"I … I really can't say."
"But they aren't actually aliens, are they?"
He looked at her silently for a second. "As alien as me."
They both heard the whisper of the helicopter approaching, the pitch of the blades deepening as it landed. He kissed her on the cheek and ran out the door.
Aurora
As the helicopter faded, she crossed the hall to her old office. It was locked, but her old key worked. She said, "Lights."
Nothing had changed. Neater than possible, but she had straightened up for the expected interview. A layer of dust.
Would she ever work here again? She'd know in a few days.
Her shelves of old books seemed untouched. On impulse, she took the latest acquisition, the volume of century-old photographs from Life magazine, turned off the lights, and locked the door behind her.
It was about a mile down to Creekside. She was tired, but didn't dare use a cab; most of them weren't set up to take cash, and the ones that did took pictures of their suspicious customers. But at least the sidewalks wouldn't be deserted, not with revelers rolling from party to party.
How many people, though, were sitting at home, terrified, waiting to die? On her way downhill, she passed two churches and a mosque, and they were all doing a brisk business.
A block from Creekside, she stopped at a convenience store and bought an overpriced bottle of domestic champagne.
It came out of a barrel of ice water. The clerk dried it off for her and put it in a bag. "I hope we have something to celebrate tomorrow," he said. "I hope we're here tomorrow."
"I wouldn't worry about that," she said. "If they wanted to destroy us, they would have done it by now."
He nodded and took her cash, and clumsily counted out change. "Do I know you from somewhere, ma'am?"
"No. Just passing through."
She crossed the bridge over Hogtown Creek and hurried into the apartment building. There were a lot of people sitting, partying, on the grassy banks of the creek, and she didn't want to be recognized.
She tried four entrances before she found the one with P. PARKER, 203. Whatever his real name was.
She'd expected a spare bachelor flop, appropriate for a man with no history. But it was an eclectic, even baroque, collection of furniture and decorations from all over the world.
Japanese screen, coffee table from Bali or someplace, Mexican bullfight poster, a cuckoo clock from Germany or Switzerland. A pile of cushions in front of the cube, imported from exotic Taiwan. There was something odd about the collection, which suddenly struck her: everything was the same age. As if he'd gone into Pier Three and said, "I'll take this, this, and this."
No champagne flutes in the kitchen, but she did find two wineglasses of Waterford crystal. So it wasn't all Pier Three. She popped the cork on the champagne and poured herself a glass, and put the bottle in the refrigerator.
It was empty, and spotless.
She checked the cupboards and there was no food, not a can of sardines or a box of cereal. Just matching plastic salt and pepper shakers.
Nothing sinister about that. A lot of bachelors ate in restaurants all the time, or brought takeout home.
She took the champagne back to the living room and turned on the cube. It didn't respond to the clicker, but the manual controls were clear enough. She put it on CNN and turned the sound down to a whisper. She set her glass on the Balinese table and curled up on the Taiwanese pillows and opened the musty old book.
That was also a world-changing time, World War II. The stridently upbeat tone of the magazine probably meant people were as worried as the young man who sold her the champagne. But that was protracted—she checked the dates, six years—and the enemies were just people, beatable. Not aliens who could destroy your planet on a whim. Or said they were.
She put her book down, finished off the glass in a couple of gulps, and went to refill it. From the kitchen she could hear a commotion going on outside. She filled the glass and took it out onto Pepe's balcony.
A circle of young people was dancing in the creek, laughing and singing. About half were naked, in spite of the cold water. Crowds on both banks were clapping and shouting. "Take it off, take it off."
Well, they were expecting a message of peace and hope in a few hours. What would they actually get?
She closed her eyes and suddenly opened them, just in time to keep from dropping the expensive crystal over the balcony. Her arms and legs were heavy with fatigue. She went into Pepe's bedroom and manually set the clock to wake her at five forty-five, not trusting the voice controls. Exactly three hours of sleep. She was unconscious before it said two forty-six.
When the clock woke her she staggered downstairs and got breakfast from machines, guaranteed bad coffee and a candy bar. They didn't have any Mars bars, unfortunately, so she picked one at random. Did they still make Mars bars? She hadn't bought a candy bar in twenty-some years. The chocolate was unpleasantly rich and sweet. But it would get her through to the end of the world.
She was mildly surprised not to have been rousted out of bed by FBI agents. Whatever Pepe was, he was evidently not on their side.
She turned on the cube and switched it to Channel 7, hoping to catch Marya. Some male voice-over was describing the procession of notables, showing footage of one helicopter after another alighting on the same landing pad, dropping off this or that president or prime minister or movie star. A large stand of bleachers filled up with people not accustomed to sitting in bleachers. The rising sun was behind them; the sky was salmon deepening to perfect blue.
At precisely six, a U.S. Marine Corps helicopter, number 1, came in and disgorged President Davis and his retinue, including a squad of heavily armed marines. Rory smiled at that. They wouldn't be much help against planet-busting aliens, but they might prevent him from sharing the fate of his predecessor. She had been following his career from Cuba; he was the least popular president since Nixon. A majority of the House and Senate wanted him impeached, if not actually hanged, but they were putting it off for a few days. Maybe the aliens would vaporize him and save them the trouble.
After the old man was safely installed on the dais in front of the bleachers, seated uncomfortably close to the secretary-general of the UN, the cube switched to a telescopic view of the alien ship. It didn't seem fundamentally different from a human spaceship, which could just be form following function. Or perhaps they wanted to reassure us.
Or, most likely, it was a human ship, part of the biggest hoax in history. With Pepe somewhere near the center of it.
Her certainty had grown as the evidence accumulated that Pepe had obviously been planted in her department, set up to be her second-in-command. If it was a hoax, it was an enterprise larger than the Manhattan Project. The early data could have been faked, someone hacking the input from GRS-1 and its lunar counterpart. But eventually other telescopes picked it up. It did come from outside the solar system, though perhaps not from nearly as far or going as fast as they thought.
And it did apparently crack Phobos in two, though that could conceivably have been set up beforehand. The figure of a hundred thousand megatons—"give or take a factor of a thousand"—came from Leo, but through Pepe. She'd never checked, and Leo died.
Like the president. Like Pauling, and the rest of the cabinet.
She and Norman would have been out of the picture, too, except for the coincidence of Qabil hearing about the FBI.
The four satellites, destroyed by an invisible ray—that was the easiest to explain. Simple sabotage.
In less than an hour, the last piece would fall into place, though it probably would not be conclusive. Hollywood had more than a century of experience in creating aliens.
The president gave a neutral, optimistic speech, blessedly free of spoonerisms and hysteria. The secretary-general of the UN followed, speaking in his native Bantu. Except for glottal clicks and such, it was pretty much the same speech as Davis had given. A great opportunity awaits us; we welc
ome our friends from space with open arms. Now that they've destroyed our other arms.
There were lots of vehicles parked behind the bleachers—white NASA vans, a couple of military trucks, two ambulances, and a fire truck. She wondered whether one of them might conceal a last-resort bomb, and if so, who controlled the trigger.
And how big a bomb? A high helicopter showed the NASA causeway as crowded as a subway station, all the way to the dikes; over a million people waiting to watch the alien craft land. She was glad not to be there.
The cube shifted to a shimmering telescopic view of the alien craft, which had begun to deorbit somewhere over Australia.
It might pass by overhead on its way to the Cape. She went out on the balcony to check the sky, but it was the usual gray blanket.
The partying students were gone, and had not left a mess behind. Kids nowadays. She heard muffled news broadcasts from apartments all around her, and kept the door open so she could listen for Marya or Pepe on the cube.
Not hearing Marya was no surprise. She hadn't had a chance to disappear after the "accidental" broadcast, and even if the FBI didn't take her, the network would probably have fired her or put her on ice for a while.
Overhead, the familiar double crack of a sonic boom; a spaceship on its approach path to Cape Kennedy. She went inside and sat in front of the cube.
There was Pepe, on the dais with nine other notables, behind the president, who slowly got to his feet. They all did the same.
The ship was dimly visible, descending. Rory realized she was holding her breath.
It touched down precisely at the end of the runway, about the size of a regular shuttle. It would have to be, of course, if this were a hoax—they couldn't have secretly built a spaceship from scratch. It was prettier than a regular shuttle—shiny, like chrome, and somehow it didn't use a braking parachute to slow down.
It rolled to a stop a few hundred meters from the dais, and then, with a slight hissing sound, continued on to stop directly in front of the president. A door opened in the side of the craft and a stairway unfolded to the ground.
Two human-looking figures walked down the stairs. They wore shimmering silver skintight suits, obviously male and female. They didn't walk like people who'd been in zero-gee, Rory noticed. Then she noticed they were both beautiful, despite complete hairlessness, not even eyebrows. A nice touch.
When they stepped off the staircase, it folded back into the ship. As they walked toward the dais, the ship started to hiss again, and rolled slowly down the runway.
They walked up the steps in no rush, the woman leading, and when they got to the dais, they ignored the standing notables and went straight to the microphone.
The woman spoke first: "We are not aliens from another planet. We are aliens from earth. We come from five hundred years in your future."
The man continued: "It was the largest engineering enterprise in the history of humanity. The energy we displayed approaching you was only a small fraction of what was required to bend space and time and send us back. That required the total destruction of a small star, the kind you call a brown dwarf."
"We bring a message of hope and caution," the woman said. "The message of hope is that we are here, and therefore you do have a future. Knowing that is going to change you. The catastrophic war that seems about to begin will evaporate—and a series of things will happen, starting today, that will make war impossible within the lifetimes of most people now living."
"It's been decided," the man said, "that we cannot—and we know from historical record that we did not—tell you what these things are. You have to find them out for yourselves. Experience them as they happen."
"This has never been done before," the woman said. "We have to assume that so long as the two of us conform to historical record, subsequent events will occur as our history books record them, and there will be peace. But history does not allow us to remain with you, visitors from an impossible time."
The man gestured at the spaceship. "Likewise, we have to dispose of the spacecraft. If one country took possession of the ship's secrets, it would dominate the world."
The ship had reached the end of the runway. It pivoted slowly and then started to roll back toward them, the hiss of exhaust building to a scream. It was already airborne as it passed the reviewing stand, and it arced upward into a vertical climb with such acceleration that within seconds it was a dot, and then it disappeared. Then it exploded, a brilliant perfect sphere of light, in total silence, outside the atmosphere.
"Now there is only one artifact from the future, besides our clothing," the woman said. She held up an ordinary data crystal, and stepped forward to hand it to a technician surrounded by cameras. "Show this a few minutes from now."
"Of course, we are both also artifacts from the future," the man said, "though we're just people." The woman joined hands with him. "You have many ways to extract information from us."
"There was no way," the woman said, "to make us not know things that might be potentially dangerous to your survival."
They looked into each other's eyes and said in unison, "So, good-bye." They both slumped to the floor.
The next few minutes were a fast confusing drama of swarming medics, stretchers, helicopters, but Rory hardly noticed it, lost in thought.
She saw what Pepe had meant. Sure, it was a hoax, audacious and mind-bendingly expensive. But of course she wouldn't blow the whistle. There was a big chance it might work; it might become a self-fulfilling prophecy. So long as the secret was kept.
All she wanted to know was how they managed it; how could they put all the pieces together without somebody spilling the beans? Who was in on it? Certainly not fools like Davis.
She watched the crystal the "dead" woman had handed the technician, and it indeed showed their landing, speech, and "death." At least she hoped that was part of the choreography, and they hadn't called upon two people to sacrifice their lives to make the hoax more realistic. The introduction to the scene was convincingly futuristic to her eyes and ears; the voice-over with an unearthly accent, the beginning and ending shots showing a planet of peace and plenty. Cities floating in the air over forests and fields restored to nature. But then the throwaway spaceship showed how big a budget they'd had to play with.
The sun was breaking through the clouds, a rare thing, everybody off the roads. She decided to take a walk. Go up to the astronomy building and see what happens. Maybe reckless, but she had a feeling that the government was going to be a little too busy to pick on her for a while.
The building was deserted. Everyone was probably down at the Cape.
Pepe's office was still unlocked. Feeling a little bit guilty, voyeuristic, she went in to snoop around.
On a worktable under the window there were three neat stacks of paper, the last assignments and finals for Pepe's three classes.
There was a letter to his secretary, detailing the disposition of these papers, thanking her, and saying good-bye. He would be in touch.
Rory had a feeling that he would not be.
Coda
In a quiet corner of Barcelona, the man who was not Pepe Parker relaxed in a situation of modest wealth and perfect privacy. He had a cook, a servant, and a gardener, and walls of books in various languages.
Buried in the basement, there was a weapon that would turn a man into a torch.
With his full white beard and darkened skin, no one would connect him with the youthful Cuban scientist who had run the Coming Committee and mysteriously disappeared.
He spent most of his time reading, in the garden when it was fine, or in front of the fire when it was cool. Sometimes he dined out with beautiful women who thought he was a retired scholar, independently wealthy. Which was true, as far as it went.
In a safe-deposit box at Banco Nacional de Catalunya, there was a single sheet of paper which only he could read. It had a schedule of conservative stock purchases, and the names of the winners of the Kentucky Derby for the next fifty years.
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Joe Haldeman, The Coming
(Series: # )
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