The Visitors (v1.0)

15. WASHINGTON, D.C

Porter had gotten into his pajamas and was turning down his bed when the phone rang. He glanced at the clock on his bedside table; it was almost two o'clock.

"This is Jack," said the voice on the other end of the line. "Jack Clark. Were you asleep?"

"In another minute, I would have been."

"Dave, I think this is important. Can you come down to the White House? Meet us in your office."

"Who is us?"

"Me, NASA, the science advisor, Whiteside."

"Not the President?"

"He's asleep. We don't want to wake him. There are a few things we should talk out."

"Such as?"

"Your line is not secured. I can't tell you. I repeat, it is important."

"Be there in ten, maybe fifteen, minutes."

"On second thought, maybe I should get the White House chief of staff in on this too. You have any objection?"

"Hammond? Sure. Why not? By all means, get him in."

"All right, then. We'll be expecting you.

Porter put the phone back in the cradle. Now what the hell? he wondered. Clark was excited and concerned; it could be heard in his tone of voice. Perhaps, Porter thought, no one else could have known. But he did. He'd known Jack Clark for a long time.

He took another look at the bed. Why not just sack out, he asked himself, and to hell with Clark and the others? God knows, he needed the rest. In the last twenty-four hours, he had logged little sleep. But he knew that he was only trying the thought on for size. In fifteen minutes, he would be walking down the corridor toward the press office. He started taking off his pajamas, heading for the chest of drawers to get socks and underwear.

In the driveway, before he got into the car, he stood for a moment, looking at the sky. Somewhere to the north, some distance off, he could hear the mutter of a plane coming in to land. He looked for the blinking lights of the craft, but they could not be seen. Out in the street, fallen leaves made a rustling sound as they were driven along the pavement by the wind.

Everyone except Hammond was present and waiting when he entered the door of the press room. Against the wall, the wire machines made soft chortling noises. The kitchen had brought up coffee; a gleaming urn sat on one of the desks, with white coffee mugs ranged in a huddled group.

Whiteside had taken the chair behind Porter's desk, was teetering back and forth in it. Crowell, the NASA man, and Dr. Allen sat side by side on a small sofa. Clark was filling coffee cups preparatory to passing them out. Hammond came striding briskly through the door.

"What is going on?" he asked. "You sounded urgent, Jack."

"I don't know how urgent," said Clark. "It's something we should talk over. The shuttle went out and the station has sent the word."

"What kind of word?"

Clark gestured toward Crowell. All eyes in the room turned to the NASA man.

"The new object in space," said Crowell, "as many of us must have suspected, but didn't want to talk out loud about, very definitely has a connection with the visitor that came down in Minnesota."

"How connected?" asked Hammond.

"It's not an object at all, in the classical sense of the term. It is a cluster of the visitors, hundreds of them, perhaps thousands. No one so far has taken the time to compute how many there could be."

"You mean a swan-n of them clustered in the form of a wheel?" Crowell nodded. "We should have known without even going out to look. Telescopic observation from the station should have tipped us off. The observers saw no solid object, what they saw was a collection of discrete particles."

"Not exactly discrete particles," said Clark.

"From the distance of a thousand miles, they would have seemed to be."

"But they're still remaining in the cluster," said Hammond. "What I mean, they're not beginning to break up."

"We can't be sure," said Crowell. "The two men on the shuttle said they seemed to be sort of unraveling at the edge. All the visitors—visitors is an awkward word, but I don't know what else to call them—all the visitors at the edge of the disc didn't seem to be as neatly tucked away as they should have been. Whether this means the swarm is beginning to break up, we don't know. If you carry the analogy to that of a swarm of bees, that situation could be quite normal. In a swarm of bees, while the swarm itself may be intact, there are always quite a number of bees in motion around the edges of the swarm, jockeying around to find a more secure place where they can fit themselves. That may be the case with our swarm out there. The men in the shuttle couldn't be sure. They had trouble seeing."

"Couldn't see?" asked Whiteside. "What could prevent their seeing?"

"In space, objects often are hard to detect," said Crowell. "There's not a proper background against which to see them. You see mostly by reflected light."

"But there's the sun," said Whiteside. "The swarm would have been in full sunlight. There should have been plenty of reflection."

"General, there simply wasn't. Which leads me to believe we may be dealing with what amounts to black bodies."

"Black bodies? I've heard the term, but.

"Bodies that absorb all energy, in this case, the radiation from the sun. A perfect black body would absorb all energy, reflect none at all."

"Why, certainly," said Allen. "I should have suspected that. Should have known it, in fact. To navigate through space, a fair amount of energy is needed. That's the way these things get their energy. There isn't much, but they get all there is. Not only from the suns in space, however feeble the radiations from those suns may be, but from anything else from which they could extract energy. The impact of micrometeorites would give them some. Kinetic energy, of course, but probably they could transform that into potential energy. Cosmic rays, and cosmic rays have a lot of energy. All other kinds of radiation. They'd gobble it all up. They'd be energy sponges."

"Doctor, you're sure of that?" asked Hammond, dryly.

"Well, no, not exactly. Certainly I'm not certain of it. But the hypothesis is sound. It could be the way it works. There'd have to be some such means for a space-going machine to extract sufficient energy to keep going."

He said to Crowell, "Even before you told us what the object is, I had a hunch we'd find what you describe. My men at Lone Pine report the visitor there is sending out signals, modulated signals, which would argue that it is in communication with something. And I asked myself what could it be communicating with. The answer seemed to be others of its kind. No one else could decode the garbage that it's sending."

"Which means," said Whiteside, "that it is telling all of its relatives out there what fine forests it has found. Inviting them in to eat their fill. In a little while, there may be others tumbling down, landing in our forests and tucking their napkins underneath their chins."

"Henry," said Hammond, "you're jumping to conclusions again. We can't be sure of that."

"The possibility exists," said the general, stubbornly. "We can't close our eyes to it. My God, what a horrible situation!"

"What else did your men find?" Porter asked Allen.

"Not much. The visitor is not metal. We are sure of that. We don't know what it is. We tried to get samples…"

"You mean your men just walked up to it and pried away at it and scraped away at it?"

"Hell, man, they climbed all over it. They examined every inch of it. It paid them no attention. It never even twitched its hide. It just went on with its lumbering."

"For the love of God," asked Clark, "what are we dealing with?"

No one answered him.

Crowell said, "One other thing puzzles me. How the swarm up there got into orbit. It takes a while to eject an object into orbit. Several times around the Earth until it's where you want it and moving at the speed you want it. If this new object, if this swarm did any jockeying preliminary to getting into orbit our spotters would have caught it well ahead of time. But they didn't. When they found it, it already was in a settled orbit. And, another thing: It would have had to know quite a lot about the planet around which it intended to set up an orbit—the planet's speed, its rotation rate, its gravitational attraction. This would apply to any kind of orbit, but to set up a synchronous orbit, it would have had to have all the factors figured to a fraction. Apparently, it just plopped in and settled to the correct altitude at the correct speed and how the hell that could be done, I don't know. I'd say, offhand, it would be impossible."

"So now that we have all the bad news," said Hammond, "what are we going to do about it? That's what this meeting is for, isn't it? So we can map a course of action. In the morning, I'd like to be able to tell the man upstairs that we have some answers for him."

"One thing we should do is to notify all the governors to put the National Guard on alert," said Whiteside.

"That would be guaranteed," said Hammond, "to scare the country senseless."

"And make some of our international neighbors nervous," said Clark.

The general asked, "How about passing the word along quietly? Telling the governors to be prepared to call out the guard at a moment's notice."

"It would leak," said Porter. "There's no such thing as secrecy among forty-eight governors—fifty if you were to include Hawaii and Alaska and I suppose Hawaii and Alaska would have their noses out of joint if we passed them by. Governors are political creatures and some of them are blabbermouths. Besides, they all have staffs and.

"Dave is right," Hammond told Whiteside. "You'd simply be asking for it."

"If it comes to that," said Porter, "the country should be told, not only about what we are doing but why we're doing it. They'll find out in a few days in any case and it would go down better if we told the people at once. Let the news come from us rather than from someone else."

"Otherwise than the National Guard, what can we do?" asked Whiteside.

"You persist," said Allen, "in regarding these things as enemies.

"At least, they're potential enemies," said the general. "Until we know more about them, we must be prepared to recognize them as possible threats. If they should invade us, then, automatically, they are enemies.

"Maybe it's time for us to lay out the situation to some of our international friends," said Hammond. "We've held out from doing this, but if that swarm up there starts coming down, we're not going to be the only ones involved. Maybe we owe it to the others to let them know what is going on."

Whiteside said, "The President should be sitting in with us on this."

"No," said Hammond. "Let him sleep. He needs the rest. A long, hard day is coming up.

"Why do we assume that we are the only ones who sent out a shuttle to have a look at the swarm?" asked Porter. "The Soviets also have a space station. They could have sent out a shuttle. We announced the new object in space more than twenty-four hours ago. They'd have had the time."

"I can't be sure," said Hammond. "I think it is unlikely. Their station is a considerable distance from ours, the shuttle trip would be longer. Not that distance makes that great a difference, but somehow I don't think so. For one thing, they'd have less reason to react. The visitor is in our country, not theirs."

"What difference does it make, anyhow?" asked Clark.

"We wouldn't want to go to them," said Porter, "and say, ‘Look, pal, we got these things up there' if we had any reason to believe they knew as much as we do, maybe more than we do."

"I think your objection is academic," said Hammond.

"Perhaps so," said Porter. "We just don't want to look any sillier than we have to."

"Let's get back," said Whiteside, "to the matter of defense. You vetoed the National Guard. If we can't do that, the regular military establishments should be alerted."

"If it can be done without publicity," said Hammond. "If you can guarantee no leaks."

"That can be managed," said Whiteside.

"What I'm worried about is public panic," said Hammond. "It's been all right so far, but touch the wrong button and the country can go sky-high. There's been so much talk, so much controversy, all these years, about the UFOs, that the country's ripe."

"It seems to me all the UFO talk works to our benefit," Porter told him. "The idea of aliens coming to Earth is a bit old hat. Many people are reconciled to the thought that some day they will come. Thus, they are more prepared for it. It will be less of a shock. Some people believe it would be good for us if they did come. We no longer have the H. G. Wells' War of the Worlds psychology. Not in full force at least. We have some philosophical preparation."

"That may be so," said Clark, "but one damn fool saying one wrong thing could trigger a panic."

"I agree," said Hammond. "Maybe your approach is correct, Dave. Tell the people what we know. Give them a little time to think it over, so if more visitors come the people will be half accustomed to the idea. A soothing word here and there, being careful not to overplay the soothing syrup. Buy some time for sober reflection. Time to think it out and talk it over."

"So what we have is this," said Clark. "Military installations will be informed of the situation. Nothing will be done at the moment with the guard, but we'll be ready to put it on alert, throughout the country, on a moment's notice. We'll give earnest consideration to informing and consulting with other governments. We'll tell the people as many facts as we can. How about the U.N.?"

"Let's leave the U.N. out of it for a time," said Hammond. "They'll come charging in fast enough. And it is understood the man upstairs has to put his stamp of approval on all of this. He'll be waking in a couple of hours. We won't have to wait long. When we do move, we should move fast."

"John, I'd like to get the word to my boys right away," said Whiteside. "I can't imagine you would object to that. It's all in the family, so to speak."

"No objection," Hammond said. "That's your turf."

Allen said to Crowell, "The station is keeping watch, I'd assume. They'll let us know if anything is beginning to happen? Or looks as if it is beginning to happen."

"That's right. The minute there's anything going on, we'll know."

"What if one of our international friends gets trigger happy and proposes boosting off a nuke to blow the swarm all to hell?" asked Whiteside. "Or worse, acts unilaterally."

"Henry, you think of the damnedest things," said Hammond. "It could happen," said the general. "Let Someone get scared enough."

"That's something we'll just have to hope doesn't happen," said Porter.

"I think it's most unlikely," said Hammond. "Maybe I should get State out of bed. He'll have to be briefed. Perhaps he could have breakfast with the President. He and a few others. The Attorney General, for one. I'll make the calls."

"And that's it?" asked Crowell.

"It would seem so.

"It's barely worth going back to bed," said Clark. "In an hour or two, it will be morning."

"I'm not going back," said Porter. "There's a comfortable couch in the press lounge. I'm going to stretch out there. In fact, come to think of it, there are two. Anyone care to join me?"

"I think I will," said Clark.