Chapter 3

"I am not sure that I can believe you. If your machine can touch my mind, maybe it can influence me into believing anything you say."

Han'lic said, "You have a valid point from a technical point of view, but as a member of the species that developed the device, let me assure you that your fear is ungrounded. We were afraid of the very same thing, so that protection was put into the original prototype and has remained there ever since."

"OK, I guess that I will choose to believe that. Would you like to come aboard our space station?"

"Thank you for the invitation, but our ships don't have an airlock. Do you have a bay that we could enter and bring up to pressure before we opened our canopies? Neither Han'lic or I are very skilled at breathing vacuum."

The being in the space station chuckled and said, "Yes, on the side of the station facing Irgon III you will find a loading dock that should be large enough for both of your vehicles. I will open the door and you can enter through there."

"Thank you. We will see you in a few minutes." The two pilots flew around to the down side of the space station and found an open door. They flew in and settled into place. The outer door closed and pressure built up. Instruments reassured them that the air was breathable to both of them, so they turned off their spacetubs and activated their personal antigravity belts. They were standing in front of their spacetubs when a being slipped into the room.

"Slipped" was the proper word, or maybe that should have been "slithered." The person looked like a snake with four arms. Both visitors had to suppress an automatic fear reaction when they saw something that looked like a 15-foot long snake. Nevertheless, they were able to relax and greeted the being. "Hello, my name is Nils Michaelson, a human, and this is Han'lic, an Arlosian. Please call me Nils."

"I am pleased to meet you both. I am Sssfirth. I am captain, mechanic, and janitor for this space station. At the moment, I am the only resident, and my relief is not due for another 12 days, so I am glad to see anybody. I am pleased to see that you can accommodate to microgravity so well; personally, I hate it. If it were not for my magnetic skid plate, I would spend most of my time drifting around the room."

"We have a device that lets us adjust to any gravity field that we encounter, so we had not noticed the low gravity."

"Lucky you! I would give the last six inches of my tail for such a device! Let us adjourn to a more comfortable lounge, if you please." They went down a short corridor to a room where there was a kind of hammock arrangement which Sssfirth slipped into and seemed to relax completely. He pointed to more of the hammocks and invited the visitors to make themselves comfortable.

Nils and Han'lic sat down on a hammock and Han'lic asked, "If you don't mind telling me about it, why are you occupying one of 12 space stations which appear to be armed with very efficient laser cannon?"

"The answer is both simple and complicated. The people of Irgon IV fire missiles at us whenever we are in a favorable orbital position. The laser cannon are meant to blow up the missiles before they can reach the atmosphere. So far, we have been lucky, and very few of their bedamned missiles have gotten through.

"The complicated part of the answer is that we have no idea why they are shooting at us. This shooting started about seven years ago, and we don't know what started the attacks. We are frantically working on the problem, but we don't yet have the technology to shoot back at them. All we can do is destroy the missiles as they get close to us."

"Perhaps Nils and I can investigate for you and find out why they attacked you. We are scheduled to visit there as soon as we leave here."

"I am sure that our emperor would love to know what started all this, since we have no ill will toward anybody. We just want the bombardment stopped. So far, all of the missiles that have landed have not hurt anyone and have caused little property damage, so we are not angry at the people of Irgon IV. If they stop shooting at us, we'll forget the whole thing."

"OK, we'll look into it. In the meantime, who can we talk to, to arrange for a diplomatic team to visit you?"

"I don't know the specific answer, but I can find out pretty quick. Please excuse me while I use the radio." There followed about an hour of conversation with various people before an agreement was reached for a diplomatic team to visit the surface of Irgon III. The team was on the ground within another hour. FTL travel was a wonderful thing when it was used properly.

Meanwhile, Nils and Han'lic journeyed to Irgon IV to see what they could find, especially what they could find out about this one-sided war that was going on. They orbited the planet and saw no signs of space stations. Nobody shot at them, which was a pretty good indicator that the natives were not very warlike.

The two spacetubs dipped into the atmosphere of Irgon IV and found that there was a trace of hydrogen sulfide in the atmosphere. Not enough to be detected at a distance, but enough to be a health hazard for both the pilots. They orbited the planet many time just high enough to clear most of the atmosphere. After several hours of searching, their sensors could not find a trace of life, not even as far down as one cell, either plant or animal.

If there was no life on Irgon IV, then who the hell was shooting the missiles at Irgon III? In desperation, they began scanning the radio frequency bands in hope of finding a clue. At a frequency of 10 MHz, and at 10 KHz intervals above that, they found a mass of radio traffic, virtually all of it digital, though there was some analogue. Now the two pilots were truly mystified. If nobody lived there, why was there so much radio traffic? Well, this was beyond their training to dope out, so they jumped back to Freya to report their findings.

The information was relayed to Irgon III to see if they could shed any light on the situation, but they had nothing to offer, either. A scientific team was hastily organized and dispatched to Irgon IV to try to solve the mystery. A few hours later, a message was received from Irgon IV asking for help. Specifically, they wanted Jill and Jim Anderson to translate some books that they found. They suspected that the discoveries would be Earthshaking if they could just read the books.

The Andersons were between assignments, so they were transported to Freya, outfitted with the necessary protective gear, and shuttled over to Irgon IV. With her usual efficiency, Jill was reading the books within a week, and Jim was interpreting what she found. The books turned out to be treatises on AI (Artificial Intelligence). The developments were far beyond anything that had been done on Earth or Arlosia, so the trip had been well worth the effort.

One of the scientists, who also happened to be a radio ham (VE3XMA) spotted what had to be a radio transmitter hooked up to some sensors. He pulled out his own instruments and found that the transmitter was transmitting on 11.630 MHz, so he tuned to that frequency and heard a lot of digital gibberish pouring through the ether. He further noticed that his presence near some of the sensors caused a change in the nature of the data being transmitted. He recorded the data, both with and without his influence, and plotted the 0s and 1s on a chart. He then asked Jill to look at it and assume that the squiggles were numbers. He wanted to know if she could see a pattern.

She only needed a moment to spot a pattern which her husband saw was a series of numbers being transmitted in a 16-bit Hex (Hexadecimal) code. With some experimenting, the engineer and the scientist discovered that the channel that changed the most appeared to be recording his brain's alpha waves.

Jim had a sudden inspiration. He asked the scientist to stand near the sensor and think that he wanted to communicate with the intelligence at the other end of the circuit. This went on for a couple of minutes, and a voice suddenly spoke from a transducer high on the wall. Of course, they could not understand what the voice said, but they still were making tremendous progress.

Jim then asked the scientist to stand back and let Jill be the one in the sensor field. He asked her to try to communicate with the voice. At first, the intelligence at the other end of the circuit seemed confused by the change in personnel at the human end of the circuit, but soon recognized what was going on and cooperated in a language learning program. Jill rapidly was able to handle the number system and a simple vocabulary.