I liked to think of Kaley as youthful and as full of energy as I am. And in fact she was, maybe even more energetic than yours truly. However, at this point in her pregnancy, her incredible schedule the last few months began to make a bit of difference in her general progress. For one thing, she retained water, and her ankles, always slender, almost delicate, showed it. Further, her blood pressure, always a bit low, now tipped the scales at a bit elevated. Her MD didn’t seem perturbed, but he forbade her from any further work, even from her desk computer. I agreed that she didn’t need work problems to add to the challenges of later pregnancy.
To say she didn’t like the order was like saying cats don’t care to go for a bracing swim. She became a tad grouchy, to put it as politely as possible, and retreated to the den to watch a good deal of bad TV and mutter under her breath. I stayed home, making only hurried trips to E2 three times, to humor her, sitting an astounding number of hours on the sofa beside her, while I ground my teeth due to the cable and download program quality.
On Monday morning, she started to sense my unrest. “Go to work like normal and let me suffer alone. I know I’ll get through this, and with enough of these crummy programs, I’ll be happy to get back to work when the time comes.”
I knew she wanted me around, in a way, but she knew how many things I needed to cover, so I kissed her and headed, first to work, and then to IC headquarters. Bobby and Virgil had taken a few days off to go to the cabin in Colorado which they both deserved as much as Kaley and I did. Virgil had worked way too hard taking up the slack in my duties, and Bobby hadn’t taken a day off in some time. With them out of the way, I concentrated on my plan for our captive Bugs.
We only had three left. One had been injured and died the day after our attack. A second had gotten loose and attacked its guards, leaving them no recourse but to fight back. The damn cockroaches were surprisingly strong, although only on average about a meter and a half tall. They had severely wounded one IC soldier, and the other had literally killed it by knocking off its head with a nightstick.
That left three captives. They were now housed in separate, adjacent rooms where they could hear each other but not so much as touch. While I had wondered if they only communicated via exchanges of touch on their antennae, it turned out that they could make a variety of sounds, mainly odd screeches that might have been made by rubbing their mandibles together, and a series of sharp clicks, also made similarly. And yes, their horizontal jaws did indeed resemble the mandibles of beetles or ants. It wasn’t clear if they had anything resembling human vocal chords, but they could communicate using this series of odd sounds.
I visited the prison area, surveiling them using a series of cameras concealed in walls of their cells.
For the first time even, I took time to examine their bodies, which were now naked, as we had removed their uniforms after the now-dead Bug snatched a weapon out of a concealed pocket in the coverall uniform they all wore. Up close, and the cameras got plenty close, they resembled Earth-type insects a great deal.
Like both insects and arachnids, they were exoskeletal, the outer “bones” stiff and quite tough, though not tough enough to stop a bullet. The head featured compound eyes much like many flies, bees, ants, and other Earth insects. One difference: their bodies had two sections against the three of insects on Earth, resembling arachnids in terms of body form. However, the resemblance ended there.
Their upper body part was the head. The lower, the thorax, held the six appendages. The four upper appendages were utilized as arms, the lower two as legs. The arms ended in clawed hands, not so flexible as the human appendages, but ultimately used the same way. The legs ended in what were basically hard pads, with virtually no feet at all. The edges of the pads displayed an impressive array of tiny claws, which would help, I supposed, in providing traction.
Once they learned they could hear each other—I couldn’t see any indication of ears, but the scientists assured me that they existed—the screeches and clicks became numerous and frequent. They never slept, although occasionally they would become still for an hour or so. As I had requested, the place was crawling with biologists, physiologists, and various other scientists. There were probably forty of our most powerful computers listening carefully to every sound, analyzing the Bugs’ activity as they talked and working diligently on possible translations of the language.
I had been afraid the Bugs would refuse to eat, starving themselves to death. And they still might. But one of the onlookers had suggested adding a wide bowl of distilled water and sugar to each room, and eventually, all of the three had begun to siphon up liquid and nutrition regularly. Whether such nutrition would benefit them or not, we had no idea, but perhaps it would help.
Between trips to E2, I visited every day for two weeks. To my surprise, our computers began to decipher the odd language, and a few words began to emerge. A philologist on the staff had even begun to put together a dictionary. Based on their exchanges, the language resembled Chinese, the combinations of sounds being used to make up separate words in combination, much as a Chinese calligrapher used a set of basic lines to put together a word character. The computers and scientists in combination began to decode a limited vocabulary of first dozens, and then hundreds of words. In fact, the Bugs communicated with a very simple and basic vocabulary that seemed to stabilize at about a thousand words.
While that might seem clumsy and inefficient for such a technically talented species, one of the language experts reminded me that despite the hundreds of thousands of words we have available in English, the average English-speaker gets by with only three thousand or so words in normal conversation, and an average engineer, for example, can add a few hundred technical terms to that vocabulary and comfortably express ideas.
The point was, it looked like my idea might work. We were learning the language of the Bugs, and very quickly as well. June segued into July, the E2 visits again became a routine, and my main worry at that point was the impending birth of our child. By Kaley’s calculations, our daughter should arrive around the end of the month or August first.
On July tenth, Overton called me early and told me I should come over ASAP, that the computers and scientists, working together, had made several breakthroughs in understanding the language. Kaley sat at the breakfast table, eating oatmeal and muttering complaints under her breath. I knew she felt uncomfortable, but I hated to offer help or sympathy; she was much too proud and independent for that.
I terminated the call and sat on the opposite side of the table. “Overton. I gotta go to IC headquarters.”
She nodded. She hadn’t put on any makeup and her face appeared pale. “I’ll swear to God,” she said. “The last month of pregnancy is to convince the mother that the pains of childbirth are preferable to carrying this load around any longer.”
“Wish I had an easy solution.”
“Oh, the solution is easy. Have the damn labor.” She shook her head. “Oh well, it’ll come soon enough. Go to Fort Worth. I need to get on the computer and see how the service situation is today.” Which she wasn’t supposed to do, but in her current mood, I wasn’t about to remind her of that fact.
The new field techs were easing our workload and queue of service requests, but we were still catching up. The problem with the current situation: with Kaley on the sidelines, that created a need for about 2.5 to 3 additional techs, Kaley was that good. Had she been able to make calls on her own, our service backlog would have vaporized quickly. As it was, we were making headway, but we had a way to go before we were back to guaranteeing service within 24 hours.
“Please don’t sit too long in front of that terminal,” I finally decided to mention.
“No work to it. I’m simply listening and occasionally offering advice or hints.”
What I wanted to say was, “Don’t give me that crap. You’re so involved in every damn problem you interact with that I’ll bet your blood pressure spikes fifty points on each call.”
What I did say was, “Take it easy on Baby Susie and yourself.”
Her head swung up. “About that ‘Baby Susie’ crap—we’re going to have to pick a name pretty soon.”
Actually I had an idea about that, but I figured now was not the time. “Agreed. But not today, as I need to head out.”
I stood, circled the table, kissed the top of her head, and headed to the garage. I made good time—to the SSS parking lot, into the lab, through our already-dialed-up portal, and straight from the IC lab to our prisoner’s habitat.
Overton was talking to a couple of the scientists as I strolled up. I caught a part of the conversation with one of the language experts.
“ . . . and the learning process with our analysis programs is more or less a parabolic function,” she was saying. Blonde, medium height, with a pleasant face and a hard focus, she had Overton’s full attention, and now mine as well. “The first days, it was mainly trying to isolate common sounds and perhaps sequences of sounds. Then came actual identification, that is, tying a sound to a specific idea or physical item. That went very slowly at first. However, the more our programs learn and connect, the easier subsequent recognition goes. The last few days, we’ve reached the rapidly increasing slope of the parabola. This morning, we believe we passed a significant concept recognition threshold, where we now are able to translate perhaps ninety percent of the dialog between members of the alien species.”
I suppose saying “Bug” was far too unsophisticated for the good doctor what’s-her-name.
Overton, as usual, didn’t waste time marveling at the accomplishment. “What do you have?”
Apparently she appreciated to-the-point dialog. “They’re making plans to escape, although the plans are woefully naive. We can ignore them for a while. The point is that they have clearly discussed two other hidden sites on Earth that we have not yet discovered.”
He stopped her. “You mean there are still hidden Bug sites here?”
She nodded. “We believe they are both in Antarctica, although part of the translation is still iffy.”
Overton’s eyes swung to me. “Can we get Bobby on that?”
“Shoot him all the details you have and I’ll give him a call.”
I turned to the expert, whose name I still didn’t know. “I’m Charles Hays. I have a question.”
She nodded, her expression saying that she knew the name although she hadn’t met me. “I’m Ellen Muyskens. I’ll answer it if I can.”
“You’ve made astounding progress. So now, we have a good idea of their language and what they are saying.”
“Right.”
“How long until we can talk to them?”
I thought I might surprise her, but she smiled. “Working on a translator now. In a few days, at most, we’ll be there.”
I appreciated her confidence. What I needed, however, was not a few days but right-now-this-fucking-instant. “Put all your effort on that. We need to send them home very, very shortly, and they must be able to deliver a message to their leadership. How long?”
“Can’t say. We’ll concentrate on that if you wish, but there are still unknowns.”
“Anything you need to accelerate your progress, Admiral Overton will get it.” Didn’t even ask his permission as I made the commitment. I also determined that Bobby would get involved with the effort sooner rather than later.
Overton nodded. “In this case, Doctor Hays speaks with my voice. That’s your goal.”
The interview soon over, I followed Overton to his office.
Seated behind his desk as I took a chair in front, he said, “You want to propose something.”
“Yes. You need to ready one of those compact nukes and have it ready to send to Ganymede. What I propose to do is to eliminate their largest military base. Bobby and I have spent a lot of time exploring their world, and I know exactly where it is.
“My plan is to bomb that base, then release the three Bugs in our custody onto the street in their biggest city. With a message: ‘We know where you live and how to reach you with our super weapons. Do not try to invade us again, cease all dial-ins, and we will let you continue to live. Bother us again, and we will wipe you out to the last member of your species.’ I think the combination of events will get their attention.”
He didn’t bother to think it over. “I’ll put the plans in motion. I suppose the date for this event depends on our scientists.”
“Yes. And the sooner the better. Get out your whip and crack it frequently over their heads as they work.”
“As a scientist, you yourself know that your breed does not like to be herded.”
“Yeah, but if enough incentive is available, you can do it. Offer them more research funding and they’ll be happy to do their darndest.”
He laughed. “I’ll see what I can do.” Which meant he’d take care of it.
I thanked him. We discussed the status of E2 and activities there. I could tell him that things were going well, although that one member of the team continued to have what appeared to be a rather irritating cold.
It didn’t take long. In half an hour I was on my way back to my office to make sure that as he had returned from Colorado, Bobby would begin examining satellite scans to locate the probable bug sites in Antarctica and to address the myriad problems that seemed to crop up every day. One of these days, I told myself, I was going to follow Bobby’s example and head for that cabin in Colorado for another weekend.
Yeah, sure.