“Where are the pilots, the soldiers?” Harry asked.

“The machine does not live as we do,” the Guest said.

“It’s a robot, automatic?”

“It is a machine.”

Harry pushed his chair back and rubbed his face vigorously with both hands. The Guest appeared to observe this closely, but otherwise did not change position.

“We have a couple of names for that kind of machine,” Arthur said, facing Colonel Hall. “It sounds like a von Neumann device. Self-replicating, without outside instructions. Frank Drinkwater thinks the lack of such machines proves there is no intelligent life besides our own in the galaxy.”

“Playing devil’s advocate, no doubt,” Harry said, still massaging the bridge of his nose. “What scientist would want to prove intelligence was unique?”

Colonel Hall regarded the Guest with an expression of mild pain. “It’s saying we should be on war alert?”

“It’s saying…” Harry began angrily, and then controlled his tone, “it’s saying we haven’t got the chance of an ice cube in hell. Art, you read more science fiction than I do. Who was that fellow—”

“Saberhagen. Fred Saberhagen. He called them ‘Berserkers.’”

“I am not being spoken with,” the Guest said. “Have you become aware of the results of this information?”

“I think so,” Arthur replied. They had not asked a perfectly obvious question. Perhaps they didn’t want to know. He appraised the Guest in the silence that fell over them. “How long do we have?”

“I do not know. Perhaps less than an orbit.”

Harry winced. Colonel Hall simply gaped.

“How long ago did your — did the ship land?” Arthur continued.

The Guest made a small hissing sound and turned away. “I do not know,” it replied. “We have not been aware.”

Arthur did not hesitate to ask the next question. “Did the ship stop by a planet in our solar system? Did it destroy a moon?”

“I don’t know.”

A short, powerfully built Asiatic man with close-trimmed black hair, dark pockmarked skin, and broad cheekbones entered the room. Arthur slapped his hands on his knees and glared at him.

“I beg your pardon, gentlemen,” he said.

Sanborn cleared his throat. “This is Colonel Tuan Anh Phan.” He introduced Arthur and Harry.

Phan greeted each with a reserved nod. “I’ve just been informed that the Australians are releasing news photos and motion pictures. I believe this is important. Their visitors are not like our own.”

InfoNet Political News Forum, October 6, 1996, Frank Topp, commentator: President Crockerman’s rating in the World-News public opinion polls has been a rocksteady 60 to 65 percent approval since June, with no signs of change as Election Day approaches. Political pundits in Washington doubt that anything can derail the President ‘ s easy victory in November, not even the hundred-billion-dollar trade imbalance between the Eastern Pacific Rim nations and Uncle Sam…or the enigmatic situation in Australia. I, for one, am not even wearing campaign buttons. It’s going to be a dull election.

QUARENS ME, SEDISTI LASSOS

7

Hicks, bleary-eyed, clothing rumpled, sat on the straight-backed hotel desk chair and scanned the contents of the file he had marked “Hurrah.” “Hurrah” contained the choicest bits of information from twenty-two hours and perhaps three hundred dollars’ worth of accessing specialist bulletin boards around the world. He did not care about costs. He was still high.

Australia did indeed have an artifact in their Great Victoria Desert, something apparently disguised to resemble a huge chunk of red granite. The Australian government had kept the find secret for about thirty days, until leaks through investigating military and scientific agencies threatened to scoop them on the greatest story of all time. This much and more — speculation, rumors — had been repeated again and again on all the networks he had accessed. While the government had not released full details, they were expected to do so any day.

The Regulus bulletin board was used solely by radio astronomers belonging to the 21cm Club, of which he was an honorary member. After searching through the general and special interest messages, in a small area headlined “Irresponsible Murmurs,” Hicks had found a cryptic and unsigned note: “Ham fanatic, right? Say no more about identity. Picked up unscrambled transmission to AFI” — that, Hicks decided, must be Air Force One, the President’s plane — “concerning ‘our own bogey in the Furnace.’ The Man’s heading west to Vandenberg. Could this be…?”

Hicks frowned again, reading that. He knew several shuttle pilots currently flying out of Vandenberg. Dare he call them up and ask if anything untoward had been happening? Dare he mention “our own bogey in the Furnace”?

A knock interrupted his reverie. He was heading for the door when it opened and a young Asian woman in lime-green blouse and slacks backed in. “Housekeeping,” she announced, seeing him. “Okay?”

Hicks looked over his room abstractedly, relieved that he had chosen to wear a robe. He often worked in the buff, paunch, gray chest hairs, and all — the habit of a bachelor of long standing. “Please, not yet.”

“Soon?” she asked, smiling.

“Soon. An hour.”

She shut the door behind her. Hicks paced back and forth from curtained window to bathroom door, chin in hand, face as clear and guileless as an infant’s. “I cannot think straight,” he muttered. Turning on the television and selecting a twenty-four-hour news station, he sat on the corner of the bed.

For a moment, he thought he had tuned to a movie channel by mistake. Three shiny silver objects, shaped like long-necked gourds, hovered above arid sandy ground. Nearby squatted a large van topped by an array of electronic sensing equipment. The van gave the objects scale; each was as tall as a man. Hicks reached over to turn up the volume, joining a male announcer in midsentence:

“—from four days ago, shows the three mechanical remote devices which the Australian government claims emerged from a disguised spacecraft. The government says these devices have communicated with their scientists.”

The video of the silvery gourds and van was replaced by a typical press conference scene, with a slender, thirtyish man in a brown suit standing behind a clear plastic podium, reading a prepared statement: “We have communicated with these objects, and we can now affirm that they are not living creatures, but robots, representing the builders of the spacecraft — it is now confirmed to be a spacecraft — buried within the rock. While the actual communications are still being analyzed and will not be released immediately, the substance of the information supplied was positive, that is, not threatening or alarming in any fashion.”

“Jesus bloody Christ,” Hicks said.

The image of the hovering gourds returned. “They’re flying,” Hicks said. “What’s holding them up? Come on, you bastards. Do your job and say what the bloody hell’s going on.”

“Commentary from world leaders, including the Pope, after these messages—”

Hicks flung his arms out and swore, kicked the cabinet holding the television, and punched the set off. He could spend another three hundred dollars chasing rumors across all the networks and bulletin boards in the world, or—

Or he could stop being a novelist wallah and start being a journalist again by finding the news behind the news. Certainly not in Australia. The Great Victoria Desert, by now, had representatives of the media three-deep, trying to interview every grain of sand.

A faint memory of some obligation suddenly flared into consciousness. He had had an appointment this morning. “Damn.” That single word, said almost happily, adequately expressed his slight irritation at having forgotten the local television interview. He should have been at the studio five hours ago. It hardly seemed to matter. He was on to something.