“Looks human,” the professor said, smiling at Benny.
Benny laughed. “That she does.”
A voice came over a speaker system, saying simply over the noise. “Everyone is on board safely. We are moving to a safe point now.”
David pointed to the window.
Benny pulled his gaze from Gina and turned just in time to see the planet shrink and then vanish in a blur of gray motion.
Maybe ten seconds later the stars returned, with no planet.
“Wow,” David said, clearly excited. “It took only a few seconds to move two light years.”
Benny had no real idea how far it was they had just traveled. And he honestly wasn’t sure if he wanted to know. He had enough to deal with at the moment.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
GINA MOVED SLOWLY around the room for the next hour, glancing over at Benny at times and once smiling at him and he smiled back.
Now, after almost two hours, the room was settled and her staff had a pretty good control of all the situations.
The room’s disinfectant air cleaners had also cleared most of the smells as well, which she was thankful for. In short order, she would be living in that smell of death. She was glad it was gone for the moment now.
Finally, she found herself just standing, looking around. Everything for all the people seemed to be in control.
So she turned and worked her way back toward Benny and the others from the big stone building.
“Looks like the situation is under control,” Benny said, smiling at her as she approached. “Nice job.”
“Control might be the wrong term,” she said, smiling back. “Call it contained panic.”
Benny kept smiling and she was drawn even more to him and that wonderful smile that actually reached his eyes. “Been fighting that myself a lot over the last ten days.”
“Can’t say that I blame you,” she said. She looked away from Benny and at the young girl. “You feeling better?”
Candice nodded, but said nothing, just stayed leaning against the professor.
The professor nodded his thanks to her. Clearly he was doing fine as well, taking the responsibility of his last class very seriously. She liked that about him.
“You boys doing all right?” she asked the other two.
Both nodded. “Can’t believe we’re two light years from Earth.”
“It took only seconds,” the second one said.
She smiled. “Distance in space between stars is vast. So even at the speed we took this jump, it takes a long time to get some places.”
David nodded. “Like to your home world.”
“Yes,” she said, nodding. “That’s a great distance away.”
“So what does your home world look like?” Benny asked.
She looked into his eyes and smiled. “Actually, very similar to yours, except that it has a little more land mass and a little less water. But I was born in a city on an island very similar to your Manhattan Island.”
All of them nodded and she was about to excuse herself again to keep making rounds when Benny asked a very simple question. “So you sticking around after this rescue operation?”
“I am,” she said, figuring it wouldn’t hurt to tell him since he would never remember anyway. “Thousands of us will be embedding on your planet to help the recovery along.”
“It would be great having you in our building,” David said.
Benny smiled at her and nodded.
“I just might take you up on that if you’ll have me.”
“I think we have more than enough room,” the professor said. But he was frowning. She didn’t want him to ask the next question. Clearly the professor was very smart as well. No wonder he and Benny had made such a good team getting that big building cleared and set up for survival.
“I’ve got to go check on everyone else,” she said, smiling at the professor and Candice, then at Benny.
His gaze was intense and she had a hunch he also realized something about what she said was wrong.
“Back in a short time,” she said, lightly touching his arm as she walked past.
And that simple touch had sent a shock wave through her.
What in the world was going on?
Forcing herself to not look back again at Benny, she started another slow circuit of the big room. She really, really wanted to get to know him. More than anyone she had met before.
But that would happen once she reached the planet.
Nothing that happened here in the next few hours would make a difference because he wouldn’t remember it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
BENNY WATCHED HER go, wishing he could just walk along with her and talk with her and stay close to her.
Then he glanced down at the professor. “Did something just happen there that I missed?”
Benny had a hunch he knew what it was, but he wanted the professor to confirm his suspicions.
“She’s going to come to live in our building,” the professor said.
“That is so cool,” David said.
“But we won’t remember any of this,” the professor said, making an assumption that had not yet been stated.
Benny nodded and glanced at where Gina knelt talking with two survivors sitting in chairs.
The professor was right, Benny was sure. He was going to have to meet her all over again.
Part of him was sad about that and part of him was excited that he wouldn’t remember any of this.
“We don’t ask her that question,” Benny said to everyone.
“No point anyway if you are right,” David said. “We won’t remember the answer.”
“But we will meet her again,” the professor said. “And even if we don’t remember, she’s going to be a great help.”
Benny couldn’t agree more.
Over the next few hours the professor managed to get more food and drink into Candice to make her stronger and want to come back to the building. But through that smell on a hot day was going to be a very nasty hike for her. Benny wasn’t sure if she could make it.
But he had a hunch that if Gina showed up, she would work with them to find Candice and others to join the building, and that was exactly what they needed.
She would remember and she would know exactly where everyone was located.
She came by and talked with them twice more in the next few hours and the boys asked her all kinds of science fiction questions. Mostly Benny just listened and enjoyed the time being close to her.
Sometime after nine hours, true to his word, the man who had given the speech at first came back in and everyone got quiet.
“Everyone on the planet, almost two million souls, has survived the second and final wave of deadly electromagnet waves,” he said.
The room gave him a cheer and a lot shouted out “Thank you!”
Benny did the same.
And across the room he could see that Gina looked relieved. Benny had no doubt that saving over two million people had to have been a massive undertaking. More than he wanted to imagine.
His style was helping one person at a time.
“We are returning to Earth,” the man said, “and will be in Earth orbit in a minute or so.”
“So do we have an option of going to another planet?” someone shouted.
“No,” the man said, which caused the room to explode in talking.
The man held up his hand for silence and got it. “We will take the extremely wounded and the near-death sick, but all of you, and the two million others on all the ships are the future of humanity on Earth. We can’t rob Earth of that.”
“How do we survive?” someone shouted from behind where Benny stood.
“Some of you won’t,” the man said bluntly. “But many will, enough to rebuild a wonderful culture and society and preserve much of what is already there. Your job is to save the old art and culture and build new on top of it.”
“Wow, the guy is blunt,” David said. “And guys, we are back
in orbit.”
Benny glanced around to see the planet below them.
Suddenly, beside Benny the professor shouted out, “We won’t remember any of this, will we?”
The officer smiled. “It is possible, but unlikely,” he said. “Most of you won’t remember any of this.”
That stunned everyone even more than the death sentence he had just declared on many people in the room.
Benny smiled at Gina and pretended to tip his hat at her in thanks.
She smiled back and nodded.
“I wish each and every one of you luck,” the man said. “The future of the human race on the planet Earth depends on all of you.”
With that a shimmering wave swept over the room.
Benny knew he was going home, to the city he loved, and his new home near the top of the Empire State Building.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
GINA WATCHED AS they all vanished, leaving only her and her team scattered around the room.
Everyone stood in silence for a moment, then turned silently to start cleaning up. Everyone had prepared for this rescue for a long time. It was now over and her job and the others embedding into the culture was just starting.
“Great job,” Chairman Carson said to her, stepping down off the stage. He was the captain of this ship. Since every Seeder ship was a business to itself and everyone on board was paid, the captain was called Chairman.
“Thank you,” she said. “I’ll be starting the next stage tomorrow.”
The Chairman nodded, his normally happy face drawn with lines of exhaustion. She hadn’t seen him look so tired before.
“We’ll cloak in a week or so,” he said, “so local sector rescue ships won’t know we are remaining here. Get some rest before you start. At this point, the deadline is past, the long slow job of helping rebuild this civilization starts.”
“I’m feeling that,” she said, nodding. “But also excited to get down there to help and save as many as I can.”
He nodded. “Anything you need, don’t hesitate.”
“Thank you, Chairman.”
He transported away, leaving her standing and staring at the mess where over two hundred survivors had been a short time before. The two empty chairs where the professor and Candice had sat seemed hauntingly alone.
She needed to get Candice back to the big building first. Of that she had no doubt.
And she really wanted to meet Benny again, and have time to actually get to know him this time around.
She spent the next hour working with her crew and the medical staff on those injured survivors they had not sent back. There were almost forty of them and she knew they would all be transferred to another ship to be taken to worlds that had volunteered to take them as refugees. Most of the survivors would survive and would get mental help as well as the medical.
Finally, she went back to her apartment, took a long shower, got something to eat, and then went to her screens to check on the people on the island.
No one was moving. It was late afternoon and more than likely the day was hot.
She focused down on the man she had met and was so attracted to. Benny sat in his apartment, alone, his feet up, staring out over the city. He had made a former office into an apartment and it looked very comfortable. He had even set up a nice kitchen with a dining table near a window for the view.
She had no idea what he was thinking about, and she wished she was there to ask him.
Then, as she watched, he did something she couldn’t believe he could do.
He stood up, went over to a pad of yellow paper on a counter, then in large script he wrote a note.
As she stared at it, she just shook her head.
The note said:
Gina, please get Candice on your way here tomorrow.
He held that up to the sky for a moment, then put it on the table in plain view.
Then he wrote another note.
I’ll set you up an apartment.
There are a lot of people we need to save when you get here.
He put that note on the table beside the first one and then smiled upward before moving over to the chair to sit down again and put his feet up.
He remembered!
Gina just stared at the screen and the slight smile on Benny’s face.
How in the hell had he remembered?
How was that even possible?
She just stared at that smile on his handsome face and then just started laughing.
She had some research to do and do quickly.
She teleported to the transportation department of the ship.
Seeders could just teleport from place to place within reason, but every ship also had a transport department for moving others and supplies. And that department had been responsible for the smooth transport of all the survivors who came to this ship. She needed one question answered before she did anything.
She needed to know how Benny could remember.
She needed to know if it was a glitch, or if there was something, as she suspected, very, very special about Benny Slade.
Besides the fact that all she wanted to do was jump him and make love to him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
BENNY AWOKE WITH a slight headache in his big bed. The sun was high in the sky and he glanced at a clock he had put beside the bed. It was after two in the afternoon.
Ten hours.
Then he bolted upright in bed, sitting there, trying to calm his racing heart.
He had had a dream about being taken up to a ship and meeting the most stunning woman he could ever imagine.
In his dream, he had been taken from sleep right before sunrise, about 4:30 a.m. and his dream had him, and everyone, being on the ship for almost ten hours.
He kept staring at the clock.
How was that possible?
He dropped back onto the bed, staring up at the tile in the former office ceiling. They had said no one would remember. Had he imagined it all?
Had he imagined Gina Helm?
He hoped not, but his racing heart wanted to let him believe he had.
He had never given much thought to people living on other planets. The very idea of it had never interested him much at all, actually.
Now it seemed people on a lot of other planets were a very real thing.
Or he had just dreamed it all.
Far more likely.
But not once in his life had he slept for seventeen hours, which was how long it had been since he had crawled into bed.
He lay there in his bed until finally he couldn’t stay still any longer.
He had to move, see if there were any answers.
He took a long shower, got into fresh clothes, and headed down to a public area where the professor and the boys spent their time. It was near all their rooms and they all ate lunches and dinners together.
All three of them were sitting there, not talking.
“Anyone have any idea why we all slept so late?” Benny asked, grabbing a cold glass of iced tea and sitting down with them.
“Not a clue,” the professor said. “Never slept that long in my entire life.”
“We all did,” David said. “I think the planet got hit with something again and this time only knocked us out.”
Freddy shook his head. “Aliens, I’m sure. They wanted to plant trackers on us or something for their experiments.”
Both David and the professor shook their heads.
“It was sure weird,” Benny said.
They talked for a few more minutes, then Benny decided to take some action. He had a hunch, if his dream was true, they were going to start having company fairly quickly.
“I’m going to spend the evening setting up a second apartment on my floor. I think because of our lights at night, we need to start getting ready for company pretty soon.”
They divided up work, including helping him bring up a second bed, some furniture from an office ten floors down, and another dining table from a lunch room even more
floors down. To move furniture, they used the service elevator and he hated it. Even knowing how to get himself out of the elevator didn’t help. Having an elevator powered by a generator just wasn’t his idea of a confidence builder.
There were two large bathrooms with showers on his floor, so it would easily divide into an apartment for Gina.
He hoped she would want it.
He hoped she was real.
If not, he was going to a lot of work to make a living apartment for a figment of his imagination.
He headed back up to his own apartment after a half hour to sit and do some planning while the professor and the boys did chores and made sure the generators were all working fine, as well as the alarms for the monitors on the doors.
Then after dinner, they would actually set up the new apartment.
It was as he sat looking out over the city that he got the feeling he was being watched.
The windows were tinted to not allow anyone to see in, so he knew it wasn’t coming from outside.
The woman of his dreams had tuned in again.
If she was real, and believed he wouldn’t remember, she was in for a shock.
He smiled and went over to the table and wrote a couple of notes for her in very large letters.
If she was watching, that would really mess with her mind, and that made him smile even more.
If she wasn’t watching, if she didn’t really exist, then he hoped one of the survivors they ran across was a good trained counselor, because he was going to need real help for believing in a dream woman from space.
THE FIRST STEPS
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
GINA HAD SPENT a good hour with the fine people in the transport area, trying to understand why anyone from the surface would remember their time on the ship.
She was told there were only two reasons. One was that the equipment had malfunctioned slightly, but she was assured that hadn’t happened after they spent a good thirty minutes checking everything over.
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