"They want to muffle the news?"

"Well, not really. Although I suspect some of them would be happy if I did. No, it was other things. Sullivan screaming off his head about a few trees being cut down, as if a few trees are of any great account. State insisting that we immediately set up a policy for dealing with the visitor. The CIA counseling that we keep secret all that we may learn from it. Whiteside worrying about how we can defend ourselves against it."

"Dave, you say the President and his men, as if you were not one of the President's men. You don't really like these men, do you. The men the President has around him."

"It isn't a question of whether I like them or not. I have to work with them. But on my own terms. More and more I am seeing that I have to do that. Some of them I like. Jack Clark, the presidential military aide—I like him. We generally see eye to eye."

"Actually," said Alice, "we don't know what our Minnesota visitor is."

"No, of course we don't. Not the slightest idea. It seems quite apparent that it came from space, but that is all we know. Some of these men we were talking about aren't even willing to admit that much, including our science advisor. Not knowing what it is is not to be wondered at. It landed just a little more than twenty-four hours ago. We'll be lucky if we have any real idea of what it is by this time next week. It may take months to know."

"If it stays that long."

"That, too. It may not stay more than a day or two. If that should be the case, it will give us something to talk about and argue about for years. All sorts of conjecture. All Sorts of ideas about how its reception could have been handled differently. All sorts of theories about what we should have done. I hope it stays long enough for us to get a few things nailed down."

"What I am afraid of, if it stays long enough," said Alice, "is that we'll get angry at it, for cutting down some of our precious trees or for some other reasons. Dave, we can't afford to hate this thing. We can't allow ourselves to become tilled with a blind hatred for it. We may not love it, but we must respect it as another life form."

"There," said Porter; "speaks the true anthropology student."

"You can make fun of me if you want to," she said, "but that's the way it has to be, for our own good. There probably is other life in the universe and if there's life, there should be some intelligence—but it's unlikely there are too many intelligences.

"Alice, we don't even know if this thing is alive, let alone intelligent."

"There must be intelligence. It landed on a road; it picked its landing site. It is cutting down trees and extracting cellulose. That would argue some intelligence."

"A pre-programmed machine

"I can't accept that," said Alice. "It requires too much. A preprogrammed machine would have to be programmed to respond to millions of situations and environments. I doubt that could be done. When the visitor landed, it could have had no preconceived notions of what kind of planet it was landing on. A general idea maybe but that is all Even if it were only a machine and was capable of all these things that seem so impossible there would have to be somewhere an intelligence that put the pro gram into it."

"I know. You can talk around in circles on it."

"You cannot sidetrack the conclusion," said Alice, "that an intelligence somehow is involved. We shy away from it, of course, because of our biological bias. Such a thing as that big black box, we say, cannot be alive. There's no living thing on Earth like it, so it cannot be alive. It's so illogical, too. That's another reason we recoil from it. It's processing cellulose and why should it want cellulose? We use cellulose to make paper and perhaps other things as well. I'm not up on cellulose. But this thing can't be intending to make paper, so it makes no sense. No one has stopped to consider that cellulose may be a treasure to it, that trees are a bonanza. Just like gold or diamonds would be to us. It may have traveled across many light-years to find a planet where cellulose exists. There wouldn't be, throughout the galaxy, too many planets where trees, or the equivalent of trees, would grow."

"I have the horrible feeling," said Porter, "that you are leading up to something."

"Yes, I am," she said. "A parallel in history that may teach a lesson. Here is a thing that plops down on top of us and begins to take what it wants, without asking us, ignoring us—doing the same thing the white men did when they came to the Americas or to Africa or wherever else they went. As arrogant as we were, as self-satisfied, as assured as we were of our right to do it."

"I'm afraid," he said, "that there are others who will be saying the same thing. You are the first, but there will be others. The Indians, for one."

"The native Americans," said Alice.

"All right. Have it your way. Native Americans."

"There's another thing," she said. "We have to make every effort to communicate with our visitor. It may have so many things to tell us. Some things, perhaps, that we have never even thought about, have never conceptualized. New viewpoints and perspectives. ‘What we could learn from it may change our lives. Turn us around. I have always thought that somewhere along the way, we got off on a wrong track. The visitor, just possibly, could put us back on the right track."

"I agree with you," he said, "but how do we go about talking with it? To do any good, if it's capable of doing us any good, it couldn't be just pidgin talk. It would have to be a meaningful conversation. That might be hard to come by—if we can talk with it at all."

"It would take time," she said. "We'll have to be patient. We must give it, and ourselves, a chance. Above all, we should do nothing to drive it away. We should hang in there, no matter what it takes."

"So far, Alice, there has been no suggestion that we should drive it away. Even if we wanted to, there's no one who has the least idea of how to go about it."

14. LONE PINE

Kathy woke in the middle of the night, huddling in the bed, cringing against the darkness and the cold of the motel room pressing down upon her.

The cold, she thought, the cold and darkness. And knew that she was not thinking so much of the present cold and darkness, here in this small room, as of the cold and darkness through which the visitor had passed to arrive on Earth.

Had she been dreaming of it, she wondered, the dream, now forgotten, translating into this first waking moment? If so, she had no recollection of the dream.

But the thought of the visitor and of the chill emptiness of outer space still continued to persist. From how far out, she wondered, had it come? Perhaps across light-years, with the glint of unknown suns faint specks of hazy light in the all-engulfing darkness. Propelled across the cosmos, driven by a purpose of its own, driven by an emptiness of soul as deep and wide as the emptiness of galactic space, driven by a hunger unlike the hunger that an inhabitant of the planet Earth might feel, seeking, perhaps, the Earth or another planet like the Earth. And why the Earth, or a planet like the Earth? Because it would have trees? Fiercely, she shook her head, for it must be more than that. There must be something more than trees.

Maybe, she told herself, it was doing no more than exploring, mapping the galaxy, or following some dim, cobbled-together chart that some earlier traveler might have put together, following it in the fulfillment of a mission that the human mind might not have the capability to grasp.

The cold and dark, she thought again, wondering why it was that she continued to come back to the cold and dark. But there would be more, she thought, than the cold and dark. There would be, as well, the loneliness, the smallness of one's self in the never-ending gulf where there could exist no flicker of compassion or even of awareness, but only a great uncaring that took no notice of anything that moved or made its way across it. What kind of creature, she wondered, could stand up in the face of this great uncaring? What kind of creature could consign itself to the maw of nothingness? What sort of motive must it have to drive itself into the continuing emptiness? Perhaps it had a purpose—for to do what it had done, there must be a purpose. But if its purpose were the Earth, then it could not have known when it started out that it would achieve its purpose. Certainly, no one in even the most shallow depths of space could know of Earth, or have any inkling of Earth.