Part 2

Someone once defined eternity as the time required for everything to happen once. If you toss a coin enough times, it will eventually land on edge; if you shuffle a deck of cards enough times, they will eventually deal out in any predetermined order. And, by the inherently unprovable laws of probabilities, if you watch a glass of water long enough, all the high-velocity molecules will congregate in one place and boil off, leaving the remainder of the water frozen solid. You may have to wait some ten to the twentieth years, or it may happen tomorrow. But, however improbable, each of them _can_ happen.

Take a spaceship. In order for one spaceship to spot another, via radar, they must be within a million or so miles of each other and have low velocities relative to each other. An Earth vessel might never see another Earth vessel in space unless they had arranged it beforehand. And arranging things beforehand is stacking the deck, a reversal of normal entropy that only intelligent beings can bring about.

The Thirty-six approached the Therbis sun at something less than a thousand miles per second, the actual difference in velocity between that sun and Sol. Therbis itself was the fourth planet of the system; cold and bleak. It was somewhat bigger than Terra, with plenty of water and a high percentage of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, so the greenhouse effect kept it warm enough for human beings to colonize the island chains that surrounded the equatorial belt.

The HC-36 was braking in when the odds-against coincidence happened. Near planet six, which just happened to be at its nearest approach to Therbis, a spaceship came into range of the instruments of the HC-36. At first it was thought to be a meteor; that was what the instruments were meant to look for, and that's what they expected.

But no meteor is a smooth prolate spheroid, like a football with smoothly rounded ends. And no Earth ship was ever shaped like that, either.

It was visible on the plates of the HC-36 only a few seconds--then it vanished.

Orders were already snapping over the robot control system as Parmay charged for the main salon. He had heard the alarm and came running.

Tallen was slapping his hands over switch plates with lightning movements of his wrists. "Alien ship!" he shouted. "As soon as our radar touched her, she hit hypersee. That was about thirty-five seconds before our own equipment registered the echo, so she's had better than a minute to arrange herself nicely to blast us!"

"Won't she have to come out of hypersee to do it?"

"Sure, but where?"

"I'd--"

He was cut off by a hum of power from Fire Control; at the same instant, he saw the football shape of the alien on the screen. It was less than eight miles away.

The Earthship's beam blazed momentarily on the alien vessel, then vanished. The alien dodged suddenly ahead, and something flickered on her side. All hell broke loose in the Thirty-six. From the engine section came a faint thudding vibration of overload switches cutting out. The ship shivered and hiccoughed like a drink-deprived alcoholic.

Again Fire Control beamed out, and again the alien ship flared. But there was no answering blast.

Parmay, shaken, watched the weird battle on the screen. Behind the enemy ship loomed the vast bulk of planet six, a gigantic ammonia-methane globe, a Jovian monstrosity that outlined the darker form of the alien ship.

Slowly, the enemy vessel began to shrink; it was falling toward the giant planet.

"Her drive's out!" Tallen shouted gleefully.

"So is ours!" snapped a voice from the speaker above the panel.

"Are we falling?"

"No, it's the hypersee that's out. The planetary drive is perfect. The hypersee is burned all to hell. No breach in the hull."

"Get us orbited to Therbis," Tallen ordered. "What damage to the alien ship?"

Fire Control answered. "The ionic disruptor didn't do as much damage as we thought. We weakened their hull, but we didn't open it."

"Okay," Tallen said, "keep an eye on the 'scope. Compute the orbit of the ship and watch it. If it shifts off the computed fall path, we'll hit it again."

Parmay grabbed Tallen's shoulder.

"Did all this get on tape?"

"Sure. Why?"

Parmay pushed Tallen aside and headed for the communicator.

* * * * *

The news hit Earth like a slug in the teeth. For the second time in half a millennium the human race was brought face to face with the fact that it was not the only intelligence in the galaxy, much less in the whole universe.

The instant the news came, a fleet of armed ships was given its orders, and within six hours they were squirting through hyperspace toward Therbis.

Meanwhile, the Psychological Corps was in a dither. Parmay was shooting data to them from Therbis and asking, in return, for all kinds of seemingly irrelevant information. Chemists were asked questions about organic oxidation-reduction equations; physicists were asked for data on propagation of electromagnetic waves in distorted spaces and warped fields; biologists supplied facts about--of all things--deep sea fish.

All these things flowed into robot analyzers and synthesizers, came out and were fed back in again, directed by the frantic brain of Romm Parmay.

After twelve days, the big-wigs of Operation Interstellar were beginning to ask: "What in hell is Parmay driving at?"

And when Parmay was asked, all he would say was: "I'm not sure yet. I'm stranded here on Therbis until the fleet gets here, and I want to get back to Earth. I can't give you any answers 'til then."

Kerrman was on Earth, and he wasn't entirely unaware of what Parmay was working on. Kerrman, in fact, knew bloody well what it was. But he kept his mouth shut and applied a few ideas of his own.

Finally, word came that Parmay was on his way back from Therbis.

When he landed, the Directors of Earth were waiting for him, and two days later he was ready to appear before the assembled Directorate.

The fourteen Directors waited quietly for him to speak. The vast silence that filled the room seemed almost a little too big for it, as though even a slight noise would not be heard if it were to be made. Pol Enson, the Speaker, looked at the others, then at Parmay.

"Okay, Romm; blaze away. I'm not a psych man, and I don't quite understand what you're driving at, but I hope you're right."

"I think I am," Parmay answered. "I've checked into it from every conceivable angle, and everything fits--there isn't one single unexplainable factor.

"We contacted the ship of the aliens. It went into hypersee. Then it attacked. Point one.

"Ask yourselves: _Why did it attack?_ And then ask: _Why did_ we _attack_?" He paused, watching them, then went on. "_Why didn't we both get the hell out of there?_"

The Directors frowned and waited.

"Keeping that in mind," Parmay continued, "let's look at our method of checking a system for the presence of aliens. We looked for modulated electromagnetics; we never found any. One explanation was that there weren't any aliens. But there's another explanation that fits the picture even better.

"They didn't put out any because they don't know anything about them in communication!"

The frowns of the Directorate became puzzled.

"Let's take another tack," Parmay went on. "Our ionic disruptors are supposed to turn any metal into an incandescent gas. But they hardly touched the enemy ship. Why? Because it was a non-conductor! Plastics, gentlemen, plastics strong enough to construct a spaceship hull of them. And that's even stronger than you think.

"But why plastics? Why not metal? That's another clue.

"Here, then, we have a race which does not use metal or the longer electromagnetic radiations--I have no doubt that they can use the shorter ones. And they attack another ship.

"Let's get back to that because it's important; it gave me my first clue. I wondered why they attacked. There could be no reason to attack a ship that might be better armed than you, even if your psychology is bred toward pure hate.

"There is only one good reason, and it is the same reason that made us fight back instead of running. We had a colony in that system, and we didn't want the enemy to know it. If they had found us in a system where we had no colonies, we would have turned tail and run--the only sensible thing to do.

"But we didn't--and neither did they.

"Therefore, they, too, have a colony in that system!"

* * * * *

The Speaker said: "Where? Therbis is the only planet with--" His voice trailed off as he suddenly saw the truth.

Parmay nodded. "All this time, we've been assuming that the aliens were after the same planets we were. But every bit of evidence indicates that they live on the ammonia-methane giants!"

He paused to light a cigarette, then went on: "Alina Starrnel, my wife, has done some checking on the conditions that obtain in such an atmosphere. Alina--" he nodded toward her.

She looked at them from her cool green eyes. "The atmospheres of ammonia-methane giants are such that the surface suffers from almost unbelievable electric storms. Every sunspot on the primary, every wind, every slight change in temperature causes lightnings and electrical displays such as we on Earth can't imagine. The atmosphere itself is a semi-conductor.

"Therefore, it would be almost impossible for them to have radio communication as we know it.

"There are two reasons why metals are not used for construction on such planets. One: the heavy, metal-bearing core of the giants is buried beneath thousands of miles of ice. Two: metals wouldn't stand the strain. At the temperatures prevailing on those planets, most metals are so brittle that they'd shatter under the loads that the unimaginable gravitational pull would cause.

"Plastics are a different matter. Any life that would evolve on such a world would be able to synthesize hard, tough materials in its own body. With plenty of carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen around, they would have to find some way of making building materials from organic compounds. Actually, they're probably not plastics as we know them; possibly they wouldn't even stand up at normal room temperature on Earth."

Parmay took up the story again. "There, you see, is the reason we never contacted them. We never went anywhere near such planets; we had no use for them. And they wouldn't try to colonize our planets any more than we'd try to colonize Mercury."

The Speaker had a question: "How did they detect your radar when it impinged on their ship?"

Alina answered him. "On their worlds, sound would be useless as a normal means of communication. There's too much noise. It would be like you or I trying to talk within fifty feet of an atomic bomb explosion. The shorter electromagnetic spectrum, bad as it is, would permit them to 'shout' at each other over a distance of a hundred yards, and they could probably carry on a normal conversation in a room this size.

"We believe that they are naturally equipped to speak to each other by radio--after all, an electric eel can generate currents within its own body of quite sizable voltages. A slight modification, plus a controlling intelligence, could make a transmitter of a living body.

"Therefore, when our radar hit them, it probably sounded like a siren. They knew our ship was somewhere near and got the devil away from there."

The room was silent as Parmay thanked Alina and concluded his speech.

"So, we have no quarrel with the aliens; they have none with us. We have entirely different spheres of operation. There is no need for conflict between us, now, or ever. Our job now is to contact them as best we can and trade knowledge for--"

The door opened suddenly, and Kerrman stepped in. He walked over to Parmay and whispered softly for a moment.

Parmay turned back to the Directors. "Gentlemen, Dr. Kerrman has had scout ships watching for several days in places where the aliens might be assumed to be. It's paid off. Our calculations are perfectly correct."

He grinned widely. "We don't have to worry about feeling inferior; we have a lot of things they don't, and vice versa.

"For instance, we have Earth. And I don't know how close we may have come to their home base, but they have already colonized Jupiter!

"As a poet named Frost once said, 'Good fences make good neighbors.' We've got the best of all possible fences, so--let's get friendly with the neighbors, boys!"