ABLE (Jim Able: Offworld Book 1) by Ed Charlton (13 inch ebook reader txt) 📗

the similarities of physique were a reasonable basis for overcoming her negative feelings. Had they had a similar evolution? Jim had referred to their both being primates. Madhar wasn’t sure if that would hold up to close scrutiny. Perhaps the possibility alone was sufficient for her to see the commonality.

She glanced at Jim as he studied the pictures on her wall. It was the hair. How could any self-respecting creature go around with that disgusting knot of hair pointing in such confused directions?

Turcanians had lost the fur of their ancestors several subspecies ago. To appear on this moon with hair was to declare oneself a throwback to the aggressive and the primitive. Yet Jim Able was neither. She was glad he had decided to come first in secret. There were many who would have reacted badly to such a creature if it had suddenly appeared in the center of a city.

Madhar suddenly thought of the appopo she had sat watching in the zoo months before. Appopo were the nearest branch on the evolutionary tree. There was nothing in its behavior to say it had any intelligence; any creature can scratch itself or pick up a stick and chew on it. But to do it while keeping eye contact with a stranger beyond the glass and have the encounter be one of mutual study took true intelligence. It was in the appopo’s eyes that she had understood its intentions. It was in the first flash of Jim’s eyes in the dark of the field that she had understood the same. His head might look like a balloon with a small rug on it, but inside was a creature her equal, if not more.

She steeled herself to put such things aside and to return to gathering every piece of knowledge she could, regardless of her visitor’s appearance. This was a night to grasp hold of with both hands. She felt more excited than if she had been elected to rule the world.

“How do you communicate over the distances?” she asked.

“That’s another really useful application of the D-switches—the communications relays. There’s a network of communications devices serving trading partners. They kind of...sit out there, switching back and forth constantly, making a way of communicating instantly.”

“But don’t they drift? I mean, everything in the galaxy is in constant motion.”

Jim shrugged. “Yeah, I guess so. Like I say, I’m a user, not an engineer.”

“Hmm,” she said, gazing far off. “What happens if someone hits one or uses this D-switch to go to the same space that something else occupies?” She sat back, holding up both hands in a gesture he had seen her use on the talk show. She waited as if she were going to catch his answer.

“You’re responsible for checking that there’s nothing already there. That’s an advantage of the limited range; you don’t need to have most of your ship given over to long-range sensors. But it could be fatal, I suppose. Some substances can take a sudden increase in density without too much trouble—there’s a lot of interatomic distance. Live tissue has more difficulty with foreign objects suddenly appearing in the middle of it. But no two D-switches will hit the same space at the same time. That’s what I hear. I haven’t wanted to try it.”

“No, I can imagine. What bothers me—apart from suddenly being in a very different galaxy from the one I woke up in this morning—is what have we got that anyone else would want? We’re a small fish in this enormous pool. And if we do have something worth anything to other races, what’s to stop them—or you—just coming in and taking it?”

“That’s really how I come to be here.”

“Go on.

“I work for the Office of External Affairs, which is part of Sol Earth’s—that’s the name of my home planet—Earth’s Department of Extra-Solar Activities. I’m a bureaucrat.”

“How dull! I thought you were an explorer or a diplomat.”

“No,” he laughed, “I got involved because there is a dispute about who gets the reward for making first contact with you. I have two competing claims on my desk. There’s a premium to be gained by getting to a new race before anyone else. You can make exclusive deals and cut out the competition from the other races. My world is still fairly new in the game. We pay big money for the chance to get in first. I get to deliver the money, when appropriate, to the person who makes such an introduction. Now, of course, there’s also a risk in each first contact. If it’s not handled right, you can open hostilities rather than trade. If a smaller race feels threatened, they can easily overreact. That’s when everyone else takes notice.”

“Yes, you said about the rewards.”

“You know what happens when you have a battle between spaceships?”

“What do you mean?”

“Imagine I’m in a ship like that one out there, and I fire a rocket with an explosive warhead at you in your ship.”

“Okay...”

“Suppose I destroy you. What happens to your ship?”

“It breaks up. I die.”

“It breaks up into billions of tiny pieces, all endowed with explosive velocities. They are a menace to everyone until they embed themselves in something else. You just hope that something isn’t you or your equipment. Now just suppose, as happens a lot in the heat of a battle, my rocket misses your ship. What then?”

“It’ll keep going in the direction you fired it until it gets caught in the gravitational influence of a planet or star.”

“That’s right. Space is big. It can keep going for a long time until it hits something.”

The scientist looked into the distance, frowning. “We have some problems with space debris in orbit. Our satellites occasionally get punctured by bits that dropped off earlier ones or, as you say, from explosions. We’ve had a few missions that went wrong. But rogue munitions are a terrifying prospect.”

“So, the other side of paying out First Contact fees and opening up trade with a new race is talking to them, watching what