Chapter 3 Chapter 2 Difference-1
Our research work with children was wonderful and enjoyable, at least for the first few years.Carolina used to say they were like budding foreign tropical bulbs, they brought us joy and wonder with each new day, music was Kylie's first love, it seemed to all of us before she could talk Not interested in hobbies.She made her music out of everything she could get that resonated, sometimes imitating the trill of a bird, and the sounds she invented were so complex and unmelodic.
Nick started walking when he was seven months old.That same morning, Kelly carefully pronounced the first syllable.They spent the whole day learning from each other intently.They waddled up to Carolina that afternoon hand in hand, and whispered proudly in unison, "Look at us—walk!"
Nick learned to read before the age of two, apparently from a set of picture books about the planets.He taught Kelly.They were not three years old when Marco found them huddled on the floor in the nursery one morning flipping through the dictionary on his desk.
"Now—" Kelly asked in her birdlike voice, "Biocosmology?"
She looked up the word in the dictionary, and Nick bent over the dictionary, scanning his whole head within two inches of the word.
"A planetary ecology of related or compatible life-forms," he tried to pronounce correctly, mispronouncing a word or two he had probably never heard, "despite all known universes of the solar system Creatures all show certain similarities, but bioforms from one biological universe are generally useless or harmful to members of another galaxy."
"What does that mean?" Kelly looked up at Marco, "Uncle Yuri, what is the biological universe?"
"A chain of life," Marco said. "On Earth, we all belong to a chain of life. Cows eat grass, we eat cows, and grass grows on animals. We exhale the carbon dioxide needed for grass, and grass Spit out the oxygen we need.
In our own biological universe, we are all made of similar chemicals, and we adapt to each other. "
Nick understood and nodded cleverly, while Kelly was still frowning.
"We call our world the Alpha Universe," Marco said, "and our ship has to take some little Alpha Universes with us because we can't breathe air or eat the creatures that live on that planet on any other planet." food.
Neither the inferior organisms on Venus nor the third-order organisms on Jupiter fit into our biological chain.That's a big problem with space exploration.Different biological universes don't make friends easily. "
"Thank you, Uncle Yuri," Kylie shook her head, still satisfied. "And Guy? He belongs to—" She held her breath, "Does he belong to our biological universe?"
"We don't know much about Guy," Marco hesitated, looking a little uncomfortable. "We're doing as much research as we can. We want to help him grow up and make him happy."
"Please cover!" she whispered in a trembling voice, "We need you, Uncle Yuri. You, Aunt Carolina, and Uncle Kim, because my own biological father was afraid of me and Nick, and he didn't like building at all! "
We try to help all three of them, Nick and Kelly don't need much teaching.Soon Nick was reading books at a computer-like speed that astounded me.In addition to music, Kelly had a dozen other hobbies and then lost interest, as if she was always looking and couldn't be sure.
The summer that Nick and Kelly turned four, we arranged a vacation trip for them.Although we encountered some unfriendly crowds in dozens of cities, they still played games with those people and a few of us in a relaxed and happy manner.Nick learned Ukrainian from Marco's father in Lucerne and Japanese from Suzie's mother in Honolulu, but to his disappointment she couldn't write Chinese characters.
While Nick seemed to be gleeful about everything, wide-eyed and sarcastic, Kelly cut us short.Due to the spread of fear of alien objects in space, Guy was left behind at Skygate.Kelly was always anxious that Guy would have trouble being alone.When he saw him again, he squirmed like a hungry kitten and murmured a name that Kelly said was hers.
Guy now wakes up every three or four hours, even though he sleeps from morning till night.His hairy limbs are still developing, and his movements are still slow and clumsy.That summer, Kelly had him on his feet—to her he lay down like a gray ogre.Another year is over before Guy can walk or talk.Even then, Guy's words were slurred mumbles that Kelly had to translate for several of us.
Anyway, Guy became a special friend of mine.I'm willing to tolerate his slow-moving, gray, weird form, maybe because he's my brother's only son.He seemed to be showing me an animal affection before I could even understand the sounds he was making.He loves to snuggle up to me and ask me to stroke his fur.
When he consciously missed his parents, I guess he thought of me as his parents.I remember a poignant scene in the nursery, the summer he was five.Kelly was sitting on my lap one day, and she slid off of me when Guy staggered closer.Maybe he wants her "seat," but he's too heavy for me to lift, leaning against me and wailing at me and grabbing me awkwardly.I smelled a pungent pure peculiar smell of him, a little like the smell of dry cornfields.
"Guy wants to know what he is," I just smiled when Kelly said that, and she was very serious, "He wants to know why he's not like me and Nick, he can't understand why he doesn't have parents who love him , dressed him up nicely."
Robin was with her fourth husband, a lunar culture fanatic who transformed Hudson Crater into a low-key "rejuvenation sanctuary" for aging billionaires.My brother disappeared without a trace.
"You're fine, Guy." I stroked his bare fur. "You have parents. They're traveling. Your mother's on the moon, but I'm sure she misses you a lot."
He listened, making a savage noise, and Kelly rushed to him and wrapped her golden arms around him, tears streaming from her night-like eyes.
"We really love you, Guy." She looked at me helplessly. "He wondered why he was nobody and loved."
"Tell him you three are different," I found myself saying to Kelly, even though I knew Guy could understand, "different and amazing! Tell him we're doing research in the lab, Find the answer."
I wanted to meet Guy's face, but his inhuman strangeness disturbed my thoughts.His eyes were warm black lumps with yellow sockets and I couldn't read his eyes, they looked at things without blinking.Tears trickled from his eyes, leaving blue streaks on his hairy cheeks, and he whimpered hoarsely and sadly.
"Guy, you're amazing too." Kelly choked up and looked at me, her big eyes almost condemning, "He said he was boring and ugly as a toad, and he wanted to know why he wasn't as pretty as Nick ,clever."
I am speechless.
Public Office gave us a different mission, initially trying to sell the children as exotic moon children, and when plans started to sour, we wanted to protect them from the fear and anger of the outside world that we couldn't prevent. .
Marco and I once read the hate-filled letters we had received, and their increasingly vicious language terrified me.The writers called the children disgusting names, denounced their closeness to the cosmic biological enemies of other planets, and even demanded their destruction.
"To a lot of people," I said to Marco, "they're monsters. Not just Guy - I think he does look like one, but Nick and Kelly too. But I don't understand why anyone would hate them ?”
"They're vulnerable," he tore slowly to shreds of a sinful letter, "I guess we all look for external demons, and when we can't stand the demons within ourselves, we take out our disgust on our children. Mercury The beings on Earth, Venus, and Jupiter may be demons, but they are elusive, and the children of the moon are strange and vulnerable here."
"But they're human," I objected. "In a way, anyway."
"Somehow." Marco frowned at the paper ball, "but not in a way. I guess that's why people have irrational hatred," he nodded gloomily, "to the old' Man-best sex' taboo fear."
I think about that question a lot.The sullen Guy, with his furry look, must have looked like a foreign object to outsiders, like a second-class citizen of Venus.Even though Nick and Kelly are touching most of the time, I also remember moments when they acted strangely and disturbingly.
Sometimes even when they are playing, it worries us.I remember walking into nursery one summer afternoon when they were four years old, and the kids, engrossed in their games, didn't notice us.Nick knelt on the floor, carefully building a tower out of white plastic blocks.Kelly danced around him on tiptoe, an old golf ball on her head, humming strangely.Guy crouched beside them, staring at the golf ball with sleepy yellow eyes.I smiled at their seriousness and concentration, but Marco's expression was numb.
"Nick, what are you doing?"
"Just a game, Dad."
Nick carefully put a hat made of little orange plastic blocks on his tower, and Marco leaned over to look.Nick looked at Kelly, her humming changed.She jumped closer to us, dropping the ball down a spiraling passage onto one of the tower's shelves.
"Nick," Marco's voice was so strangely high that Kelly gave him a bewildered look, and he tried to ask again, holding his breath, "where did you learn this game?"
"I made it up myself."
"Tell me about it?"
"You see, Dad," Nick shrugged, "that's all there is to it."
"But I don't understand what I see,"
Marco turned to Kelly, almost desperate, "Can't you give me a hand?"
"I'll try, Uncle Yuri." She nodded solemnly.
"In this game, we are space beings, abandoned on Earth. We found a way to send a message to our kind far away, and they sent a ship to pick us up," she touched the ball. "This is That ship."
"That tower," Marco pointed fingers trembling, "what is that tower?"
Kelly turned to Nick in bewilderment.
"It's the Tachyon Terminal Station."
He tried to be precise, "You see, Dad, this ball is a tachyon ship. It travels faster than light and travels between stars. But here it needs a suitable terminal station to send out the tachyon ship. The particle signal tells it where to land."
"I...I know." Marco choked up, playing the game with difficulty, "but how did you know about tachyons?"
"I saw it in a book." Guy nodded vaguely towards the nursery library.
"A book about ships and stars. The author says tachyon ships will never work because the speed of light is an obstacle we can never surpass. Maybe he's right. We're just playing games. In games we're just Jumping around obstacles, state transitions through the bare minimum." He must have caught my puzzled look, his little dorky face turned serious, "You know, convert the main body of the ship into tachyons State, at whatever pace we want."
"I...I see," Marco blinked at the plastic tower again. "Why did you build the tower like that, Nick? I mean, seven pillars with colorful plastic cubes made of them."
"I don't know, Dad." Nick shrugged and looked impatiently. "It's just a game after all."
"And Guy hates playing," Kelly said sharply, "because he doesn't mine tachyons. Now he wants to go out and play in the pool if he can."
Guy, still unable to walk alone, cried longingly, and Kelly ran to him, waiting for Nick to help.Together, they helped Gai up.He shambled away between them like a gray, lumbering beast.
The toy tower was left there.Its piles of plastic clumps are a common magnetized plastic roller taken from a device Carolina had covered.I didn't see anything special, but Marco ran over to get his video camera to show Tower View and had me dictate and tape the whole situation before he could answer my questions.
"That's a model of the terminal station I saw--or thought I saw--the place on the moon where the grains of sand lead us," he said to me. The taller pillars in the middle, the spiraling landing pad, the colored signal lights at the top."
He frowned at me and shook his head.
"I wonder where they learned that game from."
We found the book about ships and stars, but no drawings of the tachyon terminal.Carolina assures us that she has never told the children so much about the grains of sand and the mysteries of the children themselves.After a lengthy and fruitless discussion, our report was filed in the category of unresolved issues.
The archives grew thicker by the year, the cosmic organization gradually crumbled, and politicians began to call it a den of spies and traitors.We're having problems with our budget, capable people are quitting.We try not to panic the kids with any news of danger from the outside world.
I remember one thing Carolina said.
One day we came to the alien biology lab and she was still there after hours of work.
The blue sanitizing lamps "washed" the walls with pale, sentimental light.The air passed through the filter with a rustling sound, and there was still a strong, peculiar smell in the air (the smell of the second life rustling in the glass-walled bacterial incubator), a pungent and foul smell like rotting grain and grass.She has been showing me slides and models of tiny foreign objects, her eyes sparkle with what seems to be love, but when I mention the future of the Universal Organization, her life is gone.
"Mr. Hodian, it's like a sandcastle," she said again in the black accent she usually tried to avoid out of worry and nervousness, "like those sandcastles we built on the beach when I was a kid, and the waves kept coming." Gobbling it up. I'm worried what's going to happen to the kids when it's gone?"
"Maybe it won't go away," defending the future of the organization, I feel helpless to whom I have no real allegiance, but I've always been "hopeful," "I know they keep cutting our budget, but we at least Got to make a lot of money on the Explorer project. Now the bill is finally paying off."
I'm thinking about the new wealth that's emerging in space and people's awareness of it.Those who enter Mercury's tunnel of digging iron walls still want to prove themselves.Navigation ships reported incredible billions of tons of iridium and gold nuggets on the crater-like ridges surrounding those channels.
Critics object that gold on Mercury is not worth transporting.Jupiter seems to have provided more exciting information and cheaper transportation. Flying objects have appeared, gathered, and moved around Jupiter, as if they were observing the behavior of astronauts dragging the prefab at Jupiter No. 1 station.They soar with great speed and freedom of angle, which may reveal entirely new principles of space travel, if the specimens can be caught.
The bold passage and rapid escape of those Jupiters seems to prove the existence of some kind of intelligent life, but the situation of advanced life on Venus and Saturn is not so clear.Another orbiting station in Venus's nascent mottled clouds recently reported an unexplained loss of energy when it stopped transmitting. None of the Saturn probes returned, nor did any reports from the encircled planet's vicinity.
"Why should we be afraid of our space neighbors?" I asked Carolina. "We've been neighbors for billions of years and they've never harmed us."
"It's not the planets that worry me," she said, "it's the people. As a Negro, I don't see people the way you do, Mr. Hodian. I'm afraid we're not as noble as the founders of the Universal Organization thought, and that's The reason we have to give our kids a chance. I hope they will be better than us."
We stood in silence for a while, contemplating the unpredictable future of our children.
"Of course I want to know what dug those tunnels in Mercury," she said suddenly, "and why our Saturn probes never came back? But I think humanity is the greater danger, to the organization of the universe, To children, and even to our sister cosmic beings."
She grimaced as the foul-smelling sub-bacteria grew in the milk-foam flasks in the incubator.
"We've been having trouble with some unknown agent killing bacteria one by one for years," she said, "and now I think I've found the killer. If the higher Martians don't like us humans, Maybe they have a reason."
That's all she told me then, because she wanted to repeat some of the experiments, but after a few days she sent me, Marco, and Thorson back to hear her tell of her findings.She told us to gather around a table in the laboratory, and she handed Sowson a flask of off-white congealed liquid with brown bits in it, and he held his nose and backed away.
"It won't hurt you, sir."
She assured him softly, "It's an inferior bacterium, but it's dead. I killed it with a drop of juice. What really killed it was an ordinary enzyme. If the creature didn't have a stronger Immunity, where a molecule spreads like a virus among lesser bacteria, and a single drop of human blood can cause a severe contagion among them."
"So we're poisonous to them?" Thorsen grinned at the flask with relief. "I guess they'll learn to respect us."
"It depends on how evolved they are." She gave him a strange look, confused and sad, "Anyway, we still have other problems, and this is the key."
Thorsen himself was one of the problems.To understand the children, as Karolina puts it, we need to know exactly what the grit did to the three crew members aboard the Explorer 2.Although my brother is missing, Marco and Thorson are still being studied.
Other than infertility, Marco had none of the persistent reactions he experienced on the moon.
In spite of Thorson's furious denials of the effects on himself, he had grown thin, aged, and unresponsive, his hair and beard had slowly turned gray, and his charismatic pleasure had become Frustrated taciturn.We spotted that change with keen observation, and the results took us by surprise.He wants to kill Nick.
It was a warm autumn afternoon when the children were five years old.Suzie arranged a cookout in the hope that Thorson, and perhaps herself, would revive a fading interest in the children.Nick doesn't want to go, and Kelly thinks Guy would like to travel.
Trouble begins when Thorson orders the children to get dressed.Kelly obediently and neatly put on the sun suit and brought Guy shorts, but Nick came out naked.Thawson lost his temper and gave another order, and Nick whispered that he didn't need clothes and would not wear them.
Thorson called him nasty and pushed him out of the car, and Nick walked quietly back to the nursery.
Suzie was crying then, and Guy started whimpering too.Kelly ran after Nick, and when she brought him out, he was already in red swimming trunks.
I watched them go away in Suzie's new electric car, a gift from Sossen at an earlier family event.He looked sullenly at the wheels, and Kelly quickly became excited, showing Guy everything.
An hour before they returned, the hospital called us.We found all three children lying outside the emergency ward, covered in blood and grime, limp as death.
Carolina darted to them and later told us they were just sleeping.Marco and I left her to babysit them and we wondered what the hell was going on.Suzie drove them back.
She was beaten, exhausted and has now been sedated.A police helicopter arrived at the picnic and picked up Thorson, still bleeding from the scratches on his face.He looked at us sullenly and told the police to put him in jail.
We didn't know what had happened until Suzie and Kelly woke up the next day.It happened when their new car broke down on a rocky slope in a little spring we call Indian Springs.Thorson opened the hood and looked at the fuel tank manual, finally saying that they had to wait on the spot to be rescued.
Nick spoke. He said it was only necessary to repair the fuel tank, and he turned the piston for Thorson.The car started immediately with a bang, but Thorsen was so angry that he gasped without saying a word, grabbed Nick by the throat and threw him to the ground.
Suzie screamed, but Sossen ignored her and continued to strangle and kick Nick.She charged at him, clawing frantically at his face.He let go of Nick with one hand and pushed her to the side of the road with one.Guy hugged his leg as Thorson shook Nick with both hands again, meowing like a wounded kitten.
Kelly's actions are more effective, and she finds in Suzie's handbag the emergency pistol that Thorson had given her when she brought the bride back from the moon to troubled Earth, and knocks him out with a single shot.
Nick was paralyzed by now, and Kelly knew he was still alive.She helped Suzie carry Nick and Guy to the car, and did not lie down until they were safe on the Terrace sidewalk. Since Suzie did not prosecute, Thorson was released and lived in Tianmen.Marco and I wanted to ask him some questions, his scarred face looked pale, his mouth reeked of whiskey, and at first he was reluctant to say anything.
"No, I'm not drunk!" he exclaimed. "I didn't drink at all yesterday. The whole thing was too much for me to bear, and when that quick-witted kid fixed the car, I couldn't bear them any more!"
"But they are our children." Marco blinked like an owl, "Little Kelly is your biological daughter."
"A damned cuckoo!" His face began to contort and turn red. "They're all cuckoos. Something implanted them in us, hatched them into human form, but they weren't really our kin, they There is as much difference between a man and a crocodile as there is between a crocodile and a man!"
"You can't believe-"
"We're all complete fools!"
He raised his voice and suppressed Marco, "I want to raise them so that they can take the world from us. They should all be wiped out!"
We stood looking at him in amazement, and I could not understand him.After a while he limped away, seemingly exhausted by his own violence, and collapsed on the edge of the bed.
"Guess I must be stupid today to let goblins lure me into touching him. But they're too much for me, too smart, too quick, and I figured it out months ago." He paused and squinted We, looking very confused and frightened, "Do you know what monsters they are?" He whispered in despair, "Do you know what they are trying to do?"
Thorson's attack on Nick sparks a new rift within Cosmos Sandcastle.The leaders quarreled with doctors at the space hospital about his madness, and he was fired and transferred to a psychiatric hospital for treatment.The leaders did not reach an agreement on who to replace him, and then they summoned Marco for a private meeting, and finally decided to appoint him as the executive director to complete a new project as the center.
"Half the leadership thinks Eric is right," he shook his head dejectedly, "and they want to get rid of the kids. They don't know how, so they let us spy on them. They want us to record anything we see." Change, every word, every action is reported to them."
This broken castle has become a prison, but the kids are safer inside.The new Joint Research Council has not funded our formal research, and Nick and Kelly are more eager to know their own mysteries than we are.
To protect the children, Carolina used to warn me not to tell them about the alien universe and the mystery of their birth.When they started asking about themselves, at first, she didn't answer the questions.
"You three are certainly different."
She used to say, "You are the children of the moon, your ancestors were moon people, and that is what makes you so special and precious. You are nothing like us poor, boring earthlings."
They were not satisfied with this simple answer.In the spring of the year he was seven, Nick discovered Carolina's name in a children's book called Our Neighbors in Space.He held the book in front of me and asked me if Dr. Carolina was his mother?I said yes, and he and Kelly had the idea of visiting the Exobiology Lab.
Carolina reluctantly obliged, carefully masking them so they would not be infected by the xenomorph.Kelly hugged me tightly and kept silent for fear of the strange smell and the machines, while Nick seemed particularly excited and kept asking questions loudly through the mask.
He stared wide-eyed at the lesser-living bacteria growing in his flasks, poked at a curly lump of iridium he'd brought back from Mercury, and winked at the snake-like creatures around the Jupiter station on the slideshow.
When we were about to leave, there was an uncoordinated harsh bell, and the automatic door "slammed"
It slammed shut with a bang, sealing the hall in front of us.A blinding deep purple glow filled the glass corridors surrounding the incubators.
"Uncle Kim!" Kelly asked, clutching my hand, "what's this?"
I was a little nervous, but she seemed happy.
"Don't panic," said Carolina, putting her arms around the children. "It's an inferior creature. Sometimes it changes shape, you see. Like a tadpole turning into a frog, or a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, only with its own special Way."
She turned to me, her expression more serious.
"We've been observing it for several months, although we haven't collected the data for a formal report. The bacterium reproduces itself as a single cell, but accidents happen from time to time. These similar cells combine to form a miraculous status.
Let's take a look. "
She made us wait while she put on a rubber suit, then walked through the double doors into the incubator room, holding a sealed flask close to the glass wall so we could see.The children stared at it, holding their breath.
The milky liquid in the bottle had turned into bright red bubbles, and there were some strange spots of gold and black, and it was surrounded by tendrils of silvery threads.It expanded and then contracted along the side of the bottle in an unsteady rhythm, as if trying to breathe.
"Poor thing!" Kelly whispered, "it wants to come out."
Carolina put the flask on the shelf.We stood outside the glass wall for half the afternoon, looking at the imprisoned guy, while she took notes and took pictures. The "breathing action" was vigorous at first, but then slowed down and became irregular.
"That bottle suffocated it," Kylie scolded Carolina when she came out. "Can't you let it go?"
"Our breath will kill it," Carolina said, patting Kylie's golden shoulder reassuringly. "We all want to help it, but it can't survive in my biological universe."
We watch it die.The last beating stopped, its bright color faded to leaden gray, the cells ruptured, the fragile membranes disintegrated into drops of brown slime.
Carolina opened the door and we smelled it: a faint, sickening smell of rotten eggs.I want to go, but Nick and Kelly have questions.
"Two or three of these things happen a week," Carolina told us. "Each of these mutated organisms is a different color and shape, and they all want to escape, and that's what we're going to do with sensors and automatic doors." Reason. None escaped, or lived for two hours. Really, we don't know much about them yet, and you'll have to wait until we have enough information to complete the report."
"Mom, what are we? Why do you keep us here, in our own special laboratory? Why do you watch us all day and night? Are we specimens too? Like..." He resumed carefully Saying the word, "Like one of those shapeshifters?"
"Don't worry, honey," she tried to hug him, "you are our children and we love you very much."
"But we're different from anyone else," he said, wrenching himself free from her arms, stepping back in confusion. "You're watching us. You're videotaping us, you're recording us, you're testing us. You're recording and reporting, and you're Treat it like a worm in your test tube.
I could feel Kelly shaking.Why? screamed Nick. "What the hell are we?" "
"You are human beings," Carolina said, "but different human beings, and that's why you are invaluable to science, and just as precious to us."
"What makes us different?"
"Something happened to your respective fathers in space." Carolina's eyes were as dark and wide as Nick's, hoping he could understand. "They were part of the Explorers lunar expedition. They found A strange layer of black sand was scattered around an impact crater, and some force from that black sand affected them, changing the genes of their sperm cells, and you are their children."
"But aren't they our fathers exactly? Are we not fully human, in fact?"
"Not exactly human," Carolina nodded reluctantly, controlled her breath and tried to laugh, "much more amazing than human beings."
"Who made those grains of sand?" Nick pursued. "Who put it on the moon?"
"Nobody knows," Karolina said, "though Yuri has a theory."
Nick immediately dragged her to find Marco, and Kelly pulled me to follow, her little hand trembling in mine.Nick opened the door without knocking and rushed into Marco's office, where he was brewing coffee on a table in an appliance of his own design—a glass tube and a corked flask.He gave us a friendly nod and offered us coffee.
"Daddy..." Something caught Nick's throat suddenly, "Yuri, we saw shapeshifters. Mommy's been telling us about the moon grit and why we're the way we are. I want to see that Grit, listen to your theory."
Marco turned off the coffee machine.
"The Joint Research Committee has stored some sand in a vault." He winked at Nick seriously, "The remaining half were used by us for several years of experiments and research, and the rest were stolen .”
"How can you open the safe?"
"I'll have to ask the Joint Commission for instructions."
Marco smiled at the indomitable Nick, "But here's a model of a sand crystal, magnified a hundred times."
The model is a shiny black pyramid two feet high.It is placed on a metal pedestal.Marco had removed one of its outer layers, and the black inner layer was a complex arrangement of shiny blocks of gold and glass.
"The black stuff is allotrope grains of carbon from nowhere," he explained, "attached to tiny beads of thorium. Flakes of silicon and gold in a very intricate lattice pattern, mixed with other element."
Kelly shrank back beside me, and Nick listened intently, "Your theory, Yuri?"
"These crystals came from somewhere else," said Marco, "but I don't think it's on any of the planets we've found. From the way it's scattered around the crater, the impact came from the south— From our nearest star. I think these crystals were made and sent to the moon with technology far beyond ours."
I see Kelly shivering.
"By aliens?" she whispered, "or our own people far away!"
"That's just child's play." Nick gave her a reproachful look. "We make up stories about aliens," he told Marco, "but we don't know anything about Sara. What's the use of it?"
"Maybe there's an interstellar culture," Marco smiled at Kelly, "maybe it's spread across the galaxy, from planet to planet, maybe these grains of sand are loaded in an information missile launched from a higher civilization to communicate with us." related."
"Why sand?" Nick looked at the black pyramid-shaped crystal, "Why not a spaceship?"
“我也思忖了好几年，”马可说，“我想我知道原因了。对于飞船来说，要找到智能世界太难了，因为它们太少而且太遥远。我想这些信息导弹就像种子，撒播到或生机勃勃或死气沉沉的世界里，当碰到任何进化了的智慧时就会被唤醒。我们的探索者唤醒了它。”
“因此有了我们的降生，”尼克慢慢地点了点头，“那现在我们是什么？”
“是送信人，我想。”
“那么是什么信息呢？”
小尼克看上去迷惑而害怕。“我们要做什么？如果砂粒制造了我们，我们有什么用呢？”
“你们会找到答案的，”马可猫头鹰一样很有预见性似的顿了下，然后接着说，“我想你们会有美好的命运。”
尼克充满希望地笑了笑，而凯莉仍有些害怕。
“尤里叔叔，”，她发出细小的颤抖的声音，“如果尼克和我是外星球的信使，那么可怜的盖昵？”
马可难过地摇了摇头。
“告诉我们，尤里叔叔，告诉我们你的理论。”
“信息导弹几百万年前撞上了月球，”他的眼睛不安地从她身上移到高大的黑色金字塔体上，“砂粒得等最们去找它。我想那时间太长了，大多数晶体都被测微计给损坏了。如果它们是靠原子核裂变获得能量的固态装置——如我想像的那样——它们大部分都已有了缺陷。”
他不快地回望了她，”恐怕它们的缺陷在盖身上表现出来了。”
“不！”她痛苦尖叫着，“你一定弄错了，尤里叔叔。可怜的盖没有缺陷，我们都很爱现在的他。”
尼克叫嚷着强烈要求要看看月球砂粒的实物，于是马可便写了份申请书。联合研究委员斟酌三天后批准了，一组保安带了6粒砂和一张需要马可签收的收据来到托儿所。
三个孩子看着他把这6粒黑砂从试管里倒在了桌面上。盖看到这闪亮的东西后哭叫了起来，他灰色的小手手抓了一个飞也似的跑开了，我从没见他如此活跃过。
“那是给尼克的，“马可望着我说，”把它弄回来。”
我去追盖，他跌倒在地上了。
他喃呢着，颤抖着，好像欣喜若狂又像是十分痛苦。他的双眼向上翻着，浑身的谷场味绕着我。他急促的呼吸声慢了下来，最后停止了。他突然睡着了。除了他紧握的双拳外，整个身体都软了下来。
“让他拿着吧，”凯莉哀求道，“他那样需要它们。”