Passage

by Thorby Rudbek

  Isaac shook his head as his former Professor discerned the immediate situation precisely. He performed the introductions as briefly as he could. Ruth immediately hugged the older gentleman, recalling a time some years before, when she had briefly met him, and realising it must have been around the time when Isaac had received his doctorate. Terry nodded at him, and Conroy held back a little, keenly aware of the fragile condition of this famous businessman. Harold just waved casually, as he kept on the edge of the reunion, preferring to observe this man empowered with the American President’s ‘ear’. Isaac also watched closely as Weylin took a close look at Latt for the first time. I’ll have to ask him later what he thinks of our own alien! But for now… He rechecked the power couplings and nodded to Latt. “Let’s give it a whirl!”

  “Powering up at minimum… now!” The strange contraption jumped into the air and shot towards the roof, dragging its bundle of cables behind it with a sound like a sudden gust of wind buffeting a poorly-fitting window. Latt hastily shut it down, and it fell back towards the floor. “I’ll cut two of the Inducers out of the system for now,” he announced, as the sprung suspension threw the whole device four feet into the air on the first rebound. “This is really well below the lowest power levels ever envisaged in the specifications of these devices – they’re really intended for large-scale gravity effects.” The next bounce was only a few inches, and presently the chair was just rocking on its mounts.

  After cutting the power to the two Inducers as he had stated, he detuned the remaining devices, essentially cutting their efficiency to less than a one hundredth of normal – this was his rather crude but effective way of performing the ‘pruning.’ Once done, Latt was able to cause the chair to hover without any difficulty.

  “The real problem here iss to be able to cause a lateral movement without inducing rotation,” Latt announced to no one in particular as he took it gently up to head height. “If it rotates–”

  “You could find yourself in a power dive towards the floor!” Weylin summarized for him succinctly. “May I suggest that you attempt it at minimum altitude? That way any damage should be minimized, too.”

  Latt thought about this for a moment, then nodded and brought the contraption down to hover about three feet off the ground. “I’ll give it one ssecond of movement away from us.”

  Isaac held on to the frame of the Control Cart and braced his leg against the side. He noticed Professor Conroy glancing over at him strangely.

  “Experience has taught me to be very cautious around these things. I presume you were informed about our over-friendly Hornet?”

  Weylin smiled. “I heard only that there had been a mid-air collision with an experimental aircraft.”

  “So that’s how they put it! Well, there’s the ‘experimental aircraft’. It’s just a long box of esoteric material with its own very special power source.” Isaac pointed at the Railcar.

  Conroy looked again at the strange edifice, his eyes widening as the confirmation that this was a vessel capable of three-dimensional travel, not a super-long carriage from a futuristic train, registered in his mind.

  “And Harry Morton here – illustrious pilot with the Royal Canadian Air Force, or whatever they call it now, and previous ‘owner’ of a conventional, jet-powered Hornet – was the so-fortunate victim; I calculated that if he had been travelling a foot higher, or just five miles per hour slower, relative to us, the cockpit he was in would have been crushed against the underside of this thing,” he pointed at the prematurely aged, heavily space-worn utility/power module cum spacecraft affectionately. “And he would have been a lot shorter than he is now!”

  “An experience I am pleased to have missed,” Morton responded, reaching out his hand as he came closer.

  “Shouldn’t the Canadian version of the Hornet be called a Mosquito?” Terry stage-whispered to Ruth.

  She tried to ignore him, but her eyes betrayed her, and he smirked and looked over to the others to see if they had been listening.

  The Professor and Latt were now interacting, discussing the concept of artificial gravity, and seemed unaware of the friendly banter behind them, as did Isaac, but Morton grinned over at Ruth and Terry before turning back to Professor Weylin.

  Weylin glanced down at the control panel once more, then did a double-take as he recognised the components.

  “Yes, Professor,” Harry interjected, noticing that the U.S. President’s Scientific Advisor was studying the controls which Latt was tentatively adjusting. “Those are model radio-control ‘plane joy-sticks; it seemed the best way to provide attitude correction. I donated the parts from a model I had been meaning to construct one of these days but never got around to.”

  “So this is quite the collaboration,” Terry said from his wheelchair as he got Ruth to move him a little closer. “Japanese controls, American servos, Canadian facility and an out-of-this-world power source and pilot!”

  All of them watched as Latt applied the power necessary to move the strange contraption sideways. Sure enough, as it drifted off towards the hangar wall, it immediately developed a distinct lean to one side, and Latt had to juggle with the controls to get it to come to a halt again.

  “If you don’t mind,” suggested Harry. “I’m quite familiar with these controls. I’ve flown models of a wide variety of aircraft for over ten years, and the real thing for even longer; perhaps I could tame it for you.”

  Latt looked at Isaac, and, once he had seen the confirming nod, stepped aside, passing the joysticks to the pilot.

  Harold had been itching for this moment since he had been assigned to their security group; he rapidly manoeuvred the unit around on the end of its long cables, and within two minutes he had the strange contraption performing simple aerobatics. Finally he returned the flying chair to its original location and stepped back from the control panel, running his hands through his springy hair as if it needed putting back into place after the flight, and then shoving his hands in his pockets nonchalantly. “It would be interesting to put the controls on the chair so that the passenger could also be the pilot,” he mused, as the others clapped and cheered enthusiastically.

  “Yeah, that’s a good idea,” Terry drawled. “’Cos no one’s going to get me in there if they have any thoughts on repeating your air show while I’m in it!”

  Ruth laughed. “You’re worried now? You didn’t see what happened when we were returning to Earth!”

  “I saw more than I wanted to,” Terry stated vehemently. “The next time I fly it’s going to be by Boeing, not ‘bo-ing’.”

  The group broke into chuckles once more, and congregated around Weylin Conroy as he watched Latt shut down the power supply.

  “Some other government types have come up for your demonstration today,” the older man began. “Including Pat Rhee – he’s the deputy chief of the FBI, and a General Spiner from the Pentagon; there is some talk of possible joint American-Canadian funding of research into developing our own capability to produce this equipment you brought back.”

  Isaac expression became very serious. “Professor Conroy, we need to convince them to do a lot more than that; the future of humanity depends on it.”

  The older professor looked puzzled.

  “Don’t tell me they didn’t pass on the facts we gave about the invasion!” Isaac exclaimed angrily.

  Weylin’s eyebrows went up as he moved his head slightly from side to side.

  “You’d better give me a short summary now,” he glanced at his watch. “The meeting is due to start in half an hour, and I want to have enough of the pieces to at least know what kind of puzzle I’m making, before I start formulating recommendations for the President.”

  “You’re not going to like what you hear,” Isaac warned, as he began their story. “Come inside our ‘Wonderloaf’, and I’ll show you a few other things, as we bring you up to date.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Ironically, within any secret endeavor, the key to success is communication
– Anon.

  Some hours later, after the meeting had been brought to a rather vague, indecisive and generally unsatisfactory conclusion, the large crowd of American and Canadian officials moved to the hangar to see the Railcar and watch the demonstration of the artificial Gravity Inducers in action. Latt took the seat he helped construct without hesitation, while Flying Officer Morton piloted him around the largely vacant interior for the silent and attentive group. Afterwards, the assembled dignitaries and military leaders clapped politely, and the groups started to mingle, so that the various questions proposed by each visitor could be answered on an individual, informal basis.

  Ed Baynes, who had been informed soon after the flying Railcar had landed in Northern Alberta that three people claiming to be the abducted professor, his wife, and his wealthy friend Terry were in what amounted to protective Canadian custody, went directly to Isaac Hardy to ask about the alien physiology.

  “Baynes, of the National Unusual Incident Team,” he said quickly. “You’ll have to excuse our late arrival; I’m sure you can imagine that a series of circumstances as strange as these can sometimes produce a delay before appropriate action is taken.”

  Isaac nodded and shook his hand warmly.

  “We are the group that investigated the disappearance of your party from off the Florida coast. How does this man Latt fit in with the aliens I read about in the reports?” He led up to his real interest as quickly as he could.

  “According to Latt, all humans associated with the Controllers are used for slave labour,” Isaac began. “Certainly everything I saw would support that hypothesis…”

  As this and a whole series of other, independent conversations were starting up, Judy Brisson managed to seize the opportunity to zero in on Latt. He was powering-down the reactor and making the controls secure, and (unaccountably – at least to her) no one else seemed interested in talking to him.

  “Welcome to Earth!” She said a little uncomfortably, her usual reticence around men over-powered by her fascination with meeting someone from another world.

  “Thank you. No one else has said that to me. Is it a sstandard greeting?”

  Judy considered this seriously for a moment, then she found herself smiling broadly. “Maybe it will become one!” She eyed the power cables stretching back into the Railcar. “What does it run on?”

  “Excuse me,” Latt responded. “But I do not know the correct term for the – ah, element. It has four possitive charges in each… atom?”

  “Just as I thought! Beryllium! So there must be a connection, after all.”

  “Why did you think this element was the one being used by the Controllers?” Latt remembered that Judy had been introduced during the meeting as the observation officer for the National Unusual Incident Team, some kind of investigative organization for the more populous country immediately to the south; he wondered how she could have deduced the correct element without yet having had the opportunity to examine the reactor.

  Judy looked at him for a long moment, weighing the consequences of radical revelation against sensibly safe silence, but felt a strange compulsion to confide in this other-worldly man. She then glanced around surreptitiously to check that no one else was close enough to overhear her.

  “I haven’t had clearance to tell you about this, and I’m afraid to ask in case they invent some bizarre reason for not telling you, so I’ll give you the details quickly, before I lose my nerve.” Judy squirmed a little, but continued immediately:

  “At about the same time that your ‘Controllers’ abducted Professor Hardy and the others – actually a couple of days later – we discovered an ancient spacecraft on the coast of America near the Atlantic ocean, which is a fair distance east and south of here.” She put in this clarification, as she realised he could hardly be expected to have a comprehensive knowledge of Earth geography. “It had been there for a long time; I know, because after it left I found a piece of the same stuff that it was made of, half-buried in the undergrowth nearby. I calculated that it had been there between three hundred and seven hundred years. A body found buried on the same site had been there for over five hundred years, according to the foremost archaeologist in the eastern States, and we concluded it was buried at the same time as the spacecraft arrived.”

  “After it left!” Latt had picked up on what to him was the most startling and worrying part of her story, almost missing what came afterwards. He looked at her, very worried by her revelation. Finally he came up with a question:

  “Was thiss body… human?”

  “Oh yes. No doubt about that.”

  “Did you ssee the creatures that were flying thiss spacecraft?”

  “Yes, that’s the strangest thing; I’d hardly call them creatures! One was a young girl who looked as harmless and sweet as they come, and the other was a young man not much older than her, who had just recovered from months in a coma in one of our big cities called Boston. Coma, that’s unconscious.”

  Latt nodded his understanding of the word, intensely relieved, yet puzzled that the craft had not been flown by the hated Controllers.

  “What did the sspacecraft look like?”

  Judy explained the shape, size and appearance of Citadel, and again could see that Latt was reassured.

  “I have never heard of any craft like that,” he explained. “The craft left, you ssay?”

  “Flew off into space, supposedly never to return.”

  “Thiss piece that was left behind, what was it?”

  “We don’t know; we tried everything we could to break into it, assuming that it was in fact hollow, but nothing worked. At my urging it was lowered down a test shaft in New Mexico and subjected to a small nuclear explosion – one of our tactical nuclear weapons. Afterwards, all that was left was a portion of the opposite side of the sphere; everything else had been vaporised.” Judy sounded intensely embarrassed by what she perceived as another of her failures.

  “It must have been protected by ssome kind of weak force field, perhaps one which had almost failed; when you sstarted the nuclear reaction, it musst have been jusst enough to overcome the field. After that, there is usually nothing left at all.”

  “How do you know so much about the aliens’ technology?” Judy looked at him with great respect.

  “I did not ssay this was an example of the Controllers’ technology; in fact, it does not ssound like anything they have, but I would need to ssee the remaining fragment to confirm that.”

  “I’ll try to arrange that for you. But you didn’t answer my question,” she urged, glancing around and finding, to her great relief and intense amazement, that they were still being left to their own devices.

  “They consider that fighting is the only worthy occupation. Repairs and maintenance are too far below them for them to want to sspend time learning how to do ssuch things, sso they use their sslaves to do most of it. If you do a good job, you get to live longer. I have worked on their spacecraft for sseveral years, now. I always did a good job; I intended to live as long as anyone I had heard of, maybe even to forty!”

  Judy ran her fingers through her short brown hair and found that she was staring at his unusual head of hair. His was grey, but the roots were showing through, as though they were much darker. She was now quite certain that he had not dyed it, but that it was coming through in its natural colour, probably for the first time in his life. She had heard about the food that the Controllers provided to Professor Hardy, his wife and his millionaire friend Stadt, and how it had almost killed her fellow-countrymen.

  “You must have been really good.” She was thinking how he had to have been the reason why the trip from Mars worked out. “Do you mean forty Earth years?”

  “Yess, I have almost got used to all your different units of measurement now, and with the wonderful food here, I expect to live sseveral years longer!”

  “I expect you will!” Judy smiled.

  Latt smiled back, his face muscles still unused to the exercise, then his express
ion turned gloomy.

  “No, none of us will, if we do not defeat the Controllers. They will turn us into sslaves; though very few will be left after they get here, and thosse that are, will wish they had been disposed of with those that died.”

  “Well, thanks for the information.” Judy looked uncomfortable again. “I guess it means we have two lots of aliens, although the other group seems to be human, just not from Earth. At least those ones, the ones with the Citadel, left.” She reached out and shook his hand on impulse. It was warm and the skin was callused from years of constant labour. She turned away hastily and walked off to find her team-mates.

  “I said that they would have to be quite different anatomically, to find the furniture we had to sit on and work at comfortable,” Professor Hardy explained. “What I don’t know is how that translates into reality, or what one would look like, beyond what I could see of the shape through the small window of the airlock, and that inside a fluffy vacuum suit which confused any outline. You really should ask Latt.” Isaac pointed out his new friend, standing with his back to them as he leaned over his makeshift control panel. “He worked for them as a slave for years. He’s the biggest reason we ever made it back.”

  Baynes nodded, thanking him for his help, and walked a little nervously over to the man from Rhaal.

  Judy bumped into Ruth and almost ended up sitting on Terry’s lap as she glanced back at Latt just one more time.

  “That’s okay,” Ruth reassured, as she took in the situation quickly. “Perhaps I could get you to take over as Terry’s ‘chauffeur’ for a few minutes; I really must get to chat with Professor Conroy.” She walked off, leaving Judy without giving her a chance to object.

  Terry Stadt looked up at the rather vulnerable face with interest.

  “I guess this must have really put NUIT on the map; you finally got your teeth into something that no one believed could ever happen.”

  Judy lost her far away expression and forced her face into its stern, hard mask.