The Rape of The Sun Page 8

  It was just after 1500 hours, and the control room had the returning shuttle orbiter on radio and radar; the craft was about to begin atmospheric reentry. Glancing at us as we entered, the mission director called: “Just in time! Orbiter C-9, Doctor Cavell and Captain Jensen along with Colonel Voorhees have just entered the control room; you said you had a report that they should hear as soon as any of us.”

  “Ah, roger,” the commander’s dry voice responded. “Doctor Cavell, Captain Jensen, I have just enough time to get this out before communication goes bananas. I’m afraid we’ve lost your monster, that is, we have it, but it looks dead. We finally got monitors on it, and we find no life signs at all—oh-oh, here we go, I—” It faded.

  “Shadow zone,” said the mission director. “Eight minutes in a free-falling craft, thirty minutes in the shuttle. Good time for a coffee break all around.” Some of the controllers arose for the break; others remained at their consoles; somebody would bring them coffee. Conversation in the snack bar centered on the space creature. Said a bioscientist who had joined us: “The book says nothing about dragons up there— or about any sort of life except some microscopic cysts.”

  “I confess,” I returned, “a certain skepticism—”

  Squawk-box: “Two minutes before restored communications on Shuttle C-9, all hands back, bring any coffee with you.” We trooped back in.

  The mission director told us, “Sorry, friends, but you can’t talk with them until we have them safely down.” We stood or sat as fascinated spectators while the orbiter reappeared on console screens, normal voice play resumed, and the shuttle maneuvered in growingly dense atmosphere until at last it glided in for a smooth landing. Marvelous! Sven would have , bet that it hadn’t scorched a belly-tile.

  The beast swam into the cavernous and brilliantly lighted lab; this dragon hung belly-drooping on the suspension cables of an overhead traveling crane, hung cradled in the belts with which the astronauts had secured it in the shuttle hold. The satellite, following, drew absolutely no attention. Nobody gasped, but the mean-looking animal was awesome. Phototechnicians were at work around and overhead and beneath, getting the specimen on movie film and on holographic stills.

  Unquestionably it was dead. They lowered it prone on the floor. Measuring tapes were deployed: the thing stretched five meters from snout to tail fins and about the same in wing-spread; its whiptail, straightened, extended five meters from its base; its helical horns reached out a meter from its forehead. The wide wings made maximum girth-measurement difficult, but that girth seemed to be five meters again. Dorsally it was dark green and furry; the fur was stiff and short, and the green color was common to fur and skin. The head, in addition to horns, had small pointed ears and a pair of small eyes which seemed to be all green iris except for the black pupils; these eyes were, positioned forward, but probably they were not quite binocular. The snout was diabolically batlike; and below-behind it was a nasty shark-mouth complete with large white sharp-pointed teeth—which confused us because some of them were slanted slightly forward, some were vertical, and some sloped slightly backward: that sort of dental arrangement seemed biologically inefficient for biting or chewing.

  The biochemist .at the snack bar, Dr. Edgar Fine, had stayed with us; and we had been joined by the chief space surgeon Dr. Joseph Thoms. The surgeon now knelt on the beast’s back while his fingers felt their way down back-center. “I think it’s a notochord, all right,” he remarked, “as one might expect of an elasmobranch.”

  The bioscientist had other ideas. “It does look like a manta ray, Joe, but I somehow doubt that it is an elasmobranch. Too many atypical features: the snout with its nostrils, the fur, the skin which is altogether different from sharkhide. Do you suppose it can be turned over without damage?”

  Sven and I were watching and listening with passive fascination. In me, there were gut feelings of slight revulsion and eerie fear.

  Technicians gathered up the suspension belts, which were still under the creature, and rehooked them to the crane while Joe slid off its back. Six workers aided by the crane brought off the elaborate job of turning it onto its backside; the only damage was some fur-ruffling. Joe remounted, The dorsal surface, throat and belly and wings and much of the tail, were colored chartreuse.

  Ed climbed aboard too, remarking: “I want to look first for gill slits under the wings. Eh, here and here; but if these are gills, they are damned funny ones. See these tubular swellings, one on each wing up high near what we might call the armpits? Look at this little hole at the back of each swelling. The holes look like vents for expelling something—and in deep space, it sure wouldn’t be water, or air either.”

  “When you get right down to it, Ed,” Surgeon Joe commented, “why would a space creature have gills—or nostrils either?”

  Moving aft on the body, bioscientist Ed muttered: “Presumably not a mammal—no nipples or evidence of lactation pores. No visible genitalia, but here is a well-defined pair of anuses; possibly these are cloacal, internally there should be either penises or some sort of female equipment. Or should the plurals be anoos and penoos? That’s about it for now. Joe?”

  “No ribs either,” said the surgeon, palpating the chest, “but some sort of smooth endoskeleton. Those nostrils really bug me; what would it breathe?”

  I contributed: “Maybe it is a lung-breather jettisoned by a low-cruising flying saucer.” It brought some nervous chuckles.

  “Perhaps not a joke,” Ed returned. “I can’t now figure any way that this damned thing could have evolved on Earth.”

  “There are some other things,” Joe asserted, absently slapping the dry furred belly. “It died hours ago in space, but there is no evidence of bloat; also no start of rigor mortis, although it may be too early for that. It must contain decay bacteria in order to assimilate whatever it finds to eat in space, and perhaps here we are in some danger from that; and yet, after a couple of hours in our atmosphere, there is no odor of decay. It’s a hell of an anomaly, and I think we ought to cut.”

  I squeezed Sven’s arm. “Agreed,” said Sven. “But first— chief, how about your photography as is?”

  “Complete,” said the chief photographer who knew his business. “And we’ll aim internally from overhead while the doctor cuts.”

  Ejaculated Jeff: “We may not have to cut. Look here.” He was fingering something lateral to the belly area. Sven and I climbed aboard while with his two index fingers Joe parted the fur, revealing a segment of a tiny line-bulge no more conspicuous than a hairline cicatrice.

  I murmured: “If I didn’t know better, I’d call it a pressure zipper.”

  Ed uttered: “No!”

  Sven, progressively parting fur, was following the line down toward the tail, while the surgeon watched. Sven said: “It terminates here just aft of the anuses. . . . Wait.” He fingered the far side of the anuses. “Sure enough, here’s the stem end of another line miming up the other side—hey, I think I found a node where one would start running the zipper. I’m going to try—”

  He pressed; the point sprung open. “By damn!” I shouted. “Our dragon is artificial, or something!”

  “Here, let me,” said Joe, crawling to where Sven was; and Sven yielded, knowing that the surgeon’s fingers were extra sensitive. Slowly Joe ran the zipper with his middle finger, tracing it up the length of the body, around the edges of one wing, up and across the throat, out around the other wing, then down the other side to just short of tail-base. He backed on hands and knees, having left the loosed stretch of ventral fur and skin slightly rumpled, revealing at the edges a hint of the interior.

  We stared.

  Joe said, “I don’t know why I have to ask. Shall we lay back the skin?”

  Clearing my throat, I said, “Let’s do.”

  Crawling forward, I straddled the thing’s throat and stared down the body length while Sven in the middle and Joe and Ed on the two wings grasped the leading edges of the unzipped skin and laboriously backed, peeling it
away as though they were removing a heavy tarpaulin from a cannon. When the butts of the three men butted at the body-narrows, Joe and Ed slid off the sides and continued pulling skin from floor-level while Sven crabbed it down from the belly, dismounting finally by using tail fins for steps. They laid the massive pelt fur-down on the floor, covering the creature’s tail; the hide was still attached to the creature by a six-inch width just above the anuses to which it was sealed for obvious reasons. There was no bleeding: our dragon-ray was bloodless, its exposed interior was an intricacy of containers and wiring.

  The surgeon looked at the bioscientist. “Ed,” he said, “this is not our cup of tea. Doctor Cavell, Captain Jensen, pray take over—but do you mind if Ed and I hang around to watch?”

  “My God,” I groaned. “It’s my dish, all right—but somebody get me a drink; electronics I can handle, but not as guts.”

  Hours later, Sven and I sat facing each other in my hotel room, sipping terminal wine, talking in something that approached restrained panic. During the hours we had spent prowling the dry viscera of the manta-robot, somebody had brought supper; Sven had snacked lightly as he worked, but greenish-faced me had eschewed all food. The viscera were programed wiring with mechanical interfaces, pure and simple; but I could not shake the impression that I was performing an autopsy.

  Throughout, I had kept up a running fire of pertinent comment, all of which, with Sven’s interjections, had been recorded via a sensitive overhead pickup. Samples: “Eyes are indeed light sensors. . . . Homs appear nonfunctional, probably something related to style that might tell us a thing or two about the designers. . . . How about ears and nostrils? No sense in space. . . . Oh, here it is: nostrils are radar outputs, ears are return input receivers. . . . Can’t figure jaws and sharp forward-andTbackward teeth, no food-tube connection to the interior; maybe it was programed to protect itself against whatever, that would account for its mouth-attack on our satellite in the shuttle. . . . Look here, Sven, these two orifices behind the leading edges of the wings, these open tubes that Ed analogized to gill-vents—jet nozzles is what they are, for propulsion; yeah, right here in center-chest between the wings is a large canister tube-connected to the nozzles, probably contains or contained compact fuel. . . . Everything else in these wings is microcircuit wiring, can’t take time with it now, let’s go netherward. . . . Oh, here’s why the thing died, as they say: prime fusing right here behind the fuel pack, and you can see that the fusing is fused, the thing kicked up so much fuss in the shuttle that it blew itself. . . . These leads from the fusing, one set goes forward to the fuel pack and the other backward to this box, can’t be nuclear because we haven’t counted enough geigers, perhaps it contains a big storage battery, better not get into that before tomorrow morning—”

  That was when I had to quit; and Sven, too, was ready.

  Now, in my room, I said to Sven in a voice that grated: “Sorry I pooped out before I could get much behind the chest. What did you make of the middle and rearwards?”

  Sven’s jaw muscles were knotted, he was rhythmically knuckle-rapping a meta chair arm. “What I got,” he answered, his voice only slightly better controlled than mine, “would appear to complete some kind of picture, though I don’t know what picture. Practically all of the abdominal capacity is filled with two elastic-walled containers which appear to be empty; I pressed on them all over with both hands and most of my weight, and all I got was air-poofs out of the anuses to which the containers are connected.”

  “Air-poofs? Air out of space?”

  “Probably the vacuum in the empty containers began sucking in air as soon as the shuttle landed and its hold was opened. Fascinating that atmospheric pressure didn’t squash the best. But there’s more. After you gave up and sat down for a recovery drink, I went in with a light under the power pack—or maybe over the pack, since we were examining from the bottom. There’s another small container which is rigid, connected to the power pack with more fused fusing, and it is bristling with leads to and from almost everywhere. It has to be the major control complex. Some leads go to various positions along the underparts of those big empty containers in the belly; and from die feel of the container walls, they embody spiral sphincter muscles which would progressively compress the containers beginning at the front and going on back, in order to force the contents out through the anuses, like squeezing toothpaste out of a tube. Probably these containers were completely contracted at the time of the fuse-blows, and the power loss allowed the sphincters to relax—which caused the suck-in of air.”

  “Aha! And when you got air-poofs, did they—was there any odor? I’m sure you sniffed it, you twirp!”

  “Let me get back to that, I want to pursue this wiring thing. There are leads from the tail to the central complex, and quite separate leads from the central complex to tail and wing muscles. I’m provisionally guessing that occasional instructions from outside could be radioed to the tail as an antenna in order to change or override the guidance programing and so on. Speaking of guidance, tomorrow you’ll want to check into those wings, looking for a gimmick that might enable the brute to adjust its wings and tail in order to maneuver in solar wind. But the major activation seems to be a fixed program—and you’ll never guess where the programing keyboard is?”

  “I don’t feel like guessing. What do you think?”

  “Those teeth.”

  “Teeth?”

  “There is a lead to the central console from the root of each and every tooth. I fiddled with the teeth; each one can be moved for click-setting in one of three positions, inward, outward, or vertical.”

  Weakly, I told him, “I counted the teeth, there are fifty of them. If the program is set up by the pattern of inward, outward, or vertical teeth, with maybe five or ten of the teeth as program-level indicators and maybe with a variant number of pushes for each tooth, the number of program permutations is astonomical. Oh, fine. My paranoia is in high gear—except that if I think someone is watching us, I’m probably right. Sven—”

  “Helen?”

  “The—the anal odor. What?” I was rigid.

  He too was rigid, the knuckle-rapping had resumed. “Nothing organic. At least, nothing animal. It was—most faintly, you understand—like—”

  “Like what?”

  “Like—the odor of new-mown alfalfa.”

  He was gazing hard at my taut face. His eyes dropped to my blouse, whose three top buttons were loosened. He went male-rigid. Seeing this, I released a long groan; I came to my feet, ripped my blouse wide open, ran to him, sprang into his lap, clutched him hard around the neck rubbing my forehead into his neck and grating, “I think I’m going crazy brutalize me before I do go crazy”

  Wel simply had to be told about the space-manta. I did it Monday night at home, describing its invasion of the shuttle in space, drawing him a rough picture of how the thing looked, telling him about its electronic innards, promising to show him pictures when they would be ready. Then I waited.. Smoking, he mused. After a bit, he asserted: “You know, - Hel, this is the most positive and circumstantial report* of a UFO that anybody has ever brought out."

  “You agree that we are being invaded?”

  “No imaginable creature can live in space, and you’ve established that the manta is a. robot, and a robot has no discretion and is not spontaneously generated. Ergo, the robot has been sent. What else?”

  “I can’t imagine what else. And also, let me tell you about Sven’s poofing of the anuses and getting the aroma of new-mown alfalfa—”

  “Oho!” Wel stubbed out his cigarette. He ruminated. He demanded, “You say you first thought it was a dragon?” “Right. Only a first impression, of course, but still—” “You know I play hunches. I am reminded that we are involved in a sun project. I am also reminded of the Babylonian dragon Tiamat who created eclipses by swallowing the sun.”

  “I thought of her, too.”

  “Of course you would. Only—

  “Wei?”

 
“The hunch-connection is, that the planting of the draconic space-manta has something to do indirectly with our solar project.”

  “Only a hunch, husband.”

  “I plan to run it down.”

  “Of course you would. Which reminds me that I am going to persuade J.C. to go public on this. Through you.”

  “On the space-manta?” His eagerness was manifest.

  I cooled it immediately. “Definitely not on the manta yet—what do you want to do, start a flock of riots?” His helpless grin-crinkle was comical, it made me laugh aloud. Recovering, I reassured him: “I mean on our solar satellite project, I want J.C. to okay a report forward to NASA in Washington, and a decent few days afterward we ought to go public.”

  Wel went through a series of diversified crinkles: a delighted smile with eyebrows up, then a crinkle of meditation, then a frowning crinkle. During the frown, he lit another, and then he queried: “Wouldn’t publicity telegraph your competitors to go into action?”

  “Of course, but they’re way behind, they can’t even start catching up until they see eventually that our gamble is working. And by then we’ll have the inside track. Can you make a meeting with J.C. Thursday morning?”

  “Well, natch—”

  “I’ll tell you in advance if I blow it.”

  “God, what a hell of a Sunday feature—”

  Long silence, while he was meditating happily and I was turning over the favorable and unfavorable aspects of blowing something else. I arrived at decision, but it was awfully hard to bring out.

  I said unhappily, “Wel-”

  He looked up at me. “Hel?”

  I brought it out. “He got me. Or rather, I got him.”

  His frown was profound. “You and Sven?”

  Frowning, I stared down at his feet. “Right.”

  I could feel him meditating. I didn’t dare look. He said presently, “Our new house has three bedrooms, it’s a shame for Sven to quarter elsewhere—”