Dewhurst
by Chukwudi Ogbonna

They were again listening, all calmly attentive. Save for Wendy, who had a question. She had dragged Ellis to the vast battery of screens at the room's far side.

"Just say what you said, all over again, really slowly. What is their world like?".

"Imagine a sort of box with infinite planes and tubes passing through it. That's only a crude picture, I must warn you".

"You guys have a way of qualifying everything. I was actually beginning to from a clear picture of that box with the infinite tubes and planes sticking out of it."

Dewhurst interrupted them. "Boss, maybe you ought to get a look at this Dewhurst said. "It's a really detailed picture that's just been obtained."

"Excuse me please" said Ellis to Wendy, and he walked over to the battery of consoles. At the console Ellis glanced from screen to screen.

"We're picking out what is clearly dialogue" Dewhurst explained as Ellis studied the figures on the several screens. "There are apparently two Spectralian individuals; the computers are still trying to work out what activity they're engaged in using the standard theory but the dialogue's pretty clear".

"Well let's have it " Ellis suggested.

"You look very beautiful at this moment."

"This is a military installation."

"I can have opinions, even If I am a sailor".

"There's no god damned chain of command out here," Wu declared. " At least the one that operated on the Avenger doesn't apply here. Here the laws of supply and demand will operate to select a leader for us and so I will not take any damned orders from you or any bullshit either".

"Okay then, that's perfectly fine by me," replied Walsh. "I'll just step back and let the invisible hand work out who the boss is."

Wu said nothing more, and Walsh watched the young scientist-officer as he tapped at the keys on the device's extendable keyboard. It seemed to Walsh that Wu cared little if he existed or not and at that moment Walsh felt really alone. He still had a form grip on his dignity however, and on the reality that he regarded as having begun to become more complicated with the passing of each slow hour. Walsh wasn't a religious man, so he could find no help in prayer, as a lot of the crew had begun to do. He was alone, alone with a hostile world and equipment that couldn't get him anywhere and an indeterminate number of ravenous Spectralians. He could attribute real personalities and reality in general to the Spooks now, remarkable at that time for a non-scientist. They were being hunted, and this was now a game where no prisoners would be taken, a game that could never be anything other than zero-sum, with either the humans or the specters winning and he was already at a disadvantage, hob

bled already. He would fight his way out of the restricted reality at his command, but he did not have the requisite implements and the requisite power, and he was the sort of person who believed in fighting to win. The game could not be considered fair if there was so much stacked against him, and, he thought, had he been an Ancient . Greek, he would have had good reason to believe the watching gods were prejudiced against him.

Wesley White, a young black officer, sat at the portable console now, fiddling with the commands. "Hey, Jordan, "he said after a while,"we've got some big stuff here". "What's the problem? Asked Wu. " They're staging an attack on a native village " said White. "And more and more spook ships have been deploying around this planet".

They heard a distant explosion and then a chorus of screams; screams which grew more desperate for about a minute, and then were abruptly silenced.

"Really, I wonder what they believe they'll have to wipe out all locals around here for "said Walsh.

"The savages are little more than vermin to them, admiral "Wu offered. "Then on top of that they must have observed that we're smart as well and they wouldn't want any smart pests sneaking around when they would have had whatever it is they're determined to establish here running".

"But the damn savages here are pretty much innocuous "Walsh observed.

"How would you feel if you heard all that drumming of theirs outside your office window just about every single day" asked Wu. "The noise alone would justify their extermination. And then there's the observed fact that these savages can learn quite a bit, and the spooks most have figured out that these incredibly stupid yet intelligent people would start figuring out a few things for themselves. There's an ancient Chinese proverb which says that when slaves spend too much time hanging around the temples of the gods they start to overemphasize what they can observe about themselves which they believe is similar to the properties of the gods. The Chinese were really wise people, weren't they?"

" Did the Chinese really say that?" White asked.

"So you believe these crude apes could comprehend what the spooks are", said Phelps. "You believe they could even begin to form some sort of idea what spectrals represent. They don't have the math; they don't have the basic scientific attitude. It would make no difference whatsoever if the spooks let these savages live. The savages are worthless anyway".

"You'll be surprised what a savage is capable of accomplishing when he's got self-improvement as an objective" argued Wu. "These so called savages will realize that there's a lot about the spooks that clearly isn't divine, then they will start measuring themselves against the Spectrals".

"Yeah, but the savages will need pretty sophiscated instrumentation for that huge task of working out that the spooks aren't divine " noted Philips. " They can't learn much about the Spectrals with crude observation. I wrote these bastards off a long time ago."

Walsh saw lieutenant White leave the portable console and walk over to where a cluster of portable detectors were kept under a large plastic cover. White pulled a detector out and turned to Dillon. "Major, I've got results which say that an extra detector's going to be necessary for the perimeter".

"Alright" side Dillon." You'd better take some sort of quality sidearm with you".

"The spooks can't beat the shield yet "said Phelps

"Take a blaster anyway, White", Dillon maintained.

"I've got a blaster already." There was an activated quantum gun hanging from White's holster. With strong, almost choreographed seeming strides White walked off into the jungle.

He had nothing but loud animals that kept themselves carefully concealed for company, and as he strode across the shadowed floor of that grand forest he found he was a little frightened by the grand scale and the way that world seemed to be suffused by a sort of stealthy cold because the plants with their leaves up in the canopy seemed to be monopolizing all the sunlight. It was hard to believe that there was a sun at all, from where he was. There was actually an incredible sort of dullness about that forest.

White depended on an electronic map for guidance through that unmapped and untamed world. It was as if the Natives had never existed in that area; there was no sign that any form of tool using, thinking life had ever been in that area. At length white stopped walking, the display on his wrist unit having indicated that he had reached the point where the detector had to be placed and he drew a mallet out of his toolkit and placed the detector on the damp earth and gave it a single smart blow with the mallet. He then watched as a cluster of minute lights flashed across the detector. Satisfied with the results of his labors he gathered his tools and turned and began to stride again through the trackless wilds.

He had walked a while when he heard a sound like a whisper among the moist leaves. He stopped and looked around and saw nothing and walked on. He did not note the frantic activity on a schematic map displayed on his wrist unit's secondary screen. A blob of metallic, shimmering light seemed to leap out of nowhere and hit White in the temple. Most of his brain burst out through the opposite temple, and he fell over like a severed log.

The girl was young; she still had pimples on her face. Her glance was unsteady when it alighted on other people's faces. She operated the bay door interface panel with deftness. The sequence of heavy panels and doors began to slide aside, while a conveyor shifted the excursion team outwards. A circular shield door opened last of all and the shifting conveyor deposited the team in the main crew vestibule of a micro-platform. The girl walked over to another panel. There was a young man a few meters away, Caucasian, with intensely blond hair and clear blue eyes. He looked around the nearly spherical vestibule like a person sizing up a new real estate purchase. He did not appear to be in much of a hurry, even though the other members of the team were leaving the vestibule. After surveying his new surroundings he walked over to a side of the vestibule and squatted and unzipped his knapsack.

He began by taking a piece of furled cloth out of the knapsack. As he unfurled it, it became a flag. The flag featured an amalgam of the ancient Confederate Battle Flag and a Nazi swastika.

Perry and Johnson were the only other people left in the vestibule and they needed little time to notice the flag the young white officer had with him. There was a long silence as they watched.

"Look, I hope you wasn't bringing that flag onto this platform "Perry began.

Well I have, haven't I? " the young officer replied, turning slightly, his voice cold.

"We can't have no Aryan White supremacist bastard sharing the damned air on this platform with us."

"The code of freedoms outlines that I've got an inalienable right to express my opinions, whatever they may be, so mind your own damned business, " the boy snarled.

"Sure, Klansman" said Perry, as he and Johnson watched the boy walk away, trailing his flag and lugging along his heavy knapsack.

A few minutes later the microplatform launched. Leaving its mother ship it glided through the surrounding spectral environment, with all its strange properties, then it warped, the odd properties and constitution of this environment not serving to limit the capabilities the microplatform's human creators had built into it.

The microplatform flew around something that looked like a huge, shimmering though tattered tower, which seemed to continue onwards in both directions to infinity and which appeared, in addition to pulse with light, as though it had a heartbeat. From low on the horizon a huge, gliding wall of shimmering light appeared. The microplatform's escort drone vanished, enveloped by a shimmering cloud. What was more, the platforms instruments were detecting a still larger reality.

"We're picking something out" Perry announced. He and Johnson were computer experts and did not have even a remote idea of what else the platform was doing. Then a huge ray shot out of nowhere and hit them.

Memorial services were held for Perry and Johnson. Simms, Dewhurst, Ball, Ellis, Jill, Wendy Hayward, Kay Howarth and the Pimply Girl who'd been on the mission with them, a Phillipa Pais, were all there, as well as scores of the black friends of the two fallen sailors. The eulogies were delivered by the platform's black African chaperon, and by a black friend of both of the deceased. Both eulogists were overwrought.

"There's a system of ideas and rationalizations that they don't share and which they could never sympathize with so they could never be part of our world. They will remain forever shut out of our world; they will never be able to carry out the conceptual leap which ought to be able to provide them with access to our culture ".

There was a gap in the conversation. Ellis began to doodle on the screen of his electronic pocket computer. The command center around him was quiet.

For the military people there was a lot of information coming out of the Specterverse that had to be weighed and considered and processed but Ellis would have likened their efforts at interpretation to an attempt to play baseball without bats. He agreed with the emerging Nesbit school that any kind of effective response by humanity to the problem posed by the Specterverse and its evidently ingenious inhabitants required the establishments of a hypostasis of scientific theory that would serve as a mediating instrument. That is, it would be necessary for humans to obtain an understanding of what they were dealing with before they could deal with it.

"Dr. Ellis, Spectralian subjects, currently a male and a female, are currently engaged in a non-verbal activity with sexual implications, " the supervising computer told Ellis, in a dull tone.

" I copy " Ellis replied. Ellis took a look at the stream of figures gliding across his screen, figures which described the activity of the two subjects. These were figures without color or drama or heart or heat or anything of that nature but Ellis found them of immense value, however, his only complaint being that there were too many of the figures. The small portions of the rapidly flowing torrent of figures he succeeded in reading intermittently were as clear and as meaningful as a poem or the lines of a pop song would have been to most other people.

There was a beep from the minute speakers on the console. The dialogue had resumed. Ellis doodled a little more.

"Every group should have a place in the new technological world that is being developed. That is the final purpose of all our efforts, isn't it? The improvement of the condition of people irrespective of their nationality."

"That's nonsense, some peoples simply don't get it. They simply don't have a damned clue."

EXPERTS FROM THE NOVEL "AVENGER"

© Chukwudi Ogbonna 2000