The InterSec man had put a hand on her forearm. He said politely, “Don’t you think you could go a little slower?”
“What for? All these pictures now are in your files, and I have more important things to get to. This is your Sun, and here are some of your planets—” Sandy blinked. The pictures were coming faster than he could take them in, and he could hear people grumbling around him. Polly paid no attention. “Earth, Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Mars. The interesting part to you, I suppose, is that these are mostly polar views—taken from north of the ecliptic as we came in from Gamma Cephei, south of it on our trip to Alpha Centauri. There are many other pictures, of course, which will be made available to you later. That is enough on that subject. Lights!” she called peremptorily, and gazed complacently out at the muttering audience as the overheads went on again.
“Now,” she said, “let me get to the more important part of what I have to say today.” She broke off, peering at a man near Sandy, who had his hand up. “Do you want something?” she asked.
“I just want to know if we’ll have a chance to ask questions,” the astronomer called.
“I suppose so, but not until I have finished. Please pay full attention now, all of you. I have been instructed by my superior, ChinTekki-tho, to inform you that you should begin construction of a magnetic-impulse thruster—what you call a ‘railgun’—at once. We have identified two suitable sites. One is on the island you call Bora Bora, the other is the peak you call Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa. Our specialists are now completing detailed plans for construction, which will be transmitted to you shortly, and we are prepared to land two teams of specialists, one for each thruster, to supervise the construction and then the operation of the machines. The most important use of the thrusters will be to launch needed raw materials to replenish the stores of our interstellar ship, but ChinTekki-tho has decided that, as a special favor, several of the first launches will be to put self-propelled objects into Low Earth Orbit. These will be used to collide with, and thus decelerate, some of the objects that are likely to deorbit in the near future, so that they can be caused to descend in whatever parts of their orbit you think least dangerous to any of your installations or people. Thus,” she finished triumphantly, “we have solved one of your great problems for you. Now you may ask questions if you wish to—but, please,” she added, glancing at her watch, “not for very long, as it is nearly time for my midday meal.”
To Sandy’s surprise, there weren’t any immediate questions. The audience was silent. It surprised Polly, too; she was twitching resentfully as she waited. Then at last she pointed to a man midway back. “Ask,” she ordered.
“I was simply wondering why you didn’t photograph Uranus and Pluto?” he called.
Polly snorted in displeasure. “Why don’t you ask about the more important things I have said? We simply did not happen to observe Uranus and Pluto.”
“But if you missed them,” the astronomer persisted, “how do you know there weren’t some you missed at the other stars?”
“We did not ‘miss’ any planets,” she corrected him coldly. “We did not concern ourselves with possible objects that would be of no use to us, because they were too far from their sun. Of course, there are many more pictures. We Hakh’hli have visited some sixty-five stellar systems in this journey, and of course we have records of many other visitations by other ships.”
Another astronomer called, “Are you still getting them?”
“You mean reports from other ships?” Polly hesitated, then replied unwillingly, “Not at present.”
“How about the planets of your own original system?”
“We have no pictures to show of our own planets. Our ancestors knew it quite well. They had no need of photographs to remind them.”
“Can you at least identify your own star from our catalogues? You said it’s only eight hundred and fifty light-years away; if it’s as bright as the Sun, it should be at least a fourteenth or fifteenth magnitude object, and we’ve got all of them on our atlases.”
Polly hesitated. “It can be identified,” she said.
“By you?”
Unwillingly, she said, “Not necessarily by me, at present.”
“You mean you’re lost, don’t you?”
“We are not lost! It is simply that we have not yet reestablished contact with the home star, because of the great distance involved—as even you should know, to communicate over a distance of eight hundred light-years takes sixteen hundred of your years for a message to be sent and an answer received. When we have accomplished our mission we will notify the home planets.”
“What is your mission, exactly?”
She paused, then flared up. “Our mission is to explore and learn! Have you no better questions to ask than this?”
“Have you no better pictures than this?” an astronomer demanded. “These are just optical-band photographs! Don’t you have infrared, ultraviolet, X-ray, gamma ray observations to go with them?”
“It is not our custom,” Polly said sharply. She was obviously beginning to get angry. “Are not any of you going to ask questions about the magnetic launchers?”
There was a pause, then Hamilton Boyle leaned forward to the microphone. “I have one,” he said. “These plans you’re going to give us. Have you ever built a launcher from them?”
“I myself? Of course not.”
“Or anyone on your ship?”
“Not recently, no,” she conceded.
“So how do you know they’ll work?”
She glared at him, divided between astonishment and anger. “They are Hakh’hli plans,” she explained. “They have been approved by the Major Seniors! Of course they’ll work. Aren’t there any sensible questions?”
When it appeared there were not, Polly stormed off to her midday meal, refusing Hamilton Boyle’s offer to accompany her. As the meeting broke up, Boyle caught up with Marguery and Sandy. “Got any plans for lunch?” he asked amiably.
Marguery answered for both them. “We’re going to explore New York,” she said. “I think we’ll just get some sandwiches and eat them on the way.”
Boyle nodded, gazing shrewdly at Sandy. “Your friend wasn’t happy with us, I’m afraid,” he offered.
Sandy decided not to mention that Polly was seldom happy. “I think she was surprised that no one seemed to want to talk about the railgun offer.”
“Oh?” Boyle said, raising his eyebrows. “Was that what it was, an offer? It sounded like marching orders to me.”
“That’s just her way, probably,” Sandy said.
Boyle nodded. “Do you think it’s a good idea?” he asked.
Sandy looked at him in surprise. “Of course it’s a good idea. The Major Seniors wouldn’t approve it if it wasn’t. You can put thousands of capsules into orbit, very cheaply. And what about kicking some of that garbage out of orbit in safe areas? Don’t you want to save your cities from the kind of thing that almost happened to Perth?”
Boyle sighed. “Yes,” he said meditatively. “That certainly sounds very good, shoving the trash around so that it will miss cities. It’s the other side of that coin I’m thinking about.”
“I don’t understand,” Sandy said.
Boyle shrugged. “Well, if you can make an object deorbit to miss a city,” he said, “don’t you think it would be just as easy to make it hit one?”
Chapter 16
The four lasting legacies of the twentieth century are radionuclides, atmospheric gases, toxic chemicals, and plastics—and plastics is the greatest of these. Ten billion transitory hamburgers are long since digested, excreted, and gone; but they have left ten billion immortal Styrofoam boxes behind. Plastics are generally light enough to float in water. So when nylon fishing nets are lost overboard by trawlers they drift eternally through the seas and kill fish as long as they hold together, which is forever. Coca-Cola jugs and shampoo bottles wind up in the oceans and bob onto all the beaches of the world. The Rockies may tumble, Gibraltar may crumble, but a plastic six-pack container will never die. Like diamonds, plastics are forever. For some members of the animal kingdom, this is good news. Jellyfish, for instance, benefit from the situation. The animals that feed on jellyfish are likely to eat a drifting sandwich bag by mistake and die of it, so the jellyfish survive uneaten and prosper. But it is bad news for seals, diving birds, turtles, fish . . . and people.