Second Contact, page 10
part #2 of Not Alone Series
For much of the long day, Dan had been so caught up in the excited reaction to the Reciprocity announcement that he temporarily postponed his own theorising over the meaning of the Kerguelen bolide. He was surprised that Godfrey still hadn’t said anything outside of one short overnight radio interview, either about the bolide or about Timo, but it was not a disappointed kind of surprise.
“There’s something I’ve been thinking about,” he said to Emma after a general discussion of the day’s events. “You’re going to be with Timo in a few days… so what if we tell him some of the truth without telling him anything about the lie? He talked about looking for New Kerguelen, and there are two things we know that could really narrow the search parameters. The first thing is that the Messengers could walk and breathe without suits in an environment where we could do the same, which tells us certain things about the kind of environment they evolved in. And the second thing — the main thing — is that they told me we have a name for their home star but not for their home planet. If we told Timo that I met the Messengers…”
Clark responded first, with some general obscenities colouring his disbelief at Dan’s suggestion.
Emma raised a finger to ask him to be quiet. “Dan,” she said, “I thought we were on the same page about this?”
“We are. I didn’t say we should say anything about the hoax, just that we could maybe tell Timo that we met aliens and that they told us a few things. And I said Timo, okay? Not everyone. Not Cole or Godfrey or anyone else. Not even Billy or my dad. Timo. He’s the only guy who could take the info we have and act on it in a positive way.”
“What even makes you think they’d let you tell him?” Emma asked. “They told us they’d interfere if Walker tried to talk.”
“Exactly! They didn’t say they’d interfere if I did.”
“Because we didn’t ask, Dan. We weren’t stupid enough to be thinking about that. Just listen to me for one minute, okay, because as soon as any part of this is out, it’s all out. Don’t kid yourself on that. And the second you told someone, you would wish you hadn’t. This thing is a weight we have to bear — we didn’t ask for it, but we’ve sure as hell got it. And if you told someone, you would immediately realise that the weight wasn’t lifted, it was just dumped onto them too. Do you think this would be more difficult for the two of us if Clark didn’t know? Do you think this would be easier for the three of us if your dad knew? No. It would just be equally as difficult for more people, and you would never sleep again because you’d be worried that they would spill it. We can trust ourselves and we can trust each other, and that’s it. That’s all. Okay?”
“Okay,” Dan said, quite brightly.
Emma raised her eyebrows. “Dan…”
“I said okay. No big deal.”
“Well, it kind of is, which is why I need you to promise. I need you to promise me that you’re going to stop thinking about this. Can you do that?”
“I promise.”
Emma turned to Clark. “Are you happy with that?”
“Do I look happy with that?” he groaned. In turn, he looked at Dan. “I swear to God, man… if I hear you talking about any shit like that again, you’ll wish I hadn’t.”
“Jesus,” Dan sighed. “Last night you say nothing is off the table; no judgement; say whatever you think. Then today Timo makes a big announcement and I have an idea directly related to that, so I say it. I say it to the two of you, in here, in private, and now suddenly it’s like judgement judgement judgement. I didn’t say I’m gonna tell him, did I? I said ‘what if we did?’… but Emma said no, so that’s it. You don’t need to be such an asshole.”
“You think this is me being an asshole?” Clark asked. “Then you really don’t want to see what happens if I hear you suggesting anything like that again.”
Emma butted in. “Clark, that’s enough.”
“No it’s not. If someone has an idea as stupid as that, you call it out. If you don’t, you’re just encouraging him to have more stupid ideas.”
“If he has ideas, I want to hear them,” Emma said. “Whether you think they’re stupid or not, if he’s gonna have them, I want to know what they are. You want to just leave everything stewing in his head? You want him to tell someone else because we don’t listen and the thoughts drive him crazy?”
“Uh, I am standing right here…” Dan said.
Emma put her hand around his back and rested it on his shoulder. “I know, sorry. But Clark, cut him some slack. However hard this is for us, we’re not the ones who felt physical pain when the meteor came in and we’re not the ones who got called to the cornfield last time, okay? Stuff like that changes your perspective. So when Dan has an idea, he can tell us — without judgement.”
Clark paused, then closed his eyes for a second and nodded slowly. “I’m sorry, too, man. But at the same time, try and see it from my side. If you were me and I was suggesting something like that…”
“I’d probably lock you in the basement with no computer and no phone line,” Dan said, laughing as he spoke.
Emma lowered her hand from Dan’s shoulder after suddenly noticing that it was still there. “Don’t give him any ideas, Dan.”
“Anyway, I’ve got an early shift tomorrow,” Clark said, clapping his hands together. “Dan, you coming?”
Dan nodded, then turned to Emma. “What are you doing tomorrow? Do you need to go into the city again for work?”
“No, that was a one-time thing — campaign emergency averted. Actually, I might have to go into the city to pick up a little something for your birthday next week, but that’s it. Apart from that I’ll just be working from home and I don’t have much booked in. Why, what about you?”
Dan shrugged. “I’ll see what comes up.”
“Cool, well… I’ll probably catch you sometime tomorrow, right?”
“Definitely,” Dan said. “See you later.”
As Dan walked to the door, Emma pulled Clark back very subtly. “Be nice to him,” she mouthed. She was smiling, but Clark wasn’t.
“The softer you get, the more I have to overcompensate,” he whispered. “Don’t make this more difficult than it already is.”
He was gone before she could reply.
C minus 76
White House
Washington, D.C.
Many in and around President Slater’s administration had been keeping extremely close tabs on Timo Fiore’s space-related investments and research projects for a long time. His decision to bring his various astronomical interests and facilities together under the new banner of Fiore Frontiere was more than a mere rebranding, however, and allied with the strength of Timo’s comments it showed that he really did mean business.
Like Timo, several high-profile former NASA officials and employees had recently been growing acutely frustrated with the direction in which Godfrey had been taking the GSC. The glacial pace of any real progress beyond one admittedly impressive project was a constant source of annoyance, and some contended that the laudably short period of time taken to design and construct the Unity 1 rocket which would ultimately launch Research Station 1 was less of a feather in the GSC’s cap than it was an indication of the kind of progress that could have been simultaneously made on many distinct projects if the Commission was more efficiently run.
Respected voices within the security community had for many months stressed to President Slater the importance of ensuring that Timo never developed a direct cooperative relationship with either the Russians or the Chinese. There was no solid reason to think he ever would — Timo had never made any secret of his conviction that Western economic and democratic ideals were the foundational basis of human prosperity, and bribery couldn’t tempt him any more than a snorkel could tempt a basking shark — but it remained unknown whether, and how, he could ever be tempted to work with any national governments at all should the GSC ultimately disintegrate as so many predicted.
In a post-GSC world in which international competition returned, it struck most political observers that Timo Fiore could well be the kingmaker whose cooperation with one reinstituted national space agency would decisively set it apart from the others.
Timo’s decision to headquarter Fiore Frontiere in the United States gave Slater reason to be hopeful as to which path he would ultimately take in such a post-GSC scenario. Nothing could be taken for granted, however, so she reaffirmed to her staff the importance of refraining from making any comments critical of Timo while also avoiding any public criticisms of the GSC.
Slater had walked tighter ropes at greater political altitudes, but striking an expedient balance between long- and short-term considerations of these issues was anything but straightforward.
Glancing at transient headlines on her computer screen, President Slater considered the point that the calls for comment on these issues were at least far less vociferous than the calls for comment about the IDA leak had been a year earlier. This time, there was no media circus in Birchwood or anywhere else; and even more importantly, this time there was no lightning rod in the mould of a Dan McCarthy for the public to march behind in their call for truth.
And no Emma Ford to play the press like a fiddle and make my life a thousand times more difficult than it has to be, Slater reflected with an ironic grin.
But as she thought back to the previous year and recalled just how friendly Timo had gotten with the troublemakers in Birchwood, Slater’s grin faded. The fact that Billy Kendrick, another of their allies, was already wrapped up in the Kerguelen incident only increased the potential for an unwelcome change in the direction of current media narratives, and Slater didn’t like some of the possibilities that arose in her mind.
Ford and McCarthy are nowhere to be seen for now, she thought. But how long is for now…?
C minus 75
McCarthy Residence
Birchwood, Colorado
In the small hours of the night, Dan went upstairs to get a drink from the refrigerator. He didn’t bother switching on the kitchen light, which was why he noticed a light outside the back door.
Intrigued, he opened the door and stepped out. Several thoughts went through his mind, with the worst being that he would find one or more intruders sneaking around. He didn’t think of this until the door was already open, but fortunately the fear was quickly proven to be unfounded.
The light was coming from Emma’s place, from a large motion-activated floodlight above her back door.
“Dan?” she said, responding quietly to the sound of the door, no louder than necessary in the silence of the night.
He walked over to the high white fence; their houses were around ten metres apart with two driveways and a flowerbed in-between, but at the back of their homes only this fence separated the properties.
The light from next door was enough to illuminate the recently reinvigorated vegetable plot on Dan’s side of the fence, as well as the new stone pathway in the middle of the relaid lawn leading to a shiny new toolshed built on the site of the rickety and leaky old one which had stood for decades.
“What are you doing out at this time?” he asked through the fence. It struck him as the obvious question.
“Couldn’t sleep,” Emma said. “I thought I might as well look at the stars instead of my bedroom ceiling. What about you?”
“Are you asking if I’d rather be looking at your bedroom ceiling?” Dan deadpanned.
Emma laughed heartily. “Oh, Dan Dan Dan. When did you learn to tell jokes like that?”
“It’s really weird talking through a fence,” he said, focusing on the suddenly dominant thought in his mind rather than on Emma’s previous comment.
“Do you want to come round to talk for real?” Emma asked. “I don’t have to be up early tomorrow.”
“What do you want to talk about?”
“Hold on until I check my list of topics…” she said, laughing again. “I dunno, Dan, just whatever. It feels like I’d barely seen you recently until this Kerguelen thing, and now it’s like that’s all there is. We didn’t always need there to be something to talk about, did we?”
“Kerguelen is a big deal, Emma. Everyone is getting distracted by Timo and Namtso and all that stuff, but the Messengers are coming back. They’re coming back soon.”
“I hope so. At least it’ll give us something new to talk about,” Emma said. There was only a hint of a chuckle in her voice this time and Dan didn’t really know how to read it.
“I’m going to go back inside,” he said. “It’s freezing out here. Don’t stay out too long, okay?”
Emma looked up again at the stars overhead, imagining what it would look like when they did come back, and especially if they came down with their craft uncloaked.
“Can you imagine if their craft—”
Her question was interrupted by Dan’s door closing behind him as he re-entered the kitchen.
“’Night, Dan,” she sighed.
C minus 74
Stevenson Farm
Eastview, Colorado
Three miles south of Birchwood, Richard Walker sat pensively at the kitchen table of the cottage which had once been his second home and was now his only refuge from a hostile world. The picturesque cornfield vistas and relative privacy despite its proximity to the city had been Walker’s motivations for choosing this cottage over his other options, and he had never regretted the decision for a minute. Only a handful of people knew where Walker lived, and he was equally confident for varying reasons that each would stay quiet.
The first was Joe Crabbe, a long-term ally who continued to deliver essential supplies every two weeks. Joe knew where Walker lived, but he didn’t know what had happened there. He didn’t know anything.
Joe didn’t know that Walker’s cover-up was a hoax, much less that his lies had come true when real aliens furtively sabotaged DS-1’s launch to prevent the nuclear weaponisation of space. And Joe certainly didn’t know that those aliens had taken Walker — the man whose lies led to the launch of DS-1 in the first place and thus necessitated the initial intervention — and told him that any attempts to destabilise the world further with an admission of his lie would result in a second and permanent abduction.
As time passed, Walker had grown progressively less sure that the aliens had been serious about their threat. It struck him as highly unlikely that they were still keeping tabs after so much time, but he hadn’t yet felt an urgent need to test this in any way. On occasion he had been tempted to bring Joe in on the secret to ensure that the option of revealing it didn’t die with him, but on reflection he realised that Joe had so little mainstream credibility that he would have been as well scrawling “WALKER LIED — IT WAS A HOAX” in brown paint on the wall of an abandoned warehouse.
The only other three people who knew Walker’s current location were the same three who knew everything else: the McCarthy brothers and Emma Ford. All three continued to surprise him greatly by remaining strong enough and selfless enough to keep it all quiet.
Events of the last few days had left Walker feeling uncomfortably and intolerably impotent. For decades he had enjoyed real power in frontline politics, first as a congressman and ultimately as the long-standing head of the Interspace Defense Agency, but right now those days seemed a long way away.
His elaborate plan to sell a hoax by dressing the lie up as a secret had succeeded in its primary goal of halting China’s ambitious plans to colonise the Moon and walk on the surface of Mars, two developments which to his mind would have unacceptably ceded the ultimate high ground and, in his famous words, surrendered the “well-earned national security advantage” of the United States.
The unfortunate side-effect of the hoax, from Walker’s point of view, had been the creation of the GSC — a truly supranational organisation which brought all national space agencies together under one umbrella. Power creep had always been his main concern when it came to such organisations, and the one saving grace in his eyes was that the GSC at least had a strongly pro-West leader in the form of William Godfrey, whose occasional anti-American comments of the past Walker knew to have been strategic rather than authentic.
Nevertheless, Walker wanted the GSC to die — yesterday.
When a meteor entered the Earth’s atmosphere and exploded with tremendous force high above the island of Kerguelen, the people of Earth had been powerless to stop it. And with the United States fully signed up to the GSC’s charter, all unilateral defensive measures were out of the question. It disgusted Walker that a rich European like Timo Fiore was doing more than President Slater to safeguard the people of the United States and the world at large.
Walker didn’t buy the theories that the Kerguelen bolide was anything but a coincidence. He also didn’t buy the theory that it was a “close call” as many had been calling it. Like Tunguska and Chelyabinsk, he saw it instead as a warning for humanity to get its act together.
A meteor today, and what tomorrow?
Walker was asking the question, but it seemed to him like no one else was. And if things continued the way they were going, with a corrupt and bloated GSC prohibiting anyone else from doing anything to protect the planet while its mechanisms did the square root of nothing, he would have no choice but to do something.
At 4am, he decided it was time for a test run.
Walker coughed dryly, grimacing and holding the throat which had recently begun to fail him so completely. His loyal old dog, Rooster, walked to his side as he always did when the coughing got bad. Walker patted the dog’s head and told him it was okay.
He then picked up his phone and dialled Joe Crabbe’s number. It rang and rang, but there was no answer.
“One of these days…” he said after the beep, coughing again to clear his treacherous throat and in doing so destroying his initial effort to sound intimidating. “One of these days or nights… I’m going to need you to answer on the first ring so we can set up an urgent live interview. You know I don’t have many days left, Joe. What you don’t know is that there’s something I want to get off my chest before the last one comes.”
