Second Contact, page 27
part #2 of Not Alone Series
“I’ll be there as soon as I can,” Trey said.
“Good. I’ll see you tonight, I guess.”
“Maybe the early hours of tomorrow,” Trey replied after doing some quick mental arithmetic. The hotel signs at the side of the highway were no longer calling, but a short rest or two to avoid serious fatigue would be necessary to ensure a safe drive. “But anyway, Dan… thanks for this, dude, seriously. It’s going to be a real life-changer.”
Dan put his phone down.
“Hopefully not too much of a life-changer,” Clark said, speaking for the first time in a while.
“He’ll be fine,” Emma said.
Dan looked away from the phone at last, turning to Emma. “What are we going to tell him? Everything?”
“Definitely not,” she said. “That’s why he’s going to be fine.”
C minus 29
McCarthy Residence
Birchwood, Colorado
In the minutes after Trey’s call, the implications of his remarkable double-sighting began to sink in on Dan.
If Trey’s impromptu journey to Lolo had ‘only’ resulted in an unobstructed view of a spectacular bolide-like event, that alone would have been enough to externally vindicate Dan’s belief that the Messengers really were leading him to something. The neck twinges had been enough to convince him, but given the fact that he had now successfully predicted the time and place where a Kerguelen-like event would occur — a time and place communicated to him via familiar but scarcely-understood channels — no one could have any doubts any longer.
But the fact that Trey’s journey allowed him to capture excellent footage of not only the Lolo meteor but also a bona fide alien craft… well, that elevated Dan’s proof to another level entirely. Although there was a necessary element of conjecture behind his thoughts, Dan felt that Trey’s sighting indicated that the Messengers weren’t just leading him to something — they wanted it to be undeniable.
As generally seemed to be the case recently, things were nowhere near as clear cut as they had been the previous year, when all Dan had to do was push for official disclosure of what he had then believed to be the truth. It now struck him that things weren’t exactly straightforward for the Messengers, either.
Dan, reluctantly but necessarily returning to conjecture, knew that the Messengers could have publicly announced their presence with trifling ease by appearing over a densely populated area and hovering for a few minutes while the world’s eyes turned to face them. Of course, they could also have remained in the shadows altogether by not appearing over Lolo while only Trey was there to see them.
This brought to Dan’s mind the wider point that the Messengers could have remained in the shadows even more totally by not causing the Kerguelen bolide in the first place and not presciently alerting him to the similar event at Lolo. This also tied in with the idea that whatever they wanted to tell him wasn’t something they could just tell him directly… or, perhaps, it wasn’t something they could risk merely telling him directly.
If Dan was right — as he had been so far — and if the triangular treasure map that was taking shape really was building towards his imminent discovery of the fourth plaque, there had to be an excellent reason for the information engraved on its surface to be delivered via that medium rather than directly to Dan. The only conclusion he could draw was that the imminent message was not a message for Dan McCarthy but a message for the whole world; one which the Messengers trusted him to deliver, but one which they couldn’t risk being dismissed as a figment of his imagination.
He had spent a lot of time over the past few days trying to predict what the message was most likely to be, principally by thinking about what kinds of things they may have come to wish they’d told him during their first and only face-to-face meeting. A new question crossed his mind at that moment: the question of why the Messengers couldn’t just call him to a meeting spot and drop the newly engraved fourth plaque in his hand, just as he had delivered the blank third and fourth plaques to them a year earlier.
When Dan thought too much about these questions, he felt a growing physical unease in his stomach similar to the kind he had felt in previous days. He had also read more than enough science fiction novels and watched more than enough movies to know that he shouldn’t really try to analyse the actions of an intelligent extraterrestrial race in relation to human patterns of thought and logic, but right now he didn’t have much else to go on. Complicating things further, of course, was the fact that the Messengers themselves were interacting with Dan based upon their own assumptions of human logic and understanding.
The Messengers were evidently highly intelligent without being all-knowing about humanity, as highlighted by their evident mastery of space travel coexisting with their evident need to ask Emma’s thoughts on the least invasive way to plant a third plaque which could calm the shit-storm — her words — that had been whipped up by Richard Walker’s hoax and the Messengers’ regrettably necessary intervention against DS-1’s launch in China.
You just have to trust the dots, Dan thought, recalling his own earlier words to Clark. Then when we look back, we’ll see how obviously they all fit together.
“Can you look up the number for Timo’s Cavalieri Observatory?” Emma asked. “Alessandro will be at work by now, and I want to ask if they have any info on the Lolo meteor. Coming so soon after Kerguelen, and especially coming over the continental US, this is going to be a huge story in its own right.”
Dan’s fingers were typing as soon as Emma asked the question, and the phone was ringing seconds later.
It wasn’t Alessandro Bonucci who answered, but he was on the other end of the line before long. “Emma! How are you?”
“Pretty curious about what just happened over Montana,” she said. “What do you know?”
“Less than I would like to,” Alessandro replied, “you know, given our total lack of access to space-based equipment. But I still have some friends on the GSC’s side of the fence, and I already know that they just lost track of a rogue satellite which was supposed to burn up over the Pacific in around thirty-six hours. With as much certainty as my current position allows, I can tell you that the ‘meteor’ everyone is talking about was in fact the satellite in question. As soon as better footage comes in, experts will appear on TV to dissect the images and say it doesn’t look like a meteor, then by the end of the day something will leak out of a GSC facility somewhere. This was an old Chinese satellite, so my money is on it being a Chinese facility. Bad news for Godfrey, needless to say. The GSC failing to stop potentially dangerous meteors from exploding over an island in the middle of nowhere is one thing… the GSC failing to stop a Chinese satellite from falling towards the United States is something else entirely.”
“And what’s bad for Godfrey is good for Timo?” Emma said. “That’s your take?”
Alessandro chuckled. “Without wishing to put too fine a point on it, that is more or less what I was getting at.”
As Dan mouthed the words “anything else?” to Emma, she passed them on to Alessandro: “And have there been any reports of anything else near the meteor? Uh, satellite, I mean?”
“Like what?” Alessandro asked, his voice perking up with interest.
“I don’t know exactly, we just saw a few comments about a possible double flash.”
“Hmm, that’s news to me. Probably just the different stages of the burn-up, but I’ll keep my eye on things. I could certainly ask around to find out if anyone else has—”
“Don’t ask around about anything,” Emma interrupted, briefly closing her eyes and cursing herself for saying too much… and for almost saying far too much. “I’ve spoken to Timo about this and he doesn’t want any contact between his staff and Godfrey’s staff on this, however unofficial, otherwise Godfrey could try to paint it as interference.”
“Oh, okay,” Alessandro replied. “So is Timo with you now?”
Emma shifted her feet and leaned forward, clearly ready to end the call. “No, he’s staying at a hotel in the city. Anyway, thanks for the info on the satellite. I’ll talk to Timo about this in the morning; it’s really late here.”
“Of course. Both of you must be exhausted after the last few days and then all of your travelling. If anything major comes through the grapevine, I’ll let you know as soon as I hear it.”
“Thanks, Alessandro. We’ll touch base tomorrow, whatever happens in-between. Bye for now.”
“What do you think is going to happen in-between?” Clark asked as soon as Emma hung up.
She shrugged. “I just meant that I’ll talk to him tomorrow, whether or not he contacts us again overnight. Why, what do you think is going to happen?”
Clark glanced at Dan, immediately saw that he wasn’t on the same wavelength, and just as quickly decided that the only way to do this was to blurt it out: “Well, you’re going to have to explain some stuff to Tara pretty soon, because she followed us to Walker’s place and she saw him.”
“Her phone and Clark’s phone got mixed up,” Dan added, concerned by the silence which followed Clark’s words. “She picked up Clark’s by mistake, and we had left for Walker’s by the time she noticed… at which point she tracked her phone’s location to where we were, which was Stevenson Farm. She saw him, but we sent her home and told her you would answer every question she had and that the most important thing in the world was that she didn’t tell anyone anything about where we were or who we saw. That was on Monday evening, about thirty-two hours ago, and she hasn’t said anything. I think you’re going to have to tell her everything, because the only other way out would be some other complicated lie that I would have to remember.”
Emma’s reply was a simple one: “Did Walker see her?”
“He asked us who she was,” Dan said. “He saw her, but we were a good distance away and our faces weren’t lit up like his was. So much has happened tonight that I can’t even remember if I told you this yet, but Walker is dying — like, soon — and he was talking like he felt bad about everything he dumped on me last year. Death will do that to you, I guess.”
Emma nodded slightly and turned back to Clark. “Don’t worry about it; it sounds like it was her fault, if it was anyone’s fault except mine for letting her stay here without me, and I know she’ll never spill it. It’s like you two with your dad: the main reason I’ve kept her out of this is because I love her too much to bring her in. I’ll sleep on it, but right now I don’t see any way out without going the whole way in; like Dan just said, if the choice is another huge lie — a big, active lie — or telling her everything, telling her is almost definitely safer. She knows some pretty big old family secrets that she’s kept even when the people they’re about really tried to screw things up for her, so I know she’ll understand. And if I have to play firm at first like I did with Timo, I know she’ll respond to that, too.”
“How firm were you with Timo?” Dan asked.
Emma shrugged. “Basically I just told him that he really didn’t want to make an enemy out of me and that he wasn’t holding any cards. Saying that now, it sounds ridiculous… but he has this idea of me as being an unstoppable super-powered guru, because that’s all I’ve ever let him see. He’s on our side, too — all-in, fully on-board — but for the next little while I want to keep him pretty close, just so I can stay on top of everything.”
“If you want to keep him closer than the hotel, he could always stay here,” Dan said. “I could sleep either upstairs or maybe at your place. You know, just until you didn’t need him so close anymore.”
Clark, standing behind Dan, made a stupid face at Emma, his eyebrows raised high and his mouth open in a shocked circle.
“Too close is the last place I want Timo tonight,” Emma said, ignoring Clark and smiling more broadly than she realised. “The Gravesen is where politicians and hotshot arms executives have always stayed when they’re in the city for business, so he’s safe with their high-security set up and he’s happy enough in his suite. But, you know, you’re totally welcome to stay with me if you want to get out of this basement for a night. I know I would. Tara won’t bother us.”
“The basement is fine,” Dan said. “I just meant if Timo wanted to stay here. If he’s happy at the hotel, I don’t have to go anywhere.”
Clark’s eyebrows fell, his expression deflating as his younger brother’s signal-reading skills lived up to their billing as the worst in Birchwood and quite possibly the western hemisphere.
“Yeah,” Emma said. “That’s what, uh… exactly. It’s all good; everyone is happy right where they are. So I guess I’ll see you guys tomorrow. Good work with Trey. And Clark… don’t worry about Tara; accidents happen. At least you defused it before she learned anything else.”
“Do you want me to see you out?” Clark asked as Emma moved towards the stairs.
“I’m okay,” she said. “See you tomorrow.”
“’Night,” Dan called.
Emma stopped at the top of the stairs before closing the door. “’Night, Dan.”
Clark stood still as the door locked, quietly looking at Dan.
“What?” Dan asked, returning his gaze.
“If you could look away from your computer and the rest of this stuff for two minutes and just pay some attention to the world around you… right in front of you… maybe you’d have a clue what was going on.”
“What are you talking about?” Dan asked, evidently very genuine in his confusion.
“I’m not getting involved, man. I just want you to know that this…” Clark trailed off, gesturing at Dan’s research-covered wall, “all of this… it’s not the most important thing in the world.”
Dan hesitated for a moment, as though doing a second processing check on a sentence he couldn’t have disagreed with any more strongly than he did. “Clark, this is more important than everything else in the world put together! Wherever this thing is going to end, it’s telling us something huge. You think the Messengers are messing around here? We’re going to have the fourth plaque in a few days and it’s going to tell us something big, about New Kerguelen or a huge new technology or something on that level.”
Clark sighed and softened his expression, as though ready to try a more gentle tack. “I know this is important, and maybe right now it is the most important thing. Okay? I know that. We know that. But you need to try to open your eyes to the little things, too. Life will pass you by if you don’t, man. Fast. People will pass you by. And… okay, I know I said I’m not getting involved. But people like Emma?” Clark paused to snap his fingers. “They pass you by like that. Someone like Emma and someone like you… seriously, outside of TV shows written by a roomful of scrawny nice-guy losers, this is a once in a fucking light-year kind of thing. You are a nice guy, Dan — scrawny as a twig in November, but passable enough on the physical front — but there’s a world full of guys like that. I’ve been around, man, and I’ll tell you this: however far you go and however hard you look, you won’t find another Emma… let alone one who’s looking at you.”
“A light-year is a unit of distance,” Dan said, blurting it out immediately after Clark stopped speaking. “A year is a unit of time and a light-year is the distance that—”
“Jesus,” Clark interrupted. “You know, if you were an actual robot, at least I could turn you off to give my self a break, or maybe update your firmware or expand your emotion centre or some shit. And don’t tell me robots don’t have firmware, okay? No one cares.”
“They definitely don’t have emotion centres,” Dan said. He then smiled slightly as Clark groaned. “I’m just messing around, man; I heard what you said. And I’m not as much of an idiot as you think. I know we’re not on TV, and I know that the hot one and the weird one don’t end up together anywhere except on TV. But we’re real people… we’re not one trait and we didn’t just bump into each other in an elevator. Still though, unless Emma has told you something she hasn’t told me, I don’t see it. The night before she left for Italy didn’t count because you got her so wasted that—”
“Dial back,” Clark said, involuntarily raising his pitch in surprise. “What happened the night before Italy? And I didn’t ‘get her wasted’, I let her get wasted. I also brought her home before the end of the night and made sure she had some water. I don’t normally care about specific wording, but the way you said that has certain connotations, you know? That’s not me; I’m not that guy. But anyway, the night before Italy…?”
Dan shrugged. “Nothing happened. I didn’t know if she even meant what she was saying. And then when she said she’d forget it all by the morning, I started to think I was right to doubt that she did. So like I said: unless she’s said anything to you…”
“It wouldn’t be fair for me to repeat anything I might or might not have been told in confidence,” Clark said, “but I’ll tell you what I told her: this isn’t middle school. In the grown-up world, people—”
“So you were talking about it,” Dan interjected.
Clark covered his face with his hand, having genuinely tripped over his own words. “See what I mean? I never was any good at this stuff.” He then performed an exaggerated gesture of zipping his mouth closed before starting up the stairs. “Okay, I’m leaving. Get some sleep, man.”
“I’m not tired.”
“It wasn’t a suggestion,” Clark said firmly, turning to face Dan from a few stairs up. “Get some sleep. Emma has to deal with Tara tomorrow, and we all have to deal with Timo and Trey.”
“Trey has done his part and he’ll be easy to deal with,” Dan replied, shaking his head slightly while holding Clark’s eyes. “And I’ve got a feeling that by the time he gets here, we’ll all be looking somewhere else.”
