Veezee: The Invasion

by Clyde Key

  * * *

  It was already late afternoon when Ed called most of the troops back to the Kingman training area for briefing. They were given a synopsis of all the reports Ed had received so they would know what they were up against, before returning to the field of operations.

  “For the present,” he told the somber group, “we will force no further confrontations until we have more people and weapons. What we will do is keep the patrols going, night and day, so we can know what they’re doing. We won’t fight them unless we have to, but we must know where they’re going and what they’re doing.”

  Then a roaring noise interrupted the briefing and Richie Taylor craned his neck to see. “What on Earth? Aliens?”

  “No,” said Ed. “That’s the veeto plane Tilson brought from Northeast. I have no idea what it’s doing here.”

  Briefing stopped and the troops all turned to watch as the ungainly craft came to rest in the open area behind them. When the jets stopped raising clouds of sand, the hatch opened and a stair extended slowly to the ground. Then out came Everett Lane, followed by a uniformed young woman who must have been the veeto pilot.

  “What are you doing in that?” asked Ed. “Don’t you know how much fuel that thing uses?”

  “Of course I do! I also know it’s an improvement over floaters for surveillance!”

  Ed considered that as the troops gawked. “Yes. I believe it definitely is!” He turned back to the troops. “Captain Baines!”

  Baines stepped out. “Yes sir.”

  “Take charge of the company. Marilee—I mean Lieutenant Sharp—and I are going on patrol. I’d like you to take about six floaters and follow us, in case we need some action.”

  “Yes sir.” Baines was already selecting troops for his patrol, and pointing them to their floaters.

  Ed and Marilee joined Lane and the pilot, whom Lane introduced as Lynette Searles, and took their seats in the aircraft. When Searles started the engines, the whine filled the cabin, so much that they almost couldn’t talk, but Lane yelled, “It gets a little quieter when we’re in the air.”

  The craft lifted straight up off the ground amid swirling clouds of dust, then leveled off and gradually picked up speed.

  “Where would you like to go, sir?” asked Searles.

  It was a minute before Ed realized she was talking to him. “Uh... How about toward the rockets? Can you fly a few kilometers north of Highway Forty, and keep those floaters in sight?”

  “I can do that, yes. But I thought you might want to go a bit faster than the floaters. That’s the whole advantage of having an aircraft.”

  “Yes, of course. Why don’t you take it pretty fast to Needles and then slow down where we can get a good look.”

  “As you wish, sir.”

  Ed felt the craft’s acceleration push him back in his seat, just like in a new high powered floater, except that it kept on accelerating until the ground below sped under them in a blur.

  Shortly, the veeto craft was circling the huge rocket fleet. The rockets were spectacular from ground level, but here at several hundred meters in the air, the sight was humbling. They were flying at an altitude no more than half the height of the rockets.

  Lane gawked as pilot Searles guided the veeto through the tall rockets. “My God! How many aliens must there be?”

  “It’s hard to say,” said Ed, “but I think there must be millions—just at this landing site. There are probably as many at all the other sites, too.”

  Then Searles noticed the fallen ships. “It appears there’s been a major accident. A lot of the rockets have fallen over.”

  “That was no accident,” said Ed. “I did that on purpose.”

  Searles took that without comment but Lane wondered, “Is that wise, Ed? Without their ships, they’ll not ever be able to leave.”

  “Nobody ever said the aliens planned to leave,” said Marilee. “AABC has always maintained that we should make them welcome.”

  “What’s that on the ground?” asked Searles, suddenly.

  “What? I don’t see anything,” said Ed.

  “The discoloration. The ground is a lot darker around those space ships that are fallen.”

  “Rocket fuel! We’d better get away from here fast! The veeto exhaust could ignite the fumes!” said Ed.

  “Okay!” Searles turned the veeto sharply and sped away through the shortest path out of the rocket fleet. “Now where?”

  “North. Maybe northeast a bit. Can you swing it around some where we can look over a wider area?” Then Ed turned to Marilee. “You keep in contact with Baines on the comphone. Don’t let him get too close to the fleet, with all that fuel on the ground.”

  Searles flew the aircraft in a pattern of large arcs that went from due east to due north of the rocket fleet. When they were about 100 kilometers north of the alien fleet, they passed over a small town along State Road 936. At first it looked deserted, but then Marilee saw something. “Look! All around that apartment building—I think I see globes!”

  Ed peered where she pointed. There were indeed alien globes all around the building, almost like shrubbery. Then he saw many more around some of the houses that were nearby. “Can you slow down and take it lower? I’d like to have a look down there.”

  Searles slowed the veeto to a seeming crawl, then had to turn the jets almost vertical to keep it in the air. The whining sound immediately filled the cabinet again. “Just wave if you’d like to go back up or pick up speed, sir,” yelled pilot Searles. Ed nodded. “Or if you’d like to talk, just press the blue button in front of you.”

  “What does that do?” asked Ed. Then he realized nobody had been able to hear what he said. He pushed the button and yelled, “What does this do?” Everyone jumped when Ed yelled, and then he noticed that the sound had gone away.

  “It’s noise cancellation,” said Searles. “It takes a lot of energy, so it only stays on for a few seconds. You’ll have to activate it about every time you speak, but you shouldn’t use it very much.”

  Sure enough, the sound came back almost immediately.

  Marilee was staring at the globes below. After a while she pushed the noise cancellation button and said, “There’s something different here, Ed. All these globes are parked. They’re resting on the ground, with no visible rocket flame.”

  “That’s right,” said Lane. “But all those on the outer perimeter are operating.”

  “I’ll bet those are guards,” said Ed. “Probably all these others are parked, and the aliens have gone inside the buildings.”

  “What are they doing in there?” asked Searles.

  Then the noise came back and Ed had to push the button again. “You don’t really want to know.”

  “What are we going to do?” asked Marilee.

  “I’m not real sure,” said Ed, “but I think we should land the plane and check this out a little further.”

  “I can land in that opening,” said Searles, looking back at Ed, who nodded in agreement.

  When she had landed the craft, Ed said, “I’m taking Lt. Sharp with me. You and Lane ought to stay here and keep the engines running.” Turning to Marilee, he asked, “You still have that laser gun, don’t you?”

  “Right here. I wouldn’t go anywhere without it.”

  Ed and Marilee stepped outside the veeto and looked around. The houses here were much like anywhere else in California, from medium to slightly large and painted in many different soft shades. Lawns were all neatly trimmed and low repeller rails lined the residential streets. Playground equipment was arranged around the outer part of the neat little park where they had landed. One could picture children playing on the swings and teeter-totters, and even playing baseball here, if the veeto craft had not landed right atop the pitcher’s mound. But this town was eerily silent.

  Then it struck Ed that the globes seemed almost a natural part of this picture! The shiny metallic globes were lined up around some of the houses like shrubbery, almost artistically. Ed motioned to M
arilee who followed him toward the nearest house where there were alien craft. “Be prepared,” he said. “What we find here may be ghastly.”

  As they came near to the front yard of the first house, Marilee suddenly covered her ears with her hands. “Oh! Oh my, but that hurts!”

  “What? What hurts?” Then Ed remembered that Marilee had heard a strange high-pitched noise around the alien before, when he could not. He looked around behind them and saw three aliens approaching, in their rippling, sloshing manner. Ed gagged. “The sound may bother you but it’s the smell that gets me!”

  “Eww! That, too!” said Marilee.

  They watched as the aliens approached. The way they traveled across the ground made Ed wonder how they would get past the repeller rail. It was only about 40 centimeters high but the aliens never lost contact with the ground as they sloshed and wiggled along. Then one alien came in contact with the rail. It stopped for a moment before the gelatinous goo began to flow from an opening near the alien’s base. The goo poured out into one big quivering mass, part of which oozed under the rail. Then the thin skeletal part of the alien bounded over the rail, at first completely away from the blob, which had gone under the rail, but then it inched its way back until it touched. As they watched, the alien completely absorbed the mass until it had filled out to its former size. Before it had finished its arduous method of crossing the rail, the other two aliens had reached the fence and started the process.

  Marilee still had her hands over her ears, but she watched wide-eyed as the aliens crossed the rail. “If you ever want to slow them down, I think I know how now.”

  Then the aliens were within 50 meters of them. “From now on, the most important army-issue equipment is ear plugs!” she said.

  “Nope! No way!” said Ed in a nasal twang because he held his nose. “It has to be nose plugs!”

  “Yeah. Definitely nose plugs!” said Marilee.

  “Did you notice that when we aren’t talking, the aliens seem to come straight toward us, but when we speak they wander around like they’re lost?”

  “That’s right!”

  “Let’s try something. Let’s go over there by the walk and keep talking for a while. See if they can find us.”

  “Okay,” said Marilee. “But talk about what? I can never think of anything to say when I try to.”

  “Anything. Talk about Arlene Sisk. Or recite the alphabet or count or something.”

  “Okay. A is for Apple. B is for balloon. C is for cat. D is for...”

  “That’s enough already! They’re already confused. Now let’s be very quiet.”

  While Ed and Marilee were talking, the aliens had gone off in different directions. But when they were silent, the aliens began to converge on them again. “The sound you hear is sonar,” said Ed. “They can’t see! They navigate like bats!”

  “But if they use sound to see, how do they talk? How do they communicate with each other?”

  “That’s a good question. Maybe they both see and communicate with sound.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Marilee. Otherwise, they would always confuse each other when they talk.”

  “What really gets me is that they spoke English when they were still in space. So why do they seem unable to communicate now?”

  Marilee touched Ed’s shoulder and pointed behind him. “There are more of them now, and they don’t all seem confused.”

  Ed looked around and saw that it was true. Perhaps three dozen aliens had converged and now all of them, including the first three, seemed to know exactly where Ed and Marilee stood.

  “Oh!” said Marilee. “What are they going to do? What are we going to do?”

  “I don’t know, on either count. Maybe we’re going to make contact now, but I don’t like being surrounded. Keep your weapon ready.”

  Aliens soon surrounded the frightened AABC agents. Ed estimated 35 to 40 aliens stood about a meter apart in a perfect circle. There was no way out, but at least, the aliens didn’t seem to be coming any closer.

  “I wish we’d waited for Captain Baines and the patrol,” said Marilee. “With some help, we’d have a chance.”

  “But maybe this is our chance,” said Ed. “Maybe this time they came to talk.” Ed started walking toward the aliens and held up his hands. “Greetings, Visitors. I am Ed Halloran, representative of the government of the United States of America on whose portion of the Earth’s surface you have landed. I must speak with your leader.”

  The alien directly in front of Ed quivered slightly. Then a thin arm with three fingers came slowly out of slits in either side of the alien’s body. One thin arm extended toward Ed as if to offer a handshake.

  “No, I’m sorry I can’t take your hand,” said Ed. “But we still come to you in peace and desire to speak with your leader. Are you the leader?”

  Then all the aliens extended skeletony arms toward them and began to tighten the circle around them, moving much faster than Ed had ever seen them move before. Ed turned completely around. The aliens were closing in and more were coming from two directions. Then he heard a rapid zipping sound and saw flashes of light. He spun and saw that Marilee had shot several aliens with the laser gun. About six or eight of them lay on the grass, with their body substances running out and little trails of smoke rising into the sky.

  “This way!” she yelled. Marilee ran toward the new opening and leaped over the dead or dying aliens.

  Ed followed without hesitation. But when he tried to jump over the aliens’ bodies, his elderly body couldn’t quite make it. One foot hit at the edge of the globby substance that was spreading across the ground, and the foot slipped out from under him, dropping him on his backside into the goo. He could almost have suffocated from the smell just then, and possibly would have if Marilee hadn’t run back to grab his hand and pull him up and away. “Hurry!” she screamed, as she tugged at his arm.”

  “You should have gone on!” he said. But now he was up, and apparently not suffering serious injury, although he wasn’t moving very well.

  A line of aliens blocked them from going back to the veeto plane, and the remaining aliens that had surrounded them were now following, not very fast but very certainly after them.

  “Come this way now,” yelled Marilee as she tugged him in a different direction.

  “I am not up to this. You go back without me! You could circle around and make it back to the plane!”

  “Shut up and hurry!” Marilee was half dragging him along as they went between two houses, both of which were lined outside with the alien globes.

  Then they both saw it at the same instant. An alien had a dead human body partially wrapped in folds of its skin. Part of the body was already reduced to bone, and it was obvious the alien was devouring it.

  “Oh my God!” cried Marilee. “That vile loathsome creature!” She shot the alien with her laser gun, reducing it to a putrid puddle. Then she shot two more that appeared around the corner of the house.

  “Come on,” said Ed. “You can’t shoot all of them, and it probably doesn’t help to shoot any of them anyway.”

  She looked as if she didn’t agree with him, that she wanted to kill any of them she could find.

  Then they heard the sound of the veeto plane and saw it rising into the sky. As soon as it was up about 30 meters, it flew directly over them slowly. The plane tipped it wings so that they could see into the cockpit, and Ed saw pilot Searles waving and pointing. “She wants us to go that way,” said Ed, and now he was dragging Marilee by the arm. The veeto plane was landing over in the next street. There were no aliens near it, but there were some down the street, and several aliens had followed them between the houses, moving surprisingly fast for the sloshing way they had to travel.

  The door of the craft was open when they reached it, and Lane quickly pulled them up and inside. They hardly had closed the door and were not in their seats yet when the veeto was back in the air.

  “I thought we were going to lose you back there,” said
Lane. Then he shuddered and made a face. “Sheeoo! I almost wish we had!”

  17

  Oct. 12, 2029

  Headline: ANOTHER SPACE MESSAGE RECEIVED! MAYBE

  Dateline?Washington, D.C.

  Lawrence Jantzen, Undersecretary of State in the Rogers administration and chairman of the Extra-Terrestrial Communications Commission (ETCC), announced a change in the format of messages received at the Arecibo, P.R. Institute for Astronomical Observation. According to Jantzen, the group of scientists he has assembled to evaluate the signals believe this change is in response to messages transmitted back to space from Arecibo starting almost four years ago. Since then, the Arecibo station has transmitted messages daily. Jantzen cautioned that no one is yet able to decode the transmissions, which seem to be in a distinct language that is different from any on Earth.

  Evan Saxton, who is a member of ETCC and holds an assistant professorship in mathematics at Bennett University, elaborated on the history of space communications and the commission on which he serves. According to Saxton, the first signals were received from space in 2011 but they were then classified as an unusual form of radio noise. Saxton said that scientists later began to find repetitions and some other definite characteristics that made them believe they may have come across an alien language coming from space, although it wasn’t clear if that was a message being sent to us, or was just randomly received by us. However, in 2016 a startling discovery was made at Bennett University when it was learned that the entire complex message started over in an exact repetition every 47 hours and 33 minutes. Virtually all scientists were then convinced that the transmissions were indeed meant to establish contact with us. Then later Bennett University, in conjunction with the institute at Arecibo, transmitted back an exact recording of the message as it had been received, in order to signal to them that we had received it, even though we hadn’t interpreted a bit of it. Four and a half years later, in late 2025, the message coming back from space abruptly changed. The second message was only three hours and five minutes long, but it was comprised of all the same elements present in the longer message initially received. Saxton says scientists recognized that change as a response to our transmission, and believe that this constituted the first two?way communication through space between two civilizations. The latest message is believed to be just over seven hours long, although it will be some time before the entire message can be recorded and analyzed because only a short segment can be received while the antenna at Arecibo is in the proper position.

  According to Saxton, the first message received led to the formation of the Extra-Terrestrial Communications Commission that has coordinated the space communication effort. Lawrence Jantzen organized ETCC at President Kermit Rogers’ direction for the purpose of establishing ongoing communication with the distant civilization. Jantzen noted this was a long-term goal that would require support from future administrations as well as the president. However, he says that President Rogers believes this program, much like the nation’s first lunar travel program, deserves bipartisan support, even though some future president may get credit for the breakthroughs that have come as the result of his administration’s efforts.

  ETCC is comprised of two main subcommittees, both reporting to Chairman Jantzen. Evan Saxton heads the technical subcommittee and Helen Norden leads the group responsible for designing the actual communications that are being transmitted. “The technical aspect of our task is clearly the easiest to achieve,” said Norden. “After all, the technology already exists to send and receive the messages across space. But according to Norden, the larger task—and undeniably the most important—is the composition of the messages that we send. It is ETCC’s belief—and we are virtually unanimous in this—that we must tell them truthfully about ourselves, that we must not be self-serving, and that we must not omit any major facet of human existence. Then in turn, we can expect to be enlightened by them. That is, when we’ve learned to translate their language.”

  When questioned further, Norden said that although there were many linguists employed by her staff, none had managed to break even a small portion of the transmissions. Still, she said the nature of the transmissions had already given them a basic knowledge of the nature of the aliens, and that a profile was being prepared for publication later in the month. “In all actuality, the language will probably first be translated by supercomputers. However, it will be up to my subcommittee to interpret and analyze when that happens,” she said.

  Henry J. Halloran is another member of the commission on the technical subcommittee. Halloran explained that scientists do not yet have an exact fix on the aliens’ location. Because of the relatively long wavelength of the transmissions (compared to visible light), the usual triangulation techniques for establishing distance have insufficient resolution in this case. However, since the antenna at Arecibo has very sharp focus, the direction from our solar system is known with a great degree of accuracy. The problem, he notes, is that there are no detectable stars within many light-years of our solar system in that direction, but the apparent distance is only slightly under two light-years. (A light-year is the distance over which light would travel in a year. This is actually a relatively short distance, astronomically speaking, since the known stars nearest our sun are about four light-years away.) Halloran said that scientists initially believed the aliens’ distance to be two and a fourth light-years since the first response took four and a half years. However, the next response took just under four years, so astronomers have decided that the actual distance is slightly less than two light years, and the original discrepancy was likely due to the aliens taking some considerable time to develop their response to our transmission. He did caution that would mean the aliens could be somewhat nearer than that, if they had taken even longer to compose this last message.

  Lawrence Jantzen, chairman of ETCC, has promised a comprehensive report on the commission’s findings.

  18

  March 14, 2030

  “We have an exciting new development at ETCC, Mr. President!” Lawrence Jantzen smiled broadly, and then hesitated while he searched for the grand phrases he’d rehearsed for the occasion. “This is an unprecedented breakthrough in human endeavor, an epochal event in the history of the universe! This is...”

  “Jantzen! We’re not on TV,” said President Rogers. “Cut through it and get to the point.”

  “Very well, Mr. President. I will get to the point. We have interpreted that last space message!”

  Rogers settled back in his chair as he thought about Jantzen’s announcement. “I hope you’re not putting me on. If this is anything like the alien psychological profiles that Norden dame keeps coming up with, I’ll deny any connection with it or you. That phony psycho report made asses of all of us, except maybe for Saxon and a couple of his colleagues. Why didn’t you tell me that business was fabricated out of thin air?”

  “Mr. President, I am truly sorry about how that turned out. Of course we all knew that Ms. Norden was very political, as are a couple of others on her subcommittee. But we didn’t expect her to start publishing all those profiles that made aliens out to be exactly what she wanted them to be.”

  “I expected you to be on top of it, Jantzen.”

  “Quite right, sir. I should have been, and I take full responsibility for it. If you wish, I will dismiss Norden immediately.”

  “No. I’m afraid we can’t do that.” Rogers sighed, and leaned his elbows on the huge walnut desk, looking very tired. “Norden has attracted a following. Regardless of her goofy ideas, she has become the darling of the new liberal class. If we got rid of her, I wouldn’t last the rest of my term.”

  Evan Saxon felt ill-at-ease in the Oval Office, even as he considered how weak President Kermit Rogers seemed. The massive desk made the president look small and more comical than powerful. But, Evan mused, this was the president of the greatest nation on Earth. He spoke up anyway. “Mr. President, I think this latest news will counter any ba
d press from Norden’s group.”

  “Yes?” Rogers only then seemed to be aware of Saxon’s presence in the room. “Maybe you’ll tell me what this is all about, since Jantzen won’t get to the point. What did the aliens have to say?”

  “We didn’t exactly interpret anything they said. We still haven’t broken the language,” said Evan. “But what we have is similar to sign language, much like the pictures we’ve transmitted to them.”

  Rogers winced, then waved impatiently. “Yes? Go on.”

  “The last transmission had all he same elements as the first two, but they seemed to be arranged in some different sort of format, with a lot of repetitions in it. Anyway, we suspected it could have been something other than speech patterns so we had the computers looking at it from some different angles. What the computers came up with was a three-dimensional model of space. Or at least our corner of space.”

  “They sent a picture of space?” Rogers’ face took on a worried look again. “How can you have a picture of space?”

  “Not space, exactly,” said Evan. “It’s a three-dimensional raster with all the nearest solar systems held in proper perspective, including our own sun and the nearest star called Alpha Centauri.”

  “Why would they send that, do you think?”

  “To show us where they are, obviously. There is an object in the model—a blip, you might say—which undoubtedly marks their position relative to the astronomical bodies. It’s just under two light-years away, which is much nearer than Alpha Centauri at 4.2 and it’s about 5 degrees south-southeast as you would view it from the sky. We didn’t know there was anything in that part of space until now, and we still can’t see it, even with the most powerful telescopes.”

  “That would make you think there might be quite a lot of real estate out there we haven’t found yet, wouldn’t it?” asked Rogers.

  “Absolutely. And there are new discoveries being made almost every day. Some of it is important and some of it is just odd chunks of rock and ice, which is important too, in a way.”

  “So what do you think it means to us? What should we do about it?” asked the president.

  “It means opportunity, Mr. President!” Jantzen stood up to regain his control of the meeting. “If we play this right, we can knock the props out from under the Democrats. True two-way communication with aliens is the most astounding news in years! And we did it ourselves, under the leadership of your administration. And I’ll tell you something else, sir: since the technical subcommittee did this, it also gives us the perfect opportunity to get Norden and Washington out of our hair. I’ll disband that subcommittee immediately!”

  “You’ll do nothing of the sort,” said Rogers. “Just try to keep her noise level down. Anything more will cost us in the liberal wing of congress, Democrats and Republicans alike.”

  “Does that mean I still have to keep Norden updated on everything we do?” asked Saxon.

  “I’m afraid so. But use your best judgment in what you tell her, so you don’t encourage any more psycho-babble profiles.”

  “I quite understand, sir.”