Bears Discover Fire

“Then it flowed—sort of rippled; it’s quite strange, but you’ll see—back down my arm and into the bowl. All this is at High Orbital in zero g, remember, and there’s nothing to keep our little ET in the bowl except that it wants to be there. Or something.”

“You’re calling it an ET now.”

“Wouldn’t you call this communication, or at least an attempt to communicate? Unofficially speaking, this and its method of arrival are enough to convince me. What else would you call it but an ET?”

“A Ouija smudge?” I thought—but I said nothing. The whole business was beginning to sound crazy to me. The dark nonsubstance in the bowl had looked about as intelligent as the coffee left in my cup; and I wasn’t too sure anymore about the woman in the wheelchair.

“I can see you’re not convinced,” said Hvarlgen. “No matter; you will be. At any rate, I spent the next few hours under guard, like Odysseus lashed to the mast, to make sure I didn’t follow Mersault out an airlock. Then I tried it again.”

“Stuck your hand in the bowl.”

“My right hand, again. This time I was holding the pencil in my left, ready to go. But this time our friend, our ET, our whatever, was very reluctant. Only after a couple of tries did it ripple onto my arm; and then only an inch or so up my wrist, and only for a moment. But it worked. It’s like it was communicating directly with my musculature rather than my consciousness. Without even thinking about it, I wrote this—” She turned the page on the pad and I saw:

* * *

“Which says ‘Old Man.’”

I nodded. “So naturally, you sent Here’s Johnny for me.”

Hvarlgen laughed and scowled, and I understood for the first time that her scowl was a smile; she just wore it upside down.

“You’re getting ahead of yourself, Major. I interpreted all this to mean that there was a reluctance to communicate with me, which had something to do with my age or my sex or both. Since we hadn’t left for the Moon yet, I used my somewhat extravagant authority and sent the shuttle back down. I recruited an old friend, a former professor of mine—a retired advisor to SETI, in fact—who had spent some time at Houbolt, and brought him to Luna with me.

That clipped another three days out of my precious time.”

“So where is he? Out the airlock, I suppose, or I wouldn’t be here.”

“Not quite out the airlock yet,” said Hvarlgen. “Come with me and you’ll see.”

I had never met Dr. Soo Lee Kim, but I had heard of him. A tiny man with long, flying white hair like Einstein, he was an astronomer, the leader of the deep-space optical team that had been kicked out of Houbolt when it had been turned into a semiautomated warning station. Dr. Kim had won a Nobel Prize. He had a galaxy named after him. Now he occupied one of the two beds in the infirmary under the clear dome in East. The other one was empty.

I smelled death in the room and realized it was PeaceAble, the sinsemilla nasal spray given to terminal patients.

It’s a complicated aroma for me, the smell of love and loss together, a curious mixture I knew well from the last weeks of my first wife, the one I went back to when she was dying. But that’s another story altogether.

Dr. Kim looked cheerful enough. He had been expecting us.

“I’m so glad you’re here; now perhaps we can begin to communicate,” he said in Cambridge-accented English.

“As you probably know, the Shadow won’t talk with me.”

“The Shadow?”

“That’s what I call it. From your old American radio serial. ‘Who Knows what Evil lurks in the Hearts of Men? The Shadow knows!’”

“You don’t look that old to me,” I said.

“I’m not; I’ll be seventy-two next week, when the Diana returns, if I’m unfortunate enough to last that long.” He took a quick shot of PeaceAble from an imitation ebony spraypipe, and continued: “Collecting old radio tapes was a hobby I picked up when I was at university. They were forty-five years old even then, forty-five years ago. I don’t suppose you remember Sky King and his Radio Ranch?”

“Nobody’s that old, Dr. Kim. I’m only seventy-six. How old do you have to be for this ghost-in-a-bowl?”

“The Shadow,” he corrected. “Oh, you’re quite old enough. I’m old enough, actually, I think. Or would have been, if it weren’t for—”

“Start at the beginning, Dr. Kim,” said Hvarlgen. “Please. The Major needs to know everything that has happened.”

“The beginning? Then let’s start at the end, as the Shadow starts.” He laughed enigmatically. “I have learned one thing, at least: language is contained as much in the musculature as in the brain. The first time, I did as Sunda did; I stuck my hand into the bowl, and my brain was looking on, unattached, as the Shadow picked up my hand, and with it picked up a pencil—”

“And wrote you a letter,” I said.

“Drew me a picture,” Dr. Kim corrected. “Korean is at least partly ideographic.” He reached under the bed and pulled out a paper, on which was written:

“Take me to your leader?” I guessed.

“It means, more or less, ‘okay’; and it suggests a more intimate relationship, which I immediately implemented, so to speak, and which—”