I looked at my wife. She’d always been the adventurous one, the one pushing the limits. I wouldn’t have experienced half the wonders I have without her.
“Okay, you can do it, but you’ve got to promise me you won’t go in there while I’m not around. And for god’s sake, take him some clothes.”
***
I stayed in the airlock while Lisa went into the lab. I had a pistol in my hand, an old 9mm. I doubted it would help but it made me feel better.
Lisa approached Adam slowly. She held out her hands to show him they were empty but he didn’t seem concerned; he just stood next to the metal table, watching her with those electric blue eyes. Lisa was carrying a grey medical gown over one arm and she placed it on the table in front of him. He glanced down at it, a slight smile forming on his lips.
Then he spoke.
I don’t know what he said — the microphones in the room were still dead and his voice was too quiet to hear through the door — but when Lisa looked back at me the look of pure delight on her face told me she’d understood him.
That first trip inside the room was supposed to last five minutes. Just enough time to make contact and then get out. After thirty minutes I opened the door to the lab and walked in. Adam stopped talking and looked at me. He’d been sitting on the edge of the table, still naked, but when he saw me walking towards him he stood up and backed away, putting the table between us.
Lisa turned to me. “What are you doing?” she asked, her voice muffled by the environment suit.
“We said five minutes. It’s been half an hour.”
Lisa started to protest but Adam interrupted her. “Your husband is right,” he said. “You should go. We can continue our discussion tomorrow. I will not be going anywhere.”
Lisa looked at Adam and he smiled. “Thank you for talking to me. I enjoyed our conversation.”
“As did I,” said Adam.
Lisa managed to wait until we were back in the control room with Daniel before she started talking.
“It was incredible . . . he’s incredible.”
“What did he say? Is he human?” Daniel asked.
“No, he’s an explorer, like us. He came here from another planet, another galaxy, somewhere he calls Naret. It sounds a lot like Earth but better — there’s no war, no famine, no death.”
“No death?” I echoed.
“Yes. He’s immortal or close enough that it doesn’t matter. He’s been on Mars for thousands of years. He doesn’t need food or water or air or anything. He just . . . is.”
“Why Mars?” I asked.
“I don’t know, we didn’t get that far. God, I have so many questions. This will change the world, Alex.”
***
The next day, after a restless night and an early breakfast, Lisa went back into the isolation lab. Without the ability to record anything that was going on, we were relying on her taking notes, so she took a notebook and pencil. I stayed in the decontamination chamber again and watched as she chattered excitedly to Adam, pausing the conversation every now and again to scribble in the book, her pencil skipping across the page in her hurry to get back to unlocking the mysteries of the universe.
Three hours later, Lisa stumbled back out of the lab with dozens of pages of notes. She was giddy with excitement and immediately started bombarding us with information. Whatever Adam was, he seemed more than happy to answer any questions we had. Eventually I managed to convince Lisa to eat something while Daniel scanned her notes into the computer but half an hour later she was back inside the lab with Adam.
That’s how it continued. Every day Lisa would go into the lab while Daniel and I watched helplessly from outside. A couple of times we tried to accompany her but each time Adam would greet us and then refuse to talk until we’d left the room. He would never tell Lisa why he’d only talk to her but that seemed to be the only question he wasn’t prepared to answer.
Lisa came out of the room with detailed descriptions of his home planet, a lush and beautiful world similar to Earth but without the destructive influence of industrialised man. He knew of Earth but none of his kind had ever visited it. He’d spent time on other planets and had spoken to other life forms; Mars was just the latest stop in his travels. To us, his journey was almost unimaginable but to him it was just a pleasant diversion, a road trip to help fill the eons stretching out ahead of him. He was happy to answer our questions because for him, there would always be a tomorrow.
Days turned into weeks and as the window for communication with Earth neared, our excitement grew. Lisa in particular became more and more agitated and impatient. She’d barely been sleeping or eating and I was worried about her.
“You need to slow down,” I said one evening as we sat in bed, me reading a book, her making notes on the conversation she wanted to have with Adam the next day.
Lisa looked across at me, sadness in her eyes. “I’m afraid there isn’t much more time. As soon as we can communicate with Earth again we’ll need to tell them what’s happened.”
“Of course we will. We have to.”
“I know, I know, but when we do, the UN will send a team of scientists to investigate.”
“But the discovery will still be ours. I’m sure they’ll let us lead the research team.”
“It won’t matter. Adam will be gone.”
“What makes you think that?”
“We have a . . . connection. You must have noticed that. He can leave at any time but he’s stayed this long because of me, and I’ve never felt as alive as I do when I’m in that room with him. When the research team gets here, maybe even before then, that connection will be broken and he’ll leave.”
I rested my hand on her shoulder. “You don’t know that.”
“Yes, I do,” she said softly, blinking away tears.
I tried to put my arms around her, to comfort her, but she pulled away and rolled onto her side to sleep. Her notebook began to slide off the bed and I grabbed it before it fell onto the floor.
It was filled with notes, dense scribbling interspersed with clearer, more measured ideas for questions she should ask. The later pages contained less writing than the ones from when Adam had first arrived, even though the conversations were as long, or longer. The notes that did exist were general observations rather than facts, as though the interviews had become less rigorous, more conversational. The last page of notes contained a single word.
Love?
I flipped the notebook closed, slipped it onto Lisa’s nightstand and returned to my book.
***
Three days later, the night before we were due to send our first report to Earth, I woke to find Lisa gone. I knew where she was, of course — she was still convinced Adam was going to leave once we contacted Earth and she was desperate to get as much information as possible out of him before he left.
I made my way down to the isolation lab as quickly as I could. Despite Adam’s apparent harmlessness, I still didn’t trust him.
The lights in the observation room were off when I arrived, the room lit only by the crackling white glow of the useless video displays. I walked over to the observation window and looked into the lab.
It took me several seconds to realise what I was seeing.
At first, like an eight year old walking in on his parents, I thought Adam was attacking Lisa. Then she removed the headpiece from her environment suit and kissed him, her arms wrapped around him, her eyes closing as she ran her fingers down his naked back.
Without hesitating, I flicked open the cover on the emergency decontamination button and pressed it.
***
A faintly artificial voice echoes through the care facility. Visiting time is over for today.
I stand, my knees cracking. The number falls to 4,032,390,103. I can’t remember the last time it was that low and the optimism returns, just for a moment. I look at my wife, willing her to open her eyes. Until the artificial voice speaks again, more insistent this time. I blink away tears and wa
lk to the door.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, Lisa.”
I glance at the number as I leave.
4,107,083,671.
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Thanks for reading Bottled Lightning, I hope you enjoyed it.
Only Friends is a short story that was originally published in The Anthology of European SF. The anthology is no longer publicly available but you can get a free ebook edition of Only Friends by visiting my website at http://solitarybooks.com/blfree.
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About the Author
Philip Harris is a speculative fiction author and video game developer. Originally born near Oxford, England, he now lives on the West Coast of Canada where he spends his days developing video games and his nights writing speculative fiction - anything from horror to science fiction to fantasy.
His first publication, Letter From a Victim, appeared in the award winning magazine, Peeping Tom, in 1995. Since then he has been published in numerous magazines and anthologies including Garbled Transmissions, So Long, and Thanks for All The Brains and James Ward Kirk's Best of Horror 2013. He has also worked as security for Darth Vader.
His science fiction serial novel, Glitch Mitchell and the Unseen Planet is a homage to the old Buster Crabbe Flash Gordon serials and will be published in early 2015.
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Also by Philip Harris
Short Stories
Curfew
Saviour
Coming Soon
The Girl in the City: A Novella
Glitch Mitchell and the Unseen Planet
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Bottled Lightning
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Also by Philip Harris
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