Critical Threshold Read Online Free Page B

seemed that he knew when to leave things be.
    He pointed to the files.
    â€œFind anything?” he asked, levelly. He could have said something along the lines of ‘What do your feelings tell you,’ and made it sarcastic. He didn’t. He was keeping it neutral. He really did want a peace pact.
    I thought maybe it was time to climb down just a little. No harm in making things a little easier, on the surface.
    â€œI don’t know,” I said. “I’m just absorbing it all. I won’t be able to read anything into it until I see it on the ground. Twenty minutes in the forest will probably tell me as much as three weeks combing the reports.”
    â€œWhy comb them then?”
    I allowed myself a tiny smile. “It’s because I’ve combed them so thoroughly that twenty minutes on the ground will be able to tell me so much more. The way you get to see so much is standing on the shoulders of giants, remember?”
    He was ready to smile, too.
    He stood up, but before he could reach out to open the door someone else did it for him. It was Pete Rolving, apparently in too much of a hurry to bother knocking.
    â€œYou better come,” he said. “I got an answer to the radio signal.”
    That was good news. I shot to my feet, and I could see the relief in Nathan’s face. Obviously he’d been worried about the prospect of getting no answer at all.
    But Pete was quick to jump in on top of our elation. “They don’t make much sense,” he said. “In fact, they don’t make any sense at all.”
    He was already moving back along the corridor. We followed. Looking back over his shoulder, he said: “They’re like children. Moronic. Half the time I can’t tell what they say. They made contact in response to the alarm, but I don’t think they know what they’re doing at all. I get the impression that they think it’s God talking. They keep saying ‘Thank God’ over and over.”
    Nathan wouldn’t look at me. I don’t think he wanted to see my face.
    â€œSomething,” said Pete Rolving, as we reached the radio, “is wrong.”

CHAPTER THREE
    They couldn’t give us co-ordinates to tell us where to set down. In fact, they couldn’t tell us anything. They had opened a circuit, but not to communicate. As Pete had said, they had reacted to the alarm on their set. They had made the bell stop ringing. But they didn’t seem to know what was going on—like very young children...or idiots. We could hear them talking, but not to us.
    Later, in orbit, we got a fix on their signal. Pete took the ship down manually, and very carefully. We used a bit more fuel than we should have done, but it was like aiming for a postage stamp. There was a hillside, cleared of trees, where a settlement had been established. It wasn’t very big, to say the least. About two miles by one and a half, including the crest of the hill and long, shallow slopes.
    We settled like a feather, almost exactly in the center. We looked out, through the ship’s eyes: four screens gave us a complete panoramic view.
    There were houses on the slopes—a group to the south, odd ones scattered elsewhere, between fields which, once upon a time, had been marked out for grain and vegetables. The houses, so far as we could see, were in a state of some dilapidation. The nearest structure to the spot where we’d set down was a cairn of squarish stones, set right on the crown of the hill.
    We didn’t see the people, not immediately. They must have hidden from the noise of our back blast and the sight of our mass floating down out of the clouds. It’s an intimidating sight.
    While we watched, however, they began to come out.
    The first ones were children, but the initiative seized by the very young was soon pre-empted by the old. It was the adults who came right up the slope to stare at the ship from close range. There weren’t many.