by Jay Mackey
“Who was her father?” asked Penny. “You?”
“At the time, I didn’t know who her father was,” said Jack. “She was born during that time when I was . . . away. Away from Groom Lake. I didn’t know. She was a little girl by the time I saw her.”
“And what happened to her?” asked Oval.
“That, I’m afraid, is the whole point of the story,” said Jack.
“What is?” asked CJ. “That you lost Venus?”
“I’ve never seen Venus again. That’s what’s driven my life since I returned. I never got over the guilt of leaving her.”
“So where did you go?” asked Oval.
“You doofus,” said Penny. “Don’t you get it? Remember who’s talking here, and who his friends are. The True Believers. Come on. He flew off in a spaceship.” She pursed her lips and crossed her arms. “Where did you go, to Mars or something?” she asked Jack.
“No. I don’t know where we went, but it was considerably farther than that. Years farther.”
“Okay, I get all that,” said CJ. “So you think that my grandmother is Venus, and she’s the one you left.”
“I think your grandfather was there in the desert that night, the night of the escape, the night that I lost Venus. And if he was there, then there’s a chance that your grandmother, that she . . . They might know what happened to Venus.”
“Or, that she is Venus, right?” said CJ.
“Right,” responded Jack, although he sounded reluctant to admit it. “There’s a chance your grandmother is Venus. The Venus I knew. Just a chance.”
“That’s crazy,” said Oval. “Your grandmother is no alien, CJ.”
“Not alien, exactly,” said Jack. “Maybe half. And as I said, the differences are subtle.”
“So,” said Penny. “I still don’t believe your story, but if it’s true, then I don’t get what all the secrecy is about, the kidnapping, all that.”
“If the government found out about them, your grandparents, CJ, then, they would be in danger. You would be in danger. All of you. Because the government has a huge secret, and they will do anything—anything—to keep that secret. It could explain a lot about CJ’s life. That his grandparents have been living in hiding all these years, living in fear for their lives. Maybe that’s why CJ’s grandmother doesn’t want him digging into her past. Because she doesn’t want to call attention to herself and her husband, because if the government knew where they were, who they were, well . . . who knows?”
“But you know secrets, and you’re still alive,” said CJ.
“Yes, true, but I’ve been carefully handled. The government has skillfully positioned me so that no one will believe me. I’m just one of those ‘True Believers.’”
“How did the government do that?” asked CJ.
“That all happened after I got back,” said Jack, pulling the car into a parking spot in front of an imposing old Victorian-style building on the outskirts of Carson City. “And that’s a story for another time, after we’ve followed up your lead on your grandmother’s orphanage.”
“You think this is a waste of time, don’t you?” asked Penny.
“I do,” responded Jack.
“Then why did you bring us up here?” she asked.
“It was the only way to get you all to listen to me.”
“Well,” said CJ. “We’re here now. Let’s go see what we can find.”
And so the group trooped into State of Nevada Records Office, where they were sent on a tour of various offices, as one after another said they needed to look somewhere else.
Eventually, they found an office that did indeed have records from the facility that had burned down near Las Vegas in the sixties. After CJ persuaded the older Hispanic man that he was the grandson of the orphan in question, they found that the records didn’t include anyone named Violet Jones, or Venus Jones, or anything like that. Unfortunately, the records didn’t go back further than the mid-fifties.
None of the helpful employees of the State of Nevada could come up with anything on Nini—birth records, school records, hospital records, census data, or anything on adoption, foster children or orphans. By the time the group trudged out of the last office, tired, sweating in the Nevada heat, and thoroughly dejected, they were convinced that Nini had never lived in Nevada in her life, and they weren’t even sure she existed, even given that her marriage certificate seemed to confirm that she was in Nevada at one time.
As they gathered in a little café in Carson City to grab an early dinner before their long drive back to Las Vegas, the kids’ attention turned back to Jack’s story.
“So, Mr. Star Traveler, tell us what happened in your adventures,” Penny said to Jack. “Since we can’t find any facts about CJ’s grandmother, we might as well listen to some more fantasy from you.”
“I’ll be happy to tell you more of my story. And after you’ve heard it all, it will be CJ’s grandparents who provide the proof that what I’m telling you is not fantasy, but the God’s honest truth. But first, let’s all get a milkshake to soothe our tired bones, and I’ll tell you as much as I can remember once we hit the road back to Vegas.”
43
August 2001
Jack sat, strapped in to his seat, eyes squeezed closed tightly, trying to breathe. He didn’t remember this from his last landing, on Aphrodite’s home planet: the intense vibration, the rising heat—he could feel a small river of sweat running down his back—or the noise. It sounded like the worst hailstorm ever experienced in the state of Minnesota, where he was from, and he knew hailstorms. Maybe it had been like this. It had been so long ago, and he had been concentrating so much on Aphrodite, who hadn’t been in good shape. She’d been weak before the escape, and hadn’t recovered before they put everyone into hibernation—the word they used when they told him what they were going to do. Their bodies wouldn’t survive the intense acceleration unless they put them into the pods, which were filled with some gel substance that somehow kept them alive until they emerged sometime later—months, years, he wasn’t sure.
This time, his anticipation was different. Before, he’d been escaping, and had never given his destination a thought. He was protecting the woman he loved, and nothing else mattered.
Now, he was going home. He had some idea what to expect—he’d lived most of his life here, after all. But it was going to be different, because it had been so long ago. He’d aged about twenty-two years, by his calculation. But he’d been told that things on Earth would have moved forward more like thirty-seven years during that span. The difference was because of the time in hibernation, plus the time-compressing effects of approaching the speed of light and extreme gravity; he was a physician, not an astrophysicist, so he didn’t understand all the details. Didn’t really matter. What really mattered was that Venus, about sixteen years old when he left, would now be in her early fifties. Ten or eleven years younger than him, physically.
The flight smoothed out. Jack assumed that meant they had successfully made entry into the atmosphere on Earth, and their speed had dropped to something understandable, though probably still faster than any Earth vehicle could manage. He had no idea where the planned touchdown was going to be, or if they made that decision on the fly. All he knew was that he was going home.
The plane they were in—it was more plane than rocket ship, with retractable wings and the ability to hover when the small engines on the wings were rotated—was little different than the one he’d escaped in those years ago. It seemed tight with the crew of seven, plus him, the sole passenger. But he remembered that they’d managed nearly twice that during the escape.
This wasn’t the same vehicle that did the interstellar travel; that one was much bigger. This was just the lander. The lander that was taking him home.
He wondered how he’d fit into Earth society, thirty-seven years after he’d left. It couldn’t be worse than where he’d just come from, where he’d been content as long as he had Aphrodite. She needed him, living in pai
n and discomfort for years, the direct result of the injuries she’d sustained during her time as a prisoner and the procedures she’d experienced at the hands of Dr. Blankenship. But after she died, three years ago, he realized that he was lost in a society that had never embraced him.
He’d never fully learned the language, which was difficult because so much of it was non-verbal. He’d never had anything remotely like a job, so his medical skills and knowledge were wasted. At best, he was a nurse for Aphrodite, trying to help her through some of her difficult periods.
Of the others who’d made the escape, Faccio had returned to Earth soon after landing. He said he’d never wanted to come, and there was another expedition a year or so later, so he was allowed to go. Jack wished him well, but was glad he was gone.
His old buddy Chet hadn’t lasted long. He died within two years of landing, of some kind of overdose, he learned.
So now completely alone, he leapt at the offer to return to Earth at the next opportunity.
There were few windows in the cabin of the lander, so Jack had little idea where they might be, not that he’d necessarily know by looking. He just hoped that they’d land somewhere that would enable him to make his way to the Western US, and preferably to California and Nevada. He was going to try to find Venus, or at least discover what had become of her, and that might prove difficult if he was dropped off somewhere like China.
He knew one of the crew: his old friend Zeus. God, how old was he now? But this was his fourth or fifth trip to Earth, and each trip took him only a year or two, while everyone not on the trip aged seventeen or eighteen years. Even though Zeus would be Venus’ grandfather, his physical age might be seventy or eighty years less than his chronological age. It was possible that he’d be younger than his grandchild. Crazy.
Zeus wasn’t the pilot on this trip; another man was flying the lander. But he still had that commanding presence, so it seemed like he was in charge. Jack wasn’t sure—he wasn’t in the loop on chain of command.
Jack had a somewhat limited ability to understand what was being said in the ‘cockpit, but he gathered that Zeus was telling the pilot to change course. He was directing him to a new landing spot. It seemed that Zeus was getting new information fed to him from somewhere, even though there was no headset or radio that Jack was aware of.
Based on the attitude of the lander, and the acceleration and deceleration Jack felt, there were a number of course corrections before the lander stopped, hovered, and then set down. After a few minutes, a door opened near the front of the lander, a ladder was extended to reach the eight or ten feet to the ground, and one of the crew went out. About all that Jack could see was that it was dark outside, but his seat gave him no view. He struggled to remove the restraints and emergency life support system built into the seat. Zeus came over to help him, but told him to remain seated.
“Let us see what the situation is before you go out,” said Zeus. “There are friends in the area, but also . . . um, others.”
“Friends?” said Jack. “Others?” Jack couldn’t fathom who’d be included in either group. Who would be friends of a group of aliens landing on their planet? Who would be “others”? Everyone else, or enemies? And who would be enemies?
Zeus went back to the front of the cabin and peered out the door. He said something to the crew member who was outside, and then scrambled down the ladder himself, followed by two others.
Jack stood and went to the doorway. He could see that they had landed in a small clearing in a heavily wooded area. So not the Nevada desert, he thought. As he watched, a set of headlights appeared through the woods to his right.
Headlights. Something I haven’t seen for many years.
A small car pulled into the clearing and stopped, thirty or forty yards away from the lander. Zeus and one of the others walked slowly toward the car, silhouetted by the headlights. Two people emerged, one from each side, but because the headlights were shining directly at Jack, he couldn’t see them other than shapes. Jack could tell that Zeus was talking to the people, but the engine noise from the lander drowned out any chance of hearing what they were saying.
As they talked, the group drifted out of the direct line of sight of the headlights, and Jack could see that the people from the car were a young couple. The woman glanced over toward him, standing in the doorway, and for a moment he felt a flash of recognition—could this be Venus? The short blonde hair, the small, trim figure were as he remembered, but no, Venus would be fifty-some. This woman was twenty-some. A trick of memory. That’s all it was.
He saw the woman look suddenly skyward. The others looked too. Zeus looked startled. He pointed up. Jack couldn’t see what they were looking at from his vantage in the lander, so he went down the ladder to get a better look. Moving out into the clearing, he could see an approaching helicopter. And then he saw another, just a little farther away. The lander engines had drowned out the noise, allowing the copters to surprise them.
Jack looked to the young couple. They appeared frightened. The man turned to his car, but Zeus held the woman’s arm, and pointed to the lander. It appeared they disagreed on which way to go. Zeus yelled at them, trying to be heard above the noise from both the lander and the helicopter, which was now setting down at the far edge of the clearing, maybe fifty yards away.
While Jack stood watching, two of the crew quickly climbed the ladder back into the lander. The other ran toward Zeus and waved frantically to get him and the couple to come. Zeus, pulling at the woman and yelling at the man, moved toward Jack, slowly at first, but then more quickly, as the woman stopped resisting.
Then a new sound emerged, cutting through the engine noises. Gunshots. The second helicopter was now nearing, and Jack could see muzzle flashes from the open side door of the large copter. He looked back down and saw puffs of dirt fly up near Zeus and the woman, who were now running hard toward the lander. The man, too, was now running, but suddenly he fell. He’d been shot, knocked down. He tried to get up, but fell again.
Jack, reacting without thinking, ran toward the man, who was still struggling to get up. The whole clearing was lit up now by lights from the helicopters. As Jack reached the man, he could see soldiers running from the copter that had landed. They seemed close.
Jack grabbed the man’s arm and pulled him up. The man put his arm around Jack’s shoulders and tried to walk. One leg didn’t work. Jack put his arm around the man’s waist, and together they struggled back toward the lander, where Jack could see Zeus pushing the woman up the ladder.
Zeus ran out to help Jack. Together, they managed to get the man to the ladder. But then Jack felt something hit him, hard, in the back. He fell into the dirt, face-first.
44
Nevada, April 2018
“I woke up in a hospital,” Jack said. “Had no idea where, or when, or how. I’d been shot in the back, and had some pretty significant injuries. It took months for me to recover. They moved me a couple times, and I ended up back at Groom Lake.”
“No freaking way,” said Oval. “When did all this happen?”
“Sometime in 2001, as near as I can tell.”
“Wow,” said Oval. “Did they let you go once you recovered? What have you been doing since then?”
“They held me at Groom Lake for about nine years,” said Jack. “First, so I could recover physically. Then, to interrogate me, since I’m the only known person to have been to an alien world. And finally, to hold me, because I knew too much.”
“So how did you get free?” asked CJ. “Escape?”
“No, they eventually put me in a mental institution in California,” said Jack. “Kept me drugged out of my mind. But I met a couple of the True Believers in there, made friends, as much as you could make friends given how drugged up we were. I guess that gave them the idea to let me go. We were all released at the same time, and my story about aliens didn’t sound much more believable than some of theirs. I was just another crazy loon who claimed to have been taken by aliens
.”
“So the True Believers are fake?” asked Oval. “They haven’t seen real aliens?”
Jack turned to look at Oval in the backseat. In fact, he was turned around so long CJ got nervous, and said, “Hey, watch the road.”
Jack turned back to the road, and said, “No. What the True Believers actually believe in are little green men who magically appear and zap you away to experiment on you, and then zap you back. They don’t know that Earth-born humans are the ones doing the experimenting. Here on Earth.”
“So didn’t they realize that you were telling the real story?” asked Oval.
“No, mine was just another of the endless variations,” said Jack. “Not that I blame them. They’re good people, most of them. They’ve been good to me.”
CJ stared off into the desert. It was twilight; the sky was deepening into reddish orange over the mountains to the west. Soon it would be dark, pitch dark, like only the desert gets. It would happen quickly—one minute, nice sunset, the next minute, black.
He didn’t know what to think about Jack’s stories. He had made it sound real, and he seemed sane, not like some nut job, but still, it was all pretty crazy.
“What do you think, Penny?” he asked.
Penny, who’d been quiet for a long time, especially for her, responded with, “About what?”
“You know, about what Jack said, aliens and everything.”
“Oh, is story time over?” she said.
CJ got the message. Apparently Oval did too, because he stifled a laugh that leaked out of his nose.
CJ asked, “So you don’t believe what he said?”