The Return

by Joseph Helmreich

  “Where?” Leland didn’t look up.

  “You know. There.”

  Leland went on rustling papers and muttering as though Shawn hadn’t said anything at all. Shawn was used to that, and he closed his eyes and listened to the sound of the rain beating down on the roof, interspersed with occasional cracks of thunder in the distance. They’d likely be heading out first thing in the morning, but there was still time to get some sleep. Leland, he was sure, wouldn’t be going to bed anytime soon. In the month and a half since Shawn’s escape from Dellwood College, he had never gone to sleep after Leland nor woken up before him.

  Shawn adjusted his position several times and then closed his eyes and began to drift off, while Leland, sounding like some kind of madman or shaman, continued to mutter under his breath as the names of unfamiliar American towns floated in and out of Shawn’s fading consciousness.

  CHAPTER 17

  What happened to Andrew Leland? The question had haunted Shawn ever since high school, and while he certainly had more information now than he ever did before, it had had never been truly answered and in fact had only morphed, taking on deeper, more psychological dimensions. Where once Shawn wondered merely about the basic facts of Leland’s experiences in space, now the mystery encapsulated Leland’s entire identity, as well.

  As far as Shawn could tell, there were at least three Andrew Lelands. The first, and the one Shawn related to most, was the brilliant young scientist who had revolutionized the field with his early work in theoretical physics in the late ’90s and early 2000s, whose first treatises were obscure and long winded, but whose writing eventually sharpened into articles and books so lucid and original that each time you read them, the depth and singularity of his brilliance struck you anew. Next, came the sellout Leland of the following years, a grinning, self-satisfied C-list celebrity who had seemingly made a conscious decision to dumb down his persona in order to make it lucrative, an ambitious goal for any physicist but one that had largely paid off, even if his reputation among his peers had steeply declined.

  If those Andrew Lelands were accessible, easy to characterize, the third and present Andrew Leland was a mystery wrapped inside an enigma wrapped inside a very boring man. The antithesis of the former media-happy playboy, this Leland was silent, joyless, and intensely private, making him something of a less-than-ideal constant traveling companion. He also bore no real resemblance to the celebrated genius that had constituted his original incarnation. If his famous brain ever produced an interesting thought nowadays, something beyond which town or city would provide them with the best cover for the next few days, he evidently kept it to himself. He didn’t talk physics, and he sure as hell didn’t talk about anything that had happened to him in space.

  Meanwhile, the limited information he was willing to disclose differed sharply from what Shawn had been told back at Dellwood College. On his first night there, Rachel had said that after having been discovered in Mexico, a bearded, haggard-looking Leland had been brought somewhere in Texas and interrogated by the federal government before Ambius could speak to him first. In truth, it had been Ambius itself that had interrogated Leland. What had he experienced in space? they demanded to know. Why had he come back now? Most urgently, what was the exact nature of the giant shield he had built for the other planet, and how could it be dismantled?

  But in stark contrast to Rachel’s account, instead of Leland’s heart giving out under the stress of their inquisition, he had escaped. How he had done so, how he could have done so, he would not reveal, though Shawn had his own ideas. In the past month and a half of observing Leland day in and day out, he had come to suspect that, beyond the changes in his personality, Leland might have come back from space different in other ways, too. Physical ways. Several incidents, including Leland’s initial rescue of Shawn from the river, hinted at this. If that were indeed the case, it might explain not only how Leland had escaped from Ambius in Texas but also how he had continued to elude capture ever since, even as Ambius had hunted him across the globe with trained teams of foot soldiers. In the Netherlands, South Africa, most recently in Spain, he had been confronted by Ambius hit squads again and again, and each time, he had somehow narrowly escaped. It didn’t add up unless there was more Leland wasn’t telling.

  Spain had been different, though, in two notable ways:

  First, they hadn’t just gone after him this time; when they thought they’d missed him, they had murdered all those who’d been close to him, presumably as a warning that wherever he went, he would bring disaster to anyone he befriended. Second, when they found him, they didn’t try to take him alive, as they’d done in the past, but actually tried to kill him. (According to Leland, he survived only because a fire suddenly broke out in the old church where he’d been cornered and he was able to escape under the cover of smoke.)

  They didn’t need Andrew Leland anymore. They had Shawn.

  Rachel had told Shawn that a certain planet was planning a deadly attack on Earth and that Ambius needed him to complete Leland’s work and help them build a giant shield in outer space for protection. This was a total inversion of the truth. In reality, it was Earth, and specifically Ambius, that had been planning to attack the other world. There was apparently some extremely valuable object or resource they possessed (Leland couldn’t or wouldn’t tell Shawn more about it), and Ambius was determined to steal it. The aliens became aware of Ambius’s plans, and so they recruited Andrew Leland to build the cosmic shield to protect them. And once he had done so, a desperate Ambius had in turn recruited Shawn, a supposed expert on Leland’s work, to figure out how to dismantle it (flipping the story, meanwhile, so Shawn thought he was helping them build it). Looking back now, Shawn realized he was probably the only person on the entire Dellwood campus who hadn’t known the truth, who had believed they were all there to try to save the world.

  The irony, though, was that the fake threat Ambius had concocted to lure Shawn in had become all too real—they just didn’t know it. In the time since Leland had built the cosmic shield, the aliens’ stance toward Earth had evolved. No longer was the shield deemed sufficient to counter the danger of such a reckless and destructive planet as Earth. The threat it posed needed to be permanently neutralized. Earth, it was concluded, had to be destroyed.

  The one thing preventing that from happening, though, was the shield, whose existence blocked the aliens from attacking Earth as much as it blocked Earth from attacking them. And while Leland never said so directly, reading between the lines, Shawn understood that the only one on that world who could have effectively dismantled it for them was Leland himself. Presumably, he had refused to do so. What happened after that and how Leland wound up back on Earth were still missing pieces of the puzzle.

  Now, thanks to Shawn’s unwitting help, the aliens wouldn’t need Leland to dismantle the shield because Ambius would do it, instead, totally unaware of the doom that would invite.

  “Can’t we just tell Ambius the truth?” Shawn had asked on an open highway somewhere between Minneapolis and Salt Lake City. “Shouldn’t that do it? Just say, ‘Hey, Ambius, that planet you want to attack? It’s actually already planning to attack us, and that big shield you want to remove is actually the only thing preventing them from doing it’?”

  Leland, at the wheel, shook his head.

  “Why not?”

  “One of two things would happen: they wouldn’t believe it, or they’d think they can strike first.”

  “Why?”

  “Arrogance. It’s their defining trait.”

  Shawn considered that a moment. “Fine. Then screw Ambius. What about just telling everyone? We could expose Ambius, expose everything that’s going on!”

  “And who do you think would believe us?”

  “Who would believe Andrew Leland if he came out of hiding and spoke openly and honestly to the world? Everybody.”

  Leland shook his head. “It would be too late. Ambius won’t be stopped.”

  “Yo
u don’t know that. Anyway, at least people would know what’s coming. Even if they couldn’t do anything about it, they’d be prepared. The world has a right to know.”

  Leland suddenly turned to him. “You don’t get it. If the world knew it was going to be attacked and slaughtered by an advanced alien race, the world would destroy itself before the aliens ever got here.”

  Leland turned back to the road, and Shawn remained silent, though he didn’t really buy what Leland was saying. The world hadn’t destroyed itself when it had watched a man get snatched up into the sky on live TV. The world had adjusted. Either way, it wasn’t Shawn’s or Leland’s or anyone else’s place to protect humanity from itself. Shawn knew, however, that there was no point in arguing further. Leland’s stubbornness on this issue, his perverse, fatalistic insistence on riding out the apocalypse instead of doing anything to prevent it, hardly seemed rooted in logic. It was almost as though on some level he wanted the confrontation to happen, though Shawn couldn’t for the life of him imagine why.

  In the meantime, the plan was to lie low and survive. The whole world was living on borrowed time. Ambius would take down the shield and the other planet would attack, and what happened after that was a burning bridge Shawn and Leland would cross when the time came. For now, they would remain focused on everyday concerns like where to find food, shelter, supplies, how to stay unrecognized, unknown. Shawn knew this passive approach of self-preservation was probably unconscionable, but he also knew that defying Leland wasn’t an option.

  “Why are you keeping me with you?” he’d asked him early on. “We both know you’d move faster without me.”

  “True. But you’d last about two hours without me.”

  Leland was probably right, but Shawn had trouble believing he actually cared much about him, just as he hadn’t seemed particularly regretful when recounting the priests who’d been murdered on his account in Spain. The main reason Leland was keeping him around, he suspected, was exactly the same reason Shawn was wanted dead by Ambius: he knew too much and couldn’t be trusted to keep that information to himself. It was the unspoken dynamic in their relationship, that whatever else Shawn was to Leland, he was also his prisoner.

  Meanwhile, though Leland would occasionally recount things that happened during his time on the run, he never discussed his experiences in space. If Shawn even tried to bring up the subject, Leland would immediately shut down. When Shawn had been at the campus with Rachel and the other young recruits, he’d been kept in the dark about anything beyond their specific project. Though he had yearned to hear about other planets and the intelligent life they contained, as well as the advanced alien technologies that Ambius had come to possess, no one would tell him anything of substance, and it frustrated him to no end. Now, fate had brought him together with Andrew Leland, the real Andrew Leland, the man whom he had spent years obsessing over and longing to meet, and it was the same old shit all over again. His dream had come true and had turned out to be just another dead end.

  CHAPTER 18

  In the cool and misty morning, after rubbing down the surfaces of the barn with microfiber cloths to wipe out fingerprints, Shawn and Leland loaded up the Civic with everything they had, and, Leland commanding the wheel, they got back onto I-17, headed north toward Flagstaff. The idea was to lay over in Camp Verde for the next few days, unless by some chance they found a suitable hideout along the way.

  They did.

  It was Shawn who first spotted the old mansion, its witch-hat turret and weather vane jutting out from behind the honey locusts that dotted the side of the highway. The small portion of the structure visible from the road was striking in both its design and its dilapidation. It looked like a haunted house, which meant it looked like a deserted house.

  Shawn alerted Leland, who pulled the car off the highway and onto a narrow wooded road that turned out to lead almost directly to the house itself. About sixty yards from it, he stopped the car, and Shawn got out. Being the far less conspicuous of the two, Shawn would now approach on his own, scope out the scene, and if the house turned out to be as abandoned as it seemed, Leland would pull in round the back and they would unload their things.

  As Shawn walked the overgrown driveway leading up to the entrance, the old mansion loomed over him. Tricolored in cream, pink, and lavender and comprising a host of cylindrical and triangular shapes, classy but asymmetrical dormers, chimneys, and balconies, it reminded him of some of the old Victorian manors he used to see on school trips in Massachusetts, but with a dash of Dr. Seuss or Disneyland thrown in. A plaque affixed to the front door read:

  The Atterbury House. Built by James Creighton in 1869, this gorgeous 21,000-square-foot Queen Anne Victorian was home to Dr. Timothy Atterbury, a 19th century oil heir and scholar of French literature. The interior includes eleven rooms, among them five bedrooms, a parlor, foyer, dining room, servants’ quarters, and library. Today, the house is preserved as a historic museum.

  But it was clearly no museum, at least not anymore. Its body paint was chipping all over, and about half of its decorative fish-scale shingles were missing. As Shawn ascended the balustrade staircase leading to the front door, he half expected to crash right through it. When he reached the entrance, he pressed the button on the brass doorbell, feeling a little absurd. After the anticipated interval of silence, he tried the doorknob. At first, it didn’t budge, but once he’d put his back into it, the unlocked door cracked open, and Shawn stepped gingerly into a wide vestibule. Almost immediately, he began to cough as beams of natural light from the high windows illuminated thick columns of dust. Covering his nose and mouth, he did a quick trek through the house, which yielded no signs of human habituation, and then went back outside and gave Leland the all-clear.

  Several hours later, after most of the windows had been opened and the house aired out, Shawn and Leland sat on the floor of an upstairs bedroom, eating a silent meal of instant lentil soup they’d cooked on a tiny portable butane stove. Despite the abundance of rooms, they had designated just a single one for eating, sleeping, and storing their belongings in. This was part of the Andrew Leland MO of survival. Always consolidate, so if you have to move out, you can move out now.

  After dinner, as Leland busied himself with a crinkled atlas, Shawn set about exploring the old mansion in greater depth. The plaque outside had mentioned servants’ quarters, but Shawn hadn’t seen evidence of any yet, so he thought he might try to seek those out.

  But there was one place he knew he wanted to check out first.

  The Atterbury library, located on the mansion’s first floor, was a wide, round room with rosewood paneling and arched, curtain-draped windows. In the center sat an antique red velvet settee and several leather armchairs resting upon what looked like a Moroccan rug, all of this overhung by an elegant crystal chandelier. But what really drew Shawn’s attention were the hundreds, or likely thousands, of books lining the shelves floor to ceiling. Back at Dellwood College, the dusty old school library had felt oppressive and claustrophobic. Now, after six supremely boring weeks on the road, the sight of so many books made Shawn feel suddenly free and alive.

  He took a step closer to one of the shelves and was delighted to find that, in addition to his interests in French literature, Dr. Atterbury must have also been something of a science geek. At least one section was full of books on anatomy and physiology. Shawn scanned the titles, names like Physical Science and Sexuality and On Curing Intemperance, works by authors now obscure, but who might have been greatly renowned in their own times. One book that sounded particularly intriguing was Mind and Brain by Thomas Laycock. Slowly and gently, Shawn pulled it out from the shelf and blew some dust off its ancient leather binding. But when he opened it and started to flip through, he squinted in confusion. The first twenty pages or so appeared to be blank. He flipped through some more and discovered that the whole book was blank!

  “Braille,” said a voice behind him, and Shawn nearly jumped out of his skin.

 
How long had Leland been standing there? Shawn breathed a sigh of relief and looked back down at the book and realized he was right. In the late afternoon light, he had totally missed the embossment that covered all the book’s pages.

  “Someone who lived here must have been blind,” Leland said. “Maybe Dr. Atterbury himself, though probably not. Don’t imagine there were enough Braille books in the nineteenth century for a Ph.D.” Leland walked passed Shawn and pulled out a thick volume from another shelf. Shawn watched as he thumbed through the pages and then stopped at a certain spot and gently fingered the paper, a perceptible distance coming into his eyes.

  Shawn observed him only a moment longer.

  “How did you get past the shield?” Shawn asked, surprising himself. He’d wanted to ask the question for a long time, but only here and now, in the quietude and stillness of that majestic room, did he suddenly summon the courage.

  A cloud passed over Leland’s face, his trance broken. He looked at Shawn, frowned. Shawn swallowed, but pressed on. “The cosmic shield should have worked both ways,” he said. “So how could you have made it through to get back here? Was it not as impenetrable as it was supposed to be?”

  Leland stared at him a moment longer, then looked down at the book he was holding, blew some dust off the page, and closed the cover. “Let me ask you a question,” he said. “You’re in a spacecraft going ninety thousand miles per hour and you hit the shield. What happens?”

  “You get shot back in time.”

  “How far?”

  “Probably around six thousand years.”

  “Okay. Good. And if you’re in a ship going thirty thousand miles per hour?”

  “Around two thousand years. But no spacecraft could get you to a perfect speed with enough consistency that you could pass through the shield and wind up on the other side still in the present.”