The Fourth Science Fiction MEGAPACK ®. Айн Рэнд

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СКАЧАТЬ down at the wub, into the gleaming, moist eyes, he pressed the trigger.

      * * * *

      The taste was excellent.

      They sat glumly around the table, some of them hardly eating at all. The only one who seemed to be enjoying himself was Captain Franco.

      “More?” he said, looking around. “More? And some wine, perhaps.”

      “Not me,” French said. “I think I’ll go back to the chart room.”

      “Me, too.” Jones stood up, pushing his chair back. “I’ll see you later.”

      The Captain watched them go. Some of the others excused themselves.

      “What do you suppose the matter is?” the Captain said. He turned to Peterson. Peterson sat staring down at his plate, at the potatoes, the green peas, and at the thick slab of tender, warm meat.

      He opened his mouth. No sound came.

      The Captain put his hand on Peterson’s shoulder.

      “It is only organic matter, now,” he said. “The life essence is gone.” He ate, spooning up the gravy with some bread. “I, myself, love to eat. It is one of the greatest things that a living creature can enjoy. Eating, resting, meditation, discussing things.”

      Peterson nodded. Two more men got up and went out. The Captain drank some water and sighed.

      “Well,” he said. “I must say that this was a very enjoyable meal. All the reports I had heard were quite true—the taste of wub. Very fine. But I was prevented from enjoying this pleasure in times past.”

      He dabbed at his lips with his napkin and leaned back in his chair. Peterson stared dejectedly at the table.

      The Captain watched him intently. He leaned over.

      “Come, come,” he said. “Cheer up! Let’s discuss things.”

      He smiled.

      “As I was saying before I was interrupted, the role of Odysseus in the myths—”

      Peterson jerked up, staring.

      “To go on,” the Captain said. “Odysseus, as I understand him—”

      PICTURES DON’T LIE, by Katherine MacLean

      The man from the News asked, “What do you think of the aliens, Mr. Nathen? Are they friendly? Do they look human?”

      “Very human,” said the thin young man.

      Outside, rain sleeted across the big windows with a steady, faint drumming, blurring and dimming the view of the airfield where They would arrive. On the concrete runways the puddles were pockmarked with rain, and the grass growing untouched between the runways of the unused field glistened wetly, bending before gusts of wind.

      Back at a respectful distance from the place where the huge spaceship would land were the gray shapes of trucks, where TV camera crews huddled inside their mobile units, waiting. Farther back in the deserted, sandy landscape, behind distant sandy hills, artillery was ringed in a great circle, and in the distance across the horizon bombers stood ready at airfields, guarding the world against possible treachery from the first alien ship ever to land from space.

      “Do you know anything about their home planet?” asked the man from the Herald.

      The Times man stood with the others, listening absently, thinking of questions but reserving them. Joseph R. Nathen, the thin young man with the straight black hair and the tired lines on his face, was being treated with respect by his interviewers. He was obviously on edge, and they did not want to harry him with too many questions at once. They wanted to keep his good will. Tomorrow he would be one of the biggest celebrities ever to appear in headlines.

      “No, nothing directly.”

      “Any ideas or deductions?” the Herald persisted.

      “Their world must be Earthlike to them,” the weary-looking young man answered uncertainly. “The environment evolves the animal. But only in relative terms, of course.” He looked at them with a quick glance and then looked away evasively, his lank black hair beginning to cling to his forehead with sweat. “That doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”

      “Earthlike,” muttered a reporter, writing it down as if he had noticed nothing more in the reply.

      The Times man glanced at the Herald, wondering if he had noticed, and received a quick glance in exchange.

      The Herald asked Nathen, “You think they are dangerous, then?”

      It was the kind of question, assuming much, that usually broke reticence and brought forth quick facts—when it hit the mark. They all knew of the military precautions, although they were not supposed to know.

      The question missed. Nathen glanced out the window vaguely. “No, I wouldn’t say so.”

      “You think they are friendly, then?” said the Herald, equally positive on the opposite tack.

      A fleeting smile touched Nathen’s lips. “Those I know are.”

      There was no lead in this direction, and they had to get the basic facts of the story before the ship came. The Times asked, “What led up to your contacting them?”

      Nathen answered, after a hesitation, “Static. Radio static. The Army told you my job, didn’t they?”

      The Army had told them nothing at all. The officer who had conducted them in for the interview stood glowering watchfully, as if he objected by instinct to telling anything to the public.

      Nathen glanced at him doubtfully. “My job is radio decoder for the Department of Military Intelligence. I use a directional pickup, tune in on foreign bands, record any scrambled or coded messages I hear, and build automatic decoders and descramblers for all the basic scramble patterns.”

      The officer cleared his throat but said nothing. The reporters smiled, noting that down.

      Security regulations had changed since arms inspection had been legalized by the U.N. Complete information being the only public security against secret rearmament, spying and prying had come to seem a public service. Its aura had changed. It was good public relations to admit to it.

      Nathen continued, “In my spare time I started directing the pickup at stars. There’s radio noise from stars, you know. Just stuff that sounds like spatter static, and an occasional squawk. People have been listening to it for a long time, and researching, trying to work out why stellar radiation on those bands comes in such jagged bursts. It didn’t seem natural.”

      He paused and smiled uncertainly, aware that the next thing he would say was the thing that would make him famous—an idea that had come to him while he listened, an idea as simple and as perfect as the one that came to Newton when he saw the apple fall.

      “I decided it wasn’t natural. I tried decoding it.”

      Hurriedly, he tried to explain it away and make it seem obvious. “You see, there’s an old intelligence СКАЧАТЬ