“OK, Mr Todd, in your own time then.”
So Trev recounted once again how his brother had been in contact with him regarding a friend of his, namely Bruce, who was coming over to the States on holiday and who might or might not turn up on his doorstep. He then went over how many times Sue had come to dine. Not many, Trev admitted to himself, but she had certainly made an impression on him, even when he realised she was pregnant.
“Yes, that is an interesting subject,” Agent Duke said at one point.
“There’s no doubt in my mind Bruce is the father,” Trev said. “His mother remarked on it more than once when she was here, how the baby was the spitting image of Bruce himself at the same age.”
“So it was clear to you they had met before, as unlikely as that might seem?”
Trev looked thoughtful and cast his mind back to the day Sue had turned up in the bar with the baby. She had not expected to find Bruce there at all. However, Bruce had made it pretty clear when she turned up that he knew Sue and believed the baby was his, as well, though they didn’t have any idea how and where they had met. Somehow.
“I have no fucken idea what’s going on here,” Trev reflected. “But I have no doubt that Bruce is the father,” he repeated.
“He certainly is,” Sue interjected. “I told you at the time we didn’t know we had met before on Skid. When they let us go, the Skidians applied some form of memory wipe Myfair later reversed when he took us back to Skid for the second time,” Sue reminded Agent Duke. The comment just added to the surrealism to the situation. Memory wipe? Skid?
What the hell was this? Trev wondered for a moment if someone had drugged him, slipped some hallucinogen into his drink for a laugh. He had felt that way when he had imagined the President in his bar – it had never occurred to him the experience might have been real.
“What’s a memory wipe?” he asked out loud, not clear with himself if he really wanted an answer. After he and Sue had met in the bar, Bruce had disappeared for a few days then returned without explanation, was his only recollection of the events the agents and Sue were referring to.
“The Skidians can tamper with your mind, they can make you forget things then replace the memories if they need to.”
“Now, Mrs Harwood, I warned you …”
“What are Skidians?” Trev asked, interrupting Agent Duke’s rebuke. He was now totally confused yet intrigued at the same time.
For some reason Trev sensed Duke had lost some control over the situation. While Duke seemed to be in charge, it appeared Sue was not without some influence of her own. That in itself was a revelation because as far as he knew, Sue had been a travel agent of some kind when they had first met.
“Bruce and I were captured by aliens,” Sue continued flippantly, challenging him to disagree, oblivious to Duke’s attempt to keep her under control. “And they spirited us off to their home planet. Myfair and Leaf come from a planet called Skid.”
“What sort of name for a planet is that?” Trev chortled disbelievingly.
“Myfair brought us back after our second trip to the planet then …”
“You’ve been there twice?” Trev interrupted, incredulous.
“Yes, at least twice I know of,” Sue nodded. Trev stared at Agent Duke, daring him to challenge her. Some of this information was obviously new to him as well. “And somehow, I’m not sure of all the details, Bruce is now in complete control of the space patrol ship and the American Government wants access to it and the technology it represents.”
“For the benefit of all mankind,” Duke added solemnly, sounding like someone had ordered him to repeat the standard party-line message.
“Bloody hell!” Trev was at a bit of a loss and had no idea how to respond so he just laughed. It was all so improbable he had to pinch himself to make sure he was awake and even then he was not entirely convinced. “You have got to be joking,” he said, between gusts of laughter. “You expect me to believe that?” He stood and paced around the room.
Duke eyed him up nervously. He was not sure about Todd. For all he knew, he could be one of the aliens and he knew they were not to be trifled with. If half of Sue Harwood’s accounts were to be believed, then it explained a few things.
“So what is it exactly you want from me?”
“There are a few things. We want to corroborate Mrs Harwood’s story, which to some extent you already have, and no doubt there are other insights you can offer. We also want to confirm that President Mitchell was involved and has had some contact with the Skidians, at least the Skidian known as Myfair, and of course Mr and Mrs Harwood.”
“And if I don’t want to cooperate?” Trev asked almost mischievously because he detected Agent Duke was still not entirely sure who he was dealing with in Trev. There was slight hint of apprehension in his voice and mannerisms.
“We were hoping it won’t come to that, Mr Todd.”
“Very well, let’s get this over and done with. I have a business to run.”
“Oh, didn’t we tell you, Mr Todd, your bar has just burnt to the ground. The fire was extinguished quickly by the fire department but not before the owner was killed trying to put the fire out. You, Mr Todd.”
“You what?”
“You’re a non-person. Your next of kin are being informed as we speak,” Agent Duke told him like a predator sizing up his next meal.
“So where were we? Seeing as you have nowhere special to go at the moment? If your answers are satisfactory you might make a Lazarus-like reappearance. If not, you will probably meet an unfortunate end in a federal facility.”
Trev gulped and sat down.
“I told you so,” Sue reminded him. “The stakes are really high and these guys aren’t to be trusted. Best you tell them everything you know and maybe they’ll let you go when the news finally gets out about the Skidians. The federal government has been trying to keep a lid on the news, this is all tied up with the story about the large asteroid heading this way – and there’s much more to that story than has been released to the media!” she added emphatically.
“What news?” Agent Dodd and Trev asked simultaneously. As far as they were concerned Earth had dodged some kind of bullet in terms of the asteroid headed their way. By all accounts it was going to clear Earth by a considerable distance. Everyone knew one day a large asteroid would hit the planet or at least would be aimed directly at it. By then the technology would exist to destroy or deflect it, Trev hoped. Unbeknownst to him, of course, the capability already existed. Though, that capability was not in human hands.
Some of the wind seemed to have gone out of Duke’s sails as he contemplated the possibility the asteroid might not after all pass them by.
Suddenly, and perhaps understandably so, all he wanted to do was leave this quasi-interrogation and go home to his family. He cared nothing about alleged aliens and whether or not they had met with the President. He had not for the moment joined all the dots regarding the wider implications of why he was conducting the current interrogation.
“You don’t need to worry too much, gentlemen. I can just about guarantee the asteroid won’t hit the planet,” Sue said, trying to put them all at ease.
“How do you know so much?” Agent Duke asked suspiciously, ignoring his superior on the other end of his earpiece.
“Because I was there when the Skidian spaceship and its controlling artificial intelligence put some rockets on the asteroid to manoeuvre it out of the way of Earth.”
“So it’s all true then?” Agent Duke asked. Until now there had been a fair degree of scepticism in his mind over the existence of the aliens and the spaceship. He had had no direct contact with the aliens or the Harwoods until now. He had only been involved in the process since the announcement there had been some terrorist activity in Portland and outside Las Vegas and that both incidents were connected in some way.
“And the President? He is involved somehow?”
“Yes he is, and for what it’s worth, I’m glad I never voted fo
r the useless old prick,” Sue added venomously. “He almost got us killed with his little adventures, and I don’t in the least bit feel sorry for him.”
“What do you mean?” asked Duke.
“Well, the man is unstable, for one thing, and he tried to start a war. Actually it was worse, he supported someone who almost successfully committed a complete genocide because he wanted power – and power over me and more particularly Bruce. Who, by the way,” she paused for a moment to catch her breath, “is also a bastard. Even though he has done me wrong and left me, he always tried to do what he thought was the right thing for the Skidians, and in hindsight he was mostly right.”
Trev almost felt superfluous. However, Agent Duke turned to him a few moments later and asked, “Is any of this true?”
“I’m buggered if I know really,” Trev replied. “I have a clear recollection of someone I now know to be Myfair, who you’re telling me is actually an alien, sitting in my bar five or six months ago with the President, waiting for Bruce to turn up. That’s about all I know,” he explained. “My memory of this is a bit murky, to be honest. One minute Bruce was there, the next he wasn’t. I don’t know why I thought it at the time but it didn’t seem all that unusual, then he returned as if nothing had happened, and the rest is history. And Myfair and his lady friend turned up as well. I actually thought I’d dreamt the whole thing up as I had had a bit to drink at the time,” he lied.
“So why are we here?” Trev asked Sue. “What happened between you and Bruce?”
“It’s a long story, Trev, and I’m not sure I understand it all myself. On top of all the drama around getting married and stuff, we had this issue with the asteroid and the space patrol ship, and now I see Bruce was trying to do the right thing but I thought I knew better.” She paused thoughtfully. “Maybe I should have listened to him – maybe we’d still be together and I wouldn’t be sitting here with you in this room.”
“Thanks very much!” Trev muttered.
Sue took another look at him. He didn’t look too happy, understandably – he was now a non-person with no prospects. The government could lock him up forever and nobody would ever know. The future might not be all that flash for her either, she realised.
Trev, for someone contemplating the end of his world, actually looked quite handsome. Sue let the thought waft through her mind as she watched Agent Duke nod his head several times while he received instructions.
“Yessir,” he said as he stood. “OK, you two, we have a new safe house to hold you for a few days until they …” even Agent Duke was not sure who ‘they’ were, only that he was taking direct orders from the highest echelons of government, “… until they decide your future.”
Twelve
In the blink of an eye the ship was back in orbit around Earth, although immediately Bruce felt something was not quite right; all was not as it should be with the world.
He thought he was having a heart attack and clutched at his chest. Or rather he watched himself – from some position he sensed was overhead of his actual physical self – clutch his chest and hear himself say he did not feel right all of a sudden. He caught the panicked expression on Ngaio’s face and watched her mouth form an O of concern.
Then as suddenly as it had begun the sensation passed. Bruce observed himself glance nervously around then shrug his shoulders. He certainly felt okay. But it was like he was having some kind of out-of-body experience. Maybe he had died on an operating table and had been brought back to life, or was having an extraordinarily vivid dream. Neither scenario seemed to make much sense but he didn’t have any better way of explaining how he felt.
Part of him felt completely normal and he was carrying on an unconvincing conversation, even to his own ears, with Ngaio, telling her not to worry. However, and this was the weirdest sensation, at the same time he knew part of him was somewhere else too – outside looking inward, or down actually – and, more intriguingly, he found he was not alone.
He sensed, imagined, other entities were sharing this new space, observing his physical self, and that somehow he was zooming backwards, well upwards. In moments he found he was not staring back down at his physical self, he was outside the ship, which was disappearing from him at a great rate of knots. Before he knew what the hell was going on, before he could catch his breath, the patrol ship, his physical self, Ngaio, the sprog and planet Earth had vanished from sight.
Bruce was unable to see the creatures he sensed he was sharing space with. All he knew was that he was not alone. He tried to contact the MPU, assuming he could still communicate with it via its wormhole thingy. However, the MPU would not respond to any form of communication and remained stubbornly silent. Had the useless, fucken thing gone offline again? Worthless piece of shit.
All the while he understood these entities, these spirits, were trying to set him at ease. They seemed eager to ensure they were not mistaken for anything malevolent, although he was unable to touch them or see them. But at the same time they were crowding him, invading his space, and prodding him mentally, which was a rather weird feeling.
Bruce sensed a test of some kind – he had no idea why he was being tested, though, as he somehow watched images of his physical self-projected directly into his brain – because he could no longer actually see the physical ship, Ngaio or the baby. He began to grasp that he was in two places at once, which was impossible. Somehow his two selves were part of the same consciousness connected by some kind of thread and receiving two sets of sensory input. One of him was with Ngaio and the sprog back on the ship behaving as if nothing was wrong, and one of him was here, wherever that was.
He badly needed a cigarette and a beer, or at least a cup of coffee.
Part of him appeared out of thin air back at the homestead and had to start attempting to placate Rangi Tauroa, who was in the process of giving him an earful as Mrs Pratt relieved him of the baby.
The homestead itself appeared to be full of armed police who seemed fascinated by the two Skidians who, in their own imitable way, were simply ignoring everyone and treating them with complete disdain. Bruce knew while the two Skidians appeared aloof and above the drama playing out around them, in actual fact they were most likely completely baffled by the events.
All the while, that part of him, that bit of his psyche that Bruce had always considered to be the real him – his inner sanctum, the little piece that was his soul, that bit of his mind that held no secrets – told him he was also in another realm entirely.
While his physical self was still being harangued by Rangi, this form was suspended in the middle of nowhere, and he was struggling to get his bearings and retain his sanity.
One moment he was staring down at the spaceship, then somehow he had a bird’s-eye view of whole universe. And still he could see and hear Rangi giving him a thorough bollocking as if he was ten years old again, and watched Ngaio trying to drag her father away as the police looked on with amused expressions.
Impressive, isn’t it? The observation was projected directly into his mind. The only thing Bruce was sure about was that someone or something other than the MPU had decided to have a chat with him. He knew it was another organic mind, or one that once had been. Not a machine, and the difference was startling – the difference between a scratchy AM signal and high-fidelity stereo. In comparison, the MPU’s method of communication with him was a crude affair.
Bruce turned one way then the other. Of course he could see nothing in the inky darkness except a series of bright lights of different intensity, which he assumed were planets and stars. It felt a bit like being in an old shed built with recycled sheets of corrugated iron through which rays of light were projecting and reflecting off grains of dust.
The quality of the conversation was actually better than high-fidelity stereo – it was more like the difference between a conversation on an old copper landline telephone and video chat with holographs and all the bells and whistles thrown in on a high-speed fibre-optic connection. Except this
entity was speaking to him seemed to have no real form at all.
“Where am I?” Bruce asked. He turned around, looking for the presence he felt was with him.
You’re everywhere, and anywhere you want to be, the voice told him reassuringly. You’re also yourself back on Number One Colony, your home planet, the unseen speaker corrected itself when Bruce asked.
“Who are you, then? And what does that actually mean? In language I can understand.”
Whatever you want it to mean, the voice responded rather unhelpfully. Nothing new there.
Bruce decided he was speaking to another remarkably unhelpful alien of some kind, just like Skidians. Probably even some form of Skidian, by the sound of things.
The Transcendent assigned to Bruce was having some difficulty dumbing itself down to his level and hiding its impatience with the slow pace of this fleshie’s thinking. It had no interest in the concerns of the fleshie. It had done all it could to set it at ease, followed all the contact protocols, and as far as it was concerned, that was all it was required of it in the first instance.
Now they had to get down to business. The Transcendent had its own set of requirements it needed to deal with and was not about to waste any more precious time than it had to on this programme, critical though it might be to its own long-term survival prospects. It had drawn the short straw by being allocated to the fleshie for the duration, and there were far more valuable things it thought it could be doing.
“Who are you?” Bruce repeated.
I’m…, the Transcendent had not really been prepared to be questioned by a fleshie. So it was at a complete loss how to explain itself without completely spooking and then overwhelming it with information far beyond its capacity to grasp. The Transcendent was in the process of falling into the trap of underestimating Bruce, even though it and its peers had selected him to do their bidding for the very reason that set him apart from any other fleshie they had had any recent dealings with. This fleshie had an enquiring and determined mind and a clear view of right and wrong.
The Lifeboat Page 28
