Anything You Can Do… (Unabridged). Randall GarrettЧитать онлайн книгу.
next picture."
The scene remained the same, and yet there was a definite change.
"This was taken three days later. If you'll notice, the normal rust-red of the foliage has darkened to a purplish brown in the area around the crash site. Now a Martian paper-tree, even in the mutated form, is quite resistant to U-V, since it evolved under the thin atmosphere of Mars, which gives much less protection from ultraviolet radiation than Earth's does. Nevertheless, those trees have a bad case of sunburn."
"And no heat," said a third man. "Wow."
"Oh, there was some heat, but not anywhere near what you'd expect. The nearer trees were rather dry, as though they'd been baked, but only at the surface, and the temperature probably didn't rise much above one-fifty centigrade."
"How about X rays?" asked still another man. "Anything shorter than a hundred Ångstroms detected?"
"No. If there was any radiation that hard, there was no detector close enough to measure it. We doubt, frankly, whether there was any."
"The 'fire', if you want to call it that, must have stunk up the place pretty badly," said one of the men dryly.
"It did. There were still traces of ozone and various oxides of nitrogen in the air when the fire prevention flyers arrived. The wind carried them away from the ranger, so he didn't get a whiff of them."
"And this—this 'fire'—it destroyed the ship completely?"
"Almost completely. There are some lumps of metal around, but we can't make anything of them yet. Some of them are badly fused, but that damage was probably done before the ship landed. Certainly there was not enough heat generated after the crash to have done that damage." His hand moved over the control panel in the armrest of his chair, and the scene changed.
"This was taken from the ground. Those lumps you see are the pieces of metal I was talking about. Notice the fine white powdery ash, which caused the white spot that you could see from the air. That is evidently all that is left of the hull and the rest of the ship. None of it is radioactive.
"Random samplings from various parts of the area show that the ash consists of magnesium, lithium, and beryllium carbonates."
"You don't mean oxides?" said one of the others.
"No. I mean carbonates. And some silicate. We estimate that the remaining ash could not have constituted more than ten percent of the total mass of the hull of the ship. The rest of it vaporized, apparently into carbon dioxide and water."
"Some kind of plastic?" hazarded one of the men.
"Undoubtedly, if you want to use a catchall term like 'plastic'. But what kind of plastic goes to pieces like that?"
That rhetorical question was answered by a silence.
"There's no doubt," said one of them after a moment, "that circumstantial evidence alone would link the alien with the ship. But have you any more conclusive evidence?"
The hand moved, and the scene changed again. It was not a pretty scene.
"That, as you can see, is a closeup of the late Wang Kulichenko, the forest ranger who was the only man ever to see the alien ship before it was destroyed. Notice the peculiar bruises on the cheek and ear—the whole side of the head. The pattern is quite similar on the other side of the head."
"It looks—umm—rather like a handprint."
"It is. Kulichenko was slapped—hard!—on both sides of his head. It crushed his skull." There was an intake of breath.
"This next picture—" The scene changed. "—shows the whole body. If you'll look closely you'll see the same sort of prints on the ground around it. All very much like handprints. And that ties in very well with the photographs of the alien itself."
"There's no doubt about it," said one of the others. "The connection is definitely there."
The lecturer's hand moved over the control panel again, and suddenly the screen was filled with the image of an eight-limbed horror with four glaring violet eyes. In spite of themselves, a couple of the men gasped. They had seen photographs before, but a full-sized three-dimensional color projection is something else again.
"Until three weeks ago, we knew of no explanation for the peculiar happenings in northern Asia. After eight months of investigation, we found ourselves up against a blank wall. Nothing could account for that peculiar fire nor for the queer circumstances surrounding the death of the forest ranger. The investigators suspected an intelligent alien life-form, but—well, the notion simply seemed too fantastic. Attempts to trail the being by means of those peculiar 'footprints' failed. They ended at a riverbank and apparently never came out again. We know now that it swam downstream for over a hundred miles. Little wonder it got away.
"Even those investigators who suspected something non-human pictured the being as humanoid, or, rather, anthropoid in form. The prints certainly suggest those of an ape. There appeared to be four of them, judging by the prints—although frequently there were only three and sometimes only two. It all depended on how many of his 'feet' he felt like walking on."
"And then the whole herd of them dived into a river and never came up again, eh?" remarked one of the listeners.
"Exactly. You can see why the investigators kept the whole thing quiet. Nothing more was seen, heard, or reported for eight months.
"Then, three weeks ago, a non-vision phone call was received by the secretary of the Board of Regents of the Khrushchev Memorial Psychiatric Hospital in Leningrad. An odd, breathy voice, speaking very bad Russian, offered a meeting. It was the alien. He managed to explain, in spite of the language handicap, that he did not want to be mistaken for a wild animal, as had happened with the forest ranger.
"The secretary, Mr. Rogov, felt that the speaker was probably deranged, but, as he said later, there was something about that voice that didn't sound human. He said he would make arrangements, and asked the caller to contact him again the next day. The alien agreed. Rogov then—"
"Excuse me," one of the men interrupted apologetically, "but did he learn Russian all by himself, or has it been established that someone taught him the language?"
"The evidence is that he learned it all by himself, from scratch, in those eight months."
"I see. Excuse my interruption. Go on."
"Mr. Rogov was intrigued by the story he had heard. He decided to check on it. He made a few phone calls, asking questions about a mysterious crash in the paper forests, and the death of a forest ranger. Naturally those who did know were curious about how Mr. Rogov had learned so much about the incident. He told them.
"By the time the alien made his second call, a meeting had been arranged. When he showed up, those of the Board who were still of the opinion that the call had been made by a crank or a psychosis case changed their minds very rapidly."
"I can see why," murmured someone.
"The alien's ability to use Russian is limited," the speaker continued. "He picked up vocabulary and grammatical rules very rapidly, but he seemed completely unable to use the language beyond discussion of concrete objects and actions. His mind is evidently too alien to enable him to do more than touch the edges of human communication.
"For instance, he called himself 'Nipe' or 'Neep', but we don't know whether that refers to him as an individual or as a member of his race. Since Russian lacks both definite and indefinite articles, it is possible that he was calling himself 'a Nipe' or 'the Nipe'. Certainly that's the impression he gave.
"In the discussions that followed, several peculiarities were noticed, as you can read in detail in the reports that the Board and the Government staff prepared. For instance, in discussing mathematics the Nipe seemed to be completely at a loss. He apparently thought of mathematics as a spoken language rather than a written one and could not progress beyond simple diagrams. That's just one small example. I'm just trying to give you a brief outline now; you can read the reports for full information.
"He