Jack Chalker - Kaspar's Box

“Have you done a lifescan of the big three moons there?”

“No sweat. Now, understand, there’s a ton of moons around this baby, but only three that could sustain our kind of carbon-based life. That and the Macouri pictures identify those three as the Kings. They’re not all resort spots, but I can tell you that all three are just teeming with life. The one that gives the weirdest readings is the little cold one. I’m not sure that the majority life-form there is carbon-based, but it’s within our biological understanding. If there are any devils or even angels around, then they’re made of something our sensors don’t know about.”

“What about humans?”

“I don’t get any signs of our folks on any one except the middle one. Not real surprising, I don’t think, if we’re the smart ones. A land of milk and honey. Rich atmosphere, mostly warm to hot on all the land masses, vegetable life that might well produce stuff we can eat, all that. We’re by no means the majority population there, but there’s a lot of our kind. I don’t get any close matches on the other two, which means that if any of us are there we’re in numbers too small to register. Just what is there, well, we’ll have to go and see, I guess. Not human. Not consistent types, either. I’d say at least twenty different major life-forms on the big volcanic one alone, and a couple on the little cold one, although in that case one really stands out. I think, though, Chief, we’ve broken the old puzzle. I don’t know how intelligent they’ll turn out to be, but I’ll bet you pretty good that we’ve got not one but several thinking alien types out there.”

“Well,” Murphy muttered, “there goes the neighborhood.”

“Let’s go see,” Darch suggested.

Maslovic wasn’t quite as eager. “We aren’t the first ship from our species to make it this far,” he reminded them all. “And none of them got back. Murphy may be right. That may be a gigantic flytrap. It’s definitely well baited.”

“But we can’t just sit here,” Darch noted.

“True, but we may be able to take a bit of a lesser risk. Captain Chung! I believe it’s time to tighten up all security at all points,” he said in a particularly loud voice. “And then you and I will get some of the jewels out of the vault.”

“What are you going to do?” Murphy asked, still feeling a bit protective of his wards.

“They, whoever they are out there, came and looked us over uninvited and without saying a word. Macouri seemed to think that the girls were a unique conduit to whatever’s here. Let’s see.”

They were delighted to get their “jewels” back. Maslovic was careful to match each girl with the color of the stone she’d been wearing in the earlier encounter so that things would be replicated as much as possible. He did hope, though, that they wouldn’t have to go through a long and boring ceremony painting their naked bodies and chanting over a pentagram. Nothing he’d seen indicated that what people like Macouri and his group had come up with or interpolated into this business had anything to do with what was really going on. He was, however, prepared to gather together Macouri and his bodyguard Joshua with the girls if he had to and endure almost anything.

Right away the girls all seemed to notice something different and tried to figure it out.

“They’re talkin’ to us, like as always,” Irish O’Brian noted, and the others nodded. “Kind of funny, though.”

“Yeah,” Mary Margaret McBride responded. “None of the ceremonies done, and you can still sort of hear ’em. Like tiny voices.”

Maslovic looked over at Darch who shook his head briskly in the negative. Nothing was being picked up on the instruments, although if his “simulation” was correct about the third stabilizing force in the system, then by now they were well within its range and influence.

Darch in particular seemed somewhat relieved by this. The observable phenomena was consistent with his model even if he had no way to actually detect this third force, and things like physics and practical sense didn’t seem all that violated, either. These might well be some kind of alien transceivers, but they were of very limited range and power. He had theorized, though, that somehow there was an exponential power growth when these stones were combined. If so, this trio should be able to get increasingly clearer signals. They might well even be overwhelmed and dominated by whatever was out there, as had happened to a degree back on the Thermopylae .

“There’s somebody talkin’, or tryin’ to,” McBride commented. “Only they’re still so far away I can’t make out what they’re sayin’.”

“It’s speaking in English, then, or Gaelic, or what?” Murphy asked them.

They all shrugged. “It’s inside your head, y’see,” O’Brian tried to explain. “It’s like talkin’ only it ain’t. I don’t think what tongue they use would have anything to do with what I understood, if that makes any sense.”

“Telepathy?” Maslovic asked his people.

“I don’t think so,” Broz told him. “At least not the way we think of it. It really is more like radio. The earliest radios were created with crystal sets, and could be made simply by poor people even without any local source of power for reception. Like this, reception wasn’t very good, but you had it if the transmitter had enough power to vibrate that crystal from far off. We all build one as part of our training classes. In this case, though, acting as both receiver and amplifier, the transmission isn’t through vibration of the air but of something inside the brain. The question is how they have enough power from this end to send back from that area, but I think they do. In some ways, it’s the old basic crystal radio principle. In others, it is to us what a hyperspacial tight-beam com signal would be to those early crystal set people who were our ancestors. It’s close enough that I can understand what it’s doing, but far enough ahead of our technology that I can’t for a moment imagine how it’s doing it.”

“They ain’t talkin’ to us!” Brigit Moran muttered, sounding disappointed. “It’s some guy and some girl talkin’.”

Maslovic was suddenly doubly interested. “They’re definitely people? Like us? You can tell that?”

“Yeah, sure’n she’s right,” O’Brian agreed. “It’s a kind of gab fest. And from the few words I can make out, it ain’t even dirty or romantic.”

“Do they know you’re listening in?”

All three shook their heads. “Don’t seem to,” Mary Margaret told them. “It’s like we’re just eavesdroppin’ on the extension.”

“What about our mysterious friend who always seems to lurk around the other side in those gems? Any sign of him? ”

“What? You mean the demon? He don’t usually show up for a while. Sometimes he don’t show up at all,” O’Brian said. “I don’t get much sense of him yet, at least not in this stuff. I don’t think he’s in the same place as the talkers. Come to think on it, it don’t seem like these two are anywhere near close, either. That’d make sense, though. If they was close, why would they need these to talk?”

Maslovic looked up at the main screen, which showed the subsystem view and highlighted the three huge planet-sized moons that had life-sustaining atmospheres. “Now, let’s see. Kaspar, Melchior, and Balshazzar?”

“You have the last two backwards,” Broz told him. “Kaspar’s the small cold one, all right, but the pretty one in the middle is Balshazzar, the one in and belching smoke into warm oceans is Melchior. If your guess is right, and the controlling force or group or whatever is on Kaspar, then maybe these two aren’t. Best bet is that they’re on separate continents on Balshazzar, since that’s where the people are.”