by Kate Moretti
“I suppose they must be. Their base of operations is not very distant from here. Velt was out seeking intelligent life when they attacked him. If they’ve followed us back here, they must have the bloodlust.”
Judy shook her head. “My people aren’t like that. They probably attacked out of fear. And pursued out of curiosity.” Even as she said it, she wondered if it were true.
“I must lead them away,” Dela said, mournfully turning away from her mate.
“Hey, wait,” Judy said, putting a hand on the tiny goblin’s shoulder and passing right through. “You can’t go out there. You’ll be shot, too.”
“If they find our ship here, all will be for naught. Remember how I said you would not be believed on your own? There were many, many people at the base Velt visited. And if they find evidence of us here, it will be far worse than even an eyewitness account.”
“There must be an alternative to endangering yourself.”
Briefly, the Clorofin’s frog-like eyes glinted black. “I could kill them all, Judy. Very easily. But I don’t want their blood on my hands.”
“No, I didn’t mean kill them! Look, Dela, you have to stay here and cut the metal out of Velt before he goes into shock.”
“Shock? Is that what’s happening to me?”
He was shaking even as he asked. Judy shook her head in a vain attempt to clear it.
“Maybe. I don’t know. You’re an alien. I don’t… what if I distract them? I’ll just run out there and reason with them.”
“Are grown men in your culture known to reason with juveniles?”
“Maybe. I mean, if I’m smart enough. Besides, it’s not like they can hurt me.”
“And as soon as they pass a hand through your holographic form, the distraction will end, and they will be more alert than ever.”
Judy put her fist to her chin and took a few steps. “Then make me look like you! I’ll lead them away from the ship and give them the chase of their lives. And the whole time, they’ll think they’re chasing an alien.”
Dela and Velt exchanged a look.
“The projector does have my image on file,” Velt said. “It’s a simple swap.”
The sounds of the approaching hunting party grew louder.
“There’s not time for a debate. Just fix up Velt so you can get out of here.”
“All right,” Dela agreed. “I’ll go adjust your image.”
Dela disappeared down a corridor. Judy turned to the prone Clorofin. “How do I get out there?”
His ears rose almost into spikes. She didn’t recognize the gesture but could guess what it meant.
“Are you laughing at me?”
“You’re not really here, remember? Just go straight through the wall.”
He pointed at the bulkhead, and Judy smiled. Of course. She ran toward the wall, and, despite knowing better, held her breath and pinched her eyes shut as she ran into it. When she opened her eyes again, she was outside in the mellow Kentucky night, and a pair of farmers were staring at her, their eyes wide. One slowly lifted his shaking finger and pointed.
“We found it, Solomon!”
The other man slapped his friend’s hand down and raised a gun. “Damn, don’t just point, Lucky. Shoot it before it gets away!”
Judy looked down at herself and marveled at her tiny new green body. She hadn’t felt the change occur. When the guns spoke, she took off like a rabbit, at first dodging every root and tree trunk that appeared before her, but after accidentally passing through her first shrub as though she were a ghost, she giddily just plowed ahead, ignoring every obstacle.
For a while, she heard the shouts of Lucky and Solomon behind her. But after a few moments, they seemed to be no longer following her.
Darn it!
She turned around. In another minute, she caught up with the hunting party. Judy whistled loudly and waved her arms. Both men turned, and a dual discharge followed. Judy was certain their aim had been true this time. Grinning in a most un-Clorofin-like way, she turned and ran away, a bit slower this time, so they could give chase.
After leading the two men for a bit, she happened upon a winding trail. She paused, knowing the two farmers were still far enough behind her not to catch up.
Oh well. Maybe this leads to the base of operations. I wonder what Velt meant by that. An army base or something?
After following the trail for a few minutes, she shook her head at the silly alien. A simple old farmhouse stood before her. Some base of operations.
She ducked behind an old outhouse, realized how silly that was, and simply slipped inside through the wall. Luckily, no one was inside. However, she realized that because of her new small stature, she couldn’t see through the human-eye-level hole carved in the door. She glanced at the commode. Under normal conditions, she wouldn’t have gone anywhere near it, but since she couldn’t smell anything and knew she was safely eight hundred miles away, she approached.
“All right, let’s see how this works.”
She pressed down on the wooden seat of the commode and stopped when she felt her hands starting to pass through as they had with everything else since becoming a hologram. She pretended her hands were locked on something solid and swung her right foot up to catch the commode. She opened her eyes and looked down to see the projector had, indeed, interpreted her desire to climb onto the seat. So the floor wasn’t the only thing she could interact with. With some effort—and a little bit of faith—she could climb, too.
Now, standing on top of the commode, she was tall enough to see the farmhouse through the crescent-shaped hole. What looked like two families of farmers were inside, all brandishing weapons. And up the trail came Lucky and Solomon, looking as though they had been shaken up like paint cans at the hardware store. The two farmers continued up and entered the house. Judy rubbed her hands together in excitement.
Okay. Everyone’s inside. Now I’ve just got to keep them there.
She darted out and charged toward the nearest tree in the yard. Hiding behind it, she glanced around and saw that no one had spotted her yet.
Wait a minute. What am I doing?
She sauntered out from behind the tree, this time secure in her own invincibility. Let the farmers freak out and shoot at me. But, of course, none of them noticed her for some reason.
Really?
Nope, everyone was somehow missing her. She just approached the house and reached a windowsill hanging just above her head.
Okay, time to give this a shot.
She didn’t want to just waltz inside and let everyone know she wasn’t really there. She wanted to keep them buttoned up by popping up at windows and doorways, seeming impervious to gunfire. That had scared Solmon and Lucky more than anything else.
She reached up and attempted to grab the ledge. She felt nothing, but as she pulled, the emitter apparently understood what she was attempting to do. Like playing a game of charades rather than actually climbing, she soon found she had mimicked the actions to bring herself up onto the windowsill.
A man who looked like a relative of Lucky’s was standing in the kitchen with a cup of coffee in his hand, taking a sip, and scratching at the bottom of his union suit. In fact, she would have bet money he was Lucky’s brother. He stopped mid-sip, saw Judy, blinked twice, and dropped the mug.
“It’s one of them!”
“J.C.?” someone shouted.
Lucky came hurrying into the kitchen, and Judy began doing a little jig. Almost as one, the two brothers leveled guns and fired. The kitchen window exploded outward. If she had really been there, the bullets would have killed her, and the glass would have shredded her corpse to ribbons. Judy clutched at her heart.
Oh, woe is me!
She did an elaborate flip off the sill, hoping it wasn’t too histrionic, an
d then ran back to the shelter of her tree. That little bit of showmanship had been enough to get the farmers into an uproar.
For the next few hours, every time one of them made for a door, Judy would rush over, do a little dance, get shot, and flip away like an acrobat. It was so much fun, she found herself breathless with anticipation, as if she were playing a schoolyard game of tag, only she was so much faster than the poor sap who was “it” that the game became a slaughter.
She bird-dogged those farmers for so long and had such fun doing it,that she almost forgot her reason for being there. Finally, when the farmers packed up and fled the farmhouse shortly before the clock chimed eleven, she let them get in their cars and drive in the other direction, away from the Clorofin ship.
When the farmers evacuated, all the adrenaline seeped out of her system. She sank to the ground, a great big smile plastered over her face. She had done it! Velt and Dela would be able to get away. She tried to stand to return to the ship, but she simply closed her eyes in exhaustion instead.
Like a wet butterfly attempting to open its wings, Judy’s eyelids fluttered against the layer of crust the sandman had left her. She jammed her knuckles into her eyes, rubbed away the gunk, then finally opened them. She was back in her room, on her bed, staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to her ceiling. A cold sheen of sweat clung to her skin.
“Was it all a dream?” she whispered.
The door handle jiggled, and she nearly jumped out of her skin. When the portal opened, no otherworldly being, miniature or otherwise, stood there—just the warm, comforting silhouette of her father.
“You all right, hon?” her father asked, taking a sip from the cup of water in his hand that had prompted his late-night/early-morning sojourn.
She blinked, as though trying to blink away the weird pre-dawn eeriness. “Yeah, Dad. Why?”
He smiled and shook his head lightly. “You’ve been making noises like a circus car full of skunks all night. Been having nightmares?”
She pulled her knees up to her chest and hugged them. She shook her head.
“You want a sleeping pill?”
She shook her head again.
“Shot of bourbon?”
“Dad!”
He nodded and reached out to pull her door closed. “All right, change into some pajamas and go back to bed. I don’t want your clothes wrinkled. Is that my dictionary?”
Her gaze alighted on the desk, where the dictionary still sat. “Yes. Sorry. I didn’t mean to go into your study.”
In a stride and a half, he reached the desk and picked up the book. “Better I be cursed with a daughter with too much curiosity than blessed with one that’s dull as a board. What word were you looking up?”
Judy pursed her lips. “Holography.”
Her father narrowed his eyes. He opened the dictionary and riffled through to the appropriate page, dragged his index finger down the length of it, stopped, and looked up at her with questioning eyes.
“It’s not in here.”
She smiled. “It will be.”
Her father grunted by way of wishing her a good night then pulled the door closed behind him as he left. She lay back down and turned her head toward the window.
“It was real,” she whispered.
“Yes,” a familiar voice agreed.
She smiled but didn’t turn her head to see Dela’s form. Even if this all was just a dream or an auditory hallucination, she didn’t want to spoil it by looking and breaking the spell.
“Why did you come here, Dela?”
“To thank you. And to bid you farewell.”
Judy rolled over and faced the little goblinoid’s hologram.
“No. I mean why did you come to Earth?”
Judy had learned to read only a little of the Clorofin body language, but Dela’s clenched fists and rigid spine were clear signs of anxiety.
“Judy, I only have a few minutes before I’m out of contact range with your planet. I couldn’t possibly explain…”
“Give me the Reader’s Digest version.”
Dela’s perky ears lowered almost to her cheeks. “The galaxy is at war. There are two factions battling for… well, everything. Your planet is in one of the last unexplored regions of the galaxy.”
“Which faction do you represent?”
“The good guys.”
“I suppose the Russians think that about themselves, too.”
“Perhaps.”
Judy rose, drawing the blanket away from herself so she could sit on the edge of the bed. “So you came to… what, conquer us?”
“No, not at all! To offer you membership in our Consortium. To offer you a seat at the galactic banquet. The keys to the stars!”
“In exchange for…?”
“Resources. Maybe conscripts for the war.”
Judy bit her lower lip. “Ah. So not outright conquest. Colonization. We would have been the India to your England.”
Dela said nothing for a moment, but her ears perked up as the translating computer struggled to come up with an analogue for Judy’s statement. “Yes, very much so.”
Judy lay back down and turned away from the Clorofin. “So now I helped you survive, you can go away and bring in the shock troops for the invas—oh, I’m sorry, I meant the occupation force.”
“Judy, I told you I came back to thank you.”
“You’re not welcome. Go away.”
“I came to thank you with more than words. In my culture, what you’ve done is considered a blood debt. You saved my mate’s life. Velt and I owe you a favor that cannot be questioned or denied. Even if you told me to take my own life, I would. And while I would never presume, I have a guess about what boon you’re going to ask.”
Judy rolled over, her eyes sparkling. “Really?”
Dela’s ears were high, her nostrils flaring. All the tension seemed to have melted out of her body.
“I told you we were explorers, and we are. Nobody else knows your planet is civilized. I’ll leave the information out of my charts.”
“Won’t your people come back?”
Dela looked up at the ceiling, transfixed by the faux constellations.
“This area is still disputed. For a planet like yours, my faction would send a fleet, as you suggested. But for what is otherwise useless celestial rocks for light years around, they won’t bother. However, the war will rage on, and eventually, this area will be disputed again. And you’ll be discovered.”
“How long will that be?”
“Fifty years. Maybe a hundred.”
“So it’s not a pardon. It’s a stay of execution.”
Dela brought all four of her hands together, tenting her fingers in stereo. Her image was beginning to fade, turning almost translucent. Judy realized they would soon be out of communication range, and then her world would shrink back down to the size of a marble.
“You can think of it that way. Or you can think of it as a chance. A chance to drag yourselves out of the Stone Age. A chance to develop new machines and new technologies to fill the stars with human beings. To develop new ways of thinking, new ways of interacting, and maybe even new ways of feeling so that when you do meet the rest of the galaxy, it’ll be on a more even footing.”
Judy rose from her bed. She had never before known what she wanted to do with her life. School was easy but boring. Nothing had ever captured her attention. But sending a man to Mars? Now that she knew it could be done—scratch that. It had to be done. That was more than an interest; that was a calling.
“I want to study science. I want to do all that and more. I want to see you again and meet you as an equal instead of the cleverest of the dumb apes.”
Dela’s ears rose in a broad grin. Her image was all but gone now, a wiry out
line of what it had been, no longer identifiable as more than a ghost.
“It could happen. How long-lived is your race?”
“I could live to be eighty.”
“Then fifty years from now, I’ll contact you again, come whatever else may.”
“It’s a date!”
“Goodbye, Judy, and—”
Whatever else Dela had to say disappeared along with the wireframe of her image. Judy reached out and passed her hands through where the alien had been, but it was only air. She lay back down but couldn’t fall asleep.
Millersville University, Millersville, Pennsylvania
2005
The voice on the other end of the phone was disconcertingly close, without even the usual expected distortion of a phone call, as though the speaker were right in the room with her.
“You have an interconnected computer data system now.”
“We do!”
“Well, I’m glad. It was a lot easier to find you this time than searching all the primitive radio frequencies for life.”
“I didn’t even have to solve a riddle this time.”
“You have artificial satellites, as well.”
“Yes! I helped build some of them!” Judy twirled the cord to her telephone around her finger. She hadn’t done that since she was a teenager. She leaned back in her chair. “My goodness, has it been fifty years already?” She glanced at her calendar. “To the day, too.”
“Yes,” Dela replied. “I set a timer for fifty Earth years, anyway. I had to lobotomize my translating computer’s knowledge of English for this whole time, too, to protect you. Is it working all right now?”
“I can’t even tell.”
“So you pursued science after all.”
“I did. I got my doctorate in physics, and I worked for NASA during the ’70s and ’80s. That’s our space program. I wrote a few articles on holography that were well received, too. We’ve been to the moon and sent unmanned craft beyond. And now, I’m teaching. It’s not like I split the atom, but I think I did my part.”