David Gerrold - A Matter for Men

"Serendipity," I admitted. "I thought I could approximate darkness with a two-hundred-lumen output in the red bandwell, it works in a dark room; why not here? I got tired of stumbling into things. But then the new measurements didn't fit the curve I'd already established. The bugs were way too active. So I started thinking about the wavelengths of their visual spectrum. All last night I had the computer varying the color temperature of the plates at regular intervals. I gave the bugs eighteen different colors. Most of them provoked no response at all. The yellow gave some, the orange a bit more, but it was the red that made them sit up twice. A little more testing this morning showed they like it best no brighter than a terrestrial twilight-and then it correlates almost perfectly with the other set of tests."

"It sounds like a good piece of work," said Jerry. Suddenly, he grinned. On his face, the effect was grotesque. "It reminds me of a project I did once. We were given three disparate life forms and we had to extrapolate the native ecology. It was a two-year project. I used over twenty thousand hours of parallel processing." He grew more serious. "So please don't be upset when I tell you that your conclusions might be premature. I've been through this exercise once. I know some of the pitfalls. You can't judge a planet by a single life form. There's a lot of difference between rattlesnakes and penguins. You don't know if these millipedes are representative or just a special case. We don't know what part of the planet they're from, or what kind of region-are they from the poles or the equator? Are they representative of mountainous fauna on Chtorr, or swampland creatures? Or desert, or grasslands, or what? And what would that identification imply about conditions on the rest of the planet? What kind of seasons are these bugs geared to-how long are they? What kind of biological cycles? How long are the days, months, years? If they have no moons, or more than one, do they even have cyclical equivalents of months? The real question about these specimens is, where do these millipedes fit in the Chtorran ecology? All you have here are indicators: the worms like to eat bugs, and the bugs like to eat anything-is that a general or arbitrary condition? What can we imply about the shape of their food chain? And what about their breeding-what is their reproductive cycle like? What are their growth patterns? Their psychology-if they even have one? Diseases? And I haven't even begun to ask questions."

"That's what we're here for," I said. "To help ask questions-and to help find answers."

Jerry accepted that. "Good." He said, "I'll see that your information gets passed along to those who can make the best use of it. You've probably opened up a valuable area of inquiry." He held his hand out for the disk.

"Sorry." I shook my head. "No terminal, no disk."

"Uh-" Jerry looked annoyed. "If you have information about any extraterrestrial or suspected extraterrestrial life forms, you know you're required by law to report it to the federal authorities. This is the agency." He held out his hand again.

"No way," I said. "A man died for this information. I owe it to him to see it delivered. I don't want it disappearing down some rabbit hole."

"It's against regulations to let you on a terminal before you're cleared." He looked unhappy. "What branch of Special Forces did you say you were with?"

"Alpha Bravo."

"And what do you do?"

"We burn worms."

"I wouldn't phrase it like that, if I were you. At least, not around here." He thought for a moment, then made a face. "Phooey on regulations. You've got a green card, haven't you? All right, I know how to do it. Come on." He led us to a nexus of four terminals, powered up two of them, logged himself in on one and slaved the second one to his control. "Go ahead," he said. "Create a password for yourself. You too-Jackson, is it? You'll be operating on a special department account for V.I.P.s---0h, and don't tell anyone I did this. Now, first thing-I want you to dupe that disk-"

THE BUS station was next to the PX. There were fifteen or twenty people standing around and waiting, most of them dressed in evening clothes or uniforms.

Hardly anybody looked up as we approached. "What's up?" I whispered.

Ted said, "I'll find out," and disappeared into the crowd. He left me standing there looking after him.

Our intention had been to ride into town and take in a show or a tribe-dance. Now I just stood in front of the bus terminal, staring at the big wall-screen. It was flashing: NEXT BUS-22 MINUTES. There was a blinking dot on the map, showing its present location.

I shoved my hands into my pockets and turned around. Almost immediately, I found myself staring into the face of a thin, pale little girl who couldn't have been more than sixteen at most, probably younger; she was hanging on the arm of a large, bombastic-looking man. He was puffy and florid-faced, and obviously drunk. He was old enough to be her father. He wore a plaid kilt and a rumpled military jacket. I didn't recognize the nationality; he could have been anything from Australian to Scot. I pegged him as a colonel. Or a buffoon. I was just about to give the girl a smile when he noticed me studying them. He glared and I turned away embarrassed.

I looked at the two WACs instead-at least, I assumed they were WACs. They could just as easily have been whores. Dad always said the way to tell the difference was that "whores dress like ladies, and ladies dress like whores." But I never understood what he meant by that. I always thought a whore was a lady. By definition. These two were murmuring quietly to each other, obviously about something neither of them cared about. They were swathed in elegance and indifference. They should have been waiting for a limousine, not a bus; but-well, the whole crowd was an odd conglomeration. Maybe they were with the three Japanese businessmen in Sony-suits who were arguing so heatedly over something, while a fourth-obviously a secretarykept referring to the readouts on a pocket terminal.

There were four black delegates speaking some unidentifiable African language; I would have guessed Swahili, but I had no way of being sure. Three men and a tall, striking woman with her hair in painful-looking corn rows. All were in bright red and gold costumes. The woman caught me looking at her, smiled and turned away. She whispered something to one of the men and he turned and glanced at me; then he turned back to his companion and the two of them laughed softly together. I felt myself getting hot.

I was embarrassed. I turned and stared into the PX window. I stayed that way, staring at faded packages of men's makeup kits until Ted came up grinning and punched my arm. "You're gonna love this!" he said.

I turned away from the dusty window. "What did you find?"

"Oh ... something." He said it smugly.

"For instance?"

"An orientation reception. You know what's going on here?"

"Chtorran studies, I hope."

"Better than that. The First Worldwide Conference on Extraterrestrial Life, with special emphasis on the Chtorran species, and particular objectives of contact, negotiation and coexistence."

"What about control?"

"I guess that's implied. There is a subsection on defensive procedures and policies, but it seems to be downplayed. In any case, this is a major effort. There are five hundred of the best scientists-"

"Best remaining," I corrected.

Ted ignored me. "-in the world. Not just biologists, Jim boy, but psychologists, ecologists, anthropologists, space scientists-they've even got the head of the Asenion Foundation coming in."

"Who's he?"

"It's a group of speculative thinkers. Writers, artists, filmists, programmers-like your dad-and so on. People with a high level of ideational fluency. People who can extrapolate-like futurists and science fiction writers."