The Return

by Joseph Helmreich

  * * *

  Shawn awoke with a start. For a second, the only thing that registered was a powerful throbbing in his head, like how he always imagined a hangover might feel if he drank. Then, as the pain began to clear, he sat up and took in his surroundings, which didn’t really amount to much. The room he was in was mostly bare, except for a ceiling fan, a folding chair (onto which his outer clothes had been draped), some random-looking pieces of tape on the wall, and the cot on which he lay. There was a window near the edge of the bed, though, and it seemed to be dark outside. Shawn swung his feet onto the floor to get a better look when the door of the room suddenly opened.

  A short, bald man with fleshy features and wearing a swanky three-piece suit stood in the doorway.

  “Good. You’re up,” he said in a soft, childlike voice. “Rachel wants to see you.”

  “Where am I?”

  The bald man gestured to Shawn’s clothes. “Get dressed.”

  A few minutes later, the man led Shawn down a corridor. As they walked, they passed several large windows, through which Shawn could barely make out what looked like a college campus, though it was too dark outside to be sure of anything. The building they were in also seemed to be a dormitory—or a former dormitory, at any rate. That might explain the tape on the wall of that room, which may have once been used for posters.

  The man led Shawn into a small office at the end of the hall, where a young woman seated at a desk was waiting for him. Once Shawn was inside, the man exited, closing the door behind him, leaving Shawn and the young woman alone. Shawn recognized her at once. The last time he had seen her face, she’d struck him with a needle.

  “Have a seat,” she instructed.

  After a moment’s hesitation, he sat down across from her. The office was spare, probably a former dorm office and, most likely, Shawn sensed, not the woman’s actual office.

  “Do you know who I am?” she asked.

  “You’re AmberQ,” he answered.

  “Very good.”

  She looked to be around his age, maybe a few years older but under thirty. Her eyes were large and rectangular like an anime character’s. Her hair was black and shoulder length with amber highlights that had no doubt inspired her online alias. There was something about her overall appearance that struck Shawn as not only beautiful but familiar, though he couldn’t tell if that was because he’d actually seen her before or because she reminded him of someone else.

  “My name is Rachel,” she said. Her speech had just the slightest trace of an accent, possibly Australian or New Zealand.

  “Why did you bring me here?”

  “We didn’t want to. We weren’t ready for you to make a move yet. But once you did, we decided to make the best of it.”

  “It was you all along, all those letters from Leland. Am I right?”

  She nodded.

  “Who are you?”

  “Shawn, do you like conspiracy theories?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Many people believe that we didn’t really land on the moon in 1969,” she continued. “They’re half-right. We landed there in 1951. The first time, at least. By 1969, we’d been there at least four times already.”

  She paused, and he realized she was waiting for some kind of reaction.

  “And I’m supposed to just believe that.”

  “You’re not supposed to anything. You can believe me or you can believe what you thought before, what everyone else thinks. It’s up to you.”

  Okay, he could play along.

  “So, what, are you saying there were earlier moon landings and NASA kept them a secret?”

  She shook her head.

  “NASA never knew. NASA had nothing to do with them.”

  “How could NASA have had nothing to do with them? Who did?”

  “We did. Ambius.”

  “Okay, so what’s Ambius?”

  “The real NASA. Or, to put it another way, Ambius is everything NASA doesn’t know it’s missing.”

  Shawn shook his head in frustration.

  “I can’t follow. You’re not giving this straight. And what does this have to do with Leland? Where is he really?”

  “We’re coming to that. And I’m sorry, I’ll try to be more clear. Ambius is a multinational space program. In all the ways that matter, it’s the only space program. It was started in 1939, a good nineteen years before NASA, when Earth first made contact with intelligent extraterrestrial life. We never could have found them ourselves, but they found us. The first communication came from a planet in the Epsilon Eridani system, but once contact had been established, we essentially joined the larger community. We were in the intergalactic phone book, so to speak. Meanwhile, we were exposed to incredible technology, things that helped Ambius advance rapidly beyond what we ever could have accomplished on our own. NASA was established shortly thereafter, a parallel program that emerged from the Committee for Aeronautics, which would exist completely independently from us, with no knowledge that contact had already been made, and which could act as the public face of space exploration.”

  “A front.”

  “Exactly. A front. Otherwise, there’d be no way to advance scientifically without alerting the world to the fact that intelligent extraterrestrial civilizations exist. And that could not happen. The evolution of the human race needed to proceed unimpeded by mass hysteria, politics, or religious interventions. Do you understand?”

  He didn’t respond. He didn’t want her to think he was accepting her story, even if in spite of himself he was becoming very interested.

  After a brief pause, she continued, “Just like the nations of our world, the different populations of the universe vary in their dispositions. Ten years ago, our intelligence sources learned that a certain planet was planning to attack us. We’re still not entirely sure why, but there were some indications it had to do with our natural resources. You may have heard in the course of your academic career that Earth, because of its size, distribution of elements, and its perfect distance from its star, is fairly unique in the universe. This is true. We’re the subject of great envy, Shawn. At any rate, we weren’t going to sit and wait for this attack to happen, so we implemented an advanced plan to build a kind of protective barrier, a large cosmic shield comprised of exotic matter that could essentially trap any object trying to pass through it and redirect it thousands of years into the past.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  She only smiled.

  “So, what, you had some kind of alien technology at your disposal to be able to build something like that?”

  “Not for this. We had a plain old regular human scientist at our disposal. A well-known theoretical physicist who had been secretly working with us for years and who, in the early part of his career, had conducted groundbreaking research on ways of integrating the Alcubierre drive with the Krasnikov tube. More recently, he had postulated a theory that the two could be effectively combined to create a kind of wall or screen of curved space-time.”

  The terms Alcubierre drive and Krasnikov tube blindsided him and rang in his ears. It couldn’t be. Or could it? Rachel saw the look on his face, and she nodded.

  “But how could he have worked for you?” Shawn stammered. “He was a hack who hadn’t contributed anything to science in decades!”

  “So it would seem. But if you were working for the most covert organization in the world, what would you want people to think?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t believe it.”

  “Like I said, you don’t have to.”

  Shawn closed his eyes. This was all so much to take in. He opened them again. “So did he build your shield?”

  “No.”

  “What happened?”

  “You know what happened. Everyone knows what happened.”

  “Bernasconi Hills.”

  She nodded. “Leland hadn’t even gotten a chance to begin adapting his old research for the project. They knew, and they took him.”

 
; “And what did they do to him?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “What do you mean you don’t know? He came back! What did he say happened?”

  “He said what you already know he said. That he didn’t even remember being abducted in the first place. That the whole thing never happened.”

  “But what did he say to you?”

  “He didn’t say anything to us.”

  “What? What do you mean?”

  She took a deep breath.

  “When Leland came back, we had no idea why, just like we had no idea why we hadn’t been attacked in the time he’d been gone. We wanted the answers to these questions. Why did they keep him alive? Was he telling the truth about not remembering anything? As soon as he was picked up in Mexico, right after the first round of the media circus, we requested he be brought to a facility in Texas for immediate questioning. But the feds got to him first. They certainly didn’t buy his spiel about having no memory, and they wanted more time with him. They continued to question him, eventually resorting to enhanced interrogation techniques. Nothing too unorthodox, probably not even as bad as what they use in Guantanamo. Problem was, traveling upward of eleven light-years is apparently not the healthiest thing for a person’s heart. They pushed just a little too hard, and that was it.”

  Shawn stared at her in shock.

  “So all those rumors about him living in the woods or the hills…”

  “Stories that serve everyone’s interests, including ours.”

  Shawn sat there in stunned silence as Rachel gave him a moment to process it all. Then she continued, “We’ll probably never know the truth about what he experienced in space or why he came back. Just as we’ll never know why he claimed to have no memories, whether his mind had actually been wiped clean or whether it was all part of some master plan. What we do know is that the threat is still very real. We can’t say why they haven’t attacked yet, but ten years isn’t much time between two planets separated by trillions of miles of space, and we have no reason to think the attack has been called off. On the contrary, we have every reason to believe it’s imminent. Meanwhile, in the time since Bernasconi Hills, we’ve made dozens of attempts at building Leland’s cosmic shield, and every single one has failed spectacularly. My colleagues think there’s no one on Earth who understands Leland’s theories well enough to finish what he started. I disagree.”

  Shawn, who’d been staring at the floor, looked up at her. He knew where this was going and couldn’t believe she could possibly be serious.

  “Let me get this straight,” he said. “You’re asking a grad school dropout to build a giant shield made out of time travel. Is there a punch line coming, or is that it?”

  “You sell yourself short, and you know it. We read your posts on gravitational singularity and superluminal tunnels on Schrödinger’s Rat, and we’ve been spitballing with you by mail for months. We know you’re not ‘smart’—you’re one in a fucking million. And grad school dropout or not, you understand Leland’s work better than anyone else alive. Is that not the case? Don’t misunderstand, we’re not asking you to do this yourself. We’re asking you to do this with us.”

  Shawn was quiet a minute.

  “Okay, let’s imagine for argument’s sake that I really do understand Leland’s work better than anybody. Still, why would I help some shady secret government outfit that tricked me, kidnapped me, and, if you’re not totally full of it, has been lying to the whole planet for almost a century?”

  Rachel smiled. “Because you wouldn’t just be helping some shady secret government outfit. You’d also be saving the world.” She leaned forward, her anime eyes staring imploringly into his own. “Please, Shawn. Will you help us?”

  Some hours later, lying in a slightly more comfortable bed in a more furnished room in the same building, Shawn couldn’t sleep. A ceiling fan circled above him, and his eyes absently followed the blades. He had a big orientation in the morning, would get situated and meet the other scientists he’d be working with. For now, though, his mind was back on his elementary school science fair and what had really transpired after he’d been accused of cheating.

  Even though Principal Davis and Mr. Wilcox couldn’t prove that he’d stolen his design for the car, they disqualified his project, anyway, and suspended him from school for a week. They also let the word get out among his teachers and peers that Shawn had plagiarized his project, turning everyone’s jealousy into disdain. But Shawn knew the design was his. No one believed him because they just couldn’t accept that he was better and smarter than they were.

  One day, things would be different, he’d promised himself then. Someday, people wouldn’t hate him for being smarter than they were.

  Someday, they would thank him.

  CHAPTER 7

  On June 24, at the stroke of midnight, Father Arroyo ambled over to a massive pile of discarded furniture and papier-mâché statues and lit the whole thing aflame, exclaiming, ““Deus lux mea!” as hundreds of spectators broke into wild applause, punctuated by the sound of fireworks and blasting trumpets. The statues, giant effigies of local celebrities and politicians, burned one by one along the cliff side as the crowd danced before them with an exuberance that rivaled the larger festivities taking place at the same time on El Postiguet Beach. La Crema, the climax of the Bonfires of Saint John festival, had commenced.

  As revelers watched to see which statue would go the longest without becoming consumed, Father Arroyo noticed Father Reese and Father McCord standing off to the side, away from all the action. The moment Father Reese stepped away to chat with someone else, Father Arroyo approached Father McCord.

  “Padre, might you have some time tomorrow evening to stop by my office?”

  “Of course, Padre.”

  “Great. Thank you.”

  As Father Arroyo walked away, he glanced over his shoulder once more at Father McCord. The assistant priest stood alone, motionless, his dark sunglasses brilliantly reflecting the flames he couldn’t see. Father Arroyo couldn’t trust him, he knew that. But he couldn’t trust himself, either.

  * * *

  The next morning, at the crack of dawn, Father McCord rose from a fitful slumber and could still hear her voice. It was the third time he’d dreamed about her that month, and once again, her voice had been a soft and sweet whisper; different, he knew, from how it had been in life. Putting on his cassock and collar, he marveled at how his conscious memories always seemed to complicate things, while his dreams seemed to understand.

  In the afternoon, he read aloud to a group of students from Salinas, whom he’d been teaching from the beginning of the month. One of the students asked him, “Padre, what’s it like to be blind?”—a surprising question only in that it was being asked so late by this particular group.

  “Imagine what you would see,” he replied, “if your head fell straight off.”

  Children gravitated to Father McCord for much the same reason many adults found him distant and aloof: he didn’t try too hard to be your friend. He was congenial, but there was also something closed off about him, not unlike his good friend at the parish, Father Reese. While on the surface Father Reese seemed much more an open book, he wasn’t; though intrusive and gossip prone when it came to others, he was remarkably private and defensive when it came to himself.

  Sometime after dinner, at the direction of Josep, the aging parish secretary, Father McCord took a seat in the antechamber to Father Arroyo’s office. After a few moments, Father Arroyo opened his door and invited Father McCord to enter.

  “How do you do, Padre?” Arroyo asked as Father McCord took a seat.

  “Fine, thank you.”

  Father Arroyo gathered some papers into a pile and shoved them in a drawer, wondering as he did why he felt the need to make a show of tidying up for someone who couldn’t see the mess nor the show. He leaned back in his chair and exhaled, making a soft whistling sound.

  “Padre,” he said, “have you heard the name ‘Salvad
or Quintana’?”

  “No, I can’t say I have.”

  “He’s a scientist, apparently something called a ‘medicinal chemist.’ Develops new drugs and medicines for pharmaceutical companies. I lunched with him and his wife last week; they want me to officiate at their daughter’s wedding. Nice people. Over the course of a lovely and respectful conversation, Dr. Quintana suddenly asks me, ‘How, Padre, can you continue to believe in all this crazy tonterías? Heaven is within reach! One man has even been there and back! Soon enough, we’ll all be going there, and it won’t be Jesus who will take us—it will be science! It will be progress and forward thinking and intelligence, everything to which your precious church stands in total opposition!’ Mind you, his manner and tone remained entirely pleasant, even as he was telling me that my church opposes intelligence.”

  “And what did you say?”

  “I conceded that yes, science might take our physical selves to spectacular places, even out to the farthest reaches of the heavens. But our souls, our true selves, will remain fixed on the ground until we accept that real transformation occurs only in the infinite space inside of us. The Great Infinity Within, as I like to call it. And that it is only through faith in our Lord and Savior that we will obtain true heaven, true spiritual salvation, true discovery, and adventure! A spacecraft can take you very far geographically, but only real faith can bring you to that wondrous place, that magical dimension where you can feel all of existence moving within and without you, where you are everything combined with everything and your heart and the rhythm of the universe beat as one.”

  There was a moment of silence as Father McCord waited to be sure the padre was finished speaking.

  “Sounds like a perfectly fine response,” he said.

  Arroyo smiled.

  “Oh, I do believe I’ll miss you, Father McCord.”

  “Are you going somewhere, Padre?”

  “Indeed I am. Though that’s just between you and me.”

  “Valencia?”

  “No, no. I’m retiring, Father McCord. What made you say Valencia?”