contacted the State Department via the embassy; they’re that scared.” Brundle pauses a moment. “Sagan and his buddies don’t know about that, of course.”
“Why has nobody shot them already?” Gregor asks coldly.
Brundle shrugs. “We pulled the plug on their funding just in time. If we shot them as well, someone might notice. Everything could go nonlinear while we were trying to cover it up. You know the problem; this is a semiopen society, inadequately controlled. A bunch of astronomers get together on their own initiative—academic conference, whatever—and decide to spend a couple of thousand bucks of research grant money from NIST to establish communications with the nearest disk. How are we supposed to police that kind of thing?”
“Shut down all their radio telescopes. At gunpoint, if necessary, but I figure a power cut or a congressional committee would be just as effective as leverage.”
“Perhaps, but we don’t have the Soviets’ resources to work with. Anyway, that’s why I dragged Sagan in for the CAB. It’s a Potem kin village, you understand, to convince everybody he contacted that something is being done, but we’re going to have to figure out how to shut him up.”
“Sagan is the leader of the ‘Talk to us, alien gods’ crowd, I take it.”
“Yes.”
“Well.” Gregor considers his next words carefully. “Assuming he’s still clean and uncontaminated, we can turn him or we can ice him. If we’re going to turn him, we need to do it convincingly—full Tellerization—and we’ll need to come up with a convincing rationale. Use him to evangelize the astronomical community into shutting up or haring off in the wrong direction. Like Heisen berg and the Nazi nuclear-weapons program.” He snaps his fingers. “Why don’t we tell him the truth? At least, something close enough to it to confuse the issue completely?”
“Because he’s a member of the Federation of American Scientists, and he won’t believe anything we tell him without independent confirmation,” Brundle mutters through one side of his mouth. “That’s the trouble with using a government agency as our cover story.”
They walk in silence for a minute. “I think it would be very dangerous to underestimate him,” says Gregor. “He could be a real asset to us, but uncontrolled he’s very dangerous. If we can’t silence him, we may have to resort to physical violence. And with the number of colonies they’ve already seeded, we can’t be sure of getting them all.”
“Itemize the state of their understanding,” Brundle says abruptly. “I want a reality check. I’ll tell you what’s new after you run down the checklist.”
“Okay.” Gregor thinks for a minute. “Let us see. What everyone knows is that between zero three fifteen and twelve seconds and thirteen seconds Zulu time, on October second, ’sixty-two, all the clocks stopped, the satellites went away, the star map changed, nineteen airliners and forty-six ships in transit ended up in terminal trouble, and they found themselves transferred from a globe in the Milky Way galaxy to a disk which we figure is somewhere in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. Meanwhile the Milky Way galaxy—we assume that’s what it is—has changed visibly. Lots of metal-depleted stars, signs of macroscopic cosmic engineering, that sort of thing. The public explanation is that the visitors froze time, skinned the Earth, and plated it over the disk. Luckily they’re still bickering over whether the explanation is Minsky’s copying, uh, hypothesis, or that guy Moravec with his digital-simulation theory.”
“Indeed.” Brundle kicks at a paving stone idly. “Now. What is your forward analysis?”
“Well, sooner or later they’re going to turn dangerous. They have the historic predisposition toward teleological errors, to belief in a giant omnipotent creator and a purpose to their existence. If they start speculating about the intentions of a transcendent
“Why has nobody shot them already?” Gregor asks coldly.
Brundle shrugs. “We pulled the plug on their funding just in time. If we shot them as well, someone might notice. Everything could go nonlinear while we were trying to cover it up. You know the problem; this is a semiopen society, inadequately controlled. A bunch of astronomers get together on their own initiative—academic conference, whatever—and decide to spend a couple of thousand bucks of research grant money from NIST to establish communications with the nearest disk. How are we supposed to police that kind of thing?”
“Shut down all their radio telescopes. At gunpoint, if necessary, but I figure a power cut or a congressional committee would be just as effective as leverage.”
“Perhaps, but we don’t have the Soviets’ resources to work with. Anyway, that’s why I dragged Sagan in for the CAB. It’s a Potem kin village, you understand, to convince everybody he contacted that something is being done, but we’re going to have to figure out how to shut him up.”
“Sagan is the leader of the ‘Talk to us, alien gods’ crowd, I take it.”
“Yes.”
“Well.” Gregor considers his next words carefully. “Assuming he’s still clean and uncontaminated, we can turn him or we can ice him. If we’re going to turn him, we need to do it convincingly—full Tellerization—and we’ll need to come up with a convincing rationale. Use him to evangelize the astronomical community into shutting up or haring off in the wrong direction. Like Heisen berg and the Nazi nuclear-weapons program.” He snaps his fingers. “Why don’t we tell him the truth? At least, something close enough to it to confuse the issue completely?”
“Because he’s a member of the Federation of American Scientists, and he won’t believe anything we tell him without independent confirmation,” Brundle mutters through one side of his mouth. “That’s the trouble with using a government agency as our cover story.”
They walk in silence for a minute. “I think it would be very dangerous to underestimate him,” says Gregor. “He could be a real asset to us, but uncontrolled he’s very dangerous. If we can’t silence him, we may have to resort to physical violence. And with the number of colonies they’ve already seeded, we can’t be sure of getting them all.”
“Itemize the state of their understanding,” Brundle says abruptly. “I want a reality check. I’ll tell you what’s new after you run down the checklist.”
“Okay.” Gregor thinks for a minute. “Let us see. What everyone knows is that between zero three fifteen and twelve seconds and thirteen seconds Zulu time, on October second, ’sixty-two, all the clocks stopped, the satellites went away, the star map changed, nineteen airliners and forty-six ships in transit ended up in terminal trouble, and they found themselves transferred from a globe in the Milky Way galaxy to a disk which we figure is somewhere in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. Meanwhile the Milky Way galaxy—we assume that’s what it is—has changed visibly. Lots of metal-depleted stars, signs of macroscopic cosmic engineering, that sort of thing. The public explanation is that the visitors froze time, skinned the Earth, and plated it over the disk. Luckily they’re still bickering over whether the explanation is Minsky’s copying, uh, hypothesis, or that guy Moravec with his digital-simulation theory.”
“Indeed.” Brundle kicks at a paving stone idly. “Now. What is your forward analysis?”
“Well, sooner or later they’re going to turn dangerous. They have the historic predisposition toward teleological errors, to belief in a giant omnipotent creator and a purpose to their existence. If they start speculating about the intentions of a transcendent
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