He touched the desk again and the heavens disappeared. We had windows and view again. Alfred O'Brien's office was on the fortieth floor of a museum complex, and out the window I could see the high leafy crowns of megatree oxygen factories and, on the ground beyond, a herd of pigmy mammoths, a gift from St. Petersburg, browsing on buttercups in their climate-controlled subarctic meadow. There was a complex of sports stadia beyond that, part of the vast group ringing the city, and the river, blue in the sun.
"We're puzzled," he said, "not only as to why they should have delusions or whatever it is, but why this particular one. You see, they are trying to tell us that these Outsiders tried to destroy them!
"The word is war.”
He fell silent. It was as if the obscenity hung in the air before us.
"The word, Karl, we have been working for centuries to remove from human consciousness. Why did they resurrect the idea?”
The progressive censorship of literature had been my job for a long time. Search and closure operations of military fants cults went with it. It was an inescapable complement to the genetic part of the program.
"You remember 1938," he said.
It was one of the secret dates every ARM operative in my section knew: In that year a 'radio' broadcast about an imaginary hostile Martian invasion had caused panic and terror and had paralyzed a large part of the United States of America for a night. One of the most serious landmark outbreaks of the Military Fantasy. The 'War of the Worlds'. It was pointed out to us in our training, lest we become complacent, that the idea of war had still had the potential to be taken seriously by large numbers of people only five years before the first test flight of the V-2 had launched the beginnings of the Space Age. Did the hoaxers know of that, too?
"I'll need to know more," I said.
"Of course. Look at these.”
O'Brien touched his desk again. A succession of holos sprang up in the air between us. There were also a series of flats.
"Here are the pictures they sent back. Well, what do you think of the Outsiders they've dreamed up? Pleasant-looking sons of bitches, aren't they?”
There were humans in the pictures, evidently in order to give some idea of scale. The humans were less than shoulder-high to the other creatures, orange colored, fanged almost like ancient saber-toothed tigers, but with odd differences: four-digited forepaws like clawed hands, shorter bodies and longer legs than real tigers, and triangular heads with bigger crania above feline faces. Distorted ears. The effect was of a monstrosity.
They appeared to be three-dimensional objects. "Jenny Hannifers," said the controller. "Sailors in ancient times sewed together dead monkeys and fish to sell as mermaids. These are a sophisticated version of the same thing.”
I looked down at the little mammoths, whose DNA had come from specimens preserved in the Siberian permafrost. "The tissue was grown in tanks, you mean?”
"No, I don't think so. It's possible perhaps. As a colony ship they had a lot of animal cell cultures and they had plenty of advanced facilities for DNA sewing machines. But there are much easier ways. They had every kind of virtual reality simulator and program.
"We've checked what records there were of the loading of the Angel's Pencil, of course. They weren't complete because a lot of personal property of crew members was never itemized.
"In any case the requirements of a colony ship are enormously complex. Some of the containers loaded might have held fake alien body parts. Some cargo had come from the Belt and we have no inventories of that. As you know, Belters hate keeping nonessential bureaucratic records and they hate any intrusions on their citizens' privacy. But they didn't need to carry physical props: Their computers would do the job. Entertainment programs and computer space are things no deep-spacer – especially no colony ship – is short of.”
"It seems a very queer sort of joke.”
"Exactly. Normal minds wouldn't do such a thing. Which means, obviously that we've got problems whatever the motive for producing them was.
"They say that these Outsiders approached them at an impossible speed, stopped dead in space in defiance of elementary laws of physics, and then tried to kill them by some sort of invisible heat ray after giving them all headaches. You can see how crazy it is. They haven't even bothered getting the basic science right, let alone the sociology.
"Then, they say, in trying to turn away they pointed their com-drive laser at the Outsider ship and a Belter crewman activated it. In one way we can be thankfuclass="underline" Suppose such a thing had really happened! When they examined the wreckage of the alien, so the message goes, they found it loaded with bomb-missiles, laser-cannon, ray-projectors: weapons, not signaling devices. Fusion-generators deliberately designed to destabilize at a remote command – sick, nightmarish things like that.”
"You're right," I said heavily after the implications of what he said had sunk in. "There's real illness here. Something deeper than I've encountered or read of." Then, knowing my words sounded somehow lame in the context of such madness, "It makes no sense.”
"No. It makes no sense. And you would think the crew of a spacecraft would know better than to tell us another spacecraft matched course with them at eighty percent of light-speed, and changed course instantaneously. As if anything organic wouldn't be killed by inertia. What about delta-v? It's as preposterous as expecting us to believe such an insanely aggressive culture would get into space at all!”
He projected another holo.
"Look at this. It's meant to be the Outsider ship.”
Two main pieces of wreckage tumbling in space, leaking smaller fragments of debris. Cables, ducting, unidentifiable stuff. I had the unpleasant thought that a living body chopped with an ax might leak pieces in the same way. There were tiny space-suited dolls maneuvering objects that included shrouded alien cadavers. There were other pictures, apparently taken from aboard the Outsider wreckage with the Angel's Pencil hanging in the background. But photographs taken in space have no scale. The objects could have been a mile across or the size of a man's hand. The EV humans could have been OO-scale figures from a child's model kit. But as he said, they were more probably electronic impulses than models. There were a lot of ways VR had already become a forensic problem.
"Can't we check it out? We've got good computers.”
"So have they.”
"I don't see anything that looks like a drive on it," I said. "Nothing like a ramscoop, no jets, no light-sail, no hydrogen tanks, no fusion bottles, nothing.”
"That's right. Rather an elementary error to design an extraordinarily maneuverable spacecraft without a drive. I told you they've ignored the science. But we know the things are fakes. What we want to know is why they were faked." He paused and contemplated his cigar, frowning. Then he switched his gaze to the pictures again.
"These things could be rather… disturbing, somehow?”
"Somehow, yes," I said, "I don't like them.”
"No. Only a few people have seen these things yet, all trained ARM personnel and a few of the Belter security people, and everyone has the same response. There's art gone into this.
"We're descended from creatures that were hunted by felines, Karl. It's almost as if whoever made up the morphology of these things has tapped into some sort of ancestral memory.”
"I still don't see exactly how I come into it." I did to some extent, though. And I saw another thing: If these holos of the alleged aliens became public, it was possible some gullible people might actually believe in them. Not as the symptoms of a space madness, though that would be bad enough, but as being real in themselves.
There were, I knew, plenty of people around bored and stupid enough to believe anything. Indeed, that was already a major social problem in itself. I understood why he had sent for me.