They strolled down to B Deck, started along the corridor, and suddenly a door opened and a Goompah waddled out and said hello. Said it in the native tongue. “Challa, Professor Collingdale.”
Collingdale felt his jaw drop. The creature was realistic.
“Meet Shelley,” Judy said, trying to restrain a smile.
Shelley was even shorter than her supervisor. In costume she was wide, green, preposterous. Her saucer eyes locked on him. She adjusted her rawhide blouse, tugged at a yellow neckerchief, and held out a six-fingered hand.
“Challa, Shelley,” he said.
She curtsied and pirouetted for his inspection. “What do you think?” she asked in English. The voice had an Australian lilt.
“We haven’t done much with the clothing yet,” said Judy, “because we’re not really sure about texture. We’ll need better data. Preferably samples. But by the time we get there, we’ll have our own team of Goompahs.”
“Well,” he said, “it looks good to me, but I’m not a native.”
She smiled. “Have faith. When we go down, nobody will be able to tell us from the locals.”
Shelley took off her mask, and Collingdale found himself looking at an amused young blonde. Her figure in no way resembled Goompah anatomy. And he was embarrassed to realize he was inspecting her.
“I suspect you’re right,” he told Judy.
HE SENT A twenty-minute transmission to Mary, describing what they were doing, and telling her how much he’d have enjoyed having dinner with her tonight on the al-Jahani. “It’s very romantic,” he said, smiling into the imager. “Candlelight in the dining room, a gypsy violinist, and the best food in the neighborhood. And you never know whom you’re going to meet.”
None of it made much sense, except that she would understand the essential message, that he missed her, that he hoped she’d wait for him. That he regretted what had happened, but that it was a responsibility he really couldn’t have passed off.
He had been getting messages from her every couple of days. They were shorter than he’d have preferred, but she said she didn’t want to take advantage of Hutch’s kindness in providing the service and run up the bill on the Academy. It was enough to satisfy him.
This was the only time in his life that he’d ever actually believed himself to be in love. Until Mary, he’d thought of the grand passion as something adolescents came down with, not unlike a virus. He had his own memories of June Cedric, Maggie Solver, and a few others. He remembered thinking about each of them that he had to possess her, would never forget her, could not live without her. But none of it had ever survived the season. He’d concluded that was how it was: A lovely and charming stranger takes your emotions for a ride, and the next thing you know you’re committed to a relationship and wondering how it happened. He’d even suspected it might turn out that way with Mary. But each day that passed, every message that came in from her, only confirmed what now seemed true. If he lost her, he would lose everything.
WHILE HE WAS composing the transmission to Mary, Bill had signaled him there was a message from Hutch.
“Dave,” she said, “you know about the hedgehogs.” She was seated behind her desk, wearing a navy blouse, open at the neck, and a silver chain. “It’s beginning to look as if all the clouds have one. Jenkins tells us there’s one at Lookout. The cloud has fallen away from it since it angled off to go after the Goompahs.” The imager zoomed in on her until her face filled the screen. Her eyes were intense. “It gives us a second arrow. When Frank uses the projectors, instead of just giving it a cube to chase, let’s also try showing it a hedgehog. If one doesn’t work, maybe the other will.
“Hope everything’s okay.”
HE WAS APPALLED to discover that some of his colleagues were actually looking forward to the coming disaster. Charlie Harding, a statistician, talked openly about watching a primitive culture respond to an attack that would certainly seem to them “celestial.”
“The interesting aspect,” he said, “will come afterward. We’ll be able to watch how they try to rationalize it, explain it to themselves.”
“If it were a human culture,” commented Elizabeth Madden, who had spent a lifetime writing books about tribal life in Micronesia, “they would look for something they’d done wrong, to incur divine displeasure.”
And so it went.
It would be unfair to suggest they were all that way. There were some who applauded the effort to get the natives out of the cities, get them somewhere beyond the center of destruction. But anyone who’d seen the images from Moonlight and 4418 Delta (where the first omega had hit) knew that a direct strike by the cloud might render irrelevant all efforts to move the population.
Most nights, before retiring, he sent angry transmissions off to Hutch, damning the clouds and their makers.
She seemed curiously unresponsive. Yes, it was a disaster in the making. Yes, it would be helpful if we could do something. Yes, getting them out of the cities might not be enough. She knew all that, lived with it every day. But she never mentioned giving the Academy a kick in the rear to try to jump-start something.
THEY HAD GOOD pictures of several of the isthmus cities, identified by latitude. Their names were not considered a critical order of business by the linguists, but since they would probably not survive the Event, it seemed appropriate to get past the numbers. Collingdale wondered which of them would turn out to be Mandigol.
The cities were attractive. They were spacious and symmetrical, the streets laid out in a pattern that suggested a degree of planning mixed in with the usual chaotic growth that traditionally started at a commercial area and spread out haphazardly in all directions. Unfortunately, the patterns of the Goompah cities were exactly what would draw the cloud.
Markover’s people had commented on a general style of design that had approximated classical Greek. They were right. Whatever one might say about the clownishness of these creatures, they knew how to lay out a city, and how to build.
The center of activity in the cities was usually near the waterfront area. But he saw parks and wide avenues and clusters of impressive structures everywhere. Bridges crossed streams and gulleys and even, in a couple of places, broad rivers. Roads and walkways were laid out with geometric precision.
Buildings that must have been private homes spread into the countryside, thinning out until forest took over. He spent hours studying the images coming from the Jenkins. The place wasn’t Moonlight, but it was worth saving.
LIBRARY ENTRY
The notion that a primitive race, or species, is best served by our keeping away from it, is an absurdity. Do we refrain from assisting remote tribes in South America or Africa or central Asia when they are in need? Do we argue that they are best left to starve on their own when we have wheat and vegetables to spare? To die by the tens of thousands from a plague when we have the cure ready to hand?
Consider our own blighted history. How much misery might we have avoided had some benevolent outsider stepped in, say, to prevent the collapse of the Hellenic states? To offer some agricultural advice? To prevent the rise to power of Caligula? To suggest that maybe the Crusades weren’t a good idea, and to show us how to throw some light into the Dark Ages? We might have neglected to create the Inquisition, or missed a few wars. Or neglected to keep slavery with us into the present day.
The standard argument is that a culture must find its own way. That it cannot survive an encounter with a technologically superior civilization. Even when the superior civilization wishes only to assist. That the weaker society becomes too easily dependent.
The cultures pointed to as examples of this principle are inevitably tribal. They are primitive societies, who, despite the claims made for their conquerors, are usually imposed on by well-meaning advocates of one kind or another, or are driven off by force. One thinks, for example, of the Native Americans. Or the various peoples of Micronesia.
However one may choose to interpret terrestrial experience, it is clear to all that the Goompahs are an advanced race. It is true that their technology is at about the level of imperial Rome, but it is a gross error to equate civilization with technology. They are, for the most part, peaceful. They have writing, they have the arts, they appear to have an ethical code which, at the very least, equals our own. A case can be made that the only area in which we excel is in the production of electrical power.
There is in fact no reason to believe that a direct intervention on behalf of the Goompahs would not be of immense benefit to them. Especially now, when they face a lethal danger of which they are not even aware. To stand by, and permit the massive destruction of these entities in the name of a misbegotten and wrongheaded policy, would be damnable.
The Council has the means to act. Let it do so. If it continues to dither, the North American Union should take it upon itself to do something while there is yet time.
— The New York Times
Wednesday, April 23, 2234
chapter 16
On board the Hawksbill, in hyperflight.
Saturday, April 26.
JULIE, MARGE, AND Whitlock had become friends. The women called him Whit, and they talked endlessly about omegas and cosmology, elephants and physicists, Goompahs and God. The days raced by, and Julie began to realize she had never been on a more enjoyable journey. It was almost as though her entire life had been spent preparing for this epochal flight.
Whit consistently delivered odd perspectives. He argued that the best form of government was an aristocracy, that a republic was safest, and that a democracy was most interesting. Mobs are unpredictable, he said. You just never know about them. He pointed out that during the Golden Age, the worst neighbor in the Hellespont had been Athens. On the major knee-bending religious faiths, he wondered whether a God subtle enough to have invented quantum mechanics would really be interested in having people deliver rote prayers and swing incense pots in His direction.