Vostok

by Steve Alten

  “The powers that be refuse to go quietly in the night. When we demonstrated the Vostok prototype, they offered me five billion dollars to buy the company. When I refused to sell out the people of this planet for a few trinkets of silver, they stole it. When we received funding to begin manufacturing our line of generators, they burned our factory to the ground. They play by their own set of rules, and—”

  I paused. In the distance, the crowds gathered around the Reflecting Pool and Washington Monument were gesturing to something in the eastern sky. Like a stadium crowd doing the wave, section by section looked up and pointed.

  I turned to see for myself, only my view was obscured by the Capitol building.

  And then I saw it.

  The vessel was imposing, as dark and wide as a B-2 Bomber, only saucer-shaped. It descended majestically and then hovered, motionless over the mall, as if it were going to perch on the tip of the Washington Monument. The teardrop belly was flashing lights and emitting a magnetic field that I knew all too well, and those people caught in its gravitational vortex found themselves levitating fifteen to twenty feet in the air.

  The crowd went wild as hundreds pushed and climbed over one another to experience zero gravity within the UFO’s shadow.

  I stared at the scene, dumbfounded. Everything about this felt wrong. Through my own experience in Lake Vostok, I knew these vehicles were organic in nature, flown telepathically by beings whose aura of sharing could be detected by humans involved in the close encounter. This was corroborated by the testimonials from military personnel who had been the first boots on the ground when a UFO had crash-landed.

  This experience felt cold and calculated, and the way in which the E.T. moved seemed too mechanical.

  It’s not an E.T. It’s an ARV—an Alien Reproduction Vehicle—designed by MJ-12 to fool the public!

  I grabbed the microphone. “Run! It’s not a real—”

  What happened next occurred so quickly that only super-slow-motion replays of the historical event could reveal the truth, which is why they were subsequently banned and removed from both the television networks and the Internet.

  That alone should have been enough to redirect the public’s rage.

  First, there was a loud humming noise. That was followed by a brilliant flash of light originating from the vessel’s power source, immediately followed by an explosion at the base of the Washington Monument.

  In the six seconds that followed, the world changed. That was how long it took the 555-foot tower to collapse, crushing and instantly killing more than one hundred people.

  Flying rubble wounded hundreds more, and the panicked crowd increased that number into the thousands as people trampled one another to flee the area.

  Concrete gravel struck the outside of my plastic enclosure as I watched the fake alien craft fly off. It did not slingshot into the atmosphere like the real thing. Instead it gained altitude like a helicopter before racing to the west.

  Then the soldiers in black camouflage fighting gear arrived. I saw Jim Clancy go down. Susan was carried off as smoke grenades closed the curtain on the scene seconds before I was dragged away.

  26

  “The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.”

  —Albert Einstein

  “True, don’t do this!” I followed my best friend across the dilapidated harbor dock to the parking lot of the Clansman. Once the crown jewel of Loch Ness, the hotel and its waterside restaurant, had been bashed into a barely recognizable pile of brick rubble.

  The sun had dipped below the Monadhliath Mountains. With darkness approaching fast, the crowd had swelled to several hundred men and women, many villagers openly carrying shotguns. They stood solemnly, watching as True and his deckhand, Jim Clancy, unloaded a two-hundred-pound cow carcass from the back of the former U.S. Army Ranger’s pick-up truck.

  “True, listen to me. There are better ways to kill this monster. Stuffing a dead cow with C-4 explosives and dragging it around Loch Ness—it’s crazy. The croc’s bigger than your boat.”

  “Nessie was bigger than my boat, too, but it didnae stop ye from diving the loch in a Newtsuit. Unlike ye, Zach, I brought this nightmare to the Highlands, and now I’m goin’ tae end it.”

  True tightened a steel cable around the dead animal’s neck while Jim slit open its belly, anchoring a plastic thermos packed with C-4 inside the ribcage.

  “Secure the udder wit’ those clamps, Jimmy, but let the entrails leak oot a bit. We’ll need a good stench tae lure tha’ bitch up from the bottom.”

  Turning to my right, I saw a BBC camera crew filming a female news reporter from behind a police barricade. Keeping my back to them, I eavesdropped on her while she read from a teleprompter:

  “Its name was Purussaurus, and it was a gigantic caiman, a prehistoric ancestor to the modern-day crocodile. Reaching lengths of more than fifteen meters, it lived in what is today the Amazonian rainforest but was eight million years agoa vast inland sea teeming with freshwater whales, giant turtles, and enormous rodents. How one of these monster predators survived to inhabit Loch Ness remains a mystery.

  “It’s a mystery that became public seven years ago when Highland resident Finlay McDonald found an ancient egg frozen in the bowels of Aldourie Castle, a three-century-old chateau that looms over the eastern shoreline of Loch Ness. An ancient aquifer connects the Moray Firth and the North Sea with Loch Ness beneath the castle grounds, and so it’s not unusual to find sea creatures venturing inland. Still, no one had ever seen an egg quite like this.

  “Footage of the egg’s discovery went viral after scientists were astonished to discover a life-form still alive inside. Three months later the egg actually hatched, producing a living, breathing, four-legged, gilled reptile roughly the size of a Bassett Hound.

  “The animal, dubbed Plessie by locals, was kept in the swimming pool at Nessie’s Retreat, a luxury hotel located in the shadow of Urquhart Castle. Experts debated over the identity of the species, conducting daily examinations, while over four million visitors flocked to the Highlands that first summer to see the creature, which the hotel owner insisted was a Plesiosaurus.

  “As the creature grew larger, it became apparent that Plessie was not a Plesiosaurus at all, but a species of crocodile. Marine biologist Zachary Wallace added to the controversy by claiming the creature was a Purussaurus, an extremely dangerous predator that dated back to the Miocene era. Wallace warned residents that the pen would not be able to contain the animal, which now exceeded three meters in length and was predicted to grow five to six times that size. A larger containment area was cordoned off at Loch Dochfour, a narrow waterway at the head of Loch Ness, with a series of gates established to secure a seven-acre pen. An observation galley was erected in time for tourist season, providing visitors with a bird’s-eye view of the pen’s truck-sized occupant.

  “For the next four years, Plessie made the Scottish Highlands the number one tourist destination in the world, the crocodile surpassing sixteen meters and weighing an estimated thirty tons, ten times the weight of a double-decker bus. During the warmer months, the croc spent its days sunning itself on the walled shoreline, to the delight of onlookers. At night and throughout the winter, she remained underwater in the muddy bog. When her handlers attempted to flush her back to the surface after a long winter’s hibernation, they discovered that the underwater gate separating Dochfour from Loch Ness had been ravaged.

  “A massive search began in the Great Glen. During the investigation that followed, one handler told authorities that three months prior to Plessie’s escape, keepers had so feared the creature that they’d kept it on a steady diet of tranquilizers. As the weather turned cold, the croc, now a juvenile adult, spent more time underwater, gradually weaning its system off the drugs, affording it the opportunity to escape.

  “Throughout March and into late spring, there were no sightings. Many believed Plessie was dead, poisoned by Loch Ness’s heavy peat content. Others cla
imed the crocodile was secretly being fed from Aldourie Castle’s subterranean caverns. Water bailiffs reported that the local deer population no longer crossed Loch Ness. When a reptile claw footprint measuring two meters was found on the shoreline near Foyers on May 29, residents grew worried.

  “The first probable attack on a human being took place two weeks later, when the remains of a fishing boat piloted by Glasgow resident Martin McCandless washed up on the shores of Tor Point. Police painted a grim picture. The creature had bludgeoned the keel from below, sinking the vessel and taking its lone occupant. Still, with no overwhelming forensic evidence to indicate a change in the creature’s diet, Inverness officials waited to exercise boating restrictions on the loch.

  “On the evening of June 21, everything changed. Hours earlier, a small ferry had left the wharf located here at the Clansman Hotel. Returning from Fort Augustus loaded with thirty-seven passengers and three crewmen, the boat was passing Urquhart Castle when it was rammed from below with what many eyewitnesses described as the force of a locomotive. Though the boat took on water, the engines remained intact and the ship’s captain managed to make it back to the dock. Then, as shaken passengers disembarked, Plessie surfaced half a kilometer to the north of where I’m standing. Hungry from her long months of hibernation, the creature went after the fleeing tourists.

  “The first victim was Magdalena Hicklen of New York. The South Bronx native, who had survived drive-by shootings and a counter-culture of drugs and crime, was vacationing in Scotland with her husband, Nate, and their young son, Spencer. When she saw the giant caiman coming down the A-82 highway, Magdalena yelled to her spouse to get the boy inside the hotel. Witnesses say the woman distracted the thirty-five-ton crocodile, ducking between parked cars before hurrying inside the Clansman’s lobby herself. The enraged animal smashed through the entrance and emerged from the wreckage with Magdalena dangling from its mouth by her left leg. The woman thrashed and kicked the creature with her other leg but was unable to free herself as the giant caiman returned to the water and submerged with its meal, leaving behind a decimated hotel and locals fearing for their lives.

  “Two more attacks have occurred since the Clansman feeding, all around dusk and at four- to five-day intervals. Lorey Schmidt was taken as she walked along the shoreline in Foyers, texting her girlfriend back home. Ernest Lazano was reported missing from Invermoriston, where he was staying at a bed-and-breakfast. His severed right arm was found thirty meters upstream from Loch Ness in the River Moriston.

  “While members of Parliament continue to debate over whether to capture or kill the Purussaurus, the man who discovered the egg has decided to take matters into his own hands.”

  I followed True as he and Jim wheeled their bait back down the wharf to his boat. Jim clipped the end of a steel cable around the dead cow’s neck collar while True used a hose to wash the animal’s blood from his hands.

  He grabbed my arm in a wet, vice-like grip when I tried to board the vessel. “Sorry, lad. You and Jimmy are stayin’ here.”

  “True, there’s no way I’m letting you do this alone.”

  “Yeah, there is. It’s my fault all this happened, an’ we both ken it. But before I go, there’s one thing I need tae hear from yer lips: how did ye do it, Zach? How did ye escape from Vostok seven years ago?”

  “I told you. I found the subglacial river and followed it all the way back to the Amery Ice Shelf.”

  “Yer lyin’, lad. Even if ye had a GPS that would ’ave worked beneath all that ice, the Barracuda didnae have enough battery power left nor air tae breathe for ye tae complete the eight-hundred-mile journey. So how did ye do it?”

  “Don’t get on that boat, and I’ll tell you everything.”

  True smiled. “Ye don’t ken yerself, do ye lad?”

  He tossed me aside, then climbed aboard the twenty-eight-foot boat and gunned the engines, sending the cow carcass flying into the water past a stunned Jim Clancy. The two of us watched as True motored half a mile out before circling the bait into a tight figure-eight pattern.

  That’s when I knew…

  There was one other craft tied off at the wharf—Brandy’s old tour boat. The engine was shot, but the radio worked. I climbed aboard, hurrying to the pilothouse—

  —Waaa-boom!

  The blast tossed me to the deck. Seconds later, a bloody stew of flesh and innards rained across the windshield, adding a lasting stain to the boat, wharf, and tarmac.

  I emerged from the cabin in a daze, Brandy’s boat rocking violently beneath me. I heard the report of wood landing on the rock-strewn shoreline, so I didn’t need to look out upon those tea-colored waters now running crimson, or inventory the collection of floating debris, to know what had happened.

  I already knew.

  I already knew…

  I already knew…

  “What did you know, Zachary?”

  “Sir, he’s still under the effects of the medication. It’ll be another—”

  “Wake him.”

  A rush of ice water blasted through my veins, forcing me to swim to the light.

  “Huh?” I awoke, disoriented. I was inside a chamber, seated upright before a machine that resembled something an ophthalmologist might use to examine one’s eyes. My wrists and ankles were strapped to the chair.

  Seated next to me was Colonel Stephen Vacendak.

  27

  “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.

  The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

  —President Dwight D. Eisenhower

  There were electrodes attached to my temples and forehead, and an I.V. bag dripped into a tube in my left forearm.

  “Dr. Stewart, your patient’s out again.”

  “Sorry, Colonel. We’ve got enough Dilaudid in him to numb a horse, but I’ll hit him with another shot of B12.”

  “I want him coherent, not in a stupor. Give him something with a little kick.”

  “Huh!”

  My eyes snapped open. My heart was racing, my lungs heaving to catch up. I was dressed in surgical greens, my wrists and ankles strapped to a leather lounge chair.

  Before me stood a big man about my father’s age dressed in surgical greens and a white lab coat. He had long, graying blonde hair and a goatee. My eyes focused on his identification badge.

  “Dr. Chris Stewart. Levels twenty through twenty-six.”

  “Good, the fog is lifting.” I detected a trace of Scottish Highlands tucked into the physician’s British accent. As he backed away, I realized I wasn’t looking at him; I was watching a flatscreen monitor on my left. The man’s face suddenly multiplied, as if he were looking into a mirror that was facing another mirror, only everything that appeared on the screen was originating from my vision.

  “Let me turn that away from you, it’s too disorienting.” He pushed the monitor around on its swivel arm.

  I heard a hiss of air pressure as a pneumatic door opened behind me. I caught a whiff of cheap aftershave and knew it was the Colonel.

  He positioned a stool on my right and then spun my chair around to face him. “What did you know, Zachary?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “In your last memory emergence you said, ‘I already knew.’ You were at Loch Ness, the day your best friend, True, died. What is it you knew?”

  “That he wanted to die. That he was wracked with guilt over the deaths caused by the Purussaurus. I knew when I saw him circling in his boat that he had rigged the keel with explosives. How did you know I was dreaming of that day?”

  He pointed to the optical scanner. “I know because this machine reads the electrical signals perceived by the brain and plays them on this monitor for me to watch. In the last seventeen days, I’ve dialed up every pertinent memory you’ve experienced, and it’s been quite an adventure. Your life is a paradox, Dr. Wallace…
No, let me rephrase that: Your death is a paradox. I’ve watched you die so many times that I feel I owe you flowers. From your drowning as a young boy in Loch Ness to your drowning in the Sargasso Sea, to at least a dozen horrible deaths in Lake Vostok. And yet, here you are.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? I had a few near-death experiences, so what?”

  “Not near-death, my friend. You died.”

  I laid my head back, feeling lightheaded.

  Dr. Stewart leaned in with an apple juice, which I sipped from a straw.

  “Thank you.”

  “Let me know if you want more. And if you feel like you have to urinate, go ahead. We have a catheter in you.”

  I felt queasy. “Why am I here? Is any of this even real?”

  “Good questions,” the Colonel said. “Over the years, many individuals have experienced a close encounter with an extraterrestrial, either physical contact or a mind-to-mind interaction. What determines the extent of the experience is the level of consciousness of the E.T.; the higher the being, the more positive the interaction. Seven years ago you channeled soul to soul with the highest being our paranormal experts have ever found trace memories of in a close-encounter subject. That makes you a conduit into another dimension. As a result, your consciousness has the ability to selectively route your soul through a multiverse of infinite probabilities.

  “Let me give you an example. On your ninth birthday you caught your father cheating on your mother. Incensed, you rowed out on Loch Ness by yourself to test your sonic lure. Your invention attracted a school of salmon, and one oversized Anguilla eel, which sunk your boat and left you flailing in near-freezing water. At that moment your consciousness created a dozen possible scenarios, all but one ending in your death. Call it multiple forks in the road. The thing is, your consciousness bypassed the eight-lane superhighway and followed a torturous dirt road, and the life of Zachary Wallace miraculously continued.”

  “So what? So I cheated death a few times. Every day, every person chooses between infinite possibilities. Some days we avoid death and never know it, simply because we took another route to work or didn’t book a plane ticket or didn’t trip on the cat and fall down the stairs. How is my life a paradox?”