“I’ll keep that in mind. But it doesn’t matter who your real parents are. What matters is why you were brought here.”
“The fact that they think I know how to stop them.”
“Because you do, somehow,” Raiff told him. “But you’re getting ahead of yourself. We need to go back to why this and other planets were seeded.”
Alex rolled his eyes again. “Fine, why were they seeded?”
“Because at a certain time the human race you grew up among would be needed.”
“Needed for what?”
“To provide things our planet could no longer provide for itself. Back there civilization developed as a single aggregate—no cultural or ethnic disparity. Everyone pretty much the same because of the placement of our landmasses in proportion to our oceans. There, like here, a caste system developed in our ancient times. The difference is we never progressed beyond that two-class system, those who have and those who do not.”
“Owners and workers.”
“Close enough,” Raiff affirmed.
“And a recipe for disaster,” Alex said, recalling the lessons learned from history. Thanks to Sam.
Now Raiff started swinging too, holding Alex’s rhythm. “How so? Tell me why.”
“Well, even a dimwit who needs a tutor like me knows that our history is full of revolutions where the workers, those who see themselves as oppressed, rise up and overthrow the owners.”
“Our world anticipated that. Steps were taken.”
“What kind of steps?”
“Population control, mostly via sterilization. Control the masses by keeping their numbers from overwhelming the ruling class. Makes revolution unthinkable and escape much more preferable.”
Alex nodded, starting to get it. “Escape to Earth, right? That’s what brought you and others here. Refugees.”
“Me and plenty of others, yes. Even though we knew they’d be coming eventually. But not for me, not even for you, necessarily.”
“Who, then?”
“Everyone else.”
Alex felt his hair bouncing about as he swung right next to Raiff. It made him remember his father telling him he needed a haircut, giving him ten dollars to get one when it cost almost five times that in the city.
“You’ve lost me,” he told Raiff, and ground his heels into the dirt to stop his swing.
Raiff stopped alongside him. “We had a haves-and-have-nots problem in our world too, but a different one than yours. Thanks to the measures that we enacted ourselves—at least the haves did—we didn’t have enough have-nots to power our civilization. They’d essentially been bred out of existence. But there were these several planets we’d seeded in order to claim their resources or turn their worlds into foreign outposts. Planets like yours packed with have-nots.”
“Oh, man,” Alex managed to say, shaking his head.
“That’s what all this is about, why your planet was seeded in the first place,” Raiff told him, his breathing gone shallow between his words. “To create a crop of slaves for the taking.”
86
FIFTH COLUMN
“AND RESOURCES AS WELL,” Raiff said, when Alex finally looked at him again from his swing.
“Resources?”
“Finite in any world. No matter how infinite knowledge may be, the growth, progress, and very existence of any race is limited to the resources they’re able to mine around them. And we vastly exceeded those limitations to the point where the survival of our species was threatened. Air, water—everything.”
“So Earth isn’t just a breeding ground for slaves, it was also a great big environmental bank where your world could withdraw anything and everything it wanted.”
“My world, Alex, but not my doing. The doing of the ruling class that owns and controls everything, and what you were sent here to stop,” Raiff continued. “That’s why it was so vital eighteen years ago that we get you through the tunnel with whatever it is you know.”
“But I don’t know anything. I’d tell you if I did, Raiff.”
“You do—you just don’t realize it.”
“I draw things sometimes,” Alex said softly. “I have this sketchbook. Never shown it to anybody, not even my parents.” Or Sam, Alex almost added.
“What kind of things?”
“Stuff that doesn’t make any sense, stuff that just pops into my head.”
“Machines?”
“And buildings,” Alex added. “Structures so strange I can’t begin to describe them.”
“Sounds like the world I came from, both of us came from.”
“Except you remember it. This, everything about us, this is all I know. All I’ve ever known and ever want to know.”
“I need to see these pictures.”
“Why?”
“Because they may hold the clue as to this knowledge you have but don’t realize you’ve got. They may form some kind of pattern or message, like the pieces of a puzzle. We just have to put them all together.”
“I told you, they don’t make any sense.”
“Maybe not to you. But they must be in your head for a reason.”
“Like what?” Alex persisted. “Tell me more about this thing I’m supposed to know. What’s coming when that wormhole opens again?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“Doesn’t seem like I’ve got much choice right now, does it?”
Raiff nodded grudgingly, turning to see if Sam was anywhere about. “Our world’s a lot like this one, only millions of years more advanced … and older. Cursed by those declining resources with a predicament exacerbated by a longtime disregard for the environment and taking the planet for granted. Sound familiar?”
“I don’t know what ‘exacerbated’ means.”
“Made worse or more prominent.”
“How do you know so much shit?”
“I read a lot. For eighteen years now.”
“While you’ve been protecting me, even though you have no idea why.”
“I know enough. This isn’t the first world they’ve seeded, only to plunder and enslave.”
“We may not be the pushovers you think we are, Raiff.”
Raiff started to smile, then stopped and started to shake his head, stopping that motion swiftly as well. His expression flattened, all the edges and ridges seeming to melt into a single, processed form.
“Oh, no? You think they come with rockets and ray guns? You think this is like some movie where the world mounts a brave resistance and ultimately triumphs? Maybe until the lights go out and the faucets get turned off and the food supply is contaminated, and all of a sudden the civilized world finds itself losing everything it’s always taken for granted. The forces coming across the space bridge don’t need to kill, only to control. They fight wars that are won before they’re even fought. You can’t beat them because they know every move you’re going to make before you make it.”
“And they know about me.”
“The wild card in all this. I think you’re finally getting the point. You scare them, because they fear you’re the only one capable of stopping them from taking this world. They have the same knowledge I do. And, just like me, they may not know everything but they know enough.”
This time it was Raiff who started swinging a bit, but Alex didn’t join him. “Just not how what you think I know can stop them.”
Raiff braked himself with his feet. “I’m not sure what it is, only that it’s the key to defeating them.”
“Which you couldn’t do up close and personal back home.”
“There was no point in trying. The lucky among us made it over to this world. We’ve been hiding among you for generations.”
“Not so lucky, considering there’s this guy who’s trying to exterminate you.”
“Langston Marsh, and his modern-day Fifth Column, is your problem now too.”
“What’s a Fifth Column?”
“A clandestine group organized toward a singular purpose not in keeping with th
e greater interests of society.” Raiff started to chuckle, then stopped. “I can see why you need a tutor.”
“Hey, lay off me. I’m your only hope, remember.”
“You might be this world’s only hope.”
Silence settled between them just as Sam approached and handed Raiff back the cell phone he’d lent her. “So what do you want to hear first, the good news or the bad news?”
87
GOOD NEWS AND BAD NEWS
“TURNS OUT DR. DONATI, MY boss at Ames, has been trying to reach me too,” Sam continued.
“Is that the good news or the bad news?” Alex asked her.
“Both, I guess. He had to call me back because he said his regular line wasn’t secure.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“He knows what’s happening,” Raiff concluded, “doesn’t he?”
“Some, not everything. He was trying to reach me about a pattern of events I found, a pattern that mimics another from eighteen years ago when Laboratory Z was destroyed.”
“The wormhole,” Raiff said.
“Yes. Donati thinks he can figure out where it’s going to open this time.”
Alex looked toward Raiff. “So it’s closed now and has been for eighteen years. I get that. What I don’t get is where the androids, cyborg soldiers, are coming from. You said they were being manufactured here, on this planet. So where?”
“If I knew that, I would’ve already destroyed them.”
“So who’s building them?”
“I’m not sure. But the better question was your first one: where are they being built, and the answer is probably lots and lots of locations scattered throughout the world.”
“Because these cyborgs are going to be the ones doing the heavy lifting when doomsday kicks in, right?” Alex asked.
“I apologize for the crack about you needing a tutor,” Raiff said, smiling thinly.
Sam kicked at some pebbles collected on the ground. “So if we can figure out how to shut them off, doomsday gets postponed, maybe for good.”
“Maybe that’s what they think I know,” Alex said to Raiff. “How to turn all these robots off.”
“Cyborgs,” Sam corrected. “Androids.”
“Whatever.”
“There’s a difference.”
“Explain it to me again after we find the switch. We need to figure out what it is I’m supposed to know, so we can stop them in their tracks,” Alex said to Raiff again.
“We need those drawings, Dancer.”
“There’s something else we need,” Alex told him. “My CAT scan results. My doctor saw something before they killed him, a shadow, he called it. Now we need to see it too.”
Sam studied Alex’s wrist, then made a grab for it.
“Hey!” he protested, pulling away.
Not to be outdone, she latched onto his forearm and pulled it toward her. “You’re still wearing your hospital bracelet.”
“I forgot all about it.”
“Good thing.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s got your patient ID number on it,” Raiff realized.
“And that’s what the hospital will file all your test results under,” Sam told him.
“Meaning—” Alex began.
“Yeah,” Sam said, reading his mind. “I’ve done some volunteer work at CPMC. I know the layout.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Only for the last day or so.”
“What about those drawings, Dancer?” Raiff reminded him.
“It’s Alex. Alex.”
“‘We know what we are, but not what we may be.’”
“That’s Shakespeare,” Sam noted.
“Hamlet, specifically.”
“I know who I am, Raiff,” Alex insisted.
“Do you?” Raiff asked him, expression gone flat again. “Do you really?”
“By the way,” Sam interjected, squirming a bit, “no, I couldn’t find a bathroom. So, if the two of you don’t mind, could we get moving?”
88
WILDER
LANGSTON MARSH EASED AHEAD of Rathman and deposited a five-dollar bill in the swaying pot next to the sign reading, DEPOSIT A DOLLAR AND ASK THE PROFESSOR A QUESTION.
“I figured I’d pay for a few extra up front,” Marsh told the figure seated on the grass-stained blanket, who reminded him of Kris Kringle, Santa Claus himself. The grass was damp with a mist that had washed in over the water and then washed out just as quickly. But his shoes still left their mark in the form of impressions across the faded fabric, which dried quickly in the brief reemerged late-afternoon sun. He’d skirted the signs reading, THEY WALK AMONG US, TRUST NO ONE, THE WAR IS COMING, and ALIENS GO HOME!, wondering if the scent of lacquer was the product of his imagination or the result of a fresh coat tracing the original letters.
Dr. Orson Wilder cocked his gaze casually from the pot to Marsh and smoothed the tangled hair from his face. “Answers are free for my friends.”
“And is that what I am, Professor, your friend?”
“We share the same goals, so I’d say close enough.”
“I’d still prefer to pay.”
“You failed. You wouldn’t be here if you’d managed to take the boy into custody, would you?”
“Should I be charging you for the answer too, Professor?”
“A waste of your money, since I already know it.”
“An unexpected development was to blame. No matter. We’ll have the boy before long.” Marsh glanced toward the five-dollar bill bent into the pot. “So I might as well get my money’s worth.”
“Okay,” Wilder said, squinting up at Marsh through the last of the day’s sunlight, which made him look spectral, almost as if he were glowing. “First question.”
“Tell me about the boy.”
“I already did. When I called in the report. I did my part.” Wilder’s eyes tried to hold Marsh’s gaze longer and failed. “Don’t make me regret that.”
“As you’ve been regretting for any number of years now?”
“We make strange bedfellows, don’t we, Marsh?”
“Strange bedfellows with a common purpose: forestalling an alien invasion, the kind of invasion your work here twenty years ago proved was possible. The mere proof of their existence was enough for me.” He stopped long enough to fasten onto Wilder’s stare until the old man looked away again. “Your work validated my entire life’s purpose. Now tell me about the boy,” Marsh repeated.
“That’s not a question.”
“What did the boy tell you?”
“That he was an alien. That his mother rescued him from Laboratory Z just before its destruction. That he’s being chased by other aliens, or some kind of robots, cyborgs, they’ve managed to manufacture.”
“And you believed him?”
“I believed he believed what he was saying.”
“And what did you tell him?”
“The truth.”
“Why?”
“Because he deserved it. And that counts as a question. Leaves you one left.”
Marsh fished through his pocket, like a man unused to carrying cash, and managed to emerge with a twenty-dollar bill this time, placing it atop the five. “You could have told me that on the phone.”
“The boy’s not your problem.”
Marsh glanced toward Rathman, who was hovering like a statue at the edge of the blanket, so big he blocked a measure of the sunlight from this angle. “I’ll be the judge of that, Professor.”
“What’s coming is your problem.”
“And what’s coming?”
“They are. Or, should I say, they’re coming back.”
“And you know this how?” Then, when Wilder failed to respond, “I still have nineteen answers left.”
“This boy’s the key. I don’t know how but I know that much. See, I saved you a question.”
“He’s an alien, like all the others,” Marsh said, stiffening.
“He’s an alien, but not
hing like the others, the ones you’ve exterminated.” Wilder’s expression changed, almost pleading now. “I came to you because I believed in your cause, believed my experiments had contributed to the problem you were determined to solve.”
“They killed my father, Professor. There’s no place for them in our world.”
“You’re missing the point, Marsh.”
“And what’s that?”
“Eighteen left now. And the point you’re missing is that maybe we had things wrong.”
“Wrong?”
“Seventeen. Since you asked, I think this kid is some kind of refugee, or was brought here by refugees.”
“I didn’t ask that.”
“Then this answer is for free. I’m afraid the aliens your teams have been tracking are refugees too and that our real problem is not them so much as who they came here to flee.”
“Really?”
“I’ll give you that one for free too. And, yes, because after meeting this boy it’s the only thing that makes sense.” Wilder stopped and gave his money pot a shove to start it swaying again. “You said you investigated what happened at his house. What did you conclude?”
“That he killed his parents after they learned the truth about him. Same thing with his doctor at the hospital. He couldn’t risk exposure. And you owe me a dollar now.”
“The boy said it was these cyborgs who killed his parents, them and some kind of holographic figure.”
“You’ve been out in the sun for too long, Professor. I believe your brain may be roasting.”
“How many men have you got?”
“With me?”
“In total.”
“Plenty,” Marsh said, thinking of the special-ops veterans Rathman was bringing in to rendezvous here in the San Francisco area.
“You better hope so, because if I’m right you’re going to need every one of them.”
“What I need is to find this boy.”
With that, Marsh flashed a nod to Rathman, who moved closer to the seated Wilder, swallowing the old, bearded man in his shadow.
“Tell me how I can find the boy, Professor.”
“That’s not a question.”
“No, it’s an order.”
“You aren’t listening to what I’ve been saying.”
“Because you haven’t been saying what I need to hear.”