I don’t think I ever was ready, but after a while I opened it anyway. See, the way you remember things is associative. I had lost some associations. I could remember that something else had been on my mind, but I couldn’t remember what. I could say, “Gee, sure, at that time I was really shaken up because—”
But I couldn’t remember what the “because” was.
And that, I finally decided, was worse than having the whole thing right in front of me all the time, because if I had to stew and fret and worry, at least I could know what I was worrying about.
To give you an idea of how I felt after my little adventure with the Foe on Moorea, I seriously considered asking Essie to put that one away for me in mothballs, too.
But I couldn’t.
I had to face it and live with it, and, oh, my God, it was scary.
I kept going over and over that long wordless meeting of minds, and the more I thought about it, the huger and more terrifying it was. I, little Robinette Broadhead, had been in the presence of the things-the creatures, the monsters, maybe one might even say the people-who were busy turning the entire universe upside down for their own pleasure.
What was a feckless, fragile little kid like me doing in the same league as superstars like them?
I need to try to put something into perspective.
It isn’t going to be easy. It isn’t even going to be possible, in any real sense, because the perspective is too immense-Albert would probably say “incommensurable,” meaning that you can’t measure the things involved on the same scale. It’s like-like-well, suppose you were talking to one of those early australopithecines of half a miffion years ago or so. You could probably find a way to explain to him that where you had come from (say, somewhere in Europe) was a hell of a long way from where he was born-say, somewhere in Africa. You might even be able to tell him that Alaska and Australia were a hell of a lot farther still. That much he might understand.
But is there any conceivable way in which you could tell him how much farther away were, say, the core of the Galaxy of the Magellanic Clouds? Impossible! After a certain point-for australopithecine or modern-day human or even machine-stored intelligence like me-big is simply indistinguishably big.
For that reason, I don’t know how to describe just how long it took for me to experience that long, tedious faster-than-light trip from JAWS to the Watch Wheel.
It was forever. I can put the numbers in. Measured by gigabit time, it was well over ten-to-the-ninth milliseconds, which is about as much time, by meat standards, as my whole meat life had been before I was vastened.
But that doesn’t really convey the slow, draggy way the time passed. On the “long” trip from Wrinkle Rock to JAWS I had made Albert show me the entire history of the universe.
Now I had begun a trip that was a good thousand times longer, and what could he do for an encore?
I needed a whole lot of things to do to keep busy. I had no trouble finding the first one.
Albert had persuaded General Cassata to persuade JAWS to let us access every bit of data they had on the Foe. There was a hell of a lot of it. The trouble was that, as far as what was going on right now was concerned, it was all negative. It didn’t answer the questions I really wanted answered, which were mostly questions I didn’t have enough background knowledge to ask.
Optimistic old Albert denied that. “We have learned much, Robin,” he lectured, chalk in hand before his blackboard. “For example, we now know that the Galaxy is a horse, the dog did not bark, and the cat is among the pigeons.”
“Albert,” said Essie levelly. She was speaking to him, but she was looking at me. I supposed I had been looking confused at Albert’s undesired playfulness, but that was not odd. I was confused, not to mention stressed, worried, and generally unhappy.
Albert got his stubborn look. “Yes, Mrs. Broadhead?”
“Have thought for some time program may need routine overhaul, Albert. Is this now necessary?”
“I don’t think so,” he said, looking uncomfortable.
“Whimsy,” she said, “is useful and even desirable in Albert Einstein program, for Robin wishes it so. However.”
He said uncomfortably, “I take your meaning, Mrs. Broadhead. What you want is a simple and lucid synoptic report. Very well. The data is as follows. First, we have no evidence that any other bits, pieces, pseudopods, or extrusions of the Foe other than the ones Robin encountered on Tahiti exist anywhere else in the Galaxy. Second, we have no evidence that they still exist. Third, as to those units themselves, we have no evidence that they are in any significant way different from ourselves, which is to say patterned, organized, and stored electromagnetic charges in some suitable substrate, specifically in this case the pods of Oniko and Sneezy.” He looked directly at me. “Are you following this, Robin?”
“Not a lot,” I said, making an effort. “You mean they’re just electrons, like you and me? Just some other kind of Dead Men? Not some subnuclear particles, like?”
Albert winced. “Robin,” he complained, “I know you know better than that. Not only as to particle physics but as to grammar.”
“You know what I mean,” I flared, trying not to be on edge and making myself more so by the effort.
Albert sighed. “Indeed I do. Very well, I will spell it out. With all of the instrumentation we were able to bring to bear, which was probably all that would have been of use, we were able to detect no field, ray, energy emission, or other physical effect associated with the Foe which was not compatible with the assumption that they are, yes, composed of electromagnetic energy just like us.”
“No gamma rays, even?”
“Definitely no gamma rays,” he said, looking irritated. “Also no x-rays, cosmic rays, quark flows, or neutrinos; also, in another category, no poltergeists, N-rays, psychic auras, fairies at the bottom of the garden, or indications of the adeledicnander force.”
“Albert!” cried Essie.
“You’re patronizing me, Albert,” I complained.
He gazed at me for a long moment.
Then he stood up. His hair had turned woolly, and his complexion had darkened. Straw hat in hand (I could not remember seeing him with the hat before), he strutted a few steps in a cakewalk and chanted, “’deedy Ah is, suh, yassuh, yassuh, yuk, yuk, yuk.”
“Damn it, Albert!” I shouted.
He resumed his normal appearance. “You have no sense of fun in your heart anymore, Robin,” he complained.
Essie opened her mouth to speak. Then she closed it again, looking at me in an inquiring way. Then she shook her head, and, to my surprise, said only, “Go on, Albert.”
“Thank you,” he said, as though it had been no more than he expected, in spite of her earlier threats. “To put it all more prosaically, since you are determined to be a wet blanket, let me return to my previous points which, if you remember, I put in semihumorous fashion to make them more palatable, and as a mnemonic device. ‘The Galaxy is a horse.’ Yes. A Trojan horse. Every external appearance indicates that it is just as it always has been in our lifetimes, but I infer that it is full of enemy troops. Or, to put it more simply, there are a whole lot of those Foe emissaries around, Robin, and we can’t detect them.”
“But there’s been no evidence,” I cried, and then, as he gazed at me, “Well, yeah, I see what you’re saying. If we don’t see them, it’s because they’re hiding. Right. I follow that. But how do you know they are hiding? There has been only one single transmission that we can blame on the Foe-what?”