Aliens for neighbours by Jim

Author:Jim [Jim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

“And all the liquor you can drink.”

“Where do I sign?” I asked.

And that is how I got to be the colonel’s aide.

I thought he was crazy and I still think so. He’d been a whole lot better off if he’d quit right there. But he had an idea by the tail and he was the kind of gambling fool who’d ride a hunch to death.

We got along just fine, although at times we had our differences. The first one was over that foolish business about confining me to base. I raised quite a ruckus, but he made it stick.

“You’d go out and get slobbered up and gab your head off,” he told me. “I want you to button up your lip and keep it buttoned up. Why else do you think I hired you?”

It wasn’t so bad. There wasn’t a blessed thing to do. I never had to lift my hand to do a lick of work. The chow was fit to eat and I had a place to sleep and the colonel kept his word about all the liquor I could drink.

For several days, I saw nothing of him. Then one afternoon, I dropped around to pass the time of day. I hadn’t more than got there when a sergeant came in with a bunch of papers in in hand. He seemed to be upset.

“Here’s the report on that car, sir,” he said.

The colonel took the papers and leafed through a few of them. “Sergeant, I can’t make head nor tail of this.”

“Some of it I can’t, either, sir.”

“Now this?” said the colonel, pointing.

“That’s a computer, sir.”

“Cars don’t have computers.”

“Well, sir, that’s what I said, too. But we found the place where it was attached to the engine block.”

“Attached? Welded?”

“Well, not exactly welded. Like it was a part of the block. Like it had been cast as a part of it. There was no sign of welding.”

“You’re sure it’s a computer?”

“Connally said it was, sir. He knows about computers. But it’s not like any he’s ever seen before. It works on a different principle than any he has seen, he says. But he says it makes a lot of sense, sir. The principle, that is. He says…”

“Well, go on!” the colonel yelled.

“He says its capacity is at least a thousand times that of the best computer that we have. He says it might not be stretching your imagination too far to say that it’s intelligent.”

“How do you mean—intelligent?”

“Well, Connally says a rig like that might be capable of thinking for itself, sir.”

“My God!” the colonel said.

He sat there for a minute, as if he might be thinking. Then he turned a page and pointed at something else.

“That’s another part, sir,” the sergeant said. “A drawing of the part. We don’t know what it is.”

“Don’t know!”

“We never saw anything like it, sir. We don’t have any idea what it might be for. It was attached to the transmission, sir.”

“And this?”

“That’s an analysis of the gasoline. Funny thing about that, sir. We found the tank, all twisted out of shape, but there was some gas still left in it.

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