Second Contact, page 45
part #2 of Not Alone Series
Jack didn’t have much of a comeback to this; it was obvious that the motley crew in Birchwood, Colorado knew something he didn’t. What troubled Cole most of all was the possibility that Godfrey and Slater were in on it, too, as such a situation could quickly make him look like an idiot left out in the cold by the self-appointed political masters of the English-speaking world.
The Prime Minister’s global frustrations were heightened by an increasingly difficult situation at home, where Diane Logan had gained significant support in her opposition to Cole and was now being widely encouraged to mount a formal leadership challenge which he knew he would struggle to survive.
He needed something big, and he needed it fast. In uncharacteristically blunt terms, Jack had already shot down one all-or-nothing idea Cole proposed as a way of turning the situation on its head in a desperate attempt to stay in power.
That idea had been sidelined for now, but Cole’s patience was running thin.
“I’m doing everything I can to find everything there is to find,” Jack said, feeling the heat, “but Trey Myers hasn’t said anything remotely interesting since our man planted the bugs on Thursday. The internal bugs are in place on both levels of the house, and between those and the external bugs we have full coverage. We’ve heard every word he’s said since they were planted — I can show you a transcript, if you like — but there’s been absolutely nothing to report. As soon as there is, you’ll hear about it, boss.”
Cole, as unimpressed as he was desperate, stared a hole through Jack. “Well you better bloody hope you’ve got something worth telling me soon,” he boomed, the words dripping with menace, “because my arse isn’t the only one on the line here, Jacky Boy. Don’t forget that.”
C plus 9
Stevenson Farm
Eastview, Colorado
Dan led the way through the faintly compressed path of corn which led to the small crop circle he had found himself inside exactly one week earlier.
On that occasion, Rooster had been standing beside him when he returned to consciousness after the dream-like experience which paved the way for his discovery of the fourth plaque and ultimately the harrowing discovery of Il Diavolo, Comet Conte-Abate.
On this occasion, Rooster entered the small crop circle at Dan’s side. The dog hesitated briefly at the threshold but continued without prompt.
“What now?” Emma asked.
Dan sat down, crossed his legs like he was meditating, and looked up at the multitude of stars that lit up the clear night’s sky. Within a few seconds, Emma joined him.
Rooster, not wishing to be left out, also settled on the neatly flattened corn.
Dan closed his eyes and tried to clear his mind of everything; if they weren’t going to show up, he was at least hoping for some kind of message.
Emma, who had never been called anywhere and had never fallen into any kind of daze to receive a message, watched Dan’s expression. She hoped it would change to indicate that something was happening, but her hope came to nothing.
When Dan reopened his eyes after four of the slowest and most frustrating minutes of his life, Emma was still looking. “Sorry,” he said, shaking his head.
“For what?”
“Getting your hopes up, I guess.”
Emma shifted onto her knees and hugged him tight. “Don’t be,” she said. “High hopes are better than low hopes and low hopes are better than no hopes.”
“There’s always hope,” Dan replied, “even if it’s low. Nothing’s over until it’s over.”
Emma lay back and pulled Dan down with her. They were both gazing up. “So where is the stupid thing, anyway?” she asked.
“About there,” Dan said, pointing towards the area which had been highlighted on the fourth plaque and using some of the most prominent stars as guides to help Emma find the right spot.
The night was so still and the sky so clear that a few satellites were visible like distant slow-moving fireflies. “What about that old Japanese laser idea for defensive satellites?” their appearance prompted Emma to ask. “Remember, from last year?”
“There are a lot of ideas,” Dan said, his tone relatively upbeat. “I don’t know if or how they could work with something this big, but pretty much all the crazy plans you’ve seen in movies are at least partly based on real ideas. And then there are newer ideas like a gravity tractor to deviate its course, but I think the timescale rules that out. There are probably some ideas that no civilians know about at all, and a lot of smart people will be working round the clock on those ideas right now.”
Emma nodded slowly, a pensive expression on her face.
Before much longer, Dan sat up. “We should get going,” he said. “It’s unlikely, but Crabbe could show up anytime if he was already on the way here before I pressed the button, and we could sure do without having to explain why we’re here.”
Emma couldn’t disagree with that, and it did look like the night was going to end in an anti-climax no matter how much longer they waited. She called Rooster over and stood up to lead him back to the car. “Thanks for this,” she said to Dan. “Even though nothing happened, I’m still glad we came.”
Dan put on a brave face and pretended to agree, but deep down he felt very differently. He had entered the cornfield with one question: were the Messengers going to help?
As he stepped out of the cornfield with nothing more to show for his visit than the wet patches where his clothes had touched the ground, the answer was only too clear:
We’re on our own.
SUNDAY
C plus 10
Ford Residence
Birchwood, Colorado
“A week ago, we were in New York,” Timo Fiore mused to Emma as he and the others watched the end of the night’s Focus 20/20 broadcast on her giant projector. “We weren’t even on the way to Italy yet. It is truly crazy how much has happened since then.”
Dan and Emma had both been invited to appear on the show via satellite but both had soundly rejected the offer. No one from the previous week’s panel was present this week, in keeping with a long-established tradition, and the whole show had an oddly low-key feel to it as the panelists looked back at the California Fireball and discussed the upcoming GSC summit with no hint of what it was really about.
There were no secrets being kept; the panelists just didn’t know the truth.
Low-key was the word of the day in Birchwood and beyond, with no anti-GSC protests of note occurring at all and life more or less going on as normal.
Timo was right: an incredible amount had happened in the last week.
And with the GSC’s week-long summit set to begin the following morning — an event which would increase both the chance of a solution to the Il Diavolo problem being found and also the chance of the problem’s existence leaking out into the public sphere — Dan McCarthy couldn’t help but wonder what the world would look like in another week’s time.
ONE WEEK LATER
C plus 11
McCarthy Residence
Birchwood, Colorado
The following Sunday evening, GSC Chairman William Godfrey quietly announced that the summit in Buenos Aires was being extended by a few more days. He presented this as a positive development, stressing that “unprecedented cooperative progress” had already been made “in several key areas.”
The great relief in both Birchwood and Buenos Aires was that the public remained unaware of just what those key areas were. This was one secret Dan McCarthy had no qualms about keeping from anyone, for he understood perfectly well that public order could break down almost immediately if the news broke in the wrong way. Chaos was not conducive to progress, as he understood just as well, and as such it was paramount that fast-tracked efforts to prevent or mitigate Il Diavolo’s impact with Earth could get underway while the world’s economic and social structures remained functional.
A handful of developments from the summit had filtered down via Timo’s Fiore Frontiere delegation, which included Dan’s friend Alessandro Bonucci as well as several planetary defence experts from Timo’s facility in South Africa, but there was so far nothing tangible.
Dan couldn’t be sure whether Alessandro’s external communications were being monitored and that he thus had to measure his words or whether there were simply no major breakthroughs to report. He hoped beyond hope that it was the former, but Timo didn’t seem to share his optimism.
The whole week had felt like something of a purgatorial twilight zone for Dan. Some news commentators drew inevitable parallels between the GSC summit and the UN summit of the previous year, at which world leaders had convened to discuss how to deal with the apparent threat or warning suggested by the crosshairs-like symbol which intersected Earth on the first two plaques.
There was one obvious similarity in the simple fact that leaders and scientists were once again gathering to establish a common response to a threat discovered on an alien plaque. The main difference in Dan’s mind was that this time, the threat was real. And this time, although precious few knew that the comet had been discovered thanks to a plaque at all, the engravings which led to its discovery truly were alien.
Global media personnel camped outside of the GSC compound in Buenos Aires in fewer numbers than they had outside of the United Nations building in New York, largely because they didn’t understand the true enormity of what was really being discussed inside. National representatives were forbidden from leaving the compound and forbidden from participating in open interviews with any reporters. In this regard there were parallels between the summit and the previous year’s highly secretive initial analysis of the first two ‘alien’ plaques, which also occurred in Argentina.
In that instance, the nature of the international team’s analysis had been public knowledge but their location had been kept secret to avoid invasive media attention. The reverse was true in this instance, when everyone in the loop knew that every ear and every eyeball around the world would have been obsessively and disruptively focused on Buenos Aires had the real reason for the summit been disclosed.
But the real reason wasn’t public knowledge, and for this reason life largely went on as normal. The anti-GSC protests which filled the streets outside the compound were now no more than memories, and each passing day’s Social Media Meta Analysis graphs clearly showed that previously acute fears over potentially imminent threats from space were fading and fading and fading.
The immediate aftermath of the California Fireball had been a period marked by borderline hysteria; but as pages were ripped off the ‘days since a major celestial event’ calendar and the number of days without incident rose, people began to consider that perhaps the rapid-fire trio of events which began with a bolide at Kerguelen and continued with an unexpected satellite re-entry in Montana was just that: a trio.
After California, eyes around the world had been trained to the sky in trepidation. Now, hindsight was beginning to make a majority of people realise that their palpable dread had been an unwarranted if understandable overreaction. It helped that the signatories of the infamous Kerguelen memo had publicly climbed down from their initial analysis of the bolide as “observably unnatural”; needless to say, the level and nature of the persuasive pressure those individuals faced was not a matter of public record.
The main media story from the summit had been a credible bomb threat on the third day, which led to a full evacuation of the GSC’s headquarters and halted the time-sensitive proceedings for an entire afternoon. Unsurprisingly to most, responsibility was claimed by the so-called Welcomers, a group whose numbers were inexplicably growing and whose focus was on sabotaging all Earth-defending measures in an effort to ensure that the scourge of “the human virus”, as they saw it, would be eradicated when the external universe saw fit.
“Why can’t those assholes just do a mass suicide like what happened at Hemshaw last year?” Clark had asked angrily when he saw this news. “If humans are so bad and should be eliminated, why don’t they start with number one?”
No one had offered any kind of argument or defence on behalf of the odious Welcomers, whose chief skill seemed to be uniting the rest of the world against them.
The week’s edition of Focus 20/20 briefly touched on the issue of the Welcomers and their ever-growing zeal, but in general the episode was illustrative of the fading fears over celestial threats as only one of its two segments focused on the summit while the other was devoted to a completely unrelated trade deal which President Slater had recently managed to hammer out.
Every few hours, the irony slapped Dan in the face like a sea lion’s flipper: just when public fears over space-based threats were dropping towards pre-Kerguelen levels, the greatest threat humanity had ever faced was drawing inexorably closer by the day.
If the purgatory-like week of silence did anything, it vindicated Dan’s long-held belief that big power really could keep big secrets.
For years, naysayers had told him that there could be no alien cover-up because the human beings involved in it would slip up before long. His ability to say “I told you so” had died when he learned that Richard Walker’s cover-up was in fact an elaborate hoax, but the fact that at least a few hundred high-ranking politicians and scientists around the world now knew about Il Diavolo proved once and for all that an alien cover-up could have been kept under wraps. The comet wasn’t exactly water-cooler talk at the GSC — only those who had appropriate clearance and worked in relevant departments were in the loop — but the national leaders of all the GSC’s primary member states were also in on the secret, and between those leaders and their inner circles of advisors the numbers quickly added up.
He shared this point with Emma in a light-hearted way, and her reply was that the situations weren’t really as similar as Dan thought; in this case, everyone understood that keeping the comet secret, for a while at least, was an objective necessity. In short, people really were being kept in the dark for their own good. That wouldn’t necessarily have been the case with aliens, she said, since that secret leaking out wouldn’t have inevitably led to immediate global disorder and chaos which could very plausibly reach anarchic proportions within days.
Having received their first payment from Timo, the Feather brothers in Salida had relieved everyone by keeping perfectly quiet about the fourth plaque. Needless to say, the Feathers still had no idea what was engraved on the plaque found in their late father’s hoard, let alone what kind of discovery its engraving had led to.
Clark, meanwhile, had gone to work on five of the last six days. His nose still didn’t look right after its run-in with an invisible wall at Richard Walker’s house, but the aching pains in his ribs had more or less disappeared. While Dan admiringly wondered how Clark could focus on anything, Clark wondered how Dan didn’t go crazy doing nothing.
Emma also worked remotely with a few high-paying clients over the course of the week, shut away in her home office and trying to keep her mind off things just like Clark was.
Timo spent his days in Dan’s basement liaising non-stop with his staff around the world, some of whom were exploring highly theoretical solutions to the comet problem. His regular presence prompted Henry to enquire one day about what was really going on and why Timo was hanging around all the time. Henry didn’t mind, but he wanted to know. Timo satisfied his curiosity with a spur-of-the-moment reply that his presence at the Gravesen Hotel in Colorado Springs had been reported and widely circulated, that public knowledge of which suite he was staying in invalidated his insurance coverage, and that he would be out of Henry’s hair as soon as he sourced a long-term home near his soon-to-open Fiore Frontiere headquarters at the old IDA building. Henry bought the white lie and insisted that he wasn’t trying to force him out.
Timo was more evasive when Henry asked a less expected question:
“So, is something finally going on with those two?”
Timo pretended not to know that “those two” referred to Emma and Dan, and he shrugged as convincingly as he could when Henry clarified the question. Henry didn’t buy this answer quite as readily as he’d bought the first.
Henry also belatedly became aware of Rooster’s presence next door, prompting the group to stick to the previous year’s story — that he belonged to Emma’s aunt — with an additional line that he was now there for good. Having been out of the picture during Rooster’s previous brief stay in Birchwood, Henry expressed his surprise that the dog was a cocker spaniel and insisted that someone had told him he was a Labrador. No one knew where Henry had gotten this idea from, and he eventually accepted that he must have misremembered.
Dan and Tara kept each other sane largely by competing endlessly at a newly viral mobile game which was supposedly based on an old Russian card game. The app had taken social media by storm thanks to its simplicity and addictiveness following a big-budget TV campaign featuring none other than the movie star Kaitlyn Judd. They both spent more money than they realised on in-app purchases, but all things considered it was a small price to pay for the amount of time the game filled. When Dan’s eyes widened as he saw the total cost of his purchases, Tara quipped that it was barely any more than she’d normally spent managing her virtual farm in the course of an average weekend.
When Dan saw Timo in the mornings and evenings, they tended to talk about nothing but the comet. Dan and Emma, on the other hand, barely talked about it at all. Both seemed to understand that it was important to insulate themselves as a couple from external stresses that would have torn most apart. Tara’s presence was a benefit in this regard, too, as she insistently steered discussion to any other topic whenever Il Diavolo cropped up as it inevitably did from time to time.
