Paper or Plastic

by Mackey Chandler

  "Yes, but this is different. Also there is a pocket knife. It's probably just a pocket knife, but if you were trying to track an uh - operative, anything they carried might have something embedded."

  "If you are talking tracking chips, an operative – agent – spy – whatever you want to call him could have one inserted just under his skin. I hope you don't have someone cuffed up in your cabin. You might have his buddies waiting for you when you return."

  "That's not a possibility and there is no way we can check the previous owner, to see if that might have been true."

  "Previous?"

  "You know how it is," Roger explained, spreading his hands loose to show it was out of his control. "He just won’t, uh, have any need of this stuff anymore."

  "Don't…say any more." Josh asked, with a palm held up in a forestalling gesture. "I don't want to know too much." He sat thinking it over before he spoke.

  "The computer is way too risky to trust even if we determine it is not radiating right now. It could be in a listening mode and be triggered by an external signal and answer before we knew what was happening. The electronic weapon is almost as dangerous that way. It has to have a pretty substantial power supply and with all the circuits it would be hard to be sure something wasn't an internal locating beacon that could be activated. The gun, unless it has an unusual amount of electronics in it should be ok."

  "The knife should be simple. I can run it through an EMP device to fry anything hidden. The only way I would suggest taking the computer and Taser out of a shielded testing space, would be if we open them up and disable anything that might be an antenna. That means they have to be opened, disassembled and probably some time taken to study them."

  "There is no particular hurry," Roger assured him. "If you'd like to keep them and take your time to make sure you have them safe that is fine."

  "How much effort have you spent trying to find out what language the computer uses?" Josh asked.

  "That's not really in question. It is not a language currently in use anywhere in the world. The symbols are different. I'm not guessing. I have assurance from a native speaker."

  "Dear God Roger. Did you – uh – did he – uh? Is there any possibility this person is, or was a time traveler?" He looked very unhappy.

  Roger threw back his head and laughed. "Oh Josh, I think you are the only person I know that would consider that possibility. No, I'm sure this person was not a time traveler. I really don't want to tell you yet, because when I do you won't believe me. I didn't believe myself and argued…the damn universe just doesn't care what I believe. Can't you just investigate the artifacts with an open mind, without needing to know what I think their source is?"

  "I could, but I won't," he said stubbornly. "This sounds really dangerous. If you don't trust me to know everything you do, then I'm afraid this time you'll have to find somebody else to look into them," Josh insisted.

  "And won't you go nuts wondering what they were like if I just leave?"

  "Yes, it will kill me, figuratively, but better that than for real. If you don't remember, I learned in the Protectorate just as well as you did, that some risks are not worth taking."

  Roger sat and considered the problem from every angle. If he withdrew, he had no fear Josh would reveal he was holding these things to any agency. On the other hand, he had no idea where else he'd go with them. Josh waited silently.

  "Buddy, we know each other pretty well. I'll tell you, but if you don't believe me don't jolly me along and act like you do. I'd rather be told you can't believe me and I'll take the junk and go, no hard feelings and all that, but I don't want you looking at the stuff wasting my time, trying to disprove what I'm already sure of, instead of really researching what I need to know. The items in the foil belonged to a human from another star system."

  "That's immmm…" Josh grated his teeth and refused to say the word.

  "If they evolved…" Josh balled up his fists and took some deep breaths.

  He looked like he expected Roger to defend his statement, but Roger sat impassive and refused to do so.

  "Even with relativistic time shortening…Oh God…" He covered his face.

  "The chances of parallel…Arrrrh!" He clamped his lips back shut.

  "The fossil record…." He got up, hyperventilating, went to the kitchen sink and threw up. Roger said nothing while Josh had the entire fractured conversation with himself. After he cleaned out the sink and rinsed out his mouth he came back to the table. His hand was all shaky when he picked up the coffee mug. He looked at that, went back to the cupboards and returned with a bottle of brandy. After pouring a generous measure in the cup he took a long gulp and set it back down. He no longer had that expectant look with Roger.

  "My, that's interesting," he admitted in a strangely mild voice. He looked thoughtfully at the reduced level of his coffee and topped it off again with brandy. "You're sure nobody is scamming you? They aren't asking you to buy shares in their space vacation business or something?" He examined Rogers face. "No, I know you too well. I figured not," he admitted. "But I had to grasp at a few last straws to try to retain my sanity. You really have valid artifacts." It wasn't a question this time.

  "Sorry," Roger allowed. "It kind of bummed me out too. All that time in college and you find out everything you have been taught is mumbo-jumbo, right up there with the sun being carried across the sky in a chariot and wearing a tiger skin so the sympathetic magic can make you fierce in battle. If it makes you feel any better, I think you ran through all the contradictions in your mind and accepted it faster than I thought was humanly possible. You are probably the smartest person I know."

  "How far ahead of us are they? Are we going to end up like the Native Americans, or Africans – marginalized and ran over with a cultural steamroller?"

  "Not if I have my way. They seem to be not that far ahead of us. In fact more like they are ahead in some areas, but not in others. I found out in the last few days we already make better computers than they do. I think you'll confirm that when you take this one apart. If you wonder why they did some things you see a certain way, be aware they take a very long-range view of things. Planning is centralized with no competition. There is no commercial pressure to rush out with a new model with new features. And being able to repair and recycle is a priority with them."

  "That would be refreshing actually. I hate working on things almost impossible to service and that will sit in a landfill bleeding lead and cadmium into the water table for a century, once it is thrown away." Josh said. "But they must be way ahead in some technology to have a starship when we don't."

  "Some things you can tell they just went a different route than we did. One thing for sure you'll see, is they don't make things pretty. They have a lousy sense of style and design. They have body armor that looks like a regular jacket, but it stops one of these."

  He pulled his pistol and worked the slide. A long Hornady 10mm round popped out on the table. Josh stopped its roll and stood it in its base. "That's a 10-'15," Roger informed him. "It’s about half again the capacity of an old 10mm or .40 S&W. It has a very strong case head with high silver content brass. It cranks out 470 meters per second muzzle velocity with a 12 gram jacketed hard lead slug in a factory load. Hit their armor at about a thirty degree angle and it just flattens out and slides off."

  "I take it their armor isn't a full body suit and face cover?"

  "No and it looks ugly as sin. If you see somebody who looks like he is color blind and bought his outfit at the Salvation Army second hand store, he might be an alien. But none of that matters, because I'll show you a load it won't stop," he worked the slide again and the next round looked different. It had a bevel instead of a curve on the front and a pale color instead of coppery.

  "This is a malleable tungsten bullet, with a metallic carbide fullerene penetrator. The penetrator is reverse tapered and moly lubed and sits in an ultra strong steel cup. When the front of the bullet hits and is pushed back, it raises the pres
sure in the steel cup until it pushes the tapered penetrator ahead of it, with much more force than results from just impact. The body and base may flatten out and remain behind, but the core can punch through two inches of P-20 steel."

  "You load this every other? Josh asked, fingering the round.

  "Every third - three sets of three in a magazine," Rog explained.

  "I have to beg, to be shown what the third type is? Josh complained.

  Rog reluctantly brought the weapon back up and dropped a third round on the table. It looked the same as the first except for a silvery tip sticking out of the copper jacket. "The nose is memory metal, a nickel alloy. Behind it is another malleable tungsten body, to get the mass up. When you fire it there is an incendiary charge against the back of the memory metal. It burns out, not far from the muzzle and then it takes another meter of travel before the heat diffuses into the metal sufficiently. After that it is unstable, like a pot of super heated water.

  "Any slight impact causes the metal to phase change and assume its original hot shaped form. That happens to be a disk over twice as big – 24mm – as it is now. So it transfers the momentum very efficiently. It's more like getting hit with a baseball bat than a bullet. It should produce blunt trauma and knock somebody on their butt, even if they have armor that can defeat the second round. The damn things are ten bucks a round too."

  Seeing the questioning look on Josh's face he added, "I haven't had a chance to try the memory metal round out in real world conditions." He hadn't said that about the second armor piercing round, Josh noticed.

  Josh played with his earring and chewed his lip thinking everything over. Roger kept his mouth shut not wanting to over-sell. "OK, come on down to the basement," Josh said, "bring the bag."

  Roger had been to his workshop before. He followed Josh down stairs that were easily half again as wide as usual, in most homes. Josh had two benches set up he could roll between on a comfortable executive chair. The one was operational with various ham radio receivers and transmitters with attendant small boxes and cables that did things mysterious to Roger.

  The other side was a horseshoe-shaped workstation with all sorts of signal generators, power supplies, oscilloscopes, racks of hand tools and a soldering station.

  Josh didn't sit there but pulled a small cart over and loaded several instruments onboard. "Bring the chair for yourself," Josh instructed and rolled away with the cart to a door Rog had never been through. Rog dropped his bag in the chair and wheeled it after Josh. When he opened the door and flipped on the light, there were shelves on both sides with canned goods, preserves in home canning jars and bulk foodstuffs like survivalists bought, such as ten liter pails of cornmeal and rice. Josh ran the cart right up against the concrete wall at the rear.

  "Would you close the door and turn the light off please?" Josh requested, without any explanation.

  When he switched the light off it was completely black. There was no leakage of light around the door. There was a rumbling sound like a heavy steel wheeled cart on a concrete floor. When the light came on Josh was standing just beyond where the wall had been, with his hand on a normal light switch box, at the end of a piece of conduit running down the concrete wall. Where the wall had been the floor went through seamlessly. There was just a line across it, where something had rolled with enough weight to make white marks on the concrete.

  There was another U-shaped bench with a single chair and a lot of the same small items as the other bench outside. The obvious primary piece of equipment was a large computer, that seemed to require an unusual amount of cooling. Rog could see the connectors for a liquid cooling system. The cables were all covered in braided metal too.

  Josh started setting the things he'd brought in on the shelves above this new bench and plugging them in with various wires and cables. Roger pushed his chair inside and stood looking around. There was a lot of storage here and he had no idea what most of the things on the selves were. Some he could see at least that they were electronic, but some appeared mechanical.

  "Rog, flip the toggle sticking out of the side of the light switch box."

  Roger would have never noticed the little black plastic paddle set back near the wall. When he flipped it the concrete wall came back across the opening very slowly on little steel wheels. When it reached the end of its travel it went down, not straight but at an angle until it met the floor with a muted thud.

  "The wheels run into little slots in the floor, that go down at an angle."

  "But what if you are in here and the drive breaks, or the power fails?" Roger wanted to know. It was entirely too tomb-like.

  "In the corner," Josh said "So you can find it in the dark." He was pointing to an old fashioned twenty pound sledge, so old it had a wooden handle.

  "This is shielded?" Roger worried, peering around.

  "The whole room is a Faraday cage," Josh assured him, "better than your foil, the concrete isn't plain concrete and you also have plenty of dirt above us where the hill runs up behind the house."

  "So what's the back way out of here - another toggle switch sticking out somewhere like on the light switch box? Hey!" he said to the nasty look Josh gave him. "I figure I know you as well as you do me, to be making cracks about how I think. I can't see you getting stuck in a blind hole."

  Josh rolled the chair back from the bench and picked up the edge of the plastic anti-fatigue mat it set on. Underneath was a flush manhole cover with recessed pulls. There were a lot of secrets being revealed today.

  "After you go down there are knee pads and gloves because you have to go on hands and knees. I’ll drop an extra set down there, since you know now."

  Roger didn't ask where it came out. That seemed too pushy.

  Josh helped himself to the foil-wrapped pieces and set them all on the bench carefully saving the foil in a stack. Rog seated himself back a bit and watched him work. Josh activated several of the test instruments and put some appliances Rog didn't recognize next to the objects, cabling them to the test pieces. The readouts started a slow scroll of numbers and while they worked Josh took a digital camera and started taking pictures of everything from several views.

  "Roger, give me a few days to take this stuff apart. When I give it back to you we'll be sure it's clean, unless they send signals with neutrinos or something we don't even know about. I'll run an image search on the web right now and see if anybody has posted pictures of similar items recently." Josh said.

  "You can do that and you don't get leakage in and out on the same line?"

  "Come on," Josh protested. "Who do you think you're talking with here? There is an optic interrupt and the power line is isolated too. The data feed is completely spoofed too. Nobody is going to back track us to the house. Every time I request a page, it appears to send it from a different location."

  "You should be safe from exotic stuff," Rog assured him. "In most areas they don't seem all that far ahead of us."

  "Then starships must be a lot easier to build than I thought," Josh said. "I don't suppose you have had a ride yet to make the story even more convincing?"

  "No, sorry," Roger admitted.

  Josh looked over a mosaic of pictures on the computer and, satisfied, told the graphic search engines PixAll and TinEye to hunt matches. There was an immediate hit for the electronic weapon.

  "Well, look at this," Josh said laughing. On the screen was a closed eBay auction. It read a match of 99%. The single picture showed the exact same case and buttons. The auction title said: ‘Garage door opener? Remote?’ It had been offered at $10 to open and closed with no bids last year. The location said Florida. Josh emailed the seller and asked if it was still available, giving an IM name to reply.

  By then there was a match on the picture of the gun. It matched 92% because it was low resolution and had a card and lock in the pic. This was a cop site, where detectives posted odd bits of evidence and associated items, trying to solve crimes. It was a password site, but that didn't appear to be a problem f
or Josh. The pistol was shown from both sides, with a property number on a business card.

  The text revealed it was recovered from a hit and run last spring. The property list showed it was one item and the John Doe also had clothing and shoes, a computer (foreign language/crushed inoperative) and a garage door opener. No ID, no money or wallet even and his prints didn't match any in North American or Interpol data bases.

  The cop was very thorough, noting it was without manufacturer marks and had not been test fired, as it was not used in the crime being investigated. There was no visible safety and no obvious way to determine if it was loaded. The picture showed it with a locked trigger guard fitted for storage.

  A link showed them the computer. Being run over by a semi-truck had not only crushed it – one corner was folded over completely and the screen was shattered. There was something smeared on it Roger suspected was blood.

  "They – uh – don't understand traffic rules," Roger informed Josh. "They'll step right off the curb and don't look either way."

  "Oh Jezz…" Josh had found the morgue photo. The computer hadn't absorbed all the damage. He closed it pretty quickly.

  "Where was that posted from?" Rog wondered. Six months old meant it had nothing to do with Martee though.

  "Philadelphia," Josh replied. If he was going to say more but the IM chime stopped him. He accepted an invitation to video chat with SurfDog.

  "Hold on a second," Josh asked Roger, holding up his palm. "Let me see if this is our eBay seller."

  SurfDog must have been a long time since he had been on a board. He looked to be in his nineties and had a very thin frail look, with big glasses like hardly anyone wore anymore. He sat unbowed and sharp-eyed, however. Josh took one look at his face and decided he'd better be careful. The old boy looked like he was way too sharp to bullshit.

  "You dropped me a mail about the remote, or whatever the heck the thing is? I know it's out in my storage shed. It'll take me a little time to dig it out, so what are you willing to pay for me to go to the trouble?"