... And Check the Oil
Astounding – October 1958
(1958)*
Randall Garrett

If we could only get hold of a working interstellar spaceship, we would of course be out among the stars ourselves. They keep telling us...!

-

	I DON'T KNOW who got me into it. Somebody mentioned my name to somebody else, I suppose, and then some third party agreed, so my name was sent to the FBI. Those worthy gentlemen stewed over my recorded past and my reputable present, and came up with a forecast on my probable future, all of which was duly forwarded to the persons interested. They chewed it all over, and I was nabbed for the job.

	Of course, it wasn't quite as crude as that. They couldn't and didn't draft me; instead, they got Hoffstetter to do it He was the perfect man for the job, too; he knows that the way to whet the scientific appetite is to give it a tidbit that it can't swallow until it's been chewed over for a long time.

	He came strolling into my lab one day with a grin spread across his chubby face and said: "Hi, Doc. I asked at your office first, but the girl said you'd be in the lab. I should have known you'd never go in for paper work."

	"Hi, Hoff," I said. "Still working for Uncle Sam'l?"

	"Well, it feels like work, and I'm drawing a paycheck. What's cooking?" 

	He meant the question literally. He was pointing at the Wolff flask on the lab bench in front of me. There was a thermometer in one neck, a mercury-sealed electric stirrer in another, and a specially designed fractionating column attached to the third. The whole thing was attached to a vacuum pump, and the stuff in the flask was boiling merrily.

	I knew he wasn't really interested, so I just said: "A bunch of benzine derivatives, I hope. What's on your mind, Hoff?"

	"I've got a job for you, Doc," Hoffstetter said casually.

	I peered at the thermometer, checked the time, and put the figures on my data sheet. "Yeah? What kind of a job?"

	His grin grew wider. "Now, what kind of a job would I be giving to the world's greatest chemist? Dishwashing?"

	"I've done plenty of that," I told him. "And knock off that 'world's greatest' bunk. I'm not, and you know it"

	"You are as far as this job is concerned. Here." He reached in his pocket and pulled out a small box. He set it on the lab bench and flipped it open. It was padded inside like a jeweler's box, and a small sealed flask nestled itself comfortably in the padding. The flask wasn't any bigger than the first joint of my thumb. It was about three-quarters full of some straw-colored liquid.

	I didn't pick it up. I just looked at it and then looked up at Hoffstetter. "So?"

	"It's all yours," he said, "all one and a half milliliters of it. We want to know what it is."

	This time, I picked the flask up. It was a trifle heavier than I'd expected it to be. The liquid inside was more viscous than water. In fact, the stuff looked and flowed like a good grade of light machine oil.

	"Where'd you get it?" I asked.

	"I can't tell you, Doc," Hoffstetter said.

	That irritated me. "Well, is there anything you can tell me? This bottle's sealed. What happens if I break the seal? Does it oxidize on exposure to air, or evaporate, or what?"

	"Oh, that. That was just to prevent leakage. No, it's fairly stable, I imagine. Odorless. Nonpoisonous, as far as I know, though I don't think anyone's tried to taste it. Oily. I don't know the boiling point."

	I was holding the flask up to the light, and I noticed that the meniscus at the surface was convex. "And it doesn't wet glass," I said.

	"Hell," said Hoffstetter, "it doesn't wet anything."

	"Interesting," I admitted. "Is this the biggest sample you could get?"

	Hoffstetter spread his hands. "It's all I have."

	"Not much to work with," I told him, "but I'll see what I can do."

	"Fair enough," he said. "Send the analysis and the bill to me, personally." He handed me a card. "And keep it under your hat."

	"Fair enough," I said. "I'll let you know in a week or so."

-

	It was a lot less than a week. Three days later, I got Hoffstetter on the phone. "Hoff, where the devil did you get that stuff?"

	"Why?" he countered. "What's that got to do with it?"

	"Because it doesn't act like anything I ever came across before."

	"You mean you can't analyze it?" he asked. His voice sounded worried.

	"I didn't say that. The first thing I did was get a spectroscope reading, so I can tell you to a T what elements are in the stuff. But the molecular weight is something fierce. It's way too high."

	"What do you mean, 'too high'?"

	"Well, the stuff ought to be a solid, not a nice, free-flowing liquid," I told him. "And it's a devil of a lot more stable than it ought to be, all things considered. Can you possibly get me any more of it?"

	There was a silence at the other end for a moment. Then Hoffstetter said: "Do you think you could analyze it if you had more time and more of the stuff?"

	"Sure. Where can I get it?"

	Hoffstetter had me with a gaff, and he knew it. I could almost see his grin coming across the phone wires. He made his proposition. I hemmed and hawed for all of five minutes before I took it.

-

	It didn't take long for me to get a leave of absence from my own company. I just left it in the hands of my business partner, George Avery, and took off. The lab staff could handle almost anything that came along while I was gone. Hoffstetter and I caught a commercial airline stratocruiser out to the West Coast, and an Air Force jet bomber took us from there. I had no idea of where we were headed, except that it was an unidentified island somewhere in the South Pacific.

	The plane rolled to a halt at the end of a long runway. A squad of Air Force men, each armed with a heavy pistol at his belt, came sprinting up to help us unload. I'd requisitioned some equipment I needed from the Air Force labs, and it was all neatly packed in crates in the belly of the ship. The Air Force men treated the crates as though they were babies, which I appreciated no little.

	The first thing that caught my eyes as I stepped off the plane was the big metal dome that towered over every other building on the base, even the control tower. It looked thick and squat, even so; it looked like a big, flat, black Easter egg sitting on its larger end. It was a hundred feet high and at least seventy-five feet through at its thickest part.

	Don't ask me why I didn't recognize it for what it was. I should have, I suppose. I should have taken one look at it, and said to myself: "Well, what do you know? A spaceship!" but somehow I had always assumed that a spaceship would be a tall thin cigar of polished metal, not a fat, eggy-looking, dead black thing like this.

	I started to ask Hoffstetter what it was, but he shook his head before I could get my mouth open. "No questions, Doc. Answers first, questions afterward."

	I knew Hoffstetter well enough to know that he wasn't just making meaningless noises, so I just kept my mouth shut and followed him to the jeep which was waiting for us a few yards from the plane. The sergeant at the wheel just barely waited until we'd sat down before he gunned the motor and took off towards the nearest of the buildings at the edge of the landing field.

	I was beginning to get uncomfortable. The plane had been air-conditioned, but the landing field wasn't. The hot whiteness of the Pacific sun glared down from a pale blue sky and sparkled from the deeper blue of the ocean in the distance. I saw Hoffstetter peeling off his civilian jacket, so I did likewise. If he wasn't going to be formal, neither was I.

	The jeep pulled up in front of a two-story wooden building that gleamed whitely with fresh paint. Hoffstetter and I climbed out, and I followed him in through the door.

	It was a normal-looking military office. Men and women in uniform sat at desks in the big room or moved through it with quiet efficiency. There was only one jarring note. Every man and woman in the place had a sidearm strapped to their waist, and every one of them gave the impression that he or she was ready, willing, and able to use it.

	Hoffstetter led me to the door marked COMMANDING GENERAL. There was an Air Force captain sitting at a desk piled high with papers. At his waist was the ubiquitous sidearm. He looked up as Hoffstetter and I came in.

	"Hello, Hoffstetter. I see you got your man." He had a rather tired smile on his thin face. "Let's see the papers."

	Hoffstetter pulled a sheaf of official papers out of his brief case and handed them over. The captain leafed through them, nodded, stood up, and saluted. Then he held out his hand.

	"Welcome aboard, commander."

	I took the hand, but I didn't return the salute. Navy men don't salute unless their head is covered.

	"I still don't quite understand why I had to accept active duty for this job," I told him. "I thought I'd be in the United States Naval Reserve. Inactive, for the rest of my life. Why recall me to duty just so I can go on being a chemist?"

	The captain frowned. "I think you'd better ask the general about that, sir. He's expecting you."

	He punched a button on the intercom on his desk and said: "Commander Barton is here, sir."

	"Send him in," said the gravelly bass voice of Lieutenant general Mawson. He didn't sound as though he'd changed a bit since I'd last seen him, eight years before.

	He had changed some, though. I saw that as soon as we entered the office. His hair, which had been only gray at the temples, was almost solid gray now, and the lines in his face had deepened, making it look more like weathered brown granite than ever.

	"Commander Peter Barton reporting for duty, sir," I said.

	He snapped me a salute and waved towards a chair. "Glad to see you, sailor. Sit down." Then he looked at Hoffstetter. "It took you long enough to get him here."

	Hoffstetter grinned. "I had to twist his arm, general."

	"All right. Give me those papers and scram. You'll take the same plane back as soon as she's refueled. See if you can snare Galvez for us."

	"I'll try," said Hoffstetter. He put his hand on my shoulder. "Be good, Doc. I'll see you." And he was gone.

	"I don't suppose you brought a uniform," said General Mawson.

	"I didn't have time, sir. Everybody was in such an all-fired hurry that I couldn't get everything straightened out at home, much less think of everything I'd need here."

	Mawson made a gesture of dismissal. "That's all right You won't need anything here except khakis, anyway. I did manage to get some insignia for you from one of the Navy boys, so you'll be all right" He opened a drawer of his desk and pulled out a handful of hardware—the Naval shield-and-anchors and the silver oak-leaves of a full commander.

	"And I got a Navy hat for that big dome of yours—a seven and three-quarters, isn't it? Right. Go down to the QM and get some khakis, then go over to Ordnance and draw a sidearm and holster. Come back here at sixteen hundred, and don't go asking a lot of questions around here. That clear?"

	"I stood up. "Yes, sir. But I'd like to ask one question of you."

	"Shoot," he said. "But I don't promise an answer."

	"Why was it necessary for me to sign up for active duty? Doesn't the Air Force believe in hiring civilian chemists any more?"

	The general's face hardened. "Not for this job. We want you under military discipline."

	"Why, sir?"

	"So we can court-martial you and shoot you if we have to."

-

	I went over to the Quartermaster building to get a uniform. The shavetail in charge gave me three suits of khakis and everything to go with them except a hat. He didn't have the regulation Navy covers. He tried to palm some field boots off on me, but I stuck with my guns and insisted on black oxfords. He gave in and then checked over his list of rooms in the Bachelor Officers' Quarters and assigned me a number and gave me the key.

	Then I went over to Ordnance and picked up a sidearm, a holster, and two magazines of ammunition. I wanted to ask the Ordnance officer why it was necessary for everyone to carry a loaded pistol, but I decided that such questions just might be the kind that Mawson didn't want me to ask. And I didn't feel like breaking any regulations until I found out what was going on.

	I headed for the BOQ to check in, dump my gear, and get into uniform. In the distance, I could see the towering black dome. I kept wondering what it was, but I decided not to ask any questions about the dome, either.

	At sixteen hundred that afternoon, I was back in General Mawson's office. We didn't stay long. Mawson led me outside, and he headed across the compound toward the great black ovoid.

	"I know you want to ask a lot of questions, Barton," General Mawson said, "but hold off a little until we can give you a connected story. It'll make things easier in the long run, and take less time. O.K.?"

	"You're the general," I said. "You know more about the situation than I do. But I warn you, I came here because of a promise; I wouldn't like to see you pull a fast one on me."

	"What promise was that?" asked Mawson.

	"That oily-looking liquid that Hoffstetter brought me a sample of," I told him. "I was promised that I'd get more of it to work on, and that I could have all the equipment I needed."

	Mawson came out with his deep, rasping chuckle. "Don't worry, Barton. We have all sorts of fascinating things for you to work on. That's why you're here."

	We went into another building, located almost at the base of the huge, looming, black egg. I could see that it was a newly constructed, temporary affair; the walls were covered with plastic sheeting, and the inside was unpainted. I followed Mawson upstairs, into a roomful of people.

	There were twenty people in that room, sixteen men and four women, and every one of them was in uniform. Air Force, Army, Navy, Marines, even the Coast Guard was represented. But most of them were Air Force.

	I knew several of them personally. Lidell, the biologist; Freisen, a physical chemist from Cal Tech; and Burkhalter, an M.D. specializing in neurology, were all friends of mine. I knew Oglethorpe, the physicist, and Bell, the biochemist, well enough to speak to, and most of the others I knew by reputation. Old Professor Brymer, one of the top astronomers in the world, was chuckling over the fact that he was the oldest boot shavetail in the Air Force. He and several others had not had reserve commissions, so Uncle Sugar had just handed out a few gold bars.

	One of the women was a good-looking brunette in her middle thirties; a sleek, svelte, efficient-looking female who looked as though she were a thoroughgoing career girl, as uninterested in men as an Easter Island statue, and as cold as Little America in August. That is, she seemed that way from a distance of a couple of yards. But when we were introduced, her hand squeezed mine, and her eyes looked straight into mine and crinkled up in the same expression that Lilith must have given Adam. With the smile on her lips and the light in those gray-green eyes, she had suddenly changed. Cold? Yeah, like an atomic oxyhydrogen torch.

	I repeated her name because it hadn't quite registered. "Lieutenant Anthony? The name is familiar, but—"

	She laughed. "Anthony is a pretty common name, Commander Barton, but I know what you mean. You're trying to place my name in some scientific field. Ever hear of S. Brownell Anthony?"

	I snapped my fingers. "Sure! That is, the name rings a bell, but I still can't quite place it. Didn't you have a couple of articles in Scientific American a while back?"

	"Five, to be exact." She could see I was racking my brains to place her, and the little devil was grinning at me! 

	"All right," I said, "I give up."

	"The last one was 'Linguistics and Primitive Man' " she said.

	"I'm crushed," I said. "I must admit my ignorance. I remember the title now, but I didn't get around to reading it."

	"That's all right," she told me, still grinning. "I didn't read your article on stable colloids, either, but at least I remembered your name."

	"I've got the last laugh," I said. "I'm Peter Barton, not Edwin. No relation. I didn't write the colloid article."

	She laughed again. "All right, we're even."

	"Break it up," said General Mawson. "You two can play guessing games when you're off duty. We have a lecture to listen to right now."

	There were chairs lined up in the room, in rows like those in a theater. At the front of the room was a broad, white projection screen, and at the rear a couple of enlisted men were standing behind a pair of projectors. One was for slides, the other for moving pictures. They both seemed to be loaded.

	General Mawson stood in front of the screen with a long wooden pointer in his hands and said: "Ladies and gentlemen, give me your attention, please."

	The room quieted down, and Mawson went on. "Some of you have already seen this, but it won't hurt to go over it again. Those of you who have just arrived may be a little surprised when you see what we have here; some of you may think we're pulling your legs. I assure you, we are not. Now, each of you has pencil and paper there on the chair. Please take notes on any questions you want to ask and save the questions until after the lecture. There is no point in going over something twice if you can get it the first time, and some of your early questions may be answered later on in the talk. O.K.? Sergeant, douse those lights."

	The lights went out, the slide projector came on, and we all sat back to see and hear the most sensational story since the Resurrection.

-

	The radar operators thought it must be a balloon the first time it appeared on their scopes. It was coming down much too slowly to be any conventional aircraft, and when it got close enough to the island for the sound detectors to pick up any engine noise, there wasn't a whisper from it.

	It was late evening, and the rainy season had come, covering the island in a visually impenetrable murk. When the thing was spotted on the radarscopes, dropping slowly toward the island, the searchlights had been turned on in an attempt to spot what everyone thought was one of the huge gasbags that are used for high-altitude weather observation.

	Only when it broke through the overcast a hundred feet above the landing field had it become obvious that this thing was a long way from being a balloon.

	If the ship had dropped in fast, the Air Force would have had it fired on by the ack-ack guns that bristled around the field. But who fires at weather balloons? And by the time the ship became visible in the withering glare of the bright searchlights, it was too late to fire the ack-acks.

	The bottom of the big egg settled itself gently on the broad concrete expanse of the airfield. It touched the surface and kept on going, crushing through the thick slab of concrete and settling into the coral rock beneath. Then it stopped.

	It was lucky that General Mawson had been there. Some officers would have gotten scared and ordered the guns to open fire; Mawson didn't. He figured that the worst thing that the object could be was a hydrogen bomb, and a bomb that big wasn't going to be a healthy target for heavy artillery. Besides, he'd had a hunch that it was something genuinely out of this world. Anything heavy enough to crunch its way through that landing strip shouldn't be floating through the air like a bubble full of helium. And Mawson knew enough to be fairly sure that neither Russia nor the United States had yet developed anything like a real, efficient antigravity device.

	Mawson had held his fire and waited.

	And nothing more had happened. The big black egg just sat there, doing nothing.

	It sent out no radio waves, no signal of any kind, except the faint background noise of the infrared radiations of its own internal temperature. The only detectable vibration from the thing was picked up by sensitive equipment that the Navy used for submarine hunting. The noise from inside the ship sounded for all the world like footsteps!

	The President had been notified, so had the Pentagon. The ultimate decision was to watch and wait. By now, it had been fairly well decided that the thing was a spaceship of alien and unknown design. So the Air Force sat around and twiddled its thumbs, waiting for the enigmatic ovoid to do something.

	General Mawson, following direct orders from the President, had put a ring of armed guards a hundred yards away from the base of the ship, which was surrounded by the broken rubble of the smashed landing field. No one was allowed inside that circle. Some of the Air Force technicians wanted to test the hull of the ship, take test shaving with a drill and find out what it was made of. Mawson's orders were strictly against anything that might be construed as a hostile act by the aliens—if there were any aliens. And Mawson had quite rightly assumed that any tinkering with the hull could properly be regarded as possibly inimical to anyone inside the ship.

	"Suppose you landed a bomber in the Amazon jungle and the local natives came out and started working on the thing with a brace and bit?" he asked. The Air Force technicians simmered down and went on waiting.

	General Mawson didn't go into the details of all the precautions that had been taken to safeguard both the spaceship and the people of Earth, but he inferred that everything that could be done had been done at least twice. The Navy, armed with .22 rifles to atomic antiaircraft missiles, was prowling around the island in precisely spaced rings. Nobody knew what that thing might do, but they wanted to be prepared for everything conceivable. I found out later that some of the boys had pretty active imaginations when it came to dreaming up every conceivable thing that the alien ship could do.

	A month passed.

	Nothing happened.

	A second month.

	Still nothing.

	On the morning of the seventy-first day, a door appeared in the side of the ship, and a man stepped out, his hands in the air.

	Well, not exactly a man. The first slide that the general showed us was taken from a distance, and the figure did look amazingly human. The second slide was a close-up. One look at it, and you knew the being could never pass itself off as human without drastic surgery.

	The eyes were large, round and protruding—a bug-eyed monster, if you please. But the heavy brow ridges that covered the eyes jutted out well over the protruding eyeballs. From the brow ridges, the head itself sloped up and back, forming a ski-slope forehead. On the top of the round head was a growth that resembled purple moss. The mouth was well-formed, but it was much too wide. It went from one pair of wisdom teeth to the other.

	In comparison, the nose was almost normal. It was a trifle longer than the average Caucasian nose, and very pointed, but not abnormally so.

	"That," said General Mawson, "is Schnikelfritz." He stopped and eyed Miss S. Brownell Anthony. She just smiled, shook her head slowly, and murmured: "Not really."

	"No, not really," agreed Mawson. "We have no idea what his name is. Or even if he has such a thing. So far, we haven't been able to get anything across to these people. So we've tagged them with names, so that our reports will make sense." He tapped the screen with a pointer. "You'll take notice that he carries some sort of sidearm. We don't know what it is or what it does. That's the reason that we all go armed; we hope that they don't know what ours will do. Don't use them unless you're attacked; then shoot to kill."

	He paused and looked around. "Now, are there any questions?" 

	One of the men said: "What about the stuff they brought out of the ship and gave to us?"

	"We'll get into that when we discuss the program as a whole, and the part that each man is to play."

	I grinned to myself. Mawson had a way of making a research team sound like a group engaged in military tactics.

	Dr. Oglethorpe, the physicist, rose ponderously to his feet, his grossly fat body looking ludicrously balloonlike in a khaki uniform. "General Mawson, am I to understand that each of us is supposed to do his investigation separately from the others? Won't we be allowed to communicate our findings?"

	"Quite the contrary," said Mawson. "We'll have copies made of all reports, so that they can be sent around to all the others. Every so often, we'll get together and have a bull session to clear the air and give each other's ideas. Is that satisfactory, doctor."

	Oglethorpe lowered himself into his chair again. "Perfectly," he said. "That is how it should be."

	"Thank you." Mawson looked us over for half a minute, then said: "We have a problem here, as you can see. What we want to know is: Why have these people come here? There are at least fifteen aliens on that ship, and they have been here for nearly four months without doing anything except give us a few odd-looking mechanisms that don't seem to do anything. (We'll get around to looking those over later.) What we want to do is get into communication with them. For that reason, Lieutenant Anthony will have a class Double-A crash priority on all data. Otherwise, your work will be pretty much unrestricted."

	One of the women, a Dr. Feathergill, who had been introduced as a bacteriologist, giggled. Mawson looked at her. "What's so funny, captain?"

	She giggled again. "I was just thinking that, in all the movies, the alien steps out, raises one arm, and says: 'My name is Umgahwah, Earthman; take me to your leader.' "

	A laugh went through the room. Burkhalter, the neurologist, said: "Yeah, and they always managed somehow to learn our language by listening to our radio programs. I never did figure out how they'd manage to decode an alien language with absolutely no referents."

	"You ought to know that, Burk," I said. "They have a neurophiltronic utravabulator that correlates brain waves with the TV commercials."

	"That's why they want to go to our leaders," someone else said: "they want to find out who writes those commercials."

	We were all laughing our heads off, even Mawson. It wasn't that what we were saying was so funny, but the tenseness that had built up in us was coming loose. It wasn't until then that I realized that I had actually been frightened—the vague fear of the unknown.

-

	It didn't take us long to discover that we had our work cut out for us. Schnikelfritz and his cohorts had brought out several pieces of apparatus from the ship. They had put the stuff on the ground near the circle of guards, and Mawson had asked for volunteers to go get it. It was from one of these gadgets that the mysterious liquid had come.

	I looked the thing over. It was a tank, flat and long, like a twelve-volt car battery. The top slid off after a clamp at one end was released. Inside, there were plates and coils of metal, and queer-looking rods of either glass or plastic—I couldn't tell which.

	The tank was about half full of the liquid, which covered some of the doohickeys inside. Why had they given it to us? What good was it to us—or to them?

	There were three of us in the lab looking at it. Freisen, one of the top men in physical chemistry; old Oglethorpe, the physicist; and myself.

	Oglethorpe shifted his weight around until he could see better, and peered inside the box. "Know what that looks like? Condensers. D'you suppose that liquid is supposed to be a dielectric of some kind?"

	"Could be," I said. "Want to check it, Freisen?"

	"We've got to start somewhere," he said. "I'll try it."

	Me, I went back to work on the chemical composition of the stuff.

	Ten days later, we were still baffled. As far as I could tell, the liquid was made up of molecules of high molecular weight, rings composed of ether links between several high-weight units. It might have been made by the dehydration of diols, but I didn't see how it could be done with such precision. Besides, the stuff didn't act right.

	Freisen had tried to test the dielectric strength of the stuff and had come up with a mess. The stuff had gone to pieces on him and ended up as a hot batch of carbon and tar. The fumes had everybody coughing.

	Oglethorpe puttered around in his lab and said almost nothing, but I could tell from his manner that the puzzle was starting to wear him down.

	After running through one eight-hour test that had given me nothing but negative information, I decided to knock off and go over to the Officers Club for a beer.

	Outside, in the darkness, I could hear the dull beat of the Pacific against the coral reefs that outlined the island, and the soft whisper of the wind through the palms. It was almost like the South Sea Island of popular fantasy except that, instead of the traditional volcano with its lurid pillar of smoke, we had a fat black egg surrounded by the white glare of searchlights.

	I went into the Officers Club, ordered a beer, and sat down at a table to brood. I didn't sit alone long.

	"Hullo, commander; are you as sulky as you look?"

	It was S. Brownell Anthony.

	"Worse," I said. "Sit down and cheer me up. And knock off that 'commander' bit. Right now, I couldn't command a rowboat. If you're a good girl, you may call me Pete."

	"I'm not a good girl," she said, with that hellfire twinkle in her eyes, "but I'll call you Pete anyway, just to show you I'm not prejudiced against Navy commanders."

	As she pulled up a chair and put her own beer on the table, I said: "Fine. And what do I call you?"

	"Brownie. From Brownell."

	"Sounds pixieish enough for you. What does the S stand for?"

	Those gray-green eyes focused on me for ten full seconds before she answered. "I shouldn't tell you, but I will. It's Susan."

	I got it then. Susan B. Anthony. The hell-raising suffragette of the late Nineteenth Century.

	"Any relation?" I asked.

	"None whatever. My mother thought it would make me independent or something."

	"I'll never tell a soul," I promised. "I, too, have a smudge on my otherwise pure name. I was dubbed 'Peter Ulysses' by my fond parents."

	"That's tough, all right, but you can just use the middle initial, and no one asks questions. But if you use a first initial, everyone wants to know what you're hiding."

	I shook my head. "I can't even do that. I have to initial reports. When I was an ensign, I was stationed in England for a while, and everybody got a laugh out of my putting PUB on all the reports."

	"My heart goes out to you, Pete," she said. And we toasted each other silently with our beers.

	"How's your old pal, Schnikelfritz?" I asked. I knew she had been working hard on cracking the alien language; she spent several hours every day, just inside the circle of guards, with a tape recorder and notebook, while Schnikelfritz and a few other aliens tried to help bridge the communications wall that stood between us.

	Brownie swallowed the rest of her beer. "We're getting along," she said. "But the language is a hard nut to crack."

	"I thought mathematics was supposed to be the universal language," I said. "You begin by agreeing that two and two is four and go on from there."

	She looked as though she'd bitten into a green pomegranate. "Oh, sure. Easy. We've been through all that. We're all agreed that the square on the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the square of the other two sides. How does that help? What's the mathematical equation for 'Hey, diddle, diddle, the cat and the fiddle; the cow jumped over the moon'?"

	"I'd think it would help establish some sort of bridgehead, anyway," I reasoned.

	"Oh, it does, it does. But it isn't as easy as most laymen seem to think. Look here; you're a chemist. You must have studied German?" She made it a half question.

	"Three years of it," I said, "and I've kept my hand in since."

	"You can read it. How about writing and speaking?"

	I shrugged. "So-so."

	"That's the way it usually works out," she said. "That is how far you've come—and you had a completely worked-out correlation between the two languages; you had a grammar and a vocabulary, and trained instructors who already knew the language. Of course, a trained linguist can do the job in a lot less time, but it's rough when you have to start out from scratch. So far, I haven't even been able to figure out the basic structure of the language; I don't even know if they have verbs and nouns."

	"Quit telling me what you don't know," I said, "and tell me what you do know."

	"It'll cost you a beer."

	"I'm a sucker for a pretty face," I told her honestly.

	I got two more beers from the bar and brought them back.

	"Now talk," I said.

-

	"Well, it looks to me as though they don't have any linguists aboard. If they did, they'd be trying to learn our language as well as teaching us theirs. As a matter of fact, I don't think they have any trained scientists aboard—a few technicians, maybe, but no research men."

	"What makes you think so?" I asked.

	She frowned. "I'm not sure. Their lack of information, mostly. For instance, the table of elements is universal. Any race, anywhere, that had discovered enough knowledge to build a ship like that would know the sequence of elements from hydrogen to uranium, and probably beyond."

	"Granted," I said.

	"Well, I got one of the boys to get me some samples of various elements—those that can be handled easily—and I tried to see if Schnikelfritz recognized them. He did. He knew copper, lead, gold, sulfur, red phosphorus, aluminum, zinc, and several others by sight. He even knew chlorine, bromine, and iodine."

	"You're sure?"

	"Reasonably sure. Anyway, I lined them up in the order of their atomic numbers, leaving blank spaces for the ones I didn't have. Then I scrambled the samples up and let him have a try at it. He did about as well as you'd expect a high-school boy to do. But he got silicon, sulfur, and phosphorous in the wrong order, for one. And none of the others could do any better."

	"There are two possible explanations for that," I said. "One: they have pretty good visual memories and were just imitating the way you put the samples in order. That might indicate that their idea of order is different from ours, though I doubt it. Or, two: they have a good layman's knowledge of science and no more."

	"That's the way it looks to me," she said. "Now take a week off and try to figure out why people like that would be aboard an interstellar spaceship."

	"Look," I said, "there's one kind of man they'd have to have aboard."

	"What's that?"

	"An astronomer. They have to navigate that thing, don't they? Why don't you get Professor Brymer to help you with the linguistics end of it?"

	She nodded slowly, thinking it over. "Makes sense. I know he has been talking to one of them. Looks like we'll have to have that bull session we were promising ourselves."

-

	We had our bull session, and, as Brownie had hoped, the correlation of our various attacks on the problem cleared a lot of the air. Within the next month, we had four more sessions, and we began to feel we were getting somewhere.

	Between Freisen and Oglethorpe's work on the tank, and my work on the fluid, we began to get part of an answer on the mystery liquid. It was a dielectric, all right, but only to certain frequencies that matched the oscillation of some of the molecular bonds in the molecules of the stuff. The tank was some sort of frequency regulator.

	Brownie had reached the point where she could speak a sort of pidgin language to Schnikelfritz and his buddies, but she didn't seem satisfied. Over one of our beer-drinking sessions, which had become a fairly regular habit, she started grousing at one of General Mawson's orders.

	"I still say that the only way we'll ever know what's going on inside their minds is to find out what's going on inside that ovum negrum."

	"That's real pretty Latin," I told her. "But even your brand of Latin grammar isn't going to get you by those armed aliens."

	"It isn't the aliens so much as it is your buddy, Brass Hat Mawson," she grumbled.

	"Why? What's he done?"

	"Well, I tried to get Schnikelfritz to let me in the ship. He didn't know what I wanted, so I started walking slowly towards the open air lock, with my hands in the air."

	"Why raise your hands? Surrender?"

	"Don't be funny," she snapped. Evidently she was in no mood for humor. "That's their equivalent of a handshake, and means about the same thing: 'Look; I'm not armed.' "

	"So, what happened?"

	"So the two guards at the air lock dropped their hands when I got too close," she said. "Two more steps, and they had their hands on those side-arms they wear. So I stopped, turned around, and went back." She shrugged. "It wouldn't have been so bad, except that Mawson saw the whole thing. And he gave me strict orders not to go inside that ship. Period."

	"I don't blame him," I told her. "That could start something we might not be able to finish. What do you think you could find out if you did go in, anyway?"

	Her eyes narrowed in thought. "I'm not sure. Our pal, Schnikelfritz, has been trying to get something across to me, though. Something about an object they want or need. I can't quite get what it is, but I have a feeling that if he could show me around inside, I'd be able to dope it out."

	"Look, Brownie," I said, "you stay away from that ship. This situation is touchy enough as it is without your pulling off something that'll blow the top off the whole mess."

	She glared at me. "Now you're giving orders, huh? O.K. Thanks for the beer, Commander Barton, I'll let you know if I decide to violate those orders."

	She got up and walked out without any further chatter. I let her go; I wasn't going to chase her.

	Then I thought of something and grinned. In spite of her protestations, she did have a touch of the original Susan B. Anthony in her make-up.

-

	A week later, I was stewing around in the lab—almost literally stewing; I had four flasks boiling—when the phone rang. I walked over and picked it up.

	"Chem lab, Commander Barton speaking."

	"How come you're working this time of night?" It was Brownie. "I phoned the BOQ, and they said you weren't in, so I tried the lab. What's cooking?"

	I told her what was cooking—literally, in words of sixteen syllables. She hadn't been civil to me all week, and I was feeling grumpy, so just out of pure deviltry, I gave her the Geneva names of the reactants in the flasks.

	"Don't pull your technical jargon on me," she came back. "I'll bet you don't even know a fricative from a labial."

	"Don't be vulgar," I said. "What's on your mind?"

	"Remember when you told me not to pull off" something that might set the place in an uproar? Well, I'm going to do just that. Better hurry." And she hung up.

	I'd come to know that girl pretty well in the weeks we'd been on the island, and I knew she wasn't just whistling through her teeth. I knew my pots would boil untended, but I gave the reflux condensers a quick check before I grabbed my hat and pistol belt and took oft" like a scalded cat.

	It was later than I'd thought. I had been working so hard that I hadn't paid any attention to the time, and I was surprised to see that it was dark outside. My watch said eleven thirty. I headed for the alien ship.

	I didn't quite make it in time; the silly wench had figured my speed pretty well. When I got there, she was already inside the ring of guards, walking towards the alien ship.

	I sprinted up to the nearest guard and stopped. I knew that if I charged in there at a dead run, one of those gabozos would cut me down with whatever it was he carried at his hip. I didn't know what those things fired, but they looked deadly, and I didn't feel like stopping either poisoned darts or death rays.

	"What's the matter, sir?" asked the guard. He'd snapped to attention and come to port arms.

	"What's she doing in there?" I asked snappishly. I didn't wait for an answer; I yelled: "Brownie! You get back here! That's an order!"

	She didn't pay one bit of attention; she just kept going.

	The guard said: "Weren't we supposed to let her in, sir? Our orders are to let any of the research team in."

	I ignored him. I stepped across the circle and started towards Brownie.

-

	Evidently, the aliens had decided on a definite distance from the ship—a warning distance at which they reached for their guns. As soon as Brownie reached a point thirty yards from the base of the big black ship, the alien guards put their hands on the butts of their weapons. Brownie stopped. So did I. They might think that two approachers were more dangerous than one. I was only ten yards inside the human guard ring, a good sixty yards from Brownie, but they might decide an attack was building up if I came closer now.

	"Lieutenant Anthony!" I yelled. "Come back here!"

	And then I heard General Mawson's voice behind me.

	"Anthony! This is General Mawson! I'm ordering you to come back!"

	I turned around and looked. Every airman on the perimeter of the circle was facing the ship now, their rifles at the ready.

	Mawson said: "Just stay there, Barton, but don't move. I think—awk! Brownie!"

	I spun around again—fast. My hand was already on my gun.

	Mawson snapped. "Don't fire! Not even if they shoot her!"

	But I couldn't have drawn my gun if I'd wanted to.

	Brownie had already dropped her pistol belt to the ground. And now, very slowly, she was taking off her clothes!

	Like a slow-motion strip tease, she was removing everything. There wasn't much to remove; she'd evidently come dressed for the occasion. The khaki blouse went, then the skirt; then she kicked off her shoes. And that was it.

	She stood there in the glare of the spotlights, her smoothly tanned skin reflecting the light as though it had been oiled. I realized that she was sweating, even in the cool sea breeze that came in from the Pacific.

	Slowly, her hands raised above her head, she turned completely around. No one else on that whole airstrip moved. They hardly breathed.

	One of the alien guards turned to the air lock and gobbled something. If there was an answer, I didn't hear it, but he turned around and faced Brownie again. His hand was still on the grip of his sidearm.

	Brownie kept her hands in the air—

	—And took a step forward.

	And another.

	And then she said something in that alien tongue. And took a third step.

	The not-quite-human hands dropped away from the gun butts, and Brownie kept walking.

	When she reached the air lock, she walked on in as the guards stepped aside to let her pass.

	And then she was gone.

	For a long paralyzed second, none of us said anything. The scene looked just as it always had—the glare of the lights trying to penetrate the dead black of the hull, the ring of silent airmen, the enigmatic, quiet figures of the two alien guards, all as they had been for months.

	Then the guard behind me whistled softly. "Well—that's one way to get an invitation to come in. I wouldn't have turned her down, either!"

	I turned savagely. "Shut up, fly-boy! That girl's got more guts in her toenails than you'll ever have in your whole body!" It was a vicious thing to say, and maybe not even true, but I was boiling.

	The airman turned crimson and his jaw muscles tightened.

	Mawson stepped up. "The commander didn't mean that, son," he said softly. "But you did make a mistake."

	"Sorry, sir," said the airman stiffly.

	"Do you think you'd be interested in one of their women?" Mawson asked.

	"Well I guess not; no, sir, I wouldn't."

	"Well, they aren't interested in her, either. Right, commander?" I had cooled off just as fast as I'd heated up. "Right. I'm sorry, Airman; I was just blowing off steam."

	"But ... why'd she do that?"

	"It was the only way," I said, "that she could prove to them that she was completely unarmed."

	"Oh," said the guard in a very small voice.

	Then I thought of something, and my grin must have split my face as wide as one of those alien's faces.

	"What's so funny, Barton?" Mawson asked, scowling.

	"I just happened to remember," I said. "She told me that she was going to pull off something that would set the place in an uproar."

	Even the airman snickered.

	We waited. Mawson and I sat and smoked cigarettes furiously for hours, one right after another, until our mouths felt as though a Russian army had retreated across them. We drank hot coffee to take the taste away, and only succeeded in making them burn worse.

	"It makes sense," Mawson said. "Sure it makes sense."

	We were sitting well back from the perimeter of the guard line, watching the still-open air lock of the great ship. We'd grabbed a couple of chairs and a card table from one of the nearby barracks with the intent of having a game or two of gin to pass the time, but so far we'd done nothing but shuffle the cards, put them down, pick them up, and shuffle them again.

	"What makes sense?" I asked, not really paying much attention. I was watching the pitiful khaki heap that lay on the shattered concrete thirty yards from the base of the spaceship.

	"Remember when I was talking about a pilot having to land his ship in the Amazon jungle? And how he wouldn't want some native working on his hull with a brace-and-bit?"

	"Yeah," I said. "Sure. I remember." I wrenched my eyes away from the lighted airstrip and picked up the cards.

	"Well," Mawson went on, "if the natives were armed, would you let 'em inside the bomber?"

	"No," I said. "No, I wouldn't." I laid out a hand of solitaire and started playing.

	"But if you thought it would help you, you'd let an unarmed native inside, wouldn't you?"

	"Yeah. Sure. Got another cigarette?" I noticed that I had laid a red six on a red seven. I picked it up and moved it to a black seven. Then I calmly played a red five on it. I played a red ace on a black deuce and then gave it up and shoved the cards into a heap.

	"How long?" I asked.

	"Who knows?" said Mawson. "As long as they let her stay."

	"I mean, how long has she been in there?"

	He looked at his watch. "Not quite two hours."

	"I wish we had some bourbon and soda instead of this lousy coffee!" I was ready to chew nails—tenpenny, not finger.

	"There's a bottle in my quarters," the general said. "Want to go get it?"

	"No. Do you?"

	"No." 

	We waited.

	A little later, I said: "Suppose I went out there and stripped to the buff. Maybe I could get in, too."

	"Or you might not," Mawson said. "They might decide there was something funny going on and shoot you both. Want to try it?"

	"No."

	"I didn't think so. And stop shuffling those cards!" 

	I quit shuffling and put the cards down on the table. Mawson picked them up and started shuffling. 

	We waited.

	"It's almost dawn," Mawson said. It seemed years had passed.

	'I know," I said. "I hope she comes out before dawn."

	"Just because she has nothing on?" Mawson dismissed the idea with a gesture. "If she can go in that way with sixty-odd men watching her, she won't be embarrassed coming out."

	"No, but—"

	"General! Here she comes!"

	It was the airman's voice. I jerked my head around to look at the ship. Brownie was standing in the air lock.

	Mawson stood up. "All right, fly-boys! A-a-bout face\" His bellow echoed across the airfield. Reluctantly, the men turned their back to the spaceship.

	"They had enough of a show last night," Mawson said.

	But he didn't turn, and neither did I.

	Because Brownie wasn't coming out alone. She walked briskly over to where her clothes were lying and put them on a lot faster than she'd taken them off. Beside her was one of the aliens—naked as a jaybird.

	"Tell the men they can turn around now, general," I said.

	"Why?" Mawson asked.

	"Because all they'll have to do is take one look at that character to realize that any slight suspicions they may harbor about Brownie's purity are utterly groundless. He's even less human than we thought."

	"If it is a he," added Mawson, and bellowed out the order.

	"I got some data, all right," Brownie said, "but I'm not sure what it means."

	We were back in the briefing room, the whole team. Mawson was sitting down with the rest of us, letting Brownie have the stage, along with the starkly naked Schnikelfritz. I noticed that most of us managed to keep our eyes averted from the alien.

	One thing had changed. None of us were wearing sidearms.

	"In the first place, they're short of food and water," she went on. "Schniky, here, had to go through a lot of pantomime to get the idea across, and he had to show me his food and water supplies, but I finally realized that they're on short rations. We can replace their water, but I don't think they could eat our food." Then she grinned. "I know we couldn't eat theirs."

	"Then why do they stay?" asked Oglethorpe. "Are they afraid we'll shoot them down if they try to leave?"

	"I'm not sure. We can discuss that later," she said.

	"Certainly, Miss Anthony. Go ahead."

	"I did get one bit of information that might have a bearing on that, though," Brownie continued. "Schniky kept pointing to one particular gauge on a control panel of some kind. It didn't register anything. There was a switch under it, and he kept turning it on and off, and nothing happened. He showed me the other gauges. There's a little shadow in them that points at figures around a dial—just like our meters and stuff, in principle. But this particular one didn't show any shadow."

	"I wish I'd get a look at that ship's insides," muttered Freisen, who was sitting next to me. "What does a linguist know about scientific equipment?"

	"You want a punch in the teeth?" I whispered back. He shut up.

	Brownie went on, giving a complete account of everything she'd seen, heard, done, and guessed about inside that ship.

	"Now, here are my conclusions," she said. "See if you agree with me. If you don't, speak up, because these people are desperate.

	Everybody nodded, so she went on. "I think that gauge was a fuel gauge. Something must have happened out there to destroy their fuel supply, and they just barely made it here. They thought our radar beams were the radio beacons that his people use to pinpoint a fuel dump." She looked over at me and Freisen. "That gadget they gave you, the tank with the queer liquid in it, seems to be some sort of communications device. It won't work without the liquid, and they need a replacement."

	"So that's what that patch was!" said Freisen suddenly.

	Everybody turned to look at him, and he looked at Dr. Oglethorpe. "Remember that patch in one corner of the tank? There was a leak, and they lost some of the liquid."

	Oglethorpe nodded silently for a second, then said aloud: "And I think you're right, Miss Anthony; they probably wanted more of the liquid; I doubt if the machine would work without it."

	Brownie nodded back. "So all we have to do is replace that liquid, and we'll be able to get these people's communicator fixed. They can call home and get food."

	"Can they wait another six months?" I asked.

	"No." Her voice was flat.

	"Then that's out. I'm not even sure I could synthesize the stuff in that time. There's a plasma-effect on those ring molecules that keeps 'em stable, and I don't know how it's done. I might never do it."

	"That's that, then," she said. "Can we give them fuel?" Then, answering her own question: "Not unless we know what the fuel is."

	"Can't you get the information from Schnikelfritz?" asked Mawson, looking at the alien, then looking away again.

	Brownie shook her head. "All I can get out of him is a number. He keeps saying 'one,' every time I ask him about the fuel. Anybody who ever tells me again that mathematics is a universal language gets a boot in the snoot."

	"I don't suppose he has any fuel left at all?" I asked. "Maybe we could analyze it."

	She gave me a patronizing grin, and I felt foolish. Her opinion of my ability as an analytical chemist didn't seem very high at that moment.

	"It's all gone," she said. "They don't have a speck left. They're running the ship on emergency batteries."

	"Even if we could get the fuel," Mawson said, "would it be smart to let them go? What if they come back with a war fleet?"

	"The military mind," I said. "Why should they do that? To conquer us? They couldn't use Earth. They couldn't eat our plants or animals, and they'd have to sterilize the whole planet to make their own stuff grow. Besides, think of their supply line."

	Mawson subsided.

	Oglethorpe said: "What kind of fuel could drive a ship like that, anyway?" 

	And then it hit him. One. "Brownie!" he snapped. "Go get those samples of the elements you were showing him! I have a colossal hunch!"

-

	It turned out that Oglethorpe was right. The big, black egg-shaped ship was fueled by the same reaction that fuels suns. Hydrogen. Element number one.

	How they did it, I don't know, but the "fuel tank" of that ship held tons of the stuff without either cooling it off or putting it under pressure. My guess was that it was something akin to adsorption on the surface of some tremendously receptive sponge, but I'm still not sure.

	The gas is fed from the "fuel tank" into a reactor that turns it into—not helium, but pure, raw energy. Fine sort of gadget, but I'd hate to have it run wild.

	While all those tons of hydrogen were being pumped into the fuel reservoir of the ship, the President was sitting with the Cabinet, trying to decide whether to let the aliens go or not. It was a tough problem. Ethically, we had no right to imprison intelligent beings against their will without due process of law. On the other hand—

	I let the rest of them worry about that. I went back to the lab. Two days after the hydrogen pumping had begun, Brownie came into the lab, a frown on her face.

	"Pete—is there any chance you can synthesize that stuff very soon?" I'd been asked that question once too often; I was beginning to feel like an absolute idiot.

	"Look, Brownie, this is a complex organic chemical. It isn't table salt or granite. Did you ever hear of synthetic hemoglobin? No. And the boys are still trying to synthesize insulin. Analysis is one thing; synthesis is another."

	"Don't be sore, Pete. I'm worried—really worried."

	"Worried? What about? Afraid our alien friends might decide to invade us?"

	"No. But Schniky says that the tanklike gadget they gave us is vitally necessary for the operation of the ship." Her eyes had a worried-looking expression.

	"I thought you said it was part of a communication device."

	She shook her head. "I goofed. The word translates as transmitter; it transmits energy from one place to another inside the ship. He wants it back."

	"He can have it back. The tank, that is. I'm keeping the liquid. There's not much of it left, and I am not going to let it out of my hands."

	The phone rang. I picked it up and identified myself. It was Mawson. "Is Brownie there?"

	I handed her the phone. She said "Hello," then listened for a minute. When she hung up, she said: "Two stop orders have just come through on the refueling job. One from the President of the United States, the other from Schnikelfritz."

-

	Of the entire group that worked on that ship, the most successful, without a doubt, was Miss S. Brownell Anthony. I told her so, six months later.

	We were still on the island; we still had to solve the puzzle of that ship. We sat in the Officers Club over beer and toasted to Schnikelfritz.

	"He tried," Brownie said, "but he was confused."

	"At least you know the language," I said. "If we ever contact his kind again, we'll be able to talk to them."

	"Other than that," she said, "we all goofed."

	"You didn't," I corrected her. "Oglethorpe did, by making a hasty guess. But how was he to know that Schniky wanted tritium—super-heavy hydrogen—instead of the ordinary stuff?"

	"Funny," she said. "Funny, queer; not funny, ha-ha. Funny that they got themselves into a scrape like this. Just a simple little joyride through space. A rich man's yachting party. They developed a little leak in the energy transmitter, and the fluid leaked out. That meant their tritium fuel was wasted—tossed out in space. They picked up our radar beams and thought we were a—" She paused.

	"Go on," I said, "say it."

	"—A filling station."

	"Yeah. And now they're all dead of starvation just because we were too backwards to understand what they wanted when they came."

	She looked into the golden, bubbling depths of her beer. "Mawson wants to keep us here as long as he can. So does the President. But what good is a linguist when there's no one left alive to learn from? You don't need a linguist to study a spaceship."

	I was humming to myself, and I caught myself trying to remember the words. The memory was elusive.

	She sipped at her beer. "The general said yesterday that I could probably go home. The President will take his recommendation, and Mawson says I'm not needed here."

	"It's odd that there were no books aboard," I said, out of a clear blue sky.

	"I looked the whole ship over," she said. "I didn't find anything even remotely resembling a book."

	I hummed a little more of the tune. "I guess they did it the hard way."

	She looked up at me with those gray-green eyes. "The hard way?"

	"Sure. That little gadget Oglethorpe and his boys are working on. It's like recorded television, except that the screen shows the print instead of moving pictures. Or maybe it was just the particular tape that they were testing."

	Her eyes took on that hellcat expression. I liked it. "You louse," she said softly. "You're just doing that to tease me."

	"I'm not. Scout's Honor. There really is a gadget. It looks like a complete recorded library. As a matter of fact, there's one of them in each room of the ship. It looks as though the rich Mr. Schnikelfritz liked to provide for his friends' entertainment."

	"A whole library." She said it very slowly. "Pete, you've been saving this up. You knew I wouldn't want to leave after hearing about that."

	"I knew it," I said. "I didn't want to be alone on a desert island."

	Then she looked at me and grinned. "That's a very pretty tune you're humming. I think I'll stay for a while just on account of that."

	Then I remembered the words:

-
I knew what I liked, 
And I liked what I saw, 
And I said to myself: 
That's for me!
-

The End