A Deepness in the Sky

"Oh thank goodness!" came the almost-familiar voice. "There's a chance then. Surely eventhey can't meddle with all the world's idle talk."

They.The emphasis cut through Thract's fizz hangover. He brought the microphone close his maw, and his next words came out almost casually curious. "Who is this?"

"Sorry. Obret Nethering here.Please don't hang up. You probably don't remember me. Fifteen years ago, I taught a short course on remote sensing. At Princeton. You sat in."

"I, ah, remember." In fact, it had been a rather good course.

"You do? Oh good, good! So you'll know I'm not a crank. Sir, I know how busy you must be right now, but I pray you'll give me just a minute of your time. Please."

Thract was suddenly aware of the street and the buildings around him. Calorica Strip stretched around the bottom of the volcanic bowl, perhaps the warmest place left on the surface of the world. But the Strip was just a faded memory of the time when Calorica had been a playground for the super-rich. The bars and hotels were dying. Even the snowfalls were long ended. The snow piled up in the alley behind him was two years old, littered with fizz barf and streaked with urine.My high-tech command center.

Thract hunkered down, out of the wind. "I suppose I can give you a moment."

"Oh, thank you! You're my last hope. All my calls to Professor Underhill come up blocked. Not surprising, now that I understand..." Thract could almost hear the cobber collecting his wits, trying not to blather. "I'm an astronomer out on Paradise Island, Colonel. Last night I saw"—a spaceship as big as a city, its drives lighting the sky...and ignored by Air Defense and all the networks. Nethering's descriptions were short and blunt, and took just under a minute. The astronomer continued. "I'm no crank, I tell you. This is what we saw! Surely there are hundreds of eyewitnesses, but somehow it's invisible to Air Defense. Colonel, you've got to believe me." His tone segued into uncomfortable self-realization, an understanding that no one in his right mind could buy such a story.

"Oh, I believe you," Rachner said softly. It was a floridly paranoid vision...and it explained everything.

"What did you say, Colonel? Sorry, I can't send you much hard evidence. They cut our landline about half an hour ago; I'm using a hobbyist's packet radio to reach rout—" Several syllables were jumbled into incoherence. "So that's really all I had to tell you. Maybe this is some Deepest Secret plot on the part of Air Defense. If you can't say anything, I'll understand. But I had to try to get through. That ship was so large, and—"

For a moment, Thract thought the other had paused, overcome. But the silence continued for several seconds, and then a synthetic voice blatted from the telephone's tiny speaker: "Message 305. Network error. Please retry your call later."

Rachner slowly tucked the telephone back in his jacket. His maw and eating hands were numb, and it wasn't just the cold air. Once upon a time, his network intelligence cobbers had done a study on automated snooping. Given enough computing power, it was in principle possible to monitorevery in-the-clear communication for keywords, and trigger security responses. In principle. In fact, development of the necessary computers always lagged behind the size of the contemporary public networks. But now it looked like someone had just that power.

A Deep Secret plot on the part of Air Defense? Not likely. Over the last year, Rachner Thract had watched the mysteries and the failures encroach from all directions. Even if Accord Intelligence and Pedure and all the intelligence agencies of the world hadcooperated, they could not have produced the seamless lies that Thract had sensed. No. Whatever they faced was larger than the world, a grander evil than anything Spiderly.

And now at last he had something concrete. His mind should climb into combat alertness; instead he was filled with panicked confusion.Damnthe fizz. If they were up against an alien force so deep, so crafty—what did it matter that Obret Nethering and now Rachner Thract knew the truth? What could they do? But Nethering had been permitted to talk for more than a minute. He'd spoken a number of keywords before the connection was chopped. The aliens might be better than Spiders—but they weren't gods.

The thought brought Thract to a halt. So they weren't gods. The word of their monster ship must be percolating across the civilized world, slowed and suppressed to one-on-one contacts between little people without access to power.But that couldn't hide the secret more than a few hours. And that meant...whatever the purpose of this vast fraud, it must be headed for consummation in the next few hours. Right now the chief was risking her life down at Southmost, trying to bail them out from a disaster that was actually a trap.If I could get through to her, to Belga, to anybody at thetop....