Yngve, AR - Alien Beach Read online

  None of them could speak for a moment, while the news sank in.

  After the meeting the crowd split up, and everyone went about their planned tasks. The biologists - among them Andrea McClintock - prepared their storing tanks and microscopes for when alien tissue samples, or even sea animals taken from other worlds, would arrive. Physicians checked the sole X-ray scanner in the field hospital, hoping for a chance to examine a live Sirian. Psychologists and anthropologists - among them Lazar Mahfouz and Ann Meadbouré - went through recordings of Sirian-to-human communication and the first Sirian transmissions, looking for the parameters of alien mind and culture.

  Engineers and nuclear physicists - among them Takeru Otomo - recorded and measured the electromagnetic fields and particle emissions emanating from the alien vessel in the lagoon, planting hydrophones in the water to record the sounds of Sirian underwater speech.

  Under the coordination of Carl Sayers, the vast and growing amount of recorded material was continuously fed by cable to the communications barrack, then transmitted by satellite to the Internet and directly to the universities, research institutes, and governments across the world. No one was to be left out - that had been the Sirians' demand from the very first broadcast - or they would not stay at all. Then again, it was not much they had revealed to mankind thus far.

  If there were any secret intentions behind that demand, the visitors kept them to themselves. In the last few days, the Sirians had spent most of their time underwater, being left alone. And the scientists waited...

  "There he is - my half-brother George. Let me do the talking."

  The taxi-driver's relative owned a small yacht in the main harbor of the Fiji capital. When the soldier and the taxi-driver found George in the late afternoon, he was busy cutting fish and packing it in boxes filled with salt. The man was similar in build to the taxi-driver - podgy, frizzle-haired and dark-skinned. The soldier couldn't possibly see how he was going to impersonate him to get past the Alien Beach perimeter.

  "Hello George," the taxi-driver said cheerfully. "A couple of fine fishes you've got there! Shouldn't we eat them before they go bad?"

  The busy fisherman shook his head, barely offering the soldier a look.

  "Shut up, Norman. I got this great business idea last night, when I saw the TV clip from Alien Beach. Did you see the aliens eat?"

  "Yeah?" Norman asked.

  "I'll start selling this catch I couldn't sell this morning, first thing tomorrow, to the tourists. I'll call it 'Sirian-style cooked' - isn't it great? The dumb suckers will pay double for yesterday's fish!"

  Norman laughed loudly, as if he had heard a great joke. The soldier didn't know whether to laugh or cry. A fat woman wearing shorts, sneakers, and a T-shirt came out of the yacht's cabin and darted him a quick, suspicious glance. Then she stepped onto the pier and walked past them, to the city.

  "Don't buy anything too expensive yet, woman!" George shouted after her. "Wait until we got the money!"

  He gave his half-brother a look, as if to express: See what I have to suffer? Norman nodded, and urged the soldier into the boat.

  "Come on board for a beer, mate, and we'll discuss the whole scheme."

  The soldier shook hands with George.

  "Call me Coffin," he said. "That's what they nicknamed me in the Gulf."

  George made a grave face.

  "Because you killed a lot of people back there?"

  "No, because I always looked ready for the coffin - white as a corpse and scared stiff."

  George and Norman burst out in laughter.

  "I like this American, Norman. He's funny! Come on in, Coffin."

  The sun sank abruptly in this part of the world. One moment a beautifully colored sunset glowed over the horizon, and a brief flash of the legendary "green light" - the next moment it was dark and a myriad stars came out. Carl loved the Pacific sky; the constellations so different from the Northern hemisphere, and no city lights to blot out the luminous veil of the Milky Way. The lights from the passing ships disturbed the view somewhat, though.

  As Carl sat on a deckchair outside his barrack, stargazing after a hard day's work, Stone dropped by.

  "They here yet?"

  "Who?" Carl said, still watching the stars.

  "You know who." Stone lowered his voice yet another notch. "Haven't you noticed the silence around us? Our people are squatting down with their cameras ready... waiting to see the Sirians perform their ceremony."

  "I sorta knew that," Carl sighed, offering Stone another deckchair. The overweight astronomer sat down and set the baseball-cap on his round head pointing straight. "I can wait a little more," Carl mused. "Astronomy teaches you patience, Stone...? We sit up night after night, year after year, watching the planets and comets and stars wander across the sky..."

  "Yeah," Stone admitted, "though I never believed all that star-gazing would pay off this big in my lifetime."

  "I never stopped hoping. Never really. I lived for this moment, even through the cancer that almost got me. In another timeline, I might've died just before the first Sirian transmission came."

  They paused.

  "But now they're really here," Stone pointed out. "Now what? They land, have a look around, take a few snapshots, and leave? That's all?"

  "Go on."

  "You know damn well what the politicians and the military are thinking: The only reason to visit another star system is to claim it, to establish a colony. They are ready to go to war."

  "All the aircraft buzzing about. No one says it out loud, but it's obvious."

  "And what if they're right? Do we have a chance? The aliens could wipe out all of mankind without firing a single shot."

  Carl sat up in his deckchair, frowning. It was too dark for both men to see each other, so they watched ahead of themselves.

  "Where'd you get that idea?"

  "MacClintock, the biologist. Weeks ago, when she first heard about how the amphibians had replaced their own intestinal bacteria with our own E. Coli , she got suspicious. She just told me. Her study of the E. Coli was so extensive, the results came only today. Didn't you get a copy?"

  Stone rested his double chin on his palms and stared out at the surrounding sea. Out there, the lights of the cruisers and aircraft carriers formed a pearl-string of glittering lights around them.

  "I've been too occupied with the politics and red tape of this whole circus - Andrea hasn't had a chance to talk to me," Carl finally said. "There ought to be more of us here to share all the paperwork, but the politicians are afraid to lose control if there are more of us."

  Stone swallowed, and looked Carl in the eye. He was adapting to the dark better than his older colleague, and just barely made out the faint reflexes in Carl's eyeballs.

  "Andrea told me - if you put one of those ordinary bacteria in the guts of an alien amphibian, even remotely related to, say, a dolphin - then the bacteria would surely die. And any of us humans have literally billions of microorganisms living on our skin, in our hair - much more so than an amphibian with smooth skin and less hair! How come Ranmotanii didn't get infected and die after shaking your hand?"

  "But I did wash my hands that morning -"

  "Come on! You wash your hands ten, twenty times - you plain can't scrub off your natural skin germs. So, the Sirians must be using some additional technology we can only dream of - nanomachines on their skin, maybe, or direct genetic engineering of their own immune system. With that kind of knowledge, they could re-shape this environment completely. Turn it into their own world. We wouldn't stand a chance."

  Carl wanted to shout at Stone, call him a prejudiced, reactionary idiot - yet Stone's suggestion frightened him.

  "So if they could wipe us out, why haven't they done so already?"

  "Wasn't Columbus friendly with the natives, at first?"

  "Columbus claimed the land, from the moment he stepped on American soil. The Sirians haven't put up one flag. Not one ."

  "We'll see about that now," Stone ha
lf-whispered, starting at the sudden sounds from the beach.

  A group of figures were emerging from the lagoon. In the background light, Carl and Stone could recognize the cone-shaped heads of at least ten amphibians. And among those rose three egg-shaped, silvery spheres, each slightly larger than a man, moving with a force and limbs of their own.

  "Robots again," Stone whispered to Carl.

  "Shh!"

  They intensely studied the group and saw Oanorrn, supported by Ranmotanii and Namonnae. The amphibians made little noise and no small talk; their attention was fixed on their machines. The three egg-shapes wandered up to dry land, then settled themselves into the sand and began to sink. Then it became apparent, with sand cascading up around the spheres, that they were digging themselves down - the sound they made was a deep hum, but unlike any familiar motor or dynamo. In less than half a minute, the silvery shapes had vanished under the surface. The Sirians gathered in a wide circle around the three sand-piles left by the machines, and locked "hands" with each other.

  Carl began to feel the goosebumps and trembling of real, physical terror. Were the Sirians hiding bombs, biological weapons, surveillance equipment? Had he been a blinded fool all this time? Yet there was no sign of secrecy in the Sirians' behavior - they must have known they were being watched from all directions. A light jet aircraft flew by several hundred meters away... taking close-up pictures, no doubt. Carl forced his breathing to slow down.

  The ring of humanoids began to move... to dance. Their flat, clownish feet moved with remarkable agility and control, in slight, measured movements, so that the circle slowly moved - first clockwise, then counter-clockwise, in some obscure pattern. Still, not a sound came from their lips. The small devices hanging from their chests sent out rapid blinking light-pulses, aimed at the sand-piles at their feet. Was it only machines communicating internally, or something more advanced?

  And suddenly came a long, loud warning peep from somewhere - it could have been the devices carried by the Sirians - and they all backed off from the piles, squinting their large eyes. The piles moved. Three long, thick metal antennas shot up like absurd cybernetic plants, sprouting smaller outgrowths with amazing speed, until they had reached a height of at least four meters.

  A series of crackling pop-pop noises came from the alien antennas; a stray blue electricity-bolt cracked out of them and struck a palmtree, fifteen meters away. The Sirians seemed a little stunned, but focused their attention on the top of the antennas. A faint blue, glow, some kind of radiation, began to flow up from the sprouting antennas - an instant shaft of deep blue, pointing at the stars.

  "That's impossible," Carl heard Stone gasp. "Radiation of that magnitude is lethal! They're going to get sick if they don't move away!" But Stone must have been wrong; the blue beam shone on, undiminished, silent; the stars above began to blur. For a moment, Carl felt as if he was going insane, fearing the stars were going out. It couldn't be.

  And it wasn't. A haze at first - then in half a minute, strips of clouds, forming high up in the night sky, a dark-blue swirl around the deep-blue light shaft. The breeze began to pick up. Now the Sirians uttered their first words.

  All dozen voices at once, chanting up at the sky, with inhuman loudness and intonation: "Chiiiskr-r-r-r... chiiiskr-r-r-r mmer-r-r-r-lleee!"

  The chant was repeated, triumphantly, as the swirling clouds above thickened and the wind rustled the tree-crowns of the island. No hint of cool observation or objective analysis came through in the alien voices, only ecstasy and revelation, and something else Carl couldn't understand. For the first time in his life, he felt there was something he might not want to understand, and he was ashamed.

  Then, just as abruptly, the blue beam died and the antenna went dark. The wind leveled off slightly; the Sirians began to sing something more lighthearted in another, even more alien tongue - clicks and peeps like the speech of dolphins - were they laughing? They formed pairs, walking off in individual directions toward the rolling surf. Carl glimpsed a male and a female amphibian embracing as they moved out of sight, caressing each other's bodies with their soft arms. Their intentions were quite obvious.

  Only Oanorrn stood alone at the antennas for a while, gazing up at the new clouds, until he turned and moved toward the sea. The others had already dived into the waters.

  As his legs splashed into the surf, Oanorrn turned his head toward the barracks and shouted in his deep, creaking singsong voice: "Goood niiight, lannnd-humaaanss!"

  The sensation down Carl's neck and face was blushing. He was heading a bunch of Peeping Toms. Takeru came up to him with a headset, carrying a suitcase-sized oscilloscope and a handheld PC.

  "The blue radiation..." he began, and hesitated.

  "Yes?"

  "Ordinary blue and ultraviolet light, power output on the scale of a battery of light-bulbs. Its temperature flickered between a hundred to several thousand degrees Kelvin in irregular, short bursts - each cycle shorter than a ten-millionth of a second. Emitted by..."

  "Plasma?" Carl suggested.

  He assumed it had to be, either from charging the atmospheric gases with electricity from the antenna, or by emitting the plasma directly from the antennas. Schoolbook science, as simple as a neon-light strip - he thought.

  Takeru shook his head: "No. Plasma would leave traces of ionized gas afterwards. But this... glow... just... vanished, straight up into the air. Plasma that changes temperature from cold to blue-hot in millionths of a second? And travels in a straight line? I don't think so."

  "Then... it must've been directed along a strong electromagnetic field?"

  Takeru seemed mortified, even more so in the nightly gloom that surrounded them.

  "I thought so too, when the antenna discharged that electric bolt. But... there was no electromagnetic field there. Just... a blue glow... moving without outside force."

  "You mean our instruments couldn't measure the field. It might have been too strong..."

  Carl's voice faltered - because it all sounded utterly ridiculous. Neither he nor the world's brightest engineer had a clue to what had just happened. Stone joined them, irritated.

  "Look," he interrupted, "for all I know we could have been treated to a sophisticated laser show. We'll go through the results again, until they make sense. Jeez..." He held up his hands in resignation. "What was that lightning charge, then?"

  The Japanese scientist replied: "A lightning charge, plain and simple. I took some still photos with light-sensitive film, and the video cameras were running... I'll find an explanation."

  He excused himself and returned to his lab, with Stone following.

  "A rational explanation," Takeru added, so that Carl barely heard him.

  "Look - over there," the soldier said to George and Norman, waving his beer-can to the north of the harbor, where the starry sky met the dark ocean. "Is that a thunderstorm?"

  Something was happening, many miles out at sea. Brief blue flashes of light flickered, so distant they barely managed to reach above the horizon.

  "It's coming from Alien Beach," George said with a slight shudder to his slurred, drunken voice. "Maybe the U.N. forces are shooting at intruding aircraft or something."

  "Or someone is nuking the aliens," Norman added.

  The soldier's weary face screwed up in a grimace of despair.

  " No! Not so soon! The bastards had to go and do it already!"

  He took an impulsive step, fell off the deck and into the harbor waters with a big splash. Norman rushed to the nearest life vest and tossed it after the splashing soldier. The soldier gasped, grasped the life vest and pulled one arm into it. And like a stranded sailor seeing a ship sail off, he began to swim away toward the faint flashes at the horizon.

  "Come back, Coffin you idiot! There's a million sharks in there!"

  After about thirty meters, the soldier felt his broken rib poking into him. It was either going back, or drowning. He turned and swam back to the anchored boat, coughing up saltwater as the sea
lapped over his face. He wished he'd been an amphibian - so he could have dived the way across. The two brothers helped him back up on deck, laughing and cursing him simultaneously.

  "Don't worry, Coffin," Norman assured him, and offered a towel. "It was just St. Elmo's fire you saw. Or northern lights. Or a shooting maneuver. George, turn on the news will you?"

  The fisherman stepped up into the nearby boat cockpit and switched on a small TV set.

  "Louder," Norman told him.

  "Wife's asleep inside," George said but turned up the volume one notch.

  The news anchorman's voice, crackling slightly, spoke: "...has confirmed that he will visit Alien Beach as soon as humanly possible. Bishop Soto, who won the Nobel Peace Prize during South Africa's apartheid years, has recently defended the Sirian presence in the face of much controversy in the Christian community..."

  The soldier thought: Of course. The priests are looking out for the new competition. What will it be: missionaries or the Spanish Inquisition?

  Chapter Eight

  DAY 56

  "You won't believe your eyes, Carl," Stone said as he shoved the thinner, older man into the electronics lab barrack. "We stayed up all night working with this - couldn't sleep, the results were too exciting."

  The six meters long, three meters wide space was crammed with sensitive electronic measuring devices. Stone indicated an oscilloscope on one table, which Takeru had connected to a computer terminal.

  "I'll replay it again, but slowing it down a million times," Takeru said from his seat at the terminal. "Each second you'll see in the oscilloscope, corresponds to one millionth of a second as I recorded the blue glow. Now watch carefully."

  He typed in a command on the keyboard, and the playback fed into the oscilloscope's fluorescent cathode-ray screen. On the dark screen was projected a swarm of dancing green lines, making wave-patterns that resembled nothing Carl had ever seen during his years in astronomy. Waves of low energy, interlocking, so many that they formed a moving blur.