Second Contact, page 33
part #2 of Not Alone Series
“I’m sure you’ll agree that each of those images was more impressive than the last,” the anchor beamed, striking Godfrey as inappropriately flippant, “and who’s to say that some even better ones won’t be with us in the next few moments.”
For William Godfrey, on the other hand, it seemed that every day lately had been worse than the last. He would have loved to think that this was as bad as it could get, but he had been in politics long enough to know better than that.
Little did Godfrey know that in a small farm cottage some 6,000 miles north of his Buenos Aires home, a defiant old foe was conspiring to make this wretched night a whole lot worse than he could ever imagine…
C minus 19
Stevenson Farm
Eastview, Colorado
“Joe, it’s me,” Richard Walker calmly said, speaking into the relatively new phone which Joe Crabbe himself had delivered along with a new computer after Emma Ford and the McCarthy brothers wisely took everything on the night of the DS-1 launch disaster and Walker’s simultaneous disappearance.
Joe and the rest of the world knew nothing about that episode, of course, but the California Fireball had now convinced Walker once and for all that it was time for that to change.
“I want to do a live video interview,” Walker continued. “There’s something I need to tell the world… something I’ve wanted to get off my chest for a long time. It shouldn’t take much more than twenty minutes.”
“Of course,” Joe enthusiastically replied, fondly remembering the exponential spike in viewing and listening figures he had enjoyed after Walker appeared on Crabbe Shoot Radio around a year earlier to defend his decision to cover-up all proof of the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life. Naturally, Joe had no idea of the palpable irony of the topic Walker intended to broach on this occasion. “Can I have twenty minutes to get everything ready?”
“Certainly. But Joe, I need you to make me a promise. I need you to promise — promise — that you won’t cut this interview off.”
“Why would I do something like that?” Joe asked.
Walker hesitated, choosing his words carefully. “Because you’re not going to like what I have to say,” he eventually said. “No one is going to like what I have to say.”
“Well, I absolutely promise that I’ll let you say it; every single word.”
Walker hung up without saying goodbye.
He then poured himself two glasses of whisky, as was his way. Some visitors over the years had no doubt thought he did this for show — to make people talk, as he often liked to do — but they didn’t know the truth. It was more of a family custom than a habit; one Walker had picked up from his own father, a stoic man who died too young. Franklin Walker had always poured himself two glasses, and he explained to the inquisitive young Richard that he did so in tribute to his own late father with whom he had shared many a glass.
“One day that second glass will be yours,” Franklin had told his son, and on the boy’s fourteenth birthday he proved true to his word. From that day onwards, the two glasses were shared between them. Franklin unwaveringly poured and drank an extra glass every night during the harrowing spell when Richard was held captive in Vietnam, and Richard had maintained the custom every time he’d sat down for a drink since the night of Franklin’s untimely passing.
Richard hadn’t expected to reflect on this after calling Joe, but the thoughts were there and they quickly turned to regrets that he had never had a son of his own to slide that second glass to like his father had slid it to him. This particular regret didn’t last long when Richard reflected on the state of the world and the sickening weakness of its leaders; he wouldn’t wish eighty years in a world of Valerie Slaters and William Godfreys on his worst enemy, much less a child of his own.
“Here, boy,” Walker called, beckoning his loyal dog, Rooster. “If they do something to stop me, Joe will be here soon. Joe. Remember Joe? Joe will come to get you. But if they come back, you can go outside. Outside, okay?”
Rooster looked up at him like any dog would, wondering what the hell his owner was saying and how the hell he expected him to understand it.
Walker stood up and placed a large bag of dog food in the hallway, open at the top and tipped on its side. He then filled three water bowls and opened the external doors at both ends of the house. This had the dual effect of creating a wind tunnel and confusing Rooster even further. “Stay,” Walker said. “Unless they come back.”
Stay was one word the dog did understand, of course, but the rest meant nothing. He sat obediently on the kitchen floor.
“Good dog,” Walker said. He walked towards his bedroom, computer in hand, then stopped at the door and looked back. “You always were a good dog,” he added, quickly going inside and closing the door behind him before he got emotional. He firmly trusted that Rooster wouldn’t leave unless something spooked him, in which case Walker would hate for him to be trapped, so the possibility of him making a thoughtless exit in pursuit of a passing bird or whatever else might appear outside was a risk that had to be taken.
Inside his bedroom, Walker set the computer down on his bedside table and opened the chat window where Joe Crabbe would appear as soon as he was ready.
Richard Walker didn’t fear many things, but his heart was beating fast.
C minus 18
McCarthy Residence
Birchwood, Colorado
Within around twenty seconds, Dan realised that his computer’s estimate of how long it was going to take Trey’s primary ultra-HD video footage to be copied from the memory card wasn’t incorrect and wasn’t going to change; it really was going to take the better part of an hour.
“Time is against us,” he said, walking away from the computer and joining the others in gazing at his giant TV. “Trey’s footage isn’t going anywhere and we need to nail down a specific location for this fireball as quickly as we can.”
“Look at that rectangle where people have seen it and look at that heat spot,” Tara said, still the most excited member of the group in the wake of Dan’s prediction that something was going to happen in either California or North Dakota having come true in such spectacular fashion. “The heat spot couldn’t be any more central within your corridor of expectation!”
Dan then glanced between the TV and his wall. Tara was correct, but what bothered him was that none of his illustrative triangles had a point inside the exact area of that heat spot. Those speculative triangles had their third points — the potential location of the plaque — falling on places like Denver, Colorado Springs and Pikes Peak. At a very rough estimate, it looked to Dan that if the second point was indeed within the heat spot shown on the news, the plaque might be somewhere to the northwest of Birchwood, around halfway to Aspen.
Mount Elbert — which many saw as the likely identity of the “Rockiest Peak” mentioned in Humphrey Finch’s infamous prophecy — was the closest location to that point which Dan had considered, but even it wasn’t perfectly aligned.
“I need something more precise than this heat spot,” Dan said. “Timo, will there be anyone in the observatory at this time of night? I know it’s not exactly business hours in Italy right now.”
“Someone is always there,” Timo replied. “It may be too early for anyone to have extracted information from any old friends at the GSC, but we can always try. And that information is certainly coming, because Godfrey is a lame duck; from what I have heard, the discontent at some facilities has already been shifting towards insubordination, and after this it’s bound to start tipping over the edge towards full-blown mutiny.”
As Emma authorised Timo to dial the observatory’s number from Dan’s wired phone, Dan heard the words “Earth-grazing asteroid” spoken on TV for the first time since he’d been paying full attention.
“That makes three completely different kinds of widely observed lights in the sky,” he said. “Kerguelen was a superbolide, Montana was a dying satellite, and this is an Earth-grazer. I don’t know what the difference between the nature of the events means, but it has to mean something. Obviously the Messengers are leading us to the plaque, but they’re also putting on a show for everyone else and none of the details are random.”
Tara, previously entranced by the incoming photographs of the California Fireball alongside all manner of famous landmarks, joined the conversation at this point. “What if this is like that whole ‘boiling a frog’ thing you guys have talked about before? You know, the thing when someone reduces the impact of something big by slowly turning up the heat with smaller things along the way? Maybe the aliens are going to show up and before then they want to do some stuff to make everyone pay attention to different kinds of things arriving from above, so that their final arrival isn’t such a massive shock when it comes?”
“Hmm,” Clark said, turning away from the TV as Tara said this. “That sounds like something that could actually be true.”
“Maybe I’m smarter than I look,” Tara said with a wink.
“Just as well,” Clark quipped, immediately earning himself a punch in the arm.
“I think that sounds as plausible as anything else,” Dan said. “Because if they do ever decide to openly show up, I can’t imagine it would be sudden or unannounced. They would maybe send an unmanned craft which could be discovered and studied, and even that would be after they’d started slowly boiling the frog with uncloaked flights over populated areas and stuff like that.”
“Alessandro!” Timo boomed, delighted by the identity of the astronomer who answered his call after so many rings that he’d begun to think no one was there after all. “I am so glad it’s you. I’m with Dan, and he has some questions.”
Dan hurried to the phone. “Is this confirmed as an Earth-grazing asteroid?” he asked, wasting no time or words.
“That much is clear,” Alessandro Bonucci said, happy to be speaking to his old friend for the first time in too long but immediately understanding that brevity was the order of the moment.
“I need precise coordinates of its perigee,” Dan said. “Its point of closest approach. I need to know exactly where it was passing over when it was closest to the ground.”
Understandably, this caught Alessandro off guard. “Why?”
“Because I do. Do you have that information?”
“Dan, of course I don’t. The GSC won’t even have solid data on that yet; they’ll have data, but they won’t be confident in it. Remember Chelyabinsk? It took NASA weeks to publish the authoritative report that included their confident assessment of the location of its peak brightness. And it’s been, what, fifteen minutes since this asteroid passed through?”
“Weeks?” Dan echoed incredulously.
“I should have a fairly precise perigee in less than a day,” Alessandro said. “I was just trying to make the point that official things don’t happen quickly. I’ll have the info for you as soon as I can get it. So far, my own tracking of the most detailed eyewitness reports regarding the points of atmospheric entry and exit — which can typically be determined more quickly than the point of closest approach — well, that tracking so far leads me to think that the perigee was very likely at a point that’s fairly consistent with this so-called heat spot that’s been all over every news station. Have you seen that? It’s maybe also worth mentioning that we had solid information about the size and equivalent yield of the 2012 Sutter’s Mill meteorite, which was also fairly close to the locations we’re looking at tonight, within no more than a day or two. So like I said: the kind of precise data you need will be here soon. But again, I have to ask: why do you need it?”
“What’s the thing about Sutter’s Mill?” Dan asked, focusing squarely on that tangent. “Is that the same Sutter’s Mill where the California Gold Rush started?”
“Yes, that’s where the meteorite’s name came from. It was a daytime bolide which occurred in April 2012 and it was relatively well-observed for that kind of incident. No fragments any larger than 200 grams were found, but those who saw the meteor spoke of a long bright trail. Let me just check… yes, it possessed between three and four kilotons of energy before it broke apart around 50 kilometres from the surface. A pebble compared to what we saw at Kerguelen, for sure, and it was certainly much less exciting and lower-profile than what we’ve seen tonight. With the unprecedented level of observation and public interest, we’ll know everything about this latest fireball extremely soon. So, Dan, I may as well try one more time… why is this so important?”
Timo, listening in, took the phone from Dan after silently asking for permission. “Alessandro, the situation is complicated,” he said. “What I ask is that you provide me with regular updates of your most precise estimate of the perigee. Let’s say you have a circle… as you receive and analyse more data, it should get smaller, shouldn’t it? Please let me know every time it does.”
“Will do,” Alessandro said, apparently having given up on seeking any answers of his own. “Out of interest, would precise location data on the junk satellite which fell over Montana be of any use to you? Something tells me that this fireball’s location isn’t important all on its own…”
Dan, hearing these words, spoke into the phone while Timo held it: “We already have what we need on that front,” he said, tacitly confirming Alessandro’s suspicion.
“Okay,” the astronomer said. “My estimate is that I’ll have something useful in a few hours and something definite by the time you both wake up. Is there any estimate on when you can tell me what this is all about?” he added, laughing slightly.
“Just as soon as we have a definitive answer, Alessandro,” Timo replied with a chuckle of his own. “As soon as we have the answer.”
Moments after the call ended, a loud and sudden chime startled everyone. It sounded like it came from the basement’s ceiling, and only Dan knew what it meant.
“Ticker,” he said, pointing to the Wall Street-style trend-ticker which, rather than stock prices, scrolled an endless loop of exceptionally viral posts related to accounts and keywords Dan followed. When a post achieved truly extraordinary levels of sudden viral penetration, which happened perhaps once a month and usually only when someone died, the ticker emitted a loud chime. The threshold for this chime was user-customisable and Dan had set it to only kick in at the most important moments of all.
Events like the Kerguelen bolide didn’t register because news of them was never spread by a single post like the breaking news of a death more typically was, which was why none of the recent celestial events had led to this kind of chime. Dan knew that whatever it was all about had to be seriously big, and his best guess was some kind of official and strongly worded post from President Slater, who had so far kept almost suspiciously quiet over recent events.
“Oh, fuck…” Clark said, immediately jumping to his feet.
Dan hadn’t caught the start of the post on its first loop, only seeing “… it’s going to be BIG! #UNMISSABLE!”
As the message looped again and Dan saw the first part, he fully understood Clark’s response.
“Post by Joe_Crabbe_USA: Huge news coming straight from the horse’s mouth --- tune in for a live and exclusive interview with RICHARD WALKER in twenty minutes… there’s something he has to get off his chest and he promised me it’s going to be BIG! #UNMISSABLE!”
“Go!” Emma said, responding to Clark’s approval-seeking expression.
“Go where?” Timo asked.
“Walker is only three miles away,” Dan answered. “Clark, I’ll come with you.”
“No you won’t,” Emma and Clark both replied, shooting this particular idea down in perfect unison.
“Everyone just wait a second,” Tara said, not quite yelling but speaking just about as loudly as she could. “Just one second, okay? I’m guessing the three of you are worried that Walker is going to confess about the hoax, yeah? But why not just let him do it? He’s not going to cloud things by mentioning anything about you. If he’s doing this, he’s doing that emergency stop thing. Dan, remember all the stuff you told me that he told you a few nights ago? And you said he was pretty nice to you that night. Why would he bring you guys into this? He’ll just say that he tricked everyone because he felt like he had to, and now he feels like he has to come clean because… you know, all that American sovereignty stuff and all his fears about the GSC.”
No one said anything for several seconds. In the last five minutes, Dan and Clark had both come to realise that in terms of deep thinking and astute observations, Tara had a lot more in common with Emma than they’d previously thought.
“This could be your way out of all the stress of the secret,” Tara continued. “Maybe this is all part of what’s meant to happen.”
Emma turned to look at Dan, successfully catching his eye. She hadn’t said anything yet, but he could tell that she was about to do so if he didn’t.
“No,” he said. “It’s a good idea, but this isn’t just about us. If it was, Walker confessing like this would be perfect, because I really don’t think he would mention us, either.”
“It’s about stability,” Emma added. “Tara, I can’t remember if you were there when I said this, but belief in the content of the IDA leak is a core part of reality as experienced by everyone on this planet except for Richard Walker and the five people in this basement. If that rug of reality was pulled from under everyone’s feet at once, that would be a very dangerous thing. But for that to happen at a time when people are already so angry at their leaders and so frightened by this surge in talk about bolides and fireballs and satellites and, yeah, even aliens… that would be deadly. There would be riots everywhere. People would die — tonight — and it would be our fault for letting Walker talk.”
Tara nodded. “Okay. I was just—”
