Джек Макдевитт - A Voice in the Night

That all seemed far away. Warren thought how well distance lends perspective. The home world was a violent, angry place. And somehow, against the eternally placid stars, its virulence was more apparent. And less real.

Meantime, the team had spent the morning at the site, where they’d unearthed several more tablets, some with images, some without. All had inscriptions. The characters were unlike anything Warren had seen before, little more than squiggles and dots. But Judy said she thought they had enough to attempt a translation.

“How do we even begin?” asked Warren.

“Actually,” she said, “it might be fairly easy. We should be able to assume the text is connected to the images. So first we try to figure out what the images are about.”

There were eleven tablets. Eight had images; all had inscriptions. The reptilian figure was portrayed in various poses: it gazed contemplatively past the observer’s shoulder; it walked casually through a corridor; it drank from a flagon, through which a lightning strike passed; it even leaned casually against a wall, as if waiting for a bus. (In the latter depiction, the lightning was again present, this time a bolt drawn diagonally across the lizard itself.)

“Hey,” said Sam, pulling his earphones down around his neck. “They took out the Holland Tunnel.”

“Blew it up?”

“Yeah. During rush hour. They’ve got a couple thousand casualties.”

They stood around for a time in stunned silence, the curious Martians all but forgotten. “I wonder,” said Jason at last, “if they ever knew what kind of neighbors they had?”

A half hour later, Sam announced that a lab report had come back on the altar stains. “There’s DNA,” he said, “and plasma, oxygen, fructose, proteins, urea—”

“Blood,” said Patti.

Sam shook his head. “They’re saying there are some differences, but it’s a decent approximation.”

Meantime, Murray thought he had the meaning of one of the tablets—The one with the creature leaning against the wall. “No loitering,” he said. “And this one, no littering.”

Somebody laughed. Snorted. But every image with a lightning bolt contained the same cluster of characters at the beginning. Do not—? Warren knew instinctively that Murray was right. But he was disappointed that the first other-worldly translation would be so prosaic. No littering. My God.

Toward the end of the afternoon, they heard that Congress had voted Pesident Martin broad emergency powers.

They worked through dinner, reading increasingly ominous bulletins, which Sam was now posting. The FBI were rounding up suspects. The National Guard had been placed on standby. The President, promising action against “cowards,” made good on his threat to suspend habeas corpus. The ACLU warned against overreacting.

Meantime, Mars Central reported that the North Ridge disks had moved! Three had rotated and now seemed to be tracking the sun. (The fourth was apparently not functional.) Warren had just begun to digest the implications when another bulletin arrived: electrical power was being collected by the disks and relayed below ground.

“What’s down there?” asked Judy.

“They’ve finally got around to ordering a radar survey,” said Sam, pressing his earphone down.

Murray’s team produced an alphabet for the alien script, and constructed a model syntax. Warren worked with them for a while, but they were too quick for him. Anyway, there was something else he wanted to look at.

“This,” he told Judy, indicating the pyramid tablet. “The pyramid has to be something special. It puts off light rays. And look at the Martian’s attitude.”

“It’s almost religious,” she said. Judy’s group had been cataloging and analyzing the other artifacts.

“That might be a leap,” said Bryan. “After all, these are alien icons. I think we should go slow trying to read nonverbal cues.”

Judy picked up the pyramid and compared it to the one in the image. “It’s the same object.”

“I think you’re right,” said Warren.

She held it at eye level. “What are you?” she asked.

It was getting late. “We’ll pick it up from there tomorrow,” I told them. “But I want to congratulate you. We didn’t think anybody was going to be able to translate the language.”

Murray drummed his fingers on the table and glanced around at the five people who had been working with him on the tablets. “We thought we’d stay on awhile,” he said. “We’re close to a breakthrough.”

But I didn’t want anyone getting ahead of the program. “Let it go, folks. We’ll get back at it in the morning.”

They grumbled and picked up some notes and I knew damned well they were going to find a place and keep working. But I wasn’t brought in to police these people, and they couldn’t take the tablets with them, so there was a limit to how much progress they could make.

Skyhawk maintained The Hawk’s Nest, a bar and recreation lounge next door to Harper Hall, which filled quickly with the Baranovians. They drifted by and talked about books they’d recently read, or about recent advances in one area or another, or just how good (or poor) the drinks were. They made it a point to avoid talking about the exercise with us. “It’s not considered kosher,” Sam said. “Not after hours.” After a while Maureeen and I withdrew to talk about the next day’s scenario.

I have to make a confession of sorts here. Maureen had caught my eye right at the start. By the end of the second day I felt positioned to try to implement some dishonorable intentions, so when she started toward the office we’d been using in the Long Elm Building, I steered us instead along the lakefront.

She looked surprised but said nothing. We congratulated each other on the good job we were doing. The wind was loud in the trees and somewhere a radio was playing. Exactly the right sort of music for a moonlit night and a beautiful woman. “You have lovely eyes, Maureen,” I told her.

Her lips curved into a smile. “I thought science fiction writers were above this sort of thing.”

The comment threw me off stride. The truth was that I couldn’t even see her eyes in the shadows. I struggled to come up with an appropriate response. Something witty. If you can make a woman laugh, I’d always noticed, everything else comes a lot easier. But she’d turned away from me and was looking out toward the lake. Along the shoreline, there were a couple of docks and a boathouse and a few benches. Someone was sitting on one of the benches.

“It’s Bryan,” she said. “What’s he doing out here by himself?”

I shrugged. “I guess he wants some time alone.”

“I guess. But the whole point of coming here’s to party, isn’t it? Especially for a guy his age.”

There was something disconsolate in his appearance, a distortion in the geometry of body to bench to moonlight. I could see that Maureen felt it too, and a cold wind blew suddenly off the lake. We looked at one another, and I read the unasked question in her face, whether we should go over; and I saw the answer in her eyes. If he wanted company he’d be in the Nest. Best let it be.

We passed on, chilled, and strolled among the bungalows that served as living quarters. Gradually we got back to laying plans for the morning. The mood of the evening had changed, and I knew that an advance on my part would not be welcome.