Chapter Twenty-Seven
Ellie and William had managed to escape from Austin Academy Boarding School before the storm’s peak.
Together with Valerie, the four teenagers had gathered in the basement of Brent’s mother’s house for the night. They had spent some time talking after dinner and then had sat down to watch a movie—Children of a Lesser God, an oldie but goodie.
Brent fed his two fish, Oscar and Wilde, both guppies with beautiful blue, green, and yellow mosaics scattered throughout their bodies. He tapped the aquarium. The water ripples flowed away from the particles of food. Oscar came up first and engulfed a few specks of food floating on the surface.
Within a few hours, sprawled all over the floor in sleeping bags, the four kids dreamed. They dreamed a vivid story, a tale they had gotten to know only too well.
“If it was up to me, I’d force the pukes down on that planet into submission!” said Colonel Riggs. “And get all the air they breathe out that we need. But my orders are to do it without their knowledge. All we need is the goddamn air they breathe out, for crying out loud! What’s the big deal anyway?”
Valerie began. “We don’t have the right to take whatever we—”
The colonel put up a hand, his palm facing Valerie. “I swear to God, Commander. Another insubordination like this, and I will put you in jail and discipline you harshly, if nothing else just to make an example out of you.” He put his hand down and paced around the room a few steps. “Now, cure these little bastards of whatever disease you gave them and get them out of stasis. We need lots of carbonyl whatever, whatever from them and take it home, where it can do some good.” The colonel left the laboratory, the door slamming hard behind him.
Four men with menacing weapons at the ready stood guard, at attention, two at each of the exit doors.
“You know, I’m not sure the drug is ready for delivery,” said Valerie, her words loud enough to be heard by the guards. She noticed the one in charge react, his attention piqued, though he endeavored to remain inconspicuous about it.
“No, it’s ready,” said Brent. “Get it ready, and let’s rid the Terrae Virentians of the infection we gave them. We owe them that much.”
Brent took his virtual writer and began sending it thought messages in Ancient Latin, in case his words were intercepted. He wrote, Keep talking! I have an idea.
As the doctors conferred about the spread of the antibiotic to the inhabitants of the planet, Brent conveyed his message to his colleagues: We need to enlist the four Terrae Virentians kids—Brent, Ellie, William and Valerie. We need them to dream up a false reality to get rid of the soldiers. They’ll leave if they think most or all the planet’s population is gone. I heard the story the Terrae Virentians tell their kids about how life on the planet begun. We can use that story to fool Riggs. When the military leaves, we’ll disinfect the planet before we depart and return home for good. For now, we’ll pretend our efforts to rid the planet of the infection are ineffective.
A few hours later, three armed soldiers escorted Brent to the planetary-vehicular module port. The antibiotic spreader had been loaded onto the round space pod. Brent strapped himself in and locked the exit door latch. He maneuvered the unit to Terrae Virentia as he had done before, this time taking the most direct route. This mission today was to appear to the soldiers as a failure. He would appear to the four youths as a simple, innocent, and harmless Terrae Virentian albino child and speak with them through computer-generated brain waves, as soon as the four kids fell asleep.
“My name is Alexandra,” he began. “I am a scientist from a star system far away from here. Your planet is in danger of destruction. My colleagues and I are here to help you. Unfortunately, we accidentally contaminated your people with an organism that causes sterility. This will cause a lot of deaths.”
The young beings listened with much attention as Brent’s thoughts infiltrated their minds.
“Can you save us?” expressed one of them.
“Yes,” said Brent. “I have a cure with me that will stop this infection, but I can’t give it to you yet.”
Puzzled expressions arose.
“Why not?” brain-waved the older being, Brent. “Our people are dying at a very fast pace.”
“All living things on this planet are now in deep stasis,” said Brent. “This includes the infectious organism we inadvertently infected your people with. The deaths have stopped for now. Soon, we’ll inoculate all things and cure the infection. Then we’ll get all living things on your planet out of stasis. But we have another problem to contend with.”
“Another problem?” dreamed Terrae Virentian Ellie.
“Soldiers from my world want to use the air you exhale for their purposes,” explained Alexandra. “We need to deceive them so they go away. My colleagues and I have a plan that may work, but we need the four of you to help us.”
“What can we do?” expressed William.
“We’re only children,” said Valerie in her dream state.
“The soldiers are monitoring your dreams in our spaceship. We need to fool the soldiers into thinking that all your people have died. Then we need you to stop dreaming. Once the soldiers see that your dreaming has ceased, we believe they’ll go away. Then everything will go back to normal.”
“How can we accomplish this feat?” inquired Terrae Virentian Brent.
“The four of you are the only ones not in full stasis. You are in a conscious-sedation state. We did that so we could continue to learn how to communicate with you and learn about you and your planet.”
“You can communicate with us already,” said Ellie.
“For now, only while you dream,” said Alexandra. “Soon, we will be able to communicate directly with you even when you are awake. But not yet.”
“Tell us how we can help,” said Brent.
“We need the four of you to identify twenty essential people in your world who can help you with this process. We’ll wake them up. We’ll show you how to send us false dreams. Then, the four of you need to quit dreaming so we don’t get your dream brain waves up in my spaceship.” Alexandra pointed skyward.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Valerie woke up first. “So where are we, really?”
“We’re in my basement,” said Brent. “My mother is supposed to be in Europe on business, but I bet she’s somewhere in this house. In stasis.” After uttering these words, Brent squinted his eyes and ran upstairs into the kitchen. The others followed him. He went to his mother’s bedroom. And there she was. In bed.
“You were right,” said William.
Ellie ran to her and checked her pulse and breathing. “No detectable carotid pulse and no breathing efforts to speak of. Yet she’s got some warmth and color.”
“So, that means she’s not dead,” said Brent.
“No, she’s in this stasis,” said William. “Like everyone else on the planet.”
The teens returned to the basement.
“Look,” said Valerie. “Oscar! Wilde!”
“They’re in stasis, too,” said Ellie. “Right? They’re not dead, right?”
The four convened near the aquarium. The guppies were on the bottom of the tank, belly up, and still.
“Let me get this straight,” said William. “Alexandra has us dreaming we’re commander scientists on a mission to a planet far away from our home world so as to explain to us what she and her cohorts are doing here on Earth.”
“You will experience, you will comprehend!” said Ellie. “Remember her words?”
All teens nodded. A long moment of silence ensued.
“Do you really think people will believe four teenagers? Our story is pretty wild and far-fetched!” said Valerie.
“Let’s hope they do,” said Ellie.
“How can they not?” asked William. “The people we wake up early to help us with the plan will see that every living person is unconscious.”
“We’ll do our best to convince them of what’s happening,” said
Ellie. “The most difficult part of all this is not even getting the proper authorities to believe our story. Remember, we must not dream. If we do, the travelers will discover our plan.” All heads nodded in understanding.
“That’s going to be fun. Not falling asleep,” said Brent. “We must find ways to stay awake until we accomplish our goal.”
“It’ll be easy for me,” said Valerie. “I’ll just go shopping.”
A chuckle scattered through the teenagers, but only for a short moment.
Valerie regarded her friend’s worried faces. “Let’s have some hope here!” She smiled. “What’s our first step?”
“We have to find the people we need to carry out this scheme,” said Brent.
“I’ve been thinking about who the best person to wake up first,” said Ellie. “I think the logical man is the head of Homeland Security. Let’s hope he doesn’t wake up too grumpy.”
“And that he’ll believe our story,” said William.
“And is up for the task!” said Brent.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
General Narrows’s phone rang. He reached over the piles of paperwork on his desk and picked it up.
“Hello, General Narrows here.”
“General, our Mars satellite sent an unscheduled communication,” Dr. Sidonia Frazier started, her voice an octave higher than usual.
“Unscheduled?” asked the general. “What did you see?”
“Nothing out of the ordinary, really. The usual communiqué. Nothing new.”
“If there’s nothing new, let’s move on. Anything else to—”
“That’s exactly the point, General. There was nothing new. So why did the computer send an unscheduled communication?”
“A computer glitch? You’re the expert, Sidonia. Why did the computer send a communication from Mars? I feel like we’re talking in riddles!”
“The computer is working just fine! It must have detected something unusual!”
“What?”
“I can’t tell. I don’t see anything unusual,” she said.
“So the computer made a mistake. We’ll forgive it this time, but if it does it again, let’s shoot the damn thing into smithereens and put it out of its misery!”
Frazier took in a deep breath and blew out forcibly. “Computers don’t make mistakes, General. Just because we don’t see something wrong, it doesn’t mean there isn’t something wrong.”
“Fair enough, Sidonia,” said Narrows. “Keep at it. Find out what the damn computer might have or might not have detected.”
“But, sir, I—”
“Look, Sidonia, the president put the country on pause for the next twenty-four hours. That means you and that means me. I’m going home. You should do the same. We’ll live to fight another day. Tomorrow!” With these words and without waiting for a reply, he slammed the phone down hard, his head still shaking.
General Brandon Narrows was the man in charge of Homeland Security, and he took his job very seriously. But today, there was no job to be done other than remain home with his family and avoid the storm’s frigid torture.
The blizzard of 2013, or rather the cleanup after it, was going to be a challenge for him and his people. The president of the United States had ordered the whole country to stay indoors for the next twenty-four hours, the expected peak of the storm. The temperatures in the nation’s capital had dropped to unheard of lows. The snow was piled up high, over twenty feet in some areas.
Narrows looked outside his window and saw only darkness. A chill went through his body. He lived in his two-story home in the suburbs with his wife. His two sons and their wives were staying with them during the blizzard.
“What time is it?” asked Lula Narrows, the general’s wife. She was wearing a long fur coat over her two sweaters and flannel-lined pants.
“It’s high noon,” said the general. “I don’t know how long our heater will hold up at this rate.”
“I’m going back to bed,” said Lula. “I’ve taken a sleeping pill. Sleep will help the time go by.”
General Narrows peered out his window again. Outside, his whole world was darkened by zero visibility. It was then he heard the footsteps and then a knock on his door. There were people right outside his home a few feet from his window. Yet, it was so pitch black out that he wasn’t able to tell who they were. Who would be at his doorstep on a day like this? Who dared travel during this horrid storm? Who could stand ten seconds outside without getting frostbitten?
“General Narrows!” he heard a voice. The voice was that of a young woman.
“General Narrows, wake up.” A different voice. A young man’s this time.
“Wake up?” Narrows said. “What the hell do you mean wake up?”
“Sir, you have to wake up!” repeated the young lady again.
He opened his door. Surely they wouldn’t survive this cold for much longer. But when he opened the door, he realized the sun was shining. It wasn’t cold at all. He looked around, stupefied. In fact, he wasn’t at the door of his home as he thought he was. He was sitting up on his couch, leaning on pillows. It was the sofa in his office. In front of him were four teenagers and one little girl, a beautiful four- or five-year-old albino girl. Part of him was petrified and confused, but the child’s innocent face brought him peace and serenity, somehow. Her pale little hand touched his.
“General Narrows,” said one of the teenager girls, her voice ingenuous. “My name is Valerie. These are my friends, William, Ellie, and William. We have a story to tell you. One you will find incredibly hard to believe!”
Chapter Thirty
“I have some ideas as to whom we need to wake up,” said General Narrows. He sipped from his coffee cup and made a face. “Let’s start with my secretary, Clarabelle. That woman can make some good coffee!” He winked. “Besides, she’ll find anyone and anything. Very resourceful, she is! She’ll help with the research we need to do to find the essential people we require for this mission.”
Ellie wrote the secretary’s name down. “Who else?”
“Well, we’ll need people to cook for us, and I have some ideas for excellent chefs and their staff. I’ll need some of my people to help us with logistics. How many can we wake up altogether?”
Brent looked at Alexandra and then back at the general. “As few as we can. We need to stay below twenty people total. If we wake more than that, we’ll run the risk that the soldier travelers will detect our presence by the amount of carbon dioxide we breathe out. They must believe that all living things on Earth are dying and will be dead in a few days.”
Narrows nodded. “Dr. Sidonia Frazier from NASA. We need NASA to give us space intelligence. Sidonia can definitely help!”
Ellie wrote the name down.
Alexandra sat on a couch, listening, silent, her feet dangling several inches above the floor. The general and the four youths continued to discuss the people who were immediately necessary to carry out their mission.
Right outside the general’s office door, a woman slept, her head on her desk. Alexandra placed her little hand over Clarabelle and the general’s secretary opened her eyes. She was confused and looked around, her brain connecting with reality.
“It’s OK, Clarabelle,” said Ellie with a soothing tone. “General Narrows is here with us.”
“Wake up, Clarabelle,” said Narrows. “You’re OK. I need your help.”
Clarabelle’s gaze shifted from teen to teen and then scanned the room.
“Did I fall asleep at work?” she asked. “I thought I went home…because of the blizzard.”
“It’s a long story,” said Narrows. “We’ll explain it all to you soon. For now, we have a few more people to wake up.”
Two of the general’s aids were also awakened, Major Logan Pickering and Colonel Ladonna Fox. They slumbered in stasis in offices down the hall.
Lengthy Internet searches produced the names of a handful of neuroscientists researching dreams and brain waves, and Alexandra and Major Pickeri
ng were dispatched to get them out of stasis and bring them to DC.
General Narrows walked into the conference room where the teens waited. A woman he introduced as Dr. Sidonia Frazier, the head of NASA’s Space Exploration Unit, accompanied him.
Behind them, a few seconds later, in walked Major Logan Pickering and Colonel Ladonna Fox with a woman they announced as Dr. Lillian Moore.
“Dr. Moore is an expert in neurobiology,” said Fox.
Everyone sat down around the large oval table.
Ellie began. She tried to be as thorough and detailed as she remembered from the first day their lives were turned upside down. The other teens piped in periodically.
“We know the travelers can communicate with the four of us but only through brain waves derived from our dreams,” said William. “They can’t communicate with anyone else on Earth.”
“For that matter, they can’t hear us when we talk,” said Brent. “They’re working on communication with us through the avatar, Alexandra.”
When Ellie reached the part about the moon-to-Earth distance, Frazier’s interest piqued. “How did you kids discover that the moon is getting farther away from the Earth?”
“I heard it on the news,” said Ellie. “The moon gets farther away from Earth at approximately four centimeters per year. This has been known to be constant for thousands of years. But this changed recently. Going by this measurement, at least two hundred and thirty years went by.”
“Although that logic is sound,” said Sidonia, “if any scientist on Earth had been aware of that, I would have known. That type of information would immediately filter down to me. But I had had no inkling about that. I’m not sure how you could have been told that by the media.”
Brent raised his hand with an inquisitive look lingering on his face. “I think this information was delivered to Ellie by the travelers.”
“To give us clues about our predicament,” agreed Valerie.
“At some point in this whole ordeal, things began to go out of order,” said William. “Our memories were erased, but no one else’s in our corner of the world.”
The Traveler's Return (Traveler Series 3) Page 9