For some reason I came out of it first. “What the hell is taking them so long?” I barked irritably.
Tom started to say something soothing, then glanced at his watch and yelped. “You’re right. It’s been over an hour.”
I looked at the wall clock, got hopelessly confused until I realized it was on Greenwich time rather than Wall Street, and realized he was correct. “Chrissakes,” I shouted, “the whole bloody point of this exercise is to protect Shara from overexposure to free fall! I’m going forward.”
“Charlie, hold it.” Tom, with two good hands, unstrapped faster than I. “Dammit, stay right there and cool off. I’ll go find out what the holdup is.”
He was back in a few minutes, and his face was slack.
“We’re not going anywhere. Cox has orders to sit tight.”
“What? Tom, what the hell are you talking about?” His voice was all funny. “Red fireflies. More like bees, actually. In a balloon.”
He simply could not be joking, which meant he flat out had to have gone completely round the bend, which meant that somehow I had blundered into my favorite nightmare, where everyone but me goes crazy and begins gibbering at me. So I lowered my head like an enraged bull and charged out of the room so fast the door barely had time to get out of my way.
It just got worse. When I reached the door to the bridge I was going much too fast to be stopped by anything short of a body block, and the crewmen present were caught flatfooted. There was a brief flurry at the door, and then I was on the bridge, and then I decided that I had gone crazy too, which somehow made everything all right.
The forward wall of the bridge was one enormous video tank—and just enough off center to faintly irritate me, standing out against the black deep as clearly as cigarettes in a darkroom, there truly did swarm a multitude of red fireflies.
The conviction of unreality made it okay. But then Cox snapped me back to reality with a bellowed, “Off this bridge, Mister.” If I’d been in a normal frame of mind it would have blown me out the door and into the farthest corner of the ship; in my current state it managed to jolt me into acceptance of the impossible situation. I shivered like a wet dog and turned to him.
“Major,” I said desperately, “what is going on?”
As a king may be amused by an insolent varlet who refuses to kneel, he was bemused by the phenomenon of someone failing to obey him. It bought me an answer. “We are confronting intelligent alien life,” he said concisely. “I believe them to be sentient plasmoids.”
I had never for a moment believed that the mysterious object which had been leap-frogging around the solar system since I came to Skyfac was alive. I tried to take it in, then abandoned the task and went back to my main priority. “I don’t care if they’re eight tiny reindeer; you’ve got to get this can back to Earth now.”
“Sir, this vessel is on Emergency Red Alert and on Combat Standby. At this moment the suppers of everyone in North America are getting cold unnoticed. I will consider myself fortunate if I ever see Earth again. Now get off my bridge.”
“But you don’t understand. Shara’s right on the edge: farting around like this’ll kill her. That’s what you came up here to prevent, dammit—”
“MISTER ARMSTEAD! This is a military vessel. We are facing more than fifty intelligent beings who appeared out of hyperspace near here twenty minutes ago, beings who therefore use a drive beyond my conception with no visible parts. If it makes you feel any better I am aware that I have a passenger aboard of greater intrinsic value to my species than this ship and everyone else aboard her, and if it is any comfort to you this knowledge already provides a distraction I need like an auxiliary anus, and I can no more leave this orbit than I can grow horns. Now will you get off this bridge or will you be dragged?”
I didn’t get a chance to decide; they dragged me.
On the other hand, by the time I got back to our compartment, Cox had put our vidphone screen in circuit with the tank on the bridge. Shara and Tom were studying it with rapt attention. Having nothing better to do, I did too.
Tom had been right. They did act more like bees, in the swarming rapidity of their movement. I couldn’t get an accurate count: about fifty. And they were in a balloon—a faint, barely visible thing on the fine line between transparency and translucence. Though they darted like furious red gnats, it was only within the confines of the spheroid balloon—they never left it or seemed to touch its inner surface.
As I watched, the last of the adrenalin rinsed out of my kidneys, but it left a sense of frustrated urgency. I tried to grapple with the fact that these Space Commando special effects represented something that was—more important that Shara. It was a primevally disturbing notion, but I could not reject it.
In my mind were two voices, each hollering questions at the top of their lungs, each ignoring the other’s questions. One yelled: Are those things friendly? Or hostile? Or do they even use those concepts? How big are they? How far away? From where? The other voice was less ambitious, but just as loud; all it said, over and over again, was: How much longer can Shara remain in free fall without dooming herself?
Shara’s voice was full of wonder. “They’re… they’re dancing.”
I looked closer. If there was a pattern to the flies-on-garbage swarm they made, I couldn’t detect it. “Looks random to me.”
“Charlie, look. All that furious activity, and they never bump into each other or the walls of that envelope they’re in. They must be in orbits as carefully choreographed as those of electrons.”
“Do atoms dance?”
She gave me an odd look. “Don’t they, Charlie?”
“Laser beam,” Tom said.
We looked at him.
“Those things have to be plasmoids—the man I talked to said they show on deepspace radar. That means they’re ionized gases of some kind—the kind of thing that used to cause UFO reports.” He giggled, then caught himself. “If you could slice through that envelope with a laser, I’ll bet you could deionize them pretty good—besides, that envelope has to hold their life support, whatever it is they metabolize.”
I was dizzy. “Then we’re not defenseless?”
“You’re both talking like soldiers,” Shara burst out. “I tell you, they’re dancing. Dancers aren’t fighters.”
“Come on, Shara,” I barked. “Even if those things happened to be remotely like us, that’s not true. T’ai chi, karate, kung fu—they’re dance.” I nodded to the screen. “All we know about these animated embers is that they travel interstellar space. That’s enough to scare me.”
“Charlie, look at them,” she commanded.
I did.
By God, they didn’t look threatening. And they did, the more I watched, seem to move in a dancelike way, whirling in mad adagios just too fast for the eye to follow. Not at all like conventional dance—more analogous to what Shara had begun with Mass Is A Verb. I found myself wanting to switch to another camera for contrast of perspective, and that made my mind start to wake up at last. Two ideas surfaced, the second one necessary in order to sell Cox the first.