The Asteroid

by M R Cates

  She was in the alien stone room. The realization struck her almost like a slap, surging her alertness up another notch. That strangeness she felt, what was it? What was it? It wasn't completely new to her. She remembered it. Strangeness. I'm on my back on the bedroll. That became her first well formulated thought. And her next one was, Damn it, they're doing that touch thing!

  Sandra, requiring more effort than she expected, turned her head to observe her image in the reflective wall. The shroud of red was there! She tried to call out, but no words came. A tremble went through her entire body, like an electric shock without pain. Once more she tried and managed to get out, “Wha ...are ...?” The question hung in the air.

  “Sandra,” came the voice – Plato's voice – “we will speak with you as before.”

  Anger welled in her. “No ... “ she said, in a kind of mutter, then Sandra forced herself to silence. She had to think, and it wasn't easy yet. But it was coming back – her alertness. With a huge sigh the astronomer forced her head to turn again, assuming the chairs would hold the glowing images. They did not. All three were empty. Sandra then looked up at the ceiling, making her new version of eye contact with the aliens. “I am ... am not interested in talking with you,” she said quietly and resolutely. “I am interested in your getting ... getting out of my head.”

  “We must touch you as we speak,” said Plato, his voice coming from everywhere, or nowhere.

  Sandra sat up on the bedroll. It took some effort. Then she said, “First, you must tell me ... what you have already done to me.”

  The blurring around her head was slightly visible as a kind of reddish filter through which she saw the room around her. At her comment the blur brightened and weakened a little, and the background sounds she'd heard before swelled into audibility for a moment before subsiding.

  Aristotle's voice – she thought – responded. “We touched the unconscious activities in your brain. We also touched the regions of your brain where the conscious functions arise.”

  “You're touching them now, damn you!” The burst of anger was unexpectedly fierce, even to Sandra. “What are you seeing? Tell me!”

  The alien presence within her brain was now quite distinct. Sandra could almost feel the changes in density or intensity of whatever these things were made of. The blur around her brightened once more, then went through a kind of flashing sequence. It was a full fifteen seconds before Aristotle's voice spoke again. “We see confusing things, Sandra. We will continue to speak together.”

  “I'll be damned if we will! How dare you knock me out, just because you thought it might be ... be interesting!”

  The disturbance of her glowing shroud began once more. The light fluctuations were enough to attract her attention to the reflecting wall, where Sandra watched the flickering chaos around her head. Plato's voice returned, saying, “Sandra, we are interested in information. We learn from your speaking..”

  “Damn it, I'm speaking!” she snapped.

  Another pause, and another sequence of varying brightness and density. Plato then said, “ Yes, Sandra. Continue to speak.”

  “Okay, I'll speak, but listen, first get out of my head for a few minutes and let's discuss this like intelligent life forces, shall we?” Her voice fairly oozed sarcasm.

  “We will not do that,” came the nearly instantaneous response. Sandra thought it was Socrates' voice.

  Sandra Hughes was fully herself by that point. Angry and tired, but herself. The nagging presence inside – to the best of her ability to tell – was not changing her, despite being intimately involved in some way or another with her brain. Several strains of thought were arising. A side of her wondered if the aliens were tracking these strains – actually reading her mind. Well, so be it. She knew she had to get hold of her emotions. This was not a trivial competition between astronomers about some totally insignificant interpretation of some data set: this was a confrontation with strange whatevers who could wreck havoc on her world if they damn well pleased. Sandra reminded herself not to let herself and her impatience get in the way. She had to take deliberate action. She had to think, dammit!

  The human astronomer, beclouded by something totally unearthly, shook her head slowly side to side. “Damn it, visitors,” she sputtered, “I hope you know this is truly weird!”

  Her response evoked a strong surge of fluctuations. The probing essence within her seemed to strengthen then weaken, and strengthen again. No voice was heard, but the cacophony of background noise rose. The redness flashed so brightly she closed her eyes against it. What had sounded like thousands of people speaking together in the same room began to be more like a roar, as if she were listening to a powerful ocean storm from a ship's hold, hearing the wind and water without feeling it. Sandra again shook her head, faster, symbolically trying to rid herself of the noise. And she put her hands over her ears.

  The intensity of whatever was going on persisted, rolling like waves of energy over and through Sandra Hughes. She held on for dear life – as she'd have said it to fellow Texan – and turned her mind loose inside. This̵ actually turning her mind loose inside ̵ she suddenly knew was what she must do. The realization was a lightning bolt within her.

  Sandra made herself think about data sets from her earlier galactic studies, racing her head through applications of algorithms extending the old string theories to the newer multi-dimensional vortices. She switched to the plains of west Texas, where she, years before, had taken a “road trip” with Debbie, going back to their roots and visiting sites where grandparents, great aunts and uncles had lived. In the midst of that she lurched her mind to Asteroid 1744, mentally confronting the aliens directly, running through scenario after scenario of her conversations with Carl, and later with Françoise and Jason, about their possible makeup, purposes, capabilities, and the like. She moved from there into thought about Hawaii, the islands as they grew from the tectonic forces beneath the sea. Abruptly, she formed a thought of a kiss, the earliest she could remember, and as a schoolgirl recalled the tremulous sensation of touching lips, the boy’s muskiness, and the mixture of compulsion and reticence she felt. And to the funeral, the sadness in the air around her, the teary look of her little sister as each orphan looked at the other. Then she thought about music. She pondered Beethoven first, mentally humming the opening of the finale with entrance of the trombones for the first time in the Fifth Symphony, then shifted to Shostakovich and did a similar internal hum of the enigmatic parody of a military march in his Seventh Symphony.

  Sandra drove herself onward, ignoring the fatigue and the oddness of that presence inside her. She sent her thoughts to the classroom at the University of Chicago, recounting discussions of neutron stars, the flaws in black hole theories, and even shifted to the professor's balding head, reflecting the colors of a sunset that happened to be in progress during the lecture. Jerking away from Chicago, Sandra went instantly back to Hawaii and started roving among Carl's trees, pretending to climb a tropical evergreen she couldn't remember the name of, inventing “Aloha Pine” for the sake of the aliens, should they be able to understand. She jumped down from there and transported herself to the northern canyons of the Big Island, wandering to a waterfall she liked and walking under it, soaking herself then laughing and shaking her hair to splatter nearby dry rocks with spotted patterns of wetness. Then she mentally gritted her teeth and supposed a huge fragment of Asteroid 1744 spiraling into the Pacific Ocean, its impact producing the loudest sound that human ears could have ever heard and a blast comparable to exploding all the nuclear weapons of all nations of earth in one millisecond. Sandra made herself create the tidal wave that rushed, a mile high, to totally destroy Honolulu in a few catastrophic seconds. She envisioned the wave sweeping on to engulf millions and millions along the Pacific coast of North and South America, Australia, Japan, the Philippines, China, on and on. She made herself cry inside, she made her mortality as mentally visible as she could, then she forced herself away from the horror.


  For a few seconds Sandra re-composed herself internally, letting thoughts go off in random pieces and directions. She thought this important, too, as something to provide to the aliens. In that moment of mental letup she felt the throbbing around her and heard the noisy cacophony, suspecting the aliens were not aware they were irritating her ears. Then, with a literal swallow, Sandra Hughes dived back into her mind. She had one final place to take them, but she didn't know what the place looked like.

  Imagining a future that extended beyond humanity, the earth, or even the solar system, Sandra placed herself among many other human beings in a kind of spiritual state, all having left their bodies and begun to float in space, transmitting thoughts to and among each other. She conjured up bizarre planets with thousands of moons, with several visible suns. She dived into a huge gas giant like Jupiter, somewhere, and frolicked with bird-like creatures who sang beautiful, eerie-but-poignant songs, then swept by them, diving, and scooped up globules of metallic hydrogen from the tightly compressed surface in the depths of a darkness that she could see through with non-corporal eyes. The astronomer pushed herself to the fringes of the Milky Way, looking back for a moment at the imagined location of the sun, then dauntless, swept out into intergalactic space, swimming toward Andromeda, turning from time to time to watch the spiral form of her birth galaxy recede. She swept by stray groups of stars, in clusters of hundreds or thousands, that had found themselves lost, millions of protoplasmic lifetimes away from any other masses in the vastness of that void. Sandra turned somersaults as she moved. She held hands with the human spirits around her, she laughed, she danced, and then swan dived into Andromeda, splashing among the stars, resolutely moving toward the core. The star density became enormous, and she grabbed handfuls of solar plasmas, tossing them back and forth to those with her. She envisioned others of the evolved human entourage splashing into stars, blowing solar flares out like birthday candles, then zipping out to the cold side of planets and reclining on slabs of frozen carbon dioxide. On and on Sandra led her cloud of fellows, burrowing into Andromeda's center, kicking against the tug of the black hole that must be there.

  Gasping inside, Sandra swung herself away from her imagined group of transformed human colleagues and swept around the massive darkness before her, swinging out and around into the spiral arms of Andromeda that mirrored those of her own beloved Milky Way. Around and around she went, then came to a screeching halt. In front of her Sandra imagined the red cloud of aliens, those denizens of Asteroid 1744. “Hello,” she said blithely. “Nice to see you. How have your journeys been?” She imagined the reply, in Plato's voice, “Very interesting? And yours.” “Fascinating,” she answered. “Shall we get together and compare notes someday? I'm headed that way” And she pointed farther away, a continuation of the route from Milky Way to Andromeda and beyond. Plato answered within her head, “Excellent. We'll meet you there.” Then the red cloud moved through her and she turned to wave goodbye. Sandra Hughes smiled. Then she said aloud in her head, “There you have it!”

  Sandra put her hands to her ears, closed her eyes and turned her mind off, concentrating on the residual firing of rods and cones in her eyes that arise from tightly closing them. And she waited. How long she waited wasn't possible to tell because she refused to consider the passage of time or anything else – to the best of her ability. Eventually, something about the presence within her head shifted, changed, modified. Still she waited. The rings of color beneath her eyelids were Sandra's temporary universe. She waited. The retinal sensations of her total focus faded, as did the astronomer's consciousness. As if someone had secretly and painlessly given her an injection of anesthetic, Sandra Hughes sank into sleep, not aware that she'd lain back on the bedroll and let her head loll to the side. As she lay there, the reddish wisps of the aliens began to leave her, pulling away in smoky swirls, sometimes straying back around her a moment longer, as if reluctant to go. The process took a long time, at least half an hour. In the midst of it a twisted column of redness extended from Sandra's unconscious body to the ceiling above. As the swirls left her, they extended downward like dozens of tiny tornados, touching down briefly on her face, then lifting. Up, and up then, no longer dallying, the alien presence returned to the ceiling, leaving it as before.

  Chapter 47

  The winds had picked up a little during the afternoon of July 19th. A small cadre of clouds had escaped from the northeast side of Hawaii, made their way across the dry Kona side and presented themselves almost proudly off the west coast, invading the clarity that had dominated for two previous days. The weather was still not threatening, and had not become a source of serious worry, but July 19th was nonetheless a rougher sea day than the 18th had been. Jon Greenberg, in the cabin of the Coast Guard cutter still attached by fifty miles of fiber optics to the Devil Fish, reported the rougher weather to Madeleine Vigola in his two o'clock update.

  “There is still no indication, Colonel Greenberg, of activity at the alien craft or the sailboat,” the Chief of Staff informed him. “Visibility of the telescopes in flight remains very good.”

  Greenberg said, “The connections are maintained for the moment, but I'm concerned that deteriorating sea conditions could break or disconnect the cable.”

  “Please keep me informed, Colonel. Our meteorology group says there should be nothing extreme happening, weather-wise.”

  “So I understand,” Ms Vigola, “but the ocean has its own peculiarities, even when it is behaving itself.”

  “I understand, Colonel.” She smiled to herself at an Air Force colonel speaking to her about vagaries of the sea.

  Jon Greenberg, after hanging up, went out on deck to look at the cable reels and the instrumentation associated with transmitting and receiving signals. It was a routine exercise for him, something more to use time than to do something necessary. Yes, he was a landlubber, but Greenberg had learned a lot about the sea and was proud that he'd gotten his sea legs rather quickly. He had no sign of nausea or other discomfort from the continuous up and down motion of the anchored cutter. Twenty minutes after his report to Vigola, Greenberg was still outside, sitting now in the aft of the ship, looking idly toward the Hawaiian Islands along the horizon. A crewman – a Navy Junior Grade Lieutenant – came toward him, catching the colonel's attention.

  “Sir, there's a message from the Chief of Staff.”

  “Oh, thank you, lieutenant,” Greenberg answered. “Did she mention the reason for the call?”

  “No, sir. She just said it was important to speak with you, sir.”

  The two moved together back to the cabin, where Greenberg waited to lift the phone until he sat.

  “Yes, Ms Vigola,” he said.

  “Colonel Greenberg,” her voice was crisp. The Chief of Staff was in command mode. “Activity at the alien craft. Images have become blurred again. Unclear as to nature of the activity, but it's possible that the craft is changing position to release Dr. Hughes.”

  Greenberg was instantly alert. “Just a moment, Ms Vigola,” he said, “I'll be sure the cables are being monitored.” After some seconds, the colonel was back on the line. “We have seen no slack that we can identify, but we'll be ready.”

  “Excellent, colonel. Listen, I'm going to assign Ms Marnier to be your contact. She'll stay on the line and report what we can determine about activities.”

  “Thank you,” he said.

  Françoise was on the line within seconds. “Hello, Colonel Greenberg,” she said, the lilt of her accent sounding calming to him.

  “Yes, hello, Françoise,” he said. “But remember – like Sandra says – it's just Jon.”

  The French student laughed. “Yes, Jon. Perhaps we will soon see Sandra!”

  “Let's plan on it,” he asserted.

  “I have routed you the image from the aircraft,” she said. “It is very poor, you see, but we can expect it to be better.”

  “A disturbance from the craft?” he said.

  “Yes, probably.”


  Looking at the display now on one of his monitors, Greenberg nodded. “Some disturbance they generate, isn't it?”

  There was great energy in the young woman's tone. “We believe that the craft is positioning itself, perhaps to release Sandra.”

  “The fiber cables are still unchanged,” he said, eyes on the indicator that was now re-activated.

  It had been less than twenty-four hours since loss of contact with Sandra, but to everyone involved the time had passed with excruciating slowness. No one, Françoise included, was getting hopes up. But the blurred image of the alien craft and moored sailboat had to be a clue that something had changed. Although the phone line remained open, neither Greenberg nor his contact ashore spoke for several minutes. Each could hear something of the other's environment: the low creaks and wind noises on the cutter, and the background conversations in Vigola's command center, including the Chief of Staff herself, talking on another line to the President's office. Every five minutes or so, Françoise or Greenberg would report to the other, always the same report. This continued for more than thirty minutes. The clock had reached 3:05 Hawaii time – well into the night in Washington – when the displayed image began to clear.

  Françoise and Debbie sat side by side, at one of the tables in the command center. The French woman held the phone, leaning back a little, eyes on the video display in front of them; the American woman leaned forward to watch the screen intently. The same image, and related ones from other telescopes, were displayed at various locations around the room, each display having a person or two in front of it. Despite all the attention by so many, it was Debbie who first called out, “Look! It's clearing up!”