sat in a small circle in the center of the crowd. The community wasn’t a large one, only about seven hundred people in all, counting children, so Athenian style democracy usually worked out pretty well.

All of them knew about the strange varmints, of course, but the secret of last night’s events had been well kept. So even with forewarning the sight of the aliens emerging from the sheriff’s van raised a murmur.

“They’re friendly,” the sheriff assured the crowd. “We can’t talk to them yet but so far we’ve been getting along fine.”

The crowd settled down.

“We have to figure out what to do. That’s why I asked you to come here. We haven’t got much time to do that, and if we make the wrong choice all of us could lose everything we have. But Dr. Aberg’s got an idea so I’ll let him explain it.”

The tracker stepped forward. He had been up all night. He looked haggard. But his voice was firm. “I know people who would kill to be here,” he began. “This is without a doubt the biggest scientific breakthrough in history. It not only can change the course of that history, it already has. The very knowledge that this anomaly exists will change every cosmological theory man has ever conceived.

“It has a dark side too. This community is about to get a demonstration of just how greedy human beings can get. You have something worth stealing. It will be stolen, that is a certainty. This is the way things are. The best you can hope for is to save something from the wreckage. That means you have to plan. You have to pit one greedy guts against another, and you have to do this not only to save yourselves, but to save them.” He pointed to the aliens.

“These people are primitives, as innocent as our own aboriginal people were when we stole all this from them. We did it all wrong before. This time we have to do better.

“If we do nothing to stop them then as soon as the news leaks out, as it inevitably will, Big Brother will move in and confiscate it, and instead of society as a whole gaining the benefit of this discovery the bureaucrats will descend on it like a cloud of maggots.

“The only counterweight to big government is big science. They can’t match the federal bureaucracy moneywise, because they don’t have the power to suck up your tax money like the government does. But they’re pretty well-heeled even so, and more importantly, they have an awful lot of clout with the news people.

“This is what I propose we do.” He paused, and a smile washed over his face. It was contagious. As he continued it migrated out into the crowd. Pretty soon everybody had one, even the aliens, who although they didn’t understand any of it, mimicked their human friends.

When Aberg finished, the history of both races had been determined for the next millennia—all in one afternoon.

“It worked!” Norman Simmons was ecstatic. Ahead of him, on the gigantic screen that served the transport module as a front windshield, the magnified image of the Milky Way Galaxy gleamed sharp and clear, though minuscule in comparison with the rest of the image. Norman had expected this, of course. Their view was from within Andromeda, from the surface of a cold and airless world circling a dying sun.

In the couch next to him Borah Kahn was no less enthusiastic, no less elated at their accomplishment, though she had subdued the urge to climb into his lap and lick her companion’s face. By nature, Canis sapiens was more demonstrative and team-oriented than Homo sapiens. They had, after all, evolved from different species of cooperative hunters. In the end, the civilized side of her won out. She regained her composure and let her practical, female side mask the lapse. “We still have to get back, you know.”

“I know. But we’ll have a couple of minutes to enjoy this, Borah. This hole is stable, just as they predicted. Look at the figures for the drift.” He pointed to a window on the screen of the armrest console between them. “It’s the distance, Borah. A galaxy is far less mobile than a single planet. You know what that means.”

She did. It meant that with refinement of the mathematics the location of anomalies could be predicted, and many more worlds would be accessible. More than they could ever visit in their lifetimes.

“The sensors are mapping everything,” Norman added. “We’ll be important people when we get home.”

“I know. It scares me.” And it did, really. Borah Kahn was more than a little sensitive to the fact that hers was the junior of the two races, that hers did not have the hundred centuries of civilization behind it that Norman’s did. It had been his people, not hers, who possessed the scientific knowledge to keep the anomaly between their worlds more or less open. Her grandparents had truly been savages by comparison. She was only three generations out of the stone age.

“It’s time to start the return program, Borah. Are you ready?”

“In a moment,” she replied. She turned her attention to the console, where the transfer data was now appearing in a steadily creeping scroll, in numbers and symbols that would have made no sense whatsoever to her recent forebears.

Borah felt suddenly humbled by it all, by the thought that almost none of what she saw was really hers, that nearly all of it was man’s doing. What a fantastic turn of luck it was, she thought, when we encountered humans. How wise they are. How generous. “Ready,” she said, and stabbed the “enter” key.