Yes, so many wonderful new concepts.
Most importantly, his was an open mind.
He, too, had been contacted in his dreams. He, too, had dreamed of trenches and aliens and the end of the world. Yes, he, too, felt compelled to be here now, in this remote sea, to film his next movie.
The aliens, I was discovering, were serious about getting help. As they should be. The whole world needed to take this seriously, if what was coming was really coming.
The ship itself seemed like a floating world, complete with rooms and hallways and a food preparation room, and so many electronic devices. The ship, I understood, was generally designed for deep sea research and salvage. That is, investigating the shipwrecks that I’d often come across on my lone journeys. The director had a full crew to help film a science fiction movie about, of all things, deep sea aliens.
Yes, this threw us all for a loop (which was, of course, a saying Tayle often used).
After a surprisingly short time informing the eccentric director (that was a word the scientists used to refer to their friend), we soon came upon a plan.
As a storm approached, and as the ship rocked and heaved—and as some crew members vomited over the sides—we decided that the three deep-sea divers would be the director and the two scientists.
Tayle didn’t like it, although I sensed Jon’s relief. He didn’t like the idea of being inside a cramped submarine deep beneath the ocean.
Heidi didn’t much like the idea of me riding piggy-back alongside her own mind, as we journeyed to the alien craft deep beneath the ocean surface, but knew she would need my telepathic guidance to help communicate with not only Levy, the giant squid, but the alien craft itself.
“It’ll be okay,” I said to her as we prepared for the journey. “I’m not so bad.”
“You have picked up American idiom rather well, Azael. I am most impressed.”
“Dolphins, as many of you scientists know, are not so far behind you humans. We use our intelligence to enjoy the freedom of the open sea, and explore our world, rather than wage war and hurt others.”
“A good use of intelligence, Azael.”
“Also,” I added, “I suspect the alien device within me goes a bit further than just helping me to communicate through telepathy. It also helps me quickly understand foreign words and concepts.”
“It helps you think like a human,” said Heidi. We were standing in a bay that housed the narrow submarine, which swung above us gently from cables.
“Yes,” I said, “Or to communicate quickly and efficiently with whatever creature I’m engaging, be it human or sea creature.”
“These aliens are advanced indeed,” she said. “I would like to speak with them.”
“We can satisfy our scientific curiosity later,” said Brad, coming over to us. “For now, we have a world to save.”
“I want to come, too,” said Tayle, frowning. I felt her frown, because I was inside her.
“Our job is done, Tayle,” said Jon, reaching out and gripping her shoulder. “We did what we could. It’s time to pass the baton to the others.”
“What’s a baton?” asked Tayle. But the moment she said the word, I sensed what it was, a small stick used to pass along in running games. How did I know this? Tayle surely didn’t know it. I suspected I was picking up latent information from Jon, as well, and perhaps the others.
Behind us, the director, Kevin, was quickly going over the submarine, inspecting it with his mechanics and engineers, prepping it for the long dive. It had already been decided that Hrump and I would go down, too, piggy-backing alongside Heidi and Brad. Brad, for his part, seemed excited by the prospect of entertaining a dolphin intelligence.
“I will be back soon,” I thought to Tayle.
“And we can play in the lagoon by my house?” she asked.
“Always,” I thought, and considered the fact that she, and her father, were a kind of pod to me.
“We call it family,” said Tayle, and she gave me a mental squeeze, one of her deep hugs.
“Okay, folks,” said Kevin, clapping his hands and looking at us each in turn, wildly, I might add. “The sub is ready. We’ve got an alien to meet—and a world to save!”
Yes, he was definitely crazy!
But I liked him.
Chapter Twenty-two
I leaped out of Tayle’s mind and into Heidi’s.
The female scientist jerked a little, gasped, stumbled a little, and then righted herself.
“Okay, that feels weird,” she said.
Are you okay? I telepathically asked her.
I think so, she thought back to me.
It’s not so bad is it?
I feel a little dizzy, Azael.
I reached out with my own mind and put hers at ease. Soon, she was calming down and feeling less dizzy. That was a good thing. When she was dizzy—I was dizzy! Also, I was getting very good at connecting and working with humans. Yes, this alien device was something special. I could not imagine what awaited us beneath the deep.
When Hrump was comfortably connected with Brad, we all watched in fascination as the experienced crew used cranes and cables and a lot of careful handling to guide the Triton submersible from the hangar and then over the ship’s side and down into the water. Nearby, both mine and Hrump’s inert dolphin forms would be watched carefully by the crew...and by Tayle herself.
Once the submersible splashed down, the center latch on top was opened and the three of us slipped inside. Kevin and Brad sat in the front, and I sat in the back with Heidi. Or rather, she sat in the back and I tagged along inside her.
Above, the crew carefully sealed us in, and the submersible powered on. Kevin the director, who was also an expert submersible pilot, scanned the dashboard in front of him, checking on this and that, twisting knobs and flicking switches.
The lengths that humans must go to, to do what dolphins do naturally must amuse you, thought Heidi.
It would, perhaps, if the world’s fate wasn’t on the line.
Heidi nodded and gripped the arm rest next to her as the submersible lurched forward...and angled down.
“And away we go,” said the director excitedly, clapping his hands for emphasis. I noted that the submersible was equipped with deep sea cameras, cameras he would use to document this trip, and to document our contact with the alien craft. I wondered how wise that was, and suspected the aliens would not appreciate being documented. We would see how that played out.
Now the vessel dipped below the lapping waves and down a few feet. Heidi gasped a little. She was nervous about going so deep in a man-made vessel. A part of her worried that the machine might not hold up, especially when confronting the alien craft. The truth was, no one knew that answer. In this regard, we were explorers together. Either way, I touched her mind again, easing her fears.
The submersible went deeper and deeper.
I was used to the sights surrounding us: the schools of mackerel and smaller squid, the lone blue shark looking like trouble (I hoped he stayed far away from the research vessel), and curious and colorful fish who approached the vessel, whispering to themselves, wondering what we were. Yes, I heard all of their thoughts.
Deeper still.
Sunlight from above disappeared. Not a problem. Kevin the director reached over and flicked on his own light, illuminating the sea before us.
Yes, man was a clever—and dangerous—animal!
Ahead, through the darkness, was a dark rift in the ocean floor. I knew down into the rift lived Levy the great squid. Fearlessly, Kevin aimed the vessel toward the rift, using my own instruction as his guidance, and soon we were over the lip and heading down, down, down into the darkness.
There, a great, many-tentacled creature rose up to meet us.
Levy was here, to guide us to the alien craft.
Chapter Twenty-three
Oh my god! Heidi thought/felt. A real live giant squid! I’ve never seen a live one before. What lovely colors!
That??
?s Levy, my contact, I agreed. Then I projected my thought to the squid: Hello Levy! This is Azael, inside the metal submarine.
I recognize your trace, the squid agreed. I felt you coming.
I am with Heidi, a human scientist and diver. She likes your colors.
The skin of the squid erupted with flowing bands of color.
“Wow! What a show!” Brad said.
“No animal on land can match it,” Kevin agreed. “Bless my cameras!”
“This is Levy, our contact,” Heidi said. “He’s showing off.”
Kevin laughed. “He can be the star of my movie! After we settle our business with the aliens.”
They all like your colors, I thought to Levy. But we are here to meet the alien machine.
I know. Follow me. I felt the squid’s gratification. Squid don’t much care about audiences other than prey, or about human beings, but this one understood from the telepathy that impressing us was good. He literally glowed as he swam down into the rift.
We followed, but could not keep the mollusk’s pace. Our sub was simply too clumsy. Levy had to loop back, then lead at a relative snail’s pace. And of course he was a distant relative of the snails. He did not swim as I did, by moving flukes; instead he swallowed water and jetted it out his mouth, propelling himself backward, his tentacles trailing. That might seem clumsy, but it was nothing of the kind; he swam beautifully.
“This is already worth the investment,” Kevin said. “The footage I’m getting is priceless.”
“The mission is priceless, apart from your footage,” Brad reminded him.
“Sure thing! I’ll take it all.”
And if the mission failed, I thought, that footage, which meant the pictures he was taking, would be worthless for an ugly reason: humans and other creatures would be gone from the world.
True, Heidi agreed.
In the depth of the rift we found the alien life-craft. It looked nothing like any of our expectations. It resembled a huge dark green millipede with hairlike legs on either side, eyes along the top, and a pig-like snout at one end. That description was from Heidi’s memory of creatures I had not encountered.
But it can swim at 30 knots, Levy thought. I trailed it when it arrived.
“Amazing!” Brad said. “It must have propulsion we don’t understand.”
Levy, dwarfed by the machine, swam to that snout. Be eaten, he thought.
“What?” Kevin asked, startled.
“Go inside,” I clarified via Heidi’s mouth. “To meet the aliens.”
Ahead of us the snout irised open. The aperture was big enough to take in the entire sub.
“That is what we came for,” Brad said. “We have to trust them.”
Kevin steered the Triton into the maw. The snout closed behind it. Then the water drained out of the compartment. The sub settled into a channel in the floor, until it was propped in air.
“It’s an airlock!” Brad exclaimed.
“Trust,” Kevin said. He pushed the button to open the port.
The air was pure and sweet, smelling faintly of a country garden. Heidi released her breath, which she had been holding. “They do know our environment,” she remarked. I was relieved too, because she would have suffocated if the air was wrong.
We exited the sub and stood in the lighted airlock. A green line went from the sub to another portal. We followed it, and another gate irised open. We stepped into...a contemporary living room.
“Our environment,” Kevin echoed in wonder.
“They read it from my mind,” I said, using Heidi’s mouth again. “When I went to land in Tayle’s body, then came back for another communicator for Hrump. They want us to be comfortable.”
“Comfortable!” Brad said with irony. That was another human concept I was coming to understand: it meant that he meant the opposite of what he said. He was not comfortable despite the physical amenities. That was not surprising; neither was I.
Be unfooted. That was an alien thought.
I translated again, with Heidi’s help. “Be seated.”
We sat in the human-comfortable chairs, which faced the center of the chamber. We were guests of the aliens. I knew this was as strange to the humans as it was to Hrump and me.
There was a swirling of vapor in the center of the room. It thickened, and coalesced into—a smaller image of the life-craft. The green pig-snouted millipede.
The hairlike limbs moved, clicking against each other. They changed color, and glowed. The clicks increased, sounding like a sandstorm striking a tin roof. Not that I had any experience with either.
Kevin was the first to catch on. “Damn—it’s an alien! A holograph! The ship’s built in their own image.”
“Correct, Kevin,” the creature said.
“And we’re not really understanding your speech,” Kevin continued. “Your speech is the clicks, way beyond Morse code, but the telepathy is now translating it for us so it feels like verbal dialogue. For our comfort, as we are visual and verbal creatures. We like to see and hear what we’re talking to.”
“Continued correct,” the alien agreed. “I am—my technical name identity is unintelligible in your language—Joe.”
“Hello Joe!” the three humans said almost together, as if this were, in Heidi’s image, a mental health meeting with a new member.
“Would you prefer that I emulate one of your kind in appearance? I can do this if it would make you more comfortable with my simulated presence among you.”
“Like a sexy blonde?” Kevin asked.
The millipede dissolved and swirled, and the classic image of actress Marilyn Monroe formed in its place. Her decolletage was quite low, and her skirt quite short, and her smile quite teasing. Indeed, she seemed about to burst joyfully out of her clothes. Both men stared appreciatively, not at all alarmed by the prospect.
“He was joking!” Heidi snapped.
The image flowed back to the alien form. “I apologize. I misunderstood. Humor.”
“Jealousy does not become you, dear,” Brad murmured.
“We’re here on serious business,” Heidi said, not much mollified.
“Business. Of course,” Joe said. “We shall proceed to it now.”
Chapter Twenty-four
“We appreciate the problem,” Brad said. “An invisible but intense magnetic bubble is headed for Earth that will obliterate Earth’s magnetic field and thus destroy most life on Earth. We’re not keen on letting that happen, so we need to shield ourselves against it or divert it. But to make a generator strong enough to accomplish that is likely to take more power than any earth facility can generate.”
“That is correct,” Joe said. “That flux is about a light month in diameter and will take about a year to pass this region of space, two years hence. You can’t shield against it; it will be as pervasive as Earth’s magnetic field itself. So you will have to divert it so that it misses this sector and goes on harmlessly between the stars. A sufficient sustained counter magnetic field can accomplish that, as magnetic fields repulse each other.”
“So how do we get a power source capable of generating and maintaining such a field?”
“We have assessed this problem,” Joe said, “and concluded that for your situation Dark Energy is required.”
Brad nodded. “You are speaking of the unknown power that is driving the universe apart at ever-greater velocity?”
“Yes. It is not unknown to us, merely obscure. It is so extensive that you should be able to tap it to have all the energy you require, without perceptibly diminishing the source.” There came a clicking flash across the alien’s body that telepathy translated as a smile. “Since you are not currently using it for your machines, there is no conflict there; it will not disrupt your normal activities.”
“Great!” Brad said. “I presume you will share the secret of safely harnessing this energy with us?”
“Yes, this is what we came here to do.”
“At what price?”
There of cour
se was the kicker, as Heidi’s mind assessed it. The aliens would want something phenomenal in return for the favor of their technology. Something Earth would not want to give, short of complete destruction. They had not gone to the enormous effort of coming to Earth and contacting the inhabitants to share their formidable technology out of pure altruism. What was it?
“There is something we would like,” Joe agreed.
Uh-huh, Heidi thought cynically.
“We have a certain problem with our home world. We were caught by the magnetic bubble before we were able to mount a deflection, and it wiped us out. Only our distant space satellites and installations survived. A few of us were able to evacuate to our space fleet, but we are now without a home base.”
“And you want to come here,” Kevin said. “Because you need a suitable world, and the depths of our seas are ideal for you.”
“This is true. We are a deep water culture. The so-called gas giant planets have no bottom, as it were, and dry rocky planets are completely unsuitable. Very few have the conditions we require, and Earth is one of them. But the code of sapience requires us to get permission of the dominant species before we colonize, even if our environment does not impact theirs.”
“And if we don’t give you that permission,” Brad said, “you will depart and leave us to fry in the bubble.”
“We would not care to put it so unkindly,” Joe protested.
“But that is the reality,” Brad said. “You need Earth, and to have it you need to save it, so you will certainly help us deflect the bubble if we agree to let you settle. But if we don’t, then you will have no practical reason to expend your limited resources on our behalf, and will focus your attention elsewhere. You may survive on another planet, but Earth will not. These are the cold equations.”