Second Contact, page 52
part #2 of Not Alone Series
Timo’s suitcases lay on the floor beside the bed, which he’d made perfectly every morning of his stay and most recently just hours earlier. A small yellow scrunchy from Emma’s hair was lying in the opposite corner of the room, repeatedly catching Dan’s eye.
Rooster sat upstairs, no doubt wondering why he was suddenly back in this house and not in the empty one next door, where it didn’t look like anyone would be home to take care of him anytime soon.
It was impossible for Dan not to think of all the time the group had spent in the basement in recent weeks, first trying to make sense of the Messengers’ signals and then finding and interpreting the cursed and godforsaken fourth plaque.
He looked across the basement at the wall-length research board he had been working on for the better part of a year. Initially his work had been relaxed and almost enjoyable as he tracked other groups’ searches for the plaque they had erroneously believed was already on Earth, but ever since the Kerguelen bolide of three weeks earlier his work had been more urgent; more consequential; more stressful.
The weight of the hoax felt a long way away; a distant feather compared to the weight of Emma’s condition and Il Diavolo’s relentless approach.
Clark saw Dan walking towards the board with his shoulders slouched and couldn’t help but think back to the night when Ben Gold’s revelation of the hoax had left Dan literally curled up in a ball on his bed. That night had been the worst either of them had known up to that point; but however bad their situation had been back then, Timo hadn’t been maimed and Emma had been by their side rather than unconscious in a hospital bed.
And of course, back then, while Ben Gold’s midnight revelation might have turned Dan’s whole world upside down, that revelation hadn’t come close to the shattering news that a giant comet was unstoppably hurtling towards it.
When Dan reached his research board — still completely covered with printed maps and photographs, neatly hand-written ideas, and a veritable bounty of more recent plaque-locating triangles and scribbled theories — he pulled his shoulders back, took a deep breath, and snapped.
He ripped down paper, clawed at the board, and even ripped some of its fixings from the wall.
Clark stood back, letting him get it all out.
“What’s the point in any of this shit?” Dan yelled, turning his attention to the security centre on the back wall and throwing his chair at the many screens. When only one of the screens cracked, he picked the chair up and threw it again.
The look on his face reflected nothing but a full-on rage directed at anything and everything related to the Messengers he saw as having let them all down so badly.
Clark stepped in only when Dan moved towards his computer; this was the line, Clark decided, since it contained data that couldn’t easily be replaced.
Dan didn’t struggle or hit Clark when he was restrained, at least not beyond an initial attempt at flailing his way free.
“That’s enough, man,” Clark said. He then felt Dan’s body go limp as all of the anger and fight went out of him, leaving only deflated defeat. Clark let him go, and he immediately collapsed onto the bed.
Dan didn’t curl into a ball or vomit like he had in reaction to learning of the hoax — could’ve been worse, Clark dryly thought to himself — but his deflation this time seemed even more total and definitive.
“Are you coming to see Timo?” Clark asked.
Dan, face down, shook his head without looking up.
“Well I am, okay? Don’t break that computer. And do I need to risk taking the plaque and the footage with me, or can I trust you not to do anything stupid to them, too?”
Dan turned his head to the side. “I’m not going to do anything,” he said, before quickly re-burying his face in the mattress, a move which muffled his next words: “What’s the point?”
Keen to both check on Timo and also loop Trey in on the minor update Emma’s doctor had given on her condition, Clark set off up the stairs.
He stopped halfway to look around the trashed basement then back down at Dan. He had also felt like trashing everything and now felt like collapsing on the bed, too, but he didn’t think his ability to keep going made him any better or any stronger than Dan — they were just built differently, in the same way that Emma and Tara were and the same way that any other siblings could be. “I’ll be back soon,” he said.
Dan replied with the least enthusiastic thumbs-up ever, a gesture designed less to reflect any positivity than to acknowledge Clark’s words without having to expend any more than the minimal possible amount of energy.
Clark sighed and walked out.
THURSDAY
C plus 31
McCarthy Residence
Birchwood, Colorado
Time meant nothing.
Dan McCarthy lay awake for hours which sometimes felt like minutes and minutes which sometimes felt like hours. The only break in his solitude had come when Clark returned home with the welcome news that Timo was on the right side of his emergency surgery and was going to make it with all his limbs in place, albeit with some major skin grafts and some serious and lasting restrictions in movement. Dan was glad to hear most of this, of course, but in the absence of any similarly positive news about Emma it did nothing for his mood.
Clark let him be after making sure he was staying hydrated, and since then Dan had been alone again. He didn’t know if it was far enough past midnight to be tomorrow, and he didn’t really care.
Little changed in his mind until he flicked on his bedside light to make sure he didn’t step on the glass of water he knew was lying around somewhere when he stood up to go to the bathroom.
There was no glass on the floor; but when he picked it up from the bedside table, he caught sight of a printed group photo of everyone at the Feathers’ place in Salida — a photo taken just after they had found the fourth plaque and before Dan had even looked at its engraving. Tara was smiling widest, right in the middle, and photogenically looked every inch the successful model she was.
Unfortunately, Dan couldn’t stop his thoughts from making a binary shift to Tara’s decidedly less upbeat expression in the moments after Emma was knocked unconscious to the ground by the explosion at Fiore Frontiere. She had looked five years younger in that moment, just as she had sounded five years younger when simply commenting “they’re not coming to save us” while she re-watched the discussion of planetary threats from Timo’s Focus 20/20 appearance.
Their earlier conversation about deus ex machina, which had faded from Dan’s mind, returned only too strongly now. He pondered Tara’s comments on the actors who played gods and hung safely out of sight, ready to swoop in and save the day.
A matter of hours earlier, hope had descended into Greek tragedy and Dan McCarthy now felt like he was alone on the stage, gazing up and hoping. Gazing up and waiting.
He closed his eyes and turned away from the photo. When he reopened them, their gaze fell upon Trey’s laptop. The footage it contained, of the Messengers flying over Lolo, was like nothing the world had ever seen. But the broader significance of Lolo and the broader truth of both what had happened there a year earlier and of what hadn’t really happened at Lake Toplitz in 1938 was something even Trey didn’t understand.
Until very recently, six people in the world had known the full truth. Since then, Emma Ford and Timo Fiore had been critically injured and Richard Walker had provoked direct extraterrestrial intervention while trying to disclose the truth of his own lie.
As the magnitude of this final thought sank in, Dan McCarthy stood bolt upright.
His head immediately shot round to the hiding place of his own secondary computer, which contained irrefutable evidence and proof of a truth so explosive that he had endured untold inner torment to conceal it.
It was a truth, it was a secret, and it was a lie.
But more importantly than anything else, it presented an option.
Even considering this thought was in itself a sign of utter desperation, but on every conceivable scale from personal to planetary, Dan McCarthy knew that there truly was nothing left to lose.
Not out of spite but rather out of desperation, he made the decision there and then.
He wanted to do it
He had to do it.
Dan took a deep breath, walked over to gather his secondary computer, and quickly navigated to a folder he hadn’t opened since first locking the computer away a full year earlier.
Too many thoughts ran through Dan’s mind for him to make sense of them all, but one he noticed rising above most of the others was the memory of sitting in a video booth in the Baker Street Public Library and leaking Richard Walker’s secret files to the world.
Dan’s decisions and actions in that booth hadn’t led to the danger that Earth was now in — the comet would have come, anyway, and with even less advance warning — but they had ultimately kicked off a long and winding series of events which had culminated with Emma and Timo being so gravely injured.
Staring again at those same original scans along with the stomach-churning files and images which Ben Gold had delivered on that fateful night, Dan felt a sudden and near-crushing responsibility to finish what he’d started.
Because if the gods wouldn’t come to him, it was time to grab hold of the strings and pull them down from the sky.
Part 8
Full Disclosure
“I do not believe in a fate
that falls on men however they act;
but I do believe in a fate
that falls on them unless they act.”
G. K. Chesterton
C plus 32
McCarthy Residence
Birchwood, Colorado
Early on Thursday morning, Clark spoke into the basement’s intercom to let Dan know that he was about to open the unlocked door and come down to check on him.
“Come on down,” Dan called as soon as the door was open, surprising Clark with the strength and energy in his voice.
Even more surprisingly, when Clark looked across the room from halfway down the stairs he saw Dan busily working at his desk.
“Have you heard from anyone at the hospital?” Dan asked before Clark could question the nature of his work. “I tried calling Tara a few times but—”
“She was asleep when I called the hospital, too,” Clark interrupted, “but reception put me through to one of the doctors — a different one from the guy we met — and she said the brain activity and all that kind of stuff looks fine. Until Emma comes to, they won’t know how clear her head is, but things don’t look quite as bad as they did.”
“Anything on Timo?”
Clark hesitated. “I called his hospital, too. He’s had some major skin grafts and his pelvis is really messed up. He’s not getting out anytime soon. I think he’s looking at months.”
“But he’s okay?”
“I mean…” Clark shrugged, hands upturned. “You know what I mean? I wouldn’t say he’s okay, but he’s not going to die from the injuries.”
Visible relief crossed Dan’s face. “Hurry up,” he said, beckoning Clark over with his hand. “I didn’t want to wake you but I’ve been working on this for a few hours.
“And what is ‘this’, exactly?”
“I want to go to the drive-in today and show everyone the plaque and footage, like Emma and Timo were going to do at Fiore Frontiere yesterday.”
Clark gave a half-nod-half-shrug as he walked over to see the details of what Dan was doing. After only a few steps, however, he noticed that there were two computers on Dan’s desk instead of one. He didn’t have to ask why this was the case, and he knew exactly what it meant even before he saw which photo was filling one side of the second computer’s screen.
It was an image Clark hadn’t seen in a long time and one he’d hoped to never see again: a photograph of a much younger Richard Walker, proudly standing next to a blackboard covered in scribbled drafts of what would eventually become the engravings on the two supposedly alien plaques that he and Hans Kloster covertly dumped a few miles from the Argentine coast.
“And once I’ve done that,” Dan continued, “I’m going to call the Messengers out.”
Clark looked more closely at the second computer, which Dan had never lied about and on which he securely stored evidence and proof of the biggest secret of all. This computer was never connected to the internet, was hidden in a physically locked compartment, and was digitally protected by military-grade encryption. For a full year, Dan had taken no shortcuts in ensuring that the secrets it kept would never see the light of day unless an emergency required him to access the files.
Evidently, that time had come.
Clark saw that Dan was making a slideshow presentation. A row of thumbnails underneath the featured image brought back memories of the first time Clark had seen these photos, back when Ben Gold delivered a box full of evidence to back up his astonishing revelation of the hoax. One thumbnail showed the famous sphere in which the first two plaques had been found, midway through its construction process and with Nazi rocketeer turned NASA physicist Hans Kloster standing beside it with a smile just as proud as Walker’s in the blackboard photo. Another showed several variations of the long handwritten German letter in which Kloster had ‘confessed’ his involvement in the fabricated discovery at Lake Toplitz in 1938. In short, as when Ben had delivered the same evidence a year earlier, there was more than enough to decisively prove the point.
While Clark gazed at the computer, Dan glanced up at him and tried to read his expression. Clark then sat down next to Dan and slowly tore his eyes away from the screen. “So…” he said, pausing for a few long seconds. “What are we thinking?”
Dan breathed a deep sigh of relief that Clark was onside; never had there been such a difference between the words “you” and “we”.
“Well, everything is on here,” Dan said. “This computer has all the videos from last year, from all the various devices we had — your phone, our security cameras, Walker’s cameras, the dashcam we had at Lolo, all of them.”
Dan went on to quickly list some of the videos in question: the footage of Ben arriving in the middle of the night to confess his role in the hoax; the footage of Dan himself sitting entranced in the cornfield while he drew the detailed map that led the brothers and Emma to Lolo in the first place; the footage of the two thresholds revealed by the varying sensitivity of the trio, Rooster and the resident wildlife; and of course the camera white-outs at both Lolo and Richard Walker’s farmhouse during the moments when the Messengers were present.
“So basically, what I’m going to do first is show everyone the plaque and the footage that Trey shot when the craft flew over Lolo a few weeks ago,” Dan said. “Then I’ll talk about what happened to me and Emma at Lolo last year when we actually met the Messengers, and then, if it gets that far, I’m going to try to make them intervene by threatening to spill the hoax.”
“So you want them to interrupt?” Clark asked, thinking he knew where Dan was going but keen to make sure. “You don’t actually want to say anything about the hoax, right? You just want it to look like you’re going to say it, so they’ll come and stop you like they stopped Walker?”
Dan sat up straight in his chair, leaning away from the computer. “Bingo. I mean, they must have the tech to deflect the comet… that’s not even something to worry about. Right now, they just don’t seem to have the will.”
Clark leaned forward, resting his elbow on the desk and his chin on his hand. “So if you’re only preparing this slideshow about the hoax in case they don’t stop you, what’s the point in preparing it at all? If they don’t stop you, just don’t say it. There’s no need to get any of this stuff ready to show people.”
“But the Messengers have to think I’m going to say it! That’s the point. They didn’t stop Walker until he was actually on Crabbe’s show, right when he was about to say it.”
“Yeah but that’s the whole thing,” Clark said. “Walker actually wanted to say it. He wasn’t bluffing. For all we know, they know what you’re thinking, man. For all we know, they can… you know… read our minds.” Clark almost whispered the last part of this thought, as though he knew it sounded crazy even midway through a discussion about the capacities of an actually existent alien race.
“Clark, think about what you’re saying. If they could read my mind, why the hell would they have had to connect a cable to my neck to talk to me?”
“Maybe so you could understand them? That doesn’t disprove the idea that maybe they can understand us without a cable.”
Dan shook his head. “No, because they were asking Emma stuff. Remember, about where to put the third plaque? If they could read her mind then why—”
“Because without the cable, she wouldn’t have known what they were asking her,” Clark said. “Listen, man, I’m not saying I’m right… I’m just saying I might be. They might know you’re bluffing.”
“I’m not bluffing,” Dan said, very flatly. “If I have to say some of this, I will. Like I just said: they didn’t stop Walker until he was already on Crabbe’s show and ready to blurt it out.”
Clark placed his other elbow on the desk and positioned his hands in front of his nose with his eyes closed, deep in thought but looking more like he was deep in prayer. “Okay,” he eventually said. “But people are going to be angry — at us — if you have to say any of this, so you have to justify it. You have to be ready to explain what happened, not just describe it. Try to think about what Emma would tell us if she was here: it’s message management, man. All the way. No half measures; if we’re going to do this, we have to full-on go for it.”
