The Last Theorem

43 LANDED IMMIGRANTS

In the Subramanian family it might have been young Robert who was the least affected by the scary developments in the world they lived in. He cried a bit more these days, true. It didn’t seem to be the state of the outside world that was saddening him, though. Rather, it was the obvious distress of his parents. Robert’s way of dealing with the problem was to be especially good—patting them, cuddling with them, even eating all his vegetables without argument and going to bed without protest when told it was time. And trying to cheer them up by repeating words and phrases from his Sunday school. “’Olden ’Ule,” he would say reassuringly, and, “’Oo unto others.”

Of course, hearing Robert’s recollections of Sunday school lessons about the Golden Rule didn’t really make things better for Ranjit and Myra. They were not displeased when he began to take an interest in things that were showing on the world’s news screens—when he could find a channel that was not overrun with the quaint denizens of the galaxy.

What was showing there was what these One Point Five invaders were doing in the Qattara Depression. Every human spy satellite not hijacked by reruns of the galactic bestiary was brought to bear on that almost forgotten part of the world.

As soon as the One Point Five armada had landed, it became clear why they had used rockets to decelerate instead of simple air friction. Air friction would have shredded their spacecraft. They weren’t streamlined. They weren’t even simple tube shapes, like the pygmy vessels of the Nine-Limbeds. The One Point Fives’ ships looked more like Christmas trees than any aerodynamic design, with cubes and balls and polygons hanging off the main bodies at all sorts of angles.

That explained their willingness to expend fuel on a slow-down. A shuttle-type reentry would have turned them into the brightest shooting star display ever, quickly followed by glowing fields of debris covering thousands of hectares.

Once they were landed in orderly ranks, the One Point Fives showed what all those grotesque add-ons were for. Some of them were tentacle-like in appearance; these detached themselves, waved indecisively for a moment, and then squirmed away to explore their new surroundings. Others linked together and headed for the brackish waters of the oasis, to do what, Ranjit could not guess. “That’s not potable water,” he said. “I hope they’re aware of that.”

Myra studied his face. “You know,” she said meditatively, “you’re looking a lot more cheerful since Joris called to say the dynamiters gave up. Now you’re worried about what these One Point Five creatures have to drink.”

Since what his wife said was true, Ranjit made no attempt to argue. “It’s like Robert keeps telling us,” he said. “We should ’oo unto others as we would have others ’oo unto us. I personally would not like any others to be shooting me.”

Myra grinned and then was caught by what was now going on on the screen. Some of the alien bits and pieces of machinery had detached themselves from their spacecraft, had crawled to a dune, and had begun chewing at it. “They’re digging a tunnel,” Myra marveled. “What do you think, maybe a kind of bomb shelter in case anyone attacks them?”

Ranjit didn’t answer that. The idea that the aliens might be expecting armed attack was all too plausible, but he didn’t want to say as much….

And didn’t need to, because all the news screens that still belonged to the human race at once went dark. They were quickly replaced by a flustered newscaster, hurriedly informing the audience that the president of the United States had requested immediate air time to make an announcement of “world importance.” “Those were the president’s words,” the newscaster on the Subramanian screen nervously informed her audience. “We know nothing beyond that here, except that this is almost unprecedented in—What?”

She was asking the question of someone invisible, but the answer was obvious. All she had time to say was, “Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the—”

And then the screen went briefly to black. When it lighted up again, it was showing a group of important-looking (but also worried-looking) men and women clustered around a table that bore a forest of microphones. Ranjit looked with some puzzlement at the scene; it was not the usual Rose Garden setting, or the Oval Office, or any of the other backgrounds the president usually preferred. There was, it was true, the giant American flag behind the standing group, as the president almost always required. But what Ranjit could see of the chamber they were in was unfamiliar to him—windowless, harshly lit with floodlights, with a corporal’s guard of armed United States Marines standing at attention, their fingers on the triggers of their weapons.

“Oh my God,” Myra whispered. “They’re in their nuke shelter.”

But Ranjit hardly heard her. He had made a discovery of his own. “Look who’s standing between the president and the Egyptian ambassador. Isn’t that Orion Bledsoe?”

It was. They had no time to discuss his presence, though, because the president had begun to speak. “My friends,” he said, “it is with a heavy heart that I come before you to say that the invasion—yes, invasion; I can find no other word to describe what has happened—of our planet by these beings from space has passed the point at which it can be tolerated. The government of the Arab Republic of Egypt has explicitly demanded that those who have committed this act of aggression stop their preparations for war at once and begin to withdraw from Egyptian territory. The aggressors not only have failed to comply with this demand, which is according to international law, they haven’t even had the courtesy to acknowledge receiving it.

“Accordingly the government of our ally, the Arab Republic of Egypt, is preparing an armored column to cross the desert and drive the invaders off their soil. Furthermore, the president of the Arab Republic of Egypt has called upon the United States to comply with existing treaties by aiding in the military effort to drive them out.

“You will understand that I have no option but to comply with this demand. Accordingly, I have ordered the sixth, twelfth, fourteenth, and eighteenth air forces to destroy the alien encampment.” He permitted himself a slight smile. “Under most circumstances that would be a highly classified decision, but I feel that showing the actual forces that have been brought to bear on the aggressors will help convince these alien invaders that they must immediately cease their provocative activities and declare their intention to depart Egyptian territory.”

The president turned to look at his own screen, just in time for the scene on the screens in the rest of the world to show the reality of what the president had promised. From all directions warplanes, arranged in precise flights and Vs, were heading in toward a single target, the Qattara Depression. Ranjit recognized some of them—supersonic flying wings; immense old B-52s, originally deployed in the Vietnam War and still going strong; the tiny, fast stealth fighter-bombers—Ranjit counted at least a dozen different types of aircraft, all heading to the same point on the map—

And then, suddenly and without warning, they weren’t.

To Ranjit it looked like nothing as much as one of those radio dog fences, where the animal gets a shock from buried wiring any time he tries to pass a certain point in his run. The planes did the same thing. As they reached a certain point along the perimeter of a circle drawn with the Qattara Depression as its center, the orderly patterns of Vs faltered, ceased to be coherent, one by one lost power. Nothing exploded. There were no flames, and no sign of enemy action. All that happened was that the mighty air fleet no longer displayed the torches of flame that were their jet exhausts. Those had winked out.

Lacking thrust, the planes did their best to glide to the ground, but their best was very poor. Within a matter of minutes the screens were displaying five or six hundred funeral pyres, each marking the point at which a member of the mighty striking force had hit the ground, the fuel that remained in its tanks immediately exploding.

And within the perimeter of the invaders’ camp, the various bits of busy machinery, paying no attention at all, kept right on with their arcane tasks.

For the One Point Fives themselves the Qattara Depression was pure heaven.

They particularly loved the brackish water of the oasis. It was purer than any water they had seen for generations on their own planet. Oh, sure, there were a few chemicals that had to be filtered out. But there were hardly any radioactive contaminants, and no positron emitters at all!

And the air! You could very nearly breathe it without a filter! True, it was on the warmish side—around 45°C, or perhaps 110°F, in the several confusing ways the human population had of measuring temperatures—but once they had finished digging their tunnel from the depression to the sea, there would be plenty of cooling Mediterranean waters to make the climate livable.

They were, in fact, about as happy as an enslaved race of largely prosthetic beings can be, except for one annoying thing.

As usual it was the Nine-Limbeds who were making trouble. The Nine-Limbeds had agreed to the destruction of the attacking aircraft because no actual local sentients’ lives were endangered, all of the war planes being of course remotely controlled. But, infuriatingly, the attack had destroyed some human life anyway.

A party of oil prospectors had had the bad luck to be setting up their seismometers just where one of the American bombers crashed. True, only eleven human beings had been killed, less than 0.0000001 percent of the human race. By any rational count that was hardly enough to worry about.

But the Nine-Limbeds kept caterwauling about it. Human ideas of justice and reparations were not the same as their own, as they knew from eavesdropping on every major human activity and a good many minor ones. Finally the council of the One Point Fives gave in. “What can we do to heal the situation?” they asked. “That is, other than leaving this extraordinarily inviting place to go back to our own planet, which we are not going to do.”

“Reparations,” said the experts of the Nine-Limbeds at once. “You must pay them. Through our eavesdropping program we have ascertained that nearly anything that goes wrong in the affairs of these human beings can be repaired by paying reparations, in the form of money. Would you be willing to do that?”

It didn’t take the One Point Fives long to answer that question. “Of course we will,” their leaders said at once. “What is ‘money’?”