“Sounds like a great way to turn a misunderstanding into a war. I’ll assume it’s a straight question.” Cassetti snapped on the suit speaker.
“We are not an assemblage of the planetary computer.”
“Are you calculators?”
“We are humans, not computers or calculators.”
The outer airlock doors swung shut.
Cassetti snapped off the external speaker and waited. There was no further comment.
Richards went to the closed airlock door and tried without success to move it. “We’re locked in.”
“Better than being booted down the corridor in pieces.”
“You know, that’s a fluent alien.”
“Well, according to that same course, one of the first steps in an extraterrestrial contact is supposed to be to match files of pictures, drawings, transparencies, and models of various objects, and exchange whatever symbols, including spoken words, represent the corresponding objects. That should make for lots of fluency.”
“Did you notice how fast that hatch went shut when you said we weren’t computers?”
“I did.”
“Something,” said Richards, “suggests to me this alien is tricky.”
“We may be about to find out. The inner hatch is opening.”
In front of them, a section of wall rotated, then swung slowly aside.
They waited tensely for someone or something to come through.
Nothing happened.
“I guess,” said Richards finally, “it wants us to make the next move.”
“Go in through the hatch?”
“What else?”
“Very reasonable. Let’s just remember what happened to the Mobile Communicator when we go in there.”
They turned carefully in various directions, using the suits’ external mirrors to be sure they were still alone, then approached the low sill in front of them. This turned out to have on the far side a kind of thin tightly woven veil of shiny interlinked circlets that lit up in their helmet lights, and hid any view of whatever might be in the darkened room beyond.
“Nice,” said Richards. “Maybe what happened to the communicator was, it just went in there.”
“Maybe. I’d more credit the computer’s natural charm after it went in.”
Cassetti got a grip on a handful of the slippery interlinked veil, and dragged it out the opening. Richards held it up while Cassetti carefully eased over the sill. Then he held it as Richards came in. Once there, they passed it over their heads, peered around, then again snapped on the suit lights.
Cassetti said, “Still can’t see a thing.”
“There’s another veil or curtain—looks like this one is made of some kind of black cloth.”
“Let’s ease around to the left.”
“What’s the point of hiding things from us?”
“Offhand, I’d think the idea is to surprise us with whatever’s on the other side of that curtain. But not to surprise us while we were still outside the hatch looking in.”
“Get us in here first?”
“Exactly. Then lock the hatch so we can’t get out. Then spring it on us. Test our reactions.”
Richards said, “I always did think they should mount a few guns on these suits.”
“Yeah. Be nice when we bumped the wrong control.”
“Everything has its disadvantages. That curtain is lighting up.”
Beyond the curtain, there was a glow, that strengthened into a bright light that shone through the fabric of the curtain. The curtain began to slide to the side. A quick check revealed the circular hatch rotating into position, to lock them in.
Richards growled, “These extraterrestrials seem to think the same way we do. They’re following your program.”
“In that case, be ready to move. This may be where the communicator got it.”
Abruptly the curtain was gone.
Before them sat what looked like a pale-pink two-headed octopus upright on a giant toadstool. Close beside it stood a figure apparently made of sections of shiny green bamboo of various thicknesses, with what appeared to be a glaring eye on each end of a T-shaped bamboo bar that seemed to serve as its head.
Both of these figures were perfectly motionless.
Richards recovered while Cassetti was still groping mentally through a maze of indoctrination to the effect that appearance did not count, and that whatever an alien might look like, the limitations of human experience rendered suspect any judgment based on appearance. There was a faint click, then Richards spoke evenly.
“How are you?”
He got no reply, and tried again: “We greet you.”
That brought no response, either.
Cassetti cleared his throat. Supposedly, the exchange of images and vocabularies had already taken place. He snapped on his external speaker.
“Hello.”
They waited.
Nothing happened.
They both shut off their external speakers.
After watching the motionless scene for about three minutes, Richards growled, “That octopus looks to me as if it’s made out of translucent plastic.”
“It does, at that.”
They stood there for another minute or so.
Nothing moved.
Cassetti said, “Do you get the impression of a little joke at our expense?”
“I’m still half-paralyzed for fear we’ll step on the extraterrestrials’ taboos and create a disaster. But I begin to wonder if maybe we’re up against some entity that doesn’t go by the book.”
“At least not by the computer’s book.”
“Right.”
“I’ve been trying to contact MC3C, and haven’t gotten a response since we came in here.”
“Naturally. How would it get a signal into this place? And do we want instructions so we end up the same way its communicator ended up?”
“I want to be sure we’re on our own.”
Richards said, “As far as I can tell, we’re on our own.”
“Then I’m going to try something.”
“Hold it. The bamboo horror just moved a couple inches.”
Cassetti turned his mirror. “It’s not moving now. ”
“It did move.”
They both stood frozen, and time stretched out. Cassetti snapped on the suit speaker.
“Hello.”
Nothing happened.
He shut off the speaker, and moved cautiously toward the imitation-looking octopus. The closer he got, the more fake it looked. He eased closer, and closer, and—
Pop!
Both heads of the octopus separated from the body in front, and swung neatly back. Out of the stubs of the necks protruded two bunches of what looked like purple-and-yellow flowers.
There was a silence that lengthened out while Cassetti listened to a distant tbump-thump that he supposed was blood being pumped through his ears.
Richards’s voice came across as a distant murmur.
“Do you suppose at some point the computer came up against this?”
In his mind’s eye, Cassetti could see the computer’s beach-ball sized communicator with all its receptors focused on this imitation alien with bouquets of flowers sticking out its necks. What would the computer do? All its complex processors, its lightning-fast memory, its high-speed cache, its bank of situation models, its Rapidaptive Master Operating System with clear and fuzzy subsystems, all its programs instantaneously on tap—all were set to swiftly process the relevant facts and relationships. So—
Just exactly which facts were relevant here?
Was anything related to anything else?
What was the problem?
Richards said, “It’s too bad we don’t know what it did, so we could do something else.”