Chapter 4 2

Marco agrees and splits the rest between Nick and Kelly, who are just as excited as Guy.Kelly held the little things in her hands and hummed a sad little tune I'd never heard before.Her palms and face turned brown in an instant, as if irradiated by some invisible radiation. Nick observed and studied the small crystal in his hand more vigilantly.He weighed it in his hand, tapped it with his fingernail and listened to it, and observed its glowing triangle with a magnifying glass.His skin became as dark as Kelly's. "They're tetrahedrons," she glanced at him pleasantly, "really tetrahedrons."

"What is it?" Marco asked, "What tetrahedron?" "The stuff we made," Nick shrugged, "in the games we used to play." "What game?" Marco turned to Kelly eagerly, "Please tell me." "You've seen it," her voice trailed off and casually, her eyes still fixed on the shining crystal. "We're astronauts, remember? The abandoned astronauts await the arrival of our own. " Marco nodded, "But I've never heard of a tetrahedron." "It looks like this," she said, pointing to the small crystal in her little brown hand, "only bigger and with a nicer luster. It's a pretty precious thing, and we use it to find our own people on alien planets." position and direct their ships to rescue us."

"How did you come up with such a thing?" She turned to look at Nick. "It's just a fabrication." His voice was disdainful. "A child's trick. Please, let's not think about it now." He bent down again, bringing them face to face, one by one, as if hoping they would stick together.Then he took another magnet out of his pocket to see if choosing them worked. We had a long discussion about the game and the grit that night in Carolina's lab, and Marco felt that something in the game represented something unknown to man.To prove it, he brought up unexplained hallucinations that appeared in the minds of expedition members on the Moon.

"The space station I'm seeing is too similar to Nick's toy terminal," he insisted, "and it can't be just a coincidence. Those sandstones can convey ideas through some medium that is very subtle to us." "But the space station you see on the moon is not real," Carolina retorted, "like the space station that Thorson saw and the golden meteor that Hood saw. Tested, with negative results." "So how do you explain that game?" "Nick said he created it, maybe he did. A lot of gifted kids have created a lot of amazing imaginary worlds, and no one says those imaginary things are real."

We went on and on, reviewing all the sources and hundreds of published theories, until I was distracted by the blue-shining sterile walls and the putrid smell of bubbling sub-bacteria, but we Nothing came of it. "Let's stop worrying about it," Carolina said as we left. "The gravel makes these kids. It means something to them, not us. If it's going to help kids find themselves, we should really be doing it." Just don't interfere." The next day, Marco tried asking Nick and Kelly again.They're still excited, but don't seem to know any more about gravel than we do.When Marco asked about the game, Kelly admitted that they were dubious about being an astronaut and had great dreams.Nick casually cites things from books and movies to prove that he copied them all.

Carolina had them sit next to Marco's desk, which made them the same height as us. Kelly kept staring at her precious sand sample without wanting to think about anything else, and Nick tapped impatiently on the table with his bare heels. "We're not bugs!" he said suddenly angrily. "You can't chop us up to see how we live, like the explorers butchered the space snakes they found on Jupiter. Why not leave us alone with?" "Nick!" Kelly said, grabbing his brown arm, "don't do that." "To many people you are specimens!" Carolina said quietly, "a miraculous alien specimen. But we want to protect you and help you escape these cruel people until you understand how you were born. please believe us!"

"Of course we believe you," Kelly whispered. "Didn't we, Nick?" He sarcastically said, "We have to trust you!" "One more thing," Marco said, "what role does Guy play in this game?" The mocking malice disappeared from Nick's black eyes, and he frowned as if to say something, shook his head again, and finally turned to look at Kelly unhappily.She turned her brown face away from the crystals and looked up.Her face began to change color, she was really pale, almost begging for mercy. "That's a bad character," she murmurs sadly, we have to lean over to hear her, "because Guy never liked the game. He didn't want to play, and he said he had no connection with the Astros, nor did he want their The ship came and took us away. He wouldn't help us build the tower. One time he kicked it over and there were blocks everywhere."

"Is it really that bad?" Her large eyes were filled with sad black, and tears glistened on her pale cheeks.She watched Nick eagerly, and he made a grimace and gave Kelly a slight push on the shoulder, as if to remind her that this was just a game, but his movement didn't make her feel any better. "This role is worse than I thought." She shuddered. "I think Guy didn't want to play because he loved me and hated Nick. I think he was afraid the Astros would take us away and leave him alone. I was terribly afraid he'd hurt Nick." "Don't worry about it," Nick pushed her again, "it's just kid's play."

Kelly turned slowly to look at him. "But Guy really loves me," she whispered. "He doesn't like me doing anything with you, really. Nick, that's why I'm so scared, I'm scared!" Bad news came from space that year, and the cosmic organization found no friendly life world.What was once a good wish that those planets were like oysters waiting to be opened has turned into a fear that Earth might become an oyster for other life. Space Expeditions did not find a new "Peru" to "loot".We all know that the flying machines of the lesser beings on Jupiter are worth more than the gold of the Inca and even the gold fields on Mercury, but they are elusive and always remain mysterious.

Those flying machines are as light and agile as shadows. Any effort to capture or destroy them is futile. No human weapon can approach and destroy them, not even nuclear missiles can cause them any harm. As if to arouse the curiosity of human beings, they kept approaching the orbital station, accompanied the slinger to fly around the satellite like a partner, flew out to meet the arrival of the rocket, and followed the spacecraft returning to the observation deck on the earth. Although the lesser beings did not capture any humans, their visit caused panic.In order to divert people's fear, we put forward the Carolina theory: Jovians once came to earth.

"They live at home in space," "It turns out they can tolerate high-altitude, dry atmospheres, at least for a short period of time. They look like flying snakes in Mexican folk art, but move like flying saucers," she said. To support her theory, she showed us data from her lab, including a photo taken from an orbiting station—a serpentine silhouette on the bright Jupiter's surface. This black snake is transparent, but has an opaque core, a black jagged object, like an irregular crystal, and the core emits two groups of glowing rays to both sides, both like Feathers, like the wings in the eyes of the ancient Aztecs. "Everything suggests that they've been sending some sort of random message for centuries," Carolina said, "without harming anyone. I doubt they metabolize the products of our planet. Except for the highest and driest mountains." There is no place on earth for them other than a brief visit." "So why?" I asked. "Would they be interested in us?" Her smile looks twisted. "Maybe because we're interested in them." Even more disturbing news came from Mercury, where computer analysis of videotape taken by the explorers showed no life on the hot planet's surface.Now the Cosmos has sent a landing team from the orbital station to verify a conclusion: the creature who built the tunnel is either dead or gone. But unfortunately happened. Initially, the landing party reported that they had landed safely on the intended rugged high ground, close to the group of tunnels they were about to survey.Just as they began blasting to level the ground to cover the tunnel, the orbital platform suddenly lost contact with them. Two hours later, contact was restored and they reported being alive.During the blasting gap, the seismograph detected a series of regular vibrations from the direction of the tunnel. As the platform flew to the top of the tunnel, smoke or perhaps steam poured out of the tunnel, and soon filled the entire sixty-mile plain and began to overflow its circular walls. Since the planet's horizon is very narrow, the detection team on the ground has not yet looked at it.The commander on the platform ordered them to stop drilling immediately if they saw smoke and prepare to take off. What happened next is unknown. A slender, glossy tongue of fog advances towards the landing point.The platform commander tried to order them to take off immediately, but the laser contact had already been lost. When the platform returned to the sky above the landing site, the landing team had disappeared, and finally the wisps of smoke disappeared from the crater basin, flowing back like some kind of liquid. In the tunnel. The commander decided not to take the risk of doing a second ground reconnaissance. From the photos, some wreckage can be seen scattered around, indicating that the landing craft crashed or exploded shortly after takeoff. Reports of the matter sparked a heated debate among the Cosmos Board of Directors. — A small group wanted to cancel all Operation Mercury, others suggested bombing the tunnels with nuclear missiles.Finally, after a compromise, they decided to order the commander of the observation deck to climb to a high orbit and prepare for self-defense.The last message they received from the platform was: when the platform passed the back of Mercury, the contact was interrupted again, and there was no more news after that. After another round of heated arguments, the board of directors finally decided to cancel the plan to send a rescue team.Exploration of Mercury halted, and the tunnel diggers remained a mystery. After this horrific catastrophe, the Cosmos budget was severely slammed.The Saturn and Neptune orbital stations still under construction had to be suspended, and a series of exploration plans were also forced to be cancelled. In Tianmen, we have many difficulties.Despite our best efforts, the three children were believed to be beings from an alien universe, and even we were viewed with suspicion.We later learned that the security forces had been secretly ordered to spy on us. Nick begged to be allowed to study a larger grain of lunar grit, but the joint research committee denied Marco's request.Some thought it was impossible for a single child to accomplish any important research, while others feared that Nick would do too much. Anxiously waiting, Nick spent most of his time in his mother's laboratory. He had learned how to breed lesser beings, he had read all of her archives on alien life universes at a rapid pace, and he had studied close-up images of new Jupiter lesser life forms from the Earth platform. In one photograph can be seen the serpentine form of third-order life on Earth surrounded by clouds. Maybe it was better eyesight, maybe a quicker mind, and Nick discovered its strange structure-something made of tiny black lines protruding from the uneven crystal nucleus branching into the snake-like shadow, and he used it for two days The timing of these observed lines was recorded with great precision.He spent another sleepless night sitting cross-legged on the nursery floor, motionless, "just thinking".Finally he came up to his mother and asked a question. "Do people from the Universal Organization still want to know how third-class creatures move?" Carolina said, "Yes." "I can tell them," he affirmed, "on the condition that I am free to study the lunar grains." She told Marco about it, and Marco reported it to the Joint Research Committee, and they brought it up to the board.Nick waited while sleeping, and when Marco came back with the news of agreement, Nick woke up from his sleep suddenly. We arranged a demo that afternoon, and two engineers from the committee were sent as observers. They didn't have much interest in Nick's research. Nick deftly used his tool to cut a round hole the size of a beer can in the center of a short pine board, and then he nailed a broken silver coin into the slit at one end of the board and a copper coin at the other. Marco and Carolina also attended the presentation.Two security vans took us to a clearing about a mile from the space station, and I can still remember the impatient looks of the two engineers as they watched Nick complete his contraption. A small, gray-eyed child who looked much smaller than a seven-year-old. His complexion was pale in the car, and it turned bronze in the harsh sun.Crouching in the dust, he carefully lowered a can of hot beer into the hole in the plank, and with a graphite pencil he began to draw intricate radiating lines from the two coins to the beer can. His work took hours, and he showed no signs of heat, while we watched, sweating.I wasn't wearing a hat, my head was a little dizzy, the two engineers were frowning impatiently through their black glasses, and a security guard sneered when Nick broke the tip of his pencil. Nick chewed his tongue as he concentrated on drawing more thin lines.I suddenly felt a chill: the taste of metal in my mouth.Nick dropped the pencil and raised his device triumphantly. "Look!" he cried, "see it fly!" Hoarfrost covered the beer cans.With a muffled bang, it exploded, and brown ice protruded. A strange hazy shadow clings to the surface of the ice, streaked like Nick's pencil lines.I saw the plank fly upwards, Nick clutching it, pale with excitement. The flakes of frost swirled and crackled, and Nick grabbed the end of the plank off the ground. Carolina screamed, and Nick let go and let it fly away, the board whistling out of sight.The sun was bright again and it was hot again.There was a rumbling sound from the sky for a few seconds, followed by silence as a stunned security guard pointed to the flying yellow dust in the distance, and I could still feel that strange bitter taste in my mouth. Nick emerged from the dust, and the shivering engineer and we were in the car.We jolted a good two miles across the plateau to a crater.The instrument fell in a pine forest there, and the engineer picked up several pine splinters and a deformed piece of aluminum.After that, they started asking what the hell this little device was. "A circuit," Nick said. "It absorbs certain energies, light, heat, even gravity. It converts them into kinetic energy." The engineers murmured, staring at it, and he added naively , "The effect is more dramatic than I would like, and the broken pencil may be too thick for the original conductor." I think the whole incident scares the engineers a little bit.They could not translate the propulsion circuits Nick had described, or the shadowy figures he had drawn of third-class creatures into forms they could understand, and their own copies of Nick's contraptions could not fly. Yet their reports must have impressed the board.The research committee granted the request, and they sent Nick half a kilo of grit in an armed truck, packed in a thick yellow-painted lead can. Nick eagerly studied the tetrahedron.Now that he was allowed to use the big computer, he scoured the database for every record of a grain of sand. He repeated experiments he had done before, and invented many new ones, but most of them failed, and as the weeks passed, and the months passed, he began to grow somewhat disappointed. For help, he had us bring a series of scholars to Tianmen.The first was Dr. Papanik, an old colleague of Carolina's who had recently returned to Earth from Uranus.Nick eagerly asked him a plethora of questions about the possibility of intelligent life in an alien universe. "What is intelligent life?" Papanik, who was still used to low gravity, dragged his feet to the chair, speaking in a mixture of English and Czech that we could hardly understand. Human translated, "A survival tool. Fangs, claws. Each biological universe plays the game of survival by its own rules. The adaptability of the second-class, third-class, and fourth-class universes cannot be compared with our first-class beings.Just like you can't measure poetry in pounds or IQ in yards. " "Is it just to survive?" Nick's thin face became a little frustrated, "Sir, I mean, can't intelligence be some kind of bridge? Can't it build a way to, understand or help another biological universe ?” "I was an idealist," Papanik said, shaking his big head, taking a deep breath. "I've been to five biological universes looking for cosmic altruists, and I haven't found one. So I think benevolence is survival. Negative factors." "Elsewhere?" Nick asked eagerly in a trembling voice, "somewhere in the solar system—couldn't friendship be a positive?" "Who knows?" Earth's gravity overwhelms Papanikslav's shrug. "The farther we go, the weirder things we find." He stayed for three days, listening to Nick and Kelly's questions.I sense their eagerness to find the creators of the lunar grit, but I'm afraid they won't get much help from Papanik. Another expert Nick brought in was an exiled Soviet geneticist who turned out to be as ignorant as we were of the effects of sand grains on the sperm cells of fellow explorers.Nick once visited a cosmologist who believed that if technology continued to improve, intelligent signals could be sent to other planets in two to three hundred years.Nick invited a group of physicists who disapproved and even laughed at all his theories about the structure and function of sand grains. His last guest was the mathematician, a large jolly Finn.They spent two days and two nights in the nursery classroom, discussing problems in chalk dust, and the Finn came out exhausted. "Am I here to teach this kid?" He looked at me suspiciously with his red eyes, "In thirty minutes, he destroyed my life's work - my model of the universe. I have never been subjected to such a powerful intelligence, although I sympathize with him, ’ the Finn rubbed his chalk-dusted chin in a trance. “He doesn’t know how to smile.” Nick didn't want to see anyone else anymore.His frenzied research and experimentation had all but ceased, and he would often sit despondent for hours thinking, or slip away from the guards to wander alone on the moonlit plateau.Although he and Kelly were immune to germs and viruses, Carolina thought he was sick from exhaustion. "God, my boy, don't be so anxious," I heard her say to him one day in the nursery kitchen, "you're just killing yourself, no doubt you and Kelly have a lot to do, But better when you're older." "We can't wait," he said, pushing away the untouched breakfast tray and staring at her with blue-rimmed eyes. "All the planets are extremely dangerous to us, Earth first. I think our only hope, It's the message in the grains of sand, but there's not enough time for us to decode it. Mom, I'm scared—" he said in a weak voice, "I'm afraid I'll die without knowing why we were born." This sad mood made us all depressed, but it was hard to help him.Even when his problems proved unsolvable, he was reluctant to forget them.He saw through the good news we were trying to fabricate, and resented our attempts to inspire him with kindness.It was a difficult year, although Guy and Kelly brought us some comfort from time to time. Guy is almost as tall as me now, and heavier than me.In his waking hours, he seemed to have the energy and frightening appearance of a one-year-old child.Though he dislikes clothes like Nick and Kelly, he begins reluctantly hiding his monstrous body under an old raincoat when he comes out of the nursery. Carolina is still training and studying his dull intellect.Sometimes she left Guy to fumble for teaching aids and toys by himself, while he crawled and sat and waited for Kelly, ignoring Nick. Kelly cared deeply about Nick, and Nick didn't want to be in the lab or go for walks with her.To figure out Nick's grit issue, Kelly asked Carolina to find her some tutors. Carolina gets her a team of international geneticists, hoping they can tell her why Nick and Guy are so different.These experts looked at all the histories of the three children, studied the grains of sand, and finally vaguely explained them as abnormal genetic mutations. Eager as Nick was to find out, she met a group of famous composers, but they understood and liked her music not much better than I did.She turned to philosophers and anthropologists, a female psychologist, and finally a Chilean poet. She likes this poet best.He's a shriveled midget with scanty black hair and childlike black eyes who plays a multi-string guitar and sings Homeric ditties about his own life.He was an astronaut who traveled to dozens of moon-like planets and asteroids in the Explorer spacecraft, but he never found the meaning of life.Kelly must have found something of her and Nick in his poems, and when the poet was gone, she didn't want to find anyone else. "The smartest people aren't smart enough," she told Carolina. "They can't help Nick, they can't tell us why we were born, they can't explain why Guy is the way he is." She sighed, "Really, you know, despite you, Uncle Yuri, and Uncle Kim, all three of us are alone." Unable to help Nick, she went to Guy, and Guy's sluggishness suddenly became worse when she approached, but she didn't care about his strange appearance. They stayed together for several months and rarely talked, which was too much for Guy. It was hard, but she used to sit beside him humming a little tune when he slept, and Guy woke up moved by her music. The so-called music was actually the high-pitched sound of her beating or rubbing some junk.These tormenting sounds were not at all pleasing to us, incomprehensible, but it made Guy writhe and yelp with animal joy. Guy's gorilla-like uncontrollable strength is frightening. He broke a lot of equipment when he was active in the gym, and when he threw a ball, he broke the jaw of the security guard who taught him to throw. Carolina laughed when the security guard called her attention to Guy.But after observing their sexual maturity, she also began to take this issue seriously.Kelly was bigger than Nick, and although she was as thin as a child, her body had matured unconsciously.Carolina reminds her, coaxes her, and finally orders her to put on a bikini.She still has to listen sometimes. While Nick never stops his quest for the grit's secrets, it's Guy who keeps it going.It was a blinding summer noon, and I was sitting in the public affairs office, looking out the window at the blue mirage above the plateau, preparing to write my daily security report.That's when Kelly rushed in screaming. "It's the Messenger!" She was out of breath. "Uncle Kim, Grit is the Messenger! Guy wanted to show you. He knows how to make contact with the Messenger." I followed her into the nursery, and I saw Nick and Guy huddled together on a small table. Nick was sitting on a chair with a naked brown body. Grab a handful of small grains of sand. "Guy knows why..." "Shhh!" Guy motioned her to be quiet, and we watched silently. Sand and stones are scattered on a white sheet.To my amazement Guy was using his thick fingers to pile three grains of sand into a triangle.Watching carefully, with a twinkle in his eye, he placed the fourth grit base on top of the spire.Immediately after the last grain was placed, a ray of blue soft light illuminated the big "pyramid", especially the empty center was the brightest. Gai raised his head and grunted contentedly.Nick snatches what he makes. "We've got it, Guy!" His voice became as high as Kelly's. "It sticks them together. Four together. Every four sticks together like this. It's making our tetrahedron……" A wild growl startled me. I don't know what happened, the table was split in half, black sand was scattered all over the ground, and Nick fell to the ground.Kelly bent over to help him, panting in fear.Guy staggered away, clutching the glowing thing. Two security guards rushed in and questioned him too loudly.He walked straight towards their drawn pistols, and didn't stop until I called his name, and stood silent, trembling.With Kelly's help, I calmed everyone down.The security put away the gun and helped to pick up the sand scattered on the ground. Nick said that Guy didn't mean to be so unreasonable, and begged Guy to complete the tetrahedron. Guy shook his head first, and murmured at the blue thing.Nick fetched the remaining grit from the lab, and Kelly coaxed him back to work.He worked all night, painfully sticking the grit together four by four, and then he built up, 16, 64.Each larger "pyramid" emits another color, strong at first but slowly fading away. 16 are green and 64 are yellow. Nick and Kelly try to help, but the job feels like Guy's exclusive.Although this tetrahedron looks the same to everyone, he carefully selects, looks at it, and tries, as if there is some invisible interface between them. He didn't explain why, but others couldn't stick the black particles together. Guy had changed miraculously, he was not so clumsy now, he looked agile and his fur was shiny.The shelves he made got bigger and bigger, and after midnight he moved everything on the desk to a file rack so he could have enough room to work. His brain slowly "woke up" in an imperceptible way.I saw Kelly staring intently at the glowing "Golden Tower" and Guy, and suddenly she looked away and asked Nick and me to accompany her to the kitchen for a snack. "It's working on Guy!" she whispered, glancing back in awe. "I don't know how to express it, but I can feel his thoughts. When he touches the sand, I can feel it through his fingers!" Nick looked dazed. Kelly's golden fingers flicked and lifted an invisible crystal. "Its edge was like a black knife. Through its surface form, three of three, I felt his other thoughts as well." Her happy eyes flickered at me. "He likes you, Uncle Kim. He thinks you're more like him than everyone else, not very smart." "Guy!" Nick was a little surprised, "What does he think of me?" Her smile disappeared.She sat down on a chair that was much bigger than her, and suddenly felt a little sad. I poured her a drink, but she didn't want it. "He loves me," she said finally, "I don't know how much. But not you, not you, Nick." "Then we can't help it," Nick stood behind the chair, his brown monkey-like hand touched her golden shoulder, and his voice was calm and practical, "One of you is with me." "How can you hate..." the pain choked her, "how can you hurt each other, I love you both." "I won't hurt Guy," he vowed so firmly that it made him seem more mature than her, "I can't hurt Guy, not even for you." Hearing his assurance, Kelly cheered up.She said she was hungry.I took a sandwich to cover while they ate at the table and he was busy making a new 'pyramid' but gave me a friendly wink and didn't have time to eat. He completed the fourth tetrahedron before dawn, and he was very tired by now.His gray palms faltered again, but he turned and placed the new "pyramid" on top of the other three, and with a snap, they stuck together. "Guy, Guy!" Kelly gasped. "It's so cute!" This final tetrahedron is 4 inches high. A cold, rose-colored shimmer shone around its blade-like edges, filling its hollow interior.But the four small crystals that make it up still retain a tinge of yellow, green, and blue gleam, which, combined with its own blackness, makes for a wonderful brilliance. Nick stared at it as if appreciating it. "I don't think it's finished," he said. "You could have made it twice as big. There's still grit left, and we could get more." "I've used up all the good ones," said Guy, shrugging, looking at the remaining grains of grit strewn about. "These are no longer usable, look!" Although these sandstones are as hard as diamonds, he crushed two or three of them into black dust with his fingers, "It can't be used." "Guy, I can..." Kelly approached this bright "Golden Tower" eagerly, "Can I touch it?" "Keep it for me, please," Guy said, placing it on Kelly's trembling hands with grace that surprised me. "I want to sleep." His voice slowed, his body shrank with fatigue, his yellow eyes dimmed.He stood, staring blankly at Kelly, idly waiting for his next command like some trained animal. "Thank you, Guy." She was completely attracted by "Pyramid" and didn't look at Guy, "Go back to bed and sleep... He staggered away, half asleep.I turned to look at Kelly, and something strange happened to her body, as if some magical liquid had been sprinkled on her from a rose-colored tetrahedron.I am completely mesmerized.She looked taller, her hips and breasts were fuller, and her surprised, happy smile soon took on a Mona Lisa-like mystique.The thin, melancholy little girl was suddenly a woman. What I felt was a sting of desire, so strong that I turned my back quickly.When I looked back, she was staring at me with those golden eyes, full of wisdom.Realizing how I felt, she seemed to be laughing at my impulsiveness, mixed with quiet pride and added charm.In an instant my eyes met her frank eyes, and I seemed to smell the fragrance of lilacs.Then she took her eyes away from me and stared at the dazzling "pyramid" again. "Nick, this is way better than the game!" she whispered eagerly. "Here's our tetrahedron—really! It's our people keeping records for us. It'll tell who we are, why we're here, maybe Tell us how we can find them."