Nolan saw it and started growling. Carol couldn’t see it, of course, but knew it was there all the same.
“You’re back,” Carol said.
The wolf barked but didn’t advance. The bark caused the figure to raise its right arm.
Now.
Win loosed an arrow and at around the same time Paul, at the far end of the first floor, fired a shot with his rifle, both of them aiming for the right arm. Both appeared to find the mark.
“Ahh!” the alien shouted.
“Get him, Nolan,” Carol whispered.
Robbie and Touré jumped out from behind bookshelves a few yards away and broke into a sprint. The wolf easily beat them both.
Nolan launched himself at the alien, hit him right in the chest, and knocked him onto his back.
Robbie dove to the floor to grab the device the figure had dropped. Touré looked like he was trying to insert himself between the intruder and Nolan before deciding this was an incredibly foolish thing to do.
“Get it off me, get it off me!” the alien cried out in a very normal-sounding voice. He was hand-checking the wolf, who was a few seconds from making the alien impossible to interrogate, provided the intruder’s throat was where everyone else’s was.
“Nolan, down!” Carol said. She stood and tapped her cane on the wolf’s back to get his attention. It worked. He backed off the alien and waited for a treat. Then Touré was on top of the intruder. Paul, still nursing his knee, reached the scene last and pointed his gun at the alien’s head.
Win stayed where she was, with another arrow nocked.
“God, he smells,” Touré said.
“Guys,” the alien said, “we’re all friends here.”
“I don’t think so,” Paul said.
Touré backed away to give Paul and Win clean shots if necessary. The alien raised his hands.
“Look, I’m Noah, okay?” he said. “Call me Noah. And you’re Paul, and that’s Touré, and Robbie, and Carol. Win’s on the balcony. I know all of you, all right?”
“We don’t know you,” Paul said.
“No, I guess not. You wouldn’t. Look, I can explain all of this. But you gotta do me a favor first.”
Paul looked at Robbie. “Can I shoot him?” he asked. “I feel like I want to shoot him.”
Robbie shrugged. “Yeah, maybe,” Robbie said.
“Just keep me out of the light,” Noah the alien said. “That’s all.”
“Are you gonna melt?” Touré asked.
“No, I’m not gonna melt, Touré. Come on. It can’t be allowed to see me here. If it does, it’s going to kill all of you, just like it did everyone else. Okay? So put me in a dark room somewhere and I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”
“Get up,” Paul said.
The alien got to his feet, albeit very slowly. He moved in a decidedly human way, although Win had to admit, she didn’t know what an alien way to move around might look like.
Robbie stepped up, slowly, and pulled back Noah’s hood.
Noah had a big, bulbous green head, black eyes, no nose, and a tiny mouth, just the way Robbie had described it. The raised hands consisted of elongated fingers—only three of them, and a thumb—with an extra knuckle.
“Well?” Carol said.
“It’s an alien, all right,” Paul said.
“What do you mean, it’s going to kill all of us?” Robbie asked Noah.
I thought Noah was just part of your fever dream, Touré, Win thought.
“Dark room first,” Noah said. “Someplace without windows.”
Robbie
1
Finding a room away from any windows wasn’t all that difficult.
There was the entire labyrinthine tunnel system, which appeared designed specifically so no MIT student ever had to contend with direct sunlight and fresh air, but it lacked room for a proper interrogation.
What they used instead was a lecture hall in the chemistry building. It was an area Robbie and Touré had already searched and was just an underground tunnel stop away. The wolves didn’t know the building, because the tunnel was the best way to get to it without coming in through the outside and the wolves didn’t use the tunnels. (Carol wanted to take Nolan with them, which would have meant introducing one of the pack to a tunnel. It took them a little while to convince her that was a bad idea and to send him back instead.)
It was a raked auditorium, with the chairs looking down on the lectern. That was where they put Noah. Since he’d insisted on there being no sunlight in the room, they were using torches to see by, which just made the alien seem that much creepier.
Touré fetched Bethany and Ananda, while Paul and Win debated tying Noah to a chair.
“We don’t even have rope,” Win was saying. “What are you going to use?”
“My belt is a rope,” Paul said.
“Guys, you really don’t have to, I can’t go anywhere,” Noah said. Then he coughed. “Believe you me, I would if I could.”
He shook his right hand, where the arrow and/or bullet had struck him. He’d been wounded, but not seriously. When they picked him up off the ground, there was a small pool of yellow liquid left behind on the floor.
Bethany was right, Robbie thought. He bleeds yellow. We’ll have to apologize to her.
The device Noah had dropped and Robbie had picked up was a small metal stick with a plunger button on the end. It looked like the back half of a large syringe or a bomb trigger in a movie.
Robbie said, “What’s this do?”
“Push the button,” Noah said. “Find out for yourself.”
“Will it send you back to wherever you came from?”
Noah shrugged. He had almost nothing one might call shoulders, so this looked really odd.
“Will it send me to wherever you came from?” Robbie asked.
“Give it a try,” Noah said.
“Don’t,” Carol said. She was sitting next to Robbie in the front row, as if patiently waiting for the lecture to start.
Noah laughed. His speaking voice managed to be simultaneously deep and nasally; his laugh was kind of a low chortle. It was the only sound he made that didn’t come off as exactly human, like whatever translation program he was using couldn’t interpolate laughter.
“I’m kidding, Robbie,” he said. “Press the button or not, it won’t do anything. It only works on me, and I have to be holding it. Please don’t lose it, though.”
Noah looked at Win and Paul. “So what’s the consensus?” he asked. “You tying me down or not?”
Win turned to Robbie. “What do you think?” she asked. “He’s your prisoner.”
“Leave him be,” Robbie said.
“Okey-doke,” she said.
“I’ll just keep my rifle trained on him, if that’s okay with everyone,” Paul said.
Ananda burst into the room then, trailed by Touré and a worried-looking Bethany. “Where is it?” Ananda asked. She headed straight for the stage. “Oh, my goodness,” she said. “Look at you.”
Paul and Win stepped back to give Ananda room for whatever perambulations were going to be a part of her process. They’d all seen her work before; she was a whirlwind pacer.
“Hi, Ananda,” Noah said.
She gasped. “It speaks,” she said.
“We told you he did,” Touré said.
“Yes, well, you’ll excuse me for mistaking that for exaggeration.”
After circling Noah a few times, she stepped closer.
“May I?” she asked him, holding up a hand.
“Sure,” Noah said, “whatever you gotta do.”
She touched Noah’s face and head, then stood behind him and pulled gently on his skull.
He laughed. “It’s attached,” he said.
She moved next to him and touched his chest, on one side and then the other. Then she felt along his back.
She leaned in close and sniffed the side of his face.
“You’re wearing a device,” she said. “It’s providin
g ammonia to you through the hole in your face. Can I call that a nose?”
“You can call it what you like,” he said. “And you’re right about all of that. Prolonged exposure to oxygen will end up killing me, so I’m sort of hoping you guys’ll let me go after this.”
“Well,” Ananda said, stepping back and turning to address the lecture hall. “He’s impossible.”
“How do you mean?” Win asked.
“He’s a bipedal alien with rubbery skin who speaks the vernacular flawlessly, and so he’s clearly a regular man in a costume. Yet he’s breathing pure ammonia, has only five ribs per side, three fingers and a thumb per hand, and no beating heart where a human being’s beating heart would be.”
“So he’s an alien,” Bethany said. She was sitting one row behind Robbie, next to Touré. He noted that she had her gun in her lap.
“Yes,” Ananda said. “Except it’s ridiculous that an alien would actually look like this. Imagine the vast number of evolutionary pressures on this planet, over hundreds of thousands of years—millions, even—necessary to produce us, a bipedal apex species. He was standing? And walking?”
“Yep,” Paul said.
“Then his musculature is such that it would allow him to survive in this gravity, at this atmospheric concentration, and balance on two legs. The number of variables is preposterous. He would have to have evolved on a planet the same size as ours, with an ammonia-rich atmosphere, and would have somehow had to win the same historical lottery we did, just to develop the intelligence necessary to understand speech. Aliens are not impossible. Aliens that look this much like us are the stuff of bad dreams suffered by people with overactive imaginations, and special-effects artists.”
“Can I speak?” Noah asked.
“Go on,” she said.
“You’re right,” he said. “She’s right. It’s practically impossible, which is just another way of saying highly unlikely. I mean, I don’t know, maybe being a biped with opposable thumbs is a requirement for interstellar travel. But, look—I’m real, this is really me, and this is really me talking. I’m not saying I learned the language. I’ve got a really great translation package, that’s all. But I get what you’re saying, Ananda, I do. I’m a scientist too, and believe me, you guys weird me out just as much as I do you.”
Ananda looked as if she had ten things to say all at once and yet couldn’t figure out which to say first, and didn’t know how to proceed from there. She shrugged and faced the room. “I cede the floor, but not the argument,” she said. “Who wants to go first?”
At no time in his life did Robbie consider himself a leader. Even way back as far as grade school, he was the kid in the back who thought not socializing was less of a hassle than actually having friends. A group dynamic in which he was the one who made the decisions was just out of the question. Even in the dorm, when it was four—and then three—of them, he was always just one voter.
It made no sense, then, that when Ananda asked who was going to be leading the interrogation of the extraterrestrial in their midst, everyone turned to him.
But he wasn’t going to let the opportunity to interrogate an alien pass him by.
“Yeah, all right,” he said. “Let’s start with an obvious one: Why did you abduct us?”
“No, that’s the wrong question,” Noah said. “You don’t wanna ask me that first, Robbie.”
Paul, off to one side of the stage, said, “Answer the man’s question,” in a low growl, over the top of his rifle.
“Rein it in, pastor. I’ll answer—it’s just not the best place to start.”
“Okay,” Robbie said. “What happened to the rest of the human race? Did you do that?”
“That’s the question. And no, I did not! I love you guys. But I was there when it happened, and I tried to stop it. You’ve seen the sparkling, right? What do you call it? The shimmer? Good name, very spooky. That’s the alien you’re looking for.”
“The lights are an alien intelligence?” Ananda asked.
“They are indeed. I know that bugs you, but it’s true.”
“And they’re who you’re hiding from?” Robbie asked. “Here in the dark?”
“Yeah, but not for my sake. For yours. Just one of them wiped out the entire human race, and as soon as it figures out how you guys survived, it’s gonna take out the rest of you. It’s not going to hurt me, but if it sees me, it’ll put two and two together and work out that you were off-world when it happened. Once the mystery is solved, you’re no longer interesting. Then it’ll be boom, bye-bye to the rest of humanity.”
Carol grabbed Robbie’s hand and squeezed. He didn’t know if that was because she believed what she’d just heard or the opposite.
“The entire human race . . .” Robbie said. “Just one of them did that?”
“What are they?” Bethany asked quietly. She was speaking to Robbie, not to Noah.
“Does anyone here know what a tachyon is?” Noah asked.
“Yes,” Ananda said.
“Faster-than-light particles,” Touré said. “But they’re, like, made up.”
“They’re hypothetical, not made up,” Ananda said. “There’s a difference.”
“But it’s not a thing, right?” Touré asked. “Nothing goes faster than light. I thought we all learned that.”
“You guys are cute,” Noah said.
“Hey,” Win said. “How about a little less condescension from the spaceman?”
“Sorry.”
“It’s not possible to take a slower-than-light particle and accelerate it past the speed of light,” Ananda said. “There’s no prohibition on particles that exist at that speed.”
“There you go,” Noah said. “Look, it’s stupid complicated. If I tried to explain all of it to you, I’d be dead before I got to the important stuff. The speed of light is the speed of massless particles. Anything with a positive mass can’t go faster. Particles on the other side . . . We’ll call it negative mass. It’s not really accurate, but it’s close. Since human beings never got this far with the science, you don’t have any words that really describe this properly.”
“So the shimmer is another alien,” Robbie said. “And it’s made up of . . . what’s the word?”
“Tachyons,” Touré said.
“Yes and no,” Noah said. “There are other particles on the other side of the light speed barrier. Tachyons are one, but there’re others. Incredibly high-energy stuff. But yes, these creatures are made from those kinds of particles.”
“But we can see it,” Ananda said. “How can we see something that is gone before light reaches it?”
“Good, good. Smart. But you’re not seeing it. What you’re seeing is . . . like a contrail, sort of. The evidence that something wasthere. Tachyon-type faster-than-light particles don’t interact with us usually. But like I said, they’re very energetic; they can excite an electron on the way by. Again, I’m dumbing this down. Not because you guys are dumb; you’re just missing about ten generations of physics.”
“Is that how they killed everyone?” Robbie asked. “Exciting the particles, or . . . I guess I don’t really know what we’re talking about.”
“Kind of. These are beings made of energy. Sometimes they radiate that energy. If you’re near them when that happens, there isn’t going to be very much of you left.”
“Turning bones to powder?” Win asked.
“Among other things. And given how fast they move, they could sweep the whole globe in a matter of hours and nobody would be able to stop them. That’s what happened before, and I’m sure that’s what happened here, too.”
“Before what?” Robbie asked.
“I told you, I’m a scientist. I’ve been studying this race of . . . we don’t even have a name for them. Tachyonites. Let’s call them that. I’ve been studying them for a while, and this isn’t the first planet I’ve seen one of them do this. Not my home planet, thankfully, but others. I always got there too late and had to piece it all t
ogether after the fact. They’re traveling extinction engines. This time, I thought I might be early enough to help.”
“The anomalous object,” Ananda said. “You put that there.”
“It’s a prototype. It was supposed to prevent the mass extinction here. It didn’t work, obviously, but I made some adjustments.” He looked at Robbie. “Okay, ask me now.”
“What? Oh. Why did you abduct us?”
“Every time a Tachyonite interacts with another life-form, it leaves behind a signature on the atomic level. It’s not something anyone on this planet would have been able to notice; you have to be able to detect tachyons in the first place, and nobody on Earth figured out how to do that until, like, Earth year 2041. Way too late. All seven of you guys—eight, actually—had traces of that signature. Poor Raymond, by the way. That was rough. I tried to talk him down, but I think I just made it worse. He totally snapped. Good kid, too.”
“I don’t understand,” Robbie said. He looked around the room to see if he was the only one. It was a tough room to read, though: Everyone was on some level of shocked and confused simply by default. “Are you saying we had encounters with the . . . Tachyonites? Are you saying we met them before you abducted us?”
“This is where faster-than-light particles get interesting,” Noah said. “They travel in an inverse direction through time. What I was detecting was traces of your interaction with them now. It faded, but when it faded, it was toward your past, not your future. And that’s what tipped me off something was gonna happen.”
“You took us from our homes,” Paul said.
“Yeah, I did,” Noah said. “Sorry. Like I said, I’ve seen what these aliens can do up close. I was here already, doing a biological study . . . like what you guys do. Oceanographers, essentially. Same deal. Been here for a couple hundred Earth years. Just collecting data. Raymond was the first one I detected the traces in. I hung on to him, stuck him in stasis, and went looking for anyone else. You seven were the only other ones I found.”
“Did you . . . probe us?” Touré asked.
“Dude, grow up,” Noah said. “Noninvasive tests, okay? I don’t know anything about those guys complaining about anal probes and all that, but it wasn’t me.”
The Apocalypse Seven Page 33
