介绍:
The request for that meeting was perhaps the second most momentous phone call in my life. The first, of
course, will be the one from Mountain Rescue. At that point your dad and I will be speaking to each other
maybe once a year, tops. After I get that phone call, though, the first thing I'll do will be to call your father.
He and I will drive out together to perform the identification, a long silent car ride. I remember the morgue,
all tile and stainless steel, the hum of refrigeration and smell of antiseptic. An orderly will pull the sheet
back to reveal your face. Your face will look wrong somehow, but I'll know it's you.
“Yes, that's her,” I'll say. “She's mine.”You'll be twenty-five then.
The MP checked my badge, made a notation on his clipboard, and opened the gate; I drove the off-road
vehicle into the encampment, a small village of tents pitched by the Army in a farmer's sun-scorched
pasture. At the center of the encampment was one of the alien devices, nicknamed “looking glasses.”
According to the briefings I'd attended, there were nine of these in the United States, one hundred and
twelve in the world. The looking glasses acted as twoway communication devices, presumably with the
ships in orbit. No one knew why the aliens wouldn't talk to us in person; fear of cooties, maybe. A team of
scientists, including a physicist and a linguist, was assigned to each looking glass; Gary Donnelly and I
were on this one.
Gary was waiting for me in the parking area. We navigated a circular maze of concrete barricades until we
reached the large tent that covered the looking glass itself. In front of the tent was an equipment cart
loaded with goodies borrowed from the school's phonology lab; I had sent it ahead for inspection by the
Army.
Also outside the tent were three tripod-mounted video cameras whose lenses peered, through windows in
the fabric wall, into the main room. Everything Gary and I did would be reviewed by countless others,
including military intelligence. In addition we would each send daily reports, of which mine had to include
estimates on how much English I thought the aliens could understand.
Gary held open the tent flap and gestured for me to enter. “Step right up,” he said, circus-barker-style.
“Marvel at creatures the likes of which have never been seen on God's green earth.”
“And all for one slim dime,” I murmured, walking through the door. At the moment the looking glass was
inactive, resembling a semicircular mirror over ten feet high and twenty feet across. On the brown grass in
front of the looking glass, an arc of white spray paint outlined the activation area. Currently the area
contained only a table, two folding chairs, and a power strip with a cord leading to a generator outside.
The buzz of fluorescent lamps, hung from poles along the edge of the room, commingled with the buzz of
flies in the sweltering heat.
Gary and I looked at each other, and then began pushing the cart of equipment up to the table. As we
crossed the paint line, the looking glass appeared to grow transparent; it was as if someone was slowly
raising the illumination behind tinted glass. The illusion of depth was uncanny; I felt I could walk right into
it. Once the looking glass was fully lit it resembled a life-sized diorama of a semicircular room. The room
contained a few large objects that might have been furniture, but no aliens. There was a door in the
curved rear wall.
We busied ourselves connecting everything together: microphone, sound spectrograph, portable
computer, and speaker. As we worked, I frequently glanced at the looking glass, anticipating the aliens'
arrival. Even so I jumped when one of them entered.
It looked like a barrel suspended at the intersection of seven limbs. It was radially symmetric, and any of
its limbs could serve as an arm or a leg. The one in front of me was walking around on four legs, three
non-adjacent arms curled up at its sides. Gary called them “heptapods.”
I'd been shown videotapes, but I still gawked. Its limbs had no distinct joints; anatomists guessed they
might be supported by vertebral columns. Whatever their underlying structure, the heptapod's limbs
conspired to move it in a disconcertingly fluid manner. Its “torso” rode atop the rippling limbs as smoothly
as a hovercraft.
Seven lidless eyes ringed the top of the heptapod's body. It walked back to the doorway from which it
entered, made a brief sputtering sound, and returned to the center of the room followed by anotherheptapod; at no point did it ever turn around. Eerie, but logical; with eyes on all sides, any direction might
as well be “forward.
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