Anything You Can Do ... Page 4

  _[4]_

  Government City was something of a paradox. It was the largest capitalcity, in terms of population, that had ever been built on Earth, andyet, again in terms of population, it was nowhere near as large as Tokyoor London. The solution to the paradox lies in discovering that the term"population" is used in two different senses, thus exposing the logicalfallacy of the undistributed middle. If, in referring to London orTokyo, the term "population" is restricted to those and only those whoare actively engaged in the various phases of actual government--as itis when referring to Government City--the apparent paradox resolvesitself.

  Built on the slagged-down remains of New York's Manhattan Island, whichhad been destroyed by a sun bomb during the Holocaust nearly a centurybefore, Government City occupied all but the upper three miles of theisland, and the population consisted almost entirely of men and womenengaged, either directly or indirectly, in the business of governing aplanet. There were no shopping centers and no entertainment areas. Thesmall personal flyer, almost the same size as the old gasoline-drivenautomobile, could, because of its inertia drive, move with thethree-dimensional ability of a hummingbird, so the rivers that cut theisland off from the mainland were no barrier. The shopping andentertainment centers of Brooklyn, Queens, and Jersey were only fiveminutes away, even through the thickest, slowest-moving traffic. It wasthe personal flyer, not the clumsy airplane, that had really eliminateddistance along with national boundaries.

  The majority of the government officers' homes were off the island, too,but this commuting did not cause any great fluctuation of the island'spopulation. A city that governs a planet must operate at full capacitytwenty-four hours a day, and there was a "rush hour" every three hoursas the staggered six-hour shifts changed.

  Physically the planet still revolved about the sun; politically, Earthrevolved around Government City.

  In one of the towering buildings a group of men sat comfortably in amedium-sized room, watching a screen that, because of thethree-dimensional quality and the color fidelity of the scene it showed,might have been a window, except that the angle was wrong. They werelooking down from an apparent height of forty feet on a clearing in apaper-tree forest in Siberia.

  The clearing was not a natural one. The trees had been splintered,uprooted, and pushed away from the center of the long, elliptical area.The center of the area was apparently empty.

  One of the men, whose fingers were touching a control panel in the armof his chair, said: "That is where the ship made its crash landing. Asyou can see from the relatively light damage, it was moving at no greatspeed when it hit. From the little information we have--mostly from amomentary radar recording made when the incoming vessel was picked upfor a few seconds by the instruments of Transpolar Airways, when itcrossed the path of one of their freight orbits--it is estimated thatthe craft was decelerating at between fifteen and seventeen gravities.The rate of change of acceleration in centimeters per second cubed isunknown, but obviously so small as to be negligible.

  "This picture was taken by the fire prevention flyers that came inresponse to an urgent call by the assistant of the forest ranger who wasin charge of this section."

  "There was no fire?" asked one of the other men, looking closely at theimage.

  "None," said the speaker. "We can't yet say what actually happened tothe ship. We have only a couple of hints. One of our weather observers,orbiting at four hundred miles, picked up a tremendous flash of hardultraviolet radiation in the area around the three thousand Angstromband. There must have been quite a bit of shorter wavelength radiation,but the Earth's atmosphere would filter most of it out.

  "A recording of the radiophone discussion between the ranger and hisassistant is the only other description we have. The ranger described abluish glow over the site. Part of that may have been due to actualblue light given off by the--well, call it 'burning'; that word will dofor now. But some of the blue glow was almost certainly due toionization of the air by the hard ultraviolet. Look at this nextpicture."

  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-redof the foliage has darkened to a purplish brown in the area around thecrash site. Now a Martian paper-tree, even in the mutated form, is quiteresistant to U-V, since it evolved under the thin atmosphere of Mars,which gives much less protection from ultraviolet radiation than Earth'sdoes. 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. Thenearer trees were rather dry, as though they'd been baked, but only atthe surface, and the temperature probably didn't rise much aboveone-fifty centigrade."

  "How about X rays?" asked still another man. "Anything shorter than ahundred Angstroms detected?"

  "No. If there was any radiation that hard, there was no detector closeenough to measure it. We doubt, frankly, whether there was any."

  "The 'fire', if you want to call it that, must have stunk up the placepretty badly," said one of the men dryly.

  "It did. There were still traces of ozone and various oxides of nitrogenin the air when the fire prevention flyers arrived. The wind carriedthem 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'tmake anything of them yet. Some of them are badly fused, but thatdamage was probably done before the ship landed. Certainly there was notenough heat generated after the crash to have done that damage." Hishand moved over the control panel in the armrest of his chair, and thescene changed.

  "This was taken from the ground. Those lumps you see are the pieces ofmetal I was talking about. Notice the fine white powdery ash, whichcaused the white spot that you could see from the air. That is evidentlyall that is left of the hull and the rest of the ship. None of it isradioactive.

  "Random samplings from various parts of the area show that the ashconsists 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 theremaining ash could not have constituted more than ten percent of thetotal mass of the hull of the ship. The rest of it vaporized, apparentlyinto carbon dioxide and water."

  "Some kind of plastic?" hazarded one of the men.

  "Undoubtedly, if you want to use a catchall term like 'plastic'. Butwhat 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, "thatcircumstantial evidence alone would link the alien with the ship. Buthave 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, theforest ranger who was the only man ever to see the alien ship before itwas destroyed. Notice the peculiar bruises on the cheek and ear--thewhole side of the head. The pattern is quite similar on the other sideof the head."

  "It looks--umm--rather like a handprint."

  "It is. Kulichenko was slapped--_hard!_--on both sides of his head. Itcrushed his skull." There was an intake of breath.

  "This next picture--" The scene changed. "--shows the whole body. Ifyou'll look closely you'll see the same sort of prints on the groundaround it. All very much like handprints. And that ties in very wellwith the photographs of the alien itself."

  "There's no doubt about it," said one of the others. "The connection isdefinitely there."

  The lecturer's hand moved over the control panel again, and suddenly thescreen was filled with the image of an eight-limbed horror with fourglaring violet eyes. In spite of themselves, a couple of the men gasped.They had seen photographs before, but a full-sized three-dimensionalcolor projection is something else again.

  "Until thre
e weeks ago, we knew of no explanation for the peculiarhappenings in northern Asia. After eight months of investigation, wefound ourselves up against a blank wall. Nothing could account for thatpeculiar fire nor for the queer circumstances surrounding the death ofthe forest ranger. The investigators suspected an intelligent alienlife-form, but--well, the notion simply seemed too fantastic. Attemptsto trail the being by means of those peculiar 'footprints' failed. Theyended at a riverbank and apparently never came out again. We know nowthat it swam downstream for over a hundred miles. Little wonder it gotaway.

  "Even those investigators who suspected something non-human pictured thebeing as humanoid, or, rather, anthropoid in form. The prints certainlysuggest those of an ape. There appeared to be four of them, judging bythe prints--although frequently there were only three and sometimes onlytwo. It all depended on how many of his 'feet' he felt like walkingon."

  "And then the whole herd of them dived into a river and never came upagain, 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 thesecretary of the Board of Regents of the Khrushchev Memorial PsychiatricHospital in Leningrad. An odd, breathy voice, speaking very bad Russian,offered a meeting. It was the alien. He managed to explain, in spite ofthe language handicap, that he did not want to be mistaken for a wildanimal, 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'tsound human. He said he would make arrangements, and asked the caller tocontact him again the next day. The alien agreed. Rogov then--"

  "Excuse me," one of the men interrupted apologetically, "but did helearn Russian all by himself, or has it been established that someonetaught him the language?"

  "The evidence is that he learned it all by himself, from scratch, inthose eight months."

  "I see. Excuse my interruption. Go on."

  "Mr. Rogov was intrigued by the story he had heard. He decided to checkon it. He made a few phone calls, asking questions about a mysteriouscrash in the paper forests, and the death of a forest ranger. Naturallythose who _did_ know were curious about how Mr. Rogov had learned somuch about the incident. He told them.

  "By the time the alien made his second call, a meeting had beenarranged. When he showed up, those of the Board who were still of theopinion that the call had been made by a crank or a psychosis casechanged 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 heseemed completely unable to use the language beyond discussion ofconcrete objects and actions. His mind is evidently too alien to enablehim to do more than touch the edges of human communication.

  "For instance, he called himself 'Nipe' or 'Neep', but we don't knowwhether that refers to him as an individual or as a member of his race.Since Russian lacks both definite and indefinite articles, it ispossible that he was calling himself 'a Nipe' or 'the Nipe'. Certainlythat'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 theGovernment staff prepared. For instance, in discussing mathematics theNipe seemed to be completely at a loss. He apparently thought ofmathematics as a _spoken_ language rather than a _written_ one and couldnot progress beyond simple diagrams. That's just one small example. I'mjust trying to give you a brief outline now; you can read the reportsfor full information.

  "He refused to allow any physical tests on his body, and, short ofthreatening him at gunpoint, there was no practicable way to force himto accede to our wishes. Naturally, threats were out of the question."

  "Couldn't X rays have been taken surreptitiously?" asked one of the men.

  "It was discussed and rejected. We have no way of knowing what histolerance to radiation is, and we didn't want to harm him. The sameapplies to using any anesthetic gas or drug to render him unconscious.There was no way to study his metabolism without his co-operationunless we were willing to risk killing him."

  "I see. Naturally we couldn't harm him."

  "Exactly. The Nipe had to be treated as an emissary from his homeworld--wherever that may be. He has killed a man, yes. But that has tobe allowed as justifiable homicide in self-defense, since the foresterhad drawn a gun and was ready to fire. Nobody can blame the late WangKulichenko for that, but nobody can blame the Nipe, either."

  They all looked for a moment in silence at the violet eyes that gazed atthem from the screen.

  "For nearly three weeks," the speaker went on, "humans and Nipe tried toarrive at a meeting of minds, and, just when it would seem that such ameeting was within grasp, it would fade away into mist. It was onlythree days ago that the Russian psychologists and psychiatrists realizedthat the reason the Nipe had come to them was because he had thoughtthat the Board of Regents of the hospital was the ruling body of thatterritory."

  Someone chuckled, but there was no humor in it.

  "Now we come to yesterday morning," said the speaker. "This is theimportant part at this very moment, because it explains why I feel wemust immediately take steps to tell the public what has happened, why Ifeel that it is necessary to put a man like Colonel Walther Mannheim incharge of the Nipe affair and keep him in charge until the matter iscleared up. Because the public is going to be scared witless if we don'tdo something to reassure them."

  "What happened yesterday morning, Mr. President?" one of the men asked.

  "The Nipe got angry, lost his temper, went mad--whatever you want tocall it. At the morning meeting he simply became more and moreincomprehensible. The psychologists were trying to see if the Nipe hadany religious beliefs, and, if so, what they were. One of them, a Dr.Valichek, was explaining the various religious sects and rites here onEarth. Suddenly, with no warning whatever, the Nipe chopped atValichek's throat with an open-hand judo cut, killing him. He killed twomore men before he leaped out of the window and vanished.

  "No trace of him was found until late last night. He killed another manin Leningrad--we have since discovered that it was for the purpose ofstealing his personal flyer. The Nipe could be anywhere on Earth bynow."

  "How was the man killed, Mr. President? With bare hands, as the otherswere?"

  "We have no way of knowing. Identification of the body was madedifficult by the fact that every shred of flesh had been stripped away.It had been gnawed--literally _eaten_--to the bone!"