by Morgan Rice
“It’s another miss,” one yelled. “I think that one hits somewhere out in the Pleiades.”
Kevin heard a groan of frustration from the other scientists there.
“They’re trying to narrow down the search,” Ted explained.
Dr. Levin was there, and to Kevin’s surprise, people seemed to be listening to her. Maybe the fact that there were definitely aliens made it easier to take orders from the head of SETI.
“The problem is too much information,” she said. “You gave us so many possible hits, Kevin, that we can’t work through all of it, even with our computing power.”
“Have you tried the Internet?” Kevin asked.
“I don’t think this is the kind of thing we’d find on the Internet,” Professor Brewster said, coming up to join them. “We have some of the most sophisticated computers in the world here.”
Kevin shook his head. “We might. When I translated, I gave the reporters the information, right? So, won’t people all around the world have been looking at it? You said the problem was having enough people to do it. Well, doesn’t this mean you have the whole world helping?”
“The kid has a point,” Ted said. “Have you checked?”
“Well… no,” Professor Brewster admitted.
Dr. Levin shrugged. “Maybe it’s worth a try. SETI has often borrowed computing power from people around the world.”
“Do it,” Ted said.
Dr. Levin went away for a few moments. She came back with a tablet computer, and a faintly shocked look.
“I… I don’t believe it,” she said, and started tapping away on it. “Hold on, I’ll bring it up on a bigger screen.”
She pressed a few points on the tablet, and a computer screen across from them lit up, big enough that the entire room would be able to see it. Coordinates sat on the screen, along with the words “Alien craft to hit Earth!” The site appeared to be anonymous, but there was no doubt about what it was saying.
“If we take this set of coordinates,” Dr. Levin said, “well, watch.”
A map of the world appeared on the screen, first so broad that Kevin couldn’t work out where the crash site was supposed to be. It turned, zooming in on South America, then kept going. It took in a country, then a region, then what seemed like a patch of jungle just a couple of miles across.
“The Colombian rainforest,” Ted said, staring at it.
“We’re sure about this?” Professor Brewster asked.
“We’ll check, of course,” Dr. Levin said, “but on first glance… yes, it looks correct. Which is astonishing in its own way. The idea that a civilization could predict where their vessel would land this precisely at such a distance is… almost impossible to believe.”
“Well, I think we need to start believing it.” Ted put a hand on Kevin’s shoulder. “If you’re right about all this, our alien friends are sending their cargo to Colombia.”
“Is that a bad thing?” Kevin asked.
Ted shrugged. “I don’t know. It might make things complicated. I’m more worried about how many other people will have seen this. Dr. Levin?”
“There’s no way to know,” the SETI director said. “I’d guess that if we found it, plenty of other people will have.”
“Which means that half the world will be there,” Ted said. “What do you say we go there to meet them, Kevin?”
“Go to meet who?” Kevin’s mother asked, walking into the computer pit. “What’s going on?”
Kevin tried to work out the best way to phrase it. “Mom, um… can I go to Colombia?”
CHAPTER TWELVE
“You don’t need to come, Mom,” Kevin said as he and the others found themselves waved through security at the San Francisco airport. She was just a step away from him, as if afraid that moving further would mean losing him in the chaos of the airport. Ted was close by too, although Kevin suspected it was for different reasons.
“Of course I need to come,” his mother said, wheeling along a small suitcase that made it look as though she’d packed for a vacation. “One moment people are trying to murder you, and the next, you’re flying off to the middle of a jungle? Do you think I’m going to let you do that alone?”
“I wouldn’t be alone, Mom,” Kevin pointed out. If anything, it seemed like the entire institute was heading to Colombia, packing itself aboard not one but two chartered airplanes, and taking with it an array of equipment designed to search for the escape capsule.
“I’m still coming,” his mother said, and Kevin knew better than to argue with that tone.
One person who wasn’t coming was Luna, and Kevin found that he was already missing having her there. She’d gone home, because her parents apparently had stricter views about her flying to South America in search of aliens.
Professor Brewster stood toward the front, marshalling the scientists and the soldiers, the agents and the occasional reporters as they loaded onto the plane.
“Are you all set, Kevin?” he asked. “We have a long flight ahead of us.”
Kevin nodded. “I can’t believe we’re doing this.”
“We nearly aren’t,” Professor Brewster said. “A lot of people are having to pull a lot of strings to let us fly into Colombia for this. Now, hurry and get aboard.”
Kevin got onto the plane and found a seat where he could look out of the window. His mother took one next to him, while Ted took one just in front of him.
“It’s a long way to Colombia,” Ted said. “It’s been a while.”
“You were there before?” Kevin asked.
“Officially?” he said with a faint smile. “Never been there in my life.”
“And unofficially?” Kevin asked.
“Oh, it was very unofficial the last time I was there,” Ted replied. “Things are a bit more peaceful there now though. There are still a few cartels, but without the civil war going on, the government can pay a bit more attention to them.”
“It sounds cool,” Kevin said.
His mother didn’t agree. “It sounds like a dangerous place to take my son.”
“I’m sure it will be fine,” Ted said. Kevin heard the doors to the plane shutting as the last people climbed aboard. “Besides, it’s too late to turn back now. Nine hours from now, and we’ll be in Bogota.”
Nine hours. How did you spend nine hours cooped up in a confined space with a bunch of scientists? It seemed to Kevin that practically everyone there was having to find the answer to that question. Some played games on phones, or read, or watched movies. Kevin’s mother mostly slept. Kevin alternated looking out of the window with trying to get some rest and occasionally putting on the headphones with the signal stream, just in case there was anything to hear. There wasn’t.
“I don’t even know if these will work so far from the research institute,” Kevin said, after the third time he’d done it.
“I asked the scientists that before we left,” Ted said. “They’ve set it up so the base signal is relayed over the Internet. Anywhere you have a connection, you can access the signal.”
Kevin supposed he shouldn’t have been surprised by that. Of course they would want to make sure that he could hear it, whatever happened. They wouldn’t want to risk missing an important message. Even so, the idea of being able to listen in from anywhere in the world seemed impressive.
Kevin spent some of the time looking down at the places they passed over. He’d never even been out of state before, yet here he was flying over deserts and thick rainforests, cities and patches of ocean. He thought about the people down there. Did they know about the escape capsule? What did they think about the possibility of actually finding alien life?
He got part of an answer when they landed in Bogota. He immediately saw a dozen similar groups, all carrying equipment that looked suspiciously similar to the gear they’d brought with them.
“Looks as though we weren’t the only ones who worked out where those coordinates led,” Ted said as he looked over the collection of them. He seemed fai
rly relaxed about it, but Professor Brewster was anything but calm.
“This is simply unacceptable,” the scientist said. “The Swiss are here, and that looks like a group from the private tech sector, and those are the Canadians. After all the effort we’ve put into uncovering this information, I can’t believe that they’re planning to snatch the capsule from under us.”
Kevin wanted to say that they didn’t know for sure that was what the other groups were there for, but he couldn’t think of another reason they might be there. He wasn’t sure how he felt about their presence.
On the one hand, he wanted to believe that the aliens’ message was intended for the whole of humanity, and that it should be shared. He was happy that he’d had to shout the coordinates to the news cameras or risk losing them for that reason. At the same time, Professor Brewster was kind of right: Kevin was the one who had been able to translate the alien signal, not the others, and he wanted to at least see the escape capsule now that he had.
“We’ll just have to be the first to it,” Professor Brewster said, although Kevin suspected that it was going to be easier said than done. He couldn’t see how they were going to get through the airport any quicker than the others, or get to the jungle quicker, or even search quicker.
They tried, though. Kevin would have laughed at the sight of a dozen sets of scientists conducting a strange kind of race through the Bogota airport, except that he had to keep up with them all, trying to find gaps in the press of people and making sure that he didn’t lose sight of his mother at the same time.
“This way!” Professor Brewster called, leading the way toward what looked like a rental car desk. “Hello, we need to rent… let’s see, probably a dozen off-road vehicles and a small truck.”
“I’m sorry,” the woman at the desk said. “As I told the last gentleman to ask for that, it is simply not something that we keep here at the airport. Most people… well, they do not need this for their vacation, you see?”
“This is not a vacation,” Professor Brewster declared. “This is a scientific expedition of the utmost importance!”
“Even so.”
Dr. Levin stepped in. “Come on, David, you know we’ll need to rest first, and then we can work on the actual expedition after that.”
“And meanwhile the Canadians will be getting ahead of us!” he complained. “How did they even get here so fast?”
There didn’t seem to be an answer to that, but Kevin found himself swept up as they made their way from the airport to the spot where the American embassy stood waiting, looking like a large gray block in the middle of Bogota.
The ambassador was waiting for them within. He shook Professor Brewster’s hand, and then shook Kevin’s, much to his surprise.
“I got the call that you were coming from the President a couple of hours ago. It will be a little cramped with so many of you here, but I’ve had rooms prepared for you all, and I’m working to arrange transport for your team to the rainforest. You should be aware that the Colombian government isn’t entirely happy about this, but we’re working to smooth the way for you.”
It didn’t sound good that the government of the country where they were looking didn’t like them being there. By that point, Kevin was too tired to worry about it. He fell asleep almost as soon as the embassy staff showed him to a room, and didn’t wake up again until he heard Professor Brewster’s voice shouting from outside.
“Come on, everyone! The embassy has managed to get us some transport, and we need to be ready to go before everyone else beats us to the prize!”
Kevin did his best to get ready in a hurry. Even so, by the time he got out there, most of the others were already ready. Professor Brewster had acquired a khaki shirt and trousers that made him look the way someone might think an explorer looked if they’d only ever seen pictures of them. His mother was wearing her normal clothes, augmented by a wide sun hat. Ted just looked like Ted.
“Quickly,” Professor Brewster said, clapping his hands. “Quickly! We can’t allow anyone else any more of a head start.”
He hurried off, trying to get everyone out of the hotel.
“Will everyone else already be at the capsule?” Kevin asked Ted. Professor Brewster might be in charge of the expedition, but Ted was the one who knew what he was doing. Half of the people there already seemed to be looking to him to find out what to do.
The former soldier shook his head. “I doubt it. The rainforest at night is tricky. It’s easy to get turned around, even without the wildlife. The sensible move was for everyone to stay put overnight, then move this morning.”
Kevin guessed it was also the move they’d all made, at least if the sold out hotels were anything to go by. There must be people from all around the world trying to find the escape pod, and all because of the numbers he’d managed to translate.
“Well, kid,” Ted said. “You’ve brought us this far. I guess it’s time to find out what’s at the end of all of it.”
They went downstairs, to where it turned out that the embassy had managed to find them trucks and SUVs, a couple of old Jeeps, and a few older cars.
“Just stay close,” Ted said, as he picked out a Jeep and jumped into the driver’s seat.
They drove, sticking together in a convoy that snaked back at the speed of the slowest car, which was, Kevin thought, pretty slow. A part of him didn’t mind that too much, because Colombia was beautiful. More of him wanted to curse the slow vehicles and the increasingly pitted roads, because he wanted to see the vessel the aliens had used to carry themselves. He wanted to see the outcome of everything he’d done.
They kept going, and as they got nearer to the area of rainforest the coordinates pointed to, the roads got worse. Then, as trees started to hem the road in on either side, they were blocked entirely by traffic, and it took Kevin a few moments to realize what was going on.
A truck lay on its side in the middle of the road, another having dents in it big enough to suggest a collision. There were more trucks and cars all around, with people standing there waiting, or trying to work out what to do, or arguing in a dozen languages. Kevin recognized some of the people there, and he knew who they had to be.
“Aren’t they the other research groups?” Kevin asked, as they pulled up. He saw Ted nod, but before the former soldier could say anything, Professor Brewster was there, moving up from another vehicle.
“Why are we stopped?” he asked.
“You can see why,” Ted said.
“But can’t we just drive around them?” Professor Brewster asked.
Ted gestured to the trees that grew close by either side of the road. “If you can do it, be my guest.”
Professor Brewster looked as though he might say something, then shook his head and set off to join the argument.
“Do you think it will make any difference?” Kevin’s mother asked.
Ted shrugged.
Ahead, Professor Brewster started arguing with half a dozen other people, some pointing fingers as they tried to work out exactly who was responsible for dealing with the problems there. Since Kevin couldn’t imagine the research institute’s director settling for talking to someone who wasn’t in charge, he guessed that the other people there arguing on the muddy road must be directors of their own organizations. Sometimes adults made no sense.
He jumped down from the Jeep, as much because he wanted to see what was going on as because he actually thought he could help. He walked forward to where two or three people were arguing over a winch, while a crowd of bored-looking scientists and soldiers looked on.
“If you have a winch, why isn’t anyone using it?” he asked.
A man with a thick Scandinavian accent answered. “Because it is our winch, and our director doesn’t want us helping others to get to the… object first.”
“But that’s stupid,” Kevin said.
“Kevin,” his mother said, catching up. “All of these people are very clever. They probably all have PhDs.”
�
��They’re still being stupid,” Kevin said, and he was surprised to find them looking at him rather than just ignoring him. They knew who he was, he realized, and they seemed to be looking at him as if waiting for him to decide what to do.
“Why don’t you just work together?” he asked.
“I told you,” the man who’d spoken before said. “We can’t let them use our winch until—”
“Not the winch,” Kevin said. “The whole thing. The aliens sent their escape capsule to this planet, not to one country, so why don’t we work together to find it?”
“And see it taken back to America?” one of those there asked.
“Well, we could find somewhere else,” Kevin suggested. “Somewhere we could all look at it.”
The men were quiet for a few moments as they started to think. One took out a map.
“There’s a UN facility a few miles from Bogota,” he said.
Another nodded. “I’ve done some work there on newly discovered plants. It has good facilities.”
“Our bosses might still want to argue,” the first said, a little uncertainly.
Kevin had an answer to that. “Then they can argue while we’re all opening the alien escape capsule.”
When he put it like that, the others didn’t seem to want to argue anymore. Instead, they started to connect up the winch, the researchers who had been standing around moving in to shift the truck from where it had toppled.
“Well done,” Ted said as Kevin returned to him. “Not many people could have talked them into working together.”
Kevin shrugged. It had seemed like the obvious thing to do.
“What is all this?” Professor Brewster asked. “What’s going on? Why are they moving again?”
“We’re going to go find the escape capsule together,” Kevin’s mother explained.
“But no one authorized that,” Professor Brewster said. “I didn’t authorize that.”
