“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.
The second reason was that the person had the Seeder gene. That tended to sometimes block such things as mind erase. Not all the time, but sometimes, if the person had a very, very strong Seeder gene.
She hadn’t known until that moment that there was anything like a Seeder gene. But it seemed there was, and it was a prerequisite to joining the Seeders. It allowed Seeders to comprehend vast amounts of information and not forget any of it over hundreds or even thousands of years of life.
And with the right treatment, it allowed the person to live basically forever, barring accidents. Having that gene allowed the health treatments that stopped all aging and sickness in all Seeders.
So Benny Slade had the Seeder gene.
The idea of that stunned her even more than she wanted to think about.
After her hour with the transportation department, she sent a message to the Chairman that she needed to talk with him.
She wanted to know what was allowed with survivors who remembered the rescue and what wasn’t. Not a question ever covered in the training up to this mission, because no one had been expected to remember.
“My office now,” was all he responded.
She jumped to his office. It was large, with a number of chairs and a large couch. The walls were a light tan and covered with photos from different planets. There was a large wooden desk with hidden screens that she knew floated over the desk when in use.
She had only been in his office once before and felt she liked Chairman Carson more because of the informal nature of the room.
She was stunned that he had a visitor.
The man with the chairman stood about six feet tall and had long gray hair flowing down his back that he had pulled into a ponytail. He was imposing and striking at the same time. He flat radiated power from his dark eyes.
Chairman Carson was standing in front of his desk talking with the man as she arrived. Carson turned to her. “Gina Helm, I would like you to meet Chairman Wade Ray.”
She managed to say, “Nice meeting you.”
And then she shook his hand before her tired mind realized that the man she was meeting was one of the most powerful and oldest of all Seeders. No one really knew how old he was. Or even what galaxy he was born in.
What was he doing here?
“Sorry to interrupt,” she managed to choke out.
Chairman Ray just smiled. “We were actually talking about you and the great job you did. And about one of the survivors in your area.”
Gina managed to get her thoughts back together and said simply, “Benny Slade?”
“You met him I understand,” Chairman Ray said, his eyes intense.
“I met him and talked with him a number of times,” Gina said, “and found him really amazing and very smart. And I discovered that he did not have his memory wiped by the transport.”
“He wouldn’t be wiped,” Chairman Ray said, and Chairman Carson nodded. “How did you discover this?”
“I checked in on him about an hour ago,” she said, “and he must have sensed me watching him and wrote me a note, asked me to pick up another survivor when I arrived in the morning.”
“Wow,” Chairman Carson said. “And you came here to tell me that?”
Gina shook her head. “Actually, I came here to ask if I could recruit him as a Seeder in this mission. He would be valuable help if I didn’t have to hide from him.”
Chairman Ray smiled and nodded. “See if you can convince him to join you.”
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br /> Then Ray turned to Chairman Carson. “Let me know if he does join us.”
Chairman Ray then turned to face Gina with those intense eyes of his. “Great job with all this and for discovering Benny Slade’s presence in your group. Good luck on the coming mission. I am sure I’ll be seeing you soon.”
With a slight smile, he vanished.
She stood shocked for a moment, then turned to Chairman Carson. “Can you explain to me what that was all about?”
Carson shrugged and pulled up the image on a screen on his wall of her talking with Benny Slade in the big room. “Somehow he knew about this Benny person and asked about him and your reaction with Benny Slade. So we watched your interaction with Benny and then you asked to see me.”
“So why does a survivor on a very damaged planet interest Chairman Ray?” Gina asked, her tired mind swimming in confusion.
Chairman Carson went around the desk and dropped into his big chair and let out a long sigh. “When you figure that out, please let me know as well.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
THAT EVENING AFTER dinner, Benny and the professor and the two boys sat up Gina Helm’s apartment on the opposite side of the same floor that Benny was on. There were two office doors and a foyer between the two apartments.
Benny didn’t tell them who was coming because he was starting to think he imagined it all. But even so, he wanted the apartment to be clean and comfortable.
They moved in a large flat screen and tan living room furniture and a library of old movies. They set up a large bed and turned a small office into a closet with a bench next to where the bed was.
They also managed to move up a fridge and set it up near a sink in a small glassed-in break room, leaving the table and chairs and the dishes in the cabinets. The room already had a small microwave and hot plate, so it would work pretty well, as far as Benny was concerned. Not as nice as his kitchen on the other side of the floor, but good enough.
High Edge: A Seeders Universe Novel Page 7
