Chapter 4

Government City was something of a paradox. It was the largest capital city, in terms of population, that had ever been built on Earth, and yet, again in terms of population, it was nowhere near as large as Tokyo or London. The solution to the paradox lies in discovering that the term “population” is used in two different senses, thus exposing the logical fallacy of the undistributed middle. If, in referring to London or Tokyo, the term “population” is restricted to those and only those who are actively engaged in the various phases of actual government--as it is when referring to Government City--the apparent paradox resolves itself.

Built on the slagged-down remains of New York’s Manhattan Island, which had been destroyed by a sun bomb during the Holocaust nearly a century before, Government City occupied all but the upper three miles of the island, and the population consisted almost entirely of men and women engaged, either directly or indirectly, in the business of governing a planet. There were no shopping centers and no entertainment areas. The small personal flyer, almost the same size as the old gasoline-driven automobile, could, because of its inertia drive, move with the three-dimensional ability of a hummingbird, so the rivers that cut the island off from the mainland were no barrier. The shopping and entertainment centers of Brooklyn, Queens, and Jersey were only five minutes away, even through the thickest, slowest-moving traffic. It was the personal flyer, not the clumsy airplane, that had really eliminated distance 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’s population. A city that governs a planet must operate at full capacity twenty-four hours a day, and there was a “rush hour” every three hours as the staggered six-hour shifts changed.

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

In one of the towering buildings a group of men sat comfortably in a medium-sized room, watching a screen that, because of the three-dimensional quality and the color fidelity of the scene it showed, might have been a window, except that the angle was wrong. They were looking down from an apparent height of forty feet on a clearing in a paper-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 arm of his chair, said: “That is where the ship made its crash landing. As you can see from the relatively light damage, it was moving at no great speed when it hit. From the little information we have--mostly from a momentary radar recording made when the incoming vessel was picked up for a few seconds by the instruments of Transpolar Airways, when it crossed the path of one of their freight orbits--it is estimated that the craft was decelerating at between fifteen and seventeen gravities. The rate of change of acceleration in centimeters per second cubed is unknown, but obviously so small as to be negligible.

“This picture was taken by the fire prevention flyers that came in response to an urgent call by the assistant of the forest ranger who was in charge of this section.”

“There was no fire?” asked one of the other men, looking closely at the image.

“None,” said the speaker. “We can’t yet say what actually happened to the ship. We have only a couple of hints. One of our weather observers, orbiting at four hundred miles, picked up a tremendous flash of hard ultraviolet radiation in the area around the three thousand Ångstrom band. 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 his assistant is the only other description we have. The ranger described a bluish glow over the site. Part of that may have been due to actual blue light given off by the--well, call it ‘burning’; that word will do for now. But some of the blue glow was almost certainly due to ionization of the air by the hard ultraviolet. Look at this next picture.”

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-red of the foliage has darkened to a purplish brown in the area around the crash site. Now a Martian paper-tree, even in the mutated form, is quite resistant to U-V, since it evolved under the thin atmosphere of Mars, which gives much less protection from ultraviolet radiation than Earth’s does. 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. The nearer trees were rather dry, as though they’d been baked, but only at the surface, and the temperature probably didn’t rise much above one-fifty centigrade.”

“How about X rays?” asked still another man. “Anything shorter than a hundred Ångstroms detected?”

“No. If there was any radiation that hard, there was no detector close enough to measure it. We doubt, frankly, whether there was any.”

“The ‘fire’, if you want to call it that, must have stunk up the place pretty badly,” said one of the men dryly.

“It did. There were still traces of ozone and various oxides of nitrogen in the air when the fire prevention flyers arrived. The wind carried them 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’t make anything of them yet. Some of them are badly fused, but that damage was probably done before the ship landed. Certainly there was not enough heat generated after the crash to have done that damage.” His hand moved over the control panel in the armrest of his chair, and the scene changed.

“This was taken from the ground. Those lumps you see are the pieces of metal I was talking about. Notice the fine white powdery ash, which caused the white spot that you could see from the air. That is evidently all that is left of the hull and the rest of the ship. None of it is radioactive.

“Random samplings from various parts of the area show that the ash consists 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 the remaining ash could not have constituted more than ten percent of the total mass of the hull of the ship. The rest of it vaporized, apparently into carbon dioxide and water.”

“Some kind of plastic?” hazarded one of the men.

“Undoubtedly, if you want to use a catchall term like ‘plastic’. But what 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, “that circumstantial evidence alone would link the alien with the ship. But have 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, the forest ranger who was the only man ever to see the alien ship before it was destroyed. Notice the peculiar bruises on the cheek and ear--the whole side of the head. The pattern is quite similar on the other side of the head.”

“It looks--umm--rather like a handprint.”

“It is. Kulichenko was slapped--hard!--on both sides of his head. It crushed his skull.” There was an intake of breath.

“This next picture--” The scene changed. “--shows the whole body. If you’ll look closely you’ll see the same sort of prints on the ground around it. All very much like handprints. And that ties in very well with the photographs of the alien itself.”

“There’s no doubt about it,” said one of the others. “The connection is definitely there.”

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

“Until three weeks ago, we knew of no explanation for the peculiar happenings in northern Asia. After eight months of investigation, we found ourselves up against a blank wall. Nothing could account for that peculiar fire nor for the queer circumstances surrounding the death of the forest ranger. The investigators suspected an intelligent alien life-form, but--well, the notion simply seemed too fantastic. Attempts to trail the being by means of those peculiar ‘footprints’ failed. They ended at a riverbank and apparently never came out again. We know now that it swam downstream for over a hundred miles. Little wonder it got away.

“Even those investigators who suspected something non-human pictured the being as humanoid, or, rather, anthropoid in form. The prints certainly suggest those of an ape. There appeared to be four of them, judging by the prints--although frequently there were only three and sometimes only two. It all depended on how many of his ‘feet’ he felt like walking on.”

“And then the whole herd of them dived into a river and never came up again, 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 the secretary of the Board of Regents of the Khrushchev Memorial Psychiatric Hospital in Leningrad. An odd, breathy voice, speaking very bad Russian, offered a meeting. It was the alien. He managed to explain, in spite of the language handicap, that he did not want to be mistaken for a wild animal, as had happened with the forest ranger.