by Ian Douglas
“If I might suggest, sir,” Hunter said carefully, “you would still have the temporal option.”
“‘Temporal option’? What do you mean?”
“Yes, brilliant!” Brody put in. “The commander is saying you could take these people home, back to Earth, but then, since you’ll be traveling backward in time anyway . . .”
“We get to Aldebaran with no delay,” Groton said, completing the thought. He looked thoughtful. “We’ll need to do a detailed paradox assessment, of course, but it might work . . .”
“I don’t see what the problem would be,” Brody said. “So long as the Hillenkoetter doesn’t get to Aldebaran before those cruisers, what’s the problem?”
“Time travel,” Groton said, rubbing his eyes with both hands, “makes my head hurt.”
“Okay,” Commander Haines said, “what I want to know is why the Saurians had that base here.”
“We’ve asked them,” Wheaton said. “For hours now, my people have been questioning the ones Commander Hunter brought up from the planet. All they’ll say is that we led them there. But we don’t know what that means.”
“I wonder,” Hunter said, “if they’re referring to our UFO mythologies?”
“What do you mean?” Groton asked.
“There’s a sizable fraction in the UFO community claiming Zeta Reticuli is the Gray home sun, right?”
“Right,” Haines said. “But they were wrong. Disinformation.”
“Maybe. Or maybe the Grays and Saurians do more than use higher dimensions to jump from point to point. Maybe they actually visit other dimensions . . . other universes. Maybe in a universe next door, Serpo is their homeworld.”
“That’s kind of a reach, Commander,” Groton said.
“Is it? Isn’t this whole damn thing a reach? But isn’t that the point? And maybe that’s not it. Maybe, since they’re from the future, in that future Serpo is more like home. Not their homeworld, necessarily, but a place where they can live. A place where they have a colony and we do have an exchange program with aliens.”
“You’re making my headache worse, Commander.”
“All I’m trying to say, Captain, is that the universe isn’t nearly as neat and rational as we like to think it is. Stuff happens that seems to make no sense at all, coincidences convince us that the cosmos is completely screwy, but if we could look at things from outside, from a different perspective, it all might make sense.”
“Commander Hunter is right,” Brody said. He shook his head slowly. “The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics suggests that there are myriad different universes overlapping in a gigantic multiverse, where anything that can happen does happen . . . in one universe or another.”
“I don’t think I buy that,” Vanover said.
“Doctor, the multiverse doesn’t care whether you buy it or not,” Brody said. “Between time travel and quantum physics, the universe is one vast, black, twisty infinity so strange, so irrational in some ways, that we may never be able to fully understand it. But we know aliens are real. We know time travel is real. So, as more of our science fiction becomes proven, isn’t it worth considering that our other ‘outlandish’ theories can be true, too?”
For a moment the room was silent. Then, “We should ask the Grays if they understand it,” McClure said. “Betcha they say ‘no, and hell, no!’”
“I just want to know why the Saurians have been abducting humans,” the ship’s senior tactical officer, Commander Bill James, said.
“Dr. McClure and one of the people we rescued both told me on different occasions that the Grays have run into a genetic bottleneck a million years off in the future,” Hunter said. “They’re abducting humans to repair the gene lines, I guess.” He shrugged. “That’s as good an explanation as we’re going to get, I think. At least for right now.”
“Right,” McClure said. “And I don’t want to hear any more nonsense about human-alien hybrids! The idea is pure hokum.”
“That’s the Grays,” Groton said. “What about the damned Saurians? They’re not related to humans.”
“Actually,” McClure said, “they are. At least distantly.”
“What the hell?” Hunter exclaimed.
She laughed. “You know . . . some people in the conspiracy community insist that humans are the descendents of aliens who crash-landed on Earth a long time ago, right?”
“I’ve heard that.”
“And it’s patent nonsense, because we are related genetically, closely related, to every other life-form on Earth. We share something like 60 percent of our DNA makeup with starfish, for God’s sake. Fifty percent with bananas! Humans very definitely evolved on planet Earth.”
“Ah. So you’re saying . . .”
“We’re related to them, yes. Very distantly.” McClure had her laptop open, tapping away at the keys. “Back in 1982,” she said, “a paleontologist at the National Museum of Canada named Dale Russell speculated about what dinosaurs might have become if an asteroid hadn’t smashed into the Yucatán sixty-five million years ago. He pointed out that one dinosaur in particular, the troodon, had quite a large brain compared to its body size, three partially opposable fingers, and binocular vision. He had a model made of this animal and of a creature that he called a ‘dinosauroid.’ He imagined it as having evolved from the troodon over the course of several million years. Here it is.”
On her computer screen, two life-size resin or acrylic models strode forward on flat bases. One was obviously a dinosaur, walking on its hind legs, its forelegs reaching forward as if to grab something. The other, however, looked far more human. Too human. Both models were dark green on their backs, pale and reddish on their fronts, and shared details of yellow, slit-pupiled eyes and three-fingered hands. Hunter guessed that the dinosauroid was about the same height as a human, or maybe a bit shorter.
“It looks awfully human,” James said.
“That was one of the main criticisms of the idea,” McClure said. “Somehow, the troodon loses its tail, adopts an upright stance, and goes from a plantigrade to an upright posture. Russell was pretty viciously castigated for his efforts.
“However, the point of the exercise was simply to get people thinking. Evolution is a continuous process, okay? Life-forms continue to evolve until they go extinct. We’re continuing to evolve. The Grays are proof of that.”
“Wait a minute,” Hunter said, seeing where this was going. “You’re saying that the Saurians—?”
“Are dinosaurs evolved to intelligence, yes.”
“So when they claim to be from Earth . . .”
“They’re telling what for them is the simple truth. Yes.”
“Hold on a sec,” James demanded. “Where the hell have they been for sixty-five million years? That’s sixty-some times longer than the evolutionary gulf between us and the Grays! They would have changed a lot more in that time. And their technology would be—I don’t know. Beyond imagining!”
“Actually, we think they developed an industrial civilization a few thousand years before the asteroid hit Earth,” McClure told them. “Modern cities, all ground to dust by time. Spaceflight, star flight. We’ve found some artifacts on the Moon that might be theirs. Ultimately, though, Earth became uninhabitable. So they moved someplace else.”
“We call them Malok,” Elanna said, “but their name for themselves translates as ‘The Surviving Few.’ You can guess what it was they survived.”
“An Earth devastated by the asteroid impact,” Vanover said softly. “Enough dust in the air to block the sun’s light for centuries. Every forest consumed by fire. The oceans turned acidic . . .”
“Exactly,” Elanna said.
“And because faster-than-light drives are, of necessity, also time machines,” McClure added, “they began exploring time. Specifically the future.”
“So the Grays are time travelers from the far future,” Hunter said, thoughtful. “And the Saurians are time travelers from the remote past? Wow! That kind of puts a dif
ferent spin on things, doesn’t it?”
Groton scowled. “Elanna? Why weren’t we told any of this?”
Her large, startlingly blue eyes blinked slowly. “It was not deemed important, Captain. Besides, certain aspects of time travel are restricted and not shared with humans from your period. Attempts to go back in time and attack the Saurians would result in truly inconceivable paradoxes. You might do terrible damage to the time lines in a hundred different interrelated universes.”
“Do we know any alien species that aren’t from Earth?” Brody wanted to know.
“Quite a few, actually,” McClure said.
“There are currently some eighty distinct species secretly in contact with various of Earth’s governments,” Elanna said, completely missing Brody’s sarcasm. “Of these, only the Talis, the future humans you call the Grays, and the Malok are originally from Earth. The rest are from all over the Galaxy, and from across time. Some are from what you think of as alternate universes or dimensions. Life, as we currently understand it, is staggeringly complex and diverse.”
“Still begs the question,” Groton said. “Why are our dinosaurian friends kidnapping modern-day humans and keeping them in giant test tubes?”
“The Malok have their own agenda, remember,” Elanna said. “The Saurians have been modifying the human genome for thousands of years . . . tens of thousands of years. They may have been responsible for creating humans in the first place, by modifying the DNA of Homo erectus half a million years ago. They hope to remake Earth as their home, but, as their name for themselves suggests, they are still few in number. Besides, they prefer to remain in the shadows, ambush predators, if you will. Opportunists. Their plan may be to redirect human evolution in a direction that will make our species more . . . docile.”
“The Grays,” Hunter said. “I’d call them docile. And down on the planet, a lot of them seem to be working for the Saurians. Almost like slaves. Or biological robots.”
“We don’t believe they succeed in changing humankind,” Elanna said. “In our time, the Malok are not in evidence, and the Talis, along with all of the other human species we know of, are free. But . . .” She gave a shrug. “They are very good at hiding in the shadows.”
“I’d say we still have a lot to learn,” Groton said. “Okay—I think you’re right, Commander. We’ll shape a course for Earth. For home. But we’ll have to turn right around and come back out to Aldebaran, once the ship is refitted and supplied. Anyone have a problem with that?”
No one did.
“We’ll depart as soon as Damage Control reports on all of the compartments the Saurians got at, make sure everything is in working order. Current guess, Jeff?”
Jeff Markusky was the senior Damage Control officer. “Give us twenty-four hours,” he said.
“Twenty-four hours, then,” Groton said. “I just hope the Xaxki go along with that.”
The Hillenkoetter and the Inman jumped, transiting the nearly 354 billion miles between Zeta 1 and Zeta 2 in an instant. Dropping to a more reasonable velocity, they floated above a vast disk of dust and gas side by side. And within that disk were . . . infant worlds.
“Dr. McClure . . .”
“Please, Mark,” she said. “Call me Becky. We’re way past formalities—at least off duty and in private.”
They sat next to one another on a couch in the ship’s main lounge. An entire wall had been converted to a viewscreen displaying the ultimate night outside. The scientists were still studying the newborn worlds, and speculating as to whether the Xaxki claims of creating them could be true.
Hunter didn’t know about that . . . but he knew an inner quiver of awe and wonder at the thought that giants walked among the stars.
“Becky, then. I was just wondering: What are you going to do when we get back to Earth?”
She laughed. “I haven’t had the time to think about that. I’ll stay with Solar Warden, of course. And write some papers on the Talis and The Surviving Few and evolutionary studies using time travel. They’ll all be kept top secret, of course, and just for scientists within the program. Someday, though, they’ll be more widely read, and I can graciously thank the committee for my Nobel Prize! How about you?”
“I don’t think I have any choice but to stay with the program. They aren’t going to let me and my people just walk out and go back to Earth, are they?”
“Depends. You’ve already been sworn to secrecy numerous times. And if you break your oath, you’ll find yourself counting boulders on Mars.”
“We have a base on Mars?” He thought about it. “I guess we would, wouldn’t we?”
“We have something there. I don’t know what. I did see a classified paper a few months ago about areologists confirming the discovery of fossils on Mars. Turns out there used to be life there, back when life was just getting started on Earth. Apparently life pops up everywhere where there’s liquid water and available energy.”
“So what’s NASA do, anyway?” Hunter asked.
“Nowadays? Serve as a front for America’s public-facing space program, mostly.” Her brow furrowed. “I think they’re also in business building a solidly human space program. Remember, the Hillenkoetter and most of what we have on the Moon and elsewhere is alien technology. Stuff we don’t really understand.”
“C’mon! How can we run it, then?” Hunter said.
“Can you turn on a TV? Change the channels?”
“Sure . . .”
“Do you understand how it works? I mean really understand about cathode-ray tubes? LED technology? How to convert radio signals to a scanned image? How a composite video signal works?”
“Well . . .” He shrugged. “I don’t need a degree in electronics to push a button on the control unit. But could I build one myself? No.”
“That’s okay. None of us can. We can still enjoy watching it without the physics and the engineering. But as long as humans are flying alien spacecraft, we’ll be completely dependent on them for everything.”
“You know,” Hunter told her, “there are stories about how the Apollo astronauts, during the Moon landings, actually saw alien spacecraft watching them. I wonder if they’d been waiting for us to get there on our own.”
“Almost certainly. That was when they began taking us seriously. By actually crossing the gulf of space to land humans on our nearest neighbor, we proved . . .”
“Proved what?”
“That we were worthy, I guess.”
“Okay, so NASA does have a reason to exist. That’s comforting. But it’s criminal the way they keep all of this hidden from the general public.”
“The general public wouldn’t know what to do with most of this stuff. Forget panic—I’m talking about actually being able to comprehend. Think about how long you’ve been here, and how much you still question. But remember, the powers that be are working toward full disclosure. Slowly.”
“Too slowly, if you ask me. I get it—it’s a lot to take in. But zero-point energy alone could solve all Earth’s energy problems, not to mention climate change, pollution, and by extension end poverty, end hunger—”
“Sure. And releasing knowledge of ZPE would bring down the oil industry, crash the stock market, and throw tens of millions out of work. Politicians losing their jobs, mobs rioting in the streets, governments collapsing . . .”
“Shit,” Hunter said, dismissive. “It would be worth it, wouldn’t it? If we could save the oil for what it should be used for . . . plastics? Stop the Earth from turning into Venus? But I’m sure the oil companies have a plan in reserve if any of that happens!”
She laughed. “If Earth becomes another Venus—a possibility—then the oil barons will have other things to worry about than staying in business.”
Hunter wondered if anyone within the so-called seven supermajors, the major Big Oil companies, had been let in on the Alien Secret. He tried to picture a conference of Big Oil magnates, all of them sweating bullets at the possibility that the internal combustion engine wa
s about to be declared obsolete.
On the other hand, what if all those Big Oil CEOs were actually controlled by the Saurians, slowly consolidating their grip on Earth through filthy politics and a shaky, fear-lashed economy?
Something about the whole UFO package lent itself to wild conspiracy theories. But Hunter now knew that the conspiracy theories themselves were but the palest shadows of reality—a reality hinting at the true insignificance, the utter irrelevance of humankind. The Grays and even the Saurians were far, far too much like human caricatures, nothing at all like the real aliens. Humans, it turned out, were mites scurrying about in the shadow of godlike beings of Mind and technologies inconceivably vast and forever beyond the human ken.
Maybe that was the real truth behind the tangled web of UFO secrets, he thought. Maybe the Brookings Report had been right. The human psyche might well be crippled by the sudden release of the knowledge that aliens surrounded them . . . not the “little green men” of popular culture, the pathetic Grays and the sinister Saurians, but the truly alien, nightmare god-beings like the Xaxki, and worse.
Perhaps much worse.
Hunter shivered at the dark thought.
“How about you?” McClure asked. “Would you go home if you could? Or stay with the JSST?”
“Beats me. You know, we might have just started a shooting war. I might have started a shooting war . . . a war that humans can’t possibly win.”
“You rescued three hundred human civilians from a literal fate-worse-than-death. You proved that the Saurians aren’t our friends. You proved to our friends out here that we can handle ourselves, that we can be a presence in galactic politics. You proved that we take care of our own! Solar Warden does need the JSST.” She grinned. “Space Marines.”
“I’m Navy,” Hunter said glumly. “Not Marines.”
“You transformed a ragtag mob of different special forces personnel into a single, well-integrated and well-disciplined elite force. The JSST works . . . and you’re the reason for that.”
“Arr . . .” Hunter said, utterly without enthusiasm.
Together, they watched the vista—bright-burning worlds embedded in a vast disk of dust, worlds forming out of emptiness. Somehow, Hunter thought, that creation was being handled by the Xaxki, a staggering, awe-inspiring, and utterly terrifying thought.