Deep Crossing

  I had expected the day before launch to be somber. To my surprise, it became comical. A notable black and blue decorated my left arm just below the shoulder, making long sleeves desirable. My home front was battened down for the long haul. Cleaned out the refrigerator, got rid of perishables that wouldn’t last, and did all the maintenance that needed doing. In the garage, I lovingly set a trickle charger to the Vette’s battery, took care of all the other long term requirements, and covered her over. A shuttle was available to all of us, as needed, for the next two days.

  RJ was waiting in my office with his feet up and coffee in hand. There was a second cup sitting on my desk, steam still rising. We looked at each other and laughed for no reason. I sat and sipped. The mix was perfect.

  “See? This is why I gave you a key.”

  “A sad testimony that you must lock your lair.”

  “Uh-oh. Are you in one of those moods?”

  “Not at all. I found last evening to be somewhat refreshing, actually.”

  “Gentlemen, we’re all civilized men here?”

  “I believe I may have underestimated the tenacity of souls less evolved.”

  “Learned something new about you last night.”

  “Pray tell.”

  “You are not above going after the gang leader when pressed.”

  “I was afraid you’d hurt him.”

  I sipped. It tasted so good it made me wince. “Anyone else in?”

  “Wilson showed up wearing a long-sleeved flight suit, purportedly to hide a big bite mark on his left arm bequeathed him by one of the motorcycle men desperate to make any impression at all.”

  I had to spit out some coffee to laugh.

  “Wilson also has quite a large red spot on his neck. I did not recall any attackers having accomplished that, and despite showing up so late he seems surprisingly refreshed and in a good mood.”

  “Hmm.”

  “I was told he did not require a ride home.”

  “Anyone else in?”

  “There is one thing I need to warn you about.”

  A tap at the door interrupted.

  “This is it,” he whispered.

  Julia Zeller slowly opened the door. She leaned inside and looked back and forth at the two of us. “Did you guys get in a fight at Heidi’s last night?”

  I tried to look like I was searching memory. “No. No, nothing I can recall.”

  She persisted. “RJ, you weren’t in a bar fight with some motorcycle gang?”

  “No, no really. Nothing to speak of.” RJ attempted to appear casual. I have never seen anyone look so guilty.

  “Because if you had, it would mean we went from an off-world police investigation to an on-world police investigation in just a matter of a few days. You know, like it was getting to be a pattern.”

  I tried to reinforce our lame performance. “No, actually we made some new friends last night.”

  “At Heidi’s?”

  I looked at RJ. “We did stop at Heidi’s, didn’t we?”

  “Yes, yes I do recall that. I had a root beer.”

  “Well, I don’t see any black eyes or bruises, so if you two are not being perfectly honest with me, at least I know you must have represented the agency well.”

  RJ tried again to help. “That is always our intention.”

  She gave him a disbelieving glance. “Although Wilson does have a big red spot on his neck.”

  “I believe he got that shaving,” I said, completing our pathetic attempt at cover-up.

  “Well, the police have called here twice. I don’t know how they got this number. You should expect they are going to want to talk to you.”

  I perked up. “If they call again, would you please ask them if we can schedule that for tomorrow afternoon?”

  She gave me a sarcastic half-smile. She paused and looked back over my office. The collar of the blue dress she was wearing seemed to part open more than usual. There was the posture of someone concerned about her figure’s presentation. I suddenly had that feeling of a closed, private door being unexpectedly left slightly open. It caught me off guard. I made an awkward wave and began shuffling items on my desk with no particular goal in mind. She left and closed the door behind her.

  Sometimes the nervous response will turn them off for good. It offers enough doubt that they return to self-evaluation with a dose of insecurity, which makes them cancel out any further daring. But with others it has no effect at all, or they decide the prey is timid enough that they are already in control. Julia was very attractive and very intelligent, but I already had my going away present with someone too special to compromise.

  JR picked up on it immediately. “Uh-oh.”

  “So, there’s talk the Colts may change their offensive coaching staff.”

  “Funny how things can change overnight.”

  “Not gonna happen.”

  “Why not?”

  “They’ll be on the road, and they’d be crazy to lose who they have.”

  The door suddenly pushed open and Terry Costerly stuck his head in. “Did you guys get in a fight at Heidi’s last night?”

  I tried to look surprised. “Why? Did someone say we were in a fight at Heidi’s last night?”

  “Hey, I’m your Test and Flight Director. That’s one step higher than a priest. You can tell me.”

  “There may have been an exchange of ideas at Heidi’s last night.”

  RJ added, “It was all in the spirit of giving.”

  “Well, there’s steak and cake in the break room. You’d better get out there, though. Wilson has seen it.”

  “On our way.”

  Terry began to leave and then paused. “You know they say steak is good for bruising.” He looked at us both for a reaction, waved off, and disappeared out the door.

  On the way back from the break room I realized there had been no sign of Paris Denard. It was too much to hope he would call in sick and stay behind. As I passed by the door to his office I opened it and leaned in. No one home. There were some eight-by-ten photographs half out of a folder on his desk that caught my eye. Feeling slightly guilty, I went in and stood by the desk. The photos were alarming. They were of the stellar drive engines, front, back, underneath, and a few partials of the top side from a portal. I did not touch them. I looked around and left.

  It was a fringe violation of our agreement with the Nasebians. I had not seen him take them. It would be easy for him to claim that as a propulsion engineer he was simply curious about a completely new drive system and wanted to know as much as he could. It was also possible he was collecting information for someone else. I wondered if this could be turned into enough of a violation of the Nasebian contract to expel him from the program. Back in my office, I leaned back in my chair and thought it over.

  On my desk was my own set of eight-by-ten glossies, one for each crewmember with a career summary attached. I looked through them one by one with great affection, and stopped at the photo of Paris Denard. What kind of impression would his prying make on Nasebian dignity? They were tough beings to understand.

  The Nasebians were so far ahead of us in evolution there was no hope of getting to know them. Their life expectancy of two thousand years or more seemed to make their perception of things far too broad for us to empathize. It was only necessity that finally elicited an Earth visit from a Nasebian representative. A single equation for light speed travel made in chalk on an antique blackboard in the messy one-room dormitory of a kid too young to drive had triggered the end of an age. The age of innocence was over. The age of cosmic puberty had begun. With the advent of light speeds something more than long reach had changed for human beings. The term ‘humankind’ became a designation specifically for Homo sapiens, the most populous species on Earth, while the expression ‘mankind’ suddenly embodied all of the biped, intelligent races resident to our galaxy. The word sapien, Latin for ‘wise’, was no longer the sole property of homo, our all-inclusive ape-evolved genus. Earth’s secret non-dis
closure pacts quickly evaporated into thin air. UFOs were no longer required to hide unless their presence was disruptive or inappropriate. We had gone from the fallacy of believing we were the most intelligent race in the galaxy to being elementaries on a campus too large to imagine. And to this day many people refuse to accept the idea other intelligent species exist, causing concerned world governments to do their limited best not to force that mind-expanding awareness upon them.

  What very few people are told is that now, when a long-range spacecraft ventures out into uncharted space, it secretly takes along a Nasebian emissary to help us avoid being bulls in a china shop. Only the captain and first officer are aware, and even they undergo months of special training before being informed. There are social constraints involved with the Nasebian race. Apparently the Nasebians abhor being in close physical contact with humans. Offensive to them is the particulate matter we exhale with each breath and the olfactory elements our bodies exude wherever we go. There is also the undesirable epidermal and follicle debris. I learned of the Nasebians and their insulting repulsions on my previous mission, only because the first officer became incapacitated and his job dropped into my lap. Not having been prepared in advance that an alien emissary was onboard to prevent us from becoming stooges in space my Captain, a man of respectable wisdom, did his best to induct me. That was just before he disappeared and left me with a stranded ship and crew being harvested by rogues.

  So that last mission had been to hell and back. We had won, but we came limping back, licking our wounds, and there were quite a few. There was no real celebration in surviving. There were too many sadistic memories, images that haunted sleep and sometimes invoked themselves during the day; flashbacks brought on by the wrong combination of words, or a familiar physical object that normally would have triggered a pleasant recollection until the full memory came crashing down around it.

  Had there not been a Nasebian emissary on that voyage it is doubtful we would have survived. I would visit her periodically and stand there enamored and awed in her presence, her long silver gown covering most of the luminous form beneath it, her dark eyes too penetrating to look at for more than a moment. I would think questions and before they could be vocalized, she would impress answers directly into my mind. Sometimes a brief flash of understanding would yield pages of information. Unexpectedly, she came to accept my primitiveness, but she had a constraint that could only be described as a compulsory caring for all living creatures, both good and bad. To her, the bad ones were simply less developed souls still in an elementary learning stage.

  She helped us barely enough to avoid being destroyed. At one point, I returned to her broken and barely alive. She had touched me and healed me and left an imprint of something beyond love, something I knew would always be there. That alliance had left me no choice but to accept the Nadir mission. She knew she could trust me. She knew more about me than I did.

  In the end I had come away with the friendship of a creature so advanced I had no way of understanding what that meant. And to commemorate that, she left me a parting gift. When I checked her secret quarters at mission’s end she was gone, but there sitting on a pedestal in her sparsely decorated stateroom was a strange crystal the size of a walnut, a keepsake I still visit often. Color slowly flows and ebbs within it, and if you hold it in your hand it evokes images in your mind. There have been messages from within it. It is a perplexing and unsettling thing to behold.

  I dug in my pocket and drew out the cotton satchel. There would be no emissary with us on this mission, but the crystal would be coming along. I took it out, sat it on the desk, and watched it glow and fade through the colors of the spectrum. I lifted the picture of Paris Denard. My plan was solid. At the space station, if I did not get an adequate time-window to leave him behind, I would have him paged to the other end of the station. That would give enough time. When I ordered the hatches sealed, the others would know. There would probably be silent celebrations. I leaned back and stared at Paris’ picture, wondering that I did not feel more guilt. Suddenly movement out of the corner of my eye caught my attention. The crystal had begun a slow turn on the desktop. I dropped the photo and stared. It picked up speed, faster and faster. It became a spinning blur like an airplane propeller. To my astonishment, it lifted off the desk and hovered six inches above it, spinning and glowing in place. It did not stop or slow. Finally, I reached out an open hand beneath it; afraid it might fly away and be lost. The spin slowed and it settled into my palm. I closed my hand and held it with my eyes shut. There was a message. It was clear. ‘You need Paris Denard.’

  I opened my hand. The crystal had returned to its passive state. Swirling blue-green flowed within. A gentle vibration of calm filled my hand. I sat back stunned and bewildered.

  Chapter 27