His mind, a machine—and a brilliant one by the reckoning of some—devoted to logic above all things, insisted that what he was seeing was either a joke, a bizarre anomaly, or pure hallucination. What it was not—what it could not be—was the word on the tip of his tongue. Peter ignored his own plea for reason and said it anyway. “It’s a fucking spaceship.”
The moment he heard the words leave his mouth the room seemed to grow smaller. His legs, good for at least two miles a day at a steady jog, suddenly felt weak. He stepped back, his eyes fixed to the screen, and sat down in the chair behind him. The longer he looked at the picture the more distinct the shape became.
He sat there for a long time, his thoughts lost in a whirlwind of denial, implication and shock. What forced him back into the present was the sound of voices coming from down the hall. He was suddenly overwhelmed by the absolute conviction that no one must know. In that respect, his mind was working just fine.
The picture that invaded his thoughts, as vivid as any movie he had ever seen, was one of Lopez standing in front of the Joint Chiefs of Staff with the image of Jupiter on the screen behind him. He was pointing at the thing—spaceship?—with the air of a man who appreciated the gravity of the situation. Peter could almost feel the sense of victory in the room, could see it on the faces looking back. Not elation or even excitement, but hunger, devious and full of malice.
He stood up, walked to the TV and turned it off just as a group of students passed the door in a cacophony of excited chatter. When he heard the door close at the end of the hall, he quickly removed the reel and put them all back in the box.
Twenty minutes later he was sitting behind the wheel of his car, the box on the passenger seat beside him, his mind on fire. All he knew for certain was that there would be no call to Lopez, just a polite letter confirming that the data was beyond recovery and that he had disposed of the reels. He would also have to remove everything from the archive in case NASA had copies. Beyond that, he had no plan, no idea where to go or what to do.
That would soon change.
Origin - Season Two Page 40