Second Contact, page 59
part #2 of Not Alone Series
Dan continued into the familiar waiting room, but with a completely different feeling in his stomach; this time, it was anticipation rather than dread.
“Hey,” he said, more than a little surprised to see Tara sitting alone in one of the many comfortable chairs.
His surprise was nothing compared to hers, and she immediately bounded over and wrapped her arms around him. She gently touched his neck to check it was okay before finally giving him some space to breathe.
“Just… woah,” was all she said, moving to Clark for a far more restrained greeting.
Dan was slightly worried as to why Tara was here rather than with Emma, but her upbeat tone and expression suggested that there could be no major bad news. He asked, anyway: “So why are you out here?”
“One of the doctors wanted ten minutes to talk to Emma. She’s feeling fine, though; if it was up to her, she’d be coming home in a few hours.”
Dan’s eyes lit up. “Is—”
“But she won’t be home for a few days at least,” Tara jumped in, mercifully cutting off the hope she saw on Dan’s face. “How did the rest of your day go once you left Birchwood, anyway? And what exactly happened with the Messengers?”
Dan explained everything — he was getting more efficient at running down the conversation each time — and when he finished the retelling, Tara made it clear that he didn’t seem as happy as she thought he should have been.
“Why aren’t you smiling more?” she asked. “Look at the TV: I don’t know what city that is, but people are partying in the street like that all over the world, wherever it’s daytime. Dan, the comet’s not going to hit! I’m not saying that everything you’ve gone through has been easy, but it has been worth it. If you hadn’t picked up that folder, this comet almost definitely would have killed us. There never would have even been a DS-1 for anyone to destroy and we would have been starting from scratch whenever someone eventually saw the comet coming.”
“I know,” Dan said, appreciative of Tara’s efforts to make the point. “I understand that, I just feel like I don’t really get it yet.”
“And don’t forget the other half of this,” she went on, “which is that if you hadn’t picked up that folder and stuck to your guns, the world still wouldn’t know that aliens were real. That was always your big thing, wasn’t it? To get the truth out? It was a long path with some horrible turns, but you got there in the end. The whole truth is out, every dirty little bit of it, and the world is safe.” Tara pointed again to the TV, which now showed a second celebratory gathering, this one conveniently captioned as being in Moscow.
After a busy and difficult day, Dan’s witnessing these scenes of sheer joy allowed the magnitude of what he had done to sink in at last.
“And… don’t forget that if you hadn’t picked up that folder, you never would’ve met Emma,” Tara said. “Or me, more importantly.”
Clark, feeling more philosophical than normal, offered his own thoughts: “Everything that’s happened is just a perfect slice of what life is, man. The highs and lows and lessons and everything else all boil down to exactly what life is all about: sticking with the people you care about, and not trusting anyone else for a goddamn second.”
“I don’t know about that,” Dan said, taking issue with the second part. “I didn’t trust Emma at first. Trusting Trey and Maria was important last year, too, and that’s without even mentioning Timo. There’s nothing wrong with trusting the right people.”
“Yeah, but you don’t know who the right people are until you know who the wrong ones are, and by then it can be too late,” Clark said. “That’s the point.”
“If you’re looking for the point…” Tara offered, retaking her seat.
Clark held out his hand. “Shoot.”
“The ‘point’ is all the little things you do along the way, all the people you meet, all the smiles you put on their faces and all the smiles they put on yours. All the hurdles you clear and all the ones that trip you up on your way… because that’s the point: even when they trip you up, you keep going. And you keep going right until the end, when you look back at all of those hurdles — the ones you cleared and the ones you knocked over — and you realise that none of them stopped you. Because as rough as it got, you made it. All of us… we made it.”
Dan nodded slowly, moved by Tara’s words.
“Anyone ever tell you you’re smarter than you look?” Clark asked.
She exaggerated an offended expression. “Why? How smart do I look?”
Clark laughed heartily and was more than a little relieved to see the doctor approaching, saving him from having to reply. The familiar man, a real stickler for the rules, announced that Emma could receive visitors for only five minutes, one at a time, and that any longer visits would have to wait for another occasion.
“You go on through,” Tara said to Dan.
Dan stood up, following the doctor and listening to a list of yet more rules about what he could and couldn’t touch and where he could and couldn’t stand. “Two minutes,” the man said when they reached the doorway.
“You said five,” Dan complained.
“Sir, please don’t raise your voice.”
Of everyone he had spoken to since taking the stage at the drive-in, from mysterious federal agents to bona fide alien beings, Dan never would have expected Emma’s doctor to be the least tolerable.
As Dan studied the man’s impatient face, he remembered the look it had worn when delivering the initial news of Emma’s serious condition. He then considered that he, Tara and Clark had enquired about Emma’s neck without explaining why, and he finally understood the doctor’s coldness; they had withheld potentially important information about his patient, however good their reasons might have been.
Part of Dan wanted to apologise, but he thought this was best left in the past.
The attentive but austere doctor opened the door and then knocked — an odd order to do things in, Dan thought — before firmly asking Emma to remain on her bed.
“What do you mean?” she asked, turning to see the doctor and in doing so catching a glimpse of Dan towering over his shoulder. She understood now and sat up straight. “Oh my God, Dan… I didn’t know what was going to happen to you.”
“Same,” he said, gently pushing his way past the literally obstructive doctor. “I was so worried about you. Everyone was. Clark is here, too, but this guy said we could only come in one at a time.”
They then warmly but briefly embraced as the doctor stood guard, hawk-eyed in his efforts to ensure that Dan didn’t touch any of the sensors or equipment he had been warned to avoid.
“I saw everything from the moment you mentioned the hoax,” Emma said. “Even before they came back, I was so proud of you for doing the reveal… not even because you did it so well, just because you did it. And that wasn’t a bad choice of T-shirt, either,” she laughed, pointing to Dan’s chest and the famous ‘Now Now Now’ logo she had thrown together in a couple of minutes a year earlier in a very successful effort to give the then-fledging Now Movement an easily identifiable uniform.
At no point in Dan’s all-too-brief visit did Emma ask him to recount his conversation with the Messengers or his experiences of being questioned at a secure facility. For most of the time, neither said anything at all. Each was too happy, too relieved, and too thankful to see the other again to say much — Dan having been gravely concerned that Emma wouldn’t wake up and Emma having had no idea what kind of wrath Dan might have invited when he lunged at the Messengers for not hitherto intervening to protect either her or the planet as a whole.
“I’m going to be home really soon,” she said, breaking a short but blissful silence. “You know how it is with head trauma, they’re always ultra careful. Have you guys been to see Timo yet? Tara said she’s spoken to Trey about him and he’s stable but pretty messed up.”
“I think we’re going to see him after this,” Dan said. “But yeah, that’s exactly what I heard. His doctors told Clark that his body is in a bad way, but that he’s not in any real danger, like you said. The opposite of you, basically… you looked mostly fine except for the cuts, but everyone was so worried about your head — your brain. It was almost like my dad last year.”
Emma lifted her feet, wriggling them under the covers. “I was a lot luckier,” she said solemnly.
“I think that’s enough exertion for now,” the doctor said, reminding them that he was there.
“I can’t wriggle my feet?” Emma asked.
The doctor turned to Dan. “Mr McCarthy, you’re welcome to return tomorrow, as I said.”
“You’ve got a funny way of making people feel welcome, man,” Dan replied, drawing soft laughter from Emma. She pulled him in by the hand and kissed him goodbye.
A quick drive across the city took Dan and Clark to a second hospital, where a refreshingly friendly doctor told them they were more than welcome to visit Timo’s private room. This hospital was considerably busier than Emma’s, which Dan understood to be because it housed a state-of-the-art trauma ward for dealing with major physical injuries too grave for standard emergency rooms and as such treated patients from far and wide.
Dan entered Timo’s room first.
“Here they are!” Timo said, delighted to see them.
Unfortunately it was not quite so easy for Dan to be happy while looking at Timo, such was his condition. His head was propped up and extensive bandages covered vast areas of his skin.
“Jesus,” Clark said, for once less able to keep his thoughts to himself than Dan was.
Timo raised his eyebrows, his face one of the few areas visible between the bandages. “Tell me about it. Depending on how this turns out, I might have to turn myself into a cyborg!”
Neither Dan nor Clark laughed nearly as much as Timo did, but they were glad that he was at least maintaining a sense of humour.
“It is not actually that bad,” Timo went on. “My spine and my neck are fine. To be honest, I don’t know exactly what has been done already and what is next, but I think the skin on the base of my neck has been grafted and that’s why I can’t put any pressure on it yet. I can imagine that it looks like I’ll never walk again, but they tell me I should. Really, it is not as bad as it looks.”
“Good thing,” Clark said, “’cause it’s not looking too hot, man.”
Timo laughed again, his threshold for comedy lowered somewhat by the strength of the painkillers. “They also told me we are lucky that the culprits were so incompetent; the IED was poorly constructed, relatively weak, and did not detonate in a single instantaneous bang. I may have misheard but I think that is what they said, and it is the only reason I sustained no significant internal injuries. The base of the chair shielded some of the initial explosive impact, so I suffered mainly secondary injuries from a delayed detonation once I’d been knocked off the chair by the initial force. Something like that, in any case!”
“An agent we spoke to said it was the Welcomers and that the guy who rigged the chairs put them there days before our press conference,” Dan said. “All three chairs were rigged to explode as soon as someone sat on them, but the other two failed completely.”
“Really?” Timo asked with wide eyes and a slight smile. “The incompetence knows no bounds! But enough about me, Dan. Fill me in on what happened with you. I’m sure you’ve already had to tell the same long story a hundred times today, so to save you some time… was everything Slater said true?”
“Yeah,” Dan said. “I was questioned and tested, and I did tell them what Slater reported. I was at a facility where they kept all the evidence of old alien stories and stuff like that. I don’t know where it was, but you would have loved it. Billy, too.”
“Sounds like it!” Timo said. “And what was the feeling you got from talking to the Messengers? Obviously they are tremendously advanced in technological and perhaps evolutionary terms, but did we overestimate their ability to interpret and predict human behaviour? To me, looking in from the outside, that is what I see.”
Dan nodded in total agreement with Timo’s point. “Exactly. I don’t know what the best word is to describe it. They’re sympathetic and altruistic, for sure, but I think they’re not as empathetic as we thought, in the literal sense that they don’t understand our thoughts and feelings as well as we thought they did. They mean well and they’re obviously way ahead of us in technological terms, but they’re not supreme beings. They didn’t know that the comet was on a collision course with Earth until right before they used the Kerguelen bolide to get our attention, and they didn’t seem to have any idea of how badly they’d handicapped our defences when they destroyed DS-1 last year. The main thing I can say is that they’re definitely not the all-knowing, ultra-rational, robotic decision-makers that I kind of thought they were. I don’t know how else to put it. They’re just… friendly aliens.”
“Just friendly aliens who just saved our asses,” Timo said. “With a little push in the right direction from a certain someone, that is. And to me, Dan, the fact that they chose to help us — the fact that they are not ultra-rational, robotic decision-makers, as you put it — that only makes it mean more that they did.”
“I didn’t mean that their un-robotic-ness was a bad thing,” Dan said, agreeing with Timo’s point and getting too tired to rely on real words. “And I know what you mean. For you especially it would have been nice if they’d come a little earlier, but they showed up when it mattered most.”
After twenty minutes which felt more like two, Clark’s deep yawn led to Timo insisting that the brothers should get home and get their heads down for some well-earned rest after the longest and most significant day of their lives.
“We’ll visit again soon,” Dan said. “And I just want to say: thanks for all your help. Right back at the very beginning, you and Billy were the first people to stand up for me without doing it to gain political capital like Godfrey did. I really don’t know how things would have turned out if you hadn’t done that, because I was in a bad place during those first few days before Clark got home and when Emma still had to do whatever the bosses at XPR wanted.”
“Well, I probably wouldn’t have been blown up,” Timo said with a dry smile.
Dan and Clark both laughed as they turned to leave. And two minutes later, after a whistle-stop tour of the city’s most advanced and expensive medical facilities at the end of what had unquestionably been the most eventful day of his life, Dan McCarthy was finally on his way home.
Before long, as the car neared Birchwood, a thought entered his mind for the first time and he immediately shared it with Clark: “What do you think Dad’s going to say about us hiding the truth for so long?”
Clark shrugged while focusing on the road. “I texted him as soon as I got my phone back from Harris, just to say we were back in town and going to visit Emma and Timo before we’d be home. No reply, though.”
“I don’t think he’s ever sent a text in his life,” Dan said, “so we probably can’t read anything into a non-reply, right?”
“Damn, Harris wasn’t lying about that roadblock!” Clark exclaimed suddenly as the impenetrable structure came into view at the edge of town, manned by a large number of conspicuously and heavily armed guards.
Clark parked Emma’s car a short distance from the barrier, right alongside all of the other helplessly abandoned vehicles, and led the way towards a point marked “RESIDENTS’ ENTRANCE” where those with a legitimate reason to pass on foot were allowed to do so.
The three guards at this checkpoint didn’t even blink when they saw whose IDs they were checking, too focused on their important roles to break concentration for a second.
No other civilians were anywhere to be seen given the lateness of the hour. The brothers walked the short distance to Clark’s car at the outskirts of the drive-in lot, which they found to be not merely closed off but positively surrounded and in fact covered by a thick inflatable-looking structure.
To Dan, it looked like a house being fumigated, or a park when the circus was in town. More armed guards surrounded the perimeter and several large black SUVs were parked beside the structure’s sealed entrance point.
“They’re not taking any chances,” Dan said as he got into the car.
“Can you blame them?” Clark replied. “They’ll be analysing the hell out of the lines where those forcefields were, and especially the spot where the craft landed. That’s why they’ve closed off that section of the road. I guess the news guys who parked their vans and equipment too close are shit outta luck, unless they were allowed to move before it was closed off. But I’ll tell you one thing that’s positive: at least it’s the Feds who are on top of this thing and not the GSC.”
During the very short drive from the roadblock to their house, the brothers’ thoughts and conversation returned to the question of how Henry was going to greet them. Clark ended this discussion by saying that he would ideally be asleep. Dan knew how unlikely that was, and his doubt was proven well-founded when they pulled up in the driveway and saw that the lights were on throughout the house.
Clark went inside first, allowing Dan to hear Rooster and the two old friends in Henry’s company before he saw any of them. Rooster then bounded over, more excited to see the brothers than ever; it had been a very turbulent time for him, too, as Dan considered when he crouched down to pet him.
“What time do you call this?” Phil Norris asked with a husky, smoker’s laugh.
Mr Byrd’s voice came next: “Better late than never… just like our friends in the spaceship!”
When Dan made his way towards the couch, Henry spoke at last. “Busy day?” he deadpanned, his expression only cracking into a smile after laughter from everyone else.
“Barman… beer,” Clark said to Phil, pointing to the kitchen.
“Make that two,” Dan said as Mr Byrd patted him on the back and Phil willingly played his familiar role.
Henry McCarthy had always been a man of few words when positive ones were in order, but his proud expression said it all. After a predictably wordless few moments he then surprised Dan by breaking into an amused smile and tipping his head back slightly. “You know something, Dan?” he began. “If someone had told me that one of my sons might just’ve saved the whole damn world — again…”
