“Uncle Frank, could you bring out some paper towels or something?”
A moment later the mystery man from the photograph in Amy’s office walked into the room—ex-Commander Franklin Arthur Stewart, late of Naval Intelligence. In person he had the same indefinable features and skin color that Amy had, combining the heritage of three or four different racial groups, Sikes guessed. He was dressed in a pair of tan slacks and a light blue sweater, far removed from anything military. He carried a roll of white paper towels.
“The girl could use them,” Amy said, pointing to Kirby’s sticky face.
“Awfully kind of you, Uncle Frank,” Sikes said derisively.
Stewart tore off a handful of towels and gave them to Kirby. Kirby vigorously wiped at her face with them, using both tied hands together.
“So what’s next?” Sikes asked. “Some chips and dip and then you send us home?”
“Something like that,” Amy said. She looked at the television, then checked her watch. A commercial was playing.
Sikes looked at Grazer. “I give up. Do you know what this is about?”
Grazer made an elaborate shrug. Then he spoke loudly. “No. But it doesn’t matter. As soon as we didn’t show up for our five o’clock meeting with the captain, APBs would have been put out on all of us. It’s just a matter of time before—”
“Save it, Detective Grazer.” It was the first thing Franklin Stewart had said. “There are no APBs going out on you. And your captain knows why you missed your meeting.”
Sikes could almost hear Theo Miles explaining how all the pieces were fitting together. If this guy’s people had managed to get through to the captain, then their power had to come from a higher source.
“So how are things at the Pentagon these days, Commander?” Sikes asked.
Stewart had the decency to look amused. “I wouldn’t know. I work for the Fuller Institute these days. There’s no official connection between it and any government agency.”
“Except through a bank account in Switzerland?” Sikes challenged. “Or is that passé now? Do you run your money through the Cayman Islands with the drug runners and the other scum?”
Stewart had stopped smiling. “That’s quite an attitude you have, detective.”
Knowing that he had struck a nerve, Sikes was just about to respond with another attack when Grazer stepped into it.
“What do you expect him to have, talking with the kind of animal that would shoot an old man in cold blood?”
Stewart coolly walked over to Grazer and slapped him so hard the forensic accounting detective fell against Sikes.
“Not bad, Bry,” Sikes muttered. “But Uncle Frank didn’t kill Petty.” Sikes nodded over at the silent blond man with the .45 in his shoulder holster. “Motormouth over there did it.”
“Yeah?” Grazer said. The left side of his face was blazing red from the blow.
“Please don’t stop, detective,” Stewart said conversationally, as if he hadn’t just hit Grazer.
Sikes shrugged recklessly. As long as they were talking they’d stay alive, even if they did have to take a few knocks, “It makes perfect sense to me, Uncle Frank. You’re the connection to the military. Amy’s the brains behind the photographs. And Mr. Happy over there is the government killer. Amy couldn’t do it. You were too smart to do it. So you brought in a specialist from Washington. I guess work has been scarce since the good old days in Nicaragua.”
Stewart regarded him steadily as if they were predator and prey. “Fascinating. A specialist from Washington to do what?”
“Kill Randolph Petty.”
“And why would I want that?”
“Because of the photographs.”
Stewart walked back to stand beside Amy. “The photographs. I see. And did I have Petty killed because the photographs were mine and I wanted them back? Or because they were Petty’s and he wouldn’t give them to me? Or because they were someone else’s and he was going to give them to yet another someone?” Stewart took a remote control wand from the top of the television. “You see, I know how your business works, detective. You have a crime, to be sure. But you have no motive. And without a motive you have no suspect. And without a suspect . . . well, you understand.”
“I saw the photographs,” Sikes said. He suddenly wondered if his captors had any intention of killing anyone. Maybe they thought they could stonewall the whole case. Maybe Theo Miles had been right about everything.
Stewart didn’t seem to be worried. “But photographs of what, detective?” He went over to a small chair and sat down to face the television. “All you saw were a few screens of computer data. Enough to make you think you had seen the real thing for . . . for afterwards.”
“Afterwards? After what?”
“After the danger has passed,” Stewart said. He checked his watch as well. “Ah, here we go.” He pointed the remote at the television and the sound came up just as CNN began its science and technology report.
“What danger?” Sikes asked.
But Stewart said nothing. Instead he gestured to the screen as if Sikes would find his answer there.
He did. The lead story concerned a report from astronomers in Russia who had announced the discovery of the fastest-moving object in the solar system—a large asteroid almost five kilometers in length that would intersect Earth’s orbit within the next twenty-four hours. The report said that the asteroid would easily miss the Earth at a distance of several million miles, and at the rate it was traveling it would actually leave the solar system. Indeed, there was some speculation that given its speed, the asteroid had originated outside the solar system, and the Russian astronomers were urging that all observatories train their instruments on the asteroid in what might be an unprecedented opportunity to study something from beyond our own sun’s influence.
“They don’t know what it is, do they?” Sikes said.
“No,” Amy answered. “And they won’t until it’s too late to do anything about it.”
“What do you mean, too late?”
Stewart killed the sound as the news went on to another story. He looked at Sikes and scratched at his chin. “Have you ever seen a space probe, detective?”
“Like a satellite or something?” The chattier Franklin Stewart became, the better Sikes liked it. True, the blond with the .45 was still keeping them covered, but Sikes was beginning to hope that they might all survive this encounter yet.
“That’s right,” Stewart said. “A Voyager, for instance. Or Galileo. Or the Vikings. Most of them could fit into this room. And the better we get at making them, the smaller they’re becoming. We keep cramming more intelligence into smaller computer chips. We make instruments more sensitive and crowd more of them together.” He stood up and handed the remote to Amy. “The advantage being that the less massive a probe is, the less energy it needs to get where it’s going, so the cheaper it is for us to launch it. It’s an evolutionary line, so to speak. The smarter we are, the smaller we make them.” He stared fixedly at Sikes. “Except for one particular class of spacecraft.” He stopped as if he expected Sikes to continue for him.
But Grazer did instead. “The space shuttle.”
“Very good, detective.”
For a moment Grazer perked up at the praise until he remembered its source. He slumped against the back of the couch.
Stewart continued. “The space shuttle and the space station. Two of the largest, most cumbersome and complex objects ever built by humans. And you know why?”
This time Sikes answered. “Because they have to keep humans alive in space for long periods of time. Jesus Christ. You think there’s somebody on that thing, don’t you?”
Amy tapped the remote against her open palm. “No, we know that there’s somebody—or something—on board that craft.”
“It’s the only possible explanation for its configuration,” Franklin Stewart added. “It’s huge. It’s hollow. You don’t need empty space for scientific instruments. But you do need enormous amo
unts of space to maintain life.”
“You have to grow food,” Amy said. “You have to be able to recirculate and replenish your atmosphere. You need room to exercise. Room for privacy—if they need such a thing.” She shuddered.
“There can be no doubt that that thing is inhabited,” Franklin Stewart concluded.
For a moment everyone in the room was silent. Then Kirby said, “You mean an honest-to-God spaceship is coming here?” Sikes couldn’t remember when he had heard more excitement in her voice. Not since she was a little girl waiting for Santa Claus, he decided.
“I still don’t get it,” Sikes said. He had to keep the two talking until he could figure out how to disarm blondie and get Kirby and Angie out of here safely. Thank God Grazer wasn’t complicating things and was letting him take the lead. It looked as if Angie had been wrong. Grazer could keep quiet sometimes. “So there’re a bunch of little green men passing by. What’s wrong with anybody knowing? Why not say hello or something?”
Franklin Stewart gave Sikes a condescending look. “You don’t know anything about history, do you, detective?”
Without thinking Sikes nodded at Grazer. “He does.” Then held his breath. Once unleashed, Grazer could provoke Stewart into shooting them all just to shut him up.
Stewart addressed Grazer. “Very well, can you think of a single instance in human history when one society has made contact with a more technologically advanced second society and survived?”
Grazer chewed his lip for a moment. “You know, Sikes, he might have a point.”
“Of course he has a point,” Amy said. “Look at Native North Americans. They thrived on this continent for centuries. And now, five centuries after Columbus, they’re a footnote to history. Decimated by war. By disease. Their land gone. Their culture something to be gaped at in museums and gift shops.” She pointed the remote control at Sikes. Her face seemed pinched and tight to him now. He wondered why he had ever found her so attractive. “Do you want that to happen to an entire species, detective? Your own species? Do you actually want to attract the attention of beings so advanced they can move nine-times-ten-to-the-sixth tonnes from star to star? Would you care to guess what this planet might look like a single century after any first contact like that? What would happen to our science? Our religions? Our cultural heritage?”
“You can’t hide out forever,” Sikes said while thinking, We’re in the hands of a bunch of racists—planetary racists who’ve murdered an old man, kidnapped a child, and are holding three members of the LAPD with the blessing of the captain and God knows who else and how high up. Plus, they are completely crazy.
“We won’t have to,” Amy said. “Someday we’ll be out there, too. We’ll fly our own craft to other stars. And that will be the time to . . . to say hello, as you put it. When we’re equals.”
“But not now,” Stewart added. “Not when we’re nothing more than trusting indigenous bow-and-arrow users who have never seen cannon before. The risk to the”—he looked up at the ceiling as if searching for the perfect word and found it—“the purity of our species’ survival is too high.”
Sikes was disgusted with them. He didn’t want his daughter to listen to any more of this crap. “And you had Randolph Petty killed for that?”
Amy nodded. “We traded one man’s life for the world’s,” she said. “I think it has a rather biblical ring to it myself.”
“Besides,” her uncle added, “Petty was a traitor. He didn’t take those photographs himself. They were leaked to him. By an astronomical photo analyst at NORAD who thought she knew better than government policy. NORAD enlisted the aid of the Fuller Institute’s, um, security division to aid in retrieving the stolen photos.”
“NORAD,” Sikes said. “So the government has known about the whole thing from the beginning.”
“We’ve known about the ‘whole thing’ since Roswell,” Stewart said. “And that was just four clones in a scout ship.” Sikes didn’t know what Stewart meant and didn’t want to know, but beside him Grazer gasped out loud.
“Why didn’t you just kidnap Petty the way you kidnapped us?” Sikes asked.
“Technically,” Stewart said, “you’re being held in protective custody pursuant to a special White House National Security Directive dating back to nineteen fifty-seven. It’s not kidnapping. And the problem with Petty was that alone of all the other astronomers to whom the leaked photographs were given, he was the only one who didn’t want to cooperate with us.”
“Seventy-two years old, he’s got an asteroid named after him, and you shot him for not ‘cooperating’?”
“Exactly,” Stewart said, glancing over to the silent man with the .45. “Seventy-two years old, an irresponsible and expendable has-been, and he should have known better than to think he could get away with it.”
Sikes looked at Amy with contempt. “And everything you told me . . . it was close enough to the truth so that after the fact everyone would think you had been a hero for trying to spread the word. But just distorted enough to make me go running after false leads until the . . . the space thing was headed back to the stars.”
“It would have worked,” Amy said, “except for Detective Grazer deciding he’d access military personnel files and trigger software alarms. That’s when we realized that the cover story would be compromised.”
“Tell me, detective, how did you manage to make the connection to the institute?” Stewart asked, one professional to another.
Sikes nodded at Amy. “Mata Hari left a photograph on her office wall that showed the two of you. And the Desert Storm briefings made your face kind of hard to forget.”
“Very clever,” Stewart said. “I’ll have to remember that for next time.”
Sikes narrowed his eyes at the man. “You actually think you’re going to get away with this?”
“I already have, detective. Another few hours and that thing will be traveling so fast that it’s going to loop around on the other side of the sun and never come back. And tomorrow you will have the choice of signing a standard National Security Oath for law enforcement personnel, swearing never to divulge the classified information you’ve unwittingly uncovered in the course of your investigation, or spending the rest of your life in a federal prison.”
“That will never happen,” Sikes said. “And you won’t get away with kidnapping and murder either.”
Stewart did not acknowledge the threat. “We have before, and we will again.”
“It’s back on,” Amy said before Sikes could reply. She pointed the remote at the television, and the sound returned. An artist’s impression of a crater-marked asteroid appeared in a box above the news reader’s shoulder as the first story was updated.
British astronomers had just announced that the object—now called the Voronezh Object, after the Russian observatory that had been the first to report its presence—was exhibiting anomalous reflectance characteristics that made it unlike any other asteroid ever discovered. Those characteristics, combined with its speed and trajectory, made the astronomers confident that the Voronezh Object was indeed from outside Earth’s solar system.
The newsreader reported that so far there had been little word about the object from American observatories. Unfortunately, several installations that specialized in asteroid tracking had been closed down for repair and maintenance and might, as a result, not be able to participate in the object’s study.
Franklin Stewart looked significantly at Sikes. “We were able to shut down twenty-eight observatories around the world just by suggesting that their grants might be up for review. Locking the lot of you up is going to be a piece of cake.”
The newsreader went on to say that efforts were underway to attempt to bounce radar and laser signals from the object.
“Hey, that’s a good way to say hello,” Sikes said.
But Stewart wasn’t troubled. “Detective, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the only country with the capability to mount that kind of effort in only a f
ew hours is this one. And I guarantee you that each radar and laser facility will regretfully report that technical difficulties prevented them from sending out any signals at all. No one’s going to talk to that thing.”
“Maybe they already know we’re here,” Kirby said bravely. “Maybe they’re just as afraid to talk to us as you are to talk with them.”
Stewart nodded. “You’ve got a smart kid there, detective. It would be a real shame if she had to grow up in a prison.”
“Daddy?”
“Don’t worry,” Sikes told his daughter. “This scumbag isn’t going to do anything to us. He’s just the kind of creep that’s probably keeping space guys away from us in the first place.”
Stewart took that as a compliment. “Precisely, detective. That’s exactly who I am. The kind of person who is keeping our world free from dangerous contamination. The kind of person who is keeping our world pure.”
“Then again,” Grazer said slowly, “maybe it’s on its way here to land and . . . and take over.”
Sikes liked seeing the shadow that passed over Stewart’s face at that comment.
“Highly unlikely,” Amy said, though she looked almost nauseated at the prospect. “With its present mass and velocity, even if it’s using total conversion of matter to energy, it’s still not big enough to carry enough reaction mass to have it change its trajectory to rendezvous with Earth.”
“Then maybe it’s just going to lob a bomb at us,” Sikes said, rubbing it in. He looked over at Amy. “Like someone once said, it’s a big universe out there.”
“Which is why we’re staying here, as quietly as possible.” Stewart walked out of the room, disappearing into the kitchen. The man with the gun remained unmoving, his gaze never leaving the prisoners on the couch.
Sikes stared at the television screen, at the corny painting of the Voronezh Object. As far as he was concerned, it probably was just a big hunk of rock, and Stewart and everyone else were nuts. But with all his might and all his heart, just in case, he sent out his thoughts to wherever they had to go in space and told that baby to land.
Alien Nation #1 - The Day of Descent Page 30
