Analog SFF, May 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

She carefully placed the shotgun in a rack by the door and, equally carefully, set the jewelry rock down on the small coffee table in front of the couch. “I figure you'll need some coffee,” she said. It was hardly a question.

  Chad nodded. “Please!”

  Linda went back into the house's tiny kitchen, separated from the living room only by a low half wall. A loud whirr was followed by the aroma of fresh ground coffee beans.

  “Okay, tell me the story,” she commanded. She filled the percolator with water and shook the newly ground beans into the filter. Once she'd confirmed that the drip-drip-drip had started, she came back and sat down.

  And he told the tale, starting with his heli-ski trip. Linda poured them coffee once the dripmaker chuckled its last. Chad ended with, “So, when I got to town, I went to a public hotspot at Pahrump Pete's. I e-mailed the write-up to some friends and posted it to some newsgroups I frequent. Just on the off-chance that someone might wonder if I was never heard of again. I saw figures around my car when I came out of the casino, so I turned right around and walked over here.”

  She started and looked at him, a little more grimly. “You're sure you weren't seen? Or followed?”

  “Pretty sure. I didn't see anybody. And I hid whenever I saw headlights.”

  Linda picked up a remote and pointed it at the console across from the couch. The console looked disproportionate to the room, both in size and quality—like a stretch limo parked in a working-class neighborhood. On a click, an eerie black-and-white image flickered into life. Chad recognized it as infrared video. She kept clicking, and successively he recognized what must be views out the back and sides of the house.

  “Well, there's nothing now,” Linda commented. “Let's see if it logged anything moving since you came in.” She clicked another button, and a ghostly white outline appeared on the street. Chad thought it looked more like a dog, though. Linda barely spared it a glance. “Oh, just the neighborhood coyote.”

  She turned back to him. “If they're real pros, of course, they could still be out there, just farther away. But so far the coast looks clear.”

  Chad was surprised at the sophistication of her surveillance.

  She looked wryly at him. “If you're a journalist, andyou're female, you take lots of precautions. Or you do if you're smart.”

  She clicked some more keys and a news site replaced the spectral coyote image. “Besides, I do a lot of my editing here. I need a professional-scale video system. Now, let's see what's been happening up in Tonopah.” She clicked some more, and they both read. Chad was dismayed, but really not surprised, to see that the pilot killed in the crash had indeed been Charlie Jones. There was also a brief, noncommittal note about a car crash near one of the new solar energy ponds. But there'd been no follow-up to that story, either.

  “Look at this,” Chad commented. He'd found a little filler saying that the Department of Energy's telepresence team was called up on standby until further notice. Linda read. “Now that'sinteresting,” she said. “The military borrowing some expertise from the DOE, do you suppose? And somebody at DOE didn't know they were supposed to keep it secret ... Well, this all lays to rest any last, lingering suspicions about your story.” She took another sip of her coffee. “And it's clear it's not just the gold. They don't impose a news blackout just for some claim-jumping thugs. The bad news is that the Feds have lots more resources for finding you. The good news is that they probably just wanted to put you on ice for a while.”

  “So what do you suggest?” Chad asked.

  “Let's do an interview. It won't be as slick as it would be with a real cameraman, but I'd be leery of getting anyone else involved right now anyway. I'll prompt you for oversights and clarifications, just as though we were doing a show. Then I'll post it, to my station, and to a bunch of contacts. I'll ask them to sit on it unless they don't hear from me by—say by noon today. And I'll also put it into my blog, with a timed release.”

  She looked at him approvingly. “Just what you've already done with your contacts. That was good thinking. The only way to fight something like this is to make it as public as possible as quickly as possible.”

  Linda then looked down at her bathrobe and made a face. “Okay, let me first get to looking like a professional newswoman. Then you can get cleaned up a bit while I set up the camera and mic. Comb your hair, at any rate!”

  “And I could get rid of the tamarisk crumbs under my shirt, too.” Chad laughed shortly. “Of course, they could be all that's keeping me awake right now.”

  “Well, I think we're both going to want more coffee. That's another thing you could do while you're waiting.”

  It took almost an hour—and another pot of coffee—to get the talk in the can and posted. Then Chad asked, yawning, “Okay, now what? I can't get my car, and it's illegal to operate on a public street in its present condition anyway. And I'm suremy place in Vegas is staked out.” He drained the rest of his coffee and shook his head. “I'm afraid the coffee's not working very well now either. It was a long day. Long day and night,” he amended.

  Linda grinned. “I've been thinking about that. We don't want to stay here, because Pahrump's too small. We'll take my car into town. It's turned out it's a good thing you had to leave your car at the casino. It'll be a decoy. There shouldn't be any reason for them to connect you to me, at least for now.”

  “So what's in Vegas?” Chad asked.

  “Well, first, it's a big city, so it's better for lying low if it comes to that,” she replied. “But this business with telepresence ... one of the top telepresence guys in the country is at LVU. Professor Jim Murthy. And I've interviewed him several times. By the time we get to Vegas it'll be the start of the regular work day. Even for academics. I figure we go right to his office first. If he's not there, or doesn't know anything...” she shrugged, thinking aloud, “...he should be able to send us to someone who doesknow.”

  She pulled back a curtain and peered out. The eastern sky was now distinctly gray. “If we leave now, too,” Linda continued, “we'll blend in with all the commuters.”

  Chad hauled himself to his feet. “Okay, I'm ready. As ready as I can be in my current state.”

  Linda picked up the shotgun. “You know how to use one of these?”

  Chad worked the action experimentally. “Sure. It's like my skeet gun.”

  “Let's bring it. Lay it in the back. It's not technically ‘concealed’ that way, but it's available.” She looked at him. “We don't want to get in a firefight with the Feds. If it's claim jumpers who want to play rough, though, it will come in real handy.”

  Linda's car was a little late-model hybrid. She folded the passenger's front seat forward and gestured. “Chad, lie down in the back,” she said. “Let's not advertise that I've got a passenger.”

  * * * *

  “Wake up, sleepyhead!”

  Chad stirred reluctantly. “Can I sit up now?” he asked.

  “Should be okay. I had the news on. There's some activity outside Tonopah, but no official word at all on what's going on. Which is just what a reporter likes to hear. It means something out of the ordinary's happening. This could be big, Chad. Thanks for getting me involved.”

  “You're quite welcome.” He sat up and stretched stiffly. “I'd just as soon not be involved, myself.”

  Linda chuckled. She parked and said, “Stick the scattergun under the seat.” She grabbed her notepad and mic and got out of the car, walking swiftly. Chad followed more slowly, still trying to wake up. There was somethingelse, he knew.... He felt that if he could just rest for a second, an important clue would become plain.

  Murthy was a successful enough grantsman to have his own secretary. Linda knocked at that office, and was rewarded with a tentative “Come in?” She did so immediately, Chad following. A strikingly pretty young woman with a long blond ponytail was standing by a desk, holding a phone handset.

  “Hello, C.J.,” Linda said breezily. Having noticed the empty inner office as well as the absence
of the secretary, Linda then took a stab in the dark. “Has Jim already gone up to the Mule Deers?”

  “Yes, he needs another experienced teleoperator,” the other woman said, lowering the handset. “I was just about to call him, in fact. I need to double-check I've got everything he wanted.”

  Linda then turned toward Chad briefly and winked. She then said, “C.J., I'd like you to meet Chad Gutierrez. Chad's just come back from the Mule Deers.” To Chad Linda said, “C.J.'s Jim's star student. I talked to her a lot when I wrote the piece on the telepresence lab. Meet Carolyn Jean Horne, but she goes by ‘C.J.'”

  C.J. blushed slightly. “Linda, I'm hardly the star!” She smiled briefly at Chad as they shook hands. Chad felt as though he'd been sandbagged. Not my idea of a robotics nerd at all! he thought. But he managed to mutter some pleasantries.

  Linda was saying, as C.J. returned to her telephoning, “I'd like to talk to Jim too, C.J., when you get a chance.” C.J. nodded. After an exchange involving lots of technical jargon, C.J. said, “Oh, and Jim. Linda McPherson's here. Says she wants to talk to you too.” She then clicked on the speakerphone.

  “Hi, Jim!” Linda said.

  “Uh, hi, Linda,” Jim said. “I can't really talk right now....”

  “You're near Gold City, right? Where some guy skied down yesterday. And triggered some strange phenomena.”

  “Well, yeah, but...”

  “That guy's standing right here beside me. In your office.”

  “He is?And he's okay? Boy, we'd like to talk to him.”

  “You mean he shouldn't be okay?” Linda asked innocently.

  There was a pause. “Well, no. No one that came that close to the ... the object has even ... well, they're not in good shape. We really need to speak to him.”

  “Well, he had some rather ... unpleasant experiences in returning from Tonopah. At least some of which apparently were due to your clients.”

  Another pause, then Murthy's voice returned. “They saythey just wanted to talk to him.” Murthy paused again. “Linda, they don't know what it is. There's something there that disrupts humans neurologically. And drastically. They first tried sending people in with cameras and such, and they all went completely psychotic.”

  “Like Charlie Jones.” Linda made it a statement.

  Again a pause. “Well, yeah, he was the one that kinda triggered the investigation. Charlie still had a lot of friends in the ... um, in my client's organization.”

  “So now you're trying telepresence. That's what we guessed, from Chad's experience.”

  “Yeah. That's right.” Another pause. “Linda, sorry, I can't say any more right now.”

  “Jim, your clients are going to need an embedded reporter, keeping the real-time records.” she responded. “They can't sit on this forever. And then they're going to need some favorable publicity. They'd better be laying their contingency plans for when it all blows up on them.”

  It dawned on Chad that Linda, in her eagerness to get the story, was perfectly willing to turn them both in at this point. He felt a flash of irritation, particularly because he realized it was too late to rein her in. She evidently thought she was now dealing from a strong position. He'd just have to hope she was right.

  A very long pause. “Okay, you and Mr. Gutierrez ride out with C.J. I'll see you here.”

  The phone clicked, and shortly thereafter they heard another knock at the door. C.J. opened it to reveal two men in dark suits. They looked like retired linebackers despite their exquisite tailoring. “Ms. Horne?” one inquired.

  C.J. nodded.

  “I'm David Braun. We're your transportation and escort. We understand you're to bring some more equipment. We need to get it loaded.”

  “There's not too much,” she answered. “I've got it all together in my office. We can pick it up on the way out.”

  “Very good.” Braun then turned toward the room. “Mr. Gutierrez,” he said. “That's quite a rig you've got.”

  Chad suddenly got it. “You shot at me! I saw your laser sights.”

  “No, we didn't shoot. We decided there was way too much chance of taking out you instead of a tire. So we let you go. We figured the risk was worth it. And so it was. You're now on the team, just as you would have been yesterday.”

  Whether I want to be or not,Chad thought. He still wasn't sure he wanted to go back to the Mule Deers, Linda's enthusiasm or no; but clearly the decision was now out of his hands.

  During all this, Braun's partner hadn't said anything. He kept his hands inside his suit jacket, though, and Chad had no doubt one—or both—held a weapon. If necessary, he was perfectly prepared to shoot holes through that expensive fabric.

  Braun had continued talking. “There's a chopper ready at Nellis, and Colonel Toth doesn't like to be kept waiting. Let's go.”

  Braun's silent partner held open the door while Braun, Chad, and the two women filed through. The partner then brought up in the rear.

  * * * *

  “You know, I'd never ridden a helicopter before yesterday—and now I'm in one again!” Chad remarked to no one in particular.

  “Well, you'll find this one a bit different, I expect.” Colonel Toth had proved to be the very model of an Air Force officer; impeccably clean cut, crisp, no-nonsense ... and as sharp as a stiletto. They'd found out he also held a Ph.D. in physics. Chad had never fallen for the stereotype of military officers as dull martinets, but still ... it was interesting how thoroughly Toth shattered the clichés. Remembering C.J., he then thought it must be his day for stereotypes to shatter.

  The chopper was different. It was a lot bigger, for one thing. They rode in back of the pilot, on benches among a welter of equipment—monitors, data displays, even a full telepresence link for C.J. C.J. was already linked in, in fact, the VR helmet down over her head, her hands encased in the skintight wiregloves. One particularly large monitor showed the view she “saw.” To her, of course, it seemed that shewas approaching that adit mouth up a narrow little canyon. Other sensors and telebots bobbed in and out of view at the edges of the display. Presumably, Chad thought, their outputs filled the other displays.

  What the hell? The same thought must have occurred to everyone. C.J.'s display abruptly blurred, then steadied. Then they saw some of the other displays of environmental variables—neutrino emissions, magnetic flux, gamma rays, and so on—oscillate wildly. When one would steady, another monitor view would get all blurry. Even the outputs of the real-time analysis of trace atmospheric components spiked crazily at one point.

  Linda pointed to one of the telepresence monitors. “Look at that!” C.J.—or her robot projection—was nearly at the adit mouth. By that entrance lay something clearly artificial, and just as clearly out of place in a nineteenth-century mining camp. It was a roughly cylindrical object perhaps two meters long, with odd protrusions here and there, and with a matte-type finish; not metallic, but almost like ceramic. Evidently it was putting out a crescendo of signals, and the increasing electromagnetic cacophony was disturbing the readouts.

  The object exuded age, too—the finish was not only dull and scratched but mottled as though stained over the years, and some of the protrusions looked broken. “Looks like it's been there since the Pleistocene,” Toth commented.

  Suddenly Chad's fatigue-addled thoughts came together. “Gold City!” he shouted. C.J., deep in the telepresence link, didn't respond. Linda and Colonel Toth just looked at him as though he'd lost his mind. “Huh?”

  "That's what's been eating at me. Look, I couldn't remember skiing down the canyon because apparently the ... the object disrupted my short-term memory. Yet in the 1800s they built a whole town there and started to mine gold! They even dug out that vein where I picked up the jewelry rock. How could they have done all that if that thingaffected them like it affected me? Either it wasn't there at all, or it's changed.

  “But it musthave been there already, it looks so old. So somehow it must've learned how to confuse humans so it could keep itself secre
t. But it must've taken a while. And that would also account for why Gold City was abandoned so quickly. People just walked away in the middle of what they were doing.”

  Toth said, “Well, if that's the case it's in trouble, because we're throwing every sensing device we can think of at it.”

  But Linda, frowning, gestured at the oddly blurry monitors, and at the wild oscillations in the other data displays. “But maybe that's just what it's trying to do. Confuse us.”

  Chad nodded in turn. “Maybe it's realized it's being observed again, and it's trying to blind the observers. By trial and error.”

  Toth snorted, “It can't confuse them all.”

  Chad replied, “Well, I wonder what its Plan B is, then, when it realizes that.”

  The ... it had to be a device ... was also moving. Some of those protrusions seemed to be extending into appendages. As they tried to make sense of the blurred view, they saw the cylinder raise itself up on an extension. It wobbled uncertainly for a few seconds, then fell over and rolled a meter or so, like a log on a skidder. They could catch glimpses, in the occasional clear images, of new projections extending, of new motions as the device continued to tilt this way and that.

  “It's broken,"Linda whispered. “It's trying to get away, and it can't."

  Something in the way she spoke made the hairs on the back of Chad's neck rise. It did act for all the world like a cornered creature, injured and thrashing. And then abruptly all the monitors washed out with static and all the data read-outs flatlined, at the same time as an intolerably bright flash limned the mountains dead ahead of them. Dazzled as they were, the self-darkening windshield had nonetheless saved their eyes. That was a nuclear explosion, Chad marveled. The pilot, his training taking over, dove immediately to set them down behind the nearest mountain, to avoid the shock wave.

  Even parked in the lee of the mountain range, the chopper shuddered violently when the wave went by, dust dancing up from the desert floor around them.

  And then it got very quiet. The pilot worked the communications gear, but the only results were flashes of static. “Sir, I can't raise anyone.”