The Expanding Universe

by Craig Martelle

  “Not even a li’l bit, sir.”

  “All right. Here is what he told me.”

  Lance half-listened—it wasn’t anything he hadn’t already thought of for himself—while dealing with the guilt of knowing that Kuldeep must have found out in the most unpleasant way possible about his deception regarding Phyllis. Still pressing his phone to his ear—Flaherty wasn’t giving him a chance to talk, he was ranting—he tossed euros at the taxi driver and climbed the stairs to their room. He banged on the door and then unlocked it with his key. No Kuldeep. Well, given what Flaherty was saying, Lance had not expected to find Kuldeep tucked up in bed.

  “He’s not here,” he interrupted. “I’m at our hotel. He’s not here.”

  “Well, find out where he went, Lance! Find him … and silence him.”

  * * *

  He didn’t have far to go before he found Kuldeep. After all, he’d worked with him for four years. They were as close as brothers. Instinct, not tradecraft or deductive reasoning, told Lance where a sick, feverish, but determined Kuldeep would be right now.

  In the nearest Internet café.

  Yeah, they still had those in Naples.

  A mist of cigarette smoke in the air, Albanians and Africans surfing porn sites, and Kuldeep in a corner, typing like the future of humanity depended on it.

  Lance moved up behind him, his steps masked by the loud pop music blasting through the place. “Heard you talked to Flaherty,” he said.

  Kuldeep jumped a mile. His hand flashed out to the mouse, but Lance was quicker. He grabbed Kuldeep’s thin brown wrist. He’d already seen what Kuldeep was doing, anyway.

  Writing an email.

  “Did you send anything yet?”

  “Yep. To Wikileaks, the New York Times, the Times of London, the WSJ …”

  Lance closed the draft—Kuldeep was using a Hotmail account registered to ‘desi1980eeeee’—and checked the sent mail. Nothing. Relieved, he opened Kuldeep’s draft again (“To Whom It May Concern”) and scanned the highly technical content. One sentence jumped out at him. Peak signal strength: 120,000,000 Jy.

  “I wiped my laptop myself,” Kuldeep said.

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “Moved everything onto this remote server I have.”

  “You’re so going to jail.”

  “I know.”

  Lance eased Kuldeep’s chair aside on its wheels. He sent Kuldeep’s draft email to himself, and then deleted the whole Hotmail account. Kuldeep made no move to stop him. His glassy, feverish gaze flickered up and down Lance’s standing body. Although the internet café was as hot as that conference room in Russia, Lance had his hoodie zipped up all the way. Maybe Kuldeep thought that was weird, or maybe he knew what it meant.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Lance said. “Let’s go back to the hotel.”

  “’Kay.”

  Outside, Lance walked away from their hotel, keeping Kuldeep on his left. The subways were under construction. They circled decrepit, graffiti-splattered hoardings.

  “Peak signal strength: one hundred and twenty million janskys,” Lance said. “No one mentioned that before. Where’d you get that?”

  Kuldeep said, “The Scream was a hundred and twenty times stronger than the Russians told us.”

  “Yeah. Where?”

  Kuldeep shivered. “It’s cold,” he said. “Remember I thought the Russians were looking at me funny?”

  “‘Member that, yeah.”

  “They thought I was with the wrong group.”

  “Huh?”

  “That night I … went out.”

  It was the first time either of them had referred to Kuldeep’s hours sitting on the ground in the middle of the RATAN-600 array. Lance’s stomach felt hollow.

  “I was gonna see if I could break into Zhigunov’s office.”

  “You should’ve told me.”

  “You’d’ve been all like, quit it, Kul. Coolness In Action is not career advice.” Kuldeep mimicked Lance’s accent so perfectly that it was chilling. “Anyway, I couldn’t get into the laboratory building. So I headed back to the guest-house. I was feeling like shit, anyway. But right then a bus pulled up. It was like one in the morning. They must’ve figured we would all be asleep. I hung back to see who would get out, and it was four Indians.”

  “India Indians?”

  “Yes, of course. They were speaking Hindi. I kind of sneaked closer and heard enough to figure out who they were. The Russians took them up to their rooms … in the other wing of the guest-house … we weren’t supposed to know they were there. I waited for the Russians to leave, and then I went and knocked on these guys’ door.”

  “Who’d they turn out to be?”

  Kuldeep turned his face to him. A bitter mix of emotions twisted his features. “The ISRO.”

  “The Indian space agency.”

  “Yup. Their Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope picked up the signal, too. They wanted to compare notes with the Russians.”

  “The GMRT is way further east.”

  “From which we can determine that the beam scanned slowly across the earth for eight seconds, and it was probably about half as wide as the planet.”

  “Yeah, you said that in your email.”

  “I also said that we know nothing about its coherency or monochromicity, only that it was powerful and had a narrow bandwidth,” Kuldeep said, always a stickler for precision.

  “One hundred twenty million janskys. The Indians gave you that figure?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why? How’d you get it out of them?”

  “I worked my cover story,” Kuldeep said. “I am a CIA officer.”

  Lance felt physically sick. Whatever Kuldeep had, maybe it was catching. “And after that, you went out to the telescope and sat there for three hours.”

  “I … yeah.”

  Lance stuffed his hands into the pockets of his hoodie. There were no more sidewalks, just beetling four- and five-story buildings crusted with balconies. Laundry hung out to dry in the reeking night air. They separated to pass one on either side of a parked truck. When Lance got past the truck, Kuldeep didn’t reappear.

  He whirled, saw him running back the way they’d come.

  “KULDEEP!”

  Kuldeep didn’t slow down.

  Lance sprinted after him. It had been a while since he ran, really ran. But the streets of Naples were easier terrain than the backwoods. He overhauled Kuldeep, was almost close enough to grab the back of his jacket when Kuldeep wrung out a spurt and darted out of the narrow canyon Lance had chased him down, into a piazza lined with open-air cafés and bars. If Lance lost track of him in the crowd, it was all over.

  The world went into fast-forward. Lance slammed into Kuldeep and tackled him to the pavement. With his arms pinned, Kuldeep couldn’t catch himself. He hit the ground with a painful grunt. When Lance helped him up, his cheek was bleeding.

  None of the people around them paid the least attention. Naples.

  “You just screwed yourself so bad. Quit making it worse.” Lance dragged Kuldeep across the piazza, into an alley lined with overflowing dumpsters.

  “It was a maser.”

  They nestled together in the darkness between two of the dumpsters, Kuldeep’s face pressed to the wall, Lance grinding against him from behind, like they were fucking, except Lance was holding his gun to the side of Kuldeep’s neck.

  “The Russian dude said it was probably a maser,” Lance grunted, wondering if Kuldeep was trying to walk back the inflammatory claims he’d made in his never-to-be-sent email. Praying he would. C’mon, Kul. Just deny everything.

  “Not an astrophysical maser. Those come from stellar atmospheres or something else acting as a gain medium.” Kuldeep coughed. Lance pressed the gun harder into his neck. Kuldeep gasped, “This was the kind of maser we use right here on Earth for comms.”

  Lance rested his forehead on the back of Kuldeep’s lank, greasy hair. “Don’t make me shoot you, man.”

&nb
sp; “It touched off a cruise missile. We can’t sit on this.”

  “You know why we got to go to Russia?” Lance had worked this out after he talked to the sailors. “Someone real high up told them either you share, or we tell the whole world the Black Sea Fleet flagship had to limp back to port with a hole in her belly. The purpose of getting the information was to cover it up. That’s what they want and that’s what we want. We’re finally on the same side with the Russians, and you’re gonna destroy that by writing to the New York Times?”

  Kuldeep breathed heavily. “I heard them.”

  “Aw no.”

  “I swear I fucking heard them. Screaming for help.”

  Kuldeep bucked and twisted. His teeth flashed white in his brown face, and Lance felt searing agony rip into his neck.

  * * *

  They buried Phyllis Hoskins at Arlington National Cemetery, because her second husband had been an Army officer who died in Vietnam.

  The crowd was stupendous. Looked to Lance like Phyllis’s entire paramour network was there, with flotillas of greater and lesser government officials hovering around. He recognized the Secretary of State. He hung back at the fringe of the crowd. It was raining. He had his best suit on, but had forgotten to bring an umbrella, so he was getting wet from the head down. The scent of wet earth rose through the meticulously mown grass.

  After the service, people milled around, reverting to D.C. networking mode.

  Tom Flaherty trudged across the lawn, a African-American man in a cheap suit, under a cheap umbrella. Lance was standing under a tree in hopes of getting less wet. He waited, unmoving, for Flaherty to get within speaking distance.

  “Good you made it,” Flaherty hailed him.

  “I never knew she had so many friends,” Lance said. He had known it, but it was another thing to see the turnout.

  Flaherty stood beside him under the tree. “Know what this is?”

  “What?”

  “The last hurrah of the old guard.” Flaherty was chewing gum. Lance could smell it. Mint. “If they knew their history, they would know pride comes before a fall. It’s just when you think you’re on top of the world that everything comes crashing down. You know about the Roman empire?”

  “Some.”

  “All empires fall. But what the historians generally get wrong, is they aren’t overwhelmed from outside. They are conquered from within.”

  Flaherty offered Lance his pack of Orbit. Lance shook his head, staring at the few mourners still wandering around Phyllis’s grave site.

  Wondering if he was imagining what he saw.

  Praying Flaherty didn’t notice.

  When he decided that he wasn’t imagining it, he started forward, desperate to try and salvage the situation.

  Flaherty caught his arm. “It’s OK, Lance. I know you let him go. It’s OK.”

  Lance shook him off and crossed the lawn, half-running. Kuldeep saw him coming and froze, in the act of reaching over the velvet rope to lay a bunch of roses on the grave.

  Lance moved him physically away from the grave, arm around his shoulders. He smelled the familiar old Kuldeep smell of B.O. and Pringles. Nostalgia ripped through him, overridden quickly by anger. “Didn’t I tell you to run? I told you run and don’t come back.”

  “It’s OK,” Kuldeep said, twisting away. “He knows I’m here.” Lance followed his gaze. Flaherty stood, half-hidden by the pendulous branches of a tree, watching them.

  “He knows you’re here, but you’re not in jail? How’s that work?”

  “They threatened my family, of course,” Kuldeep said. He walked with his head down. He still looked sick. Shouldn’t have been out in the rain. Shouldn’t be here.

  Lance’s neck twinged where Kuldeep had bitten him. Not vampire style, but like an animal in a trap.

  Kuldeep had a family?

  They’d been as close as brothers, but they’d never exchanged a word about their families. In Lance’s case, there was nothing he wanted to say. His dad was dead, his mom was stuck in the revolving door of rehab, his brother was in jail for twenty to life. Mention any of that and the associated stereotypes would swallow him up beyond escape. But of course Kuldeep had a functional family. Lance pictured a warm, loving Hindu-American clan based somewhere like New Jersey.

  The neck-biting thing had shocked Lance into dropping his gun. So much for his training. After he picked it up, there was no longer any question of going through with it.

  “So I’m not gonna say anything,” Kuldeep said. “I’m not even supposed to be talking to you. No contact with anyone from the Agency.” He met Lance’s eyes for a second.

  “Keep it tight,” Lance said.

  “Will do.” Kuldeep hesitated, then stuck out his hand. “Might see you again afterwards. Who knows?”

  “After what?”

  “After all this is over. When the aliens come.”

  They shook hands. Then Kuldeep walked away across the sorrowful green heart of the American Dream, without looking back.

  * * *

  “It was a once-off,” Lance summed up. “No one’s picked up anything similar since. It’s been almost a month. Even those fools at the Arecibo laboratory have pretty much given up looking.” This was his response to Flaherty’s question—do YOU think it was a genuine alien signal? He shrugged against his seatbelt. They were driving back across Virginia from the cemetery to Agency headquarters. “Most likely it was an astrophysical maser.”

  “Bzzzt. Wrong answer.”

  Lance slewed his eyes around.

  Flaherty nodded along to Mary J. Blige, taking it easy at the wheel of his Crown Vic.

  “The correct answer is it doesn’t matter,” Flaherty said, after a couple minutes, as if he had been waiting for Lance to speak. “Was it aliens, was it an astrophysical no-see-um, was it a collective hallucination? Who fucking cares?”

  They drove a bit further in silence. Lance reflected, seething inside, how different this was from Phyllis’s day, when veracity mattered above all.

  “Ambiguity is good,” Flaherty mentioned eventually. “Information is power … and no information is also power.”

  Lance chewed the inside of his cheek. He kind of saw what Flaherty was getting at, but he couldn’t quite grasp it. This put him in a bad mood as Flaherty parked in the main lot out front of the Old Headquarters Building.

  They walked towards the building. Flaherty extended his umbrella sideways to keep the rain off of Lance, too. Lance began to turn aside to circle around to the New Headquarters Building. Flaherty said, “It’s raining. We’ll just cut through here.”

  Friday afternoon. The historic foyer empty. Echoing.

  Flaherty casually shook rain from his umbrella on the floor. He stopped in the center of the seal.

  CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

  UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  Flaherty beckoned to Lance, pulled him close. “We are gonna own this bitch,” he whispered, grinning.

  Lance understood then. He felt a thrill like nothing in his life before.

  “Empires fall and empires rise,” Flaherty breathed to him. “What makes a successful coup? Information. And we now control the most important information on the planet.”

  Lance looked down at the eagle under his feet, hiding his smile.

  “Ten years from now,” Flaherty said, as if it was a foregone conclusion, “I am gonna be running this agency. Might even be running the country. Who knows? We’ll take it as it comes, play the cards we’re dealt. Improvise.” Flaherty chuckled. “I like your style. I told you to silence Kuldeep Srivastava. Man, I don’t know what you did to that poor bastard, but it worked. We found him in a hotel in Rome with the curtains closed, the phone disconnected, earplugs in his ears, scared outta his motherlovin’ wits.”

  “I didn’t do anything to him.”

  “Yeah, uh huh. You just keep on doing that.”

  Lance looked up. “I once called a guy a nigga.”

  “I know about that.”

&
nbsp; “I didn’t mean anything by it. That’s just how I used to talk.”

  “You can call me nigga anytime, long as you call me boss,” Flaherty said.

  Chuckling, they passed on out the back of the building. Lance felt a lightness he could not have imagined when he woke up this morning. It was like being back in Naples. The world shimmered, infinitely full of possibilities.

  “My own opinion?” Flaherty said, “I agree with you. Aliens? Gimme a fucking break. C’mon, really? Smart people believe this shit? Aliens?”

  “But they do believe it,” Lance said. He was climbing the infamous steps, right behind Flaherty. “Phyllis would have believed it. She was waiting all her life for a chance to believe.”

  “Poor Phyllis,” Flaherty sighed. “Brilliant lady. Lovely lady. It’s a damn shame she wasn’t more careful on these steps.”

  Lance froze. One foot picked up, like a cat on a roof, he watched Flaherty reach the top of the steps and vanish into the building.

  A cold pang of suspicion snuck into his soul, and joined the coldness that was already there, and blended in until it didn’t matter anymore.

  * * *

  Aliens? No such thing as aliens.

  It’s important to stay fully informed. After all, information is power, and you have to keep an open mind to use it.

  But—remember this at night, when you’re twisting and turning, helplessly wakeful, like you got a permanent case of jet-lag, and the silence of the night sounds like an otherworldly whine—there are no aliens.

  * * *

  On a sunny afternoon in April, Lance’s phone rang.

  “Help you?”

  An aged voice gabbled, “Yeah, is Phyllis Hoskins there?”

  “I’m sorry, she no longer works here. Can I help you?”

  “Yeah, well, maybe. I guess you work for her. My name’s Pete Tamura. I work with NASA, at the Infrared Telescope Facility in Hawaii. I’m the telescope operator. This happened yesterday, OK? An observing team from Harvard, they saw something really fucking weird …”

  * * *

  Want to know what they saw? Wondering where the mysterious signal came from? Find out in Freefall, the new hard SF technothriller from Felix R. Savage, available now from Amazon.